Three X

M-Biddy made a surprise visit the weekend before last. It was great! Apparently Canada's got this national holiday that coincides with Presidents Day in the U.S. -- Family Day features a bit less presidential history and a bit more highest-rate-of-suicide-all-year-so-maybe-take-the-day-off -- so he and his lady friend were going to take advantage of this really great price they found on tickets to Hungary, except the tickets were out of JFK and getting from Toronto to JFK was going to cost them almost as much as to Hungary, so they decided to make a three-day weekend of it here.

In true Erdősian style, Mike gave me and Nina some math problems to work on. Nina's: Is it possible to construct an irregular hexagon that cannot be bisected into two quadrilaterals? Mine: In a subset of size N + 1 taken from the whole numbers between 1 and 2N, is it guaranteed that there will be a pair of numbers that are relatively prime? Nina got hers in about an hour; I chomped on mine for a good couple of days but didn't really get that far (are X and 2X + 1 necessarily coprime for X > some C? I think yes, but no one seems to want to corroborate).

He also brought some all-in-one instant coffee from Vietnam and a bottle of actual Ontarian maple sizzurp.

I tried to show him a good time, but the best I could do was some fairly sketch Chinese baked goods up on Ninth Ave. and some tacos from Matamaros that promptly made me shit gallons of water. On Saturday night we (Mike and Kira and Nina and I and Kira's friend Nookie) headed to Manhattan to see some Michel Gondry thing at Deitch Projects but ended up missing it so we got Shao Lon Bao at Excellent Dumpling House right before it closed (at 9:00 PM -- what?!) and then booze until late at Local 138.

We also played a bunch of Scrabble -- fuck, we're still playing -- at the 'Lakes.

I read that Howard Zinn book, finally. Back when I was still in college, I'd wanted to read some American history and everyone was recommending A People's History, but I was sort of naively worried that it'd be too partisan, so I browsed around until I found something that didn't advertise its agenda quite as explicitly, this thousand page hunk of book called A History of the American People by Paul Johnson. At the time, I was doing some freelance computer consulting for this friend of my parents who runs a fairly prominent educational advocacy group in New York (the name of which I will omit) -- helping her back up her email, etc. She noticed I was reading this book and got kind of agitated because the guy's apparently pretty conservative. To prove it to me, she picked up the book and started quoting a section that I hadn't read yet disparaging Kennedy. "He doesn't like Kennedy," she said. "Unbelievable!" And then she threw the book into the waste basket, where it sat until I fished it out. So I didn't work for her any more, but I didn't finish the Johnson book, either, because I got bored a little ways after the Civil War. But I was right about A People's History -- it kind of assumes that you've heard the mainstream version of events, and I hadn't, really. But, yeah, Zinn is pretty great, and pretty disturbing -- there was lots of stuff I wasn't really up on, like the government's shooting war with the mining unions around the turn of the century.

Nina's aunt and uncle gave her, for her birthday, I think, a neat pair of Japanese dolls. There's this Japanese doll festival called Hinamatsuri that starts this week, in which you're supposed to sort of display your doll collection for a while (for good luck? It's for girls. The boys' celebration begins the week after, when they get to banish the dolls). She set them up on her dresser and took pictures of them. Then we drank a little bit of the sake my sister'd given me for Christmas. It was good -- thanks, Caroline!

At the behest of Tom, I've been listening to episodes of this radio show on WFMU called Seven Second Delay. It's hosted by these two guys, one of whom runs WFMU and the other of whom is like the producer of and head writer on Monk -- and who has this revolting, spluttery Jew voice and a lisp and who chews gum on air constantly. Maybe it's like rubbernecking a car wreck, but I kind of can't get enough. Maybe I'm just worried I'm Andy Breckman. I love the show! I can't believe I got through.