BRAIN DRAIN

…is finally over. There’s just no more studying left in me right now, and I’ve always prided myself on my focus in these matters.

Naturally, this means that the summer break is upon me, and I’ll be taking off in a few hours on the long-awaited vacation.

Will be back and blogging in a couple of weeks. Maybe.

Sometimes…

…I know the math. I can do math. I understand the math.

…I don’t know the math. But I could do it if I knew it, since everything else makes sense otherwise.

…I know the math. It’s doable, but I have no idea what it all means.

…the math is quite…amazing.

…the math is just more trouble than it’s worth.

…I wonder: do I really have to do the math?

The regularly scheduled post will be interrupted by this commercial break (literally):

TBS has been airing specials on funny television commercials from around the world for the past couple of years, and now a good number of them have been collected in one place via VeryFunnyAds.com.

I have no way to tell whether the site is IP restricted to viewers in the USA only (as the NBC Rewind site seems to be), but I sure hope it isn’t. Overall it’s an interesting site to check out, with a fair amount of material to choose from organized by brand, category and country of origin.

My browser’s RSS reader pointed me towards an entry from CNET on a handful of Webby winners that might have gone under the mainstream radar. Although I only gave the list a look — literally, for I just kept clicking “next” — the one site that did catch my attention was the Poetry Foundation’s.

The foundation in its current incarnation is rather new (founded in 2003), but has a more colorful history best discovered through the site. Overall, the site itself is an amazing resource of everything and anything poetry-related, with links, a blog, and even podcasts. However, what literature lovers will no doubt appreciate the most is the site’s Poetry Tool, which allows visitors to search the Foundation’s archives for poems by poet, title, occasion and, best of all, a poem’s first line.

This last feature I think is a real winner: after all, who hasn’t been made to memorize some poem or another in a high school literature class, and can remember little more of it now except for that first line? In fact, I couldn’t help myself and spent the better part of an hour putting the archive through its paces, searching for poems off the top of my head. While the site didn’t have two of my favorites — the twenty-fourth poem from Stephen Crane’s The Black Riders and Other Lines and Arthur O’Shaughnessy’s Ode — it did have many I do happen to like (in no particular order):

If a heathen such as myself can appreciate what this site has to offer, I can imagine the sheer joy this will elicit in the poetry afficionado at heart.

It took a month, but I now have both the visas needed for this year’s summer trip. Of course, there was one last ditch effort by “the system” to screw me over, with yet another consular officer giving the old “Can I see the other country’s visa first?” routine another go. Thankfully, even the illogic of bureaucracy has its limits.

Based on this month-long experience, I find that there’s really no better substitute for dealing reasonably with a reasonable person. The latter appears to be both a necessary and sufficient condition for getting things done. I am also of the opinion that that the more reasonable a person is, the more genuine their courtesy towards others. I’m sure these observations are self-evident in so many other aspects of life, but they derive particular poignancy given the setting in question.

Further, I’ve noticed that there are more ways than one for foreign embassies to “love their own”. It’s only fair for an embassy to extend preferential treatment to their own citizens: separate lines, priority processing, and similar practices are just par for the course. But Embassy B has this down to a science: not only are their citizens received in a separate area where they are attended to in a much more timely fashion, but the staff seeing to them are also so much more attractive.

Two visas in hand, and two weeks to go before I get to actually use them. These are gonna be a long two weeks!