Wow.

Just goes to show you can find “hidden” meaning in just about, uh, anything.

This being my Passover, and tonight’s class professor being Jewish, I’ve got no class tonight. You might ask what fun and enjoyment I’m planning on doing with my spare time, so I’ll tell you: I’m taking my car to the shop to get it test-driven because it’s been acting funky and I’m worried the clutch is going.

Fun.

UPDATE:

Clogged air sensor regulator or some such technobabble. Repair: $70. The car’s running like a racehorse again, by which I mean, “How can I be in 2nd gear and doing 50mph? Whheeee!!!!”

Big article in the campus paper, The Towerlight, on the “gender gap” at Towson.

Three female students approached Towson President Robert Caret a few months ago with a request.

“We need to get more men!,” they said.

It’s a common comment, although the men on campus may not agree.

“I think the ratio is perfect,” sophomore Mickey Rubin said. “For girls it must be tough though.”

Among undergraduates, the mix is almost exactly 40/60. This semester, 39.5 percent of undergraduates are men and 60.5 percent are women.

“It hasn’t changed in decades,” associate vice president for enrollment management Lonnie McNew said. “It’s been roughly 60/40 for undergraduate students from the 60s until now.”

He said a 3-to-2 mix is common for comprehensive institutions like Towson. And the gender gap is larger at the graduate level. Just one in four Towson graduate students are men.

You can make all the snide jokes you want about women being smarter than men, please just don’t ask “With that kind of gap, why can’t you get laid Snay?” I dunno, self-esteem issues? It certainly has nothing to do with my elephant-trunk like member.

Anyway, the Towerlight has a feature called “word on the street” where they interview random students. I clipped this week’s because I thought Mathias Okpo might’ve mispoken or been misquoted.

Now, substitute “someone” for “something.” See what I mean?

I won’t deny that I have, on occasion, gone to the book store and bought something based not on any literary review I’ve read or word-of-mouth I may have heard. No, no, I buy it because the cover looks neat. Anyway, after going to the Beer, Bourbon, Rip-Off thing a week and a half ago, Geisha and I went over to Borders. She bought a couple of magazines, and I bought a book by a bloke named Simon Ings, “The Weight of Numbers.”

Anyway, so I bought it because the cover looked cool (doesn’t it, though?). Sometimes this backfires, and the book is crap. Thankfully, this investment was a very excellent read. I finished reading it yesterday at work. Slow day (hopefully, since public schools are on spring break next week, I’ll actually make some cash). I don’t quite know how to describe the book — it’s like a Robert Altman movie, except it’s a book, and it isn’t like the kind of book I’d imagine Robert Altman writing, but something far better, far more convulted, and far more impossible to describe.

I found a great review on Strange Horizons:

Simon Ings’s fifth novel, The Weight of Numbers, makes for a frustrating descriptive experience. Its plot—if such a thing can even be said to exist—is a tangle of yarn. Tug at it at any point, and you’ll find a beginning. We might start with Anthony Burden, an emotionally troubled mathematician. Or with Kathleen Hosken, a sheltered, naive village girl. Stacey Chavez, former child star and lifelong anorexic. Saul Cogan, sixties radical turned human trafficker. Nick Jinks, all-around layabout and ne’er-do-well. The list goes on. Start from any one of these characters, and a series of coincidences, chance meetings, and surprising connections will lead you, one by one, to the others, passing through three different time periods and four different continents, and touching on subjects as diverse as communism, anorexia, the civil war that ravaged Mozambique during the eighties and early nineties, the history of Electro-Convulsive Therapy, Mexican masked wrestling, the Apollo space program, London’s counter-culture scene in the late sixties, and obscure philosophical societies.

Also, you know those scenes in movies where they play the film backward so you start with the explosion and then it disipates and you’ve got the package pre explosion and the guy going about his last few minutes before getting skew-blooied in reverse motion? It’s got one of those scenes too, except, y’know, in writing. AND IT WORKS!

And … for the record … I wish I could figure out how to get a fucking paragraph of text up against this image, instead of having that ugly blank space. Bah!

BRIEF UPDATE:

I’m an Amazon.com associate. If you buy the book from Amazon.com after going through the link above, I’ll get a few pennies out of it. Please feel free to support your local neighborhood Snay.