J. Michael Andresen

I had family dinner last night at my sisters' house. Jeremiah made a lovely meat loaf with garlicky mashed potatoes. I brought a salad (spinach, craisins, blue cheese dressing). Jeremiah also procured dessert but then left it at home. Initially Katie didn't think she could join us because of the amount of work she needed to get done, but she was able to come late. Jeremiah went to buy a cake in lieu of the other dessert while we waited for Katie. Missy, Tina, Mom, and I played a dominoes variant (quadrominoes) while we waited for Katie and Jeremiah. It was all a bit frenetic but quite fun. (Mom even won the quadrominoes game! Huntington's disease has not robbed her of mental toughness! Tina was going to take a picture of the game for blogging purposes, but she demurred in the end, so embarrassed was she to have lost.) After we all reassembled, we rooted for the teams we had chosen in episodes 3 and 4 of The Amazing Race. Sadly, Tina's pick of Mark and Bill made a criti...

Ekrem sent me email today with a link to an xkcd comic: This comic reminded him of me, presumably not only because I'm a Scrabble nut (to the point where I have memorized all the legal two-letter words, but not yet to the point where I have memorized all the three-letter words), but also because my sense of humor tends to the Andy Kaufman-esque style of challenging propriety in conversation and other social interactions. I would be playing CLITORIS with great alacrity. The comic has an additional clever bit in that if you mouse over the image on the xkcd web page, it delivers an additional note: "A veteran Scrabble player will spot the OSTRICH option." This is true, but while CLITORIS would score 64 points (including the double-letter scores and the bonus for playing all the tiles), OSTRICH would score a measly 10 points. That's unacceptable to a veteran Scrabble player. Thankfully, our suffering protagonist actually has two other options that garner the 50-point bon...

I wrote for the student newspaper when I was an undergrad at MIT. I joined because I thought it was a travesty for a school newspaper not to report on all of the arts events that the good student body was generating. I joined the newspaper for my senior year in order to rectify this situation. In my tenure, I covered a wide variety of MIT events: Musical Theater Guild Jesus Christ Superstar Company The Apple Tree Guys and Dolls West Side Story Dramashop The Winter's Tale Six Characters in Search of an Author Shakespeare Company Romeo and Juliet Gilbert & Sullivan Players Pirates of Penzance Chorallaries Better Late Than Never Concert in Bad Taste Next Act Kiss Me Kate One Victor H. was a member of both the Chorallaries (an a capella vocal group) as well as Next Act (a musical show put on by one of the dorms). I didn't know Victor when we were both undergrads, but we ended up being in the same class in grad school at Berkeley and became good friends. It was in retrospective...

I've been watching a lot of television lately. Most of all, I've been watching the Red Sox during the playoffs. Sadly, they are now on the brink of elimination. I'll probably still watch a lot of the World Series, but it's not as much fun without the Red Sox. Katie sometimes watches baseball with me (or reads a magazine while I watch), but Jon Stewart is the main show we watch together. We've even been to see him live recently. Most of our friends seem to like Steven Colbert better, but we enjoy how Stewart injects a lot more of his (liberal) politics into the show than Colbert, who offers more unthinking (though still quite funny) satire. Last night, our friends Christy and Gabe threw a huge party to watch the finale of Project Runway . I knew nothing about the show but knew plenty about the soirees that Gabe and Christy throw. The champagne was flowing freely and compensated for the fact that I didn't really know what was going on. Katie and I feel a little...

I love making lists of things to do and then working away at them. I am in the process of finalizing my list of books that I want to read (now expanded from simply 20th century English novels), but my list of movies is set. There are five ways to get onto my "to see" list: 1. Win an Oscar for Best Picture (starting in 1928) 2. Be nominated for the Best Picture Oscar (starting in 1944) 3. Win an Oscar for screenwriting (starting in 1927) 4. Be on the top 100 list for top grossing films of all time (inflation-adjusted) 5. Be on the American Film Institute top 100 list . That leads to a list of 498 films, of which I have just recently passed the halfway point. (I have seen 250 of the films. Katie has seen 175.) I've listed them all below! K=Katie, M=Michael, nom=nominated for best picture, WIN=best picture winner, Wr=screenwriting winner, AFI=top 100 films, ##=rank on the list of all-time inflation-adjusted ticket gross. K M Year Title Pict Wr AFI Gr y y 2008 Dark Knight, ...

The Americans were underrepresented this year in the Nobel Prizes ! Americans won 0 of 3 for Medicine, 1 of 3 for Physics, 3 of 3 for Chemistry, 0 of 1 for Literature, 0 of 1 for Peace, and 1 of 1 for Economics. That's a total of 5 Nobel Prizes, and answer B for question 8 on the prognostication quiz . Seven people correctly predicted the poor showing for the Americans: Pete, Eric, Megan, Rob, Ekrem, Tina, and Beth Z. That answer really tightens the race for best prognosticator. Based on my guesses for which answers have what probability, it looks like a three-way race between Matthew B., Pete, and Eric. For question 9, here are the latest odds for winning the World Series (from bookmaker.com): 38% A. Boston Red Sox 24% E. Tampa Bay Rays 38% F. Philadelphia Phillies or Los Angeles Dodgers For question 10, here are the latest odds on the Presidential election (from fivethirtyeight.com): 94% B. Barack Obama 06% F. John McCain For question 11, we're through the worst part of hurri...

Yesterday, Katie and I went to visit our friends Liz and Jeff who threw a football party to watch the Texas Longhorns , Jeff's college football team (#5 in the country), try to beat the more highly regarded Oklahoma Sooners (#1 in the country). Jeff is really into his football team. Check out his pre-party blog entry with him and his children all decked out. It went even further than pictured, though, in that he also drew a large orange steer head on his daughter's belly and then had her showing off to all the guests. Jeff encouraged everyone to join him in wearing burnt orange and white, the colors of the Longhorns. I tend toward the obnoxious, however, so I thought it would be fun to wear Oklahoma's red and white instead. Then I thought, why not do one better? I am a big fan of eBay for acquiring a wide variety of consumer goods, but it does have the drawback of being slow. When I want some random item fast, there's nothing like the Mall of America and its 4....

In Minnesota, we're voting for one of our Senators as well as for President. It's comedian and liberal activist Al Franken against the incumbent Republican Norm Coleman. Lots of people have yard signs around our neighborhood (we're a swing state, after all). Most political yards have at least two signs, showing support either for both Obama/Biden and Franken or for both McCain/Palin and Coleman. Because of the seniority rules in the Senate, it actually sometimes makes reasonable sense to vote across party lines for an incumbent Senator, and I know lots of people will cast simultaneous ballots for Obama and Coleman next month. I have been on the lookout for someone who has such party-conflicted yard signs. I have not yet found one, sadly. This disappoints me, but does make some sense: it's really the strong party faithful who are likely to go to the trouble of putting up yard signs. Democrats in the middle who might still vote for a Republican Senator are much less likel...

I wrote a haiku one random winter afternoon last year. At the time, I thought I might be occasionally inspired to write another, but it hasn’t happened so far. I started my desultory poetic career back in 4th grade, when I was in a "special" English class at the public school (Dayton Elementary) I attended before I started at Breck School in 7th grade. (Breck is the private college prep school I attended through 12th grade.) There were three of us in the class: Reid, Derrek (my best friend throughout grade school), and me. We had a year-long project where we each wrote a book of haiku which we then printed and bound by hand. We started our poetry unit with limericks, though. I still remember the first limerick I wrote because it was so horrible. Mrs. Heuwinkle did a very poor job explaining how to write a limerick. Instead of explaining in terms of number of syllables, she taught us to count the number of "beats" in each line. She'd read a limerick while hittin...

I've commented in the past about enjoying the "status change" microblogging on Facebook. On Monday, I posted a humorous status satirizing the importance humans place on birthday celebrations, which are really rather random: Michael is celebrating turning 36 years and 247 days today. Yesterday, I continued the joke with a new yet barely different status: Michael is celebrating turning 36 years and 248 days today. Craig wrote a comment on that: Happy Primeday! Craig is one of my nerdiest friends. I think he might be as nerdy as I am, though he devotes his nerdiness to things mathematical and physical rather than chemical and biological. I therefore had a strong inkling of what Craig was calling "Primeday." Just to be safe, though, I did a quick Google search to ascertain that there's no common concept for the term. Nothing obvious presented itself. In my 36 years, I have experienced 9 leap years. Good nerds know that leap years typically do not occur for ye...