Things are weird

1. Someone just offered us $30,000. A PhD student in Geekman's department is, by some quirk of the system, drawing both a PhD scholarship and a postdoc salary. He doesn't want them. He asked the university to take some of the money away, but they won't. And now he is trying to give it away. He thought we might like it to help pay off the house. We turned him down. But that was a weird conversation.
2. I have now been asked to teach into five different courses this semester. People seem confused when I suggest instead that maybe they should get the people they JUST HIRED to teach the courses instead of the person who they just rejected. "But those people can't teach!" they complain. "And you're so good at it!" Yeah. Isn't it nice that, as we are always being told, our university values teaching so highly.
3. I am going to Japan on Saturday. (Osaka, Kyoto). Any tips?

Sadly, I have had student essays that make less sense than this

I bought one of these LED faucet thingies, and it arrived today.

The packaging was the real treat, though. A word for word transcription follows below:

"Led Faucet light is the tap water can change the color of the tap high-tech products, Now theworld best-selling pop. Rotation can be installed at the tap on the use of, Open the faucet, Singularly immediate outflow of the light-water column, illumall washbasins, Dreams in the same sense."

And on the back:

"Now high-tech world of popular electronic products, Rotation can be installed at the tap on the use of, And allows you to tap the water column color, glorious!"

Glorious indeed.