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December 31, 2002

India-ana -- Indiana? Indianiana?

A friend tried to send me an e-greeting from bharatmatrimony.com, but it didn't get through. No matter! Elsewhere on the site I found this great article on "intimate love" which I find much more charming than the usual pabulum of the "things to do when you're not having sex" sort -- perhaps because it suggests you also do things like "Delightfully enjoy the sunlight draping your bodies" as part of a "longer lovemaking session." I wonder what kind of audience this is aimed at?

"Delightfully enjoy" -- I've come to love the Indian-English tendency towards superlatives, not to mention the curious practice of placing matrimonial ads in newspapers. I miss having a copy of India Abroad delivered to my office. A piece of theirs on Nixon-era diplomatic maneuvers regarding Bangladesh caught my eye; I don't know much about the period, so I found it interesting. Don't know how its political slant ("Washington's pro-Pakistan tilt is as unreasonable as it is enduring") fits into the general spectrum...

In other news, Rhythm Dhol Bass is playing at Basement Bhangra soon. I just found them through Rekha's email announcement about it... they sound pretty good! I wish I could be there. It's on January 2 if you're in NYC and can make it. Go!

One more bhangra website: Rukus Avenue. Found it when I was looking for my former classmate Swapnil Shah, who is apparently on the bhangra scene now. Neal, are you out there?! I want to hear your music!

Posted by me at 4:13 PM | Comments (0)

December 30, 2002

Limited-Use Poetry

My mother has been writing poetry. I'm not sure for how long; it seems to be a recent thing, though I guess it could have been going on all her life and she's only recently come out about it. She has been reading at a local cafe in Arizona, where it appears she's been exposed to poetry slams. She comes home and she recites some of her poems to us in a rhythmic way that owes a backhanded debt to rap. I was trying to explain this to someone yesterday, and they were weirded out by the fact that my whitey-white mom had any connection to rap. No, no, no, I said, it's not like that. It's to be expected that she's been exposed to rap; she used to listen to Public Enemy, and she was the one who introduced me to A Tribe Called Quest. She's always been ahead of the curve.

It's that she's reading her poetry in a way that brings to mind how she used to rap us awake on Saturday mornings, lolloping along to Mama Said Knock You Out turned up to eleven. She's always missed some subtle rhythmic idea, something to do with emphasis. She ends up sounding like rap written for cartoons. The Pokemon Rap. I told her the other day she needed to listen to Eminem. His phrasing is clever. Maybe I'm wrong, though; maybe it's Shaggy she needs to listen to, or someone else with Caribbean influences, who leaves the beat cradled and swaying like, um, testicles in their sac.

Mom's poetry itself is not bad, though. I mean, it doesn't come off as bad to me. In fact, I find it quite moving. She writes about our family, about my sisters and me, about her divorce from Dad. Quite frequently she writes about our pets in very unsentimental ways. Stuff about piss and reflexes.

It's unusual for me to not tear to pieces any poetry that's handed to me. I have a history of being inappropriately cruel about bad poetry, or awkward public poetry. My high school friends and I developed an intricate set of rules for writing unkind parodies of the poems of a girl I knew who foisted books of her poems on other people. Lately I've been raising hell over at haiku.fuzrocks.com about some of the turgid love prose that gets posted over there.

So much poetry is so bad. So much of it is so personal that it loses its heft out of the gravitational pull of the person who wrote it, becoming just another junk meme loose in the atmosphere. And so few people understand that. I've always thought, and I've implied here before, that I think poetry is frequently best left as the therapy it so often is for so many people. I just don't like to have other people's poetry inflicted on me. It used to just be unpublished poetry; I didn't trust anything that hadn't appeared in sanctified print. Having trained with Martin Espada, I can't bring myself to read the soporific stuff in the New Yorker, either.

But my mom's poetry just fascinates me. I learn so much from it. She wrote a poem about me comparing me to a brain tumor. I had never really known how she thought of me before that. (It's not as alarming as it sounds, I promise.) My mom was a hands-off parent who let me and my sisters come up with our own ideas and plans for ourselves. She's mellow, and generally keeps her thoughts to herself.

Today I read a poem she wrote about our guinea pigs dying and I broke down in tears. It was the missing piece of one of my own stories. I remembered the tortured note in my dad's voice, but I didn't remember that my mother had been there that day, at all. I didn't know she thought she could have stopped it if she'd been there. I didn't know how she thought about her chores and about keeping the house running.

It was good. The metaphors seemed effective; the lapse into rhyme in the poem's center seemed to make sense. Was it publishable good? Suddenly I found I couldn't get distance from a poem.

What revision does this require? What about a new category -- limited-use poetry? Poetry that has a practical impact on only a few people? What prose is not of limited use? Today Janice and I were talking about Mark Twain; we both agreed his prose was unbearably mannered to our ears, but I was saying I needed his messages right now anyway. We briefly debated whether a work should be assigned to students after its prose has outlived its shelf-life.

This piece doesn't have an end. I have a headache. Mom, stop saying your stuff isn't as good as the rest of the stuff in that compilation.

Posted by me at 3:36 AM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

Oh, Right -- I Got Published.

Forgot to note that I got an article in the hometown paper on Christmas Day.

Posted by me at 3:22 AM | Comments (0)

buster's

do they have intense short-term relationships as well as chai?

Posted by me at 2:01 AM

December 24, 2002

miserere nobis

qui tollis peccata mundi, miserere nobis.

Posted by me at 12:01 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

December 23, 2002

The Word-Processing Niche That Time Forgot

Why is it that newspaper filing system software is so piss-poor? Is there some reason why it all needs to be command-line legacy cruftware, some hidden purpose I'm missing? I swear, I don't understand it... Do most newspaper higher-ups put up with all this because they haven't spent a lot of time outside of journalism, and therefore have been passed over by advances in word-processing technology and don't know what they're missing? For once I'm not saying that to be derogatory, I'm serious: I'm genuinely baffled by the fact they haven't mutinied yet.

I was in the office at My Intended, the paper where I'm freelancing and applying for a job, for far too many hours today. The editor I'm working for sat me down at an ancient-looking beige box running Windows '98 and opened up an editing system with huge text and a set of command keys completely alien to me. No simple copy or paste commands, and the "edit" menu gave no clue as to how to accomplish a "cut" function. I was later told it was a delete-undelete function rather like the one in Pine, but not enough so that it became a habit for me by the end of the day. To make a paragraph break, you had to hold down shift while hitting return. To save an article, you had to hit what they were calling the "command" key (which was actually the furthest right button on the upper row of keys, marked "pause"), then period, then W. Who the hell thought this up?! Did they speak English?)

After four hours working like this -- during which this particular box crashed four times in a way that would not be swayed by the three-finger salute -- I started to feel completely handicapped. I sought the help of the city editor, who I am supposed to be impressing with my ability to overcome my lack of daily reporting experience.

After executing a few keystrokes that returned me to my now slightly lossy article, he returned to his desk. Not only did I still feel helpless to find my way around the system, I also felt helpless to explain to him what it meant to me to be working with software that was so completely alien. How was I supposed to explain to a man in his sixties that I literally can't think when the monitor is only twelve inches and the text is huge, because I can't see where all my thoughts are?

I always want to say it's like being brain damaged, because my reflexes are so accustomed to standard software by now that it's almost like having a direct neural patch into the machine, but I didn't figure someone his age would understand that. I thought about telling him it was like I was being asked to play a concerto with one hand tied behind my back. In the office, sitting right in the midst of the editors, it certainly induced that kind of performance anxiety. Or it was like I'd been playing a Stradivarius and had been handed a banjo. In a moment of poor judgement I told the city editor the latter. He retorted that it really wasn't that bad a system, considering what they could have gotten.

The horrible thing is he's not wrong, either. This system at least had a usable mouse. At the small-town paper where I had my first internship, they used old one-piece consoles with spinach green monitors, again with command-line software. Even at the Village Voice they use some arcane software where you have to do all sorts of complicated things to quotation marks and apostrophes to make them come out right.

Anyway, the moral of the story is don't ask me how it went, because I don't want to talk about it. I'm not going to get that job. Going three times as long as my space budget and taking a whole day to do so, not to mention forgetting to scrounge up pictures, is not impressing anyone.

So it's back to the world of occasional communcations jobs, right?

Goddamn.

You know that song Eminem sings about having to do your best when you're on stage singing your rap? OK, so he doesn't say it that way at all... It's the song from 8-Mile -- ya better LOSE yourself in the MUsic, the MOment, ya OWn it, rah rah rah? I like that riff... Yeah, I'm gonna write a song like that for all the unemployed yuppies out there like myself, only it's not going to be You only get one shot, you can't miss your chance to blow, it's gonna be all You get plenty of chances, only y'a gonna be stuck doing the shitwork editing for Miramax, HUH! Y'a gonna get stuck under the glass ceiling in publishing, HUH! Y'a gonna code apps for Microsoft, y'a gonna write ad copy, y'a gonna get stuck in a dead-ass nonprofit writing grants for programs with no proven benefit to society -- AWWWWW SHIT!

And of course none of it will be any good, because it's really nothing to complain about, right?

Posted by me at 11:59 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

December 21, 2002

Kiosk

But what would we rent the kiosk for? Oh, causing accidents.

Posted by me at 3:33 AM

December 19, 2002

And now, your moment of Zen:

Posted by me at 12:39 AM | Comments (5) | TrackBack

December 17, 2002

Things To Read Compulsively, #34,964

Found Magazine. (Thanks, Dave.) See? Abandoned trivia are more interesting than intentionally written coherent thoughts. I told you so. You've clicked away from my page already.

Posted by me at 1:46 AM | Comments (0)

December 16, 2002

Detritus: When The Going Gets Weird, The Weird Crawl Into My Mailbag

Mailbag! Here's a brief rundown of some of the wide-ranging mail I've gotten in the past week:

• A press release from rtMark/the Yes Men on their latest stunt.
• A really inappropriate holiday greeting sent by the guy in charge of alumni relations at Hampshire these days. Why the hell haven't they fired this asshole yet?!
• A note from a ten-year-old bidding on one of my My Little Ponies. "I love your auction!" she said. Love my auction?! Kids these days... Turns out the kid lives right in Pasadena, too, so I delivered the pony to her door. This happens sometimes with eBay... Jessamyn knows someone out in rural Vermont who found out his winning bidder was right down the street, so he delivered his package by hand to his startled neighbor. What are the odds on something like that happening... It's a funny way to meet people in your hometown, an indicator of the sort of rearranging of neighborly relationships that the Internet has effected, as further evidenced by:
• An immediate and lengthy reply from Toshiya Endo in Japan, who runs the African music discography site I linked to the other day, addressing my questions about perceptions of Africa and popularity of African music in Japan (he didn't answer any of my questions about DDR, alas.)
• A response to my questions about the Crip Walk. I've been fascinated by some of the comments posted to my site, which seem to be written by people who have not understood in the slightest what I was trying to say (witness the comments on my post about Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen -- or rather the comment; I know I had another, similar one at some point but I thought it was so stupid I took it down), so when someone posted who actually sounded like he'd read what I wrote, I wrote back. And here is the first-person ethnography Chris George, a 22-year-old guy from Columbia, Maryland, responded about the Crip Walk:

  I am from Columbia, Maryland in Howard County. It is a very unique community. It was planned in a way so that people of all economic classes and different ethnicities can live in the same area. There are neighborhoods where houses selling for 280k are directly across the road from subsidized housing (my immediate neighborhood starts in the low 300s) . There are no real gangs here. No drive-bys, or anything like that. Most people here are very open minded. There are so many different cultures here, no one stands out at all. Groups of friends might have a nickname for themselves, or people give a specific group a nickname to easily identify them. But they are NOT gangs at all. Now that I think about it, we kind of categorize people and groups of friends in a General-to-Specific way. Kind of like this, General first: High School, Village, Neighborhood, Extended friends, close friends. And in Howard County , you can't always guess the socioeconomic status of a neighborhood, it might not be all the same. My general neighborhood housing go from apartments that are 800/month to 500,000 houses!

  That's the best way I can explain my area. But, in Columbia, you won't see some kid start C-Walking on the side of the street spontaneously. But in the clubs, you will. It's not aggressive at all. You won't see anyone fighting over a C-Walk circle. If a certain song comes on, and it has that specific tempo that you can C-Walk to (i.e. Dr. Dre "Next Episode," Clipse "Grindin'," Xzibit "Get your Walk on" -- to name a few.) You might see a person start Walking. Now, this is not a dance that you do in one small area. You gotta give a person AT LEAST a 10 foot radius to really do their thing. Someone else might want to Walk too, but in the same circle. If that person just wants to do it, and be done, he'll ask "Can I get mine?" or, "Can i walk?" or "Can I get some light?" The person originally Walking will let that person go and do their thing. You are not going to be walking for 3 minutes. I dont care who you are, your calves and legs will be sore. People usually can get all their good moves in 30 seconds.

  BUT, if someone is on a competitive vibe, they won't ask to jump in. They will most likely stand on the inside of the circle and stare at the person's feet, kinda like an inspection of skill. The person who is currently walking will let that person go when he sees him. When the new person goes, he will most likely brush his shoes with his hands and show what he's got. If the original guy who was walking thinks he is better than what the second guy could do, he'll give it another shot. Some people spell their names with their feet. If anyone else wants in, they will do what the second guy had to do to get in. You know who won when the last guy in the circle stands uncontested. All the people who walked in that circle will dap (shake hands) for mutual respect, and go their own way. There won't be 30 dudes tryin to Walk. Maybe 4 if you're lucky. If a guy steps in that is an expert, no one will jump in and embarrass themselves. If someone is at a Baltimore club wearing Converse All Stars or "Chucks," that is originally a West Coast style. So in a way you are implying that you can walk on a expert level and be ready to fascinate the crowd. And if you come weak, you will get made fun of. Because, if you wear Chucks and can't walk, that's like someone saying they are a doctor, but they dropped out of high school. It's a phony front. If someone is wearing Chucks with blue shoestrings, that's a Crip. Red, a Blood. White, neither.

• Just another maxi-pad ad forwarded by Jenn Pozner? No! It's the Genius Lady, "The product which allows womens to urinate from a standing position"! "It will be... your fellow-traveller!" Hey! How deeply #1! And yet how deeply #2, because this is not the first of its kind -- I found a similar product from the 70s in Kim Edel's basement just the other day. Someday soon I will scan it in and put it up, because the heavily-perfumed promo copy on the packaging is priceless. When will these people learn to say VULVA? Or even CROTCH? (Note, mind you, that these are neither ingenious Japanese gadgeteers nor Puritanical, disease-phobic Americans selling the Genius Lady -- this is an Italian product.) Never mind, I want one anyway; peeing on my feet when I go camping got really old years ago.

  (Hey, what's that phrase again? Fellow Traveller! Does anyone remember the McCarthyist connotation of this phrase?? Is it consigned to being just another piece of dot-com jargon? (I want to be an "Extreme Fellow-Traveller!" Sign my ass up!) Oh, how hip -- it applies to nasty parasites, too!

• A questionnaire from Glamour Magazine, whose poll list I am on, asking me the following, among other things, about my orgasms:
  12. What's as good as an orgasm?
  A. A chocolate brownie sundae
  B. An amazing shopping find
  C. An exhilarating workout?just you, the road and your sneakers
  D. Nothing is as good as an orgasm.
  My response? Performing open-heart surgery with my bare hands beats orgasm! (Yeah, Xephreniaq, you know what I mean.)

I think I need to start writing to more strangers. The response from the guy in Japan, in particular, made me realize that I'm not really taking advantage of the Net. (Of course, I ought to get better about writing back to my friends first.)

Posted by me at 10:58 PM | Comments (15) | TrackBack

December 14, 2002

Multicultural Day Rant, Part I

Notes from the evening. First, a bulletin: Buster's, the coffeehouse in South Pasadena on Mission not far from Fair Oaks, appears to be in deep shit. Catherine and I showed up there at a reasonable hour (9:00 and change) on a Friday evening and we were the only ones there. The guy at the counter was talking about closing early.

This is simply not acceptable, folks. Buster's has been one of the area's best coffeehouses for years now. It can't be threatened with closing. They have a huge range of complicated drinks including Italian sodas and chai (the latter of which I found very nice when sampling it for the first time tonight). They also have a nice range of baked goods. The staff are cute! The atmosphere is totally unbelievable, with brilliant-colored walls, lots of crazy mosaic tilework, and good local art. I will grant you that to some extent it is a shadow of its former self-- they have removed all the comfortable seating upstairs, there is no longer anything of note to read (the Pasadena Weekly is a fine paper, sure -- FOR ME TO POOP ON!), the games are gone, and the lack of live music tonight was somewhat baffling. Still, though, still still still, this is a coffeehouse with much to recommend it. What the hell is going on? Would someone familiar with the area like to enlighten me?

Onward. On the way home KCRW piped up with something Fela or Femi Kuti which I identified to Catherine at around the junction of Fair Oaks and the 110. I was feeling good, you know? A car to drive, a stomach full of good chai, good conversation with an old friend, and here's Fela Kuti on the radio at 11:00 at night to remind me that I'm back where my life makes some kind of sense. I drive by my high school and Caltech and my mom's old house and I'm thinking about what Catherine said in the context of our prep school history, and about KCRW in the context of my orientation towards American pop culture, and thinking about what kind of job I might have out here, and thinking to myself My life means something here. I'm not just some interchangeable white B.A.-carrying girl for the publishing industry to chew up and spit out; I'm a person who knows the city and what its individual streets mean and who its individual families are and where it is racist and why that doesn't show so much and how we do and don't manage to be a multicultural community.

That Kuti song didn't end until after I'd gotten past the Vons on Allen north of Washington, and I thought, Damn, that's a long song, it must have been close to fifteen minutes; I knew this because South Pasadena to almost Altadena is a fifteen-minute drive. Which begged the question, How wrong is it to be measuring a Fela Kuti song by the distances between two whitey-whitebread bedroom burghs of Los Angeles? I don't mean like Kuti has no right to be in Pasadena; it's just he sings about prisons and corrupt governments and it seems a disservice to his memory to count him out in $300,000 bungalows and manicured lawns.

It reminded me how weird it is that KCRW is an LA station and there's nothing like it in New York (well, WFUV has its moments of greatness, but please). I feel guilty burning my fossil fuels through sleeping silent Pasadena and savoring those sweet, totally African guitar riffs. How do I explain this?

It reminds me of the Multicultural Days we used to have in junior high, when everyone was called upon to do a dance or sing a song or bring in a dish which says something about Their Culture. Like, This is The Day when we do Your Culture. Our terms dictate one day, only, and that Your Culture is something outside of what we normally do. Tomorrow we put our noses back to the grindstone so we can't see anything but the next test and the next and then a college education which will hopefully help us to continue living the two-houses-housekeepers-Beemers-and-prep-school lifestyle enjoyed by the alpha children in any given class.

What I'm trying to say is that I've finally become aware that you can't have a real multicultural discussion on the terms of the white mainstream. (I'm sure any number of people reading this are going "Oh great, another white kid's 'discovered' the 'New World'...") I think Carmie Rodriguez and the gang should give up on Multicultural Day and funnel all of Poly's resources and energy into, I don't know, sending every single kid abroad regardless of their ability to pay for AFS? Taking a whole year to go work in an impoverished community someplace? Something that will force these kids to play by someone else's rules.

I also don't think you can have a really eye-opening discussion without taking off the white kid gloves. I don't think I learned much about other cultures until I was in New York in the middle of this melee of people making anti-Semitic comments instead of censoring themselves, and calling each other nigger and monkey and Paki, and making fake Asian eyes at each other, and touching each other's hair and talking about each others' shapes and skin colors because we were all so close to each other we almost couldn't help it. Southern California is too goddamn genteel; it might as well be south of Strom.

(Yeah yeah, Kim and co., your diatribes about how racist LA is have finally penetrated. It wasn't going to happen just by talking at me, though; it happened when I was working with ethnic papers and in the Bronx.)

Anyway. While I was composing that diatribe I went to look up Fela Kuti and found a big ol' discography of various African artists, hosted by a biochem student in Japan... Sometimes my inability to think of new ways to find music really alarms me. I should have done more research a long time ago.

Posted by me at 3:50 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

December 12, 2002

In Defense of P2P

I don't usually like to link to things Slashdot has already covered, but Tim O'Reilly has written the most eloquent, well-supported, coherent and complete defense of P2P sharing I have seen yet. Everyone should go read it, and then quote it to the next person you hear calling P2P "piracy."

Posted by me at 11:22 PM | Comments (0)

December 11, 2002

THANKS

Thank you to all of you who posted or emailed with help about graduate schools, especially Elaine (whose link I would highly recommend) and Robert. I've had a good hard think. I'm starting to think maybe I shouldn't be trying for graduate school just yet, because I think my motives are still kind of muddy. The remaining question, for me, is this: have I just wasted a lot of energy? In other words, will the work I've done to apply (rustling up letters of recommendation, getting transcripts, having scores sent to schools, etc) be useful a year or two down the road if I decide to apply again, but to a different department?

Posted by me at 7:06 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Blimpmobile

She got to take a turn in the Blimpmobile?

Posted by me at 6:56 PM

Mainstream Comics To Watch Out For

Marvel is re-warming an old TV show spinoff as The Rawhide Kid: Slap Leather. From the article:

The Marvel honcho said the Kid won't make any pronouncements about his sexual orientation but promised readers will "know it from the moment you see him."
...While the story has "a comedic slant," Zimmerman said he hopes the 21st-century kid is "an empowering character that the gay community would be able to embrace."
One tipoff about his orientation comes in the first issue, when he's asked about the Lone Ranger.
"I just want to meet him. I think that mask and powder-blue outfit are fantastic," he says. "I can certainly see why that Indian follows him around."

I'll wait for the general consensus; until then I think I'll stick with Hothead Paisan, thanks. (The official site appears to be down.)

Posted by me at 1:52 PM | Comments (0)

December 10, 2002

Photographing Your Plastic Nag For Fun And Profit

(OK, clearly most of you regulars at this watering hole are going to be baffled by this, but just for the sake of cross-promotion, in case anyone who cares happens across this:)

I've got some Breyer model horses up for sale on EBay. More to come; I've got some good vintage ones I'm giving up waiting in the wings.

I'd like to think my "evil skills" -- what they called my knack for ad copywriting at my last nonprofit job -- are coming in handy as I'm shilling baby ponies... Robert, you're going to have to wait until I break out the My Little Ponies, which I will soon. Put the microwave away.

Posted by me at 2:30 AM | Comments (1)

Conservatives: anal sex

It's funny, but I find it really easy to ignore super conservative people and still have fun shocking them with stories of anal sex.

Posted by me at 12:37 AM

December 8, 2002

HELP

OK, I need HELP. In a total vacuum of input, I am panicking about graduate school applications. I have a week left for some of them. I have been working on them since July, and they just seem to get harder and harder as time goes on. I don't know if I'm picking the right schools (UCLA, Harvard, Teacher's College at Columbia, Stanford and UC Berkeley for education, with media literacy, technology, linguistics and anthropology subcomponents, in that order; UC Riverside for dance history; and UMass Amherst for communications, again with a media literacy focus). I don't know if I'm mentioning the right faculty I want to work with in my essays, or if I should become better acquainted with the work they're doing before I say I want to work with them. I'm also not sure if I'm saying I want to do too many things.

I'm worried that because I went to Hampshire and majored in writing and did a flaky Div III and was never, ever exposed to real theory in any of my stupid social sciences courses I will either be rejected for sounding unprepared in my essay or get into the schools and then be exposed as a halfwit when I get there. I'm starting to feel like I shouldn't bother with some of the schools because I'm not sure if they really have the program focus I want, but I'm not sure if I should narrow my prospects down any more.

I'm really worried that I've lost track of all the papers involved and I'll end up without funding as a result. (I'd be having an easier time with that if any of the goddamn Macs I have exposure to had Claris on them, so I could open the spreadsheet where I was keeping track.)

Almost any input would probably alleviate how much I'm suffering trying to get through this and will be greatly appreciated. Note to Evan: I don't want to hear from you on this one, because I don't need any more backhanded sympathy, thanks. I want to hear from people who know something about grad schools, from one form of personal experience or another. Grad schools in education would be a real plus. Thank you.

Posted by me at 3:30 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack

December 7, 2002

Detritus: It's Only Ever Detritus When I Go Home And Unclench

At the end of my flight back I started listening to the white woman seated near the aisle in the row ahead of me, who was talking to the two black men who were her seat partners about her work. She said she was some sort of massage therapist, and the work she did involved entwining her body with her clients'. Not in a sexual way, though, she protested; it's just a very intimate massage. The men made polite conversational noises. They apparently had not been to LA before, so she was telling them what was what. You really should go to Venice Beach, she was telling them, it's very New Age.

I swear that never happens to me, encountering people like that out here, even though it's supposed to be par for the course in LA. It was sort of a nice, if strange, welcome home. My own seat partners were orthodox(?) Jewish guys with hatboxes, and the garrulous one of them kept saying things peppered in Yiddish to the cute one, but they never even made eye contact with me. Are the days of stranger-on-the-plane conversations over?

* * *

I had the fantastic good fortune to return home the day before the Caltech ME72 contest and to be free at two in the afternoon to see it. It's basically a more genteel version of BattleBots, in case you've never been. This year ME72 students were charged with playing a sort of reverse game of Capture The Flag where your team had to remove its flag from a holder on your side of the card-table-like arena (one point), get it to the other side (another point), and plant it in the opposing team's holder (another point), with an extra point awarded if you knocked your opponent's flag off the table. More complicated than ones I remember. As usual, it was great fun; the audience filled the Big Wedding Cake and roared mightily for opponents to knock each others' bots off the table, which was really peripheral to the action.

As usual, the highlight of the event was the frumious Doctor Placebo, usually the Caltech mascot (a beaver, this time dressed in a pink bunny suit) attached to a bot brought in to fill holes in the contest seeding... Since this year's setup involved two bots per team, the second bot was a Miyazaki-esque device with propellers which was flown into the arena attached to a huge cloud of gold and black balloons. (I wish I had a picture, but I didn't notice which TV stations had cameras there.) It had a fork underneath it to grab the flag, but since this wasn't exactly rocket science, and the TAs who made it had been stuck at Caltech while the lead professor, Erik Antonsson, is the one currently working for JPL, the thing sort of floated aimlessly around, misdirected by its propellers... Erik said it had made it all the way up to the Beckman balcony in an earlier test.

Anyway, while looking at the program I had a strange flash where I realized the exact place and time I had learned a word. Back in the days when it was held in Ramo Auditorium, the ME72 contest was where I first heard the word "placebo."

Unfortunately, the contest was won by men again; all the teams with women on them were eliminated before the final rounds. We'll have to wait another year for the first female winner. In their absence, I was rooting for Salomon Trujillo, whose blog doesn't do justice to what a showman he was... it's always best when the participants jump up and down, grab the mic to announce the birth of new robots backstage and generally ham it up. (I mean, for crying out loud, these are machines we're cheering on...) The picture the Star News featured was of him blowing on his bot when it wouldn't move. Alas, my hero's team lost on a technicality when he bumped his opponents' flag out of its holder.

* * *

I was going to say that dad and stepmother tend to only display family photos in the house which are very serious, but that's not at all true. The ones on the fridge and in their room and various other places are frequently silly. They just have this hallway which has lots of photos which for some reason are very serious.. It's like the Hall of Gravitas. Weddings. Funerals. Aniversaries. Family Vacations. Ancestors. Birthdays, with everyone right there in the picture. Graaaavitaaaas.

* * *

I'm reading The Handmaid's Tale, by Margaret Atwood. I would recommend it to anyone who hasn't read it, but it really is a bit much to bear right now, with religious fundamentalists saturating the various offices of government. I also saw The Stepford Wives for the first time recently. It's a little strange to be absorbing two somewhat heavy-handed dystopian feminist parables so close together. Really, it's depressing. It makes me want to pee standing up, in a public place. I'm serious. That's the first thing that came to mind.

* * *

My dad just came in and asked me to take dictation to a Mr. John Moglia in Arizona. Dear Mr. Moglia, I wrote, Get bent. He has auto parts I want, said Dad. Dear Mr. Moglia, I wrote, after erasing the earlier dictation, We don't know who you are, but Dad says you have parts. You don't give good secretarial, said Dad. I aim to stay out of that line of work, I replied.

Dad's keyboard doesn't have pgup/pgdn or delete buttons. I HATE it.

* * *

I have to fill out a job application which asks for my typing WPM. I am going to list my score from Typing of the Dead. (Note: That article is outdated... Dreamcast keyboards, and Dreamcasts and the games themselves, are now muuuch muuuch cheaper. Your local school's job-training programs NEED this game, as tomorrow's workers must be able to type lightning-fast AND pick off approaching zombies to survive in a Bush economy... give back to your community -- and yourself! -- this Christmas!)

* * *

If you are in town and wondering why I didn't tell you when I was getting back, don't. I had a super-top-secret job interview and I have grad school application essays to write, and I'm not really going to feel free to fraternize until after the 15th.

Posted by me at 10:40 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

December 6, 2002

Don't Buy It!

Seattle's PBS station, KCTS, has an excellent website, called Don't Buy It!, aimed at teaching kids critical thinking skills for dealing with the media! I guess now I can't complain about how nobody's doing that...

I am really impressed with the site for a number of reasons. First, it's slickly designed and functional, which is so rare for educational/nonprofit sites. Second, it encourages kids to think about banner ads and popups as well as print and TV advertisements, which is good; I personally had not been exposed to any lines of kid-crit about the Internet. Similarly, the range of media content it critiques is quite broad, covering everything from how musical acts are packaged, to representations of police and violence, to how food is prettied up for ads, to what exactly "such-and-such not included" and "part of this complete breakfast" mean.

The examples they use are compelling and should really wow the kids, even if a few are slightly out of date (kids are going to know they're not in the target audience for Nash Bridges -- is that still on the air?! -- but they're likely to get a jolly good gross-out from the reference to Olestra causing diarrhea). The interactive parts are a lot of fun, some of them even for us older culture-jammers -- you can change the text in advertisements and print them out! (Granted, the one I did didn't print right, but oh well.) You can design your own cereal box! How cool is that?! There's lesson plans for teachers and parents and even an action center describing how kids can complain to the FCC, to their elected representatives, and to toymakers. And best of all, the site encourages you to use their banner ads, so I'm going to add one to my page.

Posted by me at 9:21 PM | Comments (1)

Six Degrees of Kukla, Fran, and Ollie

You can tell I'm home, because I have waaaay too much time to post things... Anyway, I was reading an interview with Joel Hodgson, which is what I do when I'm depressed about my job prospects, because I'm so fascinated with how he's managed to reinvent himself a million times... and in this particular interview, he mentions he was influenced by the TV show Kukla, Fran, and Ollie. The family legend, if I remember it correctly, is that my great-grandfather, Jules "Tony" Herbuveaux, was one of the people who helped get this show on the air, and I'd been under the impression it was a kids' show. However, Joel's reckoning of the show doesn't jive with what I know -- he says the puppets on the show helped introduce international films, and that the show was on CBS, while I know Tony worked for NBC. Anyone have an explanation?

No, wait, I think I do... the specific show he's speaking about appears to be a spin-off of the main K F and O show. Sorry. Anyway, it's an interesting interview with Joel (though pretty old, I'd bet), as is this one.

In other news, blogging is what I do to fill my brain with protective fluff which keeps me from realizing how much my life sucks. Further updates on my inexorable slide into the tar pits of the kind of blogging everyone else does as events warrant.

Posted by me at 8:19 PM | Comments (0)

Brown Recluse Bites Overdiagnosed

According to a study done by staff at UC Riverside, doctors routinely misdiagnose lethal conditions like Lyme disease, anthrax, and necrotizing bacteria as brown recluse spider bites. This leads, among other things, to outbreaks of arachnophobic "spider-stompings."

well, I just thought you'd like to KNOW, is all.

Posted by me at 7:24 PM | Comments (5)

December 5, 2002

Christmas List

I've already had some inquiries into what I would like for Christmas, so I thought I'd start my list. I'll add to it over time. Here are some things I would like:

Anything at all by Lynda Barry (books, framed art, t-shirts, mugs, anything), except Cruddy, which I already have. I am especially jonesing for the book One! Thousand! Demons! Anything obscure is a plus.

Mashimaro/San-X/assorted Nipponalia car accessories, blue neon car ornaments, or a license plate bracket that says "WEBLOGGERS/ DO IT AT WORK". (Yes, I am trying to pimp out my car. No bumper stickers, please.)

Subscriptions: Advertising Age, Creative, American Demographics; The Nation, CounterPunch, Multinational Monitor; DoubleTake.

A bird feeder of some low platform type that I can attach to my windowsill (as opposed to attching it to my window, a post, a tree, etc.)

Socks. Not kidding. Funky and/or wool is ideal. I don't wear tights so much anymore but I am doing the over-the-knee/thigh-high thing a lot lately.

A queen-sized duvet. (No cover, I'm making one myself.)

Media: Mini-DV tapes, minidiscs, blank CDs, and camera film.

Albums: anything by King Chango, Los Amigos Invisibles, Los de Abajo (except Cybertropic Chilango Power), or Nortec Collective; They Might Be Giants' kids album (called No!); Squirrel Nut Zippers' Bedlam Ballroom or their first album.

DVDs: Pootie Tang, UHF, Nausicaa of the Valley of Wind.

Posted by me at 12:24 PM | Comments (4)

December 4, 2002

"If I have two or three days without dancing, my bottom won't be OK!"

How could I pass up a BBC headline that read Congo's Jive Grannies? When are you gonna see an American news outlet air a story on sexagenarian rhumba dancers in Africa? I mean, c'mon! In addition to the Lynda Barry-esque quote in the title, here's another great quote:

"Now that I've grown older, and since I married and had all my children I found out that if you want to dance calmly, with dignity and serenity, you have to dance the Rhumba."

Posted by me at 10:29 AM | Comments (0)

December 3, 2002

Tattooing Robot

"He has been left with some permanent reminders of the project with some erratic early tattooing attempts."

If *I* was inventing a tattooing robot, I don't think I'd let it practice on me... I'd find some tattoo fiend and give them the option. Well, maybe he is one, who knows. As a sidenote, I find it sort of surprising that Ananova is still around.

Posted by me at 11:00 AM | Comments (1)

mölk!

melk? mölk!

Posted by me at 10:56 AM

Fries And Propaganda: New York, Winter 2002

Pomme Pomme (Manhattan: 191 E. Houston St.)
where we are joined by P

(waiter brings a large cone of fries, with a tiny container of blue cheese sauce and another of black olive sauce)
G: Whoa.
J: Whoa.
G: Do these sauces have mayo?
J: You don't like mayo?
G: There was just this kid in my high school whose big thing was eating mayonnaise sandwiches, that kind of did it for me...
J: Oh yeah, you said.
P: With nothing else?!
G: No. It was gross. He was gross.

G: This is the highest percentage of green fries we've seen.
J: You're the only person I know who shares my fear of uncooked potatoes!
G: Not uncooked, green. The green part is poisonous, don't eat it.
J: That's what I meant.
P: I just don't like cold potatoes. Something about the consistency.
G: More people should make fries with the skin on. (general assent)

P: (to the blue cheese dressing) Come here, little chunk. C'mon. Oh, yeah. (pauses) The cone-shape is very ergonomic.
J: The blue cheese is pretty intense. The olive is better than I expected.
P: I liked the cinematography.
J: The direction was uninspired.
P: (to G) You didn't eat the olive sauce, after begging for it.
G: (makes a big show of scraping some unseen substance off the roof of her mouth with her tongue)
J: How do you translate that gesture?
G: It's like a dog trying to get peanut butter off the roof of its mouth.
J: No, but the dog's enjoying the peanut butter.

J: There's something wrong with the fry cone eating the fry.
P: (Moviefone voice) Fry cones eat their own!
J: And his eyes are on a different plane... (indicating the fry in the cone's mouth) Looks kind of like he's smoking it.
P: Looks kind of pornographic.
G: Dude, you say that about EVERYTHING!

Note: We should have taken warning from the horrible horrible 3D fry logo and the name that had more to do with apples than potatoes, but there was something desperately wrong with Pomme Pomme... I developed a violent nausea-inducing migraine afterwards; could be a cheese-mold-related allergy. Steer away from the blue-cheese dressing; it's not to be messed with. I get nauseous just thinking about it. Fries were top-notch, though.

Manhattan Diner (Manhattan: Broadway and high 70s)

G: They smell like marshmallow s'mores.
J: Ooh, they're burn-the-fingers hot.
G: It's not a very large serving.
J: The cheese is on top, not layered.
G: These are some poor-quality fries-- they're just raw potato and heat. And what is this music, Michael Bolton does the standards? Michael Bolton sings the Rat Pack?

J: (looking at a cardboard box in the preparation area) At least this diner has boxes that say Idaho Potatoes... I don't know if that's what they use to make the fries; it could be Puerto Rican potatoes... Staten Island potatoes...

Cafe 82 (Manhattan: Broadway and 82nd)

J: Oh, now, this looks much more promising than the other place. Slightly burned, much more generous, less scalding hot.
G: I dunno.
J: Well, they're still narrower, they'll cool off faster. (has trouble with the ketchup, then dots it at four points of the plate, invoking cheesy faux-witchery from The Craft) We've got the guardians of the North, East, West and South here... It's slightly improved, but they still have the layering problem.
G: Is there anyplace that doesn't?
J: Diane's (Linda's, in Seattle).
G: (accidentally picking up five cheese-fused fries at once) Good cling, though!

G: I am tired of music that says shit like that.
J: "Be with you forever"?
G: Yeah.
J: It all says shit like that.

G: I think we should get another plate of these.
J: Sure, they're like $2.35? Oh, but we don't know how much the cheese cost... I don't think we need more as much as much as we need more pie.
G: (takes the last smallest/crunchiest piece)
J: Hey!
G: (offers her another)
J: That one's soggy.
G: No. (taps it on the plate, it makes a splat noise) OK, soggy. They get points for being burned. Nobody ever does that.

Georgia Diner (Queens: Queens Boulevard, low 80s)
where we are joined by K, S, and M

J: These menus are tomelike!
K: I like that the first thing under "soups" is mozzarella sticks.
G: They have Special K!
K: The horse tranquilizer?
J: The divorce tranquilizer?!
G: It's a good menu.
K: (superciliously) It's representative of the genre...
M: (to K) I'm gonna punch you soon.
G: (reading, as the waiter approaches the table) Fishkabob, fishkabob, fishkabob, fishkabob!

(S and M go for a smoke)

J: See? The cheese goes all the way through, that's what it's supposed to do.
G: I could fuck anything that moved, right now.
J: Did you say "fuck" or "eat"?
G: This is some good cheese. (steals bacon from M's potato skins)
J: You can't do that! For one thing, your palate's all messed up now. You can't evaluate the fries! I mean, there's bacon in that! You are not a scientist.

(K goes to look for S and M, doesn't find them, hypothesizes that they're making out. They eventually return, unrumpled.)

G: It's really good cheese, but not particularly good fries.
J: Yeah, it's unfortunate. It's good cheese, and liberal use of cheese. (to others) We've had some shit-ass cheese fries.
(G takes the fry with the most cheese)
J: You are such a ho! It's like with the crunchy one last time -- you have no fry generosity!
(They fight over the last fry. M offers her potato-skin cheese. G pushes the last fry stub across the plate to J)
J: That's not the same! It's fry generosity versus cheese generosity.
(S takes the last fry)
J: Aha! Third-party candidate wins again!
G: That never happens in the U.S.

Posted by me at 1:29 AM | Comments (5) | TrackBack

December 2, 2002

A sadder and a wiser man/ He rose the morrow morn.

I finally have a name for my car.

It's Albie.

Short for Albatross.

It was vandals, appparently. Nothing was taken, aside from $250 more from my quickly evaporating bank account, and that's Geico, not the petty thugs.

Posted by me at 7:44 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack