Jonathan Sprinkle's weblog

Our two most recent videos from Blockbuster Online were "Some Like It Hot" and "Tootsie". I guess most fans are on still on their honeymoon. These weren't anywhere near the top of our queue.

Would anyone else have noticed this, I wonder?

You know, writing up the NSF CAREER Award is hard work. I overestimated the time I needed in the end, but underestimated how long it would take me to polish it (hint: I am not writing it in Polish, but want to make it crisp).

Since I am a big fan of Clueless, and my CAREER proposal centers around various target platforms, I am reminder of Cher's statement while driving:

You try driving in platforms

Priceless.

A few months ago, NPR launched their "In Character" story series. They chose a bunch of lame characters (because, let's face it, NPR folks don't get out much, if they're all gonna be on the radio at 5:00 am; what I can't figure out, though, is how they all use the same microphone, if someone is in Cairo, and then they cut back to Washington. Amazing). Also, as is their wont, they selected a bunch of data points from the same place (what's up with Isaac Dickson Elementary School, anyway, and why do they have a monopoly on lame characters?).

So, I submitted the below writeup on Nero Wolfe. They didn't like it, I guess because I wasn't from Isaac Dickson Elementary School. Or maybe they consider talking about "fun to read" books, instead of "the world is such a horrible place" books to be worse than getting evidence on a divorce.

In a time before New Yorkers had neuroses, there was Nero Wolfe: a seventh-of-a-ton gourmand who never takes the stairs, refuses to leave his house on business, and spends a sixth of every day hybridizing orchids. Even so, Wolfe can solve mysteries moving nothing more than his genius, through his legman, Archie Goodwin's intelligence (guided by experience).

As a professor, I would be a witling if I did not see myself in Wolfe, as I stick to a location during office hours, or demand to a student: "Report!" We each refuse to do tasks if our self-esteem will not allow it (Wolfe and divorce cases go together like a mathematician and 1040's). The student/professor relationship is as sybmiotic as Wolfe and Goodwin, prodding us out of our self-satisfying activities to pay the bills--or in my case, serve the greater good. Satisfactory.

Wolfe's character is as strong as they come, but when characters surprise us (as Wolfe frequently does), we're given hope that our situation isn't carved in stone either. Satisfactory.

I find myself humming the Beatles "Rain" whenever it starts pouring down here in Tucson. Luckily, I haven't been caught out in it, though it has helped me to fall asleep at night with the tap tap tapping of the rain.

Looks like we get quite a bit of rain where we are, because being at the foothills of the mountains means that we get spillover from the convection created by the wind and the hills. Which got me to thinking the other day: are cumulus clouds created from regular clouds, and the fact that they're cumulus clouds mean that rain is coming, or do cumulus clouds float around for weeks on end, until they spot a little league game where the pitcher's just a few batters away from a no-hitter, and then start raining?

The "regular clouds become cumulus clouds" theory seems nice; a normal, safe-altitude, stable, cloud drifts over some massively hot area, and the rising heat makes the cloud start drifting upward in spades, until the moisture that was drifting along becomes unstable, and rains down a reign of terror.

To be continued, when I'm not writing two proposals at the same time, and shepherding another one through contracts, and running behind on my publications, and in desperate need of an espresso. Mmmmm, coffee.