Book Review: The Importance of Being Earnest (Wilde)
Have I read this before: No.
Review: Haha, this was great. It’s not often that a book (or play) makes me laugh out loud, but this one did on several occasions. All I really knew about this play going into it was that it had been criticized as one of Wilde’s only works that did not “contribute” something or have a deeper meaning/message (at least compared to his other works). After reading it, though, and reading more about it (I try to not look at info about a book/play I’m going to read before reading it if at all possible), at the time it was written, others argued that the humor itself was its contribution.
Favorite Part: I’ve obviously never seen this performed, but I think the way the lines are written allows for a lot of flexibility and actor interpretation in the deliveries. I can imagine there are a lot of variations in the performance due to that, which would be great to see.
Rating: 7/10
Book Review: The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter (McCullers)
Have I read this before: No.
Review: This book had super interesting characters. I like books that shift perspective and this book does that very well, heightening the relationships amongst the characters by allowing us to see things from their differing perspectives. Everyone has a (as the title suggests) a loneliness or isolation about them, especially the individuals who seem very highly connected with others. It’s an interesting exploration of all the different ways loneliness can appear.
Favorite Part: I like how Singer was sort of an anchor for so many different people in so many different ways. What eventually happens to him near the end is shown from all of their perspectives, adding to its weight and importance.
Rating: 5/10
I’m at maximum burnout
WEEEEEEE!
Kazoom!
Have friends? Or family? Or both?
Are they hard to buy for?
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Woo.
THE FRUIT
Y’ALL, they have Fruitopia up here!
WTF is Fruitopia, you ask? This.
This gave me a serious nostalgia trip. Fruitopia was something I used to drink a lot of in junior high because it was in one of the vending machines in the cafeteria. Mongolian BBQ also used to have it in their mini fridge. The green flavor always tasted SO GOOD with noodles, yo.
Edit: the green flavor is called Kiwiberry Ruckus. They don’t have that flavor up here, but they have something called Raspberry Kiwi Karma, which might be the same. I’m so tempted to get some and try it, haha.
Anyway.
Book Review: Great Expectations (Dickens)
Have I read this before: Yes! We read this in 8th grade.
Review: Okay, so I’m actually convinced now that we read an abridged version of some sort in 8th grade, because 1) I don’t remember this book being so long, and 2) I don’t remember half of the things that happened in it. I haven’t read any other Dickens to compare this book to, but I hope to read some more soon, as it did have a good deal of tension and build up in it (again, more than I remember from the 8th grade reading).
Favorite Part: Pip, Startop, and Herbert trying to row Magwitch to freedom. Tension!
Rating: 5/10
Y’ALL
Max Scherzer is a Met.
I repeat: Max. Scherzer. Is. A. Met.
My favorite pitcher is a Met now? THAT’S SO FREAKING COOL ALDSFJSLDFJHGLDFHLH
I AM LOSING MY MIND
I hate emojis, but…
I don’t know if it’s the sleep deprivation or what, but I stumbled upon this thing and I can’t stop laughing at some of the weirder combinations.
ACHY BREAKY SICKY HEART
Acid trip
THE EYES HAVE EYES
Sweet lord.
Hahahaha
HAHAHAHA
Okay, everyone else can go home. Mixing the spider with anything else is clearly the winning design.
“Oh heavens, I seemed to have ripped through your backyard! My apologies.”
Look, it’s me trying to add 4+7 in my head.
I hate my life and I’m super bitter so here’s a list
LOL NEVER MIND LEAVE ME ALONE
WTF IS OMICRON, NOW???
Bro, I SWEAR TO GOD if this new omicron variant cause things to regress back to where we were in the previous wave, I’m going to lose my mind. I’m so sick of this nonsense.
Edit from January: well, this escalated.
I FORGOT
So.
Remember that baseball thingy I did a few days ago?
I think I forgot to do that for the weird-ass COVID-shortened 2020 season.
So let’s do it!
I’m going to spare the spiel since I just did a blog post similar to this TWO DAYS AGO (clicky to read), so I’ll just put the results here.
Because of 2020’s Crazy Wacky Covid Schedule, there were a lot fewer games played and a lot fewer inter-league games played. Thus, there were a lot of ties when it came to the “predicted” results. The Cubs and the Angels did great against their opponents, haha.
Correlation between predicted and actual results: 0.7363. I thought this would be low due to the weirdness of it all last year, but that correlation is actually higher than 2021’s.
Odd news.
ROCK YOU LIKE A HURRICANE…LAMP
This is incredibly interesting, yo.
I love this YouTube channel. So many different things explained so well!
Basic Baseball Shenanigans
‘Sup, y’all?
So once again it’s the off season and I need some sort of baseball in my life, so let’s do that thing I’ve done the past several years where I analyze a team’s average runs per game and use that to determine how many games they would have won if they’d scored that average in every game.
Here’s the copy/paste explanation:
At the end of the regular baseball season, you can see how many wins each team got out of the total number of games they played, and then rank the teams by their performance (who had the most wins, the second most wins, etc.).
What I want to do is see how this “real” data correlates with how many wins each team would get if they scored their average number of runs per game in every single game they played. For example, if the Dodgers score an average of 5.05 runs per game, how many of their games would they have won by scoring 5.05 runs in each of those games?
(Pretend you can score a fraction of runs in a single game for the sake of all this.)
The process:
- Record each team’s average runs per game (I’ll call this “RPG”) (from here).
- Sort teams from highest to lowest RPG.
- Now, if a team A has a higher RPG than team B, that would mean that A would win every game they play against B. So the next step was to figure this out for each pairing of Team A versus Team B.
- I used this logic for all pairings, then summed across the rows to get the “predicted” number of wins based on RPG alone. I ranked the teams according to how many predicted number of wins they’d get (“1” meaning the most, “30” meaning the least). Then I compared looked at how each team’s “predicted” ranking compared with their “actual” ranking (“Diff”).
Here’s how they compare for the 2021 season:
The Astros (highest RPG, “Predicted” rank of 1) would have won every game they played; the Rangers and the Pirates both would have lost every game they played (lowest RPGs, “Predicted” ranks tied at 29).
The “Diff” column is calculated by taking the predicted rank minus the actual rank. Positive “Diff” numbers suggest teams did better than they would have had they scored their average number of runs in every single game. Negative “Diff” numbers suggest teams did worse than they would have had they scored their average number of runs in every single game. The Reds did much worse in real life than they would have if they’d scored their average number of runs in each game (“Diff” of -10); the Mariners did much better in real life than they would have if they’d scored their average number of runs in each game (“Diff” of +13).
Correlation of team rankings based on RPG-predicted games won and actual games won: 0.723
SUPAH COOL!
Book Review: Frankenstein (Shelley)
Have I read this before: Yes! We read this in “Literature of Western Civilization II” back in undergrad.
Review: I’d completely forgotten that the book starts off with Captain Robert Walton narrating, haha, before Frankenstein tells him his story. It’s also pretty sad how all the botched interpretations of this story have made the Creature a far less sympathetic, intelligent, and caring individual than he was in the original story (or at least in most of it).
Favorite Part: The interaction of the Creature and the blind father in the cabin just made me think of this:
Rating: 6/10
Book Review: Death of a Salesman (Miller)
Have I read this before: We read this in 11th grade English, too, I think, just like The Crucible. Gotta get that sweet, sweet Arthur Miller in those juniors. I can’t remember the character I read for, though.
Review: I like Miller, fight me. He’s really good at building up a persistent, nagging heartbreak that you know will eventually destroy a character. I remember going to see my drama teacher at U of I in this play way back in 2006 and I still remember how much it hurt.
Favorite Part: Just that buildup. It’s really extreme in this play (obviously) and even if you know what’s coming, it’s still very upsetting.
Rating: 7/10
Zowza
Wow. This is a beautiful, haunting cover of “Where is My Mind” by The Pixies. It sounds like a song that would play in the background as a character in a movie loses their mind or something.
Heh.
I’m hilarious.
(This is so dumb, I know.)
Today’s deep thought: we spend time and energy to create soft pasta, then dry it out to make it hard, then eventually put it in water to make it soft again.
Today’s Deep Thought™ is brought to you by sleep deprivation and spaghetti.
Book Review: The Crucible (Miller)
Have I read this before: We read this in 11th grade English, I believe. Was it 11th grade? It was whatever grade I was in when I had an English teacher who had all sorts of Yoda quotes plastered around the room. I really liked her because whenever we read a play, we actually read it out loud. She would ask if anyone wanted to volunteer to read a character (and if not, she’d assign us) and we’d just read through the plays. It was super immersive and very enjoyable.
(I was Reverend Parris when we read this play.)
Anyway.
Review: I’ve always liked this play. I love how things accelerate and snowball and how you get this feeling that there was no way to turn back once the lies started to spiral. It’s very suspenseful and stressful.
Favorite Part: Just how much you hate Abigail Williams by the end. Or even at the beginning, haha.
Rating: 7/10
Relatable
I think all profs can relate to this, especially at the end of the year.
Book Review: Babbitt (Lewis)
Have I read this before: I think I tried to read it in junior high, but didn’t get very far.
Review: Have you conformed to the standards of middle-class living? Then you, my friend, are a Babbitt! Lewis does a great job of expressing a pestering suffocation that goes along with living the supposed “American Dream” that, for Babbitt, really just consists of sleepwalking through life, work, and societal pressures. It’s quite depressing, of course, but also unsurprisingly still relatable even today. I remember a lot of my friends had very high ambitions in high school/college, but the majority of them now (at least from what I can tell) are really just…existing in a very confined societal role. It’s sad.
Favorite Part: There’s nothing that stood out to me, but that was sort of the point. Babbitt exists in monotony and, though he considers it, cannot escape but praises those who do.
Rating: 6/10
Flu in a Bog
So remember that day last month when Nate and I were certain we had COVID but both tested negative and “got over it” in like seven hours?
That’s because we didn’t have COVID.
We were idiots who left our humidifier half-full of water over the scorching summer, didn’t clean it, and then started running it that day. Nate actually suspected that the humidifier was the cause because that was the only thing that both of us were exposed to and the only thing that had been “different” over the past several days, but this was confirmed today when, after being stupid and running the humidifier again, I felt the same sort of awfulness I felt that day (Nate was feeling a little crappy as well, but I sit much closer to the humidifier all day than he does, so I get more exposure).
Supah fun.
At least that makes us more confident that we actually didn’t have COVID.
I serve you…a survey!
TASTY SHIT RIGHT HURRRR
Appetizer
When you drink soda/pop/coke, do you prefer to drink it from the bottle, a can, or after pouring it into a cup?
I don’t drink soda/pop/coke. But when I have Red Bull, which comes in a can (duh), I drink it out of the can with a straw. ‘Cause I’m a classy bitch.
Soup
What television show are you willing to stay up late to watch?
Bro, I stay up late anyway. I could watch any show at any time and not inconvenience my sleeping schedule. But back in high school, when the Discovery Health Channel started showing episodes of Chicago Hope and I got hooked on it, they moved the episodes to like 2 AM during my senior year and I would always stay up late on Friday nights to watch. 2 AM was a struggle (now it’s like when I start making dinner), so that was the only show I was willing to stay up for.
Salad
Name one person, place, or thing you think of as brilliant.
…do you really need to ask me that? Does anyone reading this NOT know what my answer would be?
Gottfried. Wilhelm. Leibniz. One of the smartest people that has ever lived. Fight me.
Main Course
Would you be willing to work 4 10-hour days instead of 5 8-hour days in order to save gas?
I don’t drive and thus don’t need gas, but YES. I’d prefer that, actually.
Dessert
If you were a superhero, what would you call yourself?
I was “Spectrum” back in the house, but I was a supervillain, not a superhero. My superhero was “Dr. Calculus.” Yes, we had superhero/supervillain names in the house. I mean, what would you expect?
UM, EXCUSE ME
This is fire.
Eigenblogger 