Wheels and Language

Spanish is a funny language. Although it, like English, has regional variations, the variations of Spanish are widely disconnected from one another; so much that its speakers are allowed to forget they exist. This leads to the arisal of many funny words whch don't propagate at once. A country may create a word when the country next door had a word that perfectly well described that phenomenom.

Where am I going with this? I recently learned a new word in Spanish. Don't ask me which region it's from, but it's enough to say I had no idea it existed, so it's probably new (in the way "cool" was new in 1975 and "groovy" was new in 1950). It came to me through a pun, possibly exploiting its novelty. It goes like this:

Alumbras más que un sol, lamparita!

Now, to translate this, I first need to tell you what it means. The literal translation is, "you light more than a sun, lamp." The "lamp" at the end makes no sense when written like this; but the "you light more than a sun" part sounds awfully romantic.

In which I start telling how I drew my avatar

In About my display picture, I explained what motivated me to draw my current display picture. Having decided what I wanted to draw was only half the battle: I had absolutely no idea how to draw a mouse. Ideally, I'd have a live model, but I knew my mother wasn't going to buy me an escape-happy, wall-chewing rodent just because I wanted to draw it.

I therefore went with the next best thing: look for a photograph. Most people think the only way to use a photo for drawing is to trace it and reproduce every hair, every floating dust particle, every trick of the light exactly. This becomes noticable because, well, if your model were to move, you wouldn't be able to get all those details. What I had to do, then, was use the photos to find the proportions and basic shapes that, when our brains see them, make us think, "Aah! There's a mouse in the house!"

Mrs. R, why do you torture me like this?

The title may be a bit extreeme, but it is exactly how I felt today when I saw that, once again, the teacher was telling us to bring something to the following day's class with few hours left in the day.

Teachers like this abound. Before the internet, it was mainly in the shape of
"Bring it to my office by tomorrow at sunrise."
"But this class is last period! There's no time to do it!"
"I don't care. Just be in my office by sunrise."

Last term I also got a teacher like this, only worse.

The deal with the food

In my first post, I mentioned a problem with the food on campus. If any of you read it, you'd be right to be worried. If you aren't I perhaps didn't express correctly just what the situation was (and that's very likely: my original post was so short, it probably wasn't clear). In today's blog post, I'm going to explain it in more detail, and tell you how I'm going to deal with it.

My college is quite removed from the city; to put it simply, this causes it to have a sort of soup kitchen, a coffee house, and a Subway store as the only places to eat. Due to budgetary constraints, the kitchen will be closing soon; however, 42% of the students eat there, mainly because we (yes, myself included) can't afford the other two places. (Going to the city and back would take four hours, making it not be an option when you have to go to class in the afternoon.)

Looking back at it, the only thing that is clear is that I have three choices to eat; exactly three. Firstly, I'll tackle what I mean with budgetary constraints: basically, the college is out of funding. While tuition may cover the teachers' salaries, grants and donations pay for food, maintenance... heck, even the paper the exams are printed on! Donations have been falling and grants aren't rising nearly fast enough to cover the difference, and a lot of the money has already been spent. You see where I'm going with this?