Butter was on a super-mega sale today; we bought 8 pounds for 12 dollars. That's the best deal I've ever seen on butter. We probably should've bought more.

So I have to call your attention to MATH For Liberal Arts, the first math textbook inspired by the look and feel of an IKEA catalog (or Glamour magazine, I can't decide which). The publisher sent my officemate a free preview copy earlier this week, and every day since then I have been taking it down from the shelf and leafing through it, and every time I do this I end up making the distinctive sighs of intense disgust and disbelief.

The trend in textbooks in our modern era is towards glitz and flash and color, in accordance with the current Modern Students' Attention Span is Briefer Than Planck Time theory, and this book is the logical next step. I am not kidding about the word MATH being in all caps. That is for real. Just like the IKEA catalog. I am not kidding about it being like a fashion magazine either -- it is softcover and about as thick as Cosmo, the pages inside are glossy and every page has several busy color illustrations, and sometimes information is presented in columns EXACTLY like advertisements. On my most recent examination I actually caught myself flipping through looking for Who Wore It Better? (or maybe it should have been Who Factored It Better, I don't know.). I made a joke about trying to find some sort of personality quiz, and then I realized that I was holding a MATH TEXTBOOK and it should be full of quizzes -- but the crazy thing about this book is that there are actually NO PROBLEMS OR QUIZZES. The book comes packaged with codes to access online homework and quizzes, but none are provided on paper. (This is actually a fairly clever attempt to shut down resale, I think -- as the front cover warns, the online resources are available only with purchase of a new book.)

I think this book is a terrible textbook, would be nearly useless as a resource, and would be insulting to students forced to purchase it (do liberal arts majors enjoy being condescended to? I assume not) -- but I could be wrong. MATH. It could be our future.

It's tough to do your laundry when you're dog tired; it's tougher when part of the stuff to be washed are your bedsheets and pillowcases, so you have to put the sheets on and make the bed before you can collapse into slumber, presumably with the basket still brimming with unfolded laundry and unmatched socks.

So I really want to get inside the head of people who don't want the 9/11 plotters to be tried in civilian court instead of some military tribunal. Because I honestly don't understand what the argument is. And the New York state governor has stated he doesn't want them tried in his state; and apparently over a third of Americans don't even want Khalid Sheikh Mohammed tried in the United States; and it just does not make sense to me to treat these guys as anything more than the worst of the worst of regular criminals who are entitled to a trial as specified in the founding document of this free nation.

Even if we accept as fact that 9/11 was the single most heinous atrocity ever committed on American soil (a statement which is in my mind arguable) we have principles and rules we should follow if we intend to live up to the hopes of our forefathers: principles which if they are worth upholding are worth upholding even in the most egregious cases. Even if we think they will somehow transmit coded messages to their confederates.

Are we worried that they will testify to being tortured repeatedly by the federal government? Because that cat is already out of the bag. Maybe someone somewhere is afraid that having that testimony entered legally into a court record will lead to criminal prosecution -- I don't care about that and neither should anyone else. As has been argued repeatedly elsewhere, the proper way to deal with federally sanctioned torture is to prosecute and then, assuming a guilty verdict, the President can step in and issue pardons if appropriate. Rule of law preserved; loose ends tied up; everybody 'wins'.

Are we concerned that somehow civil trials will damage the delicate psyches of Americans who will be forced to live through the trauma all over again? "Oh, sorry, we're not going to try to prosecute the people we think killed your father because it will hurt you too much"? I can't think of a much better way to encourage further terrorism in our country than letting on that IT ACTUALLY HURT US TERRIBLY FOR ALMOST TEN YEARS.

If we are nervous that the 'risks', whatever they might be, are so grave that we must suspend all civil liberties, then we should just kill them. I mean, seriously, right? We have presumably gotten all the information from them we can; it is probably cheaper then keeping them prisoner forever; it would make lots of Americans pleased (ugh); everybody 'wins' again!

Or are we afraid that they might actually be acquitted? Because it seems to me that there are only two ways they could be acquitted: 1) they didn't do it, or 2) we screwed up legally while holding them for trial and so as a legal matter somehow much or all of the evidence acquired against them is admissible. Either way, that's our legal system, that's how the cookie crumbles, and if our mistakes have made our enemies un-punishable then that is the price we pay for being the good guys.

As part of the publicity blitz for their remake of 1960's cult tv show The Prisoner, AMC has made the original show available On Demand. Over the course of the last few weeks, Lucinda and I have been watching some of these. I saw nearly all of them before (some several times) as a child; she had sometimes in college been in the same room when one was being shown but had never paid attention.

Her final summing-up, before even viewing the mega-trippy final episode: "This sure was made in the 60's".

On my part I was surprised to discover how painfully bad some of the episodes were. I know it's sort of the point of the series, but how many episodes can you really have about mind-control drugs before it starts to feel like you've run out of ideas? (answer: at most 2) And I understand the desire to be vaguely allegorical about things, but can't you at least try to have the plot make some sort of superficial, logical sense? (I'm not even thinking of the last episode here, which I enjoy as being completely surreal -- it's other episodes that don't commit to it, and live in this wretched half-existence between the real and the unreal.) And that episode that's set mostly in the American Old West, featuring English countryside and Tudor-ish architecture, and which bludgeons us with its poor acting and portentous symbolism? I want those 50 minutes of my life back, please.

But it was still fun to watch. The main draw is Patrick McGoohan, who runs funny and fights funnier -- sometimes his acting choices are very odd but he is always intense, like Daniel Day-Lewis. So I enjoyed watching the show mainly for him. Also in the last few episodes they apparently gave the composer of the incidental music carte blanche to do whatever -- in "The Girl Who Was Death" a new theme starts in the background nearly every minute, and each new melody is aggressively non-background. Lucinda actually found the episode nearly unwatchable because the music was so oppressive (and the instrumentation so piercing), but I actually really liked it for being full of ideas and surprisingly catchy. All the music used for those episodes was, I presume, composed by Ron Grainer, whom I'm sure everyone knows better as the writer of the Doctor Who theme.

I will attempt to watch the remake but my expectations are very low. My sense is that they stripped from the original many things that were bad but also nearly everything that was good, and also of course they cast Jim Caveziel, who is no Patrick McGoohan, that's for sure.

Another recently acquired hobby is puzzle solving. A friend from work and I have been getting together regularly to work on puzzles from the 2008 College Puzzle Challenge. Last week we were able to finally put it to bed -- the entire set of puzzles has one ultimate meta-solution which we were able to determine without actually solving each individual puzzle of the challenge.

So that's been fun. Some were easy; some were very annoying and time-consuming (and it didn't help that the one I linked to had a typo); some we just couldn't figure out what to do. Tomorrow we might start the puzzles from 2006. It's nice to exercise my brain in a new way. Puzzles and doing math aren't really VERY different but they're different enough to provide a nice challenge.

If you have been wondering what the correct punctuation was for the American holiday celebrating its veterans -- Veteran's Day? Veterans Day? Veterans' Day? -- you will be glad to know that the very first question on our government's website FAQ regarding this holiday addresses this truly vexing issue.

I didn't have to help a single student today with any business math, so that made for a manageable Monday. No compound interest, no present value: no problems!

Like, more than a year ago, a friend loaned me Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close and then I never ever read it... until this last week. It's very good -- maybe Time Traveler's Wife good -- but it's a difficult book to read on the bus because it's a very 'sensitive' book and I don't like showing 'sensitive' emotions in public.

So I bought myself a coffee maker the other day and am now attempting to use it to make myself coffee. For many of you this is trivial but for me this is Big News. Further updates as events warrant.

Working at my college's math study center this quarter has really made me aware of certain habits that students have -- well, not just students, but people of all kinds -- that make me uncomfortable or annoy me. One in particular drives me crazy: negativity. When I hear "math is stupid" or "math is retarded" or "I'm stupid" or "I'm retarded and this is stupid and I'm never going to use this anyway and my teacher never explains anything" I feel like I'm a video game and mutant leeches have grabbed onto me and my math-life-meter is slowly being drained.

And I don't know what I can do about it. A big part of success in math (and I presume many academic and non-academic fields) is having a good attitude! No, really! (I can hear my junior-high self snickering already.) But just like you can show a student every step in solving an equation and explain every detail and they still just might not 'get it', you can tell a student the straight dope ("You'll do better and learn more if you have a better attitude") and they might not be able to turn it around, because how do you MAKE yourself have a good attitude?

Actually, I guess I have to admit that I've never actually tried telling a student precisely that: that they might do well to try not to dwell on how unhappy or frustrated they are. I'm thinking about trying it next week. Good idea? Bad idea? I have the weekend to reconsider...

Hello, New Jersey; listen to this episode of This American Life called Arms Trader, which describes a completely ridiculous sting operation that succeeded in netting exactly one hapless incompetent 'terrorist'. The prosecutor in that case? The one who defended his indefensibly useless informant; whose every utterance dripped with oblivious stupidity? Yeah, he's your governor now.

I understand you had a hard choice between two complete tools, but really? Only one was a (more ore less) villain in everyone's favorite public radio documentary program. Were you not listening?

Also he has basically the same first name as his last name. Can you really do no better?

I fear that in my last post I may have come across as a bit too strident in my distaste for the pledge of allegiance, so let me provide some context by mentioning some other things that I find either more or less offensive. (To be clear, everything below offends me!)

• the new animated Jim Carrey christmas carol movie: MORE
• the obliteration of the original meaning of 'begging the question': LESS
• students who complain about how math is stupid: ABOUT THE SAME
• autotune flourishing like kudzu in pop music: LESS
• cable news: MORE
• Fox News in particular: MUCH MORE
• people who won't try a new food just once, just a little bit, even though I used to be like this, and I'm not talking about live-spider food or monkey-brain food, just unusual food: LESS
• cruelty to animals: MUCH MUCH MORE
• the war on drugs: MORE
• China's attitude and policies towards Tibet: SIGNIFICANTLY LESS
• when people don't say "bless you" or "gesundheit" when I sneeze in public, even though those statements involve the invocation of God: LESS
• how all the gossip columns these days involve stories about reality TV 'celebrities' in addition to the real celebrities: ABOUT THE SAME
  
  [late-breaking edit: apparently 'gesundheit' is completely secular, and means 'good health' or something.' My apologies.]

A friend of mine mentioned reciting the Pledge of Allegiance at her school yesterday; every time I hear a modern reference to it my first thought is, "Wow, we still do that?" The pledge is, or should be, a relic. It belongs to another, past world: a world of nuclear families and nuclear bomb shelters, a world where censors object to the flushing of a toilet.

When I think of the pledge, I do not think of loyalty or patriotism; instead I think of 'Under God', and only 'Under God'. Growing up as an atheist child, I must have recited the pledge hundreds of times. Sometimes I wouldn't say The Words and sometimes I think I would. Whether or not I said them I felt bitter and hypocritical and confused and tainted. Without The Words I probably would've viewed the pledge as mostly harmless -- maybe a little indoctrinal but mainly just a nice attempt to encourage patriotism -- but with the words the entire pledge was bullshit. A bullshit instrument of orthodoxy. We don't live under 'God', I thought; at least, I don't, and neither do lots of us -- not just atheists but Hindus and Buddhists and Deists and whatnot -- so either we're not American (which we clearly are) or this pledge is bullshit (which it ipso facto was). I felt like I was being forced to make a choice: either be American and Christian, or be neither, or lie about it.

It was one thing to me to be forced to express loyalty to my country; that was not ideal, but it was fine, it was only politics. But to enfold God into the pledge seems like a sneaky way of getting people to profess their loyalty to Him, which struck me as a big transgression. God (or absence thereof) REALLY MATTERED and should be above such petty trickery.

Historically, as we all know, the words were inserted in the 50's when many people were obsessed with Communism, in the same way many people are obsessed now by birth certificates and death panels. Granted, there was a great deal to fear about the USSR, but what good is achieved by inserting the words besides grandstanding and assholery?

Ultimately of course it's only words and it seems like we stopped saying it sometime in elementary school, and in the grand scheme of Oppression it's small potatoes; but at the time it was clear, unmistakable evidence that not all authority figures were worthy of respect. That our leaders and our elected representatives were just as capable of manipulation and coercion as a bunch of second graders.

Last night I attended a Seattle Symphony presentation of Psycho in which the movie was projected on a giant screen over the stage and the soundtrack was performed live, synchronized with the film. I had never seen the movie before and was pleasantly surprised by it. Some parts are obviously 'quaint' now, 50 years after the fact, (in particular the PLOT TWIST(S)!!!) but I am assuming it was COMPLETELY AWESOME at the time. Other parts still hold up really well; the entire first half in particular, following Janet Leigh's character, is exceptional in its slow-burning tension.

Having the soundtrack performed by live musicians was enjoyable, not only because a symphony sounds better live than recorded 50 years ago, but also because the audience was much more respectful of the film -- this was no rowdy multiplex viewing, but a classical music concert. No loud popcorn-chewing or plastic-wrapper-opening or dropped-bottle-rolling or baby-shushing! Sure, we had to pay a lot more for the privilege, but it was totally worth it. It was probably also worth it for the Symphony itself; the hall was packed, with an audience I'm confident skewed much younger than usual.

So that was my Halloween, perhaps most notable for the fact that I actually did something instead of just pretending the day didn't exist.

My favorite souvenir from Montreal is a bottle of Neutragena T/Gel shampooing therapeutique (aide a controler les symptomes associes aux pellicules!) and it turns out that Canadian dandruff-control shampoo is a different beast than American shampoo. The American recipe feels like nothing special on your scalp, but the Canadian incarnation, moments after application, feels like a brisk spring breeze. Not a tingling but a wind. I'm not sure it's any more effective, but I love the feeling.

Today: Bismarck, ND to Seattle, WA. Home before midnight. 1,236 miles. (crossing westwards into a new timezone, twice, really helped.)

My legs and arms and eyes still think we're driving.

Greetings from Sudbury, Ontario -- home of the world's largest nickel! I'm pretty sure it's not technically legal tender but it does make great photo background. It's very roughly 500 km north of Cleveland. Mmm, kilometres.

We're wrapping up day 5 of Road Trip 2009, from Seattle to Montreal and then back again. This is our first night sleeping in a bed (in a Holiday Inn). Until now we've been camping.

Here are a few notes I made in the trip journal:

* It is easy to accidentally say "Canadia" if you've been purposely saying it.

* Flavors of potato chip eaten so far: 1) ketchup 2) general tao's chicken [The ketchup chips really did taste like ketchup, and left a residue as stubborn as Cheetos, but red. Like ketchup. The other chips, which I expected to taste like what I've always called General Tso's chicken, in fact tasted like regular BBQ chips. Besides these chips we have generally been eating really healthy! Um, except for the donuts.]

* We should've bought those Tim Horton's mugs.

* They measure things so accurately here: MAX HEIGHT 4.26m

* The Canadian Superstore: a little sketchy.

* Still no Tim Horton's mugs.

* The guy who ran the campsite we stayed at the first night (in Canada's Glacier National Park) was a former professional hockey player whose teams won the Stanley Cup several times. [How this came up: we said we were driving to Montreal. He said he spent some years there. We asked, "You did?" He said, "yeah, I'm in some of those pictures over there" -- team photos covered one wall of the office, plus some trophies sitting around.]

Tomorrow: I may get to practice my negligible French!

I don't understand Google Reader but I may make it a project for next week to try to get it working and useful to me.

I don't understand how to make origami (cranes, frogs, whatever) although I have attempted to learn many times. It will not be a project for next week.

I don't understand how locks and keys work. This can probably be remedied by some wikipedia analysis (or seeing if I can get my hands on The Way Things Work, if it's in there) but such research may not happen soon.

If there is one thing that every American agrees on, it is that their passport photo looks terrible. I am pleased -- nay, positively gleeful -- to report that my passport photo is actually really good. It's true!

Something that had never happened in my life until two nights ago: waking up because of excessive facial sweat. (We're having a record-breaking heat wave!) Last night, and the night before, my sleep was interrupted more than once due to a sheen of sweat on my forehead so profound my body would not let my consciousness rest.

Tonight I will attempt to sleep in the living room on the fold-out couch, where there is less back support, but marginally more breeze and fan coverage.