recent events

Going home tomorrow for Thanksgiving, though it will be less of a chance to get away from the drudgery of pointless schoolwork and more of an interlude in which to catch up on things I have been scrupulously putting off for... I suppose it's been at least a few months now. After much internal debate, I wrote Professor V. of theory of computation fame a cautiously worded email asking him rather elliptically if he would write a recommendation letter for me. The exact words were something like, "What is your policy on writing recommendation letters?" I considered adding a paragraph to the effect that, if he refused, it would be the end of any aspirations I may have had to a grad school education, but thought better of it. I was also concerned that it would look like the meeting with him that I had requested a few weeks ago under the pretext of needing advice about grad school was all just to smooth the way for asking him for a recommendation letter (which it was), and that he would feel taken advantage of. But, I reasoned, the fact that I had put off asking him for so long after the original meeting would surely clear me of the charge that that had been my intention from the start (which it was). Well, a couple of days ago I got Prof. V's reply saying that he would be happy to write a letter for me. 

The second person I spoke to was N. M., a physics professor with whom I've taken four classes (E&M, Special Relativity, and Classical Mechanics I and II). She, too, seemed delighted to put in a good word for me with the various schools I'm applying to, which makes me wonder whether I was wrong in my earlier belief that writing recommendation epistles was a burden that few professors would be willing to shoulder unless the person being vouched for was exceptional. Of course, given that I'm applying to CS programs, I might have been better served going to another CS professor, but I basically blew the best chance I would have had by not following through on my obligations this summer to the compilers professor. He is now on the list of people at this university whom I actively avoid.

I've become somewhat disillusioned with The West Wing, which I was praising effusively a few weeks ago, not least because of Rob Lowe's sudden and unexpected departure early in the fourth season. What seemed at first to be good writing devolved very quickly into a painfully predictable formula. You would think that after five years of working together, the White House staffers would have developed a more natural way of talking to each other. Nope. The jokes all sound like they were practiced in front of a bathroom mirror for hours before filming, the recurring idiosyncrasies are overtired, and the plot has offered nothing fresh in almost 500 episodes now. Every other episode, one character finds himself on the receiving end of a quasi-witty remark that is repeated independently and verbatim by every other character over the next few minutes. "Mr. President", "Mr. President", "Mr. President" every episode. Most irritating of all is the irrelevant crescendo building up most inappropriately in the background for the first minutes of each episode, and exploding all over the title sequence in a decidedly American fashion. It would appear that our search for a TV show with good writing is not over yet.