COMMEMORATION

Jesus H Motherfucking Christ Almighty, I thought I missed my blog's birthday! When I first wrote this, I brain-farted and saw that it was June, but still felt like it was May, and it was definitely later than the tenth of the month by that reckoning. So I scrambled to save face and pop up a nice little commemorative here, and as I posted it, I realized that I'm over a week early. Oh well, at least I can claim acuracy to the month. I'll put this up today anyway, thought I'm going to forward-date it for archival purposes.

As of June 10th, 2005, Prose Justice (don't you dare click on that link, you're already here) will officially become one crazy year old!

A couple notables about this fun little project here:

• I have written 70 entries, including audioblogs, and have five drafts yet-to-be-published.
• Those entries total 30,286 words written, averaging 404 words per post.
• If you printed each character that I typed onto a piece of 8.5" by 11" paper (one character per page in banner-fashion) and placed them end to end in a line, it would be over thirty miles long.
• I have learned more than 50 'million-dollar' words in my extensive search for clever post titles.
• Since I've been tracking hits (November 15, 2004), my blog has been visited 1,316 times by 826 unique viewers. If I include my own visits, that number skyrockets to 58,422. Just kidding. It's probably a little lower than that.
• Despite all this, I'm definitely not sick of blogging, and am ready to set some new records this coming year. Either that or I won't give a shit.

Happy Birthday!

COGITATIVE

Today's a good day to speak at great length on several closely-related topics I've borne in mind lately. Why did I give today such an assessment? Because I'm at my creative best when its purpose is to keep me occupied to the extent that I cannot fathomably be drawn away to do the things that really should be done (read: I don't feel like working on my car yet).

The aforementioned closely-related topics will now be presented in no particular order (which is, I think, a certain form of order in itself, since it implicitly prevents the items from being listed, in arithmetical terms, in 'numerical order'; there is an order inherent in something that prevents the exact same condition in every incidence).

#6: Andrey Hardy brings out the college freshman in everyone.

I can't think of many recent times spent hanging out with Andrey that didn't result in a 4am or later bedtime. The 'wee hours of the morning' don't exist for me in the typical fashion when in Andrey's company... moreso, they become the ass-end of my evenings (not to attribute any rectal qualities to the time spent with him, of course). The man turns potential 'good-mornings' into 'killer last-nights', and for that I thank him. I haven't felt this resilient, satiated, and joyfully careless with my own health since... um (pausing for dramatic effect, and to help break an excessively long sentence into more palatable grammatical kibbles n' bits), since I was an eighteen-year-old die-hard Engineering House underling putting in my second weekly 40-hour day toward making EH propaganda for open-house events, or toward painting the rock, or toward some other lunacy. It feels wonderful, like being able to revisit fun-times-past without the melancholy downer of knowing those times will never be had again, since the revisitation is birthed out of the continuation or repetition of such experiences.

#42,097,463: The best television show ever is '24'.

'24' brings a third dimension to what was previously a 2-dimensional world of television programming. The writing is so gut-wrenchingly compelling, so much more dramatic than 'drama' has ever been known to be. Kiefer Sutherland plays the rawest motherfucker on the planet. The tension is so thick it can't be cut with a knife; Primacord would be better. The show is so hard to watch one-episode-per-sitting; the cliffhangers that can come predictably every hour on the hour (some writers are sadistic with the pacing of the story - sick, sick, sick.) prevent that. Where am I going with all this? Well, I refused to watch Season 4 as it was broadcast because, like I said, I can't watch one episode. The pressure of having to wait an entire week for the next installment coupled with the potential tragedy of missing an episode and being unable to find one online before the next airs is just too much for me to handle today. Hell, it would've been too much for my eighteen-year-old Andrey-Hardified self to handle (however many years ago that was). The remedy? Wait impatiently for the entire season to air, then wait for online availability, then download it in six-episode chunks to gluttonize upon when I should be spending the time fixing my car.

#2: I am chock-full of ADD.

Want proof? I started this post at 1pm. It's 2:30 now. I was supposed to wake up and work on my car. I can't even procrastinate efficiently - I got up from blogging to change my cat's litter box, I came back to the computer, found some more '24' torrents to download, then started writing more of the blog and decided instead to count the number of hyphens that appear in this entry. There are 24, and I did that on purpose.

You want the number of apostrophes? Count 'em yourself.

BEHOLDEN

***This post was written over the span of several days, I will do my best to identify discrete changes between them.***

5/22/05
It's a good day. Partied hard last night. I woke up early and worked, satisfying any vestigial need to feel productive on a weekend. I returned to bed for a delightfully peaceful nap. Awakening for the second time today, I'm at the computer, there's a bowl of egg noodles in my lap, a reggae remake of John Denver's "Leavin' on a Jet Plane" is pouncing between dendrites in a far-removed corner of my auditory memory banks, and I am going to see Star Wars Episode III for the second time tonight*.

Having already seen the film in accordance with a three-times-reinforced tradition of attending the 12:01am opening show (Return of the Jedi: The Remake, and those other two we don't like to talk about - I'll give you a hint, they rhyme with 'Schmepisodes I and II'), I can spoil all sorts of stuff, but I won't. There are two reasons I'm willing to take this journey twice: (1) It was a much better movie than both Schmepisodes I and II, and (2) among those attending is Laurali Kinsella**, a favorite among my Califriends (all of whom are favorites among my entire circle of friends; why the hell do you think I'm moving out there? For the weather?), who is in town on a rare Rochesterian visit for her lovely sister Shawna's*** RIT graduation. While I missed the chance to see their parents over the weekend, I'm certainly not going to miss hanging out with them. Much fun happens around those two. Anyway, I'm psyched. Oh, and another reason to see the movie again - I'll get a better view without the opening-day faithful taking all the best seats before I get there.

5/24/05
What a lousy day. Did absolutely nothing last night, save getting unbelievably frustrated with my car as I put parts of it... no... attempted to put parts of it back together. I went to bed with every intention of getting up early in the morning to work on it and ended up sleeping through the entire first half of the day - and haven't even felt the benefit of the additional slumber. Awakening far too late today, I'm at the computer, there's instant oatmeal stuck to the roof of my mouth, a fledgling headache is plotting an attack somewhere near the base of my skull, and my wallet is still missing after the fiasco with that godforsaken movie.

Ebb and Flow, I despise you sometimes.

*Not to say that the first time I saw it was also tonight; had I chosen to better word the sentence, it would be apparent that I meant "tonight will mark the second time I've seen the movie."

**I know I look really drunk in that picture, but I promise I was just tired.

***Shawna is the one on the left.

SIMULACRA

Possible assimilated words for the following presentation:

• Photo Story - Phory
• Blog Photos - Blotos
• Blog Pictures - Blictures, Bloctures, or Blogtures

There were more, but I forgot them. I think Blotos has a really nice ring though...

So, without further ado, here are the blotos I took from the gas-leak incident highlighted in Post-Previous.

---

Lovely White RG&E truck...


...towing a lovely fireball yellow backhoe...


...to my lovely front yard...


...so it can destroy said yard...


...really badly.


REALLY badly.


Truly, madly, deeply, even, for you Savage Garden fans...


...so it may reveal an 89 year old piece of rusted house-exploding crap...


...that threatens to send me sky-high...


...unless it gets replaced by a silky plastic tube...


...in the hole in my front yard.


They've already removed the 89 year old rusted house-exploding crap that's inside my basement...


...which was replaced by shiny new metal stuff that's now being covered up...


...by the giant fucking backhoe, aided by the nice man in the orange vest...


...anybody know anything about planting flowers?

---

PERTURBATION

I know I failed to make good my promise to write more soon.

Since I've come out and admitted it, there is no cause to criticize. I will now get out of the way, in synopsized, bulleted fashion, the innumerable (or perhaps five) events of significance that have happened which would, under normal circumstances, deserve their own blog entry, and may still, pending the opportunity, just so I may fast-forward to events so dramatic as to encompass the whole of my attention and concern, events that have not even completely transpired:

• My flight to California - I vacationed in Huntington Beach during the end of March, visiting such close friends and compatriots as Ray Ward, Joe Farnsworth, Laurali Kinsella, Meg LaRochelle, Julie Wilcox, Chris Savino, and a handful of others. I had the time of my life.
• My roommate Tom's mugging - Tom was attacked by a handful of kids as he was riding home on a bicycle. They ran off the porch and chased him down, attacking him and taking the ten dollars he had on his person. I hate Brooks Ave.
• My car woes (and consolations) - Nissan Sentra II's (slight papal allusion there) health took a turn for the worse as my timing chain skipped a few teeth, rendering the car completely useless. I couldn't afford to have a garage fix it, so I'm doing it myself. My housemates are great for accommodating me with my need to be places. As soon as the car is fixed, I'll be selling it, and adopting primary utilization of Honda Accord IV shortly thereafter.
• My plan to sell my house and move to California - What can I say? It changed my life when I went out there; every possible thing that could have fallen into place to make such a move possible, did so perfectly, to the extent that it would be wasteful not to take the opportunity to the fullest.
• The massive standoff in my neighborhood, complete with lunatics holed up in a house with shotguns, and thirty-odd cops on the scene throwing around terms like 'kill zone'. I hate Brooks Ave.

Okay, that's the most of the biggest news in the last month and a half... now, as promised, I'm here to give you the late-breaking news today, with events still unfolding... I'm going to do this line by line, for dramatic effect:

My house is mere inches away from exploding.

Not metaphorically, more along the lines of 'gigantic fireball of natural gas-ically'.

Apparently my home has been threatening to blow us all to that great California in the sky for some time now. And the amazing part is...

...IT HAS NOTHING TO DO WITH ANY OF THE ILLEGAL ACTIVITIES THAT GO ON HERE!

So Ralph's and my comfortable slumber was interrupted earlier this morning by men in hardhats knocking on my door. Meanwhile, other men in hardhats stood in my yard pointing at my porch. They quite casually informed us of a massive gas leak on my property, and apparently had already called the police locksmithing team to grant access to my basement, since it took us a whole minute to answer the door.

I guess they thought we'd all suffocated in the night? I'm not up to speed on the likelihood of natural gas poisoning... but I digress.

They called off the police, I escorted the men to my basement, covered up all the alcohol-producing apparati and other contraband, and listened as they inspected my gas main with a cartoony-looking sniffer device clad in happy dandelion (or in retrospect, fireball) yellow, that clicked like a team of South-African tribesmen playing soccer with a Geiger counter*. Turns out they need to replace the line in my basement. This also means they need to dig a small cavern in my front yard under my porch. For Christ's sake, they brought their own stalactites. This leads me to believe RG&E plans to recoup the cost of performing this operation by turning the cavern and my basement into a tourist attraction, selling tickets for guided tours underneath my home ("...and over there is where the cat shits..."). Sons of bitches. Oh well, at least I'm not being charged for the repair.

And I forgot to mention the entirely comical part about this whole thing! First off, I don't know how the HELL they knew to come over and check out this leak; I'm not familiar with any random gas-leak teams that just drive around peoples' lawns with their windows down**... something must have tipped them off. I'll not worry about that for much longer, rather, I'll worry about the place they discovered the leak. As I mentioned, the leak originated underneath my front porch... you know, that place where everybody goes outside to smoke and eventually throw their cigarettes into the bushes? Yeah, that's the place where they had to find a fucking gas leak. At this point, I'm supposed to have one of those epiphanies, where I get a new lease on life because by my best estimation, I should have died about twenty times in the last month, and that's not counting any of the stupid shit I do away from home on a daily basis.

To put it succinctly, HOLY FUCKING FUCK!

What's interesting though, is that I have the opportunity to take pictures of the whole operation in progress, which entertains me plenty, and helps me avoid working more on my car, which has become wholly tedious. Meanwhile, I'm upstairs by the porch playing with electronics and testing lady luck like it ain't no thang.

In all honesty though, it could have been much worse... I always envisioned the day when men in hazard suits came to my home as involving them drugging and dragging me into a panel van, instead of them fixing something that broke after 89 years of faithful service.

Maybe while I have them here we can talk about fixing another pipeline with another kind of gas involved - my sewer stack is smelling mighty foul lately.

* - I'm not racially insensitive, nor am I racist or anything remotely similar. The fact of the matter is that I was referencing a recently-discovered comedic performance by one Russel Peters, who spends no small amount of time musing on the intricacies of the African clicking dialect. As my dear friend Andrey puts it, "I didn't know Indians could BE that funny!" See what I'm talking about right here: Russel Peters Stand-Up Comedy

** - It turns out that's EXACTLY what they do. Every two years or so, RG&E goes around house by house checking for gas leaks, and they found ours just in time.

CATHARSIS II

Wow,

I haven't had so much to report in so long, and I have to say, thankfully, that almost all of it is positive.

I'll work reverse-chronologically from tonight back to, let's say, about two weeks ago.

Tonight: I haven't had so much fun since the night before I threw up blood in the corner bathroom stall at the robot job. I worked a very fun day at the robot job, in fact; my services were leased out to one of the other companies housed within my building, tearing apart desks and cubicles to make room for new employees, who will be entering said company through the labors of ^^^their new HR associate^^^ (EXPLANATION: emboldened triple carets flanking a phrase or word in this entry are indications of chronologically-independent cross-references. I won't link them directly, but will rather cite them all and allow you to hunt through the entry to determine which items are being linked). It's always fun to build shit, as I do often in the robot job, but every once in a while it's refreshing to tear things apart lying on your back holding a screwgun at awkward angles in tightly confined cells. I don't know why this is the case, but in my case, it's certainly true. I got to leave early and arrived home just in time to see our good previously-unreferred-to (at least in the blog) neighborhood wanderer, Terrell Holley.

Background information on Terrell, italicized: Terrell is a young man who lives near my neighborhood and due to some mental challenges, the nature and diagnosis of which is absent to me, excepting the behavioral anomalies that indicate being a few proteins short of an enzyme, is unable to obtain gainful employment. Therefore he is relegated to the task of performing unsatisfactory manual labor long the lines of lawn mowing in the spring and summer, leaf raking in the fall, and snow removal in the winter. He has not yet mastered the business skills and social interactability requisite to earning regular clients for his services, mostly because he changes his prices constantly and cannot comprehend a potential customer's disinterest in hiring him. I've had him perform work at 237 Weldon on numerous occasions, mostly out of my desire to help those less fortunate than I, but from time to time I have to tell him 'no, thanks.' This does not stop him from relentlessly harping on myself and my housemates for work, and unfortunately the manner in which he does so almost always renders one of us frustrated, frightened, or just plain perturbed. For example, if he sees a car parked in the driveway, he'll assume that it's perfectly acceptable to pound on any available surface, be it a closed window, a door, etc., for a good ten to fifteen minutes trying to rouse somebody to pay him for some work he wants to do. At its worst, he finds that a door is unlocked and pokes his head inside to yell "hello?", without exaggeration, for ten to fifteen more minutes, until someone responds to him or he's arbitrarily deemed it time to move on to the next house. He has on several occasions awoken us in the middle of infrequent precious slumber. While this sounds absolutely unbearable and intolerable, (and, it actually is in every imaginable sense), he has this innocence that can only be encompassed by the mind of a person found wanting in the realm of cognitive lucidity extruding from within him, and is therefore practically impossible to have the ^^^"I don't want you to ever return to this property"^^^ applied to him.

So, there I am, pulling into my driveway a crisp two hours ahead of schedule to find Terrell at my front porch. He asks me for an advance payment to shovel my driveway at the end of the week, as he's checked the weather reports and has determined that Friday will deal a pummeling blow in the form of crystalline dihydrogen monoxide (these are not the words he used). I craftily and politely dismissed him, still bearing the full weight of cash in my wallet prior to our exchange, and proceeded to head inside. I found all the doors in the house opened, which triggered a slightly alarmed response, since everyone in the house knows to keep the living room door shut, damn Ralph and his upstairs Haven of Feline Prohibition. I shrugged it off and headed upstairs to the attic to check on the copious amounts of expanding foam we applied the night before (PICTURE). I decided not to say hello to my housemate Amanda because her light was off and there was no sound emanating from her room... ^^^she must be napping^^^. My investigations were curtailed unexpectedly by the front doorbell, which turns out to have been rung by one of Rochester's finest on patrol. He explained that he was responding to a call from a neighbor who said that our house was being broken into. I put two and two together, knowing Terrell's tendencies to infringe on our personal space, and explained to the officer that it was just Terrell trying to find someone to talk to about shoveling, and that he was harmless. As if on cue (and I later found out that it actually was on cue), immediately after the officer radioed back to HQ about the call being erroneous, Amanda emerged downstairs visibly distraught and on the verge of tears. She proceeded to explain to me that Terrell had not just shown up as I arrived like I had assumed. In fact, Terrell performed the following recursion*: Knock on door for ten minutes. Enter my fucking home and proceed to walk around downstairs, evidently looking for us, for another ten minutes. Walk back outside and close door, knock again. RINSE. REPEAT. FOUR TIMES. That's right, my friends, Terrell was in and out of my house for 45 minutes, scaring Amanda half shitless. The poor girl was hiding in her room ^^^on the phone with a 911 operator^^^!!! She didn't come down until the cop radioed to the 911 operator that I was back home and it was safe to emerge. Needless to say, the police now have a record of his indiscretion, and if he so much as looks at us funny, I'm going to ^^^tell him what he needs to hear^^^, and if he ever again decides to intrude, he's going to face several legal penalties. We calmed down and I took a nap.

Okay, now that I've gotten the negative out of the way, I can continue to recap my recent adventures.

Shit, I can't keep going... I've been a bit loquatious tonight, and I promise I'll continue the recap soon. So for now, This is Kevin, signing off. The upcoming stories will be great.

*Recursion, in this case, I chose to use based upon the Latin definition, simply, "a repetitive event", not (as some of you computer-savvy individuals might be inclined to interpret) a call to a function from within a previously run instance of the function itself.

OPEROSE

Eighteen hours.

Spent three hours driving.
Spent $15 on two free beers.
Spent the night in a closet.
Spent three hours on a tour bus.

God, I had the best time. Thanks, Paige.


Yes, I was a little selective in my anecdotal snippets. The rest of the story is just too cool to attempt a retelling in text.

ORATORY 5

This won't make sense until you listen to the previous post.

ORATORY 4

be sure to listen to the next entry as well, kinda completes the piece.

ENSUING

Ahem,

The arrival of the heretofore unspecified time-to-conclusion of my little contest from post previous is officially announced. I must say, for all the time that's been allotted for reader response, in consideration of the at least four people who read this blog, I'm a little saddened by the fact that only half of you ventured a guess. But, the feeling passes. On to bigger and better things...

...such as announcing the winner of the contest!

Shit, saddened again. Of the two entrants, Rob and Nichelle, one posted a valid solution set in the least amount of time without outside council, but entirely lacked theoretical explanation, while the other posted a valid solution set in slightly more time with outside council, but noted a very critical point on the theoretical side. Alas, no clear-cut winner will be determined, as both entrants were mostly correct in damn near the same amount of time (which I will note, were on the order of six times faster than the time it took me to find my solution - to my credit, I did it without a computer program while both entrants' solutions were derived from program output), so I will announce Rob and Nichelle to be co-winners of the grand prize six pack! Since neither contestant flat-out defeated the other, one six pack prize will be awarded; it will be rationed out equally (two for Rob, two for Nichelle, and two for me because I can do that... it's my damn contest, so shut up already... dick).

Typically at this point, the full contest solution would be presented for all to see. Since I like doing things differently, however, and since you guys know that about me, I'm deliberately not not going to be typical, which is different than what I usually do, and I will thereby present the solution I was looking for:

The Solution
Considering the method by which the students chose to alter their lockers, one can infer a certain number of things:

(1) The second student will affect all lockers that are a multiple of two, the fiftieth student will affect all lockers that are a multiple of fifty, and so on.

(2) Conversely, a locker number that is, for example, a multiple of two and of fifty, such as locker #100, will be affected by both students two and fifty. If those two affect locker #100, then the students that represent all other numbers that multiply together to equal 100 will also stop on this locker.

(3) This reveals that a locker of a certain number will be affected exactly as many times as the number of integer multiples it has, or in short: the number of factors a locker number has, that is how many times its state will change.

(4) Since they all started closed, and the sequence begins with student one, at the end of the sequence a locker will be opened if it has an odd number of factors, and it will be closed if it has an even number of factors.

NOTE: At this point I went ahead and started going through the numbers and figuring it out manually. After a bit I realized that there was a pattern emerging. The first thing I noticed was that the number of closed lockers between each open locker increased by two each time, ie., there were two closed lockers between the first two open lockers, then there were four closed lockers between the next two open lockers, then there were six closed, etc. Upon further inspection, I realized what else was going on.

(5) Most numbers have an even number of factors, simply because it takes two numbers to multiply together in order to be considered multiples of the number in question. This is true for every single number except for a select few: perfect squares. Perfect squares are the only numbers out there which have an odd number of factors, simply because one of their factors is counted twice... rather, a perfect square has an even number of factors due to the definition of multiplication, but a perfect square will always have an odd number of unique factors. A practical example, in case I didn't explain it well enough in words:

35 - this number is hit by the following: 1 X 35 and 5 X 7. As such, it will end up being closed, due to the even number of unique factors - 1, 5, 7, and 35.

36 - this number is hit by the following: 1 X 36, 2 X 18, 3 X 12, 4 X 9, and 6 X 6. As such, it will be closed, because being a perfect square, in order for there to be an even number of multiples, 6 has to be used twice; therefore, there are only an odd number of unique factors (1, 2, 3, 4, 6, 9, 12, 18, and 36), and it will therefore be open.

So, in extremely short form, all lockers whose numbers are perfect squares, will be open.
End of The Solution

This took me about half an hour to stumble through, and I bounced a bit of theory upon partner-in-crime and answer-man Joe Farnsworth. But, that's neither here nor there. What is definitely here, is that the contest is over and the (co-)winners have been announced.

But incidentally, a contest of only winners really indicates that no one's beaten anyone, and therefore invalidates the very notion that defines their label, in this particular case. As such, I have decided that I will simply buy a six pack and drink it. I will then tell Rob and Nichelle how it was. My prediction: Delicious.

CONFORMANCE

In the last month, there have been no small number of adjustments... no, resolutions... to my life that have permitted me to fall helplessly in love with where I am right now, even despite the now comical beleaguerement that is my long-term status as a bachelor with a heartache for feminine companionship and a soft spot for chick flicks.

Incidentally,

HOLY SHIT.

When I wasn't paying attention, the world's celestial odometer rolled past 2005 laps since the beginning of that crazy rally-race, "The Jesus' Beeline To Armageddon", and I forgot to blog about it. Needless to say, I had a rip-roarin' time: I (1) partied with several groups of friends, (2) commiserated with out-of-town pals of yesteryear, (3) negotiated a potential business partnership that could potentially have million-dollar-potential, (4) discovered that I "roll deep", (5) performed a killer rendition of Tenacious D's Fuck Her Gently while doped up on Bailey's and energy drinks, (6) made some amazing new friends out of old acquaintances, (7) welcomed a pair of ass-kicking tenants into my home, (8) kidnapped my best friend and let her lead my associates and I on an 8-day movie and drinking binge, (9) discovered that I make a bread-dipping oil so delicious that people start putting it on a whole slew of other foods that are in no way related to bread, and (10) was accused of sleeping with someone's girlfriend, when I had in fact only slept next to her, and only after she broke up with the aforementioned accuser.

I also drank a lot of coffee.

Despite this, I went to bed early more often than I ever used to. I can't tell really whether I'm needing more sleep or my friends are needing less. The average bedtime in my house (which has, incidentally, become a bed-and-breakfast of sorts in the last two weeks - we have housed no fewer than four unique guests for periods of at least three days in my living room, in addition to the permanent 5-person tenancy of the house itself) is somewhere between 3am and 7am, depending on how many episodes of 'Family Guy' are on my computer, and on how much Paige has had to drink (love you, hon!). It's remarkable what an effect that girl has on our day-to-day. In about a week, she'll return to SUNY Binghampshireburg, and gone will be the glue that's held this wild ride together. We're planning to go down and visit her within a week from then. She's honestly like gravity.

While there's much more to say, I'll let it go for another time. I'll leave you with a question taken from my housemate Amanda's homework. I encourage you to take a stab at it:

There is a highschool with exactly 1000 students and exactly 1000 lockers. One day, the students line up and perform the following: Student 1 goes inside and opens every single locker door. After he's done, Student 2 goes in, starting from the second locker, and 'reverses' every second locker door thereafter(since they're all open, he is only closing lockers). Student 3 goes in next, and starting from the third locker, 'reverses' every third locker door in the school (opening ones that are closed and closing ones that are open). The fourth student reverses every fourth locker, and so on until every student has passed through the school. At the end of this procedure, precisely which lockers will be open and which will be closed?

There are a few ways to solve this, the hardest of which would be to crunch the numbers manually, and the easiest of which (for some of us) would be to write a computer program to perform the operation for you, but for the rest of you who want nothing to do with either of the previous suggestions, there are patterns in the data, and with a basic knowledge of math and a little creativity, you'll be able to solve it with a generic expression of rules by which you can identify which lockers will be open.

To everyone who wants to play along, work out the problem on your own and time yourself. When you're done and have a solution you want to present, go ahead and put it up on the comments section under this post, along with how long it took you to figure it out.

First person to post a comment with the correct solution in the shortest time (this does not necessarily mean the first person to post correctly... I'm going on the honor system here, but if you solve it in ten minutes and you post after a person who did it in twenty, YOU win) wins a six-pack of their drink of choice, as long as I am capable of delivering it to them. A word of warning, there are different ways to successfully determine the solution, and some are more elegant than others. There is only one solution I will consider complete and correct.

Go for it! Come on, there's free alcohol in it for you!

JOCOSE

You may like foreign cars. You may like small cars. You may hate either, as a matter of fact, but with complete disregard to the preceeding, you will love this commerical for this small foreign car. The Citroen C4. That is all.


And before I forget, I finally have my gmail invitations. If you have any interest in opening a gmail account (the AMAZING-AND-COMPLETELY-WORTH-IT search-based webmail service from Google), then be one of the first ten people to get in touch with me and I will bring you into the loop. It's kinda like a gentlemen's club, really: Those who know about it love it, and everyone else hates them for being involved with it*. Except that there are way more naked chicks in gmail than at a gentlemen's club. Fucking spam**.

---

* Because they're so damn jealous and don't know how to admit that they want in.
** Gmail actually has great spam filters; I just needed something to tie my analogy together.

ORATORY 3

So I received this great christmas gift, a 12 hour long dissertation from this man, Robert Kiyosaki, about better ways to manage your money and build assets. It's a very entertaining thing to listen to, case in point.

I am going to get rich, by the way.

RECRUDESCE

Ray Ward is back in Rochester. The insanity begins again.

ORATORY 2

One thing that might make that post make more sense is the following clarification: The Iraquis were the ones who set all those oil well fires in Kuwait. Oil well fires make lots and lots of smoke; I neglected to make that association to the report. Hope you can forgive me.

I'd have forgiven you, you thoughtless bastards.

DIVERTISSEMENT

Damian's Pub, arguably one of the most pleasant bars in the city, at least for the college-aged types within our sphere of influence, hosted a delightful Christmas party for welcome patrons tonight, complete with drink specials, dart craziness, and beer pong insanity. A better portion of my twenty favorite people were in attendance having the time of their lives together, which makes me a happy badass. More people need to realize that the true meaning of the season is not to spend our hard-earned financial assets on people who are kinda okay, but rather to drink ourselves to oblivion to the goal of succeeding in base competition within the realm of beer pong amidst the audience of close friends.

I think I'm too inebriated to make any sense of what I'm trying to say. I'd be better off eating the fine meal prepared for me by my close friend and roommate's girlfriend, Christina. Eating great pasta dishes is all the way better than trying to write well while drunk.

INTERREGNUM

Having been one full month since my last posting, I found it necessary to doff my slouch cap and gear back up into the exercise of bloggery.

This should be a very easy entry to write, as I've only done six things since my last entry. Four of them involve snoring.

If you know me, (and if you're reading this, then you obviously do, at least to an extent that would be sufficient to claim so for the purposes of this statement), you have already realized that in one month's time, it's far closer to accurate to state that there are only six things I haven't done since my last entry. Five of them involve snoring.

In something of a reverse-chronological stream-of-consciousness oration, I will attempt to recap the last thirty days of synaptic backwash, hopefully to some grand conclusion. Or, hell with it, it'll just feel good to have written again.

Where's George. For those of you who've never seen or noticed the little stamp that appears with quasi-rare regularity on one dollar bills innocuously reading "www.wheresgeorge.com", you are missing out on a sublimely entertaining hobby/game which was created by a handful of dudes with the noble goal of doing something cool and fun and not trying to make money off it. Yeah, it's ironic, I know already, Alanis. Anyway, the creators of this site have built a powerful database system for the sole purpose of tracking the sightings of dollar bills with this stamp on them; the idea is simple: Have you ever wondered where a bill has been, how far it's traveled before making its way into your wallet? Want to find out where it goes after you've parted with it? Wheresgeorge allows you to enter a bill's information (series and serial number) into the database. If it's been stamped, then it's been entered before, and you'll be taken to a list of the locations and dates from other users who've entered the bill when it was in their possession. If you're the first person to enter a bill, you can stamp or write the web address on it, make the first entry, then see where it goes. It often takes a long time for a bill to surface, as it not only has to be spent and make its way into another person's hands, that person has to notice the stamp and take the time to go to the website and enter it for themselves. It seems dull and pedestrian to get excited about something that has such a slim chance of happening within the limit of modern man's patience, but sometimes surprising things come up. It's sort of a spin on geocaching, where the cache (no pun intended) moves from place to place. I personally do not start bills of my own, but when I come across one, I enter it. I grabbed one out of my register at Old Navy tonight (don't worry, I put a clean bill back. I don't steal money from work, just mints), to discover that I was the second entry on the bill. The initial entry was over two years ago, in Wyoming. Despite 'sleeping' for over two years, it traveled an average of two miles per day, as the crow flies. I want to save it until I'm out in California, just to throw another crazy leap into the bill's history. Next time you see one of these bills, take a moment to check it out; you might find an interesting story attached to the innocent little piece of tender we love to cast about with nary a thought.

Long Live Rock. So, I got out of work at midnight, and somehow found myself in Charlotte with best-friend Paige and best-friend-in-training Bill and Bill's-friend (name forgotten) about twenty minutes later. What we stumbled upon, at Nola's BBQ (next door to the infamous Penny Arcade), was the most bizarre, bothersome, unique, entertaining, laughable excuse for a concert we've ever seen. The Long Live Rock Show, which is like a band, or maybe an acting troupe who spend most of their time playing instruments, performing kind of a gig, kind of a play, but not entirely one of either, and definitely gay to the fullest, because they seem to believe that this was the best idea anyone ever came up with. The following is taken directly from the pamphlets strewn all over the bar:

THE LONG LIVE ROCK SHOW
A ROCK AND ROLL ...FANTASY
...DREAM
...STORY

Step into our working man's dream of becoming a rock star!

The Long Live Rock Show begins with our bored and frustrated working man stepping into yet another lonely hotel room, bemoaning his job and his life. As he falls exhausted onto his bed, he is visited by the Dream Fairy who grants his greatest wish: to be a rock star!
That's where the live rock concert begins!
As our "rock star" emerges from his hotel room to meet his audience (that's YOU!), he overcomes his fear, meets his dream band, and launches into a show containing the hottest rock from the 60's to today! The lights, the sound, the video all pump our average Joe toward achieving his goal
...and you'll be drawn into the dream!
See his "look" change as he travels through various eras of great rock and roll. Occasionally our star will "yawn and turn over" as the band entertains him in his dream... but you know he'll be back and you'll be right back in the palm of his hand!
As our star awakens from his dream, he'll wonder (and you may too) if it was ever a dream at all... and the show kicks right back in!

So, you can gather that these people are obviously very, very proud of themselves. I mean it, they really love who they are. They think it's the coolest thing that they're doing... whatever it is one would call this. What made the whole thing so remarkable is that they were good. It was a seven-piece band, all of whom were fantastic instrumentalists or signers. The music selection was phenomenal. They could cover Van Halen as well as they could cover Evanescence, and just about everything in between. They played Led Zeppelin like they were empowered by Zoso, the God of Melodious Ass Kicking. And between songs, various band members would take their turns bantering on about this that and the other, and telling inside jokes which the rest of the band found hilarious, though no one in the audience had a clue as to what was so funny. We stood there on the balcony (this venue was incredibly built, looking like massive dollars were spent in renovations and investments; we all took a particular liking to the place, and Bill, enterprising individual that he is, got around to talking to the bar's general manager, in an office amidst piles of money and other cool things, about reserving the place AT NO COST for a party in May. Evidently my band will be playing there for this party, so stay tuned for updates) and couldn't help but laugh throughout the whole thing. A lot of my laughter was fueled by enjoyment of great music. A lot more of my laughter was fueled by the sheer hilarity of 40-somethings running around thinking they were the shit with their own little pseudo-rock opera. I don't want to lie to you, I was very entertained. But it was bittersweet, in the sense that I was watching these people and realizing that I was being entertained by the exact thing I despise about the music industry. I was being entertained by that which I pray never to become. I HATE seeing great musicians wasting their talent playing other peoples' music. I'm okay with being in a cover band right now, because it's simply a hobby. We write our own music as well, and play a fair mix of both. Playing covers is not my livelihood. So many things feel wrong to me, spiritually, karmically, practically, when I think of people who make their lives out of being a super-polishedc over band. If they're so good that they can play Aerosmith songs more convincingly than Aerosmith can, then they're too good to be playing covers at all. They should be making their own music. Being the best cover band in the world, or even worse, a tribute band of any rank, either means you're a crappy writer but still want to cash in (= soulless fucknut), or too lazy with too little vision to be respected for your own talent ( = lazy visionless fucknut). Fucknut fucknut fucknut. And yet, the music got better and better throughout the night. The songs kept being awesome, and I kept enjoying myself. As I've been explaining to the people who've been wandering around my living room in the wee hours of the morning, it's like when a friend zaps you with one of those electric shock novelty toys and you go, "Fuck, that sucked! Now, gimme! I need to play this trick on someone." I saw this band play tonight. It hurt. But it felt good too. The jury is still out on this one, as far as my overall appraisal of the experience. But I don't need to know my feelings on it to know that I want to bring friends with me to see this again. Other people need to have this imparted upon them, just so they can share in it with me. I don't want to feel this alone. It's just too much. I made it home without incident and began to write this blog entry.


Shit. All this was just today. I don't think I have it in me to go through the entire month. Reader's Digest inspires me to synopsize the remainder:

Several close buddies of mine and I played paintball a week or so ago for Mark Skryzowski's birthday. The guys had a blast, the girls had a blast. Everyone was bitten by the bug; there were many first-timers out, and all of them loved it. We are going to play again and I can't wait.

I'm getting a dishwasher for Christmas. There's also a girl moving into the house in January. There are some compound and redundant benefits there. I can't wait, because I'm sick of playing mom.

The Jones Effect is back at it again. We're practicing weekly, and finally beginning to write some new material, which will be my first opportunity for contribution with Eric and Josh. We're all quite excited. Look for us to be playing at Steel Music Hall in January, at Nola's BBQ in May as previously noted, and probably several different places in the period between.

Old Navy is filling up with hot chicks. And cool chicks. Most of them belong to both categories. I will never leave that job.

Let's see if I can write again before 2005. One month is appropriate for bills, full moons, and menstrual cycles, but not for blog entries.

I'm so sorry I just said that disgusting thing about full moons.

INTEMPERANT

I have to admit it, I had an absolutely astonishing, entertaining, and fulfilling day today.

But I'm going to talk about last night... simply because if you'd been there to witness last night as it happened, by comparison you'd give much less than a rat's ass about what I did today.

It all started harmlessly enough, with several friends and I continuing a home-beautification project, namely, insulating my attic to prepare it for future tenancy. We performed such tasks dutifully and accomplished much, as seen here:



My trusty work crew and I, highly satisfied with our accomplishments, decided to reward ourselves with a little good food and a lot of pregaming:



And that picture was taken before we got drunk.

So, a drink or two later, we were driven to Whiskey, where we rendezvoused with several people who liked buying drinks for complete strangers. By the end of the night, I actually performed a one-handed cartwheel into a wall on purpose; this made sense to me at the time, and I hasten to assume it was because someone offered me a free drink if I performed the aforementioned task for the audience that was the entire bar.

Now, I'm pretty sure that if I were a bartender (and I am, from time to time) and I watched a drunk man make a bet with a drunker man that he should perform a stupid human trick (and a potentially injurious one at that, and not just for the perpetrator... and by the way, that doesn't count as referring to myself in the 3rd person) for a rum and coke, I would refrain from serving either of them for the remainder of the night. But then, I guess that's why I love Whiskey (the bar, not the beverage; I'm much more of a bourbon person when it comes to the hard stuff)... they tolerate the drunkards because they are drunkards themselves. For that matter, they're drunkards with a stiff coke (the illicit drug, not the archrival of Pepsi) habit, which, while it invokes the 'tu quoque' fallacy against me, certainly puts them in the least appropriate position to judge me.

Before this transpired, we managed to get my dear former roomie Mary away from a term paper for, as she put it, "one beer, and then I'm leaving." I love Mary, because 'one beer' means, she'll have a beer with us, and then turn to mixed drinks for the rest of the night. She stayed at Whiskey for a couple hours as opposed to the half hour she promised she'd have to leave by, but she only had one beer.

After we were chauffeured home, I spilled my will to live (cleverly disguised as my last two boxes of mac n' cheese) all over the kitchen floor as I attempted to pour the noodles back from the strainer into the pot. After a heartbroken five minutes of sandwiching slain noodles between steamed and gooey paper towels, my fellow roommate Joe took pity on me and offered me the rest of the noodles he cooked up earlier. Actually, it wasn't pity; they were supposed to be for my fellow roommate Eli, but he had inadvertently passed out on the couch atop a pile of tools and fiberglass-laden bunny suits.

I don't remember much after that, but I woke up feeling refreshed, but exhausted, requiring me to naturally assume that after I blacked out I ran a marathon and ate a smorgasbord upon finishing before retiring to bed. When I woke up, I most certainly was not laying atop a pile of tools and fiberglass-laden bunny suits, so I had a better night than someone, at least. To top it off, I don't believe I was entirely sober the following morning when I called home to wish my grandmother happy birthday.

It was a good night.

And just for good measure (and to keep you from shoehorning me into the 'predictable' category), I'm throwing in a picture of my ideal woman. If you look anything like this, call me and we'll go out for dinner:




RISIBLE

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SUSCEPTIVE

Okay. Bandwagon, ho!

You Are a New School Democrat

You like partying and politics - and are likely to be young and affluent. You're less religious, traditional, and uptight than most Democrats. Smoking pot, homosexuality, and gambling are all okay in your book. You prefer that the government help people take care of themselves.

What political persuasion are you?