Lala boo’s Neighborhood

I recall when I first heard 50 Cent's latest single.  I was in the shower, and found the diction of it quite entertaining.  Listening to the song on the crappy radio I keep in "my" bathroom in my parents' house, under the sound of running water, for the life of me, it sounded like the man was singing, "Baba-bay-bee-ba-bee-baby". 

Turned out I wasn't too far off.  Subsequent listens enlightened me to that the real lyrics were "Have a baby by me, baby, be a millionaire."  50 doesn't just sing this once.  He does it over, and over, and over.  27 times, by my count, in the span of a 3.5 minute song.  Dude is serious about this offer.  (I could do a great blog post analyzing 50's offer from a contract law perspective, but we'll save that for another day.)

Another day at home, another shower.  This time, "I Get Money" was playing, a song with which I'm a bit more familiar.  For the first time I noticed that, nestled into the lyrics, there is:
"Have a baby by me, baby, be a millionaire / I'll sign the check before the kid comes, who the $@% cares?"

So, first he put it in this song.  I suppose that didn't work, so 50 decided he'd have to drive the point home a little harder.  One line wouldn't be enough.  The time had come to write an entire song about the premise.

As an avid reader of celebrity gossip, I am aware that 2009 was a banner year for Lil' Wayne in terms of procreation.  It became clear that he had impregnated two women within a month or two of each other, resulting in his becoming a father of two more in a very quick period of time.  Lil' Wayne seems to be having no trouble finding women to accede to an offer of the nature of 50 Cent's, in spite of his not giving such an explicit offer.  One wonders, why is 50 continuing to strike out?

Therefore, I think we ought to establish a coalition to find a woman willing to have a baby "by" 50 Cent, in exchange for $1m+.  His desire to do so cannot be manifested much more clearly - I mean, the next logical step would be for him to prowl the streets wearing a sandwichboard emblazoned with his offer.

Let's not forget what 50 has given us.  We had "In Da Club", arguably one of the best hip-hop songs of the decade.  This is the man who was unafraid to ask "21 Questions", proudly proclaimed himself a "P.I.M.P.", and educated us on the merits of the "Magic Stick" and the "Candy Shop" (basically the same song, but oh well).  Let's give something back to 50.  Let's find someone willing to get knocked up by him in exchange for cash.

Why did I leave lines blank? It has to do with three fun Christmas presents my wife got me.

Part one was a Lamy Vista fountain pen, a derivative of their Safari pen. The Safari has a following among collectors as it writes well, inexpensive without being cheap, and is a tough pen. They are great about stuffing in pockets, carrying everywhere, or letting a 5-year-old daughter have a try. It is one I recommend to folks who are getting their feet wet in fountain pens.

To the left is the nib and section of my new Vista, next to my Safari. Pretty straight-foward. In additional to Safaris being cool pens, I thought a Vista would be fun for a few other reasons. One key one is being able to show my daughter (and others) how fountain pens work. Fountain pen companies have made "demonstrator" pens for years--I thought it would be fun to have one in my collection. There was one other use...

Part two is a black light flashlight. You may have seen these at the airport, when TSA asks for your papers and makes sure you don't have 3.1 ounces of juice. I wonder what my new pen looks like if I point the black light at it?

It glows! But it looked empty? That's part three of the present: a bottle of Noodler's Ghost Blue ink. This is the only invisible ink I'm aware of that's safe for fountain pens. It reveals itself under UV light. Let's look at that text again:
You may have to make it full size, but you can see the text there. I apologize--it was hard to get the words to show with the UV flashlight on the camera--the point where the beam is brightest is a bit blown out.

Why invisible ink? Very little reason other than fun. It could be simply sharing notes with my daughter (or others). Or writing my own gripe in my notebook. Or possibly putting an "easter egg" in some note that I write--if it happens under a black light, it will be revealed.

In any case, It is definitely high on the cool and fun scale! Isn't my wife great?

I couldn't resist. For $5, it can't be bad, right?

Post-finals.  Out on the other side.  Breathing (albeit noisily, since I now have a cold).

Yet, the bad feelings haven't entirely dissipated.  This is in part because I had an exam that went badly.

Sometimes, I feel like: I should just give up and become a:
a) children's book author
b) English teacher at a posh boarding school, perhaps one of which I am an alumna
c) second wife

Sometimes, I feel like: I've already invested too much to quit.

Sometimes, I feel like: Even if I do poorly, I'll wind up gainfully employed anyway.

Sometimes, I feel like: No matter what, it's all going to be okay, somehow.  I cherish those moments.

Perhaps you need a slap chop. Not convinced? Check out the new remix!

I made Chinese food for lunch. We had sweet and sour chicken (I hadn't put the sauce on yet), egg rolls, veggie skewers, and steamed rice. All was from scratch and yummy.

I confess I'm an office supply geek, particularly with fountain pens. I was pleased to find that there are communities of like-minded people out on the Internet (let's face it: what community is not represented on the Internet?).

I've been carrying around an A4 Clairefontaine notebook around for two years to take notes at work, and am about out of pages. Today I've bought it's replacement: a Rhodia spiral-bound notebook, also A4 sized.

One thing I wonder about as I write is how much ink do I use. I don't write a lot at work, so it doesn't accumulate a lot. However, a blank notebook offers an opportunity. I'm going to try to weigh the ink.

My methodology is to weigh the notebook empty, then weigh it again over the course of its use. Today, it weighed in at exactly 500 grams.

My methodology is probably not as rigorous as the Mythbusters, but to get a rough order of magnitude, it is probably adequate. The first gap is that I won't be using the same pen and ink. While I will use fountain pens 99% of the time, my pens tend to vary from broad to fine points, wet to dry writers (and the odd pencil thrown in for good measure). While it won't create an exact pages-per-gram measure that would be reliable, it would create an average.

My past notebook has a bunch of notes clipped in, post-its, etc. I will try to control for that by not putting on stickers (as I am want to do, and, prior to weighing in, remove any notes. Likewise, I will avoid tearing pages out of my book. I was able to do this with the Clairefontaine notebook.

The other thing that could throw off the experiment is that I'm not doing anything to protect it from environmental factors. It will collect any dirt, rainwater, or other things it may encounter being hauled everywhere. I could control for this by either carrying a second notebook around, keeping it blank save for the environmental factors, or to keep the notebook in home, in a sealed box, save for writing. As this is something I'm using for function first, I'll accept that error.

As a benchmark, I weighed a Lamy Safari with a loaded converter, as well as an empty one (typically, cartridges and convertors hold about 1 mL of ink, though it varies). The loaded pen came in at 18g, and the empty one came in at...18g. It's probably beneath the resolution and accuracy of the scale. Hopefully, 80 pages of notes will show some data.

I'll check in every few months, and post results (the new weight, how many pages were used, and an average number of words on a random sample of pages).