Furious fuzz

I found out this week that Colubrid does gift matching on donations to MIT. That makes me quite a bit more likely to donate. The only weird thing is that on the Colubrid gift-match form, it has some wording about I certify that neither my donation nor Colubrid's matching donation will be used to pay for tuition, books or fees. That could be a problem since what I want to donate to is the undergrad scholarship fund that keeps MIT's application process "need-blind" -- you know, the fund that enabled me to go there in the first place. :b I wrote to the gift office to see if that refers to tuition, books or fees for me or tuition, books or fees in general.

Also, the first pair of expensive shoes I ever bought finally broke a buckle on Tuesday, seven years after I wondered if sandals could possibly be worth $100. Seven years! Oh little sandals, how I loved you! You were worth it! I went out to replace them, and ended up getting these cute sandal/clog things for half off. Then I decided to buzz through the Gap on Sunday looking for sales, and found that all their cropped pants are marked down to $9.99 right now. Whee! They call people like me cherrypickers, and they don't like us -- but between always being generally frugal and now having a job in retail optimization, I don't think I can help it. When you know some of the Gap's business rules and you KNOW they have no good initial pricing system, and you KNOW they take a lot of markdown recommendations from the system you help write... well... cherrypicking happens.

Aside from shopping, I've been geeking out, in various ways. Spent a fair bit of time yesterday with the so-called wizard book, which is both good (brain exercise) and bad (shit! my weekend!). Then heisenbug and I went to TBC's house and played Fury of Dracula, which looks incredibly teenage-boyish and dumb, but in fact is just Scotland Yard on steroids. I liked it, perhaps partly because we beat the living shit out of Dracula by trapping him in the middle of Europe at dawn, and it also made me realize that I don't think I ever read the original Dracula. Shame on me.

I'm finding Acts of Levitation to be a little like James Joyce but a whole lot better (no obscure Catholicism, for one thing). It's so slippery though. I still can't get a grip on the characters' lives. I'll just have to finish reading it so I can scrape up something intelligent to say.

"er" jokes

Last week I found myself having to explain an entire subgenre of puns to people.¹ These jokes are -er jokes, which generally depend on hearing the ending of a word as "her" instead of "er".² All of them are spoken incredulously, and have the follow-up line of something like "But I just met her!" As in:

"Fiddler on the Roof? ... but I just met her!"

People who are in a culture where a lot of these are told can get away with extreme conciseness.

Person A: One cup of butter... two cups flour... 1 cup bittersweet chocolate...
Person B: Bittersweet chocolate! But...
Person A: *smack*


Consumer awareness? But I... *smack*

Inspector Gadget? But ... *smack*

Rubber gasket? But I... ow, ow, stoppit!

Okay, so they're a low sort of humor, and most of them are dirty, but I sort of miss er-jokes (or -er jokes, or "but I" jokes, or whatever they are). I never knew they weren't widespread, but apparently they're fairly localized. Consider this my attempt to educate the rest of the world. A few more can be found here... on an MIT site, no surprise there.

¹I was explaining the genre to my coworkers in order to explain the most hardcore one of all, which is clean, but which you were probably course 6 if you even understand. Metacircular evaluator? But I just metacircular evaluator? But I just metacircular evaluator? But... Yes, yes, I know. Sigh. :)

²There are a few "but I just met him" jokes. Interim? Geez, I just met him. However, a lot more words end in -er than -im or -em or -um. It's just a feature of the language.