AUGUST 2003

  
       
  19 August 2003 Blah Blah  
  Nothing new.  Going back to DC on Saturday and trying to finish up some things around here.  Today's most amusing moment: seeing two African-American gentlemen in their ghetto/rapper/gangsta FUBU outfits carrying a dainty bag from Crate and Barrel.  Hey cool guys—it kind of messes up the look.  
  15 August 2003 Victimized  
  Lucky me—I am the most recent victim of credit card fraud!  Someone used my account to make online purchases from gameandgo.com (?) and the Lerner catalog for upwards of $1,300.  Fortunately, Fleet automatically recognized I am not that lame and froze my account.  Of course, I'm liable for none of the charges thanks to the good people at VISA.  To the perpetrator, all I have to say is that you are a poopoohead and that stealing makes baby Jesus cry.  I wish a plague of locusts on ye, and I hope you get butt-raped by a violent criminal in prison.  If Federal law made it mandatory that white collar criminals be locked up with death row felons, this country would be a lot better off.  It's probably very easy to get people's credit card information nowadays.  What's to stop your waiter from jotting down your number or some random guy at PayPal from saving it for later use?  I suppose that's why vendors pay the 2.5% surcharge on credit card purchases—that, and to make VISA a shitload of money for doing nothing.  
  13 August 2003 Blogs  
  There is something very unsettling* about a man keeping a diary, and less so a journal.  While having a blog is certainly dorky, I think it is more masculine than writing in a diary or journal.  Discuss amongst yourselves.

* Please note that I refrained from calling it "gay" because I am sensitive to the rights and feelings of the homosexual community.  That said, check out today's Craig Wilson column in USA TODAY.  It's great when people don't get offended about every stupid thing, recognize the humor in a stereotype, and play along.  I think that NBC and Bravo could just as easily be getting bad press about Queer Eye for the Straight Guy, in which five gays with great senses of fashion/decorating/culture do a male makeover.  What if they had five black guys "gang" someone up?  Is that stereotype ok for network TV?  Jesse Jackson would go nuts, but it could be funny—just look at what Snoop wears and see some of the rappers' houses on MTV's Cribs.

  
  12 August 2003 More Football Drafting  
  The autodraft for my Don and Mike league took place last night and the results are in:
   
QB     K. Warner, D. Bledsoe, D. Carr

RB    

R. Williams, T. Henry, A. Thomas, G. Hearst
WR     T. Taylor, E. Kennison, C. Rogers, Jo. Reed, J. Porter, D. Patten
TE     S. Alexander
K     J. Wilkins, J. Chandler, J. Tuthill
DEF     New Orleans

Although having 12 teams is normal, this league starts QB, QB, RB, RB, WR, WR, TE, RB/WR, WR/TE, K, K, DEF.  Quarterbacks and kickers are at a premium during bye weeks.  You've got to be lucky on the QB situation, because they get injured a lot and you have to hold on to them for later.  It's not like kickers, which are expendable from week to week.  So the draft went ok, although I ended up with more receivers and fewer defenses than I would like.  One last league to go.

  
  10 August 2003 The NASCAR  
  How unbelievably good did it feel to witness Jeff Gordon get spun out in the first turn, then spend all race working his way back to second, only to be spun out again on the final lap?  It's really difficult to gain track position on a road course, but he went from worst to almost first.  One way he did it was by pushing his fuel situation, and he ended up running out of gas on the final lap.  Despite this, he was well on his way to coasting to a top 10 finish, but with less than 100 yards to the line, Harvick plowed into and wrecked him.  Gordon didn't finish and wound up 33rd—a more than 100 point swing from what he would've had if Harvick allowed him to coast in.  Muhahaha.  Now Gordon is totally out of the championship picture and I can live happy for another year.

Around the lab today, someone brought up that a company called PowerGen in Italy has its official website at www.powergenitalia.com.  Interesting.  The site is gone now, or this could just be the latest urban legend to hit the net.

  
  9 August 2003 Fantasy Football '03 Begins  
  Drafted for the "Cambridge Retards" in my first Yahoo FFL today.  This is the odd Longfellow/McLean league, featuring 20 teams starting QB, RB, RB, WR, WR, WR, TE, K, DEF.  Here's how it went:
   
QB     D. Culpepper, K. Warner

RB    

S. Alexander, T. Hambrick, N. Davenport, O. Gary
WR     T. Taylor, E. Kennison, D. White, A. Hakim
TE     C. Fauria, K. Dilger
K     J. Hall
DEF     Dallas, NY Jets

Even though I got Culpepper in the second, I drafted Warner in the third because he was by far and away the best fantasy player on the board.  He'll probably get traded for a mediocre QB and a good WR or RB.  The WR unit is weak, but that's the easiest thing to improve during the season.  I probably should have gone for a defense earlier, but this team will do.  Also, I didn't pay attention to bye weeks, but hopefully that won't be a problem.

  
  8 August 2003 Goodbye Professor McNelis  
 

I just found out that my orgo II professor at NYU, Edward McNelis, died yesterday.  McNelis was a great teacher.  He completely ignored the book and taught what he thought was important, which was a lot.  By the end of the semester we had reams of handouts.  "Hurricane" McNelis had us learn the mechanisms for the Roelen "oxo" process, all of the Sandmeyer reactions, and a number of other reactions that most undergrad books don't even touch.  His exams were long and painful, always including A+B questions, explanations/essays, and hard syntheses.  His first midterm killed me—McNelis would later call it a "disaster."  I redeemed myself on the final exam and earned the gag label "Wunderboy" (fake German accent) from him.  Also as a freshman, I took his "Contemporary Chemist" seminar and learned a great deal about the human side of chemistry, including the politics of academia and the culture of industry.  I hope NYU continues to offer this course and that the next professor teaches it as well as he did.  Outside of class, his bawdy sense of humor was great.  I wish I could remember the compound and reaction we were talking about, but for one question, McNelis answered, "Oh, that's easy.  It'll lift its skirt for you."   He also used to joke that there was a big cabinet in his lab in which he wanted to be entombed when he died... 

 
  7 August 2003 Four!  
  With the arrival of new postdoc Lara Estroff, there are now four former Jefferson Colonials currently working in the Whitesides lab—Lara Estroff '93, Jennah Kriebel '94, Chris Love '95, and me '98.  Ridiculous.  This brings the number of TJ alumni currently in the Harvard CCB department to seven, with the others being Mike Rust '97, Evan Krygowski '98, and Mary Rozenman '99.  Harvard Chem = Lieberland North.  
  7 August 2003   Changes  
  On the advice of my attorneys, I have made some changes to a particular feature story, wink wink, nudge nudge.  Rest assured that all you care to see is still on the server and is readily accessible to persons that are clever enough to figure how to get to the food without me explicitly providing a link.  Also, this blog is looking much sexier thanks to some late night inspiration following a strong, albeit mildly disappointing, 2nd place showing in tonight's pub quiz.  In other news, I was going to break the seal and offer my first actual real-life blog news commentary, but I sha'n't because I can't find the article in the Globe's archive.  In Tuesday's sports section, there was a feature article about how the Holy Cross head football coach has a mysterious illness that is called something like "neuromuscular chemical sensitivity" which has made him temporarily wheelchair bound.  There was a quote that said something to the effect of "basically, whenever you are exposed to a chemical, you get very sensitive."  All aboard the bullshiat train.  
  2 August 2003 Still Nothing  

 

Welcome to August here at paulbracher.com.  As you can see, I've still not done much and no one is coming here.

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