originally posted april 22, 2004

it's good to be an alumnus

It took four tries, but in 2004 I actually got to enjoy Spring Carnival. There was good entertainment, plenty of food and drink, friends from out of town, and fantastic summer-like weather the whole time.

The fun started on Thursday night with a visit from stoner comedian Mitch Hedberg. I saw Mitch perform live at Carnival in 2000 where he spoke to over 200 students in Doherty Hall room 2210. We had to arrive an hour early to snag wristbands to the main stage tent where Mitch was the headliner. Opener Lynne Shawcroft drew jeers from the crowd with a mostly unimpressive routine; everyone wanted Mitch.

Mitch was funny as always, dipping into plenty of new material early on. He noted right off the bat that he was sober (no alcohol is allowed on the carnival midway) and that he prefers to perform with a little buzz. That was evident by the way he shouted his way through jokes that didn't really fit together or draw much reaction. A few times he started to do a joke, stammered, shouted, "Okay, fuck it!" and gave up. He seemed to do this a lot more than on his first CD "Strategic Grill Locations" -- a CD that I bought at his 2000 show and still listen to now.

Despite the sober shouting, Mitch eventually found a groove and got into some really good material later in the show. As a sign of Mitch's popularity, someone in the audience shouted the punchline on one joke -- prompting Mitch to say "I didn't realize I was at the Grand fuckin' Canyon!" During the traditional lull near the end, people shouted out joke requests using simple keywords like "koala bears" or "oatmeal." Mitch happily obliged.

The rest of the weekend was a mix of parties both formal and otherwise. I got to see a bottle of Everclear and know why you should not drink a concoction of 1 oz Everclear 190, 2 oz Bacardi 151, and a dash of Tabasco sauce. It sounds awful, and it works very fast. Avoid at all costs unless you want your party to end as soon as it starts.

I got to enjoy alumni hospitality without any desperate pleas for donations. The "Young Alumni Party" turned out to be an overcrowded kegger with current seniors and alumni going back to 1994. The following day, the SCS equivalent was virtually deserted but catered lavishly. I even got a few SCS freebies out of it.

Saturday night I went to "gaming night," an impromptu gathering of CS students past and present for some big-screen Soul Calibur II and DDR in the Robot Soccer lab. Fireworks, more games, and "Super Troopers" rounded out the evening.

On Sunday we finally escaped from campus for a while, bringing a bunch of friends up to the Strip District to walk around and take in some History, Heinz style. The 80-degree temperatures made everything work. Carnival weekend was notorious for bad weather in the past, but this year the brutal weather was reserved for those finishing their booths and buggies earlier in the week.

Now everything's torn down and work has resumed for everyone including me. I can still look forward to many other local alumni events like a happy hour just a few blocks from where I live and work.

Drinking, warm weather, and friends close by. Ain't it grand?

Back to April 2004, or to the year 2004.

Where am I?

This is Weill Aspects, the official news archive of Jason Weill Web Productions. All articles posted to the front page end up here. This page was generated automatically by a series of Perl scripts.

Articles in Weill Aspects are organized solely by date. You may find the Google search in the left column to be useful if you are looking for an article but do not know the date on which it was posted.

Weill Aspects is composed of static web pages generated as appropriate when a new article is posted. It was developed in May 2001 as a way of managing the content on this site. I also used it extensively while in Japan, during which time I did not have continuous access to the Internet. I was able to write daily updates during July and August 2002, pack the files onto a CD-R or memory device, and upload them from the Internet-connected computers at school.

These scripts are all hacked together in less than elegant fashion, and I don't plan to release them. Some of the design that went into Aspects also was used to develop Livestat, a suite of Perl scripts to process statistics for academic competition tournaments. Livestat is available freely.