Follow-up.

One day later, I wake up with the very famous song from "Pagliacci" in my head.

And later I start humming the Searchers's "Needles and Pins" again.

My big news of yesterday.

I woke up humming the Searchers's "Needles and Pins", and it was stuck in my head all day.

So, all day, I had running in my head that part where the singer really gets into it emotionally, and is like -

HEY
BECAUSE I SAW HER TODAY, I SAW HER FACE
IT WAS THE FACE I LOVED...

Reactions (I of II): My friend with the cat.

So, I immediately had texted everyone I know with that one factoid about Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

This is what my one friend with the cat (who has a law degree) texted back:

...Btw o w Holmes is also the one who ruled in favor of euthanasia saying three generations of imbeciles is enough.

Then, right after, she sent a second text message:

So he has his plusses and minuses.

NEWSFLASH - Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.

I was reading Louis Menand's "Metaphysical Club" (which won the Pulitzer Prize a number of years ago), and in it I found a curious fact -

Back in 1841, the then-23 y.o. Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. is on the record as saying that minstrel shows are demeaning to black people...

Which is a full 150 years ahead of the Dutch!

NEWSFLASH: Reading Selections.

Today I was googling "I Was a Negro Playboy Bunny" so I could interlibrary loan (had found out about it b/c John Waters mentions it in his book "Role Models), and a previous entry on my blog turned out to be the 3rd post kicked up on Google!

I did ILL it, and it just put this big smile on my face.

I told the one Mormon guy in my program about it, and he was like, "That is awesome! Show it to me when it comes in."

I also ran into my one (white) friend from Mississippi at the library and asked him to guess what book I had ordered, and he was like, "I don't know, but it's probably about fucking animals."

More from the priest.

Old students of the priest who I took Latin with this summer brought him down to campus for a day of Latin reading, which I def. participated in (30 people showed up! he loved it).

After it was over and we were moving into the catered dinner part of the evening, I was talking with him a bit about pedagogical techniques and stuff; I had used some of his methods where you ask kids to switch forms from singular to plural or "me" to "him" or present to future etc. in teaching Greek, and had found them very effective. But, it took me pointedly asking where he had learned these great techniques, for him to finally say that he had thought them up himself.

Also, later he was saying something, and was like, "...if God permits."

"You know," I was like, "Maybe if you're worried about that, you should pray to John Paul the 2nd... I don't know if you heard, but he got beatified the other day."

"Well," he was like, "That was a mistake," and then he put his hands up to his nose and waggled them and was like, "I'm glad to be done with Rome!". Then, after saying a few more things, he was finally like, "I hated the man."

Another weird injury.

Last Thursday I went to the gym and was on the elliptical machine for a half hour, and when I hit the locker room and went to go take a shower, I discovered that my boxers had chafed the top overside of my dick, which stung like a son-of-a-bitch in the hot water.

I put some neosporin on it that night when I got home, but it got rubbed again when I was campus all day Friday and was rubbed and red and a bit scabby, so on Saturday I put more neosporin on it and took a bandaid like for a knee and wrapped it around my cock.

By Sunday it was better when I took off the bandaid to look (the adhesive was very light and so it thankfully didn't hurt at all to peel off the bandaid), and I rubbed the dried-off scabs off with my finger.

Only, now I don't have a scabby cock, but that area looks kind of more glossy and pinkish than the rest of the surrounding skin - just like the healed part when you take a bandaid off your knee!

Subway Story (II of II): Jewish parents.

The next morning I hopped on the subway to go to school, and the train had just got in, so I dashed up the stairs and onto the subway car, only to realize that this younger Jewish couple and their 2 small kids who I had been on the subway once a couple months ago had also been in the car...

The guy was taller with a big adam's apple and one of those Jewish beanie things, and the woman was shorter and slightly rounded and had red hair, and the kids were cute but you could tell their manners weren't the best since their parents are those kind of socially-awkward people who always speak at full volume and don't get social cues and are always strangely tolerated in church communities...

I don't remember exactly what had happened before, but I think they sat on opposite sides of the car and in the perfectly quiet 8am subway car carried on a loud conversation with each other.

This time, the wife decided it was storytime - on a croweded subway car! - and whipped out some "make your children smart" age-appropriate book about Shakespeare and did a story-time in a nice loud librarian's-type voice... The (black) guy sitting next to me gave her a glance, but no-one said anything... Luckily she got off before her husband did (she was going somewhere - to work? - while her husband was taking the kids to school), and he resumed story-time, only in a hushed voice.