Vegematarian

It is time to set the record straight. Whenever I leave the west coast there is confusion over what I thought was a relatively simple concept, “I am a vegetarian”. I tell this to people from around the world and I always get recognition, “Oh okay, I know what that is”, or sometimes even “Hey me too!”. But unless I am meeting an Adventist I quickly find out that a) they don’t know what that is, and b) they are not vegetarian.

A common scenario goes something like this. I am at a restaurant ordering and I tell them, “I am a vegetarian.” They give me the, “Ooh okay well we will get it with chicken on it.” So I respond, “I don’t eat chicken, I am a vegetarian, I don’t eat meat”. The obvious reply is, “Ok, we will order fish then.”

Apparently not only is there confusion over the definition of what a vegetarian is, no one knows what meat is. At this point I feel like the guy in Zoolander, “Am I taking CRAZY PILLS?!?!” I feel like it should be put down in writing somewhere: Meat is any dead animal that people eat. This includes but is not limited to: beef, pork, chicken, fish, shrimp, veal, lamb, venison, rabbit, orangutan, fruit bat, possum, tortoise, or anything else that walks, crawls, digs, slithers, burrows, swims, or hops around the earth.

Maybe I should start making up business cards with a detailed explanation on it about what a vegetarian is. It would be complete with cited references from dictionaries and legendary nutritionists. Somehow I still think the response would be, well what about duck?

I also wanted to put up two other pictures, but I thought that it might give my blog an undesirable theme, so I will just put the links to them here and here.

Golden Oldies

When you look at the history of Science Fiction it is really quite incredible. It is a genre that has really been quite abused over the ages (mostly by the SciFi channel). When you look at where it started and what it has been through it is really amazing that it was able to develop into something capable of producing Star Wars (the original three), Firefly, Terminator 2, and many other cherished shows. I have been watching Battlestar Galactica lately. It is a SciFi channel remake of a 1978 series, it just started its second season and has become quite popular. In an effort to brush up on my scifi history I downloaded some of the original 1978 series. It really made me appreciate the advances that the movie industry and science fiction have made. One particular scene I thought was especially good.

I about died laughing when I saw that. On a more general note the older series isn’t that bad, it is just hard to take it seriously. The enemies (humanoid robots called Cylons), are just not menacing. The move slow and kind of waddle when the walk, it is just hard to keep a straight face. That has been fixed in the new series, where the Cylons are quick and efficient killing machines. They modeled them after the most deadly life form on earth.

On top you have the old sissy Cylons, and below the new kick ass Cylons. I guess they realized their fan base was largely male anyway so why not cater to them. Oh and they have the robots too, but they have a comparatively minor role.

I would say the biggest disappointment in the new series is they took away the cool electronic voice of the robots (they don’t talk at all).

So here is to the advances of science fiction and shameless producers that will do anything to boost ratings.

It’s Alive!!

Well my blog is alive, I have included my last e-mail so there will be something besides this announcement here. I will try to post interesting social commentary (rants) as often as I have time. Right now I have a lot of free time so that might be pretty often.I was logging into Yahoo! Mail the other day, they have a new format with a little picture of people doing random things, and the picture struck me as . . . odd.

It seemed the type of thing you would see in a movie or in a men’s magazine to make a point, but hey whatever.

Foreign

In many ways my experience is a lot like studying abroad. I am being introduced to new religions, new languages, new accents, new cultures, and new foods. I have to struggle to understand the teacher, and in-between class I can’t understand the other students. I am by far in the minority, both by virtue of being white, and by having English as my first language. To give a few interesting statistics, I took an informal poll (looking around the room and counting) during my last class and I was one of 5 white people in a class of 40. After further observations two of these ended up just being of fair complexion for their ethnicity bring the total to three Americans in a class of 40. This of course could launch a whole debate on the sad state of American science and all that, but I will try to stay on track.

I thought it would be helpful to give a little translation guide should any of you find yourself in a similar situation. You hear some words and aren’t sure what they are or what they mean, only to find out later it is a word you know.

dome = dorm, repeat after me “hard rrrrrr”
Leanear = Linear
plaseo = placebo
chiral,cowsal,casual = causal, no one in the class got this right
heada = heads

And many other fun ones, but I didn’t start keeping track until recently.

Grad school also has some surprises for me. For example my statistic class has kept me very busy, and I take very detailed notes:

The nice diagrams at the top aren’t even statistics, that is a different project I am working on. So ya I am keeping myself busy, working hard, or hardly working. Well that is about all the clever material I have. Actually I tired myself trying to get the picture to be inserted in the middle of the e-mail, so I hope it is appreciated. You would think it would be a standard feature on yahoo or at least gmail, but no. I had to resort to complicated shenanigans.

On a final note don’t be afraid to call, its not that I’m bored and don’t have anything to do, it is just that . . well actually it is exactly like that.