Dyneuxmite

Another perfect letter of recommendation for a former colleague

lmolyneux — Mon, 30 Apr 2012 14:27:38 +0000

I prepared this letter to accompany a friend’s application to graduate school. Let me know what you think. Not sure whether I should send this or some variation of this letter I wrote earlier for another occasion.

Dear _____________________________,

I consider it an honor to have been selected from an exclusive pool of potential recommenders that included several heads of state to write this letter expressing what is likely already obvious: Matthew J. XXXXX, Esq., will be the finest student your school has ever admitted.

His illustrious name and glimmering resume nearly speak for themselves; however, I will take this opportunity to expound on his unending greatness. Calling him and his work “brilliant” would be to understate the luminescence that from him bursts without restraint. He is not merely a beacon to the world but also the high point upon which it sets. Indeed, he magnifies himself, each glorious act inexplicably greater than the one preceeding it.

The most permanent and serious harm you could ever do to your fine institution would be to overlook Mr. XXXXX’s application, forfeiting the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to bask in his unmatched radiance, revel in his boundless genius. Please do not hesitate to contact me if you wish to discuss his qualifications further.

Yours in humble sincerity,

Logan K. Molyneux

This is just to brag; skip if your bracket didn’t do well

lmolyneux — Sun, 01 Apr 2012 04:46:00 +0000

This year I have submitted my best bracket ever. You can see it below, but I have summarized the highlights for you here:

Round 1 (which I refuse to call Round 2 even though it occurs after the new “first four” games) — Called the VCU upset, of course, because it’s VCU and there’s always some good 12-over-5 upsets. Also called Xavier but missed the rest of the upsets. Overall, 21/32 games picked correctly.

Round 2 (which the NCAA now absurdly calls Round 3) — Called the Cincy win and missed much else. Overall 11/16.

Sweet Sixteen — Here’s where it gets good. Besides the West (Louisville and Florida), which I think nobody got right, I was all over this round. I missed the Syracuse game though, because I picked them to lose after I read that their big man got injured. Overall 5/8.

Elite Eight — Again, the west kills me (who knew Mizzou would choke?), but I called KU over UNC and picked OSU to win. Kentucky is an obvious choice. Overall 3/4.

Final Four — Kansas and Kentucky, boom. Overall 2/2.

So you get a lot of points if you pick these games correctly this far down the line. I rank 74,148th on ESPN’s Tourney Challenge, out of who knows how many, but they usually get a few million brackets. In the final round I have Kentucky over Kansas, which appears to be all but a foregone conclusion now.

Submitting a bracket is a great thing, so long as you do only one. For example, in tonight’s KU-OSU game, two teams I care nothing about (in fact I always have some animosity for “establishment” teams — I mean, how hard is it to be an Ohio State fan, really?), I was rooting hard for KU because my bracket told me I should. So I make my picks and then cheer for the teams I picked as if there’s no other way the game could possibly turn out.

See my full bracket here: Logan’s Luscious Picks

UPDATE 4/3/2012: Picked the champ correctly too. First time I can remember doing that.

‘Funnyman,’ a one-act play

lmolyneux — Wed, 28 Mar 2012 20:21:42 +0000

FUNNYMAN

ACT I

Logan sits in a computer lab, waiting for the last few students to finish their assignments. The sound of clacking keyboards fills the air as they rush to finish before another class comes in to use the lab. The hallway outside the lab is empty, except for the tall, googly-eyed guy with long, scraggly hair.

Funnyman enters the lab.

FUNNYMAN: (impatiently, as if the lab might start at any moment) Um, we have a lab in here at 3.

A pause, while Logan considers who else Funnyman might be referring to when he says “we.” Logan checks the clock, and although it is indeed 3 p.m., the next lab shows no signs of bgeinning soon.

LOGAN: Yep. (goes back to grading a student’s work)

Funnyman stalls, then sets his books down and exits the lab while he waits for the rest of his class to arrive.

Curtain.

New ride, new sound

lmolyneux — Tue, 13 Mar 2012 00:48:55 +0000

I have been very busy. I’m sure you understand.

But to give you an idea of just what I have been up to, check out this gallery. I replaced my car stereo and speakers myself, another notch in my DIY belt. The wife got a minivan and I inherited what used to be our only family car, so I had to make it mine.

It was pretty hard getting the dashboard face plate to come off, and there are now a couple of marks in it where I crunched it a little while prying it up. Probably not noticeable unless I pointed them out to you. Another hard part was wiring the two harnesses together. You can see in the first picture I had to match and clamp about a dozen wires to get the new stereo to use the factory wiring. But I only had to call for help twice. Good thing Crutchfield tech support is there. Once I got the wiring figured out and the dash trim off, putting it together was pretty easy, you just slide it in the big hole. The stereo came with a black trim ring around the faceplate, but it was too wide to fit in the hole in the dash trim, but they knew that already, because the adapter they sent with the stereo had a narrower one. At first I was like, why won’t the dash go (SHOVE) … back (PUSH) … on (GRUNT), and then I noticed it was hitting the edge of the stereo faceplate. A little switcheroo and I was good to go.

Getting the speakers in took much longer, mostly because of all the tiny screws. About a dozen tiny screws to get the door panel off, four screws to get the old speaker out, four tiny bolts and four microscopic nuts and washers to attach the new speaker to the adapter plate, then four screws to attach the plate to the door. And of course another dozen screws to get the door panel back on. In the rear, I had to take apart the sides of the seat to be able to undo the rear panel, and the way it’s situated underneath the slope of the hatch means it’s almost impossible to get the inside speaker screws out. (See the eighth photo.) No way I could fit a screwdriver in there, even a short one. So I have a magnetic screwdriver with switchable tips, and I ended up putting one of those tips into the screw and using a pair of pliers sideways to turn it a quarter turn at a time. Ugh. Because the speakers face upward, they could get dust or whatever falling in them, and the new speaks didn’t come with any protection. The factory speakers had a nice mesh held in place by a ring of paperboard, so I cut that off and slid it over the new speakers, perfect fit.

That’s probably four hours too many spent on my car audio. But much improved sound and volume in my car. Next time I get a bonus, it’ll be a subwoofer, because it makes a huge difference.

On the bus: Still alive

lmolyneux — Mon, 05 Dec 2011 19:19:00 +0000

WooooooooOOOOOOOooooo, it sure has been a while. No promises about future blogging, but this post promises to be a winner. Mostly because the people I saw on the bus today were. Winners, that is.

On the bus with me today:

- This guy who fell asleep mid-text. I saw him slumped over like this and his eyes were closed and he was doing the heavy breathing. His hand was motionless, suspended about an inch from his screen, pointing at it as if he were still typing. I know he was texting because I saw “Hey man,” and a few other words on the screen. A few moments after I snapped this pic he woke up and finished his message.

- A candidate for Craziest Bus Guy of the semester got on downtown as I was headed to the Statesman to take an editing test. He was wearing cloth sneakers, polka-dot leggings, denim shorts, and some sort of jacket that I didn’t notice because of his incredibly gaudy pink sunglasses. (It is cloudy today and no brighter than your average lobby.) They had long corners that extended out to the sides like the ’50s glasses used to, but longer. Top it all off with a partial beard and some long scraggly hair down to his shoulders. He and his girl were talking about how they were headed to get him a phone because you have to have a phone if you want a job. He did not give any evidence or reasoning behind this assertion; rather, he backed it up with a song, which I have transcribed for you.

That is what he actually sang, perhaps in a different key, but definitely in a high, whiney falsetto. I expect one of you to record a remix of it for YouTube.

Aaaaaaand….

bmolyneux — Fri, 18 Nov 2011 01:01:20 +0000

…..apparently the frequency of blog posts is inversely proportional to stress level.

Thanks, PhD fairy.

Jerk.

I do other things too, you know

lmolyneux — Fri, 04 Nov 2011 15:08:25 +0000

Lest you think I do nothing but ride the bus all over the place (Though I sort of wish that could be a job. If I were a creative writer for a living I would buy a bus pass and do all my thinking on the bus. There’s something about the stop and go bumpiness or the changing scenery of a bus ride that gets my mind in motion, too.), here is a list of the things I have done in the last seven days.

1. I got As on both my exams. I’ll have one more exam at the end of this semester along with three major papers. H1: Blogging will be inversely related to the amount of work required to finish those papers.

2. I broke out my Christmas vocal music. Not the stuff that you listen to when it’s Christmastime, the stuff you start preparing now for when you want to perform it at Christmastime.

3. I made a lunch appointment with a friend and then missed it because I was in this blind focus working on a paper that was due Thursday. Like, reminded myself the day before the appointment that I was having lunch tomorrow with a friend. The next morning, having slept little because my mind was working out the paper I had to write, I said nothing to my wife as she made me a lunch and packed it in my school bag. I don’t remember saying anything to anyone, in fact, as I ate my lunch alone and typed almost all day long. I didn’t realize it until he sent me an e-mail saying, where were you? Later that day, still in the same blind focus, I missed my regular bus time and got home later than usual. I finished my work about 9 p.m. that night.

4. I planted four trees on Saturday. It was cool to see the finished product, but really hard digging through rocky ground. So rocky, in fact, that we set the rocks aside and had enough to make a neat rock circle around each tree. It looks like we planned it that way.

On the bus: Whatstoday?

lmolyneux — Fri, 04 Nov 2011 14:50:00 +0000

I forget what I’m supposed to be doing. On the bus with me today:

- Nobody. Is it Saturday and I don’t know it?

- Finally some people start getting on. One guy walks in like he owns the place. He has square features, shaggy hair and a wild goatee. Oh, I get it! I’m an extra in a Geico commercial. (OK, so he is not a caveman. He stood up as the bus got full and a mother with her two kids took his seat.)

- A girl going to nursing school, or something like that. She is reviewing notes for unit 5 in her pharmacology 2300 class. They do not teach you in nursing school that pinning your ears back with a tight do-rag is likely to cause pain by lunchtime.

- A girl with bright red hair. Her head looks like an apple with a bite taken out of it where her face is. She should wear a green hairpiece for the leaf. (One of my professors will appreciate this description because her teenage daughter wants to die her hair red.)

On the bus: We are angry and relieved

lmolyneux — Wed, 02 Nov 2011 14:27:00 +0000

A short one, but there are two important people I want to tell you about. On the bus with me today:

- Lots of runners, the people who see the bus coming and start sprinting to catch it. One lady is so relieved she made it that she cannot stop sighing, like, “WOOOOOOOooooooo!” Every other breath she is saying to the whole bus, “Did you see that? I RAN, baby, ’cause there was gonna be trouble if I didn’t catch that bus. But you know I caught it ’cause I fast.” After every sigh she looks around the bus to see if anyone noticed her amazing feat and is possibly a recruiter for the Olympic track team.

- A guy who is writing a mean e-mail. Or maybe just a mean guy writing an e-mail. Not sure. I don’t know if you can tell in the photo, but he has the biggest scowl on his face, with his bottom lip up under his nose and the corners of his mouth nearly touching the bottom of his jaw. He holds his phone about three inches from his nose as he furiously pecks away at his mini-keyboard. What makes this guy even funnier, and which you also may not be able to see in the photo, is that the hair on the top of his head is thinning, but there is still a circle of tight curls that runs all the way around his hairline. So it looks like he’s wearing a headband made out of his own hair with a bald spot on top.

On the bus: Hairsday

lmolyneux — Mon, 24 Oct 2011 22:04:55 +0000

Well, you can’t write about ALL the crazy people on the bus. Just the ones without red hair or blue hair. Narrows it down. On the bus with me today:

A guy who smells like churros sits down next to me. He is bigger than I am and could beat me up, so I am not making fun of him, just stating that I now detect the aroma of fried dough sprinkled with cinnamon, whereas before I did not. His cell phone screen is cracked, probably because he held it too tightly in his big mitts.

One guy with long ratty hair has so much stuff with him that it takes him two trips to get it all out the door. He stumbles up to the front of the bus on his second trip to get a card from another rider (friend?) and the driver yells “back door!” He says he knows and takes another long look at his empty seat to make sure he has not left anything behind.

A woman listening to a Zune. A Zune is a portable mp3 player that nobody bought and has been discontinued. OK, so I bought a Zune, but it was a mistake and I didn’t use it for very long before selling it to someone else who also should not have bought it. The woman bobs her head and I can tell it is to the music because she keeps bobbing when the bus makes a stop.

At least five sleepers on today’s bus. I think you do not want to sleep on the bus because several silly things could happen to you. You could miss your stop. You could lean over onto the stranger next to you. Your mouth could hang open and you could drool on your shirt. You could have one of those sleep jerks where you elbow the stranger next to you. So I do not know why people sleep on the bus.