idle chatter

Funny, it seems like just last week. We were sitting around a dinner table idly chatting in a desperate attempt to avoid doing work, much as most every dinner ends. Really, it only takes 20 minutes to eat, particularly on a bad food night. (Our current theory is that Ricker moves in cycles, being best on Sunday nights and degrading till they just throw whatever they have left out on Thursday.) But it's also a time of denial--when people will start reading the newspaper (!), doing the crosswords, or chatting about anything, anything to avoid returning to their rooms to do work. Dinner can take over an hour like this.

There are always a few solid staples for conversation:

1. CS. Lots of CS majors around, and they love to gripe about the massive program they have to write for CS 2xx or the problem set that won't die. As a CS major, I'm qualified to say we think we have a monopoly on impossible workloads.
   
2. Bio. There are almost as many bio majors, and when the talk gets technical, they bust out their deoxyribonucleohomeostatic words. It makes them feel special too. A certain couple people invariably end up discussing dissecting ants.
   
3. Politics. Most of us are way too apathetic to actually do anything about our government, but we love to whine. And, of course, politicians have given us plenty to whine about lately. Granted, Stanford is a pretty liberal group, even for California. But the lone conservatives are fun to mess with, and make these conversations even better.

So it was one day when talk turned to the latest craze in San Francisco. Apparently our governor takes this as seriously as evil terminators from the future, because he compares it to assault weapons and drugs. Just for hypothetical fun I asked, "So how long will it take for Bush to throw his weight behind a constitutional amendment?"

Little did I know that's exactly what he did. I must say I wasn't really all that surprised. Once again, conservatives want to amend the Constitution to take away personal freedoms for the first time since Prohibition. If you've got a few seconds for some armchair activism,
sign the PFAW petition against this movement.