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Here’s a strange story coming out of Princeton University. A mathematics graduate student has been arrested in connection with over 60 lewd incidents involving Asian females on the university campus. The grad student in question, a Michael Lohman, has now been banned from campus. The Daily Princentonian AP Wire report was quite liberal in explaining his activities:

“Lohman, 28, cut and took locks of hair from about nine Asian female University students without their knowledge or consent and poured his own bodily fluids into the drinks of Asian female students more than 50 times, according to police reports.”

“Lohman lives in the Butler apartments with his wife of four years, who is Asian, a graduate student who knows him told The Daily Princetonian Tuesday.”

“The fluids poured into the drinks were semen and urine, Lt. Dennis McManimon, the Borough police’s spokesman, said in an interview Tuesday.”

“A search of Lohman’s apartment revealed ‘a quantity of women’s panties and numerous mittens,’ according to a statement from Borough police.”

“The investigation, McManimon said, ‘has been leaning’ toward the conclusion that Lohman stuffed the mittens with the hair he had obtained from students and used them for personal sexual gratification.”

According to the article, Lohman is also a TA. I bet he broke some of those rules I was talking about in an earlier post. I will leave you with the best quote of the story:

“‘Princeton is the place he really wanted to come,’ the graduate student who knows him said.”

He’ll probably be kicked out of the math department, but the Princeton Department of Asian Studies has already stated they’ll reserve a place for him while he sorts out his legal troubles.

I’m feeling much better today. I’m not sure if it’s the combination of the antibiotics and inhaler, but it’s a world of difference. I did not know this until today, but the antibiotic I’m taking, erythromycin, is also used to treat syphilis, gonorrhea, and chlamydia. Sweet, I can hit for the cycle.

Well, I must make this a short post as tomorrow I have to hand in a report and make a presentation.

My road to recovery from whooping cough had been going fairly well until Monday morning. When I woke up, all I felt like doing was coughing. Luckily, I didn’t have class today, so I just spend the day dealing with it. I phoned the medical clinic to see if they had my test results back. Technically, I don’t have full confirmation that I have the whooping cough, though the doctor is going on that assumption. It turns out I won’t have my results for another week to three weeks. The testing isn’t being done at a private lab like MDS Metro, it’s being done at the provincial government’s lab.

I didn’t really do anything today otherwise. I did meet up with Jeff Newmark for dinner. Jeff flew in from Las Vegas to overnight here before leaving for Japan tomorrow afternoon. Also present at dinner was Eddy and Woba. I was really proud of myself, I only left the table twice to cough in the bathroom. The guys were nice enough to walk me back to my apartment after dinner. Eddy said, “Buddy, you need help”. He was probably right. With that, I said goodbye to Jeff and told the other guys I’d see them tomorrow at dinner.

Sometime after 1am, I started feeling much better. I’m coughing way less now. I’ve decided not to go back on the codeine because I’m not sure how that will interact with the antibiotics that I’m still on. The doctor did ok me to use corticosteroid inhaler though. So just minutes ago, I used an inhaler for the first time. I took two hits from the thing. It’s supposed to help open the passage ways in my lungs. I’m not sure if that’ll help with the coughing, but it can’t hurt.

The coughing makes it tough to talk, which sucks since I teach my last tutorial tomorrow. I hope I’m in a better condition by then. If there’s time I’m planning on visiting student health clinic tomorrow as well. I just want to make sure that my lungs are still clear. Whooping cough is known to lead to pneumonia in some cases and I’d like to avoid that if possible.

I kinda took the day off today. I wasn’t really planning on it, but that’s the way it turned out. I guess it all started last night when the time changed. One minute it was only moderately late and then the next, it was fairly late. I was watching Octopussy on TV. As far as Bond flicks go, this one was pretty good, minus the cheesy name.

By the time I went to bed, it was late enough that I was wondering if the first light of dawn could be visible. I awoke at noon because I knew I had to meet with my project partner for one of my classes. He had told me we’d be meeting today but not when. It took me an hour to track him down. He wanted to meet at 9pm. That was ok with me. After making some scrambled eggs, I settled in to watch an episode of Mythbusters. The highlight of the episode? Can you resell a car where a body had decomposed inside of it? To recreate the details, they sealed the carcasses of two dead pigs inside a Corvette and left it for two months. When the car was unsealed, it was a sight that most people present will probably not forget for the rest of their lives. The footage was heavily edited for TV unfortunately. After “cleaning” the car, they did manage to sell the car to some dude for parts.

Well, with that pleasant episode in my memory, I felt really tired and went down for a nap. I woke up to sunny skies and a clock that read 4:30pm. I took a shower and decided I needed to get some dinner and buy some food at Safeway. I stupidly forgot to book in at SJC on Friday, which meant I was going to miss dinner on Sunday and Monday.

After grabbing a bite to eat and buying some food, I returned to campus. As I was crossing the parking lot to my apartment, I just happened to see my project partner. He had just finished studying with another group of students. He was ready to meet now, an hour ahead of schedule. I dropped off my grocercies and we hammered out what we needed to do for the next week.

And now I’m going to watch another episode of Mythbusters. This time around, does toast always land butter side up? And, is yawning contagious?

This post will probably only make sense to gamers (ie. males) but oh well. I found this interesting video clip on the Internet. Pro gamer Jeremy gives us his thoughts on the game Warcraft.

“Warcraft is like teh gay and stuff. Don’t get me wrong, like orcs and stuff, like you know bows and arrows, dragons and some magic and stuff, it’s pretty much for like guys, like you know, never gonna have sex and stuff…”

warcraft.avi – 1.8 Mb

Please note, while I do know several people that play Warcraft, this isn’t specifically directed at any one of them. I just find Jeremy’s videos to be quite entertaining.

At lunch today, my sister sat next to former GnR guitarist Slash at the Fours Seasons hotel. By association, this automatically makes me cool.

I have just completed the draw for the erwintang.com-turns-five-years-old contest. And the winner is… go check it out yourself!

Whoops, I was meaning to mention this last night, but it slipped my mind. I wanted to remind everyone that the end of the erwintang.com contest is fast approaching.

I’ll extend the deadline to 4pm PST today. Enter now!

After what I experienced today, if you’re one of those people blessed with the ability to gracefully go through life, deal with people in a fair manner, and generally be an asset to society, be thankful for who you are. Then there are those who must be absolutely miserable in their lives as they suck the life from people around them. Stay away from those poopy people.

No wait, I’ll say it for you:

I teach about 45 students in my tutorial, twice a week, two hours each time. They do assignments in the tutorials in groups of four to five. As a consequence, I get to know my students well and the students in the groups get to know each other as well.

Last week, one of the groups (two guys and two girls) invited me to “high tea” at one of the group members place at T-Bird. They invited the whole class and they decided they wanted me to come along as well. I was flattered by their invitation, but I knew immediately I could not take them up on their offer. I told them it was very nice of them but I was not allowed to partake in such an event. I also told them that if I were to go, I’d be breaking some fundamental rules for TA-student relationships. I had read these rules months ago in the TA handbook for computer science. I was forced to use the Com Sci handbook because Mech is so lame ass, they don’t even have one for their TAs. Anyways, I remember reading some well laid out rules governing TA conduct. One of them was like not meeting students outside of the teaching environment. There was a specific mention of not meeting students in a private setting. I recited the rule about the private setting to my students. They seemed really interested in these rules. “Tell us more!” they said.

I think I mentioned something about maintaining a professional relationship at all times and meeting only on-campus in a TA’s office with the door open. Then I remember the whole long part about romantic relationships with your students, that is, you’re not supposed to have those. It also listed what you should do when a student makes sexual advances towards you. I decided at that point, my students would hear no more. I told them I couldn’t remember the rest of the rules off-hand. “Can you bring the whole list of rules to class next time?!?! We want to read them!” said one of the ladies. I was like, um, sure.

Over the weekend, I noticed I didn’t have the booklet handy and that it was probably underneath a pile of other papers in who-knows-where in my apartment. I then came to the conclusion that even if I did have the rules handy, it’d probably be a bad idea to give these rules out. My students probably would never break these rules in the first place, but I don’t think it helps by putting the idea in their head.

Just between you and I, there was this Econ TA I used to know. He was TAing this first year Econ course. One of his female students missed a tutorial once, so she sent him an e-mail. The gist of her message was, sorry for missing the tutorial, maybe I could “come over to your place with a bottle of wine and I can catch up?”. At the time, he was involved in a relationship with a super-fine lady, so he just ignored her. Boy, was his girlfriend not pleased at his student though.

I’m going to make something to eat.