Go fuck a goat

“Go fuck a goat”. While this particular phrase may have entered your ears several hundreds of times over the last few years, especially if you are frequently in the company of Rudy, I believe that we fail to truly understand the magnitude of this insult. For the first few utterances, the mere shock value of the unfamiliar act described makes it both an exotic and potent sting, it soon diminishes into a commonplace and sometimes more hilarious version of “Go screw yourself”. Having used the phrase often myself to initiate a hilarious-for-me mental image in the insulted’s head, I feel that the true extend of the insult has not been fully appreciated. The steps involved in fulfilling this expectation fill a humorous and arduous combination of tasks equivalent to the trials of Herakles himself.

First, one must go find a goat. While this may be a simple matter in rural India, it becomes increasingly difficult with increased population density and urbanization. I do not have first hand knowledge of where to find a goat. In this situation one could turn to Google. Upon doing so, as Rudy has often told me to go fuck a goat, I immediately see the link for The Belted Goat, a restaurant, recipes for oven roasted kid goat and a forum where someone is looking for goat farmers. No luck locating goats there.

Next, I simply Google “goats chapel hill” and find a link for stories about and locations of fainting goats in Chapel Hill. There are none. I find another restaurant called Goat in downtown Raleigh, an article about zoning violations where “2 goats is too many“ and an mp3 of the Mountain Goats performing cats cradle. I appears that the great and mighty Google has failed me in the quest to find a goat in Chapel Hill (either that or I am too lazy to find an adequate search term). I must turn now to my own wits and resources to find the elusive fuckable goat.

The zoo has animals. The zoo has a petting zoo always occupied by goats. And, as Google informs me, there’s not a freaking zoo anywhere freaking near Chapel Hill. One would have to drive to freaking Asheboro. Already, even finding a goat is far worse that fucking oneself will ever be. Anyway, if one drives to the zoo in Asheboro, they will find that there is neither a petting zoo nor a goat, and now the insulted will have to choose the next best thing – at the zoo. Judging from the animal listing it looks like either a Red River Hog, or an American Elk. Let’s take this opportunity to recap the extend of being told to “go fuck a goat”: one must use Google to find a nearby goat, of which there are none and then drive to the zoo in Asheboro only to find out that there are no goats there either and decide whether a tusked four legged hog or an antlered four legged elk makes a more suitable substitute. My advice would be the hog, but I feel this is really a personal decision.

Next, one must pay $10 to get into the zoo and battle throngs of hot, sticky, screaming children, their younger sibling in strollers pushed by overwrought and frantic parents, and associated other relatives to make it to the enclosure.

Finally, comes the tricky part that no one seems to mention in Baliwood films. You have to convince the goat/hog/elk that it wants to be fucked. Rudy did not say “go rape a goat”, he said “go fuck a goat”, as in, “have consensual sex with a goat”. Now I am sure there are any combination of date rape drugs and sedatives that you could use on the goat/hog/elk, but Rudy was very explicit in that you must convince the goat/hog/elk that it wants to participate in this insult. Not only do you have to come up with the ultimate pickup line that actually works, you have to figure our how, based on tonal utterances, social communication, and mating behaviors, how to convey that to a goat/hog/elk. Let’s not forget that the social framework, sexual desires, and moral code of the goat/hog/elk may be drastically different from your own.

Assuming that one has made sufficient progress in seducing the goat/hog/elk, one must now get into this enclosure, fuck the goat/hog/elk and then leave. While it is usually easy to climb over a fence and swim a moat or climb up the other side with a series of ropes and hooks, we cannot forget that speed is an entirely necessary skill in this endeavor as you will be kicked out the zoo upon closing. Instead, you will need to leap down, convince the goat/hog/elk, perform, and then use said climbing and./or repelling paraphernalia to get back out before a) the children start screaming and you are rendered deaf from the commotion, b) the parents of the screaming children see that you are having a negative reaction on their offspring/control of their offspring and pelt you to death with baby shoes, diaper bags, and pieces of the strollers, c) the screaming children alert zoo security who arrest you and send you to jail where you are labeled The Goat-Fucker, and the expected ensues, or d) the other elk/bison/lions in the enclosure gore or eat you to death.

After all of this, if you make it, you must then drive back to Chapel Hill and be forever known as The Goat Fucker.

To sum up, when someone says “go fuck a goat” what they really mean is “embark on a fruitless search to find goats in Chapel Hill, give up and drive to the zoo in Asheboro where you will test wit, strength, speed, and skill against swarms of angry children and parents all the while amassing intimate knowledge of the social, moral, and sexual codes of either the Red River Hog or American Elk then acquire climbing gear and superhuman reflexes and charm to seduce a sexual partner and perform the act all the while trying to avoid either deafness, death, and prosecution. Then, have and exhausting drive back to be forever chastised and demeaned”. Touché, Rudy. Touché.

PHYSICISTS…ZOMBIES

 

 

The APS conference was a grand confluence of physicists, the purest form of supernerd convention …( I know you can argue that mathematicians are supernerds too, however they never congregate, so its besides the point) and it basically drove home what physicists are as social beings. Was this a gathering like Woodstock, maybe something like the Olympics or was it like an award ceremony for musicians/ entertainers…with crazy parties and all the glitz…

 

Nope. What it looked most like was that Pittsburgh was invaded by zombies….

 

I just read this article about the characteristics of zombies and the similarities are chilling. heres my list of 5 reasons why you could mistake a zombie for a physicist or vice versa:

1. Zero social skills, walks about with a blank stares and will not respond to any friendly gesture…

2. Hates the sunshine, neither are ever seen enjoying what others would call a “glorious day”…

3. You never know how they will respond to the commonest behavior…

4. I read this somewhere online about zombies “ However, despite any absence of change in their senses of sight and sound, Mr. Brooks does suggests that the undead have a heightened sense of smell”, this works for physicists too. If theres free food around, you can be assured there will be physicists soon.

5.  They need to continuously eat, there were multiple restaurants in Pitssburgh downtown that had actually run out of food and had to turn off customers…this is a fact….

 

Furthermore, one can relate the transformation from undergrad to 2nd year soon to be physicist to the first 24 hours after a zombie attack.

Hour 1-Pain and discoloration of the infect area.  Immediate clotting of the wound.
Month 1-Your soul begins to ache and flesh becomes discolored due to lack of sunlight.

Hour5-Fever between 99 deg. F and 103 deg. F.  Chills, slight dimentia, vomiting, and acute pain in the joints.
Fall semester midterms- lack of sleep and stress causes  Fever between 99 deg. F and 103 deg. F.  Chills, slight dimentia, vomiting, and acute pain in the joints from atrophing muscles.  Frequent bouts of tears.

Hour 8-Numbing of extremeties and infected area, increased fever from 103 deg. F to 106 deg. F.  Increased dementia and loss of muscular coordination.
Fall Finals-  Numbing of extremeties and infected area, increased fever from 103 deg. F to 106 deg. F due to switching from sleep to coffee.  Increased dementia and loss of muscular coordination comes with the realization that you will have to take the qualifier this semester and you have put off studying until now.  Attempts to get “caught up” are futile.

Hour 11-Paralysis of the lower body, overall numbness, and slowed heart rate.
Day before the qualifier-Months of inactivity due to constant studying cause paralysis of the lower body, overall numbness, and slowed heart rate. 

Hour 16-Coma.
Weekend in between days 1 and 2 of the qualifier-Coma.

Hour 20-Cardiac arrest and cessation of brain activity.
Final test of the qualifier-all the coffee and no sleep catches up to you when you see the unsolvable Chicago problem that you could never understand.  Cardiac arrest and cessation of brain activity.  Hope dies.

Hour 23-Reanimatinon.
Later that summer-your do the partial wave analysis with Bessel functions you thought would never be useful to anyone, because it describes your research.

APS March meeting micro blog

monday 1135 am:

in room 329…emily has her talk here at around 1 15 pm…the guy is saying something that i cant understand at all…..starting to understand now…

extraordinary transmission in visible region…

the guy has a very sing song voice…

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he just said rectangular whore…ooops sorry…rectangular hole…

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also last night saw a bunch of physicists outside the bar across our hotel…that had to be the most awkward bar experience for anyone who went in…this is the truest form of nerd convention….

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monday 4:40 pm

expect to meet up with a few people I knew from earlier. plan to go around Pittsburgh sometime in the evening. Will be uploading photos from tthe conference soon. also the David l Lawrence conference center is on the riverfront, and hopefully I can go out on the terraces later to get some cool shots of the city once the lights come on…

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Tuesday 8:51 am

Just woke up. Adam has his talk 930 ish so will head out for the convention center soon. will try to keep updating about it all day long.

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So I didnt update  it all day long. well I was being productive…nah…walked all over Pittsburgh downtown. It is truly a city of bridges. also I have realised there are way too many sessions on fullerenes. we also went up the incline and took some photos of the downtown. had dinner at a fancy italian restaurant, where our server had the funniest voice ever.

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wednesday 245 pm

I am currently attending a talk on pld fabrication processes. here are some photos from last evening.

How can anyone think that Nutella and peanut butter fill the same niche?

So yet another reason that I hate grad school was pointed out to me yesterday. I have been here for less than two years and have only been sitting at my current desk since May, and already I am half of a well established old married couple who I’m not even dating. Don’t worry, I was confused for a minute two. As it turns out, my office mate (the one who watches flickr all the time) and I have all the attributes of being an old married couple. We have inane conversations about strange things that have no impact on our immediate lives, we argue about taking the elevator and the relative scale of coldness (among other things), I nag him about various issues and he tells me how mean I am to him, we complain about useless things together like China, how the British screwed over EVERYONE, how much I hate the French, and grad school, all the while doing nothing about it, and the best and perhaps strangest of all the old married couple things we do . . . we take long pointless walks around campus or Franklin street. We once climbed through a series of fences in the name of our walks and have often ended up with ice cream in the winter merely because there was a buy one get one free coupon.

You see, I have a fiancé and will one day, after many many years, forge the bond that only old married people have between them, but with my office mate, our mutual hatred of grad school is strong that we bypassed decades of closeness and became the instantaneous old married couple. So when I make him look at another lolcats comic, or he sends me a link about holy elephants in India trampling pilgrims, or I nag him for not having tried cheese whiz and he finds out he loves it, it is not because he I know him so well that I have decided he needs the peanut butter and jelly sandwich or that he has let all of his Indian guards down and doesn’t mind if I know that there are 27 Indian babies born every minute. No, it has nothing to do with what normally causes people to act like an old married couple, it is because we both truly, deeply, passionately, and completely HATE GRAD SCHOOL.

Check and Mate

Fantastic news! As it turns out, I may have reason very soon not to hate grad school! This reason is because I won’t be here anymore. Are you curious? Amazed? Intrigued? Jealous? Is it because I am a wonder child and the hours of life in a basement have stimulated my mind so worked out all the theoretical problems with my simulations? Is it because, in a caffeine-induced manic state I set up all my experiments and wrote a thesis and am about to graduate!? No, these are not the reasons, (Also, I have not gone the Indian route and bribed my PhD committee to just give me a degree), sadly. It is because, very soon, I may be charge $15,000 a year to go to school here. How exciting.

Really, it’s a good idea the school-state system has come up with. Don’t give everyone in state residency even though they have all the requirements listed on your vague standards and when they get rejected a couple of times take away tuition remission so they will be forced out for their indecisiveness in not loving North Carolina enough. I applaud such mighty efforts to weed out those graduate students who aren’t really dedicated and would only suffer if they weren’t accruing any more loans. Bravo.

Or rather, I would applaud them if I didn’t know that this was really a plot by the graduate students spanning numerous years to bring down the department. I know you’re thinking it’s not possible that we could be so conniving, organized, and evil. But I remind you that we all used to have interests outside of physics that required us to make plans with other people and that grad school has sucked out our souls just enough to commit any kind of bastardly acts. We started being especially warm, friendly, and welcoming at visitation weekends for new prospective students. We grew little by little and refused to get our residency. And after years of plotting the economy crashed, we had accepted 25 new students and the bulk of the department is mere months from getting kicked out of the program for failure to pay. The 4th and up years won’t go because they’re so close to that PhD and they’re just writing. The 1st years won’t go because then the hell that is the first year and passing the qualifier will have been for nothing. But the 2nd and 3rd years will leave with our Masters, leaving only thesis writing students who aren’t producing results, and beginning grad student who are still trying to figure out the tricks to the lab and we won’t be here to tell them the right settings. UNC physics will be worthless for years to come and won’t be able to attract new students or money.

Is it a little far to go for revenge, especially those of us not here when the whole plot started? Yes. Are we doing it excessively anyway because we have nothing better to do with our time since grad school actually makes you more stupid with each failed simulation or experiment? Yes.

Take that grad school bitches!

Exhibitionist cats and so on….

So as it turns out, my cat is an exhibitionist. For those of you who don’t know I have the most evil and adorable animal in existence for a cat. Despite the evilness, he is relatively well-behaved and only does horrible things when you are watching. When you are not paying attention, he comes to sit on your lap and cuddle, only to bite you as soon as he wakes up. Back to the story. I went to bed this weekend roommate still awake and door cracked open. Not 5 minutes after I turned out the light I hear a stressed and terrified meowing coming from the living room (he also never meows unless he’s horribly lonely and it’s the saddest thing I’ve ever heard). I got up and rushed to me poor unloved cat. But nothing was wrong, so I petted him and went back to bed. A few minutes later, what do I hear again? The same thing. So I go back out to find my cat humping a small stuffed duck and meowing all the while. The conversation goes something like this:

“Seriously, Jackson, can’t you be quieter when you do that?”

I’m lonely, you and the roommate aren’t paying attention to me and don’t love me enough, so I have to hump this stuffed duck to get some kind of affection.

“But I’m trying to sleep, and left the door open so you could come in and sleep on the bed and I came out to pet you last time.”

You don’t love me, you never loved me, this duck is the only one who cares about me. Go away!

“Um. Can you keep it down though”?

Bitch, I’m a cat. What part of that statement makes you think I’m going to do anything you say?

“Fine.” And I closed the door, but it didn’t stop the sounds. And as I lie there trying to ignore the meows of ecstasy and exhibition outside my door,  I realized that even this was not as bad as grad school.

on gay penguins and ttax people

I used to think that I hated graduate school.  Turns out, I really hated
the injustices of the world.  All of the really important ones like how a
German gay rights group has protested a zoo breeding its pair of
homosexual penguins with females, how a man with a peg leg escaped from
police by running away because he was not chained up, how two men
handcuffed together escaped from prison in New Zealand only two knock
themselves down because they ran on either side of a pole.  Seriously, it
just makes my blood boil.  I mean, who has time to worry about Iran and
the economy when the Ttax people of Papua New Guinea have been given a one
way ticket to hell by the German gay rights groups because they cannot
experience the holiness of the gay penguins.  As Kevin would say “They must
be gay”.
        The injustices of this world are becoming so numerous I almost forgot to
hate the French.  Rudy informs me that I have to hate the Pakis since I’m
now an Albino Indian, but I reminded him that brown people are the most
racist so I also don’t have to give to charities in my new found
ethnicity.  I have to say, I didn’t believe that Indians were inherently
good at yoga, but when I was suddenly able to bust out the crow pose just
being in an Indian’s aura, I couldn’t help but be awed and angry that I
was not imbued with the same natural gift of relaxation.
        To sum things up, this was my day at work.  It’s not even over and I have
succeeded in doing absolutely nothing of use and occupying my time with
the ridiculousness of fictional ideologies woven through a series of
inside jokes over instant messenger.  I used to have actual ideals.  How
is it that my life has been reduced to commenting on the inanities of
homosexual penguins?  I know both the how and the why.  Graduate school
sucks!

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