God's in his heaven, all's right with the world

Last night I saw They Might Be Giants at the Bluebird. The opening act was a band called Oppenheimer, who were actually quite good - I have seen many bands open for They Might Be Giants in my day, and I would say these guys were not quite up to the level of Ok Go, but certainly better than, oh, Corn Mo. (Click the link if you dare!) Oppenheimer is two guys from Belfast, one on drums and one on guitar, and they did a good, electronic power-pop-y set. They were super loud - my clothes were vibrating, my heart was beating in time. In certain moods, at certain times, I sure do love loud rock 'n' roll.

TMBG opened with a classic - "Hey Mr DJ, I Thought You Said We Had A Deal" - and afterwards, John Flansburgh remarked, "It may be a little early in the show to say this, but I think this may well be our BEST SHOW EVER." And it was pretty fantastic.

I have rarely seen John Linnell as animated or in such high spirits as last night. It was wonderful - he smiled the whole time, he told little anecdotes, he actually got out from behind the keyboard to move around on stage and DO THE ROBOT, he blew us a kiss at the end of the second encore. He did the robot, people. The man is like unto a god.

Linnell told a story of the first time they'd played in Bloomington, back in the 80's, when their manager's father attended the show and afterwards remarked, "That's how Hitler got started." This story seemed to really ring his bell.

John Flansburgh was also looking well, and I dig their current drummer - he's very animated. They played a good mix of old and new - a lot of stuff from The Else, as expected, but also classics like "I Palindrome I" and "Ana Ng." No real surprises, but no matter what, the opening bars of "New York City" will always be one of the most sublime moments life has to offer.

Couldn't be geekier

Oh, man, Adam Busch's band covering one of my all-time favorite They Might Be Giants songs: most dorktastically hot thing ever.


Seriously. It's Warren. Singing "Don't Let's Start." It's a good day to be me, folks.

In

You're not supposed to choose a grad school based on your hope of working with one specific professor, they told me. He or she* might move on to greener pastures (ahem, JC I am looking at you), or it might turn out that you don't work very well with this person after all. I pretty much ignored this advice, and I came out here with the notion that I would be working with the Badger, our resident logician. (I am calling him that because he is badgerlike and probably Google searches his own name from time to time, because don't we all, and he doesn't need to read what I say about him.)

The Badger is extremely terrifying, a quality I appreciate in a professor. He has very courtly manners but always seems to be shouting. He calls me "ma'am." His photograph on the faculty faceboard in the lounge shows him from behind, looking out the window, and probably brooding. I feel a subdued wish to have him tell me how to run my life, and for this reason it is probably for the best that the Badger is not my adviser ... yet.

Therefore I am pleased when the Badger appears to take an interest in me - when he says things like, 'as one logician to another' or offers to let me read the drafts of a paper he's working on, or invites me to participate in a Philosophy of Mathematics discussion group. Because of this last, I am reading Kant's Critique of Pure Reason. It is every bit as long and confusing as the Philosophical Investigations, but without the classic thought exercises and compelling metaphors. Not to mention, who is more dreamy:

or

I thought so.

*On the subject of "he or she," I read an interesting article yesterday in Bitch about gender-neutral pronouns, as an alternative to the clunky "he or she", the "ungrammatical" singular "they", or the sexist "his." Although I am, on the whole, supportive of attempts to make our language as inclusive as possible (for instance, I supported Smith College's decision to change "she" to "the student" in our school constitution), I cannot get behind these gender neutral pronouns. No one uses words like "zie," "per," or "hirself," and speaking as a linguist, rather than a feminist, they should not be made to. New words are introduced into English all the time, but as a rule they are not these sorts of words. Pronouns are structural, and while new pronouns can evolve naturally (the article points out that "they," "them," and "their" were originally from Scandinavian) they cannot be introduced artificially.

That said, if I should meet somebody who really wants to be addressed using gender-neutral pronouns, I'd probably give it the old college try, because I am nice like that.

THINGS I LOVE:

1. The way my subconscious mind is busy cranking out answers to things even when I am not paying attention: I tried to take a nap this afternoon but was shaken from a doze when I figured out how to do one of the proofs on my set theory homework.
2. The skin that forms on top of milk when you heat it
3. Baked lentils with cheese
4. Watching due South
5. Reading Laurie Colwin with a cup of cocoa -- I mean, reading Kant. Yes.