I don't know if I've mentioned it yet, but the plant that Arin Kramer gave me died. I don't mean recently, either. It's been a while since that poor thing shuffled off this mortal coil. Probably even longer than I think - I have a sneaking suspicion that her advice about it only needing to be watered once every two weeks was incorrect (her degree in plant scient notwithstanding). Since I was really attached to it (it was my first, and your first is always close to your heart), I wanted it give it a proper send off. But that's the thing about plants. What do you do with a dead plant? Bury it? That can't be it, because that's what you do with a live plant. Flush it down the toilet? The pot it was in wouldn't fit. I figured it had to be something to do with one of the fundamental elements, so I ended up burning it (since I couldn't for the life of me figure out how to give it back to the bosom of the air.

In any case, the moral of the story is "Don't trust plant science majors in their field of expertise." Which isn't anything against plant science majors - I'm an electrical engineer, and I can barely screw in a light bulb. And I know a French major who doesn't think the French are complete bumbling idiots, so clearly we don't go with him on things French. Hmmm... now that I'm thinking about it, I may be onto something. Maybe the reason "Biology is actually chemistry, chemistry is actually physics, and physics is actually math" is that people who majored in any one of those fields have no business doing any work therein. Just a thought.

So, it's happened. I've reached that critical point where I can no longer pretend that my viewing of reality television is an exercise in irony, or part of an ongoing study of popular culture. If I talked to anyone during the day, the only thing I would talk about is Joe Millionaire. And I made Sam describe at length the rules of American Idol last night. I've decided to enroll in a program. But that's going to be after the final episode of Joe Millionaire, for which I believe I'm going to throw a party. It's not only going to celebrate the agony of watching either Sarah's (the foot-fetishist porn star [and how cool was THAT news?]) or Zora's (Ain't she sweet, folks?) face go from questionable happiness to exquisite anger; it's also going to celebrate the emancipation of my Monday nights from the death grip that the show holds. The likelihood that I'd miss that last episode is exactly equal to the chance I would have missed any of the episodes of the Sopranos this season (nil).

What else... Oh yeah. Went to the DaVinci exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum of Art this weekend, which was stone cold awesome. First of all, I went with two friends of mine, one of whom was staying at a super-fly apartment on the upper-west side for the weekend. And by super-fly, I mean HOLY CRAP. My apartment in Queens, which is very nice and quite sizeable, could easily have fit into the area encompassed by his foyer and living room. I didn't have time to look at all the rooms, but from behind one of the doors I'm pretty positive I heard the thrumming of a helicopter.

When we got to the museum, there was about an hour wait to get into the exhibit. Which would have sucked if I my other friend didn't come up enormously huge by getting us free entry AND VIP passes - bypassed the line completely. I usually don't like getting dirty looks from people, but it turns out the more people there are, the better it feels. My suggestion? Grin at them. It makes 'em angry, but they can't get at you since they're on line.

The exhibit itself was really huge, also. We decided that DaVinci clearly had Attention Deficit Disorder - completely incapable of staying on one topic for more than a page. I saw pages of his draft book that on the top half had sketches for a "Maritime Assault Mechanism," and on the bottom had a design for a "Device for Bending Wooden Columns." His sketches were amazing, also. In some of the drawings (particularly his studies for drapes, which sounds banal but is actually incredibly cool) it wasn't like he was drawing a representation of the thing, but rather was drawing the thing itself. At least, that's the phrase that entered my head when I saw it. If you get a chance, go see the exhibit. And don't wait on the line, since that's for suckers.