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…er, what?

I’m at Burger King, trying to grab a bite to eat in-between classes on a particularly busy Wednesday.  I walk up to the cashier and, knowing the usual battery of questions he will ask, announce ”I’ll have a Whopper combo… no cheese… King size… with fries… for here.”

The guy at the register,  who bears an uncanny resemblance to the squeaky-voiced pimple-faced cashier Jeremy Freedman from The Simpsons, dutifully punched the buttons on the register before announcing “That’ll be $6.29.”

“No it won’t.  It’ll be $5.76,” I reply.  I’ve ordered this before.

“Oh,” says Jeremy, looking a little uncertain.  “What was that order again?”

I repeat it.  “Whopper combo… no cheese… King size… with fries… for here.”

Jeremy pushes the buttons again, being very thoughtful and deliberate.  “That’ll be $6.29.”

“No, it won’t.  Maybe you added cheese?”

“Um, no.  It says $6.29.”

“I’ll grant that,” I reply, “but the cost is $5.76.”

“But it says $6.29.”

I sigh.  It is clear that it’s not worth repeating the order, since Jeremy will punch the buttons in the same erroneous order.  I instead try a different path.

“It cannot be more than six dollars.”

“But it says—” stars Jeremy, pointing an accusatory finger at the cash register.

“Let’s reason this through,” I interrupt.  Jeremy looks concerned.  I begin.  “The cost of a Whopper combo without cheese is…”

Jeremy continues to looks confused, and reaches to push more buttons.

“$4.39, according to the menu above you,” I add helpfully.  “Add 99 cents for the king sizing, and that’s $5.38.  Adding 7% sales tax gives not more than 50 cents, so that cost is no greater than $5.88.”

“You didn’t add the cheese.”

“No, because I don’t want any.”

“You didn’t add the king fry.”

“Yes, I did.  That’s the 99 cents that, added to the $4.39 cost of the meal, brought the pre-tax total to $5.38.”

“You didn’t add the king drink.”

“Insofar as I understand the principle of king sizing, I am pretty sure it applies to both the fries and the drink.”

Jeremy pushes more buttons, this time in a different order.  “Okay, that’ll be $6.02.”

I suddenly occurs to me that I am in a black hole of dumb.  “No,” I reply, “it’ll still be $5.76. But this is getting closer.”

Jeremy tries again.  Clickity clickity clickity.  “Crap.  It’s back to $6.29.”

I’m pretty sure I rolled my eyes at this point.  “Aren’t there just numbers somewhere on that keyboard that you can add?”

Jeremy looks especially flustered at the concept of “numbers” and “adding” them.  He tries another slew of buttons, pushing pictures of hamburgers and french fries and condiments in various orders.  “Um, is $5.83 okay?”

“Sure.”

Garfield without Garfield

This is the best idea I’ve ever heard.

Who would have guessed that when you remove Garfield from the Garfield comic strips, the result is an even better comic about schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, and the empty desperation of modern life?

It’s Garfield minus Garfield.

Dear Ladybug,

Yesterday you turned twenty-three months old. Though you are only a month away from the Terrible Twos, and you are thankfully still more of dork than a demon; more of a goof than a gremlin. Your mother has foolishly uttered aloud her hope that you’ll stay your sweet self all through the next year, which can only mean she jinxed it all beyond hope. Oh well.

It’s been a bit of a rough month for our family. Papa K passed away at the end of January, and although I don’t quite think you understand what that means exactly, you do have some sense that it’s a sad thing. I haven’t quite figured out how to explain it to you, and thankfully you haven’t pushed the issue too much, because whenever I try, I start to get teary eyed, and you just say “Sad” and give me a hug. Yeah, I am sad, little Ladybug, but that helps so much.

And I need to say Thank you to you too, little girl. Your Nana asked me to give the eulogy, and while I practiced it and practiced it to make sure I could read through it without falling apart too much, none of it mattered… at the service, I didn’t get past the first paragraph before I got choked up. And then you, sitting in the front pew with Mommy and your Nana and your aunts and uncle, saw you daddy being ad, and so you ran up to the front of the chapel to stay with me. And I picked you up, and you gave me a hug… and then you stayed there, in my arms, as I read through the rest of the eulogy. Whenever it got too hard to read, I just looked at you, and you smiled or giggled or hugged me back, and that gave me the oomph I needed to continue. I know I wouldn’t have gotten through that without you up there helping me, little Ladybug, and so once again, Thank you.

Sigh.

Of course, the purposes of these newsletters is not to dwell on sadness, but to celebrate your new experiences, and this month has kept you busy doing new things. For example, this month we took you sledding for the first time. Well, not sledding in the classic sense of putting on a sled and throwing off a snow-covered inclined plane in the futile hope that you’ll steer yourself away from trees or rocks or other children — we’ll get to that next winter, when you’ve got Terrible Twos aggression to work out. No, I mean “sledding” in the sense that you sat in a sled, and I dragged you all around Rapid City in some feeble bipedal Iditarod. You enjoyed it for a while (in the sense that you put up with sitting on a plastic tray in near-freezing cold while you mother demanded that you smile for picture after picture) until I spun around a corner a wee bit too fast and flung you belly-up into the snow.

On a related note, you also learned how to make snow angels this month, albeit unexpectedly.

You also played your first game of bowling this month. You went bowling with me and Mommy and Nana and Aunt Kellie at the Suncoast in Vegas at a sixty-four lane bowling alley, notable for being slightly less smoky than the casino floor itself. At first you thought bowling was the greatest thing since slice pineapples: they gave you new shoes — new shoes! — and a giant florescent orange ball to play with. Then we put in front of a magical machine that periodicaly spit up hot pink and neon green bowling balls. And then, then, we explained the basic rules of the game: throw the bll at the pins and knock ‘em over! That’s right — the whole point of the game was to smash stuff down. Awesome.

In theory, that is. In practice, your little muscles could only impart so much force to your bowling ball, so that the ball would roll down the lane at a speed slightly slower than plate techtonics; indeed, the only reason the pins ever fell down was not because of the force with which the bowling ball struck them, but rather from pure exhaustion as they waited. After the first few frames, you decided that one turn was good enough, and so Mommy would step up to take your second turn and pick up the spare; by about the seventh frame, you couldn’t even be bothered to carry the ball to the lane, and would instead just fling the ball in its general direction right from your seat. In fact, when all was said and done, the bit about bowling that you liked the most was the fact that mommy let you eat french fries while you played, and that made it all worth it.

Of course, the biggest devlopment this month: you’re potty-trained! Well, pretty close to it, at any rate. Your mommy took the task upon herself while I was gone in Las Vegas, and I have to admit that she’s been pretty successful. She owes this success to primarily two reasons. First, she bought you a Elmo potty seat that sits on top of the regular potty. One plus is that it frees you up from having to go in your little potty seat, a thing to which, paradoxicallty, you’ve bonded so strongly that you cannot bring yourself to desicrate it. Another plus is that it has Elmo all over it, a fact that delights you to know and end which, even more paradoxically that the potty seat, encourages you to climb upon and pee over. (On a related note, I’m already putting aside some money for your eventual schizophrenia counselling.)

Of course, the real secret is that your mother bribed you. With candy. Everytime you went, your mom would give you an M&M or another candy. This worked well as motivation initially, but you very quickly figured out how to work it to your advantage: one morning you announced “Mama, tinkle!” Your mom took you to the potty and you squeezed out a couple of drops before promptly announcing “All done! Candy?” So mom gave you a piece of candy, which you greedily scarfed down before announcing “Mama, tinkle!” and repeating the entire process again, extorting your mom out of a small bad of M&Ms before she decided to change the candy policy. Now you only get immediate candy for a poop; other bathroom trips merely add candy to your after-dinner stockpile. Of course, this shouldn’t actually affect your scam, but thankfully your need for immediate gratification outweighs your ability for cold, calculated candy extortion.

That’s my girl: a sledding, bowling, tinkling little thing who knows how to cheer up her daddy. I sure love you, little Ladybug.

– Ba ba

Photo album

See more pictures from your twenty-third month of existence over at Flickr.

I’ve returned from a weekend excursion to one sibling of the Twin Cities, namely Minneapolis, doncha know?

I was there to attend the Collaboration for the Advancement of College Teaching and Learning, a conference all about how to effectively teach students born into the “Age of Internet,” and so my contribution was a presentation with my colleague J on using mathematical software to present mathematics using visual intuition and empirical hypothesis-testing, rather than the static memorization of new rules, but mainly it was a chance to show off some of my cool Maple programs, like one that allows students to render a movable tangent line:

or another that allows students to watch Taylor polynomials synamically converge to the function they’re approximating:

The ten or so folks who attended seemed very interested in the ideas we presented, and almost all of them stayed a half-hour after the conclusion of the talk to experiment some more with them, which was karmically rewarding for me.  Even better, the Vice President of Komplexify U was also in attendance, and got to see me make said presentation and see dais post-presentation congregation, which (given that I am going up for tenure next year) I hope will be financially rewarding as well.

The conference itself was held in one of the convention-hall areas of a towering Hilton.  The Hilton itself was pretty nondescript, but it is worth mentioning that the Collaboration conference was the same weekend as a Society for the Culturally Awkward (or SCA) group, which meant that when I wasn’t at a pedagogy seminar I was watching pimply-faced guys and gals in corsets and knightly body armor bady singing karaoke renditions of disco songs, which is a spectacle I would highly recommend to others.

I did not, however, stay at the Hilton, but rather at the hotel across the street, the Sofitel.  If a hotel can be built around a theme, then for the Sofitel that theme would be sixties Paris; if a hotel can be built around a single word, then for the Sofitel that word would be swanky.  There’s psychedelic paintings on the walls, oblong glass tables at which to sit, and artistically arranged (though probably non-OSHA compliant) exposed wiring in the elevators.  One wall of the foyer undulates like a sine curve, with leather loveseats nestled away into its nooks and niches adorned with scented candles and plaques with words like Magnifique or Couture or Pomme de terre in overly ornate cursive fonts.  The foyer itself consists of a vast open rectangular space in which four massive circular chandeliers dangle in scene that can best be descibed as “just moments before massive structural failure:”

I didn’t do much on Friday after the collaboration, owing to the fact that the outdoor temperature was hovering just slightly below absolute zero, but on Saturday, J and I headed downtown to catch a play at the Guthrie.  The play was Peer Gynt, a reinterpretation of a Norwegian faolk story that involved businessmen in cardiac distress, human-troll interspecies breeding, hallucinatory voyages through the desert and the ocean, and the melting of people into tin coins before it got really strange.  It was enjoyable, if a little bizarre.

The Guthrie itself is a remarkable building.  Its bright blue exterior is a strange contrast of circular arches and rectangular blocks, do that the entire structure appears to be built entirely out of overzsized Legos blocks.  Inside, the Guthrie has more twists and turns than the building in that Relativity Escher print.  There is the “forever bridge,” a sort of cantlevered archway that gives to the person standing at its far end the vertigo-inducing impression of being dangled precariously two blocks away from the theatre building itself.  There are a pair of escalators that appear to throb and pulse with light.  There is are bathrooms with no sinks, per se, but stacks of irregularly-placed planes of metal that direct (in unneccesarily Rube-Goldbergian fashion) water from a faucet to the general vicity of your hands.  There is the Dowling Theatre on the ninth floor, a massive gallery of empty space flanked on all sides by yellow-tinted windows that give the entire world a nostalgic sepia-tinged glow, as if you’d stepped out of reality and into an antique photograph.  The Guthrie is cool.

After the play, J and I strolled through downtown Minneapolis to get something to eat.  The city has this ingenious thing called the “City Walk,” which I can best describe as a human sized version of a hamster tube like this…

…except this one is the size of a major city.  Seriously, it’s this elevated, enclosed walkway that meanders back and forth throughout most of downtown Minneapolis.  It cuts its way through the interior of office buildings and commercial centers, department stores and parking garages, occasionally dropping a little tube of stairs down to terra firma should you wish to walk the mean streets.  On the one hand, its a bit like walkinh through a never-ending subway station: poorly ventilated, stuffy, and frequently smelling of urine.  On the other hand, it’s a neat way to walk through Minneapolis at night and see the city without freezing off your junk.

Anyhoo, I took some pictures over at Flickr if you’re interested.