Socorro is a great little metropolis--er, city--er, town--er, road. I live in a little box called a "dorm" (Latin for "little box that people live in"). The food is tolerable, some might even say digestible (though that is a point that could only be settled by extensive chemical analysis). And there are even girls here! Well, there are signs that say there are girls here, but nobody has seen one yet. It's kind of like the cheetahs at the zoo--the signs say there are cheetahs, the zoo keepers say there are cheetahs, there is a big cheetah pen, but no matter how long you sit there searching, you still don't see any girls. Nor cheetahs, for that matter. I think it has to do with their camouflage. For all you know, there are millions of cheetahs in the cheetah pen, you just can't see them because of their camouflage. Well, it's like that here at Tech. There are millions of girls here, you just can't see them. Not that I object, mind you. It is just kind of odd to have guys talking into nothing, hoping there might be a girl there that they can't see, and getting suckerpunched if they aren't careful about what they say. Or bitten. . . depending on whether they were talking to a girl, or a cheetah.

There is also a neat joke going around called the "National Radio Astronomy Observatory". I say joke because I've gone out searching for it on my bike three times and determined definitively that it does not exist. The last time I went searching for it I was delighted to see a sign on the freeway, "NRAO First Right 3 miles". Well, I biked for a good long while before giving up and heading back. Lo and behold, within a few minutes I see another sign on the other side of the highway "NRAO First Right". Mind you, this is facing traffic coming from the other direction, but they both say "first right". How's that work? It might have been an error, but I had a pretty clear view all the way up to the mountains going up and back, and I didn't see no two-story satellite dishes. So, obviously, the NRAO is really just a big hoax perpetrated by the physics professors here so they can tell the dean "Hey, uh, I'm going out to the, ahem, NRAO *snicker* to do some, uh, observing and stuff. Could you find someone to cover my class?" Then they play Halo all day.

Told you I had smart professors.