Nevermind what is important to the Professor

Nobody likes the sadness poll, and nobody is voting in it, and nobody has visited the workshop since the Professor opened the voting. Please forget it ever existed. Don't be sad.

Kiss me. That's an Order.

I am the King of Balls.

They love me in the Philippines. Little carts with green signs order people to kiss me.

I must experience this in person. I will travel to Manila in the coming months where I hope to get kisses, and balls, and hope not to get hepatitis. I may even invest.

I am not kidding. I am the King of balls.

We have photos of Courtney Love!

Did you know this? Where are they? Are they really here, in the Workshop?

Postillion, what do you know about this?

Good job, King of Balls.

Except for that double posting, you are golden.

See comments number 23 and 24.

A footnote to a life.

Rest in Peace, David Foster Wallace. We love you. The world will miss you terribly. Thank you for your colorful multifaceted writing, for reminding me to enjoy life again and again over the course of two decades. You are wonderful.

Sussman.

I am the King of Balls. This man is an idiot. See below for a more eloquent discussion of same.

Rant: Stupidity, Please Mock

Well, we all knew it...the blog is just like the world in revealing the many aspects of human nature. But it happens to be different than the world in that any individual can have their ignorance and stupidity crystallized and revealed for the rest of the world in the way of all fast media.

Therefore, without further ado, I have the displeasure of outing this particularly self-insular and self-centered piece of writing by a young man who had never heard of David Foster Wallace until Wallace's recent sad death.

On the blog, as on in the real world, not knowing something doesn't always imply that the person is not famous; it can just be a pointer at one's own lack of knowledge in certain arenas. Given that all of us are necessarily limited in knowledge due to the limitations of the human brain and time on this earth (I fully admit my ignorance of all things related to pop culture, mathematics and science), there's no problem with that. However, what is a problem is mistaking a serious writer who suffered from a debilitating mental disease as a sensation- and fame-seeker.

Mr. Matthew T. Sussman could only have made such a mistake in ignoring his own ignorance of a very well-known American writer and foolishly deciding to turn his ignorance into a sensation- and fame-seeking piece on David Foster Wallace. He should feel ashamed for his lack of intellectual curiosity as well as a lack of intellectual honesty. In both traits, he is the exact opposite of David Foster Wallace whose writing is much admired for displaying an energetic curiosity towards all things and all beings in the world as well as the ability to work through intellectual questions in a discerning manner.

Unuseful

The most unuseful thing off the internet

The most unuseful thing on the internet

(By the way, exclamation marks are not allowed as part of tags/labels...how unuseful. By the way, I would argue that unuseful can be semiotically different than useless...or I am just illiterate.)

Oh, unuseful here is useful.

Useful

The most useful thing on the internet.

Also Useful

The second most useful thing on the internet

Dear Mr. Wrake,

If this is copyrighted or otherwise shouldn't have a screenshot here, please notify the Professor immediately via the comments to this post so I can take it down. I think it's an internet miracle and want to draw attention to it. The workshop's two or three readers will really enjoy it, I'm sure of it. Maybe they'll send you money or name their children "Run." I know I will.

Lunchtime at the Workshop.

What, just bread Professor?

No, no. Also sweet creamy butter.

Cheese fries?

No. Poutine!
Click for a closer look and see if you can't spot one of the large tender cubes of meat in the gravy.

Those are tiny cubes of Chorizo, and there's a real clam underneath there. Click on it. I dare you.

The Professor's Sole.

A new poll, an old poll.

Thank you all for your insightful comments on the David Foster Wallace post, above, and the Sentimentality post, below. I look forward to hearing more on these topics. Please continue to comment, but also, help keep the workshop stable by voting in the new Sentimentality Poll.

Also, don't forget to vote in the Dignity poll. We've moved it up a bit for your convenience.

Sappy in the past and the future.

Note that this post does not have all necessary labels. Freedom of Expression is being limited. But this is not the topic at hand.

The Professor altered the date of this post so that the DFW love would stay at the top of the Workshop for the moment, and so that this post will not negate it.

But readers, have you noticed a turn for the sappy in the Professor's posts lately? The Professor, as a consumer of what one hopes is the objectivest reality possible, wants to know. Re-reading some recent posts, the Professor finds them to be a little sentimental. For instance, the Professor has used the personal pronoun "I" more frequently, no? And the word "love" is occurring more frequently as well. But perhaps the Professor is indeed feeling sentimental, but the blog does not in fact reflect that. It could be that the Professor is coloring everying in shades of sunrise and candy, emotion-wise, including the Professor's own posts. I just don't know. I, the Professor, need your help in figuring this out.

Also, readers, please remind the Professor of the pitfalls of being sentimental, to aid in the Professor's cost/benefit analysis. I guess the good side of sentimentality would be appropriate to hear about as well, for a true cost/benefit analysis. But sentimentality could be said to include an assumption of its own goodness. Or could it? I don't know. The Professor doesn't know. Neither one of us has faith in our own judgment any more.

I think I'll write about tanks or wiring diagrams or something next. Readers, I know the Professor is taxing you with all these requests, but please if you could, suggest something un-emotional for us to disect in the workshop.

Thank you

My hats go off to you, team Marvel. Well done. You've come through for me in a time of need. Not for me, personally, I realize, but for the Workshop. Everybody put aside their busy lives and gave a piece of themselves. Everybody but Perfect, that is. Perfect is likely a perfectionist, composing, as we speak--or rather as I write--a DFW-esque treatise on Snails and Consumer culture. Heavily footnoted, it will be so extensive and detailed that the reminder to vote in the Dignity Poll will have to be placed somewhere in its first chapter.

Team Marvel, please consider contributing regularly. You all did so well, and ... you are my strength. You are the foundation upon which the Workshop rests. Without you, it'd be nothing but a few yellow penises.

I will try to contribute as well, but it's hard to balance the actual Work of the Workshop with the meta-discussion about the Workshop that goes on in the blog. I will try to be meta for you, readers, as the Workshop has been an interesting place recently, and may continue to be interesting into the future. We're using the lab again--firing up the bunson burners, sterilizing the test tubes, hauling the electrophoresis machine out of the hall closet. It's all very exciting and dangerous!!! Look for more or less posting soon as a result of this or something else.

There are itchy people everywhere

Gilda Radner - "I base most of my fashion taste on what doesn't itch."

Rule of personalities on the workplace

In the interest of saving the Professor's sanity, I am doing the one-time favor (note: one time only) of posting after reading a plea. Moreover, I am posting a related item on sanity and the insane on the workplace. The Professor better appreciate that I am taking time off from knitting coasters to write this up.

After having worked at various companies over a decade (work experience can be rather limited for us dimwits who spent our youth and money too long at school), I have decided that there is not a single company of any size without a token psycho. So, if there is a company with only two persons, without a doubt, one person will suffer from serious behavioral issues and inflict it on the other person. Having worked in companies and departments of various sizes, it is a common variable to all workplaces.

Why does this occur? Even though I have not made an extensive study, I will make a groundbreaking hypothesis which will lay the groundwork for future studies that will earn psychologists and psychiatrists the Nobel Prize if they learn how to utilize the internet to read random rants and raves of the common layperson and thus to propel the study of the insane. My groundbreaking hypothesis of the insane at work has two parts:

1) Individuals often consider the workplace as their small tiny pool of influence and therefore consider the workplace as the world which they shall conquer and therefore become a petty tyrant.

2) As the workplace can be compared to a dysfunctional family (as one old friend pointed out to me, it is the place where we spend the most amount of our waking hours), certain individuals behave as though the workplace is their home. Thus, they become overly comfortable and start acting out as they would towards their family.

These individuals are objects of curiosity and occasional violence. One must treat them with due care, not necessarily with kid gloves but more with the thick gloves that bear tamers use.

Of course, the most notorious of violent behavior on the workplace is the postal office, hence the common term "going postal." Going postal is commonly believed to be a result of too much stamp licking by postal workers. For many years, Americans believed that there was LSD laced with the glue used on stamps that caused postal workers to go...well, postal. This erroneous belief led to the massive Rush on Stamps of 2004. Americans everywhere bought stamps and started licking them, thinking that they would get a cheap rush.

Unfortunately, this led to a shortage of stamps and a new "market will bear" pricing mentality by the United States Post Office, with stamp prices being repriced at $10.25 each. Thankfully, Americans, after much licking without any effect except for sticky tongues and stamps getting stuck to all their clothes, furniture, and their furry pets (the worst incidence of such was the negligent stamp licking owners of Pollyanna parrot who stuck the licked stamps on their Pollyanna's beak, effectively shutting her poor beak and leading to her slow death by starvation while her LSD/stamp obsessed owners didn't even realize that she had not chirped "Pollyanna wants a cracker" in twenty days; as a memorial of the cruelty suffered by American pets everywhere during this period, the US Postal Office erected a Pollyanna parrot statue outside their central DC headquarters with an eternal looping recording of "Pollyanna wants a cracker"), began to realize that LSD was not laced with the glue used on stamps. Instead, they had to arrive at the conclusion that given the incidence of mad people in America, a certain ratio also had to work at the post office. While stamp prices never dropped back down to the 2003 price, we can all now send letters for a reasonable price again.

easier to build than maintain

Has it been anyone's experience here that it seems easier to build things than to maintain them properly? I mean except for decent art. But countries, plants, workshops, languages, even cigarettes? I'm tired.

I am the King of Balls

How does one get to be a Professor¹ without knowing basic html?²

David Foster Wallace you are not.³

¹ I am the King of Balls.

² I am the King of Balls.

footnote continued on next post

³ I am the King of Balls.

A plea

Postillion, Xbasket, Perfect, King of Balls,

Help the Professor out. I have writer's block, or some similar ailment. I'm not paying enough attention to the words in my brain and the blog is suffering. See it suffer? See the one-line posts? See my agony? SEE? HOW CAN YOU CONTINUE TO STAND BY AND DO NOTHING?!?! I HATE YOUR COMPLACENCY!!!!

Please write and post something to improve the workshop in these lean times. Except for you, King of Balls. Please stop posting in the workshop unless you find something else to say.

I would also like the workshop to have more pictures, because they are each worth 1,000 words, but the yellow penises were so interesting that nothing else in the workshop really compares. [The penises are now in steady-state, by the way: unchanged since their last photo several weeks ago, except maybe a little browner.] [Can a blog have footnotes? The Professor is tangential and without footnotes the posts might become unreadable.]

I will take care of the pictures. You people, the rest of you, please put words in the workshop. Please love the workshop.

If you want a topic to write on, please pick any of the already established topics in the index, i.e. Snails and Consumer Culture, Dignity, Exclamation Marks, etc. Pick one with only one entry, and develop it.

It's 9/11 and

I am the King of Balls.

Obligatory 9/11 Post

Imagine the professor saying something insightful here, okay kids?

Also Pathetic

How did you guys do this? Most slugs just eat the leaves and flowers. You sucked the life out of them. You must be vampire slugs. Instead of the pellets the Professor should have put little stakes through your little hearts.

King of Balls

I am the King of Balls.

Pathetic

I take a hiatus for a month while my life is going through some major changes, and all Professor Marvel can do is post about moldy penises? What kind of entertainment is this, I ask you?

I recommend that all of you, Morgan Freedman, Kurt Cobain's ghost, Courtney Love, etc., entertain yourself by reviewing the catastrophe of the Republican VP candidate. And we should spend all our hours until election praying fervently to whatever mysterious forces of democracy that might still be lingering (granted in a stale, leftover sort of way) be in America to save us from such monstrosities.

That said, I am taking another hiatus to prepare my getaway in another country in case the Republicans win.

Two culprits killed, little spirals may be exonerated

Two dead slugs have been found. No spirally shells to be seen.

Pictures would be inappropriate.

We still do not know if the lobelia will pull through, but at least the Professor can have "closure" because the victims have been brought to justice. That's the way they say it works, anyway. The Professor is not so sure.