April 28, 2005
I have added very short summaries of the books I've read and a list of books I want to read.
I also finished reading Angels and Demons. Beside the facts that it was Tim Berners-Lee who invented the WWW and not Tim Berners Lee (the hyphen is elusive), that antimatter can't be used as a bomb (nor as an energy source, which the book also states it can be utilized for), and that CERN still hasn't built the LHC (it's scheduled to be operational in 2007), the book was fairly enjoyable. There's a lot of gore in the book, though, and I wonder if Dan Brown could have told the story equally well without all the graphic detail.
Avoid Coupling season 4 at all costs; the characters (in particular Jane) have completely warped, there's now way too much drama, and Jeff's sorry excuse for a replacement, Oliver, is way too bland and predictable to be funny. Seeing as Jeff is my favorite character, his disappearance really annoyed me. Now where am I going to have characters accidentally say "I have a wooden leg" and "I didn't mean you have a jar full of ears in your apartment" to women? That said, you should still watch the first three seasons.
Incredibly, I have done some semi-crazy stuff to get some russ knots. A russ knot is something you get for doing something semi-crazy, crazy, or ultra-crazy. Doing semi-crazy stuff gives you one knot, doing crazy stuff gives you two knots, and doing ultra-crazy stuff gives you three knots. The things you have to do to get these knots vary from place to place, but here are some examples of semi-crazy stuff we can do in Stavanger:
- Stay awake for 24 hours.
- Insist on using a taken seat on the bus (the victim has to be a stranger to you).
- Bite a freshman on the shins.
- Speak another dialect or another language for a whole day.
- Walk blindfolded for a day.
Examples of crazy stuff:
- Stay awake for 48 hours.
- Read a pornographic magazine on the bus or another public place with great conviction.
- Run naked around campus.
- Strip in front of a camera at a gas station (all clothes come off).
- Crawl for a day.
Examples of ultra-crazy stuff:
- Stay awake for 72 hours.
- Masturbate for five minutes during class, with great conviction.
- Donate blood.
- Bathe naked with a russ of opposite sex for ten minutes.
- Run naked around a police station some time between 24:00 and 06:00.
- Walk naked through a busy city street.
I've earned five knots, and to get them I had to eat six Kinder Eggs and assemble the toys contained within in ten minutes, crawl into a store, bark at the dog food for five minutes, and crawl out again, scold a statue for five minutes, stand still in a store window for five minutes, and take fifty trips up and down an escalator. Useless, but pretty fun.