Saturday, December 23rd, 2006

Woke up naked, curled up in the middle of my living room. Calendar on the wall says it’s been about two months. Paper everywhere. Found a couple dead rats impaled with sharpened pencils into stacks of graph theory and bayesian statistics papers… Decide to burn it all in the building’s courtyard and forego any attempts at piecing back together whatever hazy memories remain of that painful episode.

Tuesday, December 26th, 2006

Christmas Season final tally:

• Chocolate. kinda like sex without the complications, except for the part involving a mandatory liver transplant by next week.
• A portable stainless steel mini-bar. has been officially deemed a required item for any future traveling more than 10 feet beyond my doorstep. to think they would probably not let me board it as carry-on luggage nowadays. sigh.
• Italian handmade gloves. if you take them to your ear and listen carefully, you can still hear the mooing (with a roman accent).
• Books. Lotsa. Anaïs Nin, Georges Bataille, Hugo Pratt, Louis Pauwels, Joann Sfar & Vladimir Nabokov…
• Legally purchased Not downloaded Kitten cruelty-free Music
• Cool Stuff.
• Useful Stuff.

Thursday, December 28th, 2006

PickedGot picked by a tutoring professor for my year’s M. Sc. project (French university tradition: sort of like a pre-thesis plus getting-to-know-your-friendly-nearby-research-lab experience). My two fellow lab rats seem like cool bright young lads. The project is total teenage geek boy wet dream material. Judging by his papers and ongoing research, senior chief of project has to be either one of the most cutting-edge visionary Cog Sci guy of our times, or a rambling lunatic of an academic fraud. Can’t wait to figure which.

More details coming soon.

MC 2007 says: Expect way more Cog Sci and all around nerdy talk on this blog from now on (had to make up somehow for the sharp decrease in used-panties-vending-machine-related content).

Saturday, December 30th, 2006

Aging bearded dictator gets hanged in dingy Iraqi basement by couple guys wearing ski-masks. Democracy is on the march in the middle-east.

Death-penalty cheatsheet for those who may care:

• As of January 2007, two recognized democratic countries in the entire world still practice capital punishment. Of those two, one (Japan) only very recently ended a two-year-long moratorium on its application (less than 4 executions since 2004).
• Death penalty as a way to exact revenge or punishment on criminals disappeared from all self-respecting philosophical circles around the time medieval Europe did.
• Death penalty as a crime deterrent has been proven ineffective by so many comparative studies at national and international levels, it is not even a subject worthy of interest to most serious social science studies anymore.
• Which part of Thou shall not kill do you not fucking get?

For the record, this has strictly nothing to do with my harbouring the least inkling of sympathy toward the man. As far as I’m concerned, evil incarnate himself should not have been given the right to a quick and painless exit: four walls and the inescapable stare of a guilty conscience until the end of their natural days are the only worthy punishment for such people.

Sunday, December 31st, 2006

Had dinner with Ludivine. Talked about Life, our lives, the Carracci, Debussy, why cheap sake at dusk under the blossoming sakuras is so right and whether we should get married twenty years from now, when all alternatives will have been thoroughly explored and ruled out.
Went to typical Parisianite New Year’s Eve party. Drowned myself in champagne and petty mediocrity. Spent most of the first hours of 2007 fighting non-physical urge to vomit bile at the face of human stupidity. Gave up before the magnitude of the task at hand.

Monday, January 1st, 2007

Attempted to sleep through to 2008. Failed. Decided 2007 had the potential to be a cool year after all.