Overheard at UChicago

2012-01-09T11:51:00.001-08:00

Overheard at C-shop

Guy: "Foucault on Institutions? Ha how easy would that test be"

2011-11-11T13:11:00.001-08:00

Overheard at Bartlett: “Haters gonna have a shorter lifespan”

2006-10-17T15:46:00.000-07:00

(honest-to-god overheard in the A-level)

Guy: " How bitchin' would it be to be a paraplegic and have laser eyes?"

2006-09-05T11:12:00.000-07:00

In the basement of the Regenstein:

Facilities Manager: "Well, I'm going home. Have a nice, relaixng weekend."
Facilities Worker: "... weekend! Ron, it's only Tuesday!"

2006-06-14T21:59:00.000-07:00

Guy at party: "I mean, why a parrot squawking over William S. Burroughs? Why not a monkey taking a crap over Humphrey Bogart?"

2006-05-31T13:41:00.000-07:00

Overheard on A-Level:

Guy1 (to girls passing by): "Hey there, sweetcakes!"
Guy2: "Do you ever try not talking, Rob? What if you just went through your life never talking. Ever think abou that?"

2006-05-28T16:59:00.000-07:00

Geography Debate

Guy #1: "So was that on the eastern coast or the western coast of Greece?"

Guy #2: "..."

Guy #1: "I mean, it is on the side facing Italy or Turkey?"

Guy #2: "..."

Guy #1: "Okay, see there's these dots on this side, and these dots on that side..."

2006-05-28T12:27:00.000-07:00

Physics study partners,

Guy: "He just proves this shit. Without actually using Poisson's equation at all!"

2006-05-27T15:56:00.000-07:00

Overheard in Hallowed Grounds,

Boy: I'm embarrassed by what I can get away with.

Girl: I'm not embarrassed. I'm just ... scandalized. Scandalized by your freshness.

Boy: I'm so fresh.

Girl: You are just scandalizing people left and right.

2006-05-25T15:29:00.000-07:00

Overheard in the Maclab...

Girl: So we think this thing we're asked to prove is actually an unknown result. We think maybe what we're actually supposed to prove is that it's NP-HARD. I don't think it will be hard to prove that it's hard.

Guy #1: This problem makes me NP-hard!

Girl: This problem makes me NP-pissed off.

Guy #2: Better to be pissed off than pissed on!

Girl: True!

Guy #3: Unless you're on fire.

2006-05-24T20:35:00.000-07:00

MacLab Tutor 1: "Oh, thanks, Judas."
MacLab Tutor 2: "That was a little strong."

2006-05-24T15:34:00.000-07:00

Physics prof on quantum mechanics: That's the way the world is. It seems intuitively wrong, but that's because our intuition is clearly wrong.

2006-05-22T13:10:00.000-07:00

Riding home at 3am...

Guy: "What are you riding a bicycle for at two in the morning, crazy bitch?"

2006-05-22T13:09:00.000-07:00

Guy: "It's really weird that stolen objects don't go to heaven."

2006-05-22T13:08:00.000-07:00

Guy1: "I'll read it this summer."
Guy2: "You are lying out of your ass."
Guy1: "Fine. I'll read it sometime in my life."
Guy2: "That is still a stretch."
Guy1: "FINE. I'll watch the Wishbone episode of it."

2006-05-19T13:05:00.000-07:00

Overheard on the A-Level...

Girl: "I want to go somewhere warm. Let's go to the MacLab!"
Guy: "Augh! I hate that place."

2006-05-18T22:39:00.000-07:00

CS Student 1: "Why is this problem so terrible? OH. It's because every word of this is a LIE."
CS Student 2: "Yes, it's hard because we can't trust our professor for a single word."

2006-05-18T21:41:00.000-07:00

Grad Student: "I always forget the statement of the Axiom of Choice... it has something to do with choosing..."

2006-05-18T12:55:00.001-07:00

(after drinking most of a bottle): "The wine is better now!"

2006-05-18T12:55:00.000-07:00

Maclab Tutor: "Does this hurt? ... Ow!"

2006-05-16T18:43:00.000-07:00

Guy 1: "Did you beat up a wizard to get that dragon t-shirt?"
Guy 2: "No, I got it in the 10th grade! At a science fiction convention."

2006-05-16T18:14:00.000-07:00

At the ScavHunt Iron Chef competition...

Scavvie: "My capacity for rational thought has been replaced by bacon."

2006-05-16T18:13:00.000-07:00

MacLab Tutor: "The gameplay is amazing. It's exactly like fighting a real rabbit."
[about Lugaru]

2006-05-15T12:30:00.000-07:00

evol. history prof, pauses his lecture: “Say the word.”
**long silence**
TA: “What word are you fishing for?”
evol. history prof: “It sounds like… *pause*
… 'probabilistic'.”
**another long silence**
Me: “The word is probabilistic?”
evol. history prof: “No, the word is certain. But yes, it is
in fact ‘probabilistic.’”

same prof: "I don’t think there was any conscious
appropriation of Aristotle… Aristotle was in the air… a mild
miasma."

ibid.: "If you let the elephants go at it, all of a sudden
you're beep-deep in elephants."

ibid.: "What Darwin is trying to say is that females are
perfectly arbitrary."

same class, a student: "But can the duck ever really resist
its urge to eat off the bottom of the ocean?!"

same class, another student: "There is no perfect flying
squirrel."

2006-05-15T12:28:00.001-07:00

history prof: “By the end of last week, what was supposed to
have happened in your mind is that universities exist.”

ibid: “Scott is in the minority almost of one.”

ibid.: “The book was published in 1667, after being delayed
by plague and fire.”

ibid., on class evaluation in the end: “This is where you
get to write, for example, which texts you find boring and
which texts too boring.”

2006-05-15T12:28:00.000-07:00

Immediate post-lecture discussion:
Prof: “We can eat pizza and talk at the same time.”
Grad student: “Yes, but we cannot eat pizza before pizza
arrives.”

2006-05-15T12:27:00.002-07:00

visiting lecturer, on using only non-volant mammals in eco-
surveys: "No bats. Bats are difficult."

2006-05-15T12:27:00.001-07:00

chem prof: "Don't take the logarithm of this! Your
calculator will overflow!!"

2006-05-15T12:27:00.000-07:00

bio-med prof: "To put it in perspective, on the genetic
level, there is a 40% similarity between me and a banana."

2006-05-13T19:21:00.000-07:00

Guy on the quads helping erect what looks like a giant wooden labia, responding to a question from a passerby: "Oh no, this is for FOTA. Not a scav item. Please don't steal it."

2006-05-13T15:49:00.000-07:00

Girl: "Scav Hunt can't have nice things."

2006-05-13T14:46:00.000-07:00

Guy: "Wait, you can drink absinthe?"

-- overheard after the disbanded Scav Party

2006-05-13T14:42:00.000-07:00

Guy: "The backup plan is to come up with a backup plan."

2006-05-13T13:24:00.000-07:00

Physics Professor: "Of course, physics doesn't really have much of a personality. Except for rotational mechanics which, as you know, is sort of sleazy."

2006-05-11T15:27:00.000-07:00

Professor: "Most people are not used to eating themselves. Except cows. Cows eat cows. That is how mad cow disease comes about."

2006-05-11T15:17:00.000-07:00

So tell me about scavhunt?

It's great, it's when all the real UofC freaks come out to play.

2006-05-11T15:14:00.002-07:00

Professor: "After this, grad school will be easy. ... Actually, that's not true."

2006-05-11T15:14:00.001-07:00

Guy: "You see, you have this bourgeois notion of exponentiation, where you multiply stuff together, but it's really not like that at all."

2006-05-11T15:14:00.000-07:00

Professor: "The most profound impact on science is made by precisely this lazy bum character."

2006-05-11T15:13:00.000-07:00

3 out of the 4 Resident Head in Peirce my first year in '99 got divorced. So have pretty much all of all my other future resident head in any dorm I've lived in. Actually my divorced male resident head, hooked up with a divorced female resident head in the same dorm, after they left the resident head job.

2006-05-11T15:12:00.000-07:00

Professor: "Mathematics is designed to be as clean, and elegant, and as absurdly non-intuitive as possible."

2006-05-11T15:11:00.001-07:00

Lecturing TA: "Was it a duck or a swan?"
Professor: "Both, but the duck was the one who had excrement."
TA: "Definitely the duck, then!"

2006-05-11T15:11:00.000-07:00

Professor: "Hacks entail a certain disregard for the principles of sane design."

2006-05-11T15:10:00.000-07:00

Professor: "There are actually Klingon fonts available in Unicode. You can read all about it on Wikipedia. Heaven help us all."

2006-05-11T15:09:00.001-07:00

I learned a new word when I prospied at the UofC. The word "Ecletic".

Scenario:
I went up to a random student at UofC in Hutch dining hall and asked, "So what do you think about the school and the people? Are the classes really as hard as people say?"

Student, "Well, I usually skip the first week of classes, and the student are well...eclectic."

2006-05-11T15:09:00.000-07:00

Girl: "Did he get into your pants? I don't just mean 'were your pants literally off'; by 'pants,' I mean 'metaphorical pants.' ... And by 'metaphorical pants,' I mean 'vagina.'"

2006-05-11T15:06:00.001-07:00

Girl: "Who needs boobs when you're already intelligent?"

2006-05-11T15:06:00.000-07:00

Guy: "We're going to get shitty!"
Girl: "That is the worst corruption of the phrase 'shitfaced' I've ever heard"

2006-05-11T15:05:00.000-07:00

During my first year in '99 was proud to be a UofC student when MTV came to campus and there were chalkings all over saying things like, "NERDS UNITE, WE DON'T NEED POP CULTURE! GO AWAY MTV!"

Now if only they had united with the "Anti-Pants Day" movement which started in '02, that would have been quite a site to see!

2006-05-11T15:04:00.000-07:00

Guy: "How would you sound smart while saying a wine tastes like soap?"

2006-05-11T15:03:00.000-07:00

When I have sex with my calc TA, it just feels so ....real.

2006-05-11T15:02:00.000-07:00

Scav Judge: "I should resolve only to date people who know the difference between a hypen and an en-dash. It won't ensure that they are amazingly hot, but it will increase the chances."

2006-05-11T15:01:00.000-07:00

Guy: "You're like the Greek goddess of crushed hopes and dreams"

2006-05-11T15:00:00.000-07:00

Girl: "For me, the best estimate is when I can't feel my teeth anymore."

2006-05-11T14:56:00.000-07:00

On the source of a fake ID:
"This guy, he's known for, like, making Social Security cards so that people can commit insurance fraud, or, like, buy firearms after they've had their license revoked, so, you know, I trust him."

2006-05-11T14:55:00.001-07:00

Girl: "My new stockings are terrible"
Guy: "Yeah, why are stockings always terrible. You should throw them away. Take them all the way to the dump. And then they will burn, and their fumes will mingle with the filth of the earth. And everyone will continue to hate the filth of the earth."
Girl: "... go on..."
Guy: "That's pretty much the end."

2006-05-11T14:55:00.000-07:00

Girl: "I kinda like lectures. It's like TV . . . but not."
Guy: "It'd be better if there was a subplot. Like there's another professor who's evil and trying to depose them."

2006-05-11T14:54:00.000-07:00

[An Italian Gentleman comes into the MacLab]

Gentleman: "I need a shaft."
Tutor: "Do you mean a floppy drive?"
Gentleman: "yes."

2006-05-11T14:52:00.000-07:00

Guy: "Real men don't need BIOSes!"

2006-05-11T14:51:00.000-07:00

"Oh well. I do better when I'm improvising. It's called active learning in an exam environment."

2006-05-11T14:50:00.000-07:00

In the dining hall:
"You know, I can tell the Norwegians what their weather's gonna be like. It's gonna be cold, and it's gonna be day for three months, and then it's gonna be night for three months, and it's still gonna be fuckin' cold."

2006-05-11T14:48:00.000-07:00

On professional athletes striking, overheard in the B-J dining hall:
Guy: "If you had three hundred million dollars over two hundred million dollars, what would you do?"
Girl: "Buy more rice?"

2006-05-11T14:47:00.001-07:00

[User asks MacLab Tutor for some UNIX help]
Tutor1: "RTFM"
User: "Um... but I like other people to read the man pages for me."
Tutor1: [to Tutor2] "do you know?"
Tutor2: "no"
User: "Would you have told me to RTFM too?"
Tutor2: "I'm not quite that clever"

2006-05-11T14:47:00.000-07:00

In a conversation about sex toys:
"I don't masturbate with my blender."

2006-05-11T14:46:00.000-07:00

Boy: "I bet she's just having babies left and right."
Girl: "That's a very progressive statement."

2006-05-11T14:44:00.002-07:00

Conversations I've had with 2 different people:

Dude A) Wow your school is fun.
Uchicago Dude) Where are you from?
Dude A) Utah
Uchicago Dude) Oh, well that sucks, but at least you get to do the whole polygamy thing.

Dudette A) Wow your school is fun.
Uchicago Dude) What school do you go to?
Dudette A) IIT
Uchicago Dude) Umm, yeah, and surprisingly safer then your school.

2006-05-11T14:44:00.001-07:00

[Fiji Dude attempting to hit on girl with a painting]

Fiji Dude: "How did you get that darker effect in that painting? Did you just use darker paint?"

2006-05-11T14:44:00.000-07:00

Guy #1: "There's no such thing as asexuality. You're sublimating your libido."
Guy #2: "Maybe YOU'RE sublimating your UN-LIBIDO!"

2006-05-11T14:43:00.000-07:00

Girl: "Can I have some of that cheese?"
Guy: "I thought you'd never ask! Rather, I forgot about the possibility that you'd eventually ask."

2006-05-11T14:42:00.000-07:00

MacLab Tutor: "There's no guilt when you sleep. It's a beautiful thing."

2006-05-11T14:38:00.000-07:00

Guy: "I think I'd need a man with, you know, breasts and a vagina."
Girl: "I hope that works out for you."

2006-05-11T14:37:00.003-07:00

Slave Research Student: "I heard that for a scavenger hunt one year, the students had to build a nuclear reactor?"

Nobel PI, "Yep, and that student was Enrico Fermi, in 4 days he actually build a nuclear reactor next to the reg. Scavhunt helped create the first nuclear chain reaction. Unfortunately it blew up, and now all we have to commemorate it is a sculpture of a mushroom cloud and super-intelligent squirrels."

2006-05-11T14:37:00.002-07:00

Apartmentmate: We wanted to make sure the living room would be a social space, so we decided that it should be used more for homework than for video games.

2006-05-11T14:37:00.001-07:00

Overheard in the dorms:

"The truth is not your friend. The truth will not set you free. In all reality, the truth will hit on your woman and drink all your beer."

2006-05-11T14:37:00.000-07:00

[Drunk and eating crunchy granola bars]

"You know, in the real world these things suck."

2006-05-11T14:36:00.000-07:00

[Silence. Paper rustling extremely quietly to avoid disturbing anyone.]

"I think it's going to be all right. Yeah, the worst is over now. The morning sun is shining like a red rubber ball."

-- a loud and tuneless voice from a carrel on the monastic fifth floor of the Reg during finals week

2006-05-11T14:35:00.000-07:00

"I'd just like to put on the list of things that should not be: green ketchup."
"Wait, is red ketchup being phased out?"

2006-05-11T14:27:00.000-07:00

Guy #1: Yeah, all the departments throw parties for the prospective grad students...
Guy #2: And the ones here were the best?
Guy #1: Here they smoked us up!

2006-05-11T14:02:00.000-07:00

IT'S THE FUCKIN' SLED!