New site!

From now on, all my blogging will take place at the newly condensed mother-site:

http://www.morganphillips.com

The contents of this wordpress blog have been cloned and moved.  Please update any and all bookmarks, links and feeds which point here.

See you at the mother-site.

Oh, C-Town

Q: Is it a bad sign when the grocery store’s response to a mysterious(?) odor in the frozen food section is just to spray a dizzy-making amount of air freshener everywhere?

A: Yes, it is a bad sign.

Q: Can we draw a life lesson from this?

A: Yes.  If something “smells bad” in your “frozen food section,” don’t just “spray a lot of air freshener everywhere.”

Q: What are you talking about?

A: I don’t know.

Pi!

Using techniques described by Harry Lorayne, I’ve been able to somewhat easily and enjoyably memorize the following number (broken up into two lines, so wordpress won’t freak out):

3.14159265358979323846264338327950288419716939937510

58209749445923078164062862089986280348253421170679

That’s 100 decimal places.  And I generally dislike numbers.  And memorizing things.

I think I’m going to stop at 100, for three reasons:

1. Checking for errors takes a really long time already.

2. I have no reason to memorize pi digits in the first place.

3. The world record is apparently 100,000 decimal places.  Upon hearing that, a tiny little part of me says, “Hey, I wonder if I could ever…” (Cut to me six months later — rocking back and forth in a chair, muttering gibberish through my long, unkempt beard, in a locked room with strange symbols and seemingly random numbers written all over the walls.)

. . .

If anyone has any suggestions for numbers that would actually be useful to memorize (beyond checking accounts and phone numbers and such), let me know.

Omnibus

1. There is an awkward dynamic at play in computer-less temp jobs, when it comes to downtime.  It frightens the boss if you whip out a book, because then other office workers will think, “Oh, look, a temp with no work to do.  Somebody is wasting the company’s money.  And that’s why we can’t afford cocoa for the kitchen area anymore.”  The thoughtful temp instead passes work-less time in a subtler fashion.  Case in point: Today I memorized pi to 20 decimal places.*

2. I have an improv show on Thursday, and might have one on Friday.  But forget that noise.  You should go see the new Charlie Sanders one-man-show at UCB in NYC on Friday.  (Oh, it’s at 8pm?  Then you could see my shows, too.  Bonus!)

3. This live performance haunts my (morphorotic) dreams.  Some day soon I will write a post dissecting the lyrics of this song, possibly the worst lyrics ever written, ever, ever.

If you can make it all the way to the end of the video, you are awesome.

. . .

*Unless it isn’t 3.14159265358979323846 — if it isn’t, then I memorized pi to 20 incorrect decimal places.  Which is equally as useful to me.