# 01 Jan 2005, 12:03AM: Already!: I'm not READY! Could I have another month?
Filed under: Comedy
Cogito, Ergo Sumana for 2005 |
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# 03 Jan 2005, 09:15PM: Cookies and Eggs:
The Egg/Cookie show went great last night. By the way, the staff at the Hotel Rex are fantastically helpful and the bar/lounge and restaurant within the hotel serve extremely good product. Y'all should come on down.
What in life is sweeter than the phrase: "OK, you were right!"?
Usually, when introducing the dishes at the focus of an episode of America's Test Kitchen, Christopher Kimball says that bad versions of those dishes are, say, "the end of civilization" (chocolate-chip cookies). For Greek or spinach salads he went with some lighter epithet. I wish he'd said, "But bad specialty salads take the Christ out of Christmas!" or "But when we eat bad specialty salads, the terrorists win!" or "But bad specialty salads lead to the rise of militant Islamofascism in previously moderate Muslim countries such as Turkey or Jordan!"
# 04 Jan 2005, 09:17AM: Dude: Somehow in my school library in elementary school I ran across a book arguing for drug decriminalization. The topic still consarns me. Some arguments for and against.
# 10 Jan 2005, 04:46PM: Quick Links:
"Not Knowing What Else To Do, Woman Bakes American-Flag Cake" always makes me cry.
Things That Don't Exist. The video is also cool.
# 12 Jan 2005, 02:18PM: More Links: I hadn't considered these ethical questions in sign-language whistleblowing. Also, laugh-out-loud Lockhorns criticism.
# 19 Jan 2005, 11:57AM: Together They Would Explode:
Will Franken's diary was on fire a while back - check out A RESPONSE TO H.L. MENCKEN'S INQUIRY: "WHY DID I DECIDE TO GO INTO COMEDY?" despite the Comic Sans typeface.
It is confirmation that other people are fed up misanthropes skulking through life with contempt for everything.
But it does seem a big rip-off, no? The ultimate sadness is not death. The ultimate sadness is that we are first born into a life where there is no escape from death.
Once I started to hear laughter, it got even better. Laughter became and still is confirmation that I am on the right track. Confirmation that I'm not simply some fed up misanthrope skulking through life with contempt for everything.
I'm planning on seeing Mr. Franken perform this weekend. But I also have to make room for Josh Kornbluth; I have read The Mathematics of Change and now I will have a chance to see it at The Berkeley Richmond Jewish Community Center. Come see them with me, people.
# 20 Jan 2005, 10:35AM: "What You'll Wish You'd Known":
Paul Graham's new essay speaks directly to me!
The only real difference between adults and high school kids is that adults realize they need to get things done, and high school kids don't. That realization hits most people around 23.
# 26 Jan 2005, 10:59AM: A Better World Is Possible: Abolition of slavery. If you're against this, I kind of want to know why. Anyway, Salon features a great interview about abolition with a historian who's married to Arlie Hochschild.
# 27 Jan 2005, 03:19PM: Cabdrivers Complaining About Ambition:
Like Riana, I have visited an Alton Brown speaking engagement on his current tour. I wish it had been more fun. I did find out that he only found out what he wanted to do with his life at the age of 34.
He can be kind of a jerk, and so were some of the other people who showed up way too early to grab front-row seats. I wonder whether non-jerks ever actually achieve things.
# 28 Jan 2005, 12:07PM: Mannequins:
I salvaged some mannequin parts when the Old Navy downtown was tossing them. I assume they came from Old Navy because the buttocks of the mannequin legs carry an Old Navy stamp. They're going to Joe's friends Morissa and Jamie sometime soon. Right now they guard my cube, wearing some spare clothes of mine. It is creepy to see a stamped plastic buttock, but also creepy to put my own pants on plastic flesh.
My next-cube-neighbor got a full head-torso-arms-limbs combo, lucky him. The mannequin in question has a "female" torso. I think his experience draping it with clothes was even creepier than mine.
# 28 Jan 2005, 10:19PM: Stet: This has been a fantastic month for hanging out with friends - and this weekend will only increase that wonderfulness - but the burnout at Salon just gets worse and worse for me. If you know of any part-time or contract copyediting gigs, consider sending them my way. I would enjoy a paid hobby doing something I can enjoy and do well.
# 29 Jan 2005, 04:27PM: The Spam King's Gambit: Last night I couldn't sleep and I read Spam Kings by Brian McWilliams, a frequent Salon contributor. For a reader at my level of net savviness, McWilliams spins a great tale of the intimate battles among spammers, antispammers, and side-switchers. They taunt each other via instant message! A failed anti-Semite writes great ad copy for pills and plays under assumed names in chess tournaments! I wish I knew how it ended, but nonfiction doesn't wrap itself up in time for a book deadline.
# 30 Jan 2005, 11:28PM: Will Franken: Several friends turned out tonight for the Will Franken show at the Odeon. Neat-o for the friends and the material. I'm proselytizing the gospel of Franken more successfully than I ever evangelized Linux.
# 01 Feb 2005, 10:35AM: Robot Dreams:
Last night I dreamt that I met Daniel Asimov, a son of Isaac Asimov who looked exactly like his father. Daniel's brother Eric writes about cheap eats for The New York Times. How much of this is true or plausible? I have no idea.
Update of March-May 2005: I got an email telling me that Daniel Asimov does exist and is Isaac Asimov's nephew, as is Eric Asimov. Also, "Eric *formerly* wrote about cheap eats for the NY Times. Since about one year ago, however, his column in the Times is not about eats but instead about wine."
# 01 Feb 2005, 10:57AM: Salon Shirts: If anyone wants a large white shirt with a Salon logo, let me know and I can grab you one. Pocahontas, I'm already saving one for you.
# 01 Feb 2005, 10:59AM: "Cooking, Juggling, and Getting Hurt":
Recently I met Eric Fischer, who probably knows at least one of my readers through the geek network. In fact, I know he knows Mike Popovic. Hi, Mike!
I met Eric through Valencia Street Books, one of those funky San Francisco bookstores that has a store cat. I bought a gangsta rapper coloring book for Steve there. Eric alerted me that there is now Zachary's-level deep-dish pizza in the city of San Francisco and we visited Little Star Pizza, which doesn't deliver, just like Zachary's! And indeed the pizza is great.
Also, I got to evangelize Eric, as well as former flatmate Michael Constant, into seeing Scott Nery's Crash Course, a cooking/juggling/standup show that makes me laugh very hard. I highly recommend it, and would probably go to future Crash Course shows (they change every week) in case you'd like a companion.
# 01 Feb 2005, 05:16PM: Recommended Artist: Musician Jonathan Richman plays the Rickshaw Stop on Fell Street in San Francisco in a few weeks. I am probably going on the 14th.
# 01 Feb 2005, 06:40PM: Ace of Base, Eat Your Heart Out:
As a sucker for Beatles and Beatles-esque music, I have now listened agape to a mash-up of several Beatles songs and this video for a "Paperback Writer"/"I'm a Believer" mix.
By the way, the only hip-hop I can stand is the nerdcore of MC Frontalot.
# 02 Feb 2005, 01:02PM: Phew And Yay: Thank God (and the Iraqis) that the Iraqi elections seem to have gone okay. I tear up when I see people voting or when I think about voting. I hope this takes some steam out of the anti-American violence there.
# 04 Feb 2005, 08:43AM: Conversation:
"I was just pointing out another reason that I'm right, and I think you should take that in the spirit in which it was intended."
"I think I did!"
# 06 Feb 2005, 09:06PM: Cleaning Service RFC: Request For Comment. I'm considering hiring a cleaning service to thoroughly clean a one-bedroom apartment - a bedroom, a living room, a kitchen, a small bathroom and a tiny foyer. If you have any experience with San Francisco-area cleaning services, then please email me recommendations and tell me the reasonable price range. I could imagine reasonable vendors charging anywhere from $30 to $100 and could stand some guidance.
# 06 Feb 2005, 09:48PM: The Flesh Is Weak:
I neither wanted nor needed to keep the mannequin limbs, so I gave them to a friend of a friend and they will probably end up decorating a nightclub.
I kept the legs covered with my spare clothing until I put them into the car. I enjoy seeing the human form celebrated in art, but I don't feel comfortable carrying nude fake body parts on the street, be the medium plastic or marble.
Yesterday evening, while reconnecting with old acquaintances, I watched a belly dancer and joked that an authentic Middle Eastern belly dancer would wear a burqa. Hours later, I saw several women wearing very low-cut shirts. I actually warned one of them that her right breast was threatening to escape its minimum-security prison. She thanked me and adjusted her display levels. In my memory the red of her tank top arrests my vision. It seems bad user-interface design to make a tank top that can't hold in a woman's chest, but the tank top does implement good UI for the rest of us; we understand and quickly process the wearer's self-labeling as sexually available.
When I read What They Did to Princess Paragon, before anyone had ever told me I was gorgeous, I agreed with one character's argument that Amazonian superheroines would either go nude for comfort or dress warmly. As a binary-minded pragmatist, I welcome the victory of form over function in women's clothing. But now I also want to attract glances, once in a while, and can clumsily calculate the signals I send in draping different cuts of fabric over my flesh. I know that eros comes from stimulus and mystery, that desire can be like a spark that only catches fire if I act the miser with its kindling.
# 07 Feb 2005, 09:57AM: Tons Of Cocaine: Today I decided that I should start every workday with the Evolution Control Committee.
# 07 Feb 2005, 02:13PM: Don't Wish For A World Without Zinc:
Life Lessons in Literature by Margaret Berry makes me happy.
I feel mildly ill so I went to Whole Foods and got a pharmacy's worth of placebos and symptom reducers. I got slippery elm lozenges, echinacea-zinc lozenges, Emer'gen-C, and Vitamin C-licorice root herbal tea. Surprisingly, only the tea carries the "These statements have not been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration" disclaimer.
Whole Foods doesn't carry Airborne, Sarah's panacea. I suspect snobbery or a vendetta.
# 07 Feb 2005, 03:12PM: So What If It's In Kenya: I see from the Apple.com trailers site that I can expect Duma to come out soon. It should be about the Russian parliament, but it is not!
# 08 Feb 2005, 12:32PM: Science!:
Consumer Reports has put out a compare-and-contrast report on the various types of contraceptives on the market today. If you are in a committed, monogamous relationship and you want to prevent pregnancy but don't have to worry about sexually transmitted diseases, you have a plethora of options!
It is kind of weird that we still don't know why the copper IUD works.
# 09 Feb 2005, 02:55PM: My Folksonomic Tag For 43 Things: Deceivers:
My colleague Katharine Mieszkowski wrote about folksonomies a few days ago. She mentioned the group goal-setting site 43 Things. A reader told her to look into the relationship between 43 Things and Amazon.com, a huge company with a big interest in collecting personal data. She wrote up her findings: the 43 Things site did not mention anywhere the fact that Amazon is the only investor in "The Robot Co-op", which produces 43 Things. Pretty misleading.
Check out their privacy policy. "Unlikely"? Again, misleading.
Anyway, today I see the Robot Co-op has blogged about their relationship with Amazon and has called the Salon article a distortion. How in the world is the article a distortion? First they start making a deal with Amazon. Then they launch their site that doesn't mention Amazon at all. Then they blame Salon for the article that they won't even link to (maybe because it has an embarrassing quote from a Robot Co-op officer: "Nobody's supposed to know that"), and say the Salon article distorts the story. Who's doing the deceiving and distorting here?
Business Transfers: As we continue to develop our business, we might sell or buy additional services or business units. In such transactions, user information generally is one of the transferred business assets but remains subject to the promises made in any pre-existing Privacy Notice (unless, of course, the user consents otherwise). Also, in the unlikely event that 43things.com or The Robot Co-op, Inc., or substantially all of its assets are acquired, user information will of course be one of the transferred assets.
# 14 Feb 2005, 11:15AM: Salad Days:
Tonight I am going to a Jonathan Richman concert with a male friend while Leonard works on an Ultra Secret Project. This is in keeping with the "February 14th is just another day" philosophy I have held o these many years.
Leonard gave me a beet, arugula, and chevre salad to eat today. One of the pieces of beet is carved into a heart. This makes me gibber and moon. February 14th is indeed just another day; he does things as sweet as that ALL THE TIME! Leonard, thank you.
A fun Valentine's Day musing from Ze Frank.
# 15 Feb 2005, 07:53AM: Recommendation:
Last night Eric and I saw Jonathan Richman and Dengue Fever at the Rickshaw Stop. Jonathan Richman was vulnerable and wacky and touching as always, and made an endearing joke about stars. He played songs from his new album, I think, and each song lasted perhaps ten minutes. Lots of riffing and grabbing of percussion instruments. He loves the jingle bells.
Dengue Fever and the Rickshaw Stop are more awesome than an opening act and a venue have any right to be. Dengue Fever showcases a Cambodian woman singing in her native tongue to highly rockin' rock/pop. There's a sax! And an organ! And sometimes a flute! And the Rickshaw Stop is only a short walk from Van Ness Muni station, and features a friendly staff, three floors of comfy chairs and couches, and actual food! Like soba noodles!
Dengue Fever and Jonathan Richman play the Rickshaw Stop tonight and tomorrow (the 16th) and I urge you to go.
# 16 Feb 2005, 01:04PM: The World Renowned New York City Public Library:
"The public library? Are you insane?"
Sumana: http://www.salon.com/mwt/col/tenn/2005/02/16/off_the_rails/index.html
Nandini: what did you think of the advice he gave?
Sumana: I thought it inspiring, witty, and incisive
Sumana: unless you did not
Sumana: in which case it was wildly off-base and likely to send the advice-requester into spirals of turmoil
# 20 Feb 2005, 04:44PM: You Can't Fire Me, I'm Water:
Via Leonard, a bunch of jokes. Speaking of jokes, I'm seeing Will Franken on Wednesday at 8 at the Marsh on Valencia here in San Francisco. I urge you to come for his new one-man show.
Tonight some friends and I will possibly go to The Make-Out Room, also in the Mission, to watch other people dressed up as Presidents, First Ladies, and assassins for a Little Fuzzy concert there. Evidently Little Fuzzy is like an early They Might Be Giants but less lyrically gimmicky? I don't know. If we end up there it will be after a dinner and a show at the Hotel Rex -- the show being, of course, "I Look Like an Egg, But I Identify As A Cookie," which Heather has just extended through March.
# 25 Feb 2005, 12:03PM: I Relish The Experience:
Salon's office has moved to Rincon Center near the Embarcadero, nearer the northeastern tip of San Francisco. My commute has therefore lengthened slightly, but I get an obscure pleasure out of maximizing my usage of the BART/Muni FastPass. [The FastPass covers all transit between Balboa Park and Embarcadero stations (the southernmost and northernmost BART stations within the city of SF).]
One Rincon Center hosts about twenty restaurants in its food court, and the Mexican and Thai places are surprisingly good. There's also a hot dog place downstairs, which surprised me by offering a vegetarian dog. I've now eaten there three times in the past week, including for breakfast today. There's nowhere else in the Center to get vegetarian protein (eggs or something) at ten in the morning. Also, I can pretend I am at a baseball game.
# 25 Feb 2005, 04:12PM: CJ Cregg Is Nicer: Jokes from the press gaggle. The White House reporter pool and White House press secretary possibly like each other but also feel very bitter about their relationship.
# 28 Feb 2005, 12:47PM: Call Me Frederick W. Taylor:
I use an RSS aggregator to keep track of the weblogs I read. The aggregator updates once per day and I read stuff it's cached throughout the day when taking breaks from work. Somehow this makes me feel as though I don't need to "catch up" on the blogs because something else is doing it for me.
I use headphones to listen to radio streamed over the Internet. My favorite stations: KXPR, KSCU, KZSU, KEXP, and TurnUpTheSka.com. The music distracts the part of my brain that hates repetitive labor.
I rigged a SQL query to find out how many help requests I've answered that day. The more I've answered, the more proud I feel!
My e-mail client checks for mail only once an hour. That way spam doesn't constantly interrupt my work but I receive important messages within a reasonable period.
Rincon Center makes it easy for me to make up little tasks to perform as breaks from my normal work. I can go downstairs to buy special stamps from the philately room of the post office, or to buy the BART/Muni FastPass from the giftshop.
# 01 Mar 2005, 03:09PM: Presences And Absences In The Sundries Store Downstairs:
The store sells: Choco Leibniz cookies, pantyhose, liquorice allsorts [sic], and blank audiocassette tapes.
The store does not sell: Red Hots candies, Red Herring magazine, or any porn that I can see (that last despite a handwritten sign prohibiting the opening and reading of such magazines while in the store).
# 02 Mar 2005, 09:08AM: Not Just Simple Interest:
Last night I finished watching The Secret History Of The Credit Card, another great Frontline show. I am going to look up my credit score by getting a free credit report, and investigate credit unions that don't suddenly raise interest rates or fees on their customers for no good reason (unlike most issuers).
I worry about the innumeracy of my fellow Americans. Remember the magic of compound interest from math class? Remember the graph that makes it look so neat to save money and so scary to borrow? Too many people have forgotten it, or never learned.
I can't post about usury without pointing out Daniel Davies on Ezra Pound on usury.
It is absolutely horrible to be deep enough in debt that you worry about it, and this simple truth about modern life is one which is not mentioned anything like often enough. One of the consequences of having a social relation of debt is that it creates fear and worry in the lives of debtors, and this is a cost which ought to be set against the benefits of an expanding credit-based economy, and to be minimised as far as possible. Specifically, although loan sharks provide a valuable service to the poor, they often do so in an extremely destructive way, and they should be regulated as tightly as possible; also, the bankruptcy law for individuals should be easy and free of stigma. Loan sharks seek out poor neighbourhoods; they don't create them, and the fact that extremely poor people are nevertheless prepared to pay extortionate prices for the ability to move consumption around in time just confirms what a great thing it is to have access to debt...
# 03 Mar 2005, 11:43PM: Thousands Of Things!: Family, job, friends, comedy, food, aaaah! Thousands of neat things happened today! Must sleep and process!
# 04 Mar 2005, 12:11PM: Great Deals On Indulgences:
I'm obsessed with religion (Christianity specifically) and money (taxes and loans specifically). In reference to the latter:
Credit unions don't have a huge incentive to screw over their member/owner/customers. Therefore, you might consider joining one and getting your credit through it instead of using a for-profit corporation whose shareholders care about profit above all else. In San Francisco, any resident can join The San Francisco Federal Credit Union or The San Francisco Fire Credit Union.
Speaking of great deals, Amtrak is discounting its LA-Chicago line by 70% this week. Lawrence, Kansas is on that line! Also, 25% off Coast Starlight rides (the LA-Seattle line).
# 06 Mar 2005, 10:38PM: More On Usury, & Eric And Dylan As Shylocks:
I have not yet seen the new Merchant of Venice movie. While considering watching it, I came across an essay on Shylock.
In Shylock's final scene, Shakespeare had him act out another stereotype: a ritual murder. Of course, there is no mention in the play that Shylock would use Antonio's blood in any religious ritual. But the audience would have immediately associated the stage action with the myth. Shakespeare seemed to be giving his audience exactly what they expect from a stage Jew. In Portia, the audience got the means to stop the ritual murder because she would not let the Jew shed one drop of Christian blood. The text specifically says "Christian," reinforcing the "blood libel" legends....
....The Magna Carta, the basis for English constitutional law, is itself a testament to the growing unpopularity of Jewish money-lending activities. Two clauses in the 1215 document state that if a debtor dies before his debt is paid, neither his heir nor his widow will be responsible for repaying the debt....
# 06 Mar 2005, 11:00PM: Movies:
I got to see Bride and Prejudice recently, as well as Hitch.
B&P was worth watching, but had some truly "whaaaa?" badness. Many of the songs are in English and sound stupid. Due to a charisma deficit and a lack of singing, the male lead doesn't really convince us of why the female lead should love him. The movie contains a tiny bit of class discussion, but the servants are completely ignored! But I'm Indian-American, so I had to watch, and I did enjoy it. Also, you will laugh at how Rai twists the famous first line of Austen's Pride and Prejudice, and non-Indians dancing in Bollywood style = funny.
Hitch is unfortunately not about Christopher Hitchens. It is a very capable Will Smith vehicle and made me laugh and say "awwww". Smith can pull off melodrama that others couldn't, and I found the dialogue and most of the plot devices quite acceptable. Recommended.
Oh, and I got to show Leonard Office Space today. Office Space speaks to an essential truth about knowledge work and the management of corporations. So does The Matrix, which I will probably never get Leonard to see. You'd think I'm playing Airplane with the spoon full of peas.
# 06 Mar 2005, 11:11PM: Don't Get Me Started On The SFO Post Office That's Open 18 Hours A Day Including Sundays:
My father, a civil engineer and Hindu priest, and my mother, a homemaker with a master's in literature, founded Amerikannada together. It was a family affair from the beginning. My parents solicited articles from their friends, fellow immigrants from India's Karnataka state. They all spoke Kannada, a language with a rich heritage that my parents wanted to keep alive in the American diaspora. Hence the name. The logo featured a griffin-like creature, half-lion, half-bald eagle.
As my parents processed subscriptions, wrote, and edited, my sister and I stapled, stamped, glued, and sealed bits of paper in languages we couldn't quite yet read. We used the magical bulk-mail stickers, red and orange and green with single-letter codes, and piled envelopes into burlap sacks and plastic bins for the frequent trips to the post office.
It was always my Dad who took the Amerikannada mail to the post office. He was strong in those days, heaving the great bags of mail like an Indian Santa Claus alongside the blue-uniformed workers on the loading dock, the part of the post office most people never use or even see. My sister and I came along, not to help -- how could we? -- but to keep my Dad company.
The magazine died. The Internet entered our lives. My father grew frail. I never saw the bulk stickers again; companies now print barcodes on envelopes for presorting.
Salon moved into Rincon Center in February. I've discovered a post office downstairs. I think my coworkers don't entirely share my glee. Sure, it is convenient for changing one's address and for sending packages. But the most exciting part is the tiny philately department that sells the special collector's stamps. I thought it was a museum at first, since the displays take up so much of the room. I saw stamps of odd denominations, strange shapes, spare designs and colorful ones, and even collector's stamps that are not valid for postage.
A wizened collector stood at the counter, asking for a few rows of a Reagan and a panel of sparrows. He and the seller spoke in code, in mantras, in reverence for these stickers that mean more than simply payment for the conveyance of an envelope.
The next time my Dad comes to SF, I want to take him to the philately room. Maybe they'll have a lion stamp somewhere that I can smoosh together with an eagle stamp. He always did want me to take over the magazine.
# 08 Mar 2005, 04:18PM: The Cloth Pouch Is Really Nice, Possibly The Femininest Thing I Own:
I've updated my guide to menstruation products. Excerpt: ...I visited a vegetarian expo and got to buy a few hundred GoodFriend
Herbs Sanitary Pads from Good
Friend Biotech at a wholesale price. I approve. They smell nice, but not in an artificial way, even after they are soaked with menstrual blood, and I figure the mint and whatnot can't hurt. You won't see the pads on their site but you can order them via mail, and you'll get a bulk discount even if you're not a distributor or retailer. Disclaimer: at least a few people think GoodFriend pads smell "like dirt", or at least weird.
The brown rubber Keeper now has a white silicone sister, the DivaCup. I haven't used the latter; here's a
compare-and-contrast....
# 08 Mar 2005, 04:26PM: Best Email Opening Ever:
Dear Sumana
Anyone as prompt as you are will surely go to heaven.
# 08 Mar 2005, 04:31PM: More Theology Comedy:
I've never seen Dr. Who and yet all references to Daleks crack me up. Also Triffids.
He'll say it for all of us.
Calling Steve Schultz: this one mentions Ultraman!
# 09 Mar 2005, 02:45PM: Nerdcore Hop: The Metreon at 4th and Mission in San Francisco has a Dance Dance Revolution machine in an arcade on the theater floor. The machine now runs DDR workalike software called "In The Groove" and most of the songs are in English. Today I got to dance to MC Frontalot's "Which MC Was That?".
# 11 Mar 2005, 10:51AM: "Sumana" Hasn't Yet Cracked The US Top Thousand:
The Baby Name Wizard is a neat site about baby names. If you can view Java stuff in your browser, look at the Baby Name Wizard Name Voyager, which shows you the relative popularity of names in the US in the twentieth century (as long as the names were in the top thousand). Some observations:
People are naming their kids "Genesis". Should this be a boy name or a girl name? How about "Jaeden"? Evidently "Jaeden" is male, while Leonard opines that "Jaeden" "is a name for a Trill." There were quite a few "Deanna"s in the '80s and '90s.
People are naming their sons "Xander" and "Logan". People are naming their daughters and sons "Diamond". (There used to be men named "Pearl" but women have pretty effectively claimed that ground for our own. "Loren" also used to be male and is now female.)
"Rosemary" is sort of down but "Sage" is way up.
"Otis" has been slowly declining for a century.
"Grace" and "Hope" are more popular, which is too bad because I used to like them. Now I won't want to use them if I have kids, and I'll associate them with mewling brats.
"Thalia"??? "Thyra"????
"Porter" and "Portia" have alternated in popularity.
"Scott", "Pearl", "Erin", "Carlton", and "Petra" are out of fashion. "Fern" and "Florence" are nice and unpopular. "Basil", "Douglas", and "Dorothy" are down. "Lois" is on the wane.
"Horace", "Hortense", and "Columbus" have dropped out of the top thousand. Leonard and I both like "Horace" - maybe it's the connection to the old-school writer. There were a bunch of "Cicero"s 100 years ago. "Homer" dive-bombed in the '80s; "Virgil" died later. There were a lot more female "Vergie"s than male "Vergil"s.
I noticed that there are a lot more Josefs than there used to be. Leonard decided that this is "because Stalin is hot, hot, hot."
I noticed that people are naming their kids "Chasity" [sic]. Leonard:
"They are naming their kids that to get around spam filters."
Awww, no one is naming their little boy "Columbus" anymore.
Who named their kids "Buddy" en masse in the '30s? We think of "Buddy" as a nickname but back then it was a real name.
There is a big spike of "Kobe"s and "Shaquille"s recently.
MAGNUS! RODERICK! STANLEY!
# 11 Mar 2005, 11:09AM: Or Possibly Joke-hovah: Today's a really unusually wonderful day, weatherwise, in San Francisco. It just calls out for an earthquake from Jerkhovah. Leonard: "I'm still God, and I hate you!"
# 11 Mar 2005, 03:48PM: Question Marks:
Unitarian Universalist jokes and a Satanism joke: "Satanism seems to be an elaborate prank designed to annoy Christians while having some good parties ... rather than a system one could practically live by."
The classics AND contemporary media sometimes show people doing immoral things, and sometimes we see that these actions lead to their downfall. Kristen, you ask why certain books become classics, and whether classics that portray immoral behavior are smut. I've never understood what smut is. I think smut would be pornography that didn't care about a story or characters. The classics care about story.
Literature explores different ways of being human, as my old English teacher said. I realized, after reading George Eliot's classic Middlemarch and finding in Rosamond's character a reflection of myself, that I should be more emotionally independent and not a self-important parasite like her. But that's not because the story punishes her. It's because Eliot describes Rosamond so precisely, wittily, and devastatingly that I wince at recognizing myself.
And TV shows have taught me stuff, too. Sitcoms teach me that lying and hiding stuff never works; if I'm straightforward and honest with people, my life gets a lot easier. The elegant plot structures and wordplay I remember from Seinfeld (probably a classic) and Mad About You taught me about art before I ever read Fitzgerald.
I'd argue that the movie The Matrix is a classic; if anyone wants me to expand on that, shoot me an e-mail.
Compare-and-contrast: the CAPAlert guy who marks a movie down for portraying sin, even if the movie shows the sinner punished for his sin. His justification is that the very portrayal of the sin might influence a child who had not previously considered that sin. I'm not certain there are any edifying stories that don't depict bad behavior; there has to be a Goofus to make Gallant look good.
In our everyday lives, sometimes good things happen to bad people and vice versa. So morality plays for children will have to be somewhat unrealistic, and stories for adults, aiming to recreate the familiar, will depict these dismaying outcomes. (I hesitate to say the word "unrealistic." I've just read C.S. Lewis's Screwtape Letters, and his scorning comments on the secular world's use of the word "real" to mean "most unpleasant, whether material or notional" make the word "real" stick in my throat. What a funny, disorienting, doubly-directing book, Lewis's Christian edifications feinting behind the Devil's decreasingly convincing instructions.)
Last night I saw Camus's The Just, a hundred-year-old play about terrorists aiming to overthrow the Tsarist Russian state. [Spoilers ahead.] In the end, only one of them dies, but one goes mad. We as adults watching the play know that none of these people comes to a happy end and Russia never gets free, but within the play there's very little explicit punishment for the plotting and murdering. [End of spoilers.] Does that make the play immoral? I really doubt The Just encourages anyone to become a terrorist.
But the main point of your post, Kristen, was about teaching ourselves to act responsibly and accountably. If I could change one thing about the way my parents raised me, I'd work on that very aspect of my rearing. If they'd let me make little choices and suffer the consequences of choosing wrongly, I'd have been more prepared for the stormy ocean of adult life. I think.
# 14 Mar 2005, 10:35AM: Who Would Need To Say "AOL" To Describe E-Mail?: Two-person Taboo is a relaxing game in improving communication skills and revealing implicit assumptions. Last night, I tried to describe "Denzel Washington" to Leonard by saying, "This is an African-American man who gets paid to pretend things that are lies." His guess: Armstrong Williams.
# 15 Mar 2005, 04:44PM: A Round Of Music:
When I'm turning off my computer at home, and I type "poweroff", I sing
"Pow-Pow-Poweroff," like in the old TV ad for "Power Wheels" (a child-sized car).
Susanna gave Leonard and me macadamia nut oil for Christmas. Thank you, Susie! The name of the Nature's Way macadamia nut oil is "MacNut Oil." Leonard and I sing it to the tune of the phrase "Uptown Girl" in the eponymous song by Billy Joel.
Recently I got to watch a bit of The World Of Chemistry, starring Nobel Laureate Roald Hoffman. It has very energetic music over the opening credits and Leonard is quite enamored of it.
# 16 Mar 2005, 02:46PM: People Cleaving To Each Other: Man, all these people are getting married. A coworker, Andrew and Claudia, Joshua Micah Marshall even. This is following a small spate of weddings by Salon workers over the past six months. It's pretty unnerving.
# 17 Mar 2005, 02:54PM: The Summer Founders And The Sunshine Patriots: If you have ever considered founding a startup company, Paul Graham says that now's the time and he's here to help.
# 17 Mar 2005, 03:01PM: Declaring The Pennies On And The Planks In My Eyes:
I see that you can e-file for free but I find paper reassuring. My 2004 taxes are complicated enough that I'd prefer the extra reassurance of an accountant. Anyone know a California CPA who'd like my custom?
The Beatles' Taxman has some kinship with, and a mashup with, the theme from Batman.
# 17 Mar 2005, 05:44PM: Wheee:
In a few minutes, Unix will reach a meaningless milestone: the number of seconds since it started will be a bunch of 1s in a row. If you have access to a command line,
might work, as might
perl -e 'print time, "\n";'
date "+%s"
to excite your sense of wonder.
# 18 Mar 2005, 02:31PM: Fame, I Want To Live Forever:
Neat! Heather Gold has extended her one-woman show through April. If you'd like to go, let me know and I'll try to hook you up.
Heather's site now includes a QuickTime trailer, featuring my disembodied voice introducing Heather in the first half-second.
# 20 Mar 2005, 10:07PM: And Of Course "Arrested Development" Blew My Mind:
Through the magic in KEXP's internet stream, I've discovered Clem Snide's music and intend to seek more of it.
A full weekend. I met Joel Spolsky at his publisher's party (an Apress rep begged us to blog the party for no good reason I could tell), possibly hooked up an acquaintance with a new job, went to the zoo with Eric (the flamingos did Cleese-esque silly walks and a koala pooped upon noticing us), and watched 2001: A Space Odyssey, Dr. Strangelove, and about ten minutes of Zardoz with Claudia and Andrew. I'd never seen any of these films before, although I think my ex adored Zardoz.
I'm not sure whether I'm more amused at the flamingos or at my own ability to flip an omelet in midair, which I discovered this morning.
Gotta get up early to do work I should have done over the weekend! If one of those items pans out, I will have good news to tell you all soon, and will need to throw a party.
# 21 Mar 2005, 07:51AM: Reverse Foodies: If you have a dietary restriction of any sort, or if you often host parties including people who do, please let me know so I can ask you a few questions. I'm going to write an article about vegetarians, vegans, and people who keep kosher or halal or have food allergies, and their effect on hospitality.
# 21 Mar 2005, 09:43AM: gH:
When dismayed, we often say "Gah." If I'm quite dismayed, I'll say "Gaah" or even "Gaaaahhhh!". But how can we quantify our dismay more precisely and accurately?
gH is a measuring tool for dismay. Its scale is akin to the pH scale of alkalinity and acidity.
Yes, a typo in an instant messaging conversation inspired this model. Coleridge only wishes he was on AIM.7 = no dismay.
0 = dismay at murder, rape, and other such awful, barbaric behavior.
14 = dismay at Precious Moments figurines and other such sappy glurge.
# 21 Mar 2005, 02:50PM: Frist Post:
Leonard and I used to think Bill Frist was a curiosity, and I once flipped through his disaster-prep how-to book, When Every Moment Counts: What You Need to Know About Bioterrorism from the Senate's Only Doctor. Now, as Amy Sullivan points out, "Now that Tom Coburn is the junior senator from Oklahoma, Frist is merely the Senate's only not insane physician."
I harbor a deep and unreasoning affection for the nerdy pun in this post's title.
# 21 Mar 2005, 03:09PM: Fannishness: Eeeee! Aishwarya Rai in Oakland!
# 22 Mar 2005, 10:14AM: We All Fall Down:
"A woman's battle for the soul of Islam" and "A 'virtuous pagan' looks at the priesthood" make it seem that every week Salon interviews an interesting woman who's thinking about Abrahamic (Judeo-Christian-Muslim) faith. I think that isn't true, but should be.
Emily Proctor quotes an Indianapolis bishop as saying, "Of course the church messes up. We have to mess up or else we would have to believe the Inquisition was a good thing." I love seeing officials of organized religion admit fallibility. Religious officials as a group tend to emphasize obedience and belief too much for my taste. For example, Bill Keller of LivePrayer will say that he's an imperfect servant of the Lord and that we're all depraved, sinful, and far from the mind of God, which rather makes me wonder why I should listen to him in particular when he tells me that he knows what the Lord wants from us. (His usual defense: circular arguments involving the Bible.)
I think it's a good thing that there is no one Pope governing Islam. Asra Nomani's local mosque isn't being very flexible (and ShaBot would not approve), but Islam as a whole can be. Witness the Spanish imams' fatwa against bin Laden and Nomani's Muslim Women's Freedom Tour. Maybe a schism is coming. Maybe we'll have Sunni, Shiite, and Nomani Islam. Maybe the new flavor will descend into rigid hierarchy and one of its sects will launch an attack aginst an alien community on Mars. When I speculate about the future of these organized religions, I can't see how they can escape their cycles of schism and fundamentalism.
Geeks say of using "regular expressions" to solve certain computer problems that "now you have two problems." When politicians and religious activists try to solve problems, I feel lucky if they only double them. How do we finally get the bubble of air out from under the wallpaper instead of just moving it from side to side?
# 24 Mar 2005, 01:14PM: No:
Is there a television show that balances trash and wit more perfectly than House?
No, there is not.
# 24 Mar 2005, 01:33PM: Take Care:
San Francisco Chronicle readers and a Salon editor tell their stories of continuing or ending extraordinary care for family members during severe illnesses. I cried.
Death may be slow and gradual for me or it may be a flash of white and pain. In case someone else has to make that awful decision, I need to write up an advance health directive and a durable power of attorney for my sister to use.
# 24 Mar 2005, 01:40PM: Happy Purim!:
I hope those of you who celebrate the Jewish holiday of Purim have a good time. I remember evincing amazement when my freshman-year roommate told me she was supposed to booze till she didn't know good from evil; now that seems completely normal to me. Oh no, I've defined deviancy down!
During some services on the "Jewish Mardi Gras", you get to boo when the rabbi mentions the villain's name. That's pretty awesome.
It is customary to hold carnival-like celebrations on Purim, to perform plays and parodies, and to hold beauty contests. I have heard that the usual prohibitions against cross-dressing are lifted during this holiday, but I am not certain about that.
# 24 Mar 2005, 07:41PM: I New York Kind, I Delaware:
I sit in my room and listen to the cover of "Black Hole Sun" on The Moog Cookbook (think rockin', yet Muzak) while composing a review of Good Catholic Girls by Angela Bonavoglia. This morning some subway musicians brought me to tears with Pachelbel's Canon in D.
But the most significant musical experience of the past week has been obsessively listening to a CD by Lawsuit. Lawsuit was a ska band from Davis, California with awesome lyrics and sound. I discovered the band while driving around Oakland and listening to KALX; an infinitely cool DJ played "Oh Boy!", which is about a couch that yearns for a better life. I obtained some of Lawsuit's other stuff. Leonard absolutely adores "North Dakotachrome" above all other Lawsuit songs and can't listen to any others because he worships that track so. That's reasonable, since "North Dakotachrome" possesses upwards of thirty geography puns as well as a catchy melody. Lawsuit's lead singer died years ago and so there will be no reunions, but you can download the music as MP3s and play the "North Dakotachrome" game. If enough people do this and compile lists of the puns, I might have a contest.
# 25 Mar 2005, 07:49AM: Cole Porter, Genius:
Did Malcolm X get his "Plymouth Rock landed on us!" line from the eponymous song of Anything Goes?
The line in that song that interchanges wrong and right and day and night reminds me of The Communist Manifesto on the conveniently changing morality of every age. "All that is solid melts into air" would totally fit into Anything Goes except I don't know how to make it fit the meter and rhyme scheme.
# 26 Mar 2005, 11:21AM: D-D-D-Doctor House in the House!:
I originally started watching Fox's medical drama House because it stars Hugh Laurie, better known to American audiences as Bertie Wooster in the TV adaptations of P.G. Wodehouse's Jeeves and Wooster stories.
Now I watch it because of Hugh Laurie, because of the character of Dr. House, because of the banter, and because I want to figure out what they are doing with the female characters. So far I'm disappointed; both Cutty and Cameron get defined by their attractiveness and romantic interest in House. Hugh Laurie is indeed pretty attractive as House, and helps me understand why some women fall for jerks. He's like James Spader in The Practice in that way.
I also watch it because it is basically the only drama I can watch with Leonard. The campaign plots on The West Wing cause him unpleasant flashbacks to his time working for Wesley Clark, and Enterprise is in reruns.
I certainly don't watch it for the variety of plots - it's almost as formulaic as Home Improvement was. But that's soothing too.
# 26 Mar 2005, 11:23AM: Fun-To-Say Word Of The Moment:
Atavistic!
This follows Thursday evening's word, hamentashen.
# 27 Mar 2005, 10:42AM: Litigious Fairy-Tale Queens:
From The Fact-Checker's Bible by Sarah Harrison Smith, pgs. 74-75:
Audiotapes of interviews can be a wonderful source [italics in original]. They offer excellent legal protection. In a trial, libel lawyer David Korzenik says, "the factual support for an article needs to be reproducible; tapes are better than notes." He adds, "Everyone thinks they've been misquoted. Most people would sue a mirror for what it shows them in the morning if they could...."
# 28 Mar 2005, 02:09PM: Also, I Put The Caller On Hold And Then Cursed Them:
I bit my own hand as a silent stress relief technique during a bad customer support call today. I must have learned this as a child when my parents did not look kindly upon my shrieks of dismay at some huge injustice.
The tooth marks are gone but I may have some bruises.
# 29 Mar 2005, 11:16AM: And All The Faces Are Female!:
Am still blah from boring work and tech disaster at last night's Egg/Cookie show. Lunch with a friend will help. What would also help would be if the huge faceless organizations that are supposed to get back to me about possible projects that would make my life inordinately cool would, in fact, get back to me. I'm talking to you, [redacted]!
Actually none of these organizations are faceless.
# 01 Apr 2005, 08:27AM: Farewell: Alan Dundes has died. His work helped me understand Indian superstitions and I'm grateful for that, and sad that he is gone.
# 01 Apr 2005, 08:54AM: Core Competency: I was about to take Websnark off my to-read list, and then in his April Fool's entry he made me smile with a self-mocking riff on "Diff'rent Strokes Syndrome". OK, you get another week.
# 01 Apr 2005, 01:32PM: Crate-Building Nuthatch: Do you have the blues? My cure: listen to The Donnas' "Do You Wanna Hit It" and look at Dave Bort's comics.
# 03 Apr 2005, 06:11PM: Kneel-Down Comic: Just got to tell someone the most classic riddle (the Sphinx one about "Four legs in the morning..."). He didn't know the answer.
# 04 Apr 2005, 09:52AM: Salon Music Epiphany:
I just realized how much music Salon Premium members get to download. Not only do they get almost forty songs (MP3s) in the most recent Salon Music Mix and archived December 2004 mix, but they can download a new song (MP3) every weekday with Audiofile (which has an RSS feed), and there's a bunch of archived stuff too, some in MP3 format. True, some of these free downloads are not exclusive to Salon, but Salon selects good tunes to give its members. I don't have the time to scan a billion free song sites and MP3 blogs; Salon performs the filtering.
The standard iTunes price for a song is a dollar, right? Well, Salon Premium costs $35 for a year of membership, so with Audiofile and the Salon Music Mix, the membership pays for itself in a month. You could care not a whit about the writing or the free print mags, and just join Salon Premium for the music! Geeks note: no DRM, either.
# 04 Apr 2005, 04:33PM: Why Not?:
When I die, I want my organs donated. So I put the pink "donor" dot on my ID and told my loved ones about my wishes. But what if they aren't around or I don't have my wallet on me when I die? Also, I hope my loved ones would let me donate my organs, but it's tough to ask just-bereaved people to make that decision. That's why I've also joined the Donate Life California Registry. Most "major" religions support organ, tissue, or blood donation, but Shinto and Gypsy beliefs oppose organ donation.
I found the registry, which starts today, through a story in the Oakland Tribune.
What if my family members are opposed to donation?
Once an individual has made the decision to be an organ and tissue donor, and has joined the Donate Life California Registry, family members cannot override an individual's decision to donate.
# 05 Apr 2005, 10:05AM: Non-Crazy Libertarians?!:
Wow, maybe I should actually start reading Jane Galt. Not only does she make a cogent argument against a certain pro-same-sex-marriage argument, but she also actually recognizes the difference between Libertopia and our current situation!
Update: Seth, I do realize that Ms. Galt's argument is not a libertarian one but a conservative one. I mention "libertarians" and "Libertopia" specifically because she identifies as a libertarian but, in this specific instance, keeps well away from a certain species of fallacy to which naive libertarians are prone. Also, please note that I did not say that she had turned me against same-sex marriage, nor that the argument against which she argues is an argument upon which I base my support for legal recognition of committed same-sex relationships.
# 06 Apr 2005, 05:28PM: Yeah:
On BART I stood next to three speakers of Russian. I understood maybe every fifth word in Russian, but a few specific phrases in English:
Also, just as English speakers say "yeah" instead of "yes," Russian speakers will make the sound "d" instead of saying "da."
# 07 Apr 2005, 05:14AM: Blogger Turns Mainstream Media:
Several weeks ago, I applied for a part-time job copyediting the "Bay Area Living" section for Alameda Newspaper Group (the Oakland Tribune, Hayward Daily Review, et al.). The powers that be liked my writing sample, so they gave me a column instead. My column, "MC Masala," starts today and runs Thursdays in "Bay Area Living."
If anyone were to write a guide it would be him; my father has written more than anyone I know, even the bloggers. He may not be up there with Isaac Asimov, who wrote books landing in nine of the 10 major Dewey Decimal classifications. But compared to him, we're all slouches.
I hope you enjoy it. I'll post a link to the new column every Thursday.
I'VE BEEN ASKING MY DAD, for about 20 years now, for a handbook to being his daughter.
# 07 Apr 2005, 04:37PM: He Is Quite Pleasant:
Just met Tom Brokaw.
Update:
Vinay: i think i told you my favorite tom brokaw story
Vinay: let me retell:
Vinay: after the 2001 terrorist attacks, you may remember how all the news anchors were doing 24 hr shifts
Sumana: yea
Vinay: at one point, tom brokaw (probably sleep-deprived), starts talking about peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and he says "PBJs are always comfort food, especially with M&Ms in them."
Vinay: at which point, they cut to commercial break, and it's brian williams when they return
# 10 Apr 2005, 02:48PM: That Never Fails: I couldn't find Pico, my favorite command-line text editor, on my computer at home. Then Leonard helped me discover that I already had Nano, a free Pico workalike. Now I can use that to write my column! Man, my third column is a mess. Trying valiantly to jerk it into shape. I know! I'll use a heavy-handed gimmick to pull the theme together!
# 10 Apr 2005, 03:25PM: I'm Not Dead(line) Yet: On the minds of some US residents: the not-so-automatic four-month extension for filing federal taxes. California residents can get state-specific information.
# 12 Apr 2005, 10:16PM: The Title Is Much Dirtier Than The Reality: Bookslut needs columnists (check the left-hand sidebar). Many writers who read this journal would be ideal as Bookslut reviewers and columnists. Heck, Bookslut even accepted my review of Good Catholic Girls (the typos aren't mine).
# 13 Apr 2005, 01:26PM: Blissfully Sweating:
I have now turned into one of those people who brings hot sauce to work. Today I splashed a fifth of a bottle of Sontava! habanero hot sauce on my lunch. "This is disputed by some, but the habanero is clearly the hottest pepper easily obtained and regularly consumed, though only by idiots."
I love putting hot sauce on the Trader Joe's soy enchiladas. In fact, when I see or think about the soy enchiladas, my mouth waters in anticipation of the hot sauce. Years ago I found a statue of Pavlov's dog and now I'm a prisoner of hot sauce.
# 13 Apr 2005, 05:22PM: Frickin' Epistemology:
I was worried because my editor at ANG hadn't sent me any revision requests for my April 14th column. Then I found out that she had none. So, either I underestimate my own writing, or my editor's standards are too low. I'll find out tomorrow.
Leonard will tell me something I've written is okay when I worry, and he constantly undervalues wonderful things he's made. Even though it is so five minutes ago to quote Paul Graham, maybe this is applicable: "I've found that people who are great at something are not so much convinced of their own greatness as mystified at why everyone else seems so incompetent."
# 14 Apr 2005, 07:00AM: I Did Not Write The Headline:
Today's MC Masala presents humorous and baffling moments of cross-cultural confusion.
Some anecdotes, then, to amuse and warn you.We remember exceptions. Out of hundreds of BART rides, I remember the two ugly ones. A bit of unexpected praise can carry me for three weeks, as Twain said. And, even though almost no non-Indians do wince-worthy or laughable things when learning my name or ethnicity, there are the few.
# 14 Apr 2005, 12:36PM: Rejected Column Titles: A Selection:
# 16 Apr 2005, 08:24PM: The Presses:
I've scrap-booked my first two columns and am writing the third. People who know about scrapbooking (viz., all of Leonard's relatives) should feel free to email me with advice on preserving newspaper clippings.
The last time I did this was high school. In my high school journalism class, at the end of each semester, we created portfolios of our articles and submitted them for review by real reporters and editors from area newspapers. I snipped out my best news, opinion, feature, and sports articles, plus the one that had changed the most from inception to print, the one I liked the most, and the one I thought was best overall. (I never had enough sports stories.) In an unusual (for high school) move, the teacher did not look over our shoulders to check that we'd fulfilled our breadth requirements before we turned them in. He held us responsible for checking them ourselves.
The whole process, like much of that class, disoriented me. I was good at memorizing and regurgitating facts and formulae, or at performing very structured and supervised tasks. But at the newspaper I had to take the initiative and solve my problems independently. My teacher was treating us like adults, but I was still a kid. I had no idea how to do that, so I floundered and felt painfully lost for most of the four years I spent on there. (Oh yeah, and my classmates made fun of me all the time. Wow, that hurt so much at the time and I haven't thought about it in years.)
I was so afraid of failure. And yet I was completely fine with running for class president and getting booed by thousands of my classmates. I basically have no idea what was going on in my head. I wonder what I'll think of Sumana 2005 in a few years.
# 17 Apr 2005, 12:06PM: Indian-Style Popcorn:
Last night Leonard showed me Goodbye, Lenin!, a funny and touching film about deception, history, and idealism. (Finding a local and independent video place within walking distance has done wonders for our movie-watching.) I'd found my mother's recipe for Indian-style popcorn while searching for tax documentation, so I enjoyed a nostalgia-evoking treat while watching a movie about a lost world.
INDIAN-STYLE POPCORN
Use an air-popper (or the microwave-and-paper-bag method) to pop kernels of popcorn. Use about half a cup of kernels. Discard the unpopped kernels that inevitably make their way into the popcorn.
In a big pot, heat several tablespoons of oil thoroughly but not to boiling. Add a not-quite-heaping teaspoon of cumin seeds, known as jeera in Indian cookery. Shut off the heat. Add a heaping teaspoon of curry powder, also known as rasam powder or saurin puddi. Optional: add a quarter-teaspoon of
extra turmeric if you want a really bright color on the spiced popcorn.
Shake or stir the spices in the oil. When you can really smell them, mix the popped popcorn with the heated oil, shaking and stirring. Add
a not-quite-heaping teaspoon of sugar and salt to taste.
For best results, pour the popcorn and scrape the hot spicy oil into a paper bag and shake vigorously. Serve while still hot. Makes enough for one person to munch throughout one movie.
# 17 Apr 2005, 12:38PM: Questions To Ask Potential Flatmates:
Someone asked me for advice on living with a flatmate or roommate. What questions should one ask in advance to ferret out and defuse potential problems? I have a list. It's huge. Unfortunately, some questions require metacognition in the interviewee.
# 18 Apr 2005, 10:52AM: Berkeley Day:
Yesterday I got to see some Berkeley friends, a species that dwindles a little slower than that of unmarried friends.
I helped the Open Computing Facility install a couch. Alexei introduced me to some friends and we talked about religion. Alice and Steve and I talked about relationship issues and air-quotes. Do the British just use one finger instead of two for air-quotes?
The Jamba Juice category of drinks that have especially healthful effects is "Functional Flavors."
# 19 Apr 2005, 09:11AM: Reruns: At 1000 Howard Street, Unit B, near the intersection of Sixth and Howard streets in downtown San Francisco, there is a used clothing store known variously as Rerun, Re-run, Reruns, and Re-runs. Its actual name is Reruns and every item in its stock sells for a dollar (plus tax). Yesterday I visited, bought a shirt and two pairs of pants, and enjoyed excellent customer service, a huge inventory and low, low prices. Recommended!
# 19 Apr 2005, 09:13AM: "obsessed with clocks" - SO CUTE:
I actually believe that people frequently ask these questions.
There are people in the word who abbreviate "collaboration" as "collabo"?! Also, yes, if your paragraph is more than a page long, it is no longer a paragraph. It is a monster.
# 19 Apr 2005, 10:07AM: A Cappella Clips: I used to love listening to DeCadence when I went to UC Berkeley. Now I can buy albums or download MP3s of song clips on their site! Man, I wish I could get a recording of "Pop Nightmare," their medley of something like twelve then-popular songs. It was transcendent.
# 19 Apr 2005, 11:18PM: Good Luck With It: Come see Will Franken tomorrow night at the Marsh.
# 21 Apr 2005, 09:04AM: Reshma Won't Like This:
In today's MC Masala I compare "Namaste America" with "Showbiz India" and "India Waves" and mock my own inability to speak Hindi.
Enjoy!"Showbiz India" also features movie reviews, notices of the week's DVD releases and yet more gossip. Evidently every South Asian except me waits with bated breath for news about Shahrukh Khan's next project. (You may remember Khan from every Bollywood movie since 1996.)
# 21 Apr 2005, 09:46AM: Chagrin:
I used to find the ads for St. Mary's emergency room playful. The billboards show a person about to have a comical accident, and promise emergency room care within thirty minutes. These promises hurt health care workers.
Another source of chagrin: a critic took a column about Indian media as evidence that all I write about is "not being white." Wow! I had no idea that there was nothing more to my ethnicity and culture than a lack of whiteness! This explains so much! Also, all feminists have penis envy!
I can understand a person getting sick of the Amy Tan stuff - "oh, I am so torn and bicultural" over and over gets old. So I started out with those columns, and now I'm pausing those for TV reviews ("service journalism") and other light material. For a person to mistake "Bollywood shows you might enjoy" for "The Mistress Woman Warrior Joy Luck Spices Club" betrays a stunning lapse in cognition.
Oh yeah. The main chagrin: that I let her get to me before realizing her complaint was [expletive denoting worthless matter].
# 26 Apr 2005, 10:24PM: Batteries It Is: The ugly little cubes that plug into a power outlet and recharge a phone or power a mobile cassette recorder or what have you have a special name. The hip call them "wall warts." Tonight I am upending the house in search of the wall wart for my tape recorder. Any wart supplying 3 volts of direct current would suffice. I found 4.5V, 15V, 3.7V, all sorts of mutually incompatible adapters instead. Standards, people!
# 28 Apr 2005, 08:51AM: Nandini Is Not Actually Indianer-Than-Thou:
Today's MC Masala references the Indians-drive-Toyota-Corollas stereotype. (Should the plural be "Toyotas Corolla"?) There's a funny and sad moment in Spellbound when a spelling bee contestant who has never heard the word "corollary" wonders whether the word origin has "Corolla" in it.
For future use: The Sideshow reminded me of tips to make prose look less amateurish.
Anyway. Excerpt from today's column: Enjoy.
"I don't care" helps until you graduate from high school, go to a job or college, and realize that caring is the engine that keeps you going when no one is forcing you to do what he or she wants.
# 30 Apr 2005, 08:38AM: Spoiler: Starring Scott Bakula: I'm writing an article or two for Salon about the end of Star Trek: Enterprise. Paramount sent me plot spoilers for all the remaining episodes, as well as a rough-cut DVD of the final two-parter. I lorded this over my colleagues at Salon. Well, my colleagues in the production/engineering department. I think no one in editorial gives a hoot about Star Trek.
# 01 May 2005, 09:56PM: Made Me Laugh And Sniffle: Saw the Hitchhiker's Guide movie and liked it far more than I thought I would! I especially understood Zaphod, Trillian, and Adams's joyful atheism more than I ever had before. Recommended.
# 02 May 2005, 02:50PM: Argh: "Status." The word means "situation" or "state of affairs." When I ask you about the status of a person's membership, just consider for half a second what I might mean by that! Valid answers would be "expired" or "valid" or "paid-up" or "current" or "invalid" or "eligible for renewal" or something like that. This is not rocket science! This is not postmodern literary theory jargon! Argh!
# 03 May 2005, 09:47PM: "Illusions, Dad! You don't have time for my illusions!": Leonard bought the Arrested Development DVD and we can't stop watching it. The early episodes, even ones I've seen over and over, still make me laugh. Thanks, Leonard.
# 03 May 2005, 10:19PM: On Removing Sweeping Generalizations:
Me to an editor today:
"I know this paragraph makes me sound arrogant. But I'm right!"
Pause.
"Kidding!"
# 04 May 2005, 09:02AM: This One Goes In the "Comedy" And "Religion" Categories: While in Utah, I got to meet many of Leonard's relatives, including the Omans. I got to tell them that I really enjoy Nate's posts on Times And Seasons. Today I read just such an example.
# 04 May 2005, 12:15PM: The Sandman Knows Russian: I discovered a few Russian-language internet radio stations. At first it was nice to listen to Russian again and pick out words I understood. Then I had a nightmare about trying to catch a plane out of St. Petersburg.
# 04 May 2005, 12:36PM: Bookishness:
At Sam Weller's bookstore in Salt Lake City, as I bought books to read on the train ride back home, I considered getting a copy of Pilgrim's Progress to read for the first time. Then I realized that I'd want a copy of the Bible next to me so I'd get all the references. Like many US public school graduates, I don't know nearly enough about the Bible to get all the Biblical references in great works of literature. Mr. Hatch in American Literature ameliorated that but not enough. I was too dumb to understand what he was trying to do and how hamstrung he was.
I bought and read Twain's hilarious Roughing It, which I enjoyed for the whole ride. Am now reading Margaret Atwood's Orxy and Crake, which takes about three paragraphs to get going. My review of Douglas Coupland's new book is up at Bookslut.
# 05 May 2005, 07:20AM: Diversity Daze:
My column this week complains about insipid, superficial celebrations of diversity, and suggests possibly offensive measures that would help.
If you don't know why square dancing started, or the social implications of tie-dyed clothes, or the geographic and economic conditions that led to the invention of hush puppies, then I've entertained your senses of sight and sound and taste, but I've left your mind as empty or full as before.
Yet dance and clothes are but the trappings of a culture, and plates of dumplings are hardly informative. If I square-danced up to you wearing a tie-dyed shirt and offered you a plate of hush puppies, how much would you have learned about American culture?
# 05 May 2005, 09:25AM: Department Store: Hugo Schwyzer reprints a poignant poem by Carl Dennis for the occasion of Mother's Day.
# 05 May 2005, 09:30AM: Another Pleasant Internet Radio Station: EggRadio, which purports to appeal to "Geeks With Taste." Songs and interstitial bits include "Fifty Nifty United States," The Big Lebowski clips, and some sort of Muppet coming-out celebration.
# 06 May 2005, 07:26AM: Oryx & Crake: If you have read Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood, and you believe you understand the ending, please tell me your interpretation. I finished it last night and felt as though my copy were missing two pages. Since this actually happened to me with Gilgamesh it's not TOO farfetched.
# 06 May 2005, 10:20AM: Report A Spam Result: "If your Google search returns a result that you suspect is spam, please let us know using this form....In especially egregious cases, we will remove spammers from our index immediately, so they do not show up in search results at all."
# 08 May 2005, 03:19PM: Uncle Morty's Dub Shack: ImaginAsian TV's Uncle Morty's Dub Shack makes me laugh very, very hard. Think Mystery Science Theater 3000 for kung fu and Bollywood flicks, and only a half hour long. Absolutely worth taping.
# 09 May 2005, 09:44AM: This Morning On Diversity BART: On my left, a woman read the New Testament on a PDA, probably a PalmPilot. On my right, a man with a yarmulke and a prayer shawl on his head strapped tefillin to his arms, prayed quietly, and then removed all his accoutrements and packed them away. He had a tattoo on one arm, which intrigues me, since I thought Orthodox Jews refused tattoos.
# 09 May 2005, 10:24PM: Totally Blah Experience: Remind me to avoid hospitals as though they were the plague, instead of plague-curers who carry their own other plagues, such as antibiotic-resistant staph.
# 10 May 2005, 09:14PM: Day Quality: Today I got to talk to famous people about Star Trek. And Leonard made me dinner and it had pesto in it. And none of the customers I dealt with made me want to commit felonies. So that was good.
# 11 May 2005, 11:01AM: Requires Flash, But Isn't Flashy: The Morning News pointed me to this great explanation of the Social Security reform issue.
# 11 May 2005, 12:56PM: I Don't Miss Econ - Maybe I Took It Wrong: I haven't been reading enough history. Brad DeLong reminds me why I love history - the whys!
# 11 May 2005, 12:59PM: You Should Know That It Sucks: Things You Should Know by A.M. Homes is very, very depressing. So far, every story I've read has felt like a parody of the "nothing happens" New Yorker style of modern fiction. I now completely understand why Dave Eggers put together a book of adventure/mystery/fantasy genre stories as a backlash.
# 11 May 2005, 09:56PM: Am I The Only One?: Leonard used the word "opportunistic" and I immediately thought "infection."
# 12 May 2005, 08:39AM: Mulling The Uses And Abuses Of Fashion:
My column this week has a bunch of Emerson.
Emerson, in my view, backed up my function-over-form lifestyle. I hated to fuss while getting ready in the morning. Why in the world did women waste thousands of dollars and hours per year on clothes, makeup and heels instead of wearing T-shirts, Payless sneakers, and thrift-store slacks? They did it for other people's approval, and I would have no truck with it.
# 14 May 2005, 10:12PM: Homes Update: I finished What You Should Know. The best story in the collection, which mulls Nancy Reagan's day-to-day life caring for Ronald Reagan during his decline, made me weep. Like A.M. Homes's compelling New Yorker article about her adoption and her biological parents, the Reagan story draws on true events. My conclusion: instead of making up premises, stories, or characters, Homes should restrict herself to fictionalizing true stories from the newspaper. Thus, she will be assured of actually having a plot.
# 15 May 2005, 09:34PM: Validation: Will Franken won a "Best Comedian" award from the SF Weekly. Those of us who were fans several months ago get to nod in snobbish pride, while those of you who have foolishly prolonged the Frankenless portion of your existences can make up for lost time on May 26th, when Franken plays the Purple Onion on Columbus.