At 12:45 AM 3/5/2002 -0800, Robert G. Nolty wrote: Hi all -- As you may or may not have noticed, there have been no Bobologues since August. I almost squeezed one out in October, so below I send the paragraphs I wrote at that time, along with all the one-liners from my notes over the past six months. Eat them in good health -- Bob ------------------------------------------------------------------------ DONE I did it. It wasn't particularly worth doing, and I didn't do it particularly well, but that's not the point. "Semi-contained Atmospheric Neutrinos in the MACRO Detector" was not indefensible, as evidenced by my successful defense on 18 Oct. I didn't have much of an emotional reaction that day or in the following days, although now (three weeks later) I must say I am suffused with more of a sense of well-being, and that when nothing in particular is going on I can say that I'm happy. Cool. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ A SEPTEMBER TO BARELY REMEMBER I am sure I am the only one who noticed that there was no September Bobologue. I was in the throes of finishing up (what's the singular of throes?) and decided that my need to feel witty and appreciated could be deferred for a month. With September came the sudden arrival of Fall Weather, which is dominated by The Marine Layer. As I was taking the Amtrack Surfliner up to a Labor Day campout at Moro Bay (Motto: The otters are everywhere, except where you're looking) I saw a strange and beautiful sight: the train was about 50 feet above sea level, but the clouds had descended right to the tips of the waves -- it was like looking down on the clouds from 50,000 feet. I observed all this from my Business Class coach, where my $16 upgrade got me access to electrical outlets so I could pound away at my thesis on my laptop as I whisked up the scenic Simi Valley. Nothing like a little C++ coding to make a trip memorable. Fall weather was not welcomed by our six- and eight-legged friends. We had a bad summer for ants, which is to say a good summer for spiders, and I have to admit taking some macabre pleasure in noticing, under each of the Daddy Longlegs webs in my room, lots of dessicated ant bodies. But on the cold, damp day of September 1, the ants all vacated the house and went wherever it is that ants go in the winter, and the spider population (which had doubled and trebled in the summer) fell on hard times. Our previously congenial relationship turned tense; they refused to make eye contact with me and I thought I noticed a desperate and guilty demeanor. Fortunately, most of them seem to have starved before they got organized enough to do me any bodily harm. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ ALL THAT JAZZ I joined a record club, which started me out with seven free CDs (free in this case is a synonym for $20.71). I bought only jazz for some odd reason; and for some odder reason, I bought not only guys I knew I like (Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Billie Holiday) but also guys I strongly expected to hate (Dizzie Gillespie, Charlie Parker, Miles Davis, John Coltrane). If I were hung up on some woman who likes jazz it would make sense... Back in 1986 I lived in Louisville and became addicted to NPR news. And I guess I was pretty lazy because, with KFPL playing jazz about 20 hours a day, I never bothered to change the channel. And I found that there was some jazz (like Dave Brubeck or Stan Getz) that was easy to listen to, flying through my head like so many neutrinos without making ripples. And then there was bebop. I didn't get bebop. Bebop did not pass politely through my brain; it left jagged, bleeding sores. Frankly it sounded like seventh graders pushing the keys as fast as they could. But something has happened in the intervening years; Gillespie, Parker and Davis sound quite melodic and groovy to me. Alas, I'm still not ready for Coltrane. Nor do I particularly aspire to *ever* be ready for Coltrane. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ I scored big at the Salvation Army Thrift Store Halloween Half Price Sale. My motto has always been, why pay $3.60 for a pair of pants when you could get them for $1.80? Isn't canceling baseball for a week giving the victory to terrorism? Bush says we're on a crusade to rid the world of evil. I don't think he understands evil very well. I don't get patriotism. This is not meant to imply I've transcended it for a smug, superior position. I just don't get it. In the first place, it never occurred to me to feel worse about terrorists killing Americans than I have about terrorists killing Northern Irelanders or Philippinos or Israelis; nor to feel worse about foreign terrorists killing Americans than I did about Oklahoma City, nor to feel worse about the 2000 people who died due to a deliberate act of evil than about the 10,000 people who die *everyday* of hunger-related causes. And on September 12, when I saw a man standing on a freeway overpass waving a large American flag, it just astounded me that that would be a way a human being would respond to this tragedy. Now that I've seen about a million flags being flown I've grown used to the idea. But I still don't get it. At Moro Bay, I saw a young teenage girl wearing a t-shirt that said "Boy Magnet" across the chest. I asked my companions if they thought that referred to all of her, or just the chest. If you are not a baseball fan, I suggest you become one. Rewatching the 2001 World Series will alone compensate you for your effort. Watching Game 7 was one of the great emotional experiences of my life, which tells you something about Game 7, and something about my life. In Summer of 1991, I was playing in a softball league at a physics lab in Chicago, and in an outfield mishap I rolled my glasses. I remember thinking they were so old I should just replace them rather than fix them. But I didn't get around to it right away, nor indeed for the next 10 1/4 years. After my defense I did finally get around to it, and with the help of a tasteful friend I selected a style slightly more fashionable than my previous saucers. One of my female admirers even referred to them as "your sexy new glasses", although I must say that in my book, I've never considered eyewear of any kind to have any bearing on sex appeal. I think it was in November that my old buddy Dean Wilberg came to town and suggested a roadtrip. We stayed gone a little over a day, most of the time with the wheels rolling. Up the coast to SLO, then down the valley -- not the central valley, which is full of lettuce, but the one west of there that is full of oil wells. Some memorable Wilberg quotes: "I don't care where we eat, as long as it starts with an 'N'... and ends with an 'Out'." "This map shows a lot of scenic routes; I think it's giving some parts of the country the benefit of the doubt." Memo to Chevrolet: "Some folks are born, made to wave the flag/Ooh, the Red White and Blue/And when the band plays Hail to the Chief/Ooh, they're pointing the finger at you" is not a pro-war patriotic song. John Fogarty would be rolling over in his grave, if he were only dead (like any respectable sixties' rocker would be). Speaking of John Fogarty (who would be the coolest man on earth if Ray Charles weren't the coolest man on earth), I completed my CD club commitment without ever buying a single track recorded after 1990. After starting with the seven jazz albums, I got four classic rockers -- Springsteen "Born in the USA", Petty "Full Moon Fever" (the one with "Free Falling"), Fogarty/CCR "Willie and the Poor Boys", and Three Dog Night "Greatest Hits" -- I was inspired to buy the latter on Thanksgiving Weekend, when I was headed to Las Vegas but had only made it out to Needles. Meanwhile, my thirteen-year-old housemate is suddenly into eighties rock. He's playing all the tunes (Black Sabbath, AC/DC, Alice Cooper) I used to hate when my college dormmate played them. But now, they just suffuse me with a warm, nostalgic glow. I am the world's worst investor. I started my IRA with some mutual funds in 1996 and caught the greatest bull run the market has ever known, at the end of which I had slightly less money in my account than I had put in over the years. In Jesus' parable about the servants and the talents, he doesn't describe the fate of the servant who invested the talents in T. Rowe Price's New Asia Fund a couple of months before the Asian financial crisis hit. On 24 Dec I ate only M&Ms. I didn't really plan it that way, but by the time it got to be 6:00 pm and I hadn't got around to eating breakfast, the perversity of continuing to eat only M&Ms appealed to me. Linux rocks. In December I gave my server its first reboot in six months, and then only because I accidentally kicked the power cord out. Isn't this millenium going a lot faster than the previous one? I saw the year-old Disney movie "The Kid", which I enjoyed, although its main effect was to remind me what a dogless chickless loser I am. My cable modem network was down all afternoon so I called tech support; but by the time they got me off hold they had the network back up. In his nonfiction, Daniel Dafoe has an annoying habit of prefixing a 25-word sentence with "In a word,". I ate some ecologically-diverse chili one evening, and that night I ralphed for the first time in seven years. I recovered quickly; 24 hours later when I was able to keep McDonald's down, I knew I was well. I find the quality of colleges correlates well with the quality of toilet paper in their public restrooms. I went to a 1-ply college for undergrad, but my grad school was comfortably 2-ply. So one night we're in my office at Caltech and notice an annoying odor. Thirty minutes later we all have headaches and the smell only grows stronger. We call security, and they discover guys in gas masks -- GAS MASKS! -- in the basement two floors down painting a room with "chemical-resistant paint". They said we should have got a memo warning us. Only one case of behavior change in six months: I pulled a foil packet of Pop Tarts out of the box and found it was very neatly sealed with black tape -- my instinct was to blow it off and eat them, but then a little post-9-11 paranoia kicked in and I tossed them. If a man climbs Mount Everest and doesn't write a book about it, did he really climb Mount Everest? We don't know for sure because it's never happened. I only talk in my sleep when I'm in public. Well, more like shout in my sleep. If you'd had a microphone in my shared hotel room at the video convention in Vegas last August you would have recorded the following: "HA! ... HA! ... HA! ... . ... sorry guys, bad dream." Then in February, sleeping horizontally in three seats of a 727, I dreamed that someone had made a mess in my house and I yelled at them, "You're making this house into a place where I DON'T WANT TO LIVE!" Unfortunately, only the last five words were shouted in the waking world. I awoke and thought about sitting up and apologizing; but given the suicidal nature of my outburst, I decided the best course of action was to pretend I was still asleep. HE: There was a huge line at El Pollo Loco, and when we got to the front there was no chicken left. ME: It was just El Loco. ME: I'll take these two items, and could you give me a paper cup from the ice cream counter? SHE: They charge for that. ME: *They* do? What do *you* do? SHE: How do you know the meter stick is 100 cm long? ME: Because it's a meter stick. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Quote of the Month: "The game begins in the spring, when everything else begins again, and it blossoms in the summer, filling the afternoons and evenings, and then as soon as the chill rains come, it stops and leaves you to face the fall alone." - Bartlett Giamatti CURRENT READING: Since I graduated, I've been slowly working through "Exploring Complexity", an odd book by a Nobel-winning chemist. It's too informal and vague to be a text, but too technical to be read by anyone but physics graduate students. Oh well, finally *I* am the target demographic.