[12:26:41] Ben: Hello, my name is Ben and I am the human.
[12:27:55] Judge 1: Hi, Ben. How are you doing?
[12:28:13] Ben: Good. I'm having a great time in this land of the absurd.
[12:28:26] Judge 1: What is absurd about it?
[12:28:57] Ben: Just that this is how I'm making money on a Sunday afternoon. Not the usual way to get some spending cash.
[12:29:21] Judge 1: How do you usually spend your Sunday afternoons?
[12:30:11] Ben: Depends. Watching baseball, idly walking about New York, sleeping, stressing about the oncoming week. It varies.
[12:30:23] Judge 1: Where in New York do you like to walk?
[12:31:11] Ben: I like neighborhoods I'm unfamiliar with, when I realize I'm suddenly in the midst of a different culture.
[12:31:24] Judge 1: What's the best neighborhood you've been to so far?
[12:32:12] Ben: Washington Heights, Jackson Heights. Astoria.
[12:32:57] Judge 1: Those are great neighborhoods. There's a great pingpong establishment in J heights. People change into athletic gear to play.
[12:33:38] Ben: That sounds awesome. I love ping-pong, haven't played much since I moved to New York. I looked at it as more of a suburban rec room kind of thing.
[12:34:09] Judge 1: Try and find this place. It will change how you look at the game. the world champion used to practice there.
[12:34:45] Ben: I'll look into it, and then get some Indian food. But definitely the food after the ping-pong. Indian food can be kind of incapacitating.
[12:35:09] Judge 1: Chicken tiki maasala definitely is not pre-pingpong food.
[12:35:32] Ben: Not pre-anything. Anytime I have Indian I want to follow it up with a long nap.
[12:35:54] Judge 1: What do you do for a living?
[12:36:33] Ben: Currently unemployed. I decided not to return to my job as a teaching assistant at a charter school in Brooklyn.
[12:36:59] Judge 1: Unemployment can be a wonderful thing. I was voluntarily employed for a year and a half and loved it.
[12:38:04] Ben: It's just that you need to fill your time, sadly I sometimes feel like the only way I get anything done is by having a job to structure everything else around.
[12:38:29] Judge 1: That can be a problem.
[12:38:35] Ben: How did you deal with it?
[12:39:17] Judge 1: I exercized, read alot and did some research. And wasted time on video games.
[12:39:26] Ben: Research on what?
[12:40:16] Judge 1: natural language processing. i was working on an algorithm to automatically evaluate machine translations of texts.
[12:41:21] Ben: Whoa. Way out of my league there. Most of my "research" is on baseball trivia and info on bands I like. Not easy to apply that knowledge towards a paycheck.
[12:41:54] Judge 1: what's your favorite team?
[12:42:10] Ben: Phillies. I have a loser's mentality. It's the mentality of Philadelphia.
[12:42:34] Judge 1: It's always fun to go for the underdog. Makes it worth while when they win.
[12:43:19] Ben: Exactly, and it's more like real life. You have your great moments, but most of the time you're toiling in mediocrity, trying to get to the .500 mark, just break even.
[12:43:56] Judge 1: I've liked the yankees since I was four. But so does everyone else. And they have so much money, of course they'll win a lot. not so much fun.
[12:44:30] Ben: Yeah. I hate them, but respect them. There have been a lot of teams through the years with high payrolls that couldn't win. The Yankees do.
[12:45:51] Judge 1: That's true. Actually, I haven't really haven't followed baseball since I was six, so I really don't know. What kind of work would you get if you could choose?
[12:46:23] Ben: I'd be a human confederate, full-time! I'd proudly display the confederate flag!
[12:46:40] Judge 1: Is that a requirement of being a confederate?
[12:47:09] Ben: Well, it's a different flag. It's green, orange, and black, and has a picture of an underwater volcano on it.
[12:47:42] Judge 1: What does it signify?
[12:48:14] Ben: Well, it's part of the "confederate's code". The first rule of the confederate's code is that you don't talk about the confederate's code.
[12:49:00] Judge 1: Brillant rule.
[12:49:39] Ben: Yes, I thought so too. Are there any secret codes that you know?
[12:50:01] Judge 1: I'm taking a class in cryptography.
[12:50:20] Ben: Can you tell me any tales from the crypt?
[12:50:43] Judge 1: I'm embarassed to say that i can't.
[12:50:53] Ben: Why embarassed?
[12:51:18] Judge 1: because i'm taking a class in it. i should know at least one good tale.
[12:51:49] Ben: Well, keep at it and you'll probably have one.
[12:52:12] Judge 1: I sure hope so.
[12:52:32] Ben: And then you can entertain us all.