More Characters: Charlie the Tunafish

Charlie the Tunafish was a character who lived in the Goodale end of the dorm, but he could have been any of us. He could have been a good student, but he was a bit preoccupied with other pursuits.

Charlie was one of those undergrads who was always looking for love in all the wrong places. It was the disco era, so of course he had his platform shoes, snaggletooth necklace and a shirt that he always unbuttoned halfway down to his waist for the mixers. He was more a fan of Roxy Music than the Bee Gees, though, so he didn't entirely fit the scene.

But Charlie was always willing to broaden his horizons.

Charlie's bigger problem was that he was always flunking at least a couple of courses each semester. It wasn't that he wasn't MIT caliber; he just had too many other things on his mind.

Charlie once brought home a gorgeous young blonde from the Combat Zone - one who streaked Professor French's physics class one afternoon - but in true Charlie fashion, he happened to lose her to another of the dorm residents. She would become a den mother to us, she cooked a number of spaghetti suppers for the residents of the floor, and she also turned out to be a decent softball player, which was important because otherwise we wouldn't have won many games. She never became a Stickles character, though - probably because Doonesbury already had a character named Boopsie.

Star Trekkin' (Commercial Success, part 3)

You can tell the age of this cartoon, which came out soon after William Shatner started hawking Promise Margarine. Today, Shatner would be quitting to become the Priceline Negotiator. This after having been TJ Hooker and having hosted Rescue 911. He's also Dad in Sh*t My Dad Says, but we'll forgive him for taking on a role that was clearly meant for Danny DeVito.

East Campus was where Star Trek was watched. In the various West Campus dorms, Monty Python's Flying Circus captured everyone's attention. Star Trek was kind of a touchstone for us in our undergraduate days. The show had already been in reruns for eight years, but it was still Must See TV for us. It was kind of the gateway to the evening's activities - dinner, usually awful, served in Walker Memorial right after the last class of the day let out, followed by Star Trek at 7. The sun had long gone down, so we'd gather in the East Campus lounge in front of the big color console (although we could gather in the Goodale Lounge on Second East and watch the black and white set if we didn't feel like going all the way across to the other parallel). Then we'd all split up - some of us settling in for a long night of problem sets and term papers, some of us departing the building to partake in some extracurricular student activities and some of us sticking around for the prime time line-up. There were even those who'd start in on card games, though the real serious card playing did not begin until after the news and the Carson monologue at 11. Depending on the day, I might join the guys playing cards or spend the evening in the thursday office transcribing articles for the newspaper or, more likely, shooting the bull with Dave Schubert and Tom Ginden until all hours.

Star Trek also held a certain fascination for the members of the Ayn Rand Worship Society. In Ergo, when they weren't extolling the virtues of selfishness, composing paeans to the magnificent music of Richard Wagner and the romantic images of 19th Century literary classics, and saluting the steadfastness of Boston University Chancellor John Silber (who had been run off the University of Texas campus on a rail), they would wax eloquent over the parallels between individual Star Trek episodes and Objectivist thought. Captain Kirk and First Officer Spock were their philosophical heroes, which is odd, because the fourth Star Trek movie, directed by Leonard Nimoy, would celebrate saving the whales a la Greenpeace.

Indeed, none of us could foresee that the three-season oeuvre that was the original Star Trek would grow into a vast enterprise (heh!) in the '80s and '90s. There would be the next generation television series (at least two of them), complete with new characters, the movies and even the song parodies. Meanwhile, the high technologists are busily scrambling to invent devices that replicate those early Star Trek gadgets - wrist communicators, wands that can measure vitals when waved over a body and even phasers that you can set to "stun". Anti-matter has been detected and catalogued, cloaking devices that can bend light rays around objects are being designed, and there are people who are convinced that transporters will eventually be able to beam us from place to place. And the age of the flip-top communicator has come and gone; remember the Flip-Phone and the folding cellular phones that followed a generation later?

By the way, a true Trekker knows what's wrong with the above strip. The correct expression is, "Beam me aboard, Scotty" (and actually it's "Beam me up, Scotty", as in "Beam me up, Scotty, there's no intelligent life down here", usually said of Earth).

Epic Fail 2

Yes, they did this at the Institute a lot...

Fish and Strategic Gamers

(Bless me Father for I have sinned. It has been nine days since my last blog post.)

Benjamin Franklin once said that fish and Strategic Gamers always smelled after three days. Well, maybe he didn't say that, but he would have if he'd stopped by the front door of the thursday offices on Sunday and found them into the 52nd hour of a 72-hour marathon session of Panzer Brigade. There were two organizations full of these creatures - the Strategic Games Society and the Society for Creative Anachronism. I mean, who else would make an obsession out of serial Mad Mate? Who else could tell the age of a Risk board by the shape of the Ten-Army piece? And who else could look ridiculous in full chain-mail and tights, yet be authentically smelly?

Anyway, I lived on a floor that had more than its share of Strategic Gamers. We were divided up into clans that roughly paralleled the division of the dormitory itself. Walcott Hall to the south had the stoners, who would get drunk on vodka and play Mah-Jongg until 3 in the morning (or get stoned on hashish and play Backgammon until 4). Goodale had the sex-obsessed - the guys who would play Queen and 10cc while thumbing through Penthouse and fantasizing about the wattage of their stereos. And Bemis had the nerds, who would retreat to one of the lounges and preoccupy their minds with the problem set that was due at the end of the week. Oh, and the Strategic Gamers.

But the best place to find Strategic Games Society members in the wild was in Walker Memorial, whose carpet agreed with their flesh tones. They'd spread out their game boards and their hex dice and their strategy cards, and camp out for a while. They were immovable; not even the sound of Meat Loaf, cranked up to 11, could drive them away. This is not to say they didn't have their own place to gather; it's just that I could never find it...

Strategic Gamers also had another distinguishing quirk to their personality - they were obsessed with the military. Not that they possessed great amounts of brute physical ability that would qualify them as Army Strong. They were obsessed with weapons systems. One person, who lived on my floor and shall remain nameless, actually organized a Saturday night lecture on the merits of the A-10 Tank Killer (which someone in the Army would affectionately and mercifully rename as the "Warthog" when it actually went into service). If you ever wondered who kept Tom Clancy's publishing enterprise going all those years, this was his constituency. Well, that and all the old geezers who still think we could have won the war in Vietnam if it hadn't been for those damned hippies.

There was nothing quite as complex as an Avalon Hill board game. First of all, the game board was not necessarily square. Second, the dice were not necessarily cubes. And third, there were rules in this knife fight.

Many of the Strategic Gamers would go on to long and successful careers, either as Beltway Bandits or as drones in the Skunk Works. I never did find one who would later end up in the Peace Corps.

Super Bowl Sunday

"Punting" was not just someone kicking the football to the other team on a fourth-and-long situation. Nor was it an activity that one could do on the Charles River on a sunny Spring afternoon (by the way, what were those?). No, "punting" was something every student at MIT learned to do when a situation became completely untenable and there was nothing else that could be done. You could punt a problem set, a lab, a term paper or that month-old pile of dirty laundry with equal dexterity. It was a response that brought relief to the user and allowed him to then focus on something far more serious...like whether or not to go to the mixer at Wellesley or the block party at Simmons/Emanuel/Wheelock. Some things could not be punted, though - like that night shift at Twenty Chimneys. That meant no paycheck, and what student could survive without a little pocket money for the weekend?

"Punting" also referred to the process of dropping a class in mid-semester. We discussed that previously, so I'm going to punt on the explanation.

Epic Fail

It's happened to each of us. We've failed a test or an exam. Afterwards, we dust ourselves off and soldier on.

Incidentally, 18.03 is a sophomore year mathematics class, Differential Equations. This is what differentiates between the men and the boys. Later, I would find out that much of what we do in the realm of planning, designing and constructing airports does not require higher-order mathematics beyond basic calculus. But if you want to make it at Enron or AIG, this is what you have to know (courses in ethics are optional).

Incidentally, MIT in our day allowed students to drop a course within six weeks after the beginning of the semester. Usually, by then it was possible to tell if you were destined for greatness or going to bite royally. There would be at least one test or a couple of problem sets from which to divine the future. But occasionally...

Ed

I thought I'd introduce you to some of the principal characters who populated the dorm where Pud Stickles lived. These characters showed up in numerous strips over the years - and they just happened to resemble people I came in contact with while living in East Campus.

Ed was the hall tutor. Each floor in East Campus had one, and there was a master tutor for the entire dorm who was senior to the hall tutors. The tutors were graduate students - as were the teaching assistants (TA's) and research assistants (RA's). Their purpose was to organize events, keep the peace and help students solve their everyday problems - whether they were math, physics or the fact that their girlfriends had just dumped them. Ed had the added advantage of possessing a car, which meant he could help procure drinks for the hall parties.

Ed was from somewhere in Maine, which meant that he was a Mainiac and he had an accent that was even more distinct than the working-class Boston accents that all the locals had. To understand what a Maine accent sounds like, just put a half dozen cotton balls in your mouth and say, "Pawk the caw in Hawvawd Yawd". Combine that with Republican sensibilities from the Nixon era, an Izod golf shirt, a pair of brown corduroy pants from the L.L. Bean catalogue and Sperry Topsiders worn without socks and you had the quintessential Ed.

That's what distinguished Ed - that and his use of the words "Zyzz-zyzz!" to signify an event of some egregious nature (example: "Zyzz-zyzz! Commons is serving Ranch Style Stew again" or "Zyzz-zyzz! LSC is showing a Bahbawa Streisand flick tonight"). 

Ed's other distinguishing feature was a 400-watt stereo, which was just the kind of sophisticated equipment that one would expect a doctoral student in electrical engineering to possess (I think the only unit more powerful than Ed's was owned by David Hendry, who graduated two years ahead of me). It was a stereo from which the sounds of the Boston Symphony Orchestra blasting out Beethoven's Ninth, "The Pirates of Penzance" or Queen's "We Are the Champions" could be heard...all the way to the other end of the hall.

Ed had been the hall tutor and a PhD candidate before I had arrived at MIT. And Ed was a hall tutor and PhD candidate after I had graduated from MIT...and after I'd gotten my Master's degree from Stanford University and even after I had started my third job and gotten married. He was not one to be rushed.

Finally, sometime in the 1980's, Ed finally got his PhD and joined the faculty at Cornell University...in which capacity he presumably met both Keith Olbermann and Ann Coulter when they were students, or perhaps not. When Ed finally moved away from MIT, his send-off was to receive the very last Stickles ever drawn. Some friends of mine put it on a microchip and gave it to Ed. Unfortunately, I lost my copy of it. No! Mudhead, I've found it! This is the Ed send-off strip from 1985:

I've found a few other choice items while rummaging around in my basement office, which I will be adding to the Blog at a later date.