A Literary Challenge

One of the beautiful things about a teacher who loves emailing us is that we have no excuse not to be able to contact our friends. The fact that we are all friends on FB just makes it tougher.

So, I sent out my CAP portfolio, complete with all the references to all my classmates and challenged them to identify all my references.

This was directly inspired by the Suzumiya Haruhi novels, where math/physics geek Nagaru Tanigawa literally soaks the novels with references via Koizumi and Kyon. Heck, one story uses Euler's Planar Graph Formula as a plot device, complete with diagrams. Luckily, Baka-Tsuki did include all the references, and made a ton of footnotes.

That's what makes them so damn interesting. On one hand, you could ignore the references and just read it. Or you could understand all of them, and appreciate Kyon's varied and geeky interests in things his peers won't know of.

Let's see what some of the less-hidden ones are.

There are the similes, one of which referenced the Moho discontinuity, but it's said by the character to be an unpronounceable Croatian word.

The sci-fi stories lifted a Discworld species out, that can save their state using magic, then do something dangerous/stupid. In the footnote, it actually states tat their saved selfs will learn from the original's mistakes and not do what it did. It's so effective that the Discworld species, and my species went extinct 3 times.

One of my characters brought in a rifle important for the storyline later. "Hey! Doesn't that gun belong to Cherkov?"

Oh yeah, it'll be fun. I put up $40 for anybody who got all the references. An extra $5 for all the 4th walls broken. This includes mutterings by characters that sounds like WHU, snide remarks about how things are going, and the various references to me.

Now, on with tuition. We were playing around with osmosis in plants, and we got celeries, scalpels and knifes. As in the kind Dexter would use. Here's what happened. I took whatever celery stalks that were used already and started chopping them up finely. Anybody who tried to take my celeries (I'm not the only messed-up one in the class) got threatened with either a pen or a sharpened satay stick.

Kelly choked up the staff toilet sinks with the bits of my celery, poured half a bottle of red food dye into the sink and flooded the staff toilet somewhat. In that order. It looked like a copycat of Dexter was in there when the cleaner discovered the tap running away. And that was when we got banned from the staff toilets.

Before I end my post, I've got an announcement. The summary thread in the forums recently ran out of steam, and they went on a hiatus to hopefully get back. Another thing they were doing was to recruit all the writers they could get after they accidentally disbanded the team. Now, why am I writing this? Apparently, my numerous copies/parodies of their thread which I post when they go for a short break is usually well-received. There are a few more people who I feel should/could get in, but it's still up to the original staff to do the invites.

Now, what should I do for a column?

Mabel, Editor in Chief ★ Straight Ahead!