"I speak these things all the time because I'm fairly shameless," he says. "I have no qualms about accosting people and making myself friends with them if I feel they're nice people and I can practice with them. It's difficult to find Swedes! It really requires some ingenuity!"

I went to Hebrew school I tell him. Wanna hear the alphabet? "Nah. There's just something about Semitic languages that doesn't do it for me."

Fine.

My CS-51 TF used to teach section in trochaic meter. For those who didn't take English 10b, trochaic meter consists of a stressed syllable followed by an unstressed one (e.g., "Tyger! Tyger! Burning bright/In the forests of the night"). For those who didn't take CS-51, sections covered everything from high-level artificial intelligence concepts to low-level assembly language instructions (e.g., "move $t7, $0 addu $t2, $t2, 4"). For those who struggled through either the expository writing or quantitative reasoning requirements, suffice it to say that's tricky.

A week ago I heard Yahoo had bought his Internet startup for $135 million. I wonder what he says now.

Really smart or really rich?

Jeremy N. Smith '01 is a history and literature concentrator in Pforzheimer House. His column appears on alternate Fridays.