Prairie and I spent a very pleasant evening last night at Jacqueline Passey‘s birthday party. There was a wonderfully odd mix of people there, as she’d invited people from all the various disparate areas of her life: webloggers, economists, libertarians, sci-fi conventionists, and school friends. Needless to say, this made for quite a few very interesting conversations over the course of the night, and we both enjoyed ourselves.
Her “crazy peace activist” friend Fred introduced us to a few pieces of slang that he’d discovered recently while following news from the troops in Iraq that he thinks might be recent additions to the long list of military slang soon to become part of the popular consciousness:
- Salmon Day
- You spend all day swimming upstream just to get fucked and die.
- Adminisphere
- The “powers that be” above your immediate superior.
- Blamestorming Session
- The process of determining who in the adminisphere is at fault after a salmon day.
We also met Mike Layfield, who created a Hexagonal Chess game that looks quite interesting. While I’m no huge chess player — my skill level is limited to knowing how the pieces move — the variant looks to be a fun twist on the game, and there’s even a java-based version I can practice on until I pick up an actual play set.
At one point we were treated to Jacqueline’s stump speech — she’s working on running as the Libertarian Candidate for Washington Secretary of State, and is working on getting the funds for her filing fee to officially launch her campaign. While I’m no Libertarian, I have absolutely no problems with the party doing their best to keep our elections as open as possible and keep themselves on the ballot, so I went ahead and donated a little bit to her campaign. Besides, I hadn’t brought a birthday present or card, so I figured it could count for that, too. ;)
Jacqueline had covered one wall of her apartment in butcher paper and left a box of crayons on the floor so that people could decorate her wall if they felt like it. At some point during the night, some unknown person scrawled a complex mathematical formula on the paper, and wrote “Limerick:” above it. This wasn’t discovered until later in the evening, after they left, and soon after the discovery most of the guests were gathered in the hallway, doing their best to solve the equation and figure out the limerick.
Now, my math skills are not anywhere near the level of math that had been written on the wall, so I knew I wouldn’t be able to help with solving the equation. However, while visiting the restroom, I started thinking about it, and realized that solving the equation probably wouldn’t help, as it would merely result in either a number or an expression, and wouldn’t actually produce a limerick — what they needed to do was find out how best to read the equation out loud, following the A-A-B-B-A structure that limericks use.
Unfortunately, by the time I got back to the group, one of the other guests — a math teacher at Shoreline Community College — had realized the same thing, and they were well on their way to solving the puzzle, so I didn’t end up contributing at all. Still, it was fun to watch everyone work it out, and Jacqueline got a kick out of having such a geeky party. :) She’s promised to post a picture of the equation along with the final limerick at some point, and I’ll point to it when she does.
At that point, both Prairie and I were pretty tired — I’d had to work the opening shift at work, so I’d been up since five in the morning (an incredibly rare event for me) — so we made our goodbyes and headed back to my apartment to crash out.
iTunes: “Hold On” by McLachlan, Sarah from the album Nettwerk Decadence (1993, 4:12).