Ben Landrum > Recent Status Updates

I’ve never been a Yud fan but I get it.

“In gym we had a lecture on the rules of badminton […] the best part was the coach didn’t finish”

How could explaining badminton possibly take so long? Is this some kind of Theory of Racket Sports class?

Olive theory but for blood

Just read this on substack:
https://residualthoughts.substack.com...
and I have to say I'm intrigued. I think I might start working through some of these just to broaden my horizons (?) be obnoxious about them (?). The feng shui one sounds especially fun.

He says this book was almost titled “putting on the rizz”, which sounds like a book of techniques for pickup artists. Even entertaining such a title raises serious questions about both his judgement and communication skills.

Only a person who has never seen a presentation written with Beamer could say mathematical equations make a presentation more memorable and easier to understand

A lot of discussion of 24 being old here. Concerning…

Greatly moved by the image of the little French children spinning around singing about the windmill that’s too fast. This, Frere Jacques, how are they so good at nursery rhymes?

“My next birthday cake will still have fewer than 35 candles, but I’ve done and seen a lot”
Fascinating prose. Like a personal statement written by a 34 year old.

Recommended by my dad. So far seems to be about how to become the sigma male of door to door sales.

“10,000 birds die every year from smashing into windows”
Outlandishly implausible number. 27 per day? There are individual buildings that kill more birds than that.
To get something closer to the actual number, square that and multiply it by 10. In the US alone!

What could it possibly mean for something to be “glowing vaguely orange”

A character tells an anecdote about a professor ritually sacrificing the class pet to make a point about anthropomorphizing insects at the end of the semester. The IACUC probably hates this guy!

Guy who’s going to prison and is unbothered by missing his 5 year old’s childhood bc he’s unusually fastidious:
https://x.com/sadiqojn/status/1070995...

*Throwing darts at the list of C keywords*

“lift up their heads from their ‘do’ loops long enough to dole out the liter soda bottles and break pizza crusts together”

It had never occurred to me that the Cherokee syllabary would have had to be post-Columbian if nobody on the East Coast had writing when the Europeans showed up. Thought provoking stuff.

“One who would give his life to keep what life you live beside you” ok maybe not much of a spoiler in the intro

Very strange that the introduction to this book was a synopsis with the notable quotes and ending. I had some idea how the story went just from osmosis, but I feel like knowing the context of the second good quote (“it is a far, far better thing that I do[…]”) from the jump might limit its emotional impact.

If Mr. Darcy had mentioned earlier he’s got a good creek for fishin’ she probably would’ve said yes the first time he proposed😏

A little surreal to hear a dystopian description of Hyattsville, MD when I’m about a 10 minute walk away. Hyattsville specifically is much sleepier than he predicts. Greenbelt is a better match.

If guns exploded half as often as Stephen King thinks they do, there would be parts of the US with 1.5 hands for every head

Just rewatched Young Frankenstein, which as a big Mel Brooks guy I've always loved, and it reminded me of Frankenstein the book, which I remember loving in 8th grade.

I think I'll definitely revisit it, if you're interested in book club-ing it lmk and we can time our reads similarly.

The unnatural inflection of the guy who reads the Greg Egan audiobooks is annoying, but much more annoying is hearing him butcher the name of every mathematician. So far he’s gotten to ‘Yooler’, ‘Rye-mann’, and ‘Fermit’s last theorem’. I don’t know why audiobook readers are so unwilling to google pronunciations for this kind of thing.

The other family who abandons the dad to work every summer while they all live at the beach are getting divorced… wonder what sources of conflict could exist in that relationship…

“[…] like one of those samurais [sic]”
“How do you know about samurais?[sic]”

Literally find me a 17 year old who doesn’t know what a samurai is. That’s like the third most conspicuous Japanese idea in popular culture behind ramen and ninjas.

Who are these people that they can go to the beach for a quarter of every year? The intersection between people who make enough for two homes (one of which is presumably on at least moderately prime land within walking distance of the beach) and people who take summers off seems exceedingly small.