I have been thinking a great deal about this and I sort of feel like Newton with his apple. Genius often manifests by the quantification and description of an everyday occurrence, something common sense, something obvious.

Friends, I work in the front end of an institution that provides a vital and free service to the public. This gives me a ringside seat from which I can observe all manner of human behavior. I can see parents disciplining their children, students laboring over difficult intellectual concepts or simply laboring to remain awake, citizens eschewing vigilantism in favor of the Byzantine labyrinth that is the judicial system. I watch technicians servicing our computers, maintenance personnel emptying waste baskets, student workers trying not to be noticed as they surf the net on the clock. I saw a drug deal go down once, I watched a woman weep openly, laboriously sobbing, for long minutes, and I have been solicited to join a pyramid scheme.

I really do see a lot and from this vantage and I have noted, quantified, and organized an entire set of human interactions into the following equation.

� : p

Beautiful, isn't it? For those of you not mathematically inclined my new equation is pronounced thusly: Epsilon is directly proportional to p where epsilon is crazy and p is the smell of urine.

Now, let's review what "directly proportional" means. When two things are directly proportional they share a relationship wherein if one variable goes up the other goes up and if one variable goes down the other also goes down. Here's an example. As the death toll goes up in Iraq, Rumsfeld's dick gets just a little bit harder. Therefore the Iraqi death toll and the rigidity of Rumsfeld's dick are directly proportional.

So under my theorem the crazier you are the more you smell like pee. Bevin assures me that this is because toileting is merely a societal convention.

I'm not so sure. I think it may have more to do with the way crazy smells. I mean I can be minding my own business at the reference desk when suddenly and without warning I catch a whiff of pee. I know at that very moment that I am traveling a different path than I had been prior to the whiff.

Crazy smells like pee.

What do you think?

Posted at 12:08 p.m.

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