Copyright: A Summary

CPT: Have we heard back on any of the stuff we were waiting on?
Me: No. None of it.
CPT: Which were the things we were wondering about?
Me: All of them.

Unite!

Me: Rstevens says "Free yourself from the tyranny of pants! Onwards toward nudity!"
Greg: Excellent! Tell him I fully support his movement and wish to obtain some pamphlets!

On Lobster

Greg: I have to wonder, how does a giant scavenger insect living at the bottom of the sea get so tasty? It doesn't make sense.

Salt! Salt! Salt!

Mike: Nothing makes me want to destroy humanity more than Parrotheads.

Subbin'

Me: Half this choir is subs. They were reading "Assumpta est Maria"
and had to be told it was for Assumption.
Greg: Well, what did you assume?
Me: I assumed you'd say that, for one thing.

I Do Try

Sammy: You look very serious.
Me: I'm trying to prevent the clarinets from having to play Clarinet Candy, Clarinet Polka, or Fiddle Faddle.
Sammy: A noble cause.

My Obvious Hip Hop Potential

Me: They see me munchin', they hatin', something something something
something eatin' almonds.
Greg: Okay...?

From the organization that brought you "Somebody should update the wiki" comes...

Greg: I thought communication was hard, but apparently I'm awesome at it!

Yet more LBSC0735!

• We replaced everything else we had with Going Rogue; it's all you need.
• If you had a slow connection with baseball, how would you know? They're just standing there either way.
• Stupidity is boundless.
• I suppose this is really overly dorky.
• The T is for terrorism. Wow, that sounds like Sesame Street gone wrong.
• It sounds like fun! And anchovy!
• You don't see doctors throwing paint on each other and screaming "Lucifer."
• Um...hi...I've been charged with killing hobos.
• Not, like, professors, but real educators.
• Not long ago, barber/surgeon was a career choice.
  

Rejoice! For I have found two months of LBSC0735 notes, and the snide comments thereunto pertaining

• More than a third of the class has one of four first names.
• My email address is on here, which I now point to, because a year ago someone emailed me to tell me they couldn't find my email address on the syllabus. I wept quietly.
• What are the blankets that have sleeves?
• If you're Dan Brown--not that I would wish that on anybody...
• Re RIAA: ...the people what done did the suin'...
• Archivalship? Archivin'!
• Most law review footnotes are not worth your time.
• If society collapses that far, it'll be an issue of avoiding the Mad-Max-style people.
• Remember a couple years ago when we were all killed by SARS?
• If we fail, it will be spectacular.
• Week 4 is where people start showing up in tinfoil hats.
• There's never nothing happening relating to the law and information.
• He wasn't the sharpest bulb in the drawer.
• Enjoy your urban blight!
• I got caught in a scrum, and I was trying to go the other way...so definitely go to the ALA convention, just wear shin guards.
• I guess you could be an anarchist librarian, but how would you order the things?
• Aardvarks aren't edible. There's your band name! Plenty of opportunities for umlauts!
• You can tell by the acronym it was a bad idea.
• I ran out of chalkboards, so it seems like we'll go with five.
• Life without spellcheck is really confusing. I started to write parnats.
• Check the wayback machine; I'm done.
• We don't want to corrupt our children with reality!

Student: People have this bizarre but understandable love for the library.
Teacher: "Bizarre but understandable?" I like that.
Student: "Bizarre" seemed too judgmental.
Teacher: Especially because you're, y'know, here. "I'm here to destroy libraries from within!"

• Anybody get all angrified while you were reading it?
• I know nothing about Star Trek.

Student: There are Nixon deniers?
Teacher: Why not? I have no recollection of him.

• If someone wants to just chug the crumbs out of the bag, that opportunity is available.
• That wasn't the only thing: he also had a neck beard.
• I've left the house several times this week, that hasn't made the news.
• Everything will be okay, so long as Janet Jackson's not involved.
• There's a lot of evil out there, and credit card companies and data aggregators both fall into that category.
• Old Navy! Where are you?!
• I come not to praise Wal-Mart but to bury it.

Student: Note to self: Don't tell [student] anything.
Teacher: There's your privacy issue right there.

• ...pipes, gas lines, mole men...
• Now do you see how it's all fun and exciting and angries up the blood?
• Hectares! That is not a unit of measurement we use enough. Especially in terms of ordering at a restaurant. God, that's the sign Americans' diets are out of control--I'll have a hectare of potato salad, please. Bring a shovel.
• Here it's an antacid; there it's a back hoe.
• Let's obey the laws of physics!
• Yeah, the Nuremberg defense.
• Because Google has to seem threatening.
• The patent office is in the 18th century.
• It's a delightfully terrible idea.
• If you wanted to stage a Beckett play--footnote: why?--but if you did...

Teacher: I forgot two. Damnit! Okay, let's just go on to three.
Class: Profit!
Teacher: What?

Me: I'm not making you read Finnegan's Wake!
Teacher: I've already done that!
Me: Screenshot or it didn't happen.

• That's what that cubby's for! I've always wondered.
• So hypothetically, we'll call it "J.D. Salinger."
• But that doesn't work for shoes. Touche!
• I don't know why I picked Ben Hur. It was the first thing that came to mind.

Student: She was reading an abridged version, where it stops short of Beth dying.
Student 2: Spoiler alert!

• Tom Waits does admittedly sound like no human should.
• ...the annual orphan works bill...
• I don't have a beard, and I don't own any elbow patches! I had a lot of things preventing me from teaching at a law school.
• I can anticipate the moves of Garth Brooks!
• It's a hypothetical dog.
• ...fantastic in its evilness.
• If you can't identify a squiggle, just assume it's positive.
• You can't get more than full credit on the assignment. Stop talking to me.
  

Romantic Sunday Morning

Me: *frrrt*
Greg: Pathetic.
Me: Who made you king of the farts?
Greg: Do you really need to ask?

Patois

Greg: Do you want to go to the other Walmart?
Me: Yeah. I hate the fact that you can't check inventory online, but this is better than calling a bunch of Walmarts.
Greg: True.
Me: You'd have to use the local dialect: "Y'all got any a them iPhones?"
Greg: That was pretty good, but you're missing at least two things. You need a hacking cough somewhere in there, and you need to be yelling at kids in the background. "Git off the couch!"
Me: "Stop biting the dog!" *hack hack hack*
Greg: Okay that actually was kind of disturbing.

I Get All My News From Drunk Hulk

Me: Didja hear Al and Tipper Gore are separating?
Greg: No.
Me: Yeah, Drunk Hulk says he's been saying that for years, because humans and robots shouldn't marry.
Greg: Which one's the human and which one's the robot?
Me: Who can say?

Choice Quotes from LBSC0735, December 10, 2009, Which I Apparently Never Posted

• I apologize for the ones that got bent. I had cat issues. She is clearly smarter than I am.
• I would appreciate, if you got an A, that you not complain about your grade.
• Evil trolls? The scheduling fairy? I don't know.
• You should all be eating a rubber chicken dinner and I should be doing a soliloquy.
• Proactive drinking? I'm not sure what that would be besides another band name or memoir title. Or both! Why be limiting?
• The way to handle IP in the archives is to weep quietly in the corner while drinking.
• Okay, I missed something. Or did something stupid and didn't realize it. Two choices, either viable.
• If graduations did mean people bursting into song, wouldn't more people show up?
• My PhD hat is one of those octagonal things, except it has a big poofy bottom, so it's like the 16th-century Dutch navy or something.
  

The Male Flautist: Loud 'n Proud

Me: The oldest Chimes of Liberty you have, which should be Feist from 1922: does it have second flute?
Laura: I don't know!
Me: You don't know that off the top of your head? How embarrassing.
Laura: Hey Rob, the oldest Chimes of Liberty we have, does it have second flute?
Rob: I'm not sure.
Laura: He's not sure.
Me: What the hell kind of flute player is he?
Laura: What kind of flute player are you, she wants to know.
Rob: The kind that plays first.

Brush with Fame

Me: Famous person!
Jonathan Coulton: Famous person!

I understand the reasons why you're hungry 'cuz so am I

Greg: The only question is, what do you want to do for breakfast, lunch, brunch, frunch, d-lunch, d-linner, d-leackfast, d-lightful?

My Hal Leonard contact was also kind enough to point this out today

John: Hello! Carry on! Remember, could be worse, you could be stuck in a windowless room when it's gorgeous out!
Matt: I'm completely sure he didn't need to go there.

Abominable Papercrafts

Me: Did you know there are "print and fold" mascots at vancouver2010.com?
Mike: No I did not, but I so don't want a stylized Canadian first-nations origami yeti in my house. Oh, wait, yes I do.

A Selection of High-Quality Typos So Far This Week

The Way You Loom Tonight
South Rampart Street Pavane
Sleigh Rice

Matt: Y'know, I would like to hear that pavane.

The Art of Conversation

Me: Hello! Would you like to talk about my headache? It's all I can think about.
Shari: My back is killing me.
Me: Would you like to talk about my headache to take your mind off of it?

Lest you think this blog is merely a catalog of stupid crap others say

Me: In my head, a group of children are yelling "thank you, TiVO chicken! Bok bok!"
...
Me: It's like Wil Wheaton. Well, it's like Wil Wheaton dressed as Colonel Sanders.

It's not all fun and games, you know.

Greg: God, this sobriety test is so boring!

Learning

Matt: I’m all about learning through failure. Lots and lots of failure. If it’s possible to screw it up, I’m there.

Two Snippets of Radio Announcements Heard While Abusing "Scan"

1. ...for various reasons. But that is why we have so many oratorios!
2. Elaine Stritch!

Greg Summarizes Rosemary's Baby

Greg: Yay, technology! Boo, devil worship!

So we're at this restaurant showing Jacques Pepin on a loop, right?

Me: Flanmergency!
Greg: How often do you have one of those?

Black Friday Shopping

Greg: The hard thing about Mike is you have to find something truly
awful. Just horribly, unforgivably bad.

Aloo Paratha

Me: Yesterday we had potato in a pie crust, so clearly now we need
potato stuffed in bread.
Joel: How far do you want to go with this?
Me: I want a turducken of starches!

Mathramblin'

Me: That's what your book of cowboy poetry will be called.
Greg: Ridin' across the prairie, I seen a five by seven grid of cows...

9.2% abv

Me: How ya doin'?
Greg: I'm almost capable of focusing on the task at hand!

Conversation Degradation

Greg: You gotta love a man who knows his sausages.
Me: Is that a penis joke? I've lost track.
Greg: When did they start?
Me: With the "rigor" joke.
Greg: Oh yeah. Anyway, I may not know my sausages that well, but I'm
reasonably familiar with them.
Me: ...okay, was that a penis joke?
Greg: Always assume everything is a penis joke.

Mart A

Me: One of the craft blogs in my reader has a free needlepoint pattern today: "The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog." Do you see the flaw?
Greg: What flaw could you be talking about? Every pangram (the right name, I think) ever written joined every letter into a maze of language. Quite exciting!

Time to Decipher the Thermostat

Me: How is it colder UPstairs?
Greg: I don't know!
Me: Did heat not get the memo?

Don't Ask, I Won't Tell

Matt: Okay, who put words to the Minute Waltz?
Me: Barbra Streisand. Why do you ask questions you don't want the answer to?

Cold Weather Attire

Me: ...and I discovered when I went to the bathroom that there was a third layer I'd forgotten about.
Greg: "There's pants in my pants!"

With great power comes the obligation to dismiss people early

Loran: This is my first chance to be magnanimous, so take advantage of it.

Get us, bein' all topical and stuff

Mike: I'm not sure that goring is legal in football.
Me: Damnit, first that useless pass interference rule, now no goring? Where's the sport, I ask you!
Mike: Next thing you know, they'll take away our handguns!
Me: What's this country coming to?
Mike: It's the Communo-Fascist Terrorist Muslims in the government, I tell ya.
Me: We should all move to Iran, one of the most democratic countries in the world! According to them!
Mike: Plus, bonus: no gays!
Me: According to them!
Mike: Well, and why would they lie? That nice Mahmoud has such an honest face.
Me: And he's willing to stay in a normal hotel room. Unlike some.
Mike: Exactly. He's so down-to-earth and charming, it's easy to ignore the Holocaust denying. Everybody has flaws.

Nature/Nurture

Matt: I do some bone-headed guy things sometimes, but dude, some guys make guys look bad. I want to say, did your mama raise you, or were you raised by two dudes?
Me: Nah, two dudes would do it better.
Matt: No, not like gay dudes, like...
Me: Two asshats?
Matt: Exactly. You know what they say, asshats beget asshats.

The Contractors Finally Left

Matt: They did leave two ladders and a hammer.
Me: Maybe we can fix the light.
Matt: You want to fix the light with a hammer?
Me: Sure. Why not?
Matt: I can do that. There are two things I, as a man, can do: use a hammer and grill meat.

Moving

Me: We haven't unpacked any computers yet.
Mike: *spit take* No computers?! My god, woman! How do you live?

User Error

Marva: It's a good thing the copier can't talk. It'd be all "Oh hell no, don't you be looking at me like that, like I'm the idiot. You're the idiot." You'd get anywhere near it and you'd hear "Oh no, here it comes again."

Crap

Matt: You know what they say, crap wrapped in gold is gold crap. Actually they don’t say that. I just made it up. But you can sell your gold crap.

Me: It’s worth its weight in gold.

 

Explanation

Vinnie: I love to do that, just to give people cause to say "Why'd you do that?"

Programming

Mike B: It's part of the process. First we pick the tunes, then the sax section goes on and on and on about how all of the tunes suck.

Power Outage Vignettes

Chad: I feel sorry for the [auditionee] playing at the time.
Matt: If he keeps playing, he's in.

Jay: I thought we had emergency lighting in here.
Me: We do. It's called a window.

Gene: Oh my god, I just tried to use the paper shredder, and I couldn't figure out why it wasn't working.

Me: Hey, do me a favor and guard the men's room door. They have a window and I've already peed in the dark once today.
...
Me: Thanks! They're gonna be all "who put the seat down?!"

New Neighbors

Me: I was looking for someone on whitepages.com, and noticed the "search neighborhood" link, which finds the rest of the block. Households in our new area include the Gross family and the Neat family.
Mike: I guess I know who you'll be hanging out with.
Me: I don't know that we'd want either of them over for dinner.
Mike: I just hope they don't live next door to each other. I'm imagining lawn arguments.

Most Pathetic Attempt at Small Talk While Attending a Mandatory Event

Strange Woman: Looks like you got a good turn-out! Were you here last
year?

Ye Olde Eeeewwwww

Me: I am never going to a Ren Faire with you again.
Mike: Aw, man. I was counting on you for the urine.

Not like they could charge 48.75 cents each, but still

Me: CPT Pena just asked me to order the second and fourth movements of a suite for the chorus. I can pay $1.90 each for each movement, or $1.95 each for the whole suite.
Jennie: Here's your sign.

And those words are El Hambo

Me: If you're the guy who got Kde su kravy moje stuck in my head, we're going to have words.

As we raise our voices in a solemn prayer...

Me: God bless America.
Mike: And lasers.
Me: Yes, lasers bless America.

I Failed to Post This When It Happened

Mike: Wow, they Epic Failed 15 years before Epic Failing even existed!
Me: They were pioneers.
Mike: They took their Failboat across the Failsea, straight to the colony of Failsburgh, to start life anew. A life where the freedom to fail is an unassailable right.
Me: And we will call it Failtopia!

Original Thoughts are Inefficient!

Conductor: Do we have any of these tunes? [list]
Me: No, but I have the CD you're looking at.

Leadership

CPT: Is this gonna work?
Me: Beats me. I've assigned Matt the task of figuring it the hell out.

Movie reviews as a function of Leonard Part 6

Matt: ...and I realized I've never seen "Hair," and I was looking at the listings, and it's on AMC at like 4am, so I set the TiVo.
Adrian: You're proud of this? Something they only air at 4am?
Matt: Sure! I mean, it's "Hair," right? It's...
Me: Iconic.
Matt: There you go, iconic.
Adrian: As iconic as "Leonard Part 6."
Matt: Which I've seen like twenty times.
Me: You don't tell people that.
Matt: I was a kid! Plus, I'd rather see that twenty times than watch "The Happening" ever again.

Belly-Poking Standoff

Greg: It's like a John Woo movie! Except with fingers!

Advanced Topics in Shopping Theory

Mike: What I need is for the price to drop by a lot. At 50% off, I'd totally buy two.

Betty White

Adrian: She’s a lot funnier than Jack Black, I’ll tell you that.

Eating Habits

Me: How did you get parsley on your shoulder?
Greg: How could I not get parsley on my shoulder?!

Walk Tall

CPT: Who sings that?

Me: Beats me. I have David Tennant singing it.

Vinny: Yeah, but everything you have is a cover.

Me: Yeah, so?

YouTube, Summarized

Mike: The people, they have too much of the time, and too many of the
Legos.

That Certain Sound

Greg: What was that supposed to be?
Jake: A yawp of some sort or other.
Me: A barbaric yawp?
Jake: That's the one.

The Year of the NCO

Greg: The Army has a zodiac?!

(I'm Lying, Of Course)

Loran: There was a prolonged, very loud noise.
Jay: Uh, yeah. That might've been us.
Me: And even if it was, it had nothing to do with the blood on my head.
Loran: Uh huh.

He Has Opinions

Me: It's not so much math, it's probability.
Greg: Probability has math in it. Math that sucks.

And more.

Greg: My nose is itchy. And that has nothing to do with the Finnish
baserunners. I mean...
Me: What were you saying about Finnish baserunners?
Greg: Nothing!!

And yes, this did fit naturally into the conversation.

Me: You're signalling the Finnish undergound!
Greg: I wish!

Wherein Mike Wins the Text Conversation

Me: I'm at Catholic for a thing, and the room it's in has souvenirs from a priest's travels...
Me: ...and there's a carving of Ganesha from his trip to India...
Me: ...but since it's Catholic, it's labeled "man with the head of an elephant."
Mike: "Dude with lots of arms."
Me: "unknown figure seated on throne of skulls."
Mike: "Weird blue person."
Mike: "Monkey."

Clarification

Roman: By "bread," of course, I mean "pizza."

And yet this is itself true

Mike: Truth is stranger than Canadians.

Ah, inquisitive youth!

Dad: Do you have root beer?
Waitress: We do, but it's on draft, so it costs a little more. Is that
okay?
Kid: What's draft?
Waitress: It's where you pull down a big handle and it makes the beer
come out of a great big container...
Dad: ...called a keg...
Waitress: ...instead of a can.
Kid: Oh. What's a can?

Maurice Jarre

Me: Dangit, now I have Lara's theme from Dr. Zivago in my head.
Greg: Oh. I have "My Husband was a Weatherman."
Me: That's because you didn't collect music boxes as a child.

Game Day

Brian: The dragon is there whenever someone rolls a 1. So even if you
defeat him, the next time someone rolls a 1...
David: Cave of Infinite Dragons.
Alex: I need to remember to copyright that as a band name.
Greg: Eh, it's more of a debut album.

Truer Words Were Never Spoken

Greg: The internets is a dick.

Misery Loves Company

Me: I have "What's the Story, Morning Glory" stuck in my head now.
Guy from HFA: Try "Chain of Fools." That's what I've got.

were in ur dikshunaries

SGM: Since when is “vision” a verb?

Me: Since we verbed it, duh.

Career Advice

Greg: Don't get sent to Leavenworth for killing the band.
Me: But what if they need killin'?
Greg: Don't get sent to Leavenworth for killing the band.
Me: Ahhhhh, okay.

Why Is This Difficult?

Long-Winded Guy, summarized: I need a copy of [tune].
Me, summarized: Despite the fact that you failed to give me the title, composer, or any useful information, from your long description of the tune, I can tell you we don’t have it.
LWG, verbatim: I spoke to my friend today and he told me he thought the music went to the Ft. Dix music library. If you can locate the arrangement and get the exact title and the publishers name and address I can contact them and see what I can do.
Me, verbatim: I have forwarded your request to the band at Ft. Dix.

See also this classic post.

Brains!

Mike: Rarely does the addition of zombies lend itself to subtlety.

All Fear Google Street Views!

Mike: I kind of don't want to live in the Google Street Views world.  It's a very unpredictable and frightening place.

Me: What with the samurai and the UFOs and whatnot. And it’s impossible to pack for trips because of the weather.

Mike: Well, precisely. Not to mention the fact that cars and big-ass trucks pop in and out of existence from one moment to the next. Dude, dangerous!

All Hail Google Street Views!

Me: I scrolled the other direction and the sun came out!

Mike: Google Street Views is a powerful wizard!

How Not to Scam Music, continued

Navy officer: Yeah, I know we could buy it, but can’t you just fax it to us?

Another Day, Another Justifiable Homicide

Gene: So what are you up to?

Me: Oh, y’know. Not killin’ the concert band, a daily challenge.

Gene: That seems to be a common theme.

Accuracy

Me: I’m not making fun of you. In this case.

LT: Thank you for not making fun of me.

Me: …in this case.

LT: Thank you for not making fun of me in this case.

Me: There you go.

White Flannel Sheets

Me: How's the shedding going?
Greg: Well.
Me: Wow. It's amazing you still have any left on your body.
Greg: Oh my, no. I have a veritable fountain of hair.

The Salem Witch?

Me: Why would you name your boat that? Everyone would keep trying to
burn it!
Greg: Sure, but on the up side, when you put it in water, it floats.

Six Flags Under

Greg: Hurty, but fun.
Me: Worst amusement park ever. Hurty fun for the whole family! House
of Pins! Acid Flume! Tunnel of Bees!
Greg: The Bully Simulator!
Me: Teacups! Full of piping hot tea! Actual Pirates of the Carribean!
Greg: Botulism Bay!

Thursdays with Walter, week 11

There should be a technology fight song. Go, technology, go!

You'll be sorry you came to this class. This is the get jiggy class.

It's the Mothers of Invention. It's something old people use to like.

It's always somebody and his orchestra.

We have lugged in about 3000 pounds of equipment tonight, ostensibly to show you things.

I do accept coloring books in lieu of final papers, so if you threw anything away, ha ha!

Why you trickin' me, man?

What's this http thing I keep seeing? And three w's? Is that a mystical organization? They make things appear on my screen!

And that's actually Ronald Reagan!

Okay, let's not panic, we have options.

We don't have any sound off these things. What a cheap classroom.

Whoa! That's Moby Dick the sound recorder. Is that Edison right there? Whoever he is, he liked a beer after work.

That also is Ronald Reagan, by the way.

We could do ancestry next class.

Ah, it's beautiful: the music coffin.

Open the doors! Play it for the neighbors, see if I care!

If they want credit they have to stay! I love this!

Eduard-Leon Scott de Martinville, ore Eddie Martin as we used to call him...

Oh geez, I've got a class and I forgot my crank!

In the modern era, today it's an iPod, tomorrow it's a peapod, I don't know what's coming next and neither do you, and don't say you do.

No, no, don't come up with a better solution, I can't handle it. My whole house is full of better solutions.

I'm s'posed to clean this and have gloves on and...you know, read.

We're gonna do one more yodel.

Okay that's Alpine Harry and his Bob Dylan impersonation.

That's probably the greatness of museums and libraries: that the past is still there.

If you go back through old issues of Scientific American, you'll see why our society is really odd.

This thing has more scratches than Gabby Hayes's whiskers on a cheesecake.

Who says that? Chico!

If you know this group, you have serious issues.

It's too bad we can't hear this, because this is awful.

They have metal things coming our of their heads, and they look at me like I'm some kind of tree fossil. They're surprised I'm alive.

Ah! This is one handout you'll really want to color.

It was like watching a xerox copy of a baseball game.

The wildest surrealist poet on all available drugs at the same time couldn't come up with these band names.

You inhaled, you put [Inagaddadavida] on, and the next thing you knew it was Sunday!

You listen to T.S. Eliot, you don't need an antidepressant, you need someone to see where you are on the floor.

We've got time for a song. Do you want Barenaked Ladies, or Mingus, or...ooh!

Okay, the first track is called "Oh Lord, Don't Let 'Em Drop That Atomic Bomb on Me," and the second one is "Eat That Chicken."

Thereby combining Gospel and the beatniks in an eclectic mix of noise.

Razzmatootie!

If you want to learn how to preserve it, read the material.

Thursdays with Walter, week 10

I don't want to look for it, I want it to come to me!

Then we'll see if he's just another corporate fraud.

Color wrecked all that beautiful imagery!

Ol' Hook-Nose Wellington we used to call him; I remember it well.

God, I hate the web!

A friend gave it to me. Shows what kind of friends I have.

I feel like I'm repeating myself tonight. I feel like I'm repeating myself tonight.

He tried to make an engine using gunpowder. One can imagine how well that worked out, when the engine landed in Ohio, even before there was an Ohio!

You can never have too many Google windows open.

He wrote a book, and said some people are coming up with an idea, only he was writing in Latin, so it was some people are coming up with an idea est.

I'm going to bed. It's 8:00. It's dark. There's nothing to do. There won't be tomorrow, either.

I hate to tell you, it's one guy in New Jersey with a whole lot of tricks.

These are very hypnotic, so if you're feeling sleepy, put $20 in an envelope and bring it to the front of the room.

And you'd go out and burn down a barn! You were in a tizzy!

No lights, lost kids, drunk uncles? Sort of like that experience.

There ya go. If you weren't having an epileptic seizure, wait 30 seconds.

An Edison cylinder hooked up to your ears like...an ur-iPod.

It's a venti, not a grande. Shoot me.

How many pixels on the head of a pin?

If you don't know by now, you're from Mars.

I swear, one more time, it's good that I don't have a gun, because we wouldn't have a TV, we'd just have a hole.

What you don't want is a Lincoln Log on your player head.

The next time the music comes on, you'll get blown out of your chair.

It's like a phone book of the dead.

If you know Oscar Levant, you know how funny that is.

You gotta save the footage of Hero the Wonder Dog!

Next week, bring your ears.

Thursdays with Walter, week 9

(I missed weeks 7 and 8, so don't ask me anything about disaster preparedness and recovery.)

Gigs? No, I play for the walls, and they're sorry enough.

People call me the book magnet.

Okay! I'm going to read your midterms out loud and comment on them as I go. None of you did really horribly, which was disappointing. Where are the flunkies?!

Oh, this one is in English. Good!

Some of you made a lot of sense. I was impressed.

This is a class on electronics, isn't it?

It's a waste of time looking. I won't bother. Oh, here it is!

I'm sorry, we can't hire you as investigative reporters.

When you have a good enough infection of preservation that you get the disease, then you start to be like me.

If I had not been watching the World Series, I would've read them with my other eye, too. This is the first time I didn't give any B's. See what baseball does for you?

Is the broadcast archives person here? See? What if she was my only pinch hitter?!

You'd wish it was absinthe.

Ha! This guy was really lit up!

We're saving these stories, and then we have to spend the rest of our lives trying to keep them away from children.

Okay, okay, show us Superman now!

Do you have a library card? Are you a convicted felon?

In this one, the people and the machines are robots.

Well, that's it. Sorry we didn't have popcorn.

No! 1957 was the Milwaukee Braves!

My training for that event was to go out in a school corridor and hide under my coat. A kid's winter coat that you wear for five years without ever laundering? *cough, cough* And if they dropped the bomb, who would care? It'd be an act of mercy!

You put all these bizarre stories together, and it turns out to be the truth!

Do you ever ponder? When's the last time you pondered?

You gotta start writing these names down and start reading stuff! You're culturally deprived!!

Lemon juice on the Constitution? She would've been so fired!

We're all moving way too fast.

Dewey Decimated: it's another story where someone gets murdered with a rare book.

Wherever the Right ends, he was to the right of that.

You're not gonna write this down, because come on.

That's our homage to the Native American

Why, it's the damn Book of Kells--again!

Oh where, oh where has my Book of Kells gone...

You can make your whole family look like they're from Jupiter with a few clicks.

I knew I shouldn't have drank that hearing stopper.

A, we couldn't cover it in five semesters, and B, no one will ever cover it.

If you want to save the forests, don't go there.

Billions of pixels per square nanometer!

I'm a little capture device!

You can't open a jpeg 354 Chrysler engine with a tiff six-cylinder Packard.

It becomes present with lots of little toasters. This is toaster paradise!

Millions of colors! You could go mad!

If you're not interested in this, you won't be interested.

I have two in my office--one for each eye.

That's the Achilles elbow...heel, neck, whatever you want to do.

It's like Lucy Ricardo packing chocolates.

There's a couple of words you don't hear at Yahoo: quality control.

What's your favorite M-word? Metadata!

They are trying to standardize things, because too many things are optional things in the world of thingyness.

Okay, we have Canon, and we have Epson, and let's say it's a new merged company, called Can-Epson. Conniption would be good. And your company is...Lego. It's very colorful and has a lot of components. And yours is the Deutchland Uber Alles, machine, the Hasselblatt. Ah, the Hasselblatt! If I had the money! And if I cared!

We're little federal pea-shooters, and they have cannons in the industry.

You have to really Hasselblatt it to get it there.

They apparently have petabyte servers in their cars.

You can see a huge XML parade!

Machines are profoundly stupid.

I'm from the future.

Isn't it a lot easier to just pick up Dewey Decimated and just read it?

You say that like you mean it: it's fun. I know what kind of fun that is.

Thursdays with Walter, week 6

I have very good notes on this. Unfortunately they're not here. So tonight, we're going to get very imaginative.

You start making bird noises until a hawk attacks you.

As funds become available...so in other words, they're never going to do anything.

I don't have a pointer. Does anybody have any tall chalk?

If I want to see how Bob Dylan burns, I just light him up.

Look at what age does to you, baby. Whoa. That's what happens to rock stars. Can we have a moment of silence?

To test this, you have to build a structure and set it on fire, or it doesn't count.

Y'ever have to buy a roof?

So the guy shoots you when you're wet.

Maybe giraffes work there.

Land of a million sprinkler heads, all in a row, like a big huge insect.

The water doesn't know, "oh, I have to go around this post."

Within half an hour, the place is full of water and smoke, so I'm parboiled!

This is giving grandfathers a bad name: anything that's grandfathered in is a bad idea.

They call that the Fire Triangle in fire talk.

This is why this is the ideal job: you can only work four hours, and then you have to take a two-hour break.

You're gonna put a fire out with ice?

He moved to one side, and the pipe went whammo! If he'd stayed where he was, he would've been whammoed!

You get Fast Eddie's pipes, and two years later you have Fast Eddie's leaks.

Big smart-aleck preservation namby-pamby.

You're not supposed to git 'er done, you're supposed to git 'er tested!

Aspiration! Let's all aspirate!

It's an orange tube full of noses.

We've got a heavy breather on 2.

They test it by lighting something, hopefully not one of your rare books.

Why should we have an alarm? We're the fire department!

Get to be a consultant if you want to get rich. Hundred dollars an hour? Why stop there?

Removes oxygen from the space in four minutes? Removes oxygen from you a lot faster!

One of the problems with CO₂ is it's gonna kill you. Kind of a nasty side effect.

It's not gonna kill you. You might walk sideways or talk in a funny voice for the rest of your life, but what a price to pay.

Oh, well, we had a Gutenberg here, but it got blown off the shelf, a couple of pages got a little damaged...

Are computers all we talk about anymore?

If we don't get air in here soon, we're goners.

You see what happens with technology! Lucy showed us!

There's not much you can do about the weather. The weather's gonna win.

Doesn't that sound like a good idea? I could sell it to you.

Haven't you ever noticed when you move the toaster aside there's a little shadow of stuff?

That's my new favorite peeve.

I've talked fire suppression systems to death.

This is the real stuff, not just what I imagine.

This is the show and tell kingdom!

You touch the electrodes here...

It's like the flossing community. Big discussion.

And if it's late at night, it's a midnight quire.

Good for tomatoes, good for books.

Ah, the kettle stitch. Remains a mystery to me after all these years.

Bone folder! The terms start to thicken as you get into this.

Do you miss being in this class or what?

It has that acid free look.

If you don't know who Jack Kerouac is, you're not from this country.

He took some things in addition to his coffee.

Benzedrine is what there was before Starbucks. Starbucks is like a slow benzedrine.

When's the last time you were a hep cat?

You don't get free benzedrine.

The reality is that while you're at the Kerouac grave site, the guys mowing the cemetery are doing wheelies.

I was young once! Student: I was alive during the sixties. Hi! Send water!

This is relevant to the course...I'll make it relevant to the course.

There's a certificate of purity that comes with every bottle. You won't remember reading it, but in half an hour, you won't remember anything.

You're seeing things Jack Kerouac never saw.

They didn't do much editing; they just produced. Dickens was a tad wordy.

Craigslist, Harryslist, Edslist, next week it'll be Maryslist. They're all the same people. they're all Google. Google has all these pseudonyms so they can make extra money. It's like offshore banking.

The textbook industry is like an auction of your soul.

Before we go, you're gonna get one more glimpse of what's good about life.

I've accumulated quite a few things.

She was reading Kerouac.

That loaf of bread is so great to find in a book.

I need a refresher course in my own course.

Thursdays with Walter, week 5

I hope I terrified everyone: it's the midterm of midterms!

With the midterm being a big bomber, the end of the year stuff'll be a piece of cake.

This is your midterm. It's like a vision came to me.

For next week, I want you to write a short story that begins, "On the way to the wedding, I drove past a bloody corpse on the highway."

I asked them for a sample, and they send me a bible.

I'm a sham and a pretense, but I admit it.

These are the really unemployable.

Does anybody care about Google to the extent that you want to go there and say "Hi, what's new?" We just use them.

This is a cruel trade! I didn't know conservators were so ruthless!

I cooked up a horrific midterm in order to mask my ignorance.

I ain't never lickin' the tip of a ballpoint no more.

Put that in your "don't" column.

It's alcohol, alright!

If you can drink it, you can breathe it. Ooh! Write that down!

Oh wow, this is horrific, but it's original, so it's 11 million dollars.

Those tricksy conservators are behind all this.

That's what I like about the web: you get what you wanted plus 80 pages of comments.

Next week, I'll show you way more wheels. I have so many wheels now I could build an 18-wheeler.

This is your guide for the midterm. If you have trouble, light incense in front of him. If you want a color version, send me ten dollars and I'll give you a paint by number. Now that you have your totem, let's look at what you've gotten into.

If you're not here, raise your hand.

What's a Hemingway? Oh, about five pounds.

I got all of these from one box, from one dumpster. Student: Are you just hanging out by the dumpster waiting for an old guy with a box of books? Nah, these are all coincidences. I have book radar. I should be a book dowser.

"Salvation is Created" for marching band

David: I'm going to assume (hope, pray, whatever) that it's the warm-up chorale.
Me: Pfft. You know there's gonna be a flag routine with it.
David: No. I will not have that.
Me: I think you mean, "do not want."
David: That too.

Tis the Season

Me: You're so vain, you probably think Adeste Fideles is about you.

Not Helping

Austin: Oh, just what we need, more grainy, out of focus pictures of
Bigfoot. It's people like you who are ruining the field of
cryptozoology!

Could you be a little more vague, please?

Jay: What was that movie, where that guy dies?

Vinny: That’s pretty much every movie.

How's Married Life

Greg: Oh, I don't feel too good about that.
Me: What? I'm just tenting my fingers!

Surf City, It Ain't

Me: Every group going into the bar has one female and two males.
Greg: It's a good night for the ladies.
Me: And a bad day for Jan & Dean.

Jackie Chan at the Salvadoran Restaurant

Me: You're watching a Chinese movie, dubbed into English, dubbed into
Spanish, edited for television, in a mirror.
Greg: I'm not watching it for the plot.