Ever since the heady "Mit Slavkappen Raisen" days of yore, I have relished having the chance to hang around and experience his peculiar style of insanity/geniusosity. It has enriched my life considerably, probably even including those times when it takes the form of laying fatal (and frequently hilarious) pennies on the railroad track of my otherwise unstoppable conversational momentum.
Anyway, he just successfully defended his PhD dissertation today, and it was excellent to see him thereby so officially reco'nized, and to whoop it up at D's after. Kudos to you, Tom!