"he just turned out his lights
they'd have paid it no mind
had he not been so bright
he opened up his eyes
and snapped out in a groove
he saw both sides of everything
and found he could not move"

~Shawn Mullins, "Where's Johnny?"

  posted by Matthew @ 6:44 PM

 
I do weird things when I'm in a bad mood.

If you take the letters of my name, turn them into numbers (A = 1, B =2, ...), multiply my first and last names together, then turn the numbers back into letters and anagram them, it is very tricky to make a sensible sentence out of the result.

"Big acidic bee, hie!" was the closest I got.

Or, if you work it out differently in the numbers back to letters step, you can get "Beige Obi Cid Chi." I don't know what that means.

Also, Matthew becomes 13,120,208,523 when you change it this way. That factors as 3*3*3*3*31*229*22817, if you were curious. (I was!) Is it bad that I was dissapointed my name wasn't a prime? The odds of an eleven-digit number are extremely small, but still.

When you multiply Matthew (13,120,208,523) by Laird (1,219,184) you get 15,995,948,307,905,232. That's Fifteen quadrillion, nine-hundred and ninety-five trillion, nine-hundred and forty-eight billion, three-hundred and seven million, nine-hundred and five thousand, two-hundred and thirty-two. It factors as 2*2*2*2*3*3*3*3*23*31*229*3313*22817.

I should probably stop all this before I go insane. (more so!)

  posted by Matthew @ 12:06 PM

 
Holy fucking shit. I just got back from buying books (or should I say - getting reamed by an academic money factory with a monopoly on where their consumers can get their products?) and wow. I'm going to be walking funny for a few days after this one. I spent $509.75 that I didn't have today, good for me. I needed to buy 29 books (it would have been 30 if I didn't already have one of them) Now granted, that's about seventeen dollars a book, which isn't bad. But still, that's a pretty good-sized wad of bills. I just got unlucky this time around.

Here's some highlights:

Professor Foster, the guy who taught my comic book class last semester, is teaching my class on literary criticism and he has included Alan Moore's League of Extraordinary Gentlemen in the booklist. Sweet.

I've got a book from Graham Greene, one from Virginia Woolf, one from Susan Sontag, and two from Faulkner. These are all writers whose work I have meant to have more than a passing familiarity with, and now I have my chance.

John Berger's Ways of Seeing is something that's been referenced in several other things I've read (most notably in McCloud last semester, oddly enough) so it should be an interesting read.

The question is, "Am I going to be doing anything other than reading this semester?"

  posted by Matthew @ 11:42 AM

 
I'm going to make up one of those surveys that people do and post on their LJs, because I feel like it. Let's say it's asking about recently, not favorites of all time.

Music: The Magnetic Fields and Warren Zevon
Books: Shopgirl by Steve Martin and Bushwhacked by Molly Ivins
Movies: Ran (Kurosawa) and Lord of the Rings: Return of the King
TV: Simpsons and Seinfeld
Websites: Salon and Comics.com
Interests: Seven Card Texas Hold'em Poker and Millenium 3-D Chess


  posted by Matthew @ 5:14 AM

 
Last night I went and played poker with my buddies. I got second place, which meant I won ten bucks. Not so bad, particularly since the guy who won was just getting unbelievable cards. Over the course of the night (mostly when it was just him and me) he got a straight flush (to the ten), four of a kind (jacks), two full houses, and three flushes. He almost had a royal flush, but I had the king of spades, which he would have needed. My best hand the whole night was a straight. Taking that into account, I must have been playing some damn good poker.

  posted by Matthew @ 7:44 PM

 
Okay, whoah. What the fuck? Since when did the internet become the damn twilight zone?

Okay, so I wanted to set up a LiveJournal account, mostly so I could leave messages on my friend's LJs and have my own LJ friends list. So I go to sign up and check to see if anyone has used my internet nome de guerre (or handle), MrCheshire. Well, somebody had. No big deal, right? But check out the information on this guy.

The only personal info provided is that the user's name is Matthew. He created the account in July of 2001 and never used it, at all, ever. This might very well have been me. I did a google search for MrCheshire and got almost exclusively results that pointed back to me. But I know somebody else must have used it, because I had to get MrCheshire01 as my yahoo! account. (or else maybe I signed up for another yahoo! account earlier, and forgot about it)

So maybe I somehow got an LJ code two and a half years ago and made an account, though I have no memory of doing so and would have had no reason to make one, since I didn't know anybody with LJs in the first place. At least, not that I recall. But the odds that somebody else was using my internet handle at that time and that he was named Matthew are incredibly slim.

Still, this presents us with a number of hurdles. I tried the half-dozen or so passwords that I use and/or used with some frequency, and none of them worked. I asked it to e-mail the password, but I was using a different e-mail address at the time. I'm not exactly sure what it was, but I might be able to access it, if it still exists. I'm looking into that even as we speak.

This just creeps me the fuck out.

  posted by Matthew @ 1:37 AM

 
Okay, here's the deal. I like chess. I'm no good at it, but I enjoy it. But now I've done some reading and found a version of 3-D chess that looks to be not stupid. I'm really interested in it. But I don't know who else might want to play. If I knew somebody else in b-town whose company I enjoyed that would want to give it a shot, I would buy the boards and construct the proper setup. Any takers?

  posted by Matthew @ 12:39 AM