soapbox

A British saying identifies the difference between two popular sports thus: “Football (soccer) is a gentleman’s sport played by hooligans, while rugby is a hooligan’s sport played by gentlemen.”

Certainly there are exceptions, but if you haven’t been watching Sportscenter the past week, then check this out.

What’s really impressive (and slightly disturbing) is that none of the major offenses even drew a card – she ended up with just one yellow for a “minor” trip.

Whitman’s newspaper is the Pioneer and there was an article this week calling for Professor-bloggers to give the URL of their blogs to the Pio so they can be publicized.

I’m thinking that I don’t mention soapbox to them.

I had one of my wisdom teeth pulled out almost exactly a year ago. To figure out where exactly the roots of the tooth were going, they did a panoramic x-ray (which showed that it was a simple tooth to extract) and the surgeon said “did you know that you have a huge cavity in your other top wisdom tooth?” In my visits to the dentist over the summer, she confirmed that I was going to have to get that tooth out too, but since it wasn’t hurting and since the removal would hurt, I put things off. (Also, she wants me to get the remaning three wisdom teeth taken out all at once and that requires more recovery time and my bottom ones are doing just fine.)

So, I could have gotten things taken care of last year, but selling the house and moving too precidence. I could have done it over the summer, but I was watching Sarah full time and just didn’t feel like it. I could have gotten it done a couple weeks ago during “October break”, but I had better things to be doing.

Now though, it’s kind of hurting. Well, more than just “kind of”. My mouth hurts! And, of course, now I can’t get an appointment. The surgeon I was referred to does all of his extractions on Fridays, which would work with my schedule. However, he has to do a consult with you first and he only does that on Mondays and Wednesdays when I’ll be out of town. The semester is rapidly coming to a close though and I don’t want to miss any classes because we need to get through all the material for the semester. Of course, if I’m crying and rolling on the ground in a week or two, I’m not sure how effective of a teacher I’ll be.

Now I’m thinking that I should maybe find a doctor here in Walla Walla. Make an appointment for early Thursday afternoon. Get the tooth extracted, give myself 2 hours to clot, and then hop on the plane home. That, however, strikes me as being somewhat insane.

I had to go to the Apple store yesterday to get another power supply for my laptop. I have three places where I use the computer (office, home, and apartment) and I kept forgetting my existing one one place or another. Anyway, if you have lots of them you don’t have to carry them around.

While I was there though, I picked up one of Apple’s new Magic Mice. I have to say that it’s definitely the best bluetooth mouse I’ve ever used. The laser tracking is really nice, it has decent heft, and fits in your hand well. The cool thing though is that the surface of the mouse works as a multi-touch trackpad so you can scroll around by sliding your finger on the surface of the mouse. It works really nicely. Right and left click work too with the mouse sensing which finger you’re using to click.

Now for the negatives.
1) I didn’t actually need a new mouse, but couldn’t help myself.
2) There isn’t a middle mouse button, which would be handy for pasting in UNIX programs. I assume this could be fixed in software though.
3) I actually prefer a corded mouse. (The batteries in the Magic Mouse are supposed to last around 4 months, so this might just not be an issue.)

So, in conclusion, both of Apple’s mice right now are pretty good and I really like the “Mighty Mouse” (now just the “Apple Mouse”), but the ball on my old mice seem to get jammed up every 6 months or so sending the mice to mouse heaven. The fact that the new mouse doesn’t have any moving parts should hopefully solve that problem.

I’ve never stood in a line for so long before in my life. I haven’t been to concerts with lines for tickets that were that long. When the Star Wars and the Matrix sequels came out, I had friends who wanted to stand in line and got tickets for me.

But today I stood in line for 6 hours, behind about 5,000 other people, to get a shot. It’s a very anticlimactic thing too. Jab, squeeze, done. 6 hours of waiting for a 2 second thing.

The good news though is that in another week or so once the immunity fully develops, my students can sneeze on me all they want and I don’t have to worry about getting Sarah sick. Kirsten can let coworkers sneeze on her. Sarah can let other kids sneeze on her. Gabriella can let other au pairs sneeze on her. So basically if H1N1 turns into a really big thing, we’ll be amazingly happy we stood in line for six hours. If it fizzles out, it’ll be the worst use of a weekend ever.

(Of course, one of the best ways to help it fizzle out is to get vaccinated, so get the shots once you have the chance. That might not be until December, but get it in December then.)

I don’t know that there’s much more to say about it than that.. The 1918 flu was also also a H1N1 strain and predominantly killed people our age by making our immune systems overwork themselves. Young kids, old people, and people with weak immune systems all made it through. The healthy young adults were the ones who died.

The good news though is that this isn’t a H5N1 avian flu. Only a few people have ever been infected with it but the fatality rate is between 60 and 100%.

Is it mean if I think it’s funny? My students have weekly quizzes on Thursdays and this week’s quiz has a lot of true or false questions. The funny thing is that the answers are all false. (Or true, all one or the other, just in case some student happens to read this.)

If the trues and falses are distributed more or less evenly, you can feel good about the fact that you’re answering T to 50% and F to 50%. I think having a strong bias will really make people have to stand by their knowledge. It’ll be really interesting to see how many people switch their answers back and forth.