After a weekend full of Memorial Day fun filled with family and friends, the rest of the week has suddenly gotten boring during the initial dog days of summer. Making things worse was the DSL going down for a day or so, leaving me just scrambling. I call the good people at the phone company to find out more of this outage. Here is how I remember the conversation.

Is there an outage? Yes.
In my area? Yes.
What is wrong? I don't know. My computer just says there is an outage in your area.
Is there an estimated time on when it will be fixed? Nope, I have no idea.
Do you realize it has been down for more than a day now? Yes, and we apologize. We can offer you a credit for time lost but you'll have to call the billing department. (Realizing the potential windfall from such a call is a little more than a dollar, I don't think I'll be calling.)
Uh, well, thanks.

Luckily things were normal as of 10am.

This morning saw the passage of two educational competitions, the Spelling Bee and the MATHCOUNTS competition. Why both of these events are on ESPN, I will never know. MATHCOUNTS features middle school students who must answer math questions faster than their competition at the time. I'd never heard of it, but if I did, I still wouldn't be caught dead at this event anyway. Many students take a written exam and the top ten get to go on to the aforementioned oral round where 9th place takes on 10th place for the right to face 8th place and so on until the last man standing faces the first place guy to see who wins. The questions were easy but the time it takes them to solve it was extraordinary. In the final two, the streotypical Asian nerd faced off against the first place stereotypical white nerd. For an example, the penultimate question involved 4 tetrahedral die with the numbers 1, 2, 3, 4 on the 4 faces. What would be the most likely number rolled? The white guy buzzed in too quickly and did not take in the whole question, and as a result could not answer. The asian guy then had a full minute to calculate it and answered 8. With all due respect, what was he thinking??? The average is 2.5 and multiplied by 4 is 10! In the end, the white guy's favorite subject in math was geometry and the last question was a geometry question and got it right to win the championship.

The other competition was the Spelling Bee. From what I hear, the documentary Spellbound is a well-done film following the ups and downs of 8 kids in the 1999 Spelling Bee. It is just now being released into theatres, so go and catch that. The real thing featured hundreds of children from around the country listening to a new man at the mike pronouncing the words. The old guy passed away earlier in the year. In the end, one boy and one girl remained. The Indian boy from Texas won with the word, pococurante. Hopefully, the newspaper won't have a headline talking about the "spelers" like it did last year.

As for the follies involving final exams, the results have been better than expected. In 104, I've mentioned countless times before that I achieved the score of 1 out of 10 on the midterm in a class where the high score was 5, 10 people got the same score I did, and 5 did worse to receive a 0. I must've wowed the professor or something because the grade was pretty high for a 1 out of 10. In 113, my grade was lower than expected but because I took the final on the first day, the professor let us look at it before she turned them in and lo and behold, she added up my final exam score wrong. Now my grade is what I thought I'd get.

Every city faces a budget deficit and most of them may find it right to be more strict in enforcing the rules and issuing citations. New York City is getting extra scrutiny for the number of questionable citations its police officers are giving out. A pregnant woman resting her feet got a ticket for blocking a stairwell. An old man got a ticket for feeding the pigeons. A man got a ticket for having a faded out registration sticker on his car. A restaurant owner got a ticket for having the curtains closed. A tourist got a ticket for taking up two seats on the subway. Man, good thing these officers aren't riding on BART.

The Amazing Race started up again last night. 12 teams of two race around the world for $1 million, certainly the classiest show on television. It always amazes me about the kind of combinations they get for this show. There's the usual dating pairs and married couples. But then there's the clowns. And air traffic controllers. And best friends who are models. And a couple who have been dating 12 years who proudly proclaim they're virgins. Fine, but like a politician saying he's never smoked pot, nobody's gonna believe them.