Bits and Pieces

[firstfrost]

This morning:
It was brought to my attention that a Harvard cross-registered grad student had given his Athena username/password to his whole Harvard lab to let them get certificates and use the MIT on-line libraries. I wrote them a Very Cross email about this, and the prof apologized very graciously, and then the student apologized even harder. They all agree that they were very wrong and it will never happen again. My righteous fury is entirely turned aside by their sincere and humble apologies (and this continues to support my belief that Harvard people are Just Better at charisma skills than MIT people. Nature or nurture?)

Yesterday:
King Richard's Faire. Royalty Sings and Dances (though they called it something else) was better this year than the past several, though still not as brilliant as the long-ago version of Macbeth. Kye and I independently discovered that we had pretty much bought all the trinkets we wanted over the past many years of attendance, and now all we coveted were the Amazing Copper/Brass sculptures that were probably a little outside our price range for an impulse buy. Perhaps next year. Though I did still buy something from the pottery stall that I buy a bowl from every year. There are two major pottery shops - one has the same set of blue glazed thingies every year, which means I've bought one bowl from them ever; the other is Mahinda's Mad Dog Pottery, which has new stuff every time (so there's always something new to get), plus the artist is from Somerville and recognizes me, which is always gratifying.

Saturday:
Jordan's Furniture, at which we ordered a daybed for the library and dining room chairs (Right! I knew there was a reason to not cook Thanksgiving dinner this year - the three-to-six-weeks delivery period). Someday harrock, tirinian, and I will encounter an actual schism in taste, and will have to battle it out, but for the moment, furniture shopping is still very smooth. ("How about these?" "mmm, they're not as comfortable as those". "These are nice." "Yeah, these are good." "What about those?" "Enh, those are better." "Okay, let's get those." "Okay.") Then Kye's housewarming party, which did get crowded but was fun.

Friday:
Us, at the BCA. A performance art piece about gay marriage and musicals. Sort of like a passionately written essay, in performance, for which I think I was already in the choir before the sermon. I do have something of a hard time reacting the right way to impassioned rhetoric (and trying to be more nuanced in rhetoric is likely just as hard in performance art as in politics). I feel vaguely hurt when lines are drawn between Us (the gay couple forced into exile because you can't get a green card for a gay relationship, and by extension all gay relationships) and Them (cruel straight America, which passes repressive laws and spits in their faces at Niagara Falls), since as a practicing heterosexual, I think I'm being put in the Them category. And I want to argue with some of the semantics, but that's probably more like picking a fight about something we don't actually disagree about.