7 Quick Takes, Take 10
Visit the originator of 7 Quick Takes Friday.
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I’m getting ready for an exciting overseas adventure (click to see where I’m going) and on Monday had my arms pumped full of exciting medicines and vaccines in preparation. I don’t like needles very much, so it’s been a good eight or nine years since the last occasion I had an injection. I barely felt the actual needle pricks, but I’ve never experienced such strong aftereffects before: pain around the injection sites, soreness in the rest of my limbs, and general malaise for a day or so. Sort of makes me glad that I’ve declined the yearly flu shots Cornell offers us for free.
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I’ve decided to call P. Z. Meyers “Saul”. I hope that my reasoning will be obvious.
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Two weeks ago, Cornell students celebrated Dragon Day, one of our two official Quaint College Customs. The official definition of Dragon Day is “the Friday before Spring Break upon which first-year Architecture students unveil a large dragon that they have built from metal, wood, fabric, and other sundries, parade it through an appreciative crowd all around campus, and finally carry it onto a large green in the center of campus, where it is ceremonially burned.”
Unfortunately, it appears that dragons are no match for environmental legislation. Thanks to a new state regulation about outdoor burning, the aforementioned definition has to be somewhat emended: Dragon Day is now “the Friday before Spring Break upon which first-year Architecture students unveil a large dragon that they have built from metal, wood, fabric, and other sundries, parade it through an appreciative crowd all around campus, and finally carry it onto a large green in the center of campus, where it is ceremonially burned anticlimactically pushed off to the side as the architects try to stoke the crowd’s enthusiasm for burning a pile of wood and straw as a substitute.”
Tradition!
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Speaking of M(e)yerses, this week I took one of the many online Myers-Briggs personality tests with some friends of mine. In our group, it turns out, we’ve got a “Dreamer”, an “Examiner”, and an “Entertainer”. Guess which one I am?
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Spring has established a beachhead along the trails and gardens of Cornell, with shoots and blossoms emerging from their beds, but things are never quite so straightforward here — we had a bit of snow this week. (When I say “a bit”, of course, I mean a very little bit. The Snow Exclusion Bubble is still operational.
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The outcry over Notre Dame’s intention to honor Barack Obama next month shows no signs of abating. It’s unfortunate that the school’s administrators invited him in the first place, but I wonder if good things could come out of this. The official line is that they were expecting this sort of controversy, but the protests seem to be well organized, multi-pronged, and sustained. Outsiders are signing the main petition of course (the signatories now outnumber the total student population fifteen to one), but student groups have also set up their own protest site, and two bishops have condemned the invitation. Notre Dame may be getting more publicity than they bargained for.
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Items mounted on the wall directly in front of me: A refrigerator magnet that looks like an old-style iPod nano, advertising ‘student discounts’; an unfolded map of the main Powell’s Books store in Portland; a poster trying to answer the question “Will I make a good space traveler?”; a hand-painted picture of a cherry tomato; a project planning timeline; a calendar featuring daily humorous photos of cats; a copy of the Litany of Humility; and a postcard illustrated with an illuminated medieval musical manuscript.
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2 years ago