J Larsen

St. Vitus, I loathe disco in general, but my feelings about "To Be Real" may have been shaped by having grown up too close to a seedy gay disco joint on Polk St. in SF. You have no idea how many times I've heard that song at high volume. For that matter, neither do I.

I learned that the hard way in 1994 when living directly above an early-rising polka fan.

I am cursed. No matter where I move, I wind up with an upstairs or downstairs neighbor who feels like imposing their awful music on me ridiculously early in the morning. I thought I had finally broken the curse with my new apartment, but I just got a new upstairs neighbor. Not only does she sound like an elephant walking around (she litterally shakes my ceiling lights when she walks over them), but she starts playing bad music at about 8am every morning including weekends. On Sunday I was woken up by a string of disco (there's NOTHING I hate more than disco). She played that "To Be Real" song about four times in a row, and then plowed right through the 70s for the rest of the morning. I finally left my apartment at about 10am to get away from it. This morning she woke me up at 7:30 AM by playing the WORST top 40-style song I've heard in years no less than seven times in a row (yes, I counted). It might be the most ridiculous song I've ever heard. There's a whiny male with a high voice singing "I don't want to die like that/I don't want to die making love to you" (I'm not kidding) in the so-called "contemporary R&B" style. In the background there's another guy with a slightly deeper voice going "Woah-oh-oh making love, making love to youuuuuuuuuu-oh-oh, I don't wanna die, I don't wanna die oh-oh, etc. etc.". If anyone else cares to share similar horror stories, I have an unlimited supply of them.

It looks just like Newton's rings from a lens in contact with a plane glass surface. The distance between fringes gives a measure of the precsion of the lens being tested. I'd go in to a little more detail, but I'm really busy right now! (In fact, I'm so busy I half-botched this the first time I posted, hence the edit!) Edit 2: Okay, as I have a second here and there I may add a bit to this post I said above that Newton's rings are often used for examining the quality of a lens. Another application is examining the quality of a thin film. If you have a lens of known precision (say, one wavelength of red light, which is very realistic for a quality lens), then the rings can reveal imperfections in the smoothness of the thin film. Another edit: It also looks like the diffraction pattern you get if you carefully aim a high-quality laser at a metal sphere, so that the laser beam is perfectly perpendicular to the surface of the sphere. It is very tricky to get this exactly right! I did this demonstration for a class I taught a year ago. In the morning section it worked perfectly. I spent less than 15 seconds adjusting the laser to get the diffraction pattern. In the mid-day section I struggled with it for over five minutes before giving up. I don't think the mid-day students ever believed that it should really work! It is really strange the first time you see it, as normally you only get the center fringe and then it appears that the laser light is going directly through the metal sphere.

How much does that snake weigh now? How long before it ate again?

Noj, this site may explain why they didn't believe you. http://dspace.dial.pipex.com/agarman/bco/fact2.htm I'm sure you saw a large black cat, but you surely didn't see a black panther.

Mny, I'm sure you've caught on, but in case anyone else is concerned, the site is a joke. It looks just legit enough to make you wonder for a second though! The dodo is sort of a giveaway.

Afghan Hound, perhaps? http://www.petsorfood.com/exotics.shtml

Hmm, having poked around a bit on the site I linked above, I feel compelled to caution the faint of heart. They have koala, dodo, spotted owl and afghan hound meat for sale in addition to many other questionable cullinary offerings.

Mny, evidently they are as tasty to us as we are to them. Check out the second item from the top on this site: http://www.petsorfood.com/reptiles.shtml .

Don't those eat people?

Well, I'm sure that's an emergency in their book. That, a fire, or a prowler is probably the extent of their definition of emergency. In retrospect, I should have had a femal friend call. If it was a bat in a girl's room, I bet they would have come out. Never mind - I see where you got confused. I've edited to clarify. Note the rewording.

I don't know that it's the more exciting of the two, but sure! In 1999 I was invited to conduct a research project at Princeton for about five months. They set me up with what they call a "visitor's dorm" (or something like that). It was in a very old building where Winston Churchill once resided. The building was not in the best condition. Mind you, I am a city boy and not too swift about nature and animals. As of 1999, pigeons were pretty much the extent of my exposure to wildlife. Anyway, it's about two weeks into my stay (excuse me as I change verb tense), and I'm up late one night in my room working on my project. I'm listening to very loud music on headphones to stay awake. I look up for a moment for a brief mental break, when I see a very strange shadow streaking across the wall right in front of me. I'll admit that my first thought was "Holy shit, there's a terydactal in my room!!!" I spin around and see a large, dark object rapidly circling my room, and BOLT! I run downstairs where I run into a guy from Bikina Faso who became my closest friend at Princeton. I tell him there's a bat in my room. He is skeptical, as the previous night I had admitted to him that I smoked my share of marijuana as a teenager and he is convinced that such induglence permanently damages one's mind. He says if anything, there is a bird. I bet him five bucks it's a bat. He goes up to look, and sure enough there are not one but two large bats hanging from the ceiling. Much to my dismay, they have been deficating on my floor. He hands me five bucks and I use my neighbor's phone to call building services. "Hello, building services." "There are two large bats in my room, how soon can you get over here to get rid of them?" "Oh, we can probably be there by tomorrow morning around 10AM." "What are you talking about, man? You're right around the corner! How can it take you 10 hours to get here?" "University policy. Between 6PM and 10AM we only come out for emergencies." (It was around midnight at the time.) "I've got two big bats in the room where I sleep, shitting all over the place. That isn't an emergency?" "Nope. If you just don't like bats, don't you have a friend you can stay with?" A long string of explicitives follow, which precipate the jackass on the other end hanging up on me. Ahmed, my West African friend and one of the most colorful people I've ever met, walks in to my room, goes right up to one of the bats, and starts having a conversation with it! "What are you doing in here, mon? You do not belong inside!" By this point about five or six people who live in the building have come by to observe the bats - the person most freaked out by them was the biggest jock in the group! Ahmed then picks up a garbage can, and, showing no sign of apprehension whatsoever, places it directly over the bat, trapping it against the ceiling. He then releases it out the window and repeats for the other bat (the other bat resisted capture a bit, but it only took a few minutes to get him out of the room). Next we turn our attention to how the bats got in my room in the first place, as the windows are screened. It doesn't take us long to realize that there is some sort of bat nest in the roof of the building, and being on the top floor that meant that there were bats in one of my walls. There were two holes of approximately golf ball size in that wall, through which the bats must have come in. The next morning I repaired the holes, and never had bats in the room again (at least, not while I was awake!). I would hear them every now and then, though, and it was a little creepy. It sort of made it hard to have female guests over. Ahmed used to give me a really hard time about that ("Mon, if some bat scared a girl out of my room, I would fry that bat and eat it!"). I hope this was entertaining enough to read. I think it was probably a lot wierder, creepier and funnier if you were actually there. I edited this to clean up the paragraph breaks and clarify a couple points. Hopefully it's easier to follow now.

At the Bronx Zoo (a very depressing place that I don't recommend to visitors) they have an anaconda with a maximum cross section larger than a dinner plate. I still have the following stories that I haven't told: my bat-infested Princeton dorm room and a chance encounter with a stray llama in near total darkness late at night in the woods in Santa Cruz, CA. If anyone's curious I can fill in the details.

Tony, I encountered one of those milipedes in that same house in portland where we had the color-changing ladybugs. It scared the hell out of me at first just because it was so fast. My roommate caught it and fed it to his very large goldfish.

When I first moved to New York, I temporarily moved in to my friends' apartment in Brooklyn. The apartment was pretty gross, with lots of cockroaches. About a week into my stay, a praying mantis showed up in the apartment. My theory is that it came in with the organic vegetables one of my friends had delivered every week. At first, we were a little bummed on the idea of having such a large (and somewhat aggressive) insect in such a small apartment. But we soon realized that the cockroach problem was virtually eliminated. We decided to let the mantis stay. It lived with us for about a month. We found it dead in the living room one morning (perhaps it overate). The next day the roaches were back. I moved out shortly thereafter.

The world's largest spider: Legspan: 28 cm. Body: 10 cm. Diet: Birds. Lots of birds. Evidently this thing is considered a pet by many!

Dan, my next story was going to be about the two bats that took up residence in my dorm room at Princeton.

I'll relate my bug stories at the risk of no one believing me. The hardest for most people to believe: I was working with some other physicists late one night in an office with a window opening on to a marshy area. It was a very hot, humid night, and for some reason there was no A/C, so we left a window open. At about midnight a dragonfly with a body about the size of a churchill cigar and a wingspan of maybe ten inches flew in to the office. It immediately settled near a ceiling light. Its body was so big you could literally see it breathing. We stared up at it awestruck for a moment, then we decided it was pretty gross, and then decided we needed to leave the room. We attempted to find some sort of net or large box to capture the insect with and show it to a biologist (they shared a building with the physicists), but by the time we returned to the office the monstrous dragonfly was gone. We later looked it up and founf that no dragonfly should be even half that size. Fortunately I have reliable witnesses to back me up on this sighting! While I was in college in Portland, OR I rented a house near the Willamette River with a roommate. Our back yard had ladybugs capable of changing color. I picked one up once that was tranluscent. My roommate watched as it turned orange in my hand. We were not doing drugs. More later, maybe.

I will not listen to reason! Joe Montana was the man! (Of course, so were Roger Craig, Jerry Rice, Ronnie Lott, Charles Haley, Dwight Clark, Tom Rathman, John Taylor, Bill Romanowski etc. etc., and don't go saying "See, that's what I'm talking about", Mnytime! )

Rooster, did you catch the short article in the New Yorker a few weeks back on the fellow in Brooklyn who plays in the Orchestra of Excited Strings and Paul Simon's band (what a combination!) and manufactures all of his own instruments? I can't remember his name off the top of my head.

Ouch!

I guess I'm a bit too young to understand why Namath is considered to have been such a great quarterback. His career stats are very mediocre. From the numbers, it looks to me like he had one great game at just the right time. Anyone care to set me straight?

Bradshaw was a tough dude.

I'd go with Tristano/Konitz/Marshe, as it seems like more of a "special occassion" purchase. You can pick up a select anytime you have $40 or so to spend on cds.