Free Panda

Yeah I use vague titles to make people think I care about releasing panda bears back into the wild. Wrong. I just like Chinese fast food and after 3 months of hard work it all paid off. You see, I had filled my panda combo club card. Much like any other club card, every time you buy a 2 entree plate they punch your card. After 4 punches you get a free soda, after 8 a free spring roll, and after 12 a free 2 entree plate. Well only noobs would redeem for a soda, from a cost savings standpoint... comon! And wouldn't you rather have a soda than a shitty spring roll? So I ate panda once a week for 12 weeks, and made it to the top tier. But then my world was rocked right after "Lisa" gave me my orange chicken, "Rachel" asked me if I wanted a spring roll. I always say no. But then I gave "Jason" my full card, and he told me that not only do I get the free 2 entree plate, but I also get everything else I've accumulated. So I ended up with like 9$ of panda all free. And then I stole like 9 fortune cookies.

oh mang my head

I was really hungover when i woke up this morning. Maybe because it was 6 am. Or maybe it was because I was covered in ants and on the front lawn of a house at Oakland and Hill.

Brian Strikes Out

I just realized exactly how nerdy I really am. Not only do I get every reference in this song, but also things like this happen to me:

I went out the other night and ended up going back to this girl's place. We went up to her apartment and sat down on her couch. But instead of making a move, or doing anything to get with her, I spent the next 20 minutes explaining to her the benefits of the Dvorak keyboard layout. Needless to say, it was a very lonely walk home.

Fuck.

6 degrees of Wilt

I often wish that facebook was more like AIM, in that when a new version of facebook comes out I can check out the new features and go back to version 4.3. I liked the old facebook. Just linked pages. No friend statuses, photo albums, news feeds or friend details (and no fucking gifts!). I liked my facebook when it looked like this:



I remember one of my favorite features that they removed was the "You
Know Karen Through..." that gave you some connection to people you didn't know. It would list one of your friends who knows one of their friends who knows them. I can imagine when that would be useful.

Girl: Hey your Brad right?
Guy: Yeah.
Girl: Your friends with Jess right?
Guy: Yeah, how do you know Jess?
Girl: I don't, but she knows my friend Tom.
Guy: Ohh, so we have no common friends.
Girl: Yeah...

Facebook finally realize that listing more that 2 degrees of separation was futile, and that listing mutual friends was probably more relevant. But I used to enjoy trying to find people on my network that were more than 3 degrees of separation away from me. I never could find any current students that I didn't know through at least 2 people.

I was thinking about this yesterday as I was driving on the Ohio Turnpike, and it got me thinking about the whole theory of 6 degrees of separation. I started thinking about who was the most pivotal node in the network. The person that most people would use to connect to other people. This person would have to have met lots of people in lots of different places and they would have to have been well known enough so that people would remember their encounter. The answer came to me immediately. Wilt Chamberlain had more connections than anyone else, ever.

Think about this, the average person only ever meets a few thousand people in their lifetimes. Even people who are very social in college rarely leave with more than 1000 facebook friends. And even then they probably don't even know all of them. But Wilt Chamberlain had to have meet at least an order of magnitude more than the average person. He had sex with 20,000 women alone. Imagine what that means, at the time of his death there were about 250 million people in the US. 125 million women. And he had sex with 20,000 of them. That mean that 1 in 6250 women in the US had sex with The Big Dipper. That's just people he railed. He probably met people he didn't rail. If you do the math, probably 1 in a few thousand people met him, which is about how many people the average American knows. I mean you could guess that most Americans were within 2 degrees of separation of him at his time of his death. Can anyone think of anyone who could equal this guy in terms of sheer popularity. So lets see, Wilt Chamberlain was in Conan the Barbarian with Arnold Schwarzenegger who was in Twins with Danny DeVito who was in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest Jack Nicholson with who was in A Few Good Men with Kevin Bacon! So there.

Brian Russell's Safari Apartment

I woke up this morning at 5:30am on 2 hours of sleep to go to work on a Sunday. As I was lying in bed wondering why I signed up to work, I could hear the varmint that lives in the ceiling above my bed scratch away at the drywall above me. That's ok, its not like he is going to fall from the ceiling onto my bed. I got up and walked through the living room and stepped on like 30 ants. There fine, they clean my carpet so I can't complain about them. As I turned on the light to the bathroom hallway I saw a few cockroaches scurry away. Cockroaches aren't cool, they give me the heebe jeebes. After I get my bathroom on, I go back to my room to put on some clothes, and on the door to my closet is a frog. A frog. It started hopping around my room, getting slime all over my stuff. Why an amphibious creature lives in my bedroom is a interesting query. But my biggest concern is that I know he is in my room, but I don't know where. I am afraid to go to bed, put on shoes, or open my closet doors because he could be anywhere. What if I wake up and its on my face? What if he is in my base killin' my doods. For all I know he is watching me right now, planning his next strike. Ahhhhh.