Sometimes Liz Writes

New blog - Tinfoil Yarmulke

2011-02-19T06:24:00.003-05:00

My current blog is a set of travel essays and ephemera related to my recent propaganda-tour with Birthright Israel and the two months of Middle East travel that followed.

Tinfoil Yarmulke
www.tinfoilyarmulke.tumblr.com

Cheers!

Being Pretty

2010-07-05T02:37:00.000-04:00

(from my Let's Go blog)

This is one of those delicate topics where I’ll have to tread the line between vanity and annoyingly overcompensating humility. But in Italy, I am really pretty.

Save your protestations, loyal friends who will insist that I am pretty at home too. Reserve your judgment, skeptical strangers eyeballing my mugshot. I know what league I’m in at home. And I’ve just been bumped up a notch.

It’s not simply run-of-the-mill flirting I’m talking about. That I could chalk up to Italian men being infinitely more forward than Harvard men. Hell, glaciers are more forward than Harvard men.

No, it’s the freebies that show I’m really punching above my weight. The old men at Trattoria Mario who flagged the waitress to have me seated at their table and were disappointed when I returned with my prettier-by-American-standards girlfriends. My inability to do efficient nightlife research because the free drinks offered at each establishment leave me stumbling door to door like the Prophet Elijah. The museum guard who asked me out minutes after the other guard in the gallery did likewise, sparking a minor controversy regarding docent decency.

I guess it comes from looking sorta Italian, but not quite. My European friends tell me that Jewish looks are “exotic” overseas. This girl from NY never counted her hook nose as an asset before and certainly wouldn’t have expected it to go over any different in a former Axis power, but shows what she knows. Get it, nose/knows? Okay, they still don’t love my Jewish father sense of humor, but I’m working on it.

Last week, I latched on to a couple American guys whose companionship I had to earn the old-fashioned way – jeez, peanut gallery, I mean through mutual interests and bad jokes – and their presence dried up the attention. Honestly, it was a relief to go back to being conspicuous only for the normal reason: talking too loudly.

So it was a shock all over again today when the attention resumed. I stepped under the awning of a restaurant to avoid a sudden downpour, and a man came out of the restaurant to hail a taxi.

“Come with me,” he said. We had not yet exchanged a word.

“What?”

“I am going to my other restaurant by the Duomo. I own this one, and a couple others.”

“Um.”

“Come, we will have cappuccino at the other place, and then we’ll come back here and have lunch.”

See? This does not happen to me at home. And at home I don’t even consider getting in taxis with complete strangers. But I was hungry. And, well, it was raining.

So what the hell. Might as well enjoy it while it lasts. I got in the cab.

Read more: http://www.letsgo.com/article/2567-being-pretty#ixzz17VHgcp7V

The good parts

2010-07-01T02:39:00.000-04:00

(from my Let's Go blog)

You really can't complain about this job. I don't mean that there's nothing to complain about. I'm working 14 hour days, my knees, hips, and back scream in protest every time I force them to walk up and down the city in search of yet another poorly-signposted hotel, and the Renaissance is getting really, really old. I got my complaints.

I mean I literally cannot complain about my job. Because I will get punched in the face.

Metaphorically, that is. No one has yet punched me. But mentioning any of the negatives—the hours, the stress, the loneliness, the physical test—generally results in the reaction you are probably having right now: "Oh, you poooor baby. Are they making you eat too many cannolis? Wah wah, your life is soooo hard."

And they have a point. Because the crappy parts are not nearly so crappy as the awesome parts are awesome. And when you're belting
"O Mio Bambino Caro" in unison in the basement of a tiny Florentine trattoria with a dozen opera students and a half dozen old Italian men, or standing on the balcony of a 12th century hilltop monastery at dawn to watch the sun rise on the city below, this job ain't half bad.

Sphenisciphobia

2010-07-01T02:34:00.000-04:00

(from my Let's Go blog)

I understand now why people are afraid of nuns.

When the lady at the San Gimignano tourist office told me about the convent's dorms, I got my fingers ready to give this find a coveted Let's Go thumbs-up. It took me three visits to actually find a nun at the desk, and a little while longer for her to understand my rote-memorized Italian for "may I have a look around?" Eventually, she waved me upstairs, and I got to see a bit of convent life.

I found a long hallway of empty, sparse dorm rooms adorned with surprisingly tasteful Virgins. Not bad, not bad. I took a different staircase down and emerged in another hall of dorms - these clearly inhabited by persons of the cloth. Outside was a gorgeous stone courtyard with a huge old well, still in operation. I suspected that I had ventured out of bounds, but the place was empty. So I had a poke around.

Now, I am a big fan of trespassing. Sure, sometimes you get yelled at. But sometimes you make a great find. This time, I'd found a fully operational 12th-century Italian convent.

There was a chapel, of course. I bumped my head on the ceiling going in - 12th-century nuns were short - and discovered the entrance to the cloister. The convent is on the edge of San Gimignano, a mountaintop city, and to my amazement, the cloister had a postcard-perfect view of the city center's towers.

Just then the sky rumbled. And before you could say "one Mississippi" a lightning bolt had brightened the dark sky. And as every grade schooler knows, that means the storm is here. I ducked back into the convent by another door, just as a burst of sharp rain came tumbling out of the sky. At this point, I had no idea where in the apparently immense convent I was, but that wasn't going to stop me from continuing my exploration. Thunder shook the walls. A line of elderly nuns passed by in habits, probably to go sing "My Favorite Things" with the Reverend Mother, but that wasn't going to stop me either. Then one of them noticed me.

So, turns out trespassing is less fun when you can't speak the language. Normally, when an enormous old nun asks me what I'm doing, I smile and make up some convincing story, probably flashing one of my several persuasive ID cards for good measure. It worked on the monk at Westminster Abbey who put me on the list for Darwin's birthday party last year. But this nun? This nun questioned me in Italian. And I could respond with nothing better than, "Huh?"

And then I am being dragged - literally dragged, by the arm - through the convent by a very large, very angry nun shouting at me in rapid Italian. I catch words like "privato" and "vietato" but am at a loss to respond, and it doesn't seem like a great time to pull out the press pass. She yanks me all the way to the front gate. With a good shove, I am thrown out of the convent and into the rain.

I meant no offense. Nun: taken.

An open letter to Tuscany regarding the matter of cosplay

2010-06-28T02:35:00.000-04:00

Dear Tuscany,

You have a very proud culture. Your personal identity is closely tied to your regional loyalties. I get it. I mean, I basically grew up in a suburban strip mall, so I don't get it get it. I do empathize. But dear, dear Tuscany, you've taken it too far. It's time for us to have The Talk. The Talk about cosplay.

Now, now. Don't start sputtering about heritage this, tradition that. I have seen far too many grown men in moth-eaten Ren Faire cast-offs this month to buy that line. Clearly, you just do this because you like it. And that's great! More power to you.

But there is a time and a place for every time and place. So here, my Tuscan friends, are some basic rules for anachronistic dress-up time.

Rule #1: You may only dress anachronistically in routine life if the style is from a decade in which Hitchcock made films. Fedoras are hot. Top hats are not.

Exception to Rule #1: Ironic mid-'90s garb.

Rule #2: Attire from decades and centuries not covered by Rule #1 are acceptable on the following occasions:
- Halloween, Carnivale, Purim, etc.
- Theme parties
- Before your 12th birthday

Rule #3: Not all styles work for all people. Perhaps everyone in 1590 wore tights. Well, maybe you should pretend you're in 1570 instead. There's a century for every body type, my Raphaelite friends.

Rule #4: Comic book conventions and Ren Faires. And, specially for you Tuscany, major festivals. I said MAJOR. That means once annually. Comic Con is once a year. The NY Ren Faire is once a year. You can restrain yourselves from parading down the street in pantaloons at least as well as the convention cosplayers, can't you?

Exception to all rules: Waistcoats. Waistcoats are always OK.

Second exception to all rules: Hot chicks. Hot chicks are also always OK.

Italia!

2010-04-27T00:11:00.003-04:00

After procrastinating on it for all of undergrad, I am finally traveling for Let's Go this summer. I will be writing the Tuscany section of Let's Go: Italy 2011. Exciting!

Although the travel guide won't be on shelves til the winter, I'll be officially blogging on the Let's Go website as well - you can find my Italy stories here.

Ciao!

LOST in Translation

2010-04-25T02:40:00.001-04:00

(from my Let's Go blog)

I had a brief moment of panic yesterday. Harvard is forcing me to graduate, again, and I haven't the foggiest idea what I'm doing with my life after Let's Go. But this is not why I panicked.

I panicked because I realized I would be in Italy for the finale of LOST.

This is actually a big deal. What would I do? Where would I watch? With whom would I cheer the improbable success or inevitable disappointment of the finale? I'm not even that big of a LOSTie - I just caught up this fall, marathoning the first five seasons so I could watch the last season with the rest of the world. It’s, like, a cultural moment and stuff, right?

That marathon would be all for naught if I missed the finale, so I began to brainstorm. Maybe there's a LOST fan club in Florence! Maybe I could advertise on Craigslist to find somewhere to watch! Maybe I could hang signs in every hostel to rally the other misplaced LOSTies to storm an internet café!

And then I actually got a little excited. What better excuse to round up random strangers and make them hang out with me? Adventure! I began to tell my housemate – a far more serious LOSTie than myself – about my plan to mobilize the lost LOSTies of Florence via social media and Dharma Initiative graffiti. I was just getting to the part where I would unearth secret fans with each handshake by writing NOT PENNY’S BOAT on my palm, when he stopped me.

“You’re leaving May 29, right?”
“Yeah.”
“The finale is on the 25th.”
“…Oh.”

Bummer. It’s okay though. The Doctor Who finale isn’t until mid-June.

Read more: http://www.letsgo.com/profile/LizWeinbloom?page=4#ixzz17VIPufEt

Silent Mob at HMNH

2010-04-18T18:29:00.001-04:00

Running an event at the Harvard Museum of Natural History next Sunday, check it out!

Website: www.silentmob.wordpress.com

Facebook event (join to receive updates)

2010-04-12T23:49:00.001-04:00

I have now gotten lost en route to Brookline via every conceivable form of transportation. Bus, different bus, T, bus + foot, car, and now finally bicycle. The options have been exhausted! Come back, Sleep No More! I know how to find you now!

I'm pretty sure I circumnavigated the entirety of Allston and Brookline. On the plus side, my T9 now knows how to recognize the word "circumnavigated."

2010-04-08T09:17:00.003-04:00

Today, I am in the letters section of the NY Times. Glad to know my useless superpower is still in fine operating condition.

My letter

Amusingly, you can follow my entire academic/career trajectory to date through my Times letters. Standardized testing, college apps, freshman-style social awareness, Sesame Street, PBS Kids, and now internships. Also throw in there the one about the X-Files, and my mother's about paying for college tuition, and you have a pretty good record of my life in the Grey Lady. You're welcome, Future Biographers!

2010-04-07T16:26:00.005-04:00

So hey. For the next week, I'm apparently called Anna and have Elle Woods as my blogger image. Sorry about that. I'm designing a pervasive game for a course, and for the next week I am running a demo version. And stupidly I didn't think to create a new google account before starting a Blogger account for the main character. Whoops.

If you're curious, the demo is based at HarvardiAnna. Feel free to check it out* and let me know your thoughts, though remember that this is a very very early beta that is more a proof-of-concept than anything else. It is an Alternate Reality Game designed to complement Harvard's freshman orientation.

*previously this post said Harvard affiliates could feel free to participate, but I am amending that. If you are or were an undergrad at Harvard, please do give me your thoughts but don't post answers - the puzzles are designed for Harvard neophytes. Thanks!

2010-04-06T15:31:00.003-04:00

Today I learned that my dear friend Gracie's wedding got written up in Offbeat Brides. This is cooler than getting in the Times! My bar for wedding awesomeness is officially set.

Offbeat Bride | Grace & Mike's hat-tastic church wedding, with a pirate cruise reception

(I am the creator of the mentioned sign-in book)

In similar news of awesomeness, my sister is in a show that just got panned by the New Yorker. Panned by the New Yorker! That's some high-profile panning right there. I couldn't be more impressed if they'd actually liked the show.
Caligula Maximus at La Mama

2010-04-05T21:03:00.002-04:00

Today I learned how gas stoves work! Or at any rate, where they keep their pilot light.

I also learned that I don't notice the smell of gas until it has given me a splitting headache. Fail.

A Passover Pageant

2010-03-31T09:29:00.003-04:00

Jeremy: There are sections of the haggadah that, quite frankly, could use a polish.
Dan: You're gonna do a rewrite on the haggadah?
Jeremy: It's not written in stone, Dan.
Dan: Actually, some of it is.
- Sports Night

I wrote a Passover pageant, for the story-telling portion of my all-Gentiles seder. It went over rather well. Enjoy, and feel free to use/re-post, with credit.

NARRATOR: Previously, in Genesis:

GOD: It sure is dark in here... claps twice Hey, that worked!

ABRAHAM: Man, I can't keep track of all these gods, can't I consolidate all my worship into one easy deity?

GOD: Sure!

ABRAHAM: Yay!

GOD: Although, not so much with the easy. Go kill your son Isaac.

ABRAHAM: What??

GOD: J/k, j/k! Chill out, theologians.

ISAAC: I'm a pretty passive figure, overall. Jacob, Esau, what are you boys doing?

JACOB: Just stealing Esau's birthright, Dad!

ESAU: Do you have any idea how badly I want to kill you?

RANDOM ANGEL: Me too! I am so not on Team Jacob. Let's wrestle. On a ladder. Just because.

JACOB: Whatever, I am Israel, I can do whatever I want. C'mon, wives, let's get cracking on this “descendants as plentiful as the stars” business, if you know what I mean.

JOSEPH: Hey guys! I had this dream that you were all bundles of grain and you were bowing down to me! Isn't that funny guys? Why are you throwing me in this hole? Did someone take my technicolor dreamcoat? Hey guys? Guys?

POTIPHAR'S WIFE: You there! Slave boy! How you doin'?

JOSEPH: Err...

JOSEPH'S PHAROAH: Man, these weird dreams suck. I wonder if there's anyone locked in my dungeon who can interpret them for me.

JOSEPH: Me! Me me me! So either there's going to be 7 years of plenty and 7 years of famine, or you want to bone your mother. 5 cents, please.

JOSEPH'S PHAROAH: Such low rates!

JOSEPH: For you, I make a deal. Now let's talk royalties.

NARRATOR: And so Joseph became the Pharoah's chief of staff, and invited Jacob, Joseph's asshole brothers, and 70 other free-loading relatives to shlep down to Egypt and settle in the land of Goshen. Several hundred years pass, and the Hebrews, as we are now calling them for some reason, have been fruitful and multiplied. Then there came a pharoah who knew not Joseph...

PHAROAH: I know not Joseph, but I do know that all these pesky Hebrews are really ruining the neighborhood.

ROYAL BUTLER: You can't kick them out, sir; they've got rent control.

PHAROAH: Bah! Might as well make them useful, then. What are they good at?

BUTLER: Nothing very useful, sir. Comedy writing, standardized tests, and kvetching.

PHAROAH: Well, let's give them something to kvetch about. This view of the Nile would look a lot nicer with some big pointy brick things, don't you think?

NARRATOR: So the Hebrews became slaves, which wasn't exactly a picnic, so they just kept on having children so that they'd have someone to complain to.

BUTLER: Sir, the Hebrews still won't go away. They're just packing more children into their huts.

PHAROAH: They'll never give up a nice deal like Goshen as long as they have kids who can inherit it. Tell the midwives Shifrah and Puah to kill every baby boy born to a Hebrew woman.

SHIFRAH: What??

PUAH: This job blows.

SHIFRAH: I so didn't sign up for this.

PUAH: Let's tell Pharoah that the Hebrew women are unnaturally vigorous and give birth before we can get there. The ruling class always likes to hear that the disenfranchised are hardy and animalistic.

SHIFRAH: Sweet.

NARRATOR: Thanks to Shifrah and Puah, a Hebrew woman named Yochevet gave birth to a baby boy and was able to hide him from the authorities. But after a few months he was too big to hide, so with great sadness, she put the baby in a basket and floated it down the Nile. The baby's sister Miriam hid among the bulrushes to see what would happen to her little brother.

PHAROAH'S DAUGHTER: Hey look, a basket! With a baby in it! Aww, can I keep it?

MIRIAM: But you'd have to nurse it and take care of it and stuff.

P's DAUGHTER: Oh. Well, am I a princess or am I a princess? I'll hire someone.

MIRIAM: I know just the woman for the job.

NARRATOR: So Yochevet was hired to nurse her own son, which is a pretty great scam, and though Moses grew up in the court of the pharoah, he never forgot his birth mother's teachings. One day, Moses was slumming it in Goshen, and he saw a slavedriver cruelly whipping a Hebrew.

MOSES: Dude, relax.

SLAVEDRIVER: Relax? I've got production deadlines to meet, and these lazy Hebrews aren't meeting their brick-baking quota, and you're telling me to relax?

MOSES: Maybe if you were a little nicer to them...

SLAVEDRIVER: “Nice” doesn't get you bargain rate pyramids, mister. Or did you never think about where all your fancy papyrus comes from?

NARRATOR: He hadn't, actually, and so Moses did what any privileged young man would do when confronted with the source of his privilege – blamed someone else and killed the slavedriver.

MOSES: Uh oh.

NARRATOR: So he skedaddled the hell out of Egypt and had a nice long wander in the desert, before coming across a lovely shiksa named Zipporah.

ZIPPORAH: Hey, stranger. New to this strange land?

MOSES: Sure am.

NARRATOR: And Moses spent a couple decades chilling with the Bedouins. Meanwhile, things kinda sucked for the Hebrews.

ALL: Grumble grumble grumble grumble

NARRATOR: But God heard their grumbling. One day, Moses was chilling with his sheep at the foot of Mount Sinai, when the mountain went all lightning-y. When Moses reached the summit, he found a bush that burned with flame, yet was not consumed.

MOSES: Awe-some.

GOD: Moses, Moses.

MOSES: Here I am!

GOD: Take off your shoes. I just vacuumed the holy ground.

MOSES: Who are you?

GOD: I want you to go into Egypt and tell Pharoah to let my people go.

MOSES: Okay great, but who are you?

GOD: I Am Who I Am.

MOSES: But who should I tell Pharoah has sent me?

GOD: I Am Who I Am.

MOSES: That's... not very grammatical.

GOD: No, it's tetragrammatical! Zing!

MOSES: Oh god.

GOD: Yes?

MOSES: Listen, can't you get someone else to do this? I'm busy. I have to... shampoo my sheep.

GOD: Moses.

MOSES: No seriously. I am slow of tongue. I mean, sloooww offff toooongggguuuueeee...

GOD: Get your brother Aaron to talk for you. He was always the cute one.

NARRATOR: Moses went back to Egypt and found Aaron, who was in fact the cute one, and they marched in to Pharoah's palace and said:

AARON: Let my people go!

PHAROAH: No.

AARON: Oh. Please?

P's DAUGHTER: Okay!

PHAROAH: No.

MOSES: Psst, Aaron! Try the staff thing.

NARRATOR: Aaron raised his staff over the Nile, and the water turned to blood. Or red like blood. Depending who you ask. Either way, for seven days and nights it was pretty nasty stuff. But the Pharoah's magicians were also able to turn water into red stuff, so Pharoah was unimpressed.

PHAROAH: Moses, Moses, Moses. What else have you got?

NARRATOR: Next, Aaron summoned up a plague of frogs. Hundreds, thousands of frogs, hopping all over Egypt on their little frog legs. But the magicians could pull frogs out of their hat too, and Pharoah's heart was hardened. Next came gnats, which are really gross.

PHAROAH: Ew ew ew! Make them go away! Make them go away and you can leave!

NARRATOR: But God hardened Pharoah's heart, which is one of those problematic translation things that I'm just gonna skip right over, and everyone went back to the drawing board. There were flies, and cattle disease, and boils. Then shit got real. It hailed great big hailstones that burst into flame. Locusts came and nommed all the crops. And Moses stretched out his hand and--

MOSES: claps twice

NARRATOR: --drew a darkness over Egypt for three days.

BUTLER: Okay, sir? I'm covered in boils, there's nothing to eat, and I keep walking into frog carcasses because I can't see where I'm going. Let those people go.

PHAROAH: Sorry, my heart's been hardened. Out of my hands.

AARON: Alright, but listen. This last plague's not going to be pretty.

NARRATOR: God spoke to Moses and Aaron, and gave them a shopping list which has changed little in five thousand years, with the same old bitter herbs and unleavened bread, along with a nice dab of lamb's blood for the doorway so that the angel of death would pass over their house. And at midnight, the angel of death swept through the land of Egypt, and slew the first-born of all the Egyptians.

PHAROAH: Get out! Out out out! Scram! Beat it!

AARON: Kthxbai!

BUTLER: You're not going to harden your heart again, right sir?

PHAROAH: Well... I do have all these annoying unfinished pyramids... And that Sphinx could sure use a nose.

BUTLER: Which you'll want the Israelites for, obviously! ...It's funny because they have big noses.

PHAROAH: To the chariots!

NARRATOR: Meanwhile, the Israelites had reached the Red Sea.

MOSES: Huh.

MIRIAM: This doesn't look good. Do we ford the river?

PHAROAH: I'm coming for you, Israel!

MOSES: I guess we're not waiting to see if conditions improve. Onwards!

NARRATOR: And Moses raised his staff and parted the sea, and the children of Israel walked across on dry land. But when Pharoah's chariots tried to follow, their wheels got stuck in the mud, and when the last Israelite reached the bank the waters came crashing back down, drowning the Egyptians.

MIRIAM: Hurrah! Now what?

MOSES: I have to climb this mountain, brb.

NARRATOR: The Israelites, however, were not very patient.

ISRAELITE 1: Where's Moses?

ISRAELITE 2: I'm bored!

ISRAELITE 3: Can we eat yet?

AARON: Hey guys! You know what would pass the time? Why don't you give me all your gold and jewelry, and I'll build a giant shiny cow!

ISRAELITES: Yaaaaay!

MIRIAM: Why do slaves have gold?

AARON: We looted the Egyptians on our way out.

MIRIAM: Seriously? That doesn't seem very under-doggy of us...

AARON: Listen, do you want to hear one of the lesser-known stories where our guys forcibly circumcise our enemies? Or do you want to make a shiny cow?

MIRIAM: Moo.

MOSES: I am back! I am back and I have brought you these two stone tablets, which contain the – oooh, shiny! [drops the tablets] Uh oh. Hope I saved the receipt...

GOD: [face-palm]

NARRATOR: But God gave the children of Israel another chance and gave the law to Moses again. But as punishment, the corrupted former slaves had to die off before they could enter the Promised Land. Forty years of wandering later, they finally reached their new homeland. Unfortunately some other people lived there already, but that's not a very pleasant story and these four glasses of wine aren't going to drink themselves, so let's just pretend the Israelites made friends with their new neighbors and nothing troublesome or morally squicky ever happened in the land of Israel ever again. The end!

2010-03-27T19:40:00.002-04:00

A lesson in graceful writing, from the pens of Joseph Stein and Sheldon Harnick:

Tevye: Is he in bad trouble, that hero of yours?
[Hodel nods]
Tevye: Arrested?
[she nods again]
Tevye: Convicted?
Hodel: Yes. But he did nothing wrong. He cares nothing for himself. Everything he does is for other people.
Tevye: Yes, but if he did nothing wrong, he wouldn't be in trouble.
Hodel: Oh Papa, how can you say that? What wrongs did Joseph do? And Abraham, and Moses? And they had troubles.
Tevye: Yes, but... But why won't you tell me where he is now, this Joseph of yours?
Hodel: It is far, Papa. Terribly far. He is in a settlement in Siberia.
Tevye: Siberia! And he asks you to leave your father and mother, and join him in that frozen wasteland and marry him there?
Hodel: No, Papa. He did not ask me to go. I want to go. I don't want him to be alone. I want to help him in his work.
Tevye: Hodel...
Hodel: Papa.
[sings]
Hodel: How can I hope to make you understand, why I do what I do? Why I must travel to a distant land, far from the home I love. Once I was happily content to be, as I was, where I was. Close to the people who are close to me, here in the home I love. Who could see that a man would come, who would change the shape of my dreams? Helpless now, I stand with him, watching older dreams grow dim. Oh, what a melancholy choice this is, wanting home, wanting him... Closing my heart to every hope but his, leaving the home I love. There where my heart has settled long ago, I must go, I must go. Who could imagine I'd be wandering so far from the home I love. Yet... there with my love, I'm home.
[the train is heard]
Tevye: And who, my child, will there be to perform a marriage there in the wilderness?
Hodel: Papa, I promise you, we will be married under a canopy.
Tevye: Yes, yes. No doubt, a Rabbi or two were also arrested.
[the train pulls in, Tevye lifts Hodel's luggage aboard]
Hodel: [crying and hugging him] Papa! God alone knows when we shall see each other again.
Tevye: Then, we will leave it in His hands.
[he helps her aboard and watches the train pull out]
Tevye: [looking up] Take care of her. See that she dresses warm.

2010-03-25T23:49:00.003-04:00

Today I learned that it's possible to write a cover letter that actually clarifies your interests and plan. I wrote the following in a cover letter yesterday (slightly adapted for posting). I read it over today and realized that it really DOES sum up my current life plan. Can't say that about many cover letters!

I want to educate people to be more awesome. When my classmates at Harvard ask why I'm in grad school for educational media, I blather something about the pedagogical potential of interactivity for reaching students of multiple intelligences. That's true too. But I also just want more cool people to hang out with – even if I have to make them cool myself.

Games are scaffolding. That's an ed school word, but it could very well be a gaming word too. Scaffolding allows students to grok sophisticated ideas by taking them there step by step, so that each stage is a well-supported progression from the previous. Games are scaffolded as well – when you level up, you have proven the ability to tackle harder bosses. When you unlock a new clue, you are biting off a manageable chunk of the meta-puzzle. The naturally scaffolded structure of games and puzzle hunts means that you can use them to make people do all sorts of fun things they wouldn't normally do.

Engaging video games are great and all, but it's far more awesome to appropriate video game mechanics to have fun in Real Life. A pervasive game can be used to encourage exploration in an old fort, critical thinking in a museum, willingness to wander off a trail in the woods, absurd behavior in a public place, and a whole range of other activities that I, in my infinite objectivity, find valuable.

I design games because games help people do cool things they wouldn't do otherwise.

A bit rough, yeah, but that's totally the idea! :)

2010-03-25T00:34:00.002-04:00

Today I learned that pantsing, debagging, depantsing, drooping, shanking, skanking or dacking (in Australia), cacking, skegging, dekecking or just kecking (in the United Kingdom), scantying in Scotland and jocking in Ireland and, when in New Zealand, simply the down-trou all refer to the act of pranking someone by pulling down their pants.

Oh, Commonwealth countries. If the extra Eskimo words for snow reflects the abundance of the stuff in their lives*, what does this plethora of pantsing synonyms say about you?

I highly recommend the surprisingly informative wikipedia article List of School Pranks for further enlightenment/ideas.

*yes, yes, I know

On the college admissions process

2010-03-23T18:07:00.001-04:00

Today I learned that high school students and their parents ask entirely the wrong questions about the college admissions process. Not stupid questions, mind. Just the wrong ones.

Their questions betray that they just don't get the point of the whole thing. A highly typical example: "My son has a 3.7 GPA and plays lacrosse. How many hours of community service does he need for Harvard?" This reflects a student-centered concept of the process that is inaccurate and counter-productive.

Admissions committees are not awarding prizes in a scavenger hunt. They're crafting a college class. Maybe it's different at less prestigious, more ranking-conscious schools, and they really do tick off a list of GPA/SAT/AP attributes. But the good places only care about those numbers inasmuch as they are shorthand for the attributes of Real Actual People. No one cares about your ~~1600~~ 2400 if you aren't also special.

Maybe that's the first filter to the whole process - the first test of your Harvardiness is whether you can grok the reason for the admissions committee's existence. Which of course means this is yet another way in which disadvantaged kids are further disadvantaged... Understanding the motivations of the man behind the curtain, when everyone around you is an idiot, is a pretty sophisticated cognitive task.

There's just so much mis-information and bad advice - often coming from professional advice-givers, which is what sparked this blog post - that it makes me sad. And for many kids who don't have ivy-level parents or friends, the first way they learn about college admissions is through television. In my case, that meant seeing Zach Morris get a 1507 or some such impossible score on his SAT, and then watching the rest of the Saved By The Bell kids scheme to make the Hahvahd recruiter at the college fair notice Jessie Spano, as though those college fairs matter in the slightest.

Or just last week on LOST, that entire sideways-world subplot where Alex so desperately wanted a letter of recommendation for Yale from the asshole principal, and not from her mentor Dr. Linus, because the asshole principal was a Yale alum. NO ONE CARES IF HE WENT TO YALE. Ben Linus would have written a far better letter. Or at least manipulated Yale into doing his bidding, whatever. Ugh.

Maybe I should just write a tv show about kids applying to college, and do some good in the world.

2010-03-23T01:34:00.004-04:00

Back from spring break! Back to learning!

Today I learned that in 1933, a Mr. Maxwell J. House* hired a rabbi to say that the coffee bean is more like a berry than a bean, and therefore coffee is kosher for Passover. And thus was born the Maxwell House haggadah, sheepishly tucked into grocery bags by the dozen every Passover by thousands of families who couldn't manage to remember where they stored last year's Maxwell House haggadahs.

Even though my 15 Maxwell House haggadahs - the fruits of my mother's visits to four different supermarkets last weekend - would be enough (dayenu!), I am having an all-Gentile, all-singer seder, and therefore am compiling my own supplement. Thus far it consists of "readings" from Marjorie Morningstar, The King & I, Tony Kushner, and The Nanny. Suggestions for quotes, songs, and other ephemera are quite welcome.

And, typed by hand from Death & Taxes: Hydriotaphia and Other Plays because amazingly this wasn't yet on the internet, I give you the following from Tony Kushner's rambling short "Notes on Akiba":

...And, and look how good my kid is, he... performs, he really performs, he memorizes, he is prepared, a performer, he's four years old he can barely read Green Eggs & Ham and look he has memorized lengthy strings of what are to him nonsense syllables which he will now produce flawlessly on command because he knows like the whole year to follow and his life along with it will be cursed, the crops will fail and Elijah won't come because YOU FORGOT WHAT COMES AFTER MA NISHTANAHA ETCETERA, and like, that's not affliction?

*not really, but the rest of it is true

2010-03-20T13:59:00.000-04:00

Today I learned that the only way to survive hell-week - nay, hell-fortnight - is to give myself one lovely treat per day. And no, television and naps (unless in the hammock) and shameless facebook stalking don't count; must be somewhat more special.

After failing to follow this rule on Friday and Saturday, and crashing horribly, I started over with a wonderful-as-ever post-church brunch on Sunday. Yesterday featured a lovely stroll in the Arboretum, and today? Today I read a new Sherlock Holmes story.

I've actually read just a small percentage of the Holmes canon, despite being a fan. Once I realized how much I loved them, and how finite was the proper Conan Doyle canon, I decided to parcel out the original 24* over as much of my life as possible. So I only read new ones when I really, really need it. (I am allowed to reread A Scandal in Bohemia as much as I'd like). Delayed gratification - I has it.

That being said, "A Case of Identity" is a bit rubbish.

*Yes I know there's the post-Reichenbach stories, but I've not touched those yet

2010-03-04T11:16:00.002-05:00

So today I learned that in 1969 they turned off Niagara Falls. I KNOW, right???

Jenny: I already ran out of work to do, like an hour ago.
me: You can read about how they turned off Niagara Falls

me: or King Ludwig II of Bavaria
Jenny: yeah, how did they do that?

Jenny: they turned him off, too??
me: well they had this giant red dial

me: and Superman didn't get there in time to stop them
Jenny: man! I hate it when that happens
me: and they dissolved Kryptonite in the water

me: so he couldn't go manually refill the waterfall with his Superlungs

me: or supermanually, as the case may be
Jenny: hahahahahahaha

Jenny: that's a great adverb

Jenny: how did we get the falls back?
me: well that's a helluva lot of water to divert, and all that water power actually creates enough electricity to provide 1% of the nation's daily electricity use (true story)

me: Which is of course why Lex Luthor was interested in the first place, not just because it would make a good headline in the Daily Planet

me: but when you take THAT much electricity, and put it with THAT much water

me: you're gonna eventually be like "oh come on, it can't really hurt that much"

me: and try to go for a swim.
me: That's how Lex lost his hair.

me: Fully electrifying the water (cuz when the person fell in it went zap) made the kryptonite particles disperse to a safe level

me: and Superman was able to dive in, rescue Lex, and then shift the dial back to its correct setting.

Jenny: ....wow, Liz. Wow.

Jenny: that is both a brilliant plot for a tv show and a staggeringly misleading portrayal of how electricity works

2010-03-03T14:32:00.003-05:00

Today I learned about "Last Will," a collaboration between Punchdrunk and gaming collective Lost And Found. It's a MITE (Multiplatform Immersive Theatrical Experience), and it's a Punchdrunk production turned ARG, and it's basically what Sleep No More should have been.

But there's not much information about it online, aside from a small amount of press and this document. It sounds like the version that ran in 2008 was a prototype. Does anyone know more about it?

2010-03-02T14:37:00.000-05:00

Today I learned about King Ludwig II of Bavaria. He built this:
Looks like Sleeping Beauty's castle, huh? That's because Disney based his castle on King Ludwig's, who based his castle on neo-Romantic German kitsch, which was based on cultural memory of medieval castles that never existed.

King Ludwig II liked to imagine that he was a fairy tale king, rather than the lame-duck monarch of a barely-sovereign state in the Industrial Revolution. Wikipedia says he was fond of wandering through the countryside, giving lavish gifts to commoners who were nice to him. His fairy tale castle broke the bank, but the Bavarians loved him anyway (who wouldn't love a deeply eccentric castle-commissioner?). His ministers loved him less, and they engineered a legal deposition by having him declared insane - not exactly a stretch, admittedly, for a man who wanted no more from his kingship than to canoe around his palace grotto while a soprano sang Die Walkure for him.

But still. The whitecoats came to get Ludwig and he balked - "How can you declare me insane?," he asked the doctor. "After all, you have never seen or examined me before."

The next day, Ludwig and the doctor were both found dead in a shallow lake.

How this is not yet a musical is beyond me.

Can't retweet the past?

2010-02-24T00:09:00.009-05:00

Over the last two months, I serialized The Great Gatsby via Twitter on behalf of the American Repertory Theater. That's The Great Gatsby, the whole novel, in 140 character chunks. This was a promotion for the ART's production of Gatz - about which you can read my thoughts here - but it quickly became a labor of love.

Reducing classic literature into tweets sounds like just that - a reduction. But working with the text of Gatsby on such a minute and superficial level gave me a whole new appreciation for the jewel-like perfection of the language. Every sentence, every phrase tells an entire story. It is beyond masterful.

The followers of the @ARTGatz feed realized this as well, and I especially enjoyed seeing which lines they would re-tweet to their own followers. Some were predictable favorites - others were a bit more mysterious. I eventually collected every @ARTGatz re-tweet here, creating a sort of absurdist Gatsby micro-narrative. It's the world's first crowd-sourced abridgment. Enjoy.

THE GREAT GATSBY (abridged)

by F. Scott Fitzgerald

Crowd-sourced via the followers of @ARTGatz

Conduct may be founded on the hard rock or the wet marshes, but after a certain point I don’t care what it’s founded on.

I wanted no more riotous excursions with privileged glimpses into the human heart.

This isn’t just an epigram—life is much more successfully looked at from a single window, after all.

"I'm p-paralyzed with happiness."

(I’ve heard it said that Daisy’s murmur was only to make people lean toward her; an irrelevant criticism that made it no less charming.)

‘I’m glad it’s a girl. And I hope she’ll be a fool—that’s the best thing a girl can be in this world, a beautiful little fool.”

He stretched out his arms toward the dark water in a curious way, and, far as I was from him, I could have sworn he was trembling.

I was within and without, simultaneously enchanted and repelled by the inexhaustible variety of life.

It was nine o’clock—almost immediately afterward I looked at my watch and found it was ten.

—signed Jay Gatsby, in a majestic hand.

She held my hand impersonally, as a promise that she’d take care of me in a minute, and gave ear to two girls in twin yellow dresses.

“I’m Gatsby,” he said suddenly.

It faced—or seemed to face—the whole external world for an instant, & then concentrated on you with an irresistible prejudice in your favor.

It understood you just so far as you wanted to be understood, believed in you as you would like to believe in yourself...

Fifty feet from the door a dozen headlights illuminated a bizarre and tumultuous scene.

“Suppose you met somebody just as careless as yourself.”

...a faint mustache of perspiration appeared on her upper lip.

Everyone suspects himself of at least one of the cardinal virtues, and this is mine: I am one of the few honest people that I've ever known.

Even Gatsby could happen, without any particular wonder.

“I see you’re looking at my cuff buttons.” I hadn’t been looking at them, but I did now.

“How did he happen to do that?” I asked after a minute. “He just saw the opportunity.”

The officer looked at Daisy while she was speaking, in a way that every young girl wants to be looked at sometime...

...and peering toward the bleared windows from time to time as if a series of invisible but alarming happenings were taking place outside.

Americans, while occasionally willing to be serfs, have always been obstinate about being peasantry.

While the rain continued it had seemed like the murmur of their voices, rising and swelling a little now and then with gusts of emotion.

“Oh, hello, old sport,” he said, as if he hadn’t seen me for years. I thought for a moment he was going to shake hands.

—shirts with stripes and scrolls and plaids in coral and apple-green and lavender and faint orange, and monograms of Indian blue.

Suddenly, with a strained sound, Daisy bent her head into the shirts and began to cry stormily.

They’re such beautiful shirts,” she sobbed, her voice muffled in the thick folds.

“It makes me sad because I’ve never seen such—such beautiful shirts before."

“You always have a green light that burns all night at the end of your dock.”

—not through her own fault, but because of the colossal vitality of his illusion.

No amount of fire or freshness can challenge what a man will store up in his ghostly heart.

James Gatz—that was really, or at least legally, his name.

The truth was that Jay Gatsby of West Egg, Long Island, sprang from his Platonic conception of himself.

...and the moon soaked with wet light his tangled clothes upon the floor.

they were a satisfactory hint of the unreality of reality, a promise that the rock of the world was founded securely on a fairy’s wing.

—mostly I was in New York, trotting around with Jordan and trying to ingratiate myself with her senile aunt—

“I know your wife,” continued Gatsby, almost aggressively.

By God, I may be old-fashioned in my ideas, but women run around too much these days to suit me. They meet all kinds of crazy fish.”

It is invariably saddening to look through new eyes at things upon which you have expended your own powers of adjustment.

“Well, he certainly must have strained himself to get this menagerie together.” A breeze stirred the gray haze of Daisy’s fur collar.

Daisy began to sing with the music in a husky, rhythmic whisper...

...bringing out a meaning in each word that it had never had before and would never have again.

...and each change tipped out a little of her warm human magic upon the air.

“She didn’t like it,” he insisted. “She didn’t have a good time.” He was silent, and I guessed at his unutterable depression.

“The dance?” He dismissed all the dances he had given with a snap of his fingers. “Old sport, the dance is unimportant.”

“Can’t repeat the past?” he cried incredulously. “Why of course you can!”

He talked a lot about the past, and I gathered that he wanted to recover something, some idea of himself, that had gone into loving Daisy.

—an elusive rhythm, a fragment of lost words, that I had heard somewhere a long time ago.

“Hot!” said the conductor to familiar faces. “Some weather! hot! hot! hot! Is it hot enough for you? Is it hot? Is it . . . ?”

That any one should care in this heat whose flushed lips he kissed, whose head made damp the pajama pocket over his heart!

“It seems pretty soon the earth’s going to fall into the sun—or wait a minute—it’s just the opposite—the sun’s getting colder every year."

“What will we do with ourselves this afternoon?” cried Daisy, “and the day after that, and the next thirty years?”

“She’s got an indiscreet voice,” I remarked. “It’s full of——” I hesitated.

A pause followed this apparently pointless remark.

“Do you mean you’ve been to a medium?” inquired Jordan humorously. “What?” Confused, he stared at us as we laughed. “A medium?”

“An Oxford man!” He was incredulous. “Like hell he is! He wears a pink suit.”

We were all irritable now with the fading ale, and aware of it we drove for a while in silence.

Then as Doctor T. J. Eckleburg’s faded eyes came into sight down the road, I remembered Gatsby’s caution about gasoline.

“We’ve got enough to get to town,” said Tom. But there’s a garage here,” objected Jordan. “I don’t want to get stalled in this baking heat.”

There is no confusion like the confusion of a simple mind, and as we drove away Tom was feeling the hot whips of panic.

“We’re getting old,” said Daisy. “If we were young we’d rise and dance.” “Remember Biloxi,” Jordan warned her. “Where did you know him, Tom?”

Jordan smiled. “He was probably bumming his way home. He told me he was president of your class at Yale.”

“Open the whiskey, Tom,” she ordered, “and I’ll make you a mint julep. Then you won’t seem so stupid to yourself. . . .

Angry as I was, as we all were, I was tempted to laugh whenever he opened his mouth. The transition from libertine to prig was so complete.

"But both of us loved each other all that time, old sport, and you didn’t know. I used to laugh sometimes."

...and in my heart I love her all the time.”

She began to sob helplessly. “I did love him once—but I loved you too.”

I was thirty. Before me stretched the portentous, menacing road of a new decade.

So we drove on toward death through the cooling twilight.

It came out of the gathering darkness, wavered tragically for a moment, and then disappeared around the next bend.

“There’s some bad trouble here,” said Tom excitedly.

“What are you doing?” I inquired. “Just standing here, old sport.” Somehow, that seemed a despicable occupation.

I must have felt pretty weird by that time, because I could think of nothing except the luminosity of his pink suit under the moon.

There was an unmistakable air of natural intimacy about the picture, and anybody would have said that they were conspiring together.

So I walked away and left him standing there in the moonlight—watching over nothing.

He knew that Daisy was extraordinary, but he didn’t realize just how extraordinary a “nice” girl could be.

Her porch was bright with the bought luxury of star-shine;

It excited him, too, that many men had already loved Daisy—it increased her value in his eyes.

and Gatsby was overwhelmingly aware of the youth and mystery that wealth imprisons and preserves, of the freshness of many clothes...

She thought I knew a lot because I knew different things from her. . . .

The shadow of a tree fell abruptly across the dew and ghostly birds began to sing among the blue leaves.

Then out into the spring fields, where a yellow trolley raced them for a minute over the vanishing city where she had drawn her breath.

..even though she was gone from it, was pervaded with a melancholy beauty.

He left feeling that if he had searched harder, he might have found her—that he was leaving her behind.

He stretched out his hand desperately as if to snatch only a wisp of air, to save a fragment of the spot that she had made lovely for him.

But it was all going by too fast now for his blurred eyes and he knew that he had lost that part of it, the freshest and the best, forever.

But when he heard himself say this, he flinched and began to cry “Oh, my God!” again...

“Don’t do it to-day,” Gatsby answered. He turned to me apologetically. “You know, old sport, I’ve never used that pool all summer?”

and I said ‘God knows what you’ve been doing, everything you’ve been doing. You may fool me, but you can’t fool God!’”

Gatsby shouldered the mattress and started for the pool.

From the moment I phoned news of the catastrophe to West Egg village, every surmise about him, every practical question, was referred to me.

In fact, there’s a sort of picnic or something. Of course I’ll do my very best to get away.” I ejaculated an unrestrained “Huh!”

...and I should have known better than to call him.

I mentioned Gatsby.

“Oh—h!” She looked at me over again. “Will you just—What was your name?” She vanished.

“Let us learn to show our friendship for a man when he is alive and not after he is dead,” he suggested.

Of course we was broke up when he run off from home, but I see now there was a reason for it. He knew he had a big future in front of him.

“I come across this book by accident,” said the old man. “It just shows you, don’t it?” “It just shows you.”

So when blue smoke of brittle leaves was in the air + wind blew the wet laundry stiff on the line I decided to come back home.

I see now that this has been a story of the West, after all—Tom and Gatsby, Daisy and Jordan and I, were all Westerners...

I see it as a night scene by El Greco: a hundred houses, at once conventional and grotesque, crouching under a sullen, overhanging sky.

Her hand, which dangles over the side, sparkles cold with jewels.

“You threw me over on the phone. I don't give a damn about you now, but it was a new experience for me, & I felt a little dizzy for a while.”

She didn’t answer. Angry, and half in love with her, and tremendously sorry, I turned away.

I spent my Saturday nights in New York because those gleaming, dazzling parties...

—look here, when I went to give up that flat and saw that damn box of dog biscuits sitting on the sideboard, I sat down & cried like a baby.

Probably it was some final guest who had been away at the ends of the earth and didn’t know that the party was over.

As I sat brooding on the old unknown world, I thought of Gatsby’s wonder when he first picked out the green light at the end of Daisy’s dock.

Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgiastic future that year by year recedes before us.

It eluded us then, but that’s no matter—to-morrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther. . . . And one fine morning——

So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.

THE END

2010-02-23T20:23:00.003-05:00

Today I learned that Figment is coming to Boston! Figment is a wonderful zany arts festival on Governor's Island in NYC and they're doing an installment along the Charles this summer! Yay!

2010-02-22T20:57:00.005-05:00

Today I learned a sure way to reverse even the foulest, blackest, grumpiest of bad moods: sing along with "Movin' Right Along."

Gungadun gungadun.

How DOES Kermit ride that bicycle??

2010-02-21T21:05:00.000-05:00

Today I learned a fun fact about my own body. I played through Beethoven's 7th symphony tonight for the first time in almost a decade. I haven't played with an orchestra in two years and haven't practiced in, um, mumblemumble years, so even the easy parts were a disaster. But the harder bits? Right there in my fingers. MUSCLE MEMORY IS SO WEIRD.

Also, I am super impressed with 15-year-old Liz.

2010-02-17T23:40:00.003-05:00

Did I learn anything today? Not really. Instead, I have questions.

1) I don't know what to do with my eyes while listening to NPR. I don't knit, I don't drive, my commute is short and on bicycle, and although I sometimes cook I do not cook for nearly as many hours a week as I would like to spend listening to Ira Glass's voice. What do you do with your eyes? Does someone make picturebooks for grownups that I could stare at?

2) I was reading an essay about Wagner by Shaw, and Shaw made me feel like an ass (as only Shaw can) for being mostly unfamiliar with the Ring Cycle. Which is to say, I've seen "What's Opera, Doc?" and Larry O'Keefe's "Magic Futon" several times each, but that's about it. Is there a way to become acquainted with the Ring that doesn't involve listening to 15 hours of opera?

2010-02-16T11:07:00.001-05:00

Today I learned that this exists:
The Sleep No More Crossover Fanfiction Blog

Because Sleep No More is crossover fanfiction itself! Get it? Get it?

I think this is a tiny bit brilliant. Only a tiny bit, though.

2010-02-15T11:54:00.004-05:00

Today I learned that
1) someone recently visited my blog through Googling the query "are rabbits inauspicious?", and
2) my blog is the first hit for the query "are rabbits inauspicious?"

So I rather feel I should expound a bit on this subject. Are rabbits, in fact, inauspicious?

The first question to address is really "inauspicious for whom?" On the one hand, rabbits are very soft, which doesn't really bode well for them. On the other hand, bunnies must really enjoy cuddling with one another. So, dear mystery-reader, if you return seeking further insight on the auspiciality of bunny rabbits, please clarify your terms and I will see what I can do.

And what's with all the carrots? What do they need such good eyesight for anyway?

2010-02-14T11:33:00.001-05:00

Today I learned that I actually really like Valentine's Day. Is that okay?

Favorites include:
2004: Performing Mozart's Requiem with Holden at ACDA*
2007: Beauty & The Geek party. And The Little Mermaid? Or was that '06?
2009: Gallo pinto in Cambridge UK
2010: 10-person dance party, and Disney 'n' pizza

*interestingly, only my third favorite Mozart's Requiem memory, following the (life-changing) first performance in December and the Eliot JCR singalong during comm choir '05.

2010-02-13T23:32:00.000-05:00

Today I learned that chocolate-covered bacon is disgusting.

2010-02-12T23:29:00.000-05:00

Today I learned that throwing parties on Fridays is unnecessarily difficult, when the same party could just as well be thrown on Saturday. But I also learned that, perhaps not too surprisingly considering the selection bias here, a high percentage of my friends own proper flapper attire. Yay. :)

2010-02-11T18:41:00.000-05:00

Today I learned a whole ton about World's Fairs. Like, way more than I could write up here. Because I also learned that when my homework is awesome, I will go above and beyond. Watch a half hour of vintage Coney Island footage, you say? See you in four hours...

So we learned last week that the word panorama originally referred to the Imax 360 of the 19th century, and only subsequently did the suffix -orama get applied as an indicator of great scale and awesomeness. Keep this in mind as I tell you about the 1939 World's Fair's Futurama - the awesomest thing to be called Futurama until that other Futurama.

The Futurama was, first of all, the grand-daddy of the Disney-style dark ride: a narrated trip in moving seats through a vivid diorama (there's that suffix again), in this case depicting the world in twenty years, as envisioned by Norman Bel Geddes for General Motors. The principal feature of this world is the existence of an interstate highway system - build us these roads, GM told taxpayers, and we'll sell you the cars to drive on them. The thing is that although GM's argument worked, we didn't follow their instructions very well. Bel Geddes designed a utopic highway system that was carefully calibrated for ideal traffic flow - the rural elevated highways depicted in the early parts of the ride have seven lanes, with two transition lanes on a lower level, bringing drivers safely from 25 to 50 to a cruising speed of 100 mph(!).

But of course, the system we actually built was not so idyllic. Dan Howland of The Journal of Ride Theory sums it up in one of my favorite quotes on the topic: "If we lived in the Futurama, we'd be home by now."

I highly recommend this film of the Futurama itself: http://www.archive.org/details/ToNewHor1940 Highlights include the dirigible hanger in the airport (floating in a pool of water, so it can easily rotate to suit the wind direction!), and the odd reference to the Gloria Patri at the end. If you watch it, please talk to me about it - we didn't talk about it at all in class, so it is not out of my system.

2010-02-10T13:35:00.000-05:00

Today I learned a new Harvard building! You know that building to the right of Lamont? Me neither till today! In all these years, I have not only never been inside that building, or known what it is, but I've never even really registered its existence. So today I walked in and announced my presence to the dude at the desk:

Me: Hi! I've been here five years and have never been in this building. Where am I?
Dude: This is the Houghton rare books library.
Me: Whoa, that exists?
Dude: ...yes.
Me: I mean, I always thought it was just one of those Hollis designations for a particular collection, not an actual physical location.
Dude: Rare books generally need to be stored somewhere secure. And physical.
Me: This makes sense.

Next up: Liz learns to navigate new Lamont floor-numbering, avoids further embarrassing attempts to locate Shakespeare in the government docs stacks.

2010-02-09T23:58:00.000-05:00

Today I learned - well, I've been learning this for two weeks now, but today was another reminder - that I really don't like singing Bach. Or the St. John Passion, at any rate. I love playing Bach, but singing him seems to be a whole 'nother matter. It's the reverse of Mozart, who is great to sing but lousy to play. It's interesting that although alto and cello lines often share many characteristics, I can have such strong opinions on whose work I'd rather sing vs play - the same line has totally different fun-ness properties depending how it is produced.

Sometimes, however, the finger can really be pointed at the composer. Yes, I'm looking at you, Ralph Vaughan-Williams. Fantasia on Tallis AND God Bless The Master? Really? Really?

Thankfully, today I also learned to preserve the quality of my day through a Bach rehearsal by tying up my good mood in one of Jim Marvin's Santa Claus bags and throwing it into the balcony for safe keeping till 6:30.

2010-02-08T14:18:00.004-05:00

This weekend I learned that the church choir experience is completely revolutionized through the addition of a neck pillow. Reverend Gomes, you are a lovely man, but your sermons are very long.

After years of struggling to pithily describe the majority of my high school classmates in a way that doesn't:

involve ethnic stereotyping ("guidos")
inspire the listener to turn the claim back on me ("JAPs")
sound too douchey / loaded for people who actually know their Marx ("lumpenproletariat")
seem better reserved for describing the Five Towns ("nouveau riche")
seem inaccurate since most people do go to college ("townies")

I finally learned the perfect word for summing up my hometown - chavvy.

2010-02-05T22:43:00.000-05:00

Today I learned that vertiginous means vertigo-y. Can you use it in a sentence? Why yes, I can!

The soundscape in Birnam Wood is vertiginous.

There ya go.

2010-02-04T23:28:00.004-05:00

Today I learned about panoramas. Originally, panoramas were buildings that housed a 360 degree painting. These were super popular in the 19th century, and they sound a bit awesome.

Check out this cross-section of a standard panorama. The cupola overhead prevents the viewer from seeing the border of the painting on top, the artificial floor conceals the border on bottom.Fancier panoramas used projection, meaning massive amounts of Victorian mechanicalness and gas flames and roaring motors, and all in all were less like a tranquil view of the countryside and more like an awesome way to get conflagrated.

I am wondering about the Allegory of the Cave. For half a century, a significant chunk of the population has been first introduced to Plato through the Chronicles of Narnia. I'm sure this affects interpretation - the Cave and the Shadowlands are synonymous for me. There's no real conclusion to be drawn here, but I just think it's fascinating that C.S. Lewis gets to be the gatekeeper of Plato.

Bless me, what do they teach them at these schools?

2010-02-03T22:35:00.002-05:00

Today I learned that I am the first person in the history of the internet who has blogged about something related to her job, had her boss find it, and had this lead to praise and approbation. :)

I am wondering about a presentation given to one of my classes today by a producer at WGBH. The only time she defaulted to a masculine pronoun (the only time anyone ever defaults to a masculine pronoun in children's programming) was when referring to the writers. FML.

Borne back ceaselessly into Gatz

2010-02-01T23:28:00.008-05:00

I am wondering about Gatz, the seven hour Gatsby semi-adaptation at the A.R.T. Why did it feel so wholly immersive, despite being so extremely low-fi? Sleep No More and The Donkey Show achieve their immersion through verisimilitude, overwhelming your senses with lush detail. Their voices are full of money. Gatz, with its wafer-thin meta-narrative and commonplace imagery, is barely more than a staged reading. But you are there.

But there is not West Egg. The world of Gatz is not the story-world of The Great Gatsby - it is the world of The Great Gatsby, the novel, the paper-and-ink book with the blue-face cover that you dog-eared in AP English. The immersion is into the very act of reading The Great Gatsby. What engrosses you is the story, but what you experience is the telling of the story, the construction of it; the green twinkle of the perfect language, the careening inevitability of the narrative.

A novel this familiar has deep personal layers to it, separate from and wholly dependent on the actual narrative - and through the familiar text you can repeat the past, old sport. I felt keenly the sense memory of lifting my chin to balance an invisible object, moved to mimicry by the vividness of Jordan's gesture. My friend Cian, raised on the metric system, recalled reading the Plaza scene and first learning the word "quart." Little details... but they are the functional equivalent of the pine scent in Birnam Wood. Sleep No More creates future sense memories - Gatz exposes and explores the memories you already have.

And as such, it is an intensely personal experience. Your memories of reading Gatsby are not mine - though they are likely similar, high school curricula being what they are. The novel is one of the few media that stubbornly resist communal consumption. That's why people react so strongly to deviation in adaptations of favorite novels - they get it wrong, they don't understand, I know the story isn't real but it's still true and you can't just change what's true. (and Gatz was not immune to this effect. Chapter Five was plain wrong.) You can feel ownership over the reading of a novel, over your reading of a novel, because there is no one else there to lay a claim.

The power of live theater is the power of the communal experience, laid bare in Gatz because it was the first time all of us, any of us, had ever experienced this particular familiar story with people. With people. Laughing together, gasping together, feeling like an overgrown spider in the Loeb seats together. It's reading the novel, but amplified. Sleep No More transports you to a world you've only visited in dreams - Gatz is a world of your own creation that is suddenly lived in by others.

The wakening from Sleep No More is well-supported - between Manderley and the long bus ride from the remote location, you can stagger the staggering out of the dream. When Gatz was over, it was over, and there we were, blinking at Harvard Square. But we weren't ready to emerge from that world. Drained emotionally from the story, we wanted to sustain the magic circle of the stage - we didn't want to admit outsiders. Sure, they all had read the book too, they could tut-tut about the Buchanans as well as us - but they weren't there. They didn't understand.

At the large party, Gatsby removed our masks and whispered in our ears.

So we beat on.

2010-01-31T23:28:00.000-05:00

This weekend I learned that having someone read to you for seven hours is an extremely engaging and rewarding experience, especially when you're in a theater full of people, and the thing being read to you is The Great Gatsby.

And while buying school supplies I was walking through Staples with an Englishman, who pointed at a tape dispenser and exclaimed "oh look, Sellotape!" I stared at him for a moment and then realized: THAT'S WHY SHE CALLED IT SPELLOTAPE!!! Good one, JK!

I am wondering how I can arrange it so that every weekend is as awesome as this one.

2010-01-29T17:03:00.003-05:00

Today I learned that cool institutions will sometimes let you do cool stuff for them if you just ask. :)

I'm adding another category to my What I Learned In School Today posts. Inspired by Project Zero's cheesy-but-surprisingly-effective See Think Wonder thought routines, I will also, when applicable, list something I am wondering about.

I am wondering about the orchestra pit. Specifically, about the point in architectural history when theaters first started concealing the orchestra in a pit (this was with Wagner's Bayreuth Festspielhaus, which is something I learned yesterday). I'd never really thought before about what a huge innovation the concealed orchestra is. Would we have ever gotten modern musical theater without it?

2010-01-28T23:59:00.000-05:00

Today I learned academic things! I had the first meeting of my class at the design school, which is on the history of immersive entertainment spaces - aka the history of awesome. We were discussing various attributes of immersive experiences, including artificial synesthesia, loss of boundaries between self and context or others, and cognitive overload.

Also on the list was the loss of agency. I argued that this attribute should be more accurately listed as just a change in one's level of personal agency, not necessarily a loss, because some immersive experiences (I specifically named Sleep No More and the holodeck) are characterized by extremely high levels of agency within a narrative space. The professor pointed out that what I identified is really just the flip side of the same coin - in order to have the illusion of agency, the designer must have an incredibly high level of control over all the elements. The greater the illusion of agency, the less agency the individual actually has.

This blew my mind, a little.

2010-01-27T23:06:00.000-05:00

Today I learned that lady-senators have absolutely no decency when it comes to choosing the color of their lady-suits. The only rule necessary for the State of the Union drinking game is "drink every time some lady's lady-suit makes you cringe with its yellowness."

2010-01-26T23:07:00.000-05:00

Today I learned that it was Australia Day. That's about it, I reckon.

2010-01-25T23:46:00.001-05:00

Today I learned how to use Constant Contact and Google AdWords. I also learned that Big Brother is watching like whoa. Did you realize that they know whether you click on the links in an email??

2010-01-24T00:16:00.002-05:00

What I learned in, err, life today:

I can make two dozen delicious blintzes for about two dollars. Also, wrapping an old Christmas tree in pink sheeting is difficult, and Hecate's ring is not in the lockbox that Duncan puts in the second Mrs. DeWinter's suite.

Not you, Weinbl.

2010-01-22T01:02:00.008-05:00

My adviser told me I couldn't take his limited-enrollment studio unless I agreed to not dominate the conversation and let the other kids try to answer questions even if I know the answer. How do you respond to that?? Hold on while I go look up the answer in my diary from middle school. Jeez...

I told him to give me a cue when I should back off. I'm imagining a variation on Jim Marvin's hand-wave of "More alto! More alto! More alto! Not you, Weinbl."*

But if nothing else, I can always find a way to blame Ben. To wit:

Me: so my program has this required session tomorrow on how to play well with others.
Ben: is there a follow up session called "what to do when you discover the others are idiots"?

This is the source of all my problems. File under: What I'll Learn Tomorrow.

*using my fas surname as a super-sneaky pseudonym for the googlebot

2010-01-21T23:00:00.001-05:00

What I Learned In School Today:

The plural of planetarium is planetaria. The plural of stadium is stadia. The plural of penis is penes.

What I Learned In School Today

2010-01-20T23:17:00.003-05:00

This semester, I am going to write down one thing that I learned every day. I'll do it here, so that we can all learn together. Yay learning.

Today I learned that the Graduate School of Design is way cooler than the Graduate School of Education, and has far more interesting classes and far more attractive (and plentiful) men. I also learned that chocolate-covered Goldfish are awesome.

. . . I am hoping that once classes start, I'll be learning things slightly more academic. But I won't hold my breath.

Micro-travelblogging

2010-01-09T00:43:00.011-05:00

Traveling alone and domestically is a perfect opportunity to get hit by a bus while texting a tweet. I'm in Los Angeles for the first time, for truly no good reason, and I've been keeping a running commentary via Twitter. Sporadically updated to here, for those who don't do the twitter thing, is my mini trip told through mini comments.

There is a totally steampunk dude waiting for my flight. Goggles and all. He is kinda cute in that Probably Crazy way.

Perhaps Goggle Guy is flying the plane! That would explain it. Ill know if instead of boarding a 747 they have us board a red dog house.

I only just realized that even though its warm in LA, it is still technically winter and therefore will get dark early. D'oh!

Chasing the sun across the Rockies. :-D

Los Angeles is surrounded by mountains! Who knew?

Ohhhh thats why they call it The Valley. I am a moron.

You can see the Hollywood sign as you fly in! Until you fly under the smog cover anyway.

Just passed an office for Animal Dermatology. Wow LA.

So far, LA bears a striking resemblance to Long Island...

Unimpressed with Santa Monica. Looks like Sheepshead Bay. And the fog is giving me triangle hair.

Day 2

Worst. Pedestrian. City. Ever.

Vitamin D is AWESOME.

Visited the Huntington gardens with a friend I haven't seen in six years. Lovely afternoon! ...now what?

There are pricklies in my finger. This is what I get for feeling up the cacti. This, and a Darwin Award.

Been wandering Pasadena for twenty minutes and still have not found any Mexican take-out. This IS California, right?

First sidewalk star I see, as I step off the bus, is Gloria Swanson. How appropriate. I can go home now I guess.

Hollywood Blvd makes Disney MGM Studios seem exciting.

Just bought shoes at Frederick's of Hollywood. I'm doin' it wrong.

Is there a Raymond Chandler museum in LA? Prob not, same dumb way New Orleans has nothing for Tennessee Williams.

There is an 800 number you can call to ask an operator how to get somewhere on public trans. Why don't we have that?

Saturday

In the hostel courtyard, two french girls are enthusiastically video chatting with friends and a puppy in Paris. This is like a commercial for The Future.

En route to the Getty. The bus infrastructure here is actually fantastic. They just need to make a schematic map and provide free transfers.

LA women make me feel ugly, but I am receiving a higher than usual rate of compliments from strangers. Culture? Or Blonde-in-Japan effect?

I get inappropriately emotional when i visit museums alone. I just welled up at a photograph of workers erecting Eiffel's tower.

Also if you have never looked closely at Dorothea Lange's Migrant Worker, you should.

Just ran into someone from Uchoir. World = ridic.

Went to the Magic Castle. And guess what guys?? MAGIC IS REAL.

Sunday

DISNEYLAND DISNEYLAND DISNEYLAND DISNEYLAND

Monday

Disneyland recap: DISNEYLAND IS AMAZING. Sure, it's more cramped than DisneyWorld, but the Indiana Jones ride makes my life. <3>

More importantly, how do you get to be an Imagineer? Do you have to already be one of those other things that end with "-gineer"?

All the birds sing words and the flowers croon!

Tuesday

I have 14 hours left in Los Angeles. What should I do? Because hanging around Chris's apartment is looking tempting...

At the Getty Villa, where they are so flummoxed to have a pedestrian visitor that the parking attendant had to call security to check what to do about me.

I am not so much hiking as i am clambering. Or perhaps "aerobic trespassing."

Using a display laptop in Office Max like a homeless person.

This In 'n' Out thing really is pretty okay.

Chronicle of a Thanksgiving

2009-11-26T12:12:00.011-05:00

-----

[Jenny points at a large piece of driftwood on the beach - it is a good six feet tall]

Jenny - What's that?
Mom & Dad - [simultaneous] Pizza box.

-----

[we are staying in an A-frame house. Jenny got the loft, which has five twin beds in a row]

Jenny - How come you all get bedrooms, while I have to sleep in the Tenement Museum?
Me - It's a hard knock life.

-----

[Jenny is studying abroad in Bulgaria in the spring]

Me - Are you taking Bulgarian?
Jenny - You think SUNY New Paltz offers Bulgarian? No one offers Bulgarian. Even Harvard doesn't offer Bulgarian.
Me - I bet they do.
Jenny - I bet they don't.
Me - Five dollars says Harvard offers Bulgarian.
Jenny - You're on.

[ten minutes later, from the other room]

Jenny - Son of a... There's a goddamn Bulgarian dance team!

-----

Jenny - I accidentally said one of our strange family expressions to a stranger yesterday.
Us - Uh oh.
Jenny - I told a lady in the restroom that she's a better man than I, Gunga Din. She left muttering to herself "Gunga Din?" This was at the therapist's office, by the way.

-----

Mom - I see, said the hammer.

----

Jenny - I told JRB about the time you played Mama Rose when you were 8. He said that he was writing a himself note to call Arthur Laurents tomorrow and tell him.
Me - That's awesome! I have to tell Ben.
Jenny - He'll just be pissed that Arthur Laurents knows who you are and not him.
Daddy - Not if Arthur Laurents sues you for performing Gypsy without the rights...

-----

And a re-post of the classic, from Thanksgiving 2006:

Mom: The Salvation Army is coming at noon to take the sofas.
Me: What?
Mom: The sofas in the living room. They smell like the dog, it's time to
get rid of them. So the Salvation Army's going to come get them.
Me: But... we have 14 people coming for Thanksgiving tomorrow...
Mom: Right. Can't have them sitting on smelly couches.
Me: So instead they'll stand?
Mom: We have folding chairs.

- one hour later -

Salvation Army guy: The big sofa is too stained, sorry.
Me: Mom, why don't you give them twenty bucks and ask them to carry the
sofa outside so the city can come take it?
Mom: I don't want a sofa on the front lawn when we have people coming.

- two hours later -

Me: Mom, what are you doing with the sofa?
Mom: I changed my mind.
Me: We'll never get it through the door ourselves.
Mom: Your father will be home in an hour.

- one hour later -

Dad: #$^$%&@#$%@!

- one hour later -

Dad: Wait, tilt it towards me... no tilt the top... now pull the bottom
left towards you...
Me: We're gonna die.

(Jenny: Keep it down, I'm sleeping.
Mom: It's four in the afternoon!
Me: We're gonna die.)

- one hour later -

Dad: Maybe if we saw the legs off...

- one hour later -

Buttons: ::finally notices we're taking his sofa::
Buttons: ::freaks out::
Buttons: ::goes back to sleep::

- finally -

Mom: We did it! The couch is gone!
::everyone does the "Friends" couch pile-on::

- later -

Neighbor: Do you guys know there's a couch on your lawn?

Ahoy vey!

2009-09-19T20:55:00.006-04:00

Ahoy Vey!

The story of Rosh Hashana / Talk Like A Pirate Day

(which, to clarify, fell on the same day in 2009)

There was once a tiny shtetl in the old country; so inconsequential that no one bothered to persecute it, so unremarkable that no one gave it a name. And anyway, the elders argued, how can you order a pogrom on a place when you don’t know what to call it? Sure, the mail was always lost, but who wrote to them anyway? Not their good for nothing sons, that’s for sure.

One Rosh Hashanah, the esteemed rabbi of the little town stood in front of the shul. The rabbi’s emotion on the holy days was greatly renowned, and the whole town – from Abram the mostly-honest butcher to Shlomo the skill-less liberal arts major (may your family be spared such indignity!) – packed the shul to witness the rabbi's single dramatic tear as he beseeched the Lord God to forgive his people for not setting foot in His house since the previous Yom Kippur, and would He remind them of the Sisterhood potluck next Shabbos as well?

As the rabbi finished a thinly veiled comparison of the binding of Isaac to the binding of his digestion – thanks to the prune rugelach offered by certain congregants in lieu of membership dues – a commotion was heard outside the shul. People were gathering at the door.

“Uch,” thought Abram, “the lazy-bones are only showing up in time for the Part With The Stuff They Know."

“Uch,” thought Shlomo, “I could have slept later after all.”

“Uch,” thought Carlos the shabbos goy, “I hope they don’t ask me to tear their toilet paper.”

A rough voice outside shouted “amen!,” and “amen,” the congregation hastily assented, with a caterwauled descant provided by Chandleh the thinks-she’s-a-soprano show-off. “Arrrr, men!” repeated the voice with clearer diction, and a strong scent of highly un-kosher grog filled the air as a crew of pirates shoved into the shul.

The pirates were ill-shaven and well-armed, apart from the hook-handed one who was well-shaven and ill-armed, and their captain tottered atop a wooden peg leg.

“Ahoy, me hearties!” said the pirate captain.

“Oy, my heart!” said Ephraim the kvetch.

“We be needin’ some assistence from ye landlubbers. We may be the meanest, dirtiest, ugliest blackguards ever to sail the seven seas,” the pirate said (“You should see my wife,” added Samuel who-thinks-he’s-funny), “but the scurvy czar (may he prosper on someone else’s back) be refusin’ to issue us a general pillaging license.”

He paused for a moment of general tutting and commisseration.

“So we be sailin’ under the radar, pillagin’ only that which the czar don’t bother to pillage himself." The pirate smiled with black teeth. "And we be noticin’ that this speck of barnacle is long overdue for a good pillage.”

There were cries and gasps, and a few of the women in the balcony took the opportunity to get better seats by fainting onto the lower level.

"On to the ship!" cried the pirate. The townsfolk were herded towards the door, though in a moment of highly uncharacteristic bravery, Tevye the milkman took a swing at the pirate, who tripped his attacker with a well-placed peg leg.

“You fight like a dairy farmer,” the pirate spat. “Now come along, so's I can make ye walk the plank.”

But at that moment Mordecai the whittler grabbed the pirate's peg leg.

“You have this peg long?”

“Arr. A mosquito bit me thigh." Mordecai looked up. "It was me first day with me hook."

“You think that’s bad? You should see my goiter,” said Ephraim.

“That peg’s not gonna last long, way it was constructed. Allow me.” And Mordecai grabbed the arm off the end of the pew, and quickly whittled it into a fine new peg leg.

“This be a fine new peg leg,” cried the pirate, dancing a little jig. “But don’t be expectin’ that will save ye from the plank.”

“Oh no,” said Mordecai. “For the Cossacks, sure, a leg will cost an arm and another leg. But for you? For you, I make a deal.” He gestured to the rabbi to come forward.

“This is our rabbi, the wisest scholar in our land. Pose him a riddle. If he cannot answer it to your satisfaction within three days, we will happily offer up our plunder to be pillaged. If the rabbi can solve the puzzle, then we request that you allow us to remain un-pillaged. I’ll even throw in an extra peg leg."

The pirate thought for a moment, but finding himself unaccustomed to such strain, he slapped his knee in consternation and cried "shiver me timbers!"

"We accept!" said Mordecai.

"Huh?" said the esteemed rabbi.

"Wait, that warn't any riddle" protested the pirate, but Mordecai put up a hand.

"Captain, let me offer you some counsel, free of charge. If even you don't know the answer to the "riddle," how can our rabbi hope to solve it?"

The pirate paused. "I accept! Rabbi, ye have three days to shiver me timbers." (The wife of Samuel-who-thinks-he's-funny pre-emptively smacked her husband) "I'll go ready me plank."

The pirate stomped off.

Mordecai turned to the rabbi with a smile, expecting praise for his quick wit and genre savvy. Instead, he was met with several dozen pieces of stale prune rugelach flying at his head.

For three days and three nights, the rabbi prayed. For three days and three nights, the rabbi studied. For three days and three nights, the rabbi fasted, not that his other options were much better. And after three days and three nights, the pirates met the townsfolk at the shul, and awaited the esteemed rabbi's solution.

The rabbi stepped up to the bimah, and began to speak. "The Rambam wrote of the many names of the Lord our God," he began, and proceeded to argue that if "shiver" is broken down into its numerological designation... but we’ll never hear the brilliant conclusion that proved "shiver me timbers" to be the lost fourteenth attribute of Hashem, for by that point all in attendance were fast asleep.

T'kiaaaaah! A loud horn bleat from outside woke congregants, pirate and Jew alike. T'kiaaaaaah!

"What fool is blowing the shofar three days late?" the rabbi muttered, throwing open the doors of the shul to chastise the tardy horn-blower. But when he looked out into the town square, he saw none other than the whittler Mordecai, cheeks blushed scarlet from blowing a strange-looking shofar.

"So this is your plan, Mordecai?" demanded the rabbi. "Lead us into the hands of the pirates while you sound the battle cry on your cheap knock-off shofar?"

"Actually, rabbi, I completely forgot about the riddle. But I was poking around the pirates' ship, looking for lost dubloons, when I saw a beautiful plank of wood just hanging off the edge of the deck."

"Me plank!" cried the pirate. "Me beautiful plank!"

"And I couldn't help myself - I had to whittle it. But look at this beautiful horn I made! It works, too!” T'kiaaaaaaaaaah!

The rabbi was all set to strangle Mordecai with his own payyis, but he was distracted by a strange wheezing sound. Coming from the pirate.

"Hee hee hee," said the pirate.

"Hee hee hee?" asked the rabbi.

"Your Mordecai - he took my plank and he... He shofar'd me timber!"

The resulting mass face-palm was so extraordinary that the descendents of the townfolk have had crooked noses ever since.

And the pirate was so taken by this extraordinarily clumsy and painstakingly set-up pun that he spared the village, asking only that Mordecai continue to entertain gentiles for the rest of his days. And so he and his descendents did, inventing musical theater and running Hollywood and generally ruining every nice social gathering, unto this very day.

The end.

[re-posts okay, with credit]

Sitemeter is awesome

2009-09-16T19:39:00.000-04:00

A recent visitor to this blog reached the page through the following Google search:

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&safe=off&rlz=1T4GGLD_enUS320US320&q=%22harvard%20glee%20club%22%20gay%20sex&aq=f&oq=&aqi=

Yeah, you read that right. Okay, fess up, who was it?

Sometimes Liz Draws

2009-08-11T00:12:00.005-04:00

My friends Emily and Bailes are getting married this weekend, and I am chronicling their relationship each day iin an xkcd-style web comic.

It can be found at:
www.xkcEB.wordpress.com

The beginning, Day One, starts here:
http://xkceb.wordpress.com/2009/08/10/4/

To view the alt-text in Internet Explorer, hover over the image. To view the alt-text in Firefox, switch to Internet Explorer.

Sesame Street presents: Mad Men

2009-08-02T22:15:00.015-04:00

Sesame Street will be doing a Mad Men parody next season, and over on Jezebel they were fantasy-casting the Muppets in various Mad Men roles. Hate to break it to the Mad Men fans looking for a bit more actual parody in their Sesame Street, but here's how it will actually go:

Grover has a clipboard and a megaphone. Prairie Dawn, a camera.

GROVER
Alright, gather round people, gather round! Now today I, Grover, will be making my deee-rec-torial debut. So don't mess up! Places!

Bert, Ernie, Big Bird, Oscar, and others take places.

GROVER
"Mad Men," take one. Roll film, Prairie Dawn. Action!

The cast weeps. Big Bird blows his beak into a giant handkerchief.

GROVER
Stop! Stop! This is terrible!

ERNIE
Gee, I thought I was being real sad.

BERT
I was very touched, Ernie.

ERNIE
Why thanks, Bert.

GROVER
Quiiieeett! I don't want you to be SAD men. I want MAD! Sad is what you feel when the top scoop falls off your ice cream cone, or when your favorite toy breaks. Show me MAD!

EVERYONE
Oh okay -- We understand -- Yeah sure boss.

GROVER
Alright? Places! Mad Men, take 2. Action!

Everyone grins. Ernie giggles. Elmo dances around.

GROVER
No no no no no!

ERNIE
Was that better, Grover?

GROVER
That wasn't Mad Men! That was Glad Men! Way too happy, yes, far far too happy and glad. No happiness!

EVERYONE
Okay Grover -- Will do -- Not a problem.

GROVER
Okay. Good. Do you understand what I mean by mad? Like how you feel when you get woken up too early, or when you can't find your baseball, or when you have to eat a plate full of brussel sprouts.

EVERYONE
Ew.

BERT
Ooh ooh, brussel sprouts, I want, me!

GROVER
That is mad. Do you all know how to feel mad?

ERNIE
We sure do!

GROVER
Great! Wonderful! Fantastic! Show me the mad! Not sad, not glad - mad. Mad Men, take three. Action!

He looks at his cast, and suddenly they are all wearing plaid shirts.

GROVER
What is-- . Oh. I see. Plaid Men. You're wearing plaid. WHY ARE YOU WEARING PLAID I TOLD YOU TO BE MAD HOW MANY TIMES DO I HAVE TO TELL YOU--

ERNIE
Mad Men, take four! Action!

Prairie Dawn spins the camera around on Grover and films him going ballistic.

GROVER
--HOW HARD CAN IT BE TO JUST ACT MAD WHY DON'T THEY UNDERSTAND GROVER'S ARTISTIC INTENTIONS WHAT IS THE--

ERNIE
Now *that's* mad! Heeheehee!

Aaand scene.

Sesame Street's Liz Lemon

Philharmonic drinking game

2009-07-15T14:07:00.004-04:00

What could possibly make the Philharmonic's concerts in Central Park better? By adding a drinking game, of course!

Every time the audience claps inappropriately (ie, between movements), chug through the length of the applause.

One drink for every time Didi & Oscar Schaffer get a shout-out
...for every fundraising plug
...for every mic glitch

During the pieces, drink when a cell phone rings
...when a cell phone is answered
...when a baby cries
...when someone walks directly across your picnic blanket

In the music, drink whenever there's a false ending
...whenever you can hear the violas
...whenever there's a chromatic scale

If something is repeated three times in the music, drink. This rule actually can increase your appreciation of the music! Tonight's program was Mozart and Beethoven, and it was interesting to keep track of how they each used and manipulated sequences and expectations.

Bonus rule! Drink every time Grace does a prairie dog dance.

The Bus of The Doomed

2009-07-12T16:41:00.002-04:00

Despite several years of regular ridership of the Fung Wah bus, I have never experienced buses full of chickens or Chinese chefs preparing raw fish en route or any of the other horrors that old people associate with the Chinatown bus, except for some godawful traffic. Honestly, I feel a little jipped. Where is my bus full of chickens?!

Last weekend, too lazy to schlep to Canal St, I took Bolt Bus instead. Turns out I've been taking the wrong bus line all along. Bolt is the Bus Of The Doomed.*

Bus driver:

"We are now approaching Boston - South Station. Please make sure to gather all your personal belongings, and wake any sleeping passengers. And I mean give them a good knock on the forehead. Last week we had a gentleman on the bus who appeared to be asleep, with his laptop open in front of him, but actually he had passed away in his seat. So please wake all sleepers. Now arriving, South Station."

Umm.

*as the Doctor Who special would be titled, natch.

How my brain works

2009-07-09T19:00:00.001-04:00

Facebook: Richard is Alternate Juror #1

Me: Hah, I hope that means he's an understudy in a production of 12 Angry Men. I've never actually read 12 Angry Men. I wonder how the character names are formatted. Like is it :

JUROR #3
Hang him high!

JUROR #9
Chill out, dude

etc? That would get really hard on the eyes. Maybe they write out the numbers, so it's like:

TEN
He's totes guilty.

FOUR
You always say that!

Although then it just looks like the script for a multi-Doctor story. Ooh!

And this is how the words "all 12 Doctors perform 12 Angry Men" appeared in my google search bar.

NYT Fail

2009-06-20T13:03:00.003-04:00

In the NY Times Book Review tomorrow, a review of the book "Digital Barbarism" begins as follows:

One of the more trenchant cartoons of the Internet era features a stick-figure man typing furiously at his keyboard. From somewhere beyond the panel floats the irritated voice of his wife.

“Are you coming to bed?”

“I can’t,” he replies. “This is important.”

“What?”

“Someone is wrong on the Internet.”

Anyone familiar with, well, the internet will immediately recognize this as the work of everyone's internet crush Randall Munroe, in xkcd #386.

But uncredited.

The article in question, which can be found here, is about copyright in the internet age, fair use, and outraged internet denizens. Fail.

Also note the interesting assumptions the article's author makes about the relationship and gender of the xkcd characters.

Jenny noted that the article was written by a Ross Douthat, which must clearly be the pseudonym of xkcd's black hat guy. Douthat is pretty much as close to douche-hat as one can print in the NY Times, so I'm gonna go with this explanation. Stay tuned to next week's book review for an extended series on velociraptors.

Major fail, NYT.

Valley Stream pride

2009-06-17T20:51:00.005-04:00

There's an escaped lunatic on the loose in Valley Stream State Park. Or possibly an escaped kitty-cat. One of those.

I'm reading in the park, around 6 pm, and a helicopter passes overhead. And again, lower. And it quickly becomes clear that it is circling the park at low altitude. Since a string of ninjas didn't come out the drop door, it seemed safe to assume they were looking for someone.

Near me, a guy in a balaclava (also known as a ski mask) was practicing parkour. A balaclava. Mid-day. Mid-June. While exercising. Definitely a terrorist.

After a half hour, I head out. The entrance to the park is blocked by a police car, and a few cops are at the gate. I know for a fact that the other 7 entrances aren't being watched. I try to head back in to investigate, but they aren't letting people into the park now.

"You guys do know that the other entrances are open, right?"
"We're looking for someone we think is in this area."
"..."

The park, mind you, is maybe a mile around. So because I'm a punk, I bike around the outside of the park and re-enter from another entrance. Because no one ever taught me not to make fun of police officers. The other entrances are all open, as I'd thought, though one is being watched by a couple guys in South Shore Hospital uniforms. Undercover men. Or someone escaped the psych ward.

Back inside the park, two more cops are staring at the trees. There's a trail in there. The entrance to the trail is around a bend from where the cops are standing, out of their sight-line. Okay. Meanwhile, balaclava guy has fled the scene.

At the first entrance, another guy is questioning the cops.
"It's not the crime of the century or anything."
"Oh okay, so it wasn't violent."
"I didn't say that. You move along now."

I'm figuring those darn kids stole Baby Lindbergh from the manger again.

Eventually I got bored of watching my tax dollars at work. Nassau County police are the highest paid in the country. Way to earn it, guys.

I made eye contact with Gerard Butler while doing the Chicken Dance

2009-06-15T00:31:00.001-04:00

So there me and Candace were. Minding our own business. Doing the chicken dance in front of Penn Station. Because we had decided to walk from 23rd St. to Times Square by doing a different dance down each block. Naturally. And 34th St. was the chicken dance.

So we're minding our own business, doing the chicken dance, and the "clap clap clap clap!" part was getting a lot of attention. Not as much attention as our zombie walk got on 25th, but heads were turning. Including the head of Gerard Butler. And the rest of him. As well as his personal gentleman. He looked at us like we were crazy. With good reason. But he was dancing on the inside.

I smiled and waved at Mr. Butler. I didn't know who he was (of course). Candace informed me on the corner. And then we continued on our merry way, Macarena-ing down 35th.

The end.

Citing Safety Concerns, Harvard Solves Problem of Race

2009-06-05T11:33:00.005-04:00

By Liz & Ben

CAMBRIDGE, MA -- The Harvard Admissions Office announced today that it would reverse its longstanding promotion of equal opportunity through the consideration of race in its decisions.

The move comes in response to the recent discovery that even African-American students who are three weeks from graduation are still dangerous criminal thugs.

"It's a shame", said William Fitzsimmons, Dean of Admissions. "After years of believing we were educating these kids, it's turned out that they are just as black and poor as they were before they enrolled."

Dissatisfaction with current policy reached a breaking point after the shootings in Kirkland house last month, in which Jabrai Jordan Copney of New York City allegedly shot Cambridge resident Justin Cosby in a drug-related incident. The spotlight quickly shifted to Harvard senior Chanequa Campbell, who, to the shock of many, was acquainted with the victim.

"I've known Channy for years, but I never saw this coming" said Chanequa's classmate, Eliot Canaday III. "Who knew she was still "down" with the "street?" Sure, she still looks black, but I mean, this is Harvard."

Widely criticized for failing to prevent this tragedy by properly assimilating black students into Harvard culture, the administration has responded with sweeping policy change. "Decades of occasional effort and perhaps hundreds of dollars have gone into Harvard's attempt to educate all students equally," said President Drew Faust in a video address yesterday, in which she appeared with several armed guards and a pitbull. "But it is time to acknowledge that these efforts have jeopardized the safety of our real students."

Harvard is calling its decision vital to maintaining the 371-year-old institution's educational integrity, but Plummer Professor of Christian Morals Peter J. Gomes disagrees. "This runs contrary to many years of progress towards the true American dream - to take any lump-of-clay students, whether financially, ethnically, or genderly challenged, and mold them into affluent white men."

Outside Cambridge the change has been applauded, except in the handful of newspapers not published by former Crimson editors, and Yale and Princeton have quickly followed suit. "We have been preparing to unroll a similar change for the last 19 months," grumbled an anonymous Princeton official, "but now that the cat's out of the bag: fine, us too." Neither of Princeton's black students could be reached for comment.

Meanwhile, student life has continued as usual. Junior Fulbright A. Rhodes didn't even notice the change. "The black kids, you know, they kept to themselves. Only time you saw them was at school-wide events, like formals and stuff. And even in tuxedos, they always ended up looking like the hired help anyway."

Well, Hello WALL-E

2009-06-03T10:58:00.000-04:00

Fun fact:

Jerry Herman, the composer of Hello Dolly, knew last year that he'd licensed some of his songs to Pixar. But he didn't know what they'd be used for. Until he sat down and watched WALL-E. [HuffPo]

Can you imagine? Not only the surprise of having your fifty-year-old songs - by far not the most widely remembered in your songbook - turn out to be a major plot point in this fantastic little movie... but also that this fantastic little movie says your fifty-year-old songs are going to OUT-LIVE CIVILIZATION?!

In other news, despite the unlikely immortality of the b-tracks from Hello Dolly, the Tony Awards last night confirmed that musical theater has jumped the shark.

1:41 am on the LIRR

2009-05-17T13:28:00.003-04:00

Announcement upon changing trains at Jamaica:

This is the train to Long Beach. Ladies and gentlemen, as part of our Clean Train Campaign, please be aware that there are restrooms located on every other car of this train. With the combination of alcoholic beverages, fatty foods, and the rhythmic motion of the train, please remove yourself to one of the restrooms if you feel the urge to yak. The next station is Locust Manor.

The Writer's Tale - a gloss

2009-05-03T00:15:00.003-04:00

To: Benjamin Cook
From: Russell T. Davies
Sent 23 December, 03:45 AM
Subject: re: re: re: David's arse

I've got it! The great "Maybe" swirling around my head has finally come together into the perfect image: Midshipman Frame! And Ianto Jones! Fighting intergalactic crime! Shirtless! On a giant CGI pterodactyl! And then dying tragically in each other's arms! Oh, I'm brilliant, I am.

I'll have to give the Doctor something to do, don't want to upset David. He can blow up Wales I suppose. But it's perfect! All I have to is cut 2563 CGI days from the rest of the BBC's lineup to pay for it. And we were supposed to start filming three months ago, so I reckon I need to convince the Queen to push Christmas back a couple weeks. But she owes me one.

To: Russell T. Davies
From: Benjamin Cook

Dude, we finished the damn book. Stop using these emails as an excuse to write fan fiction about your own bloody characters.

To: Benjamin Cook
From: Russell T. Davies

I was wrong. I'm a fraud. It's hollow and vapid and fannish and trite, and it can't possibly work. But we're gonna go ahead with it anyway because I haven't got anything better. I need a drink.

[I actually really enjoyed The Writer's Tale and highly recommend it. But it is oh so easy to mock.]

I suck at British

2009-04-29T14:48:00.002-04:00

Four consecutive tweets:

Apparently the British for "emergency room" is Casualty. As in "she's going into labor, we have to get to a Casualty." How morbid is that?
39 minutes ago from web

And there's a BBC soap called Casualty (like ER), but for the longest time I misread it as Causality, which sounds like a much better show.
38 minutes ago from web

Crap I meant "she's going into labour." I suck at British. It's labour for all meanings of labor, right? She isn't switching parties...
7 minutes ago from web

oh god and there's no article for hospital. "She's going into labour, we have to get to Casualty." There. Glad I have no British followers...
3 minutes ago from web

Anglophilia fail.

Changes for Samantha

2009-04-25T23:04:00.014-04:00

I received a copy of the American Girl catalog in the mail today, for some reason. I used to love the American Girl catalog. I spent most of elementary school optimistically marking up every issue with circles and stars, hoping that I might get more than one new doll outfit this Hanukkah (I never did. I also desperately wanted Kirsten's summer dress, and kinda still do). So I sat down with the catalog, prepared for a happy nostalgia-fest.

I knew the company had de-emphasized the core historical dolls in recent years, in favor of "girls of today." But I was pretty shocked to see that each historical girl (many of them strangers - I aged out of the series somewhere between Addy and Josefina) now only gets a two page spread in the catalog. Where's Felicity's four-poster bed? Where's Molly's canoe? Where's Samantha's school desk, with the wrought iron curliques for hiding notes? In fact... where's Samantha?!

Samantha is going back into the American Girls vault.

This? Not okay.

I know, I know, the American Girl books were designed to sell dolls. Insanely expensive dolls, and their insanely expensive (but oh so charming!) clothing and furniture. But, if memory serves, they were also AWESOME.

The books did an honest job of turning history into understandable narrative, and the dolls turned narrative into interaction. Their stories didn't shy away from tackling the darker issues of the girls' times, either - racism, classism, war, poverty, and child labor were part of these characters' lives.

Sure, the history was sometimes a little vague. I remember being totally confused about Molly's chronology. My interior monologue, circa 1992: "There's this huge war going on, and war is something that happens in the past. But she's got refrigerators and cars and stuff, so clearly this is present day. What war is this? Are we at war now? I'll sound stupid if I ask someone. I think I'll just stay confused until I'm 15."

But I also learned that poison ivy means getting covered with chamomile lotion (Molly Saves the Day). And that little girls with poor parents have to work bare-foot in factories (Samantha Learns a Lesson). And that the black character is always going to have the crappy story lines / accessories (poor Addy*).

My sadness at the loss of one of the original three girls (Molly and Kirsten are safe for now) is especially strong, I admit, because Samantha is MY girl. I had the doll, and her little white fur muff, and her sailor outfit with the whistle, and the change purse with the penny from 1904. We couldn't afford to get the matching clothes for me. But Allison Kresch wore Samantha's plaid dress to synagogue one Shabbat and omigod I was so jealous. So see! It wasn't only the books that taught about class differences!

I fear that Samantha's jettison is another step on the American Girl Company's path towards abandoning the historical line altogether. I hope that they are just cashing in on the Disney Vault concept, and will be periodically shelving each girl for a few years at a time to scare up sales. But it is all too likely that Samantha, Felicity, and Addy are being phased out to make room in the stores and catalogs for the likes of Madison, Brooke, and Taylor, with shiny little dolly iPods and dolly MySpace accounts.

The books aren't going anywhere, but the dolls themselves serve a legitimate purpose in a market glutted with Barbies and Bratz. Yes, they're only accessible to rich kids, and that's pretty gross. But rich kids getting decent dolls is still better than no one getting decent dolls. And if you're gonna buy a kid a $90 doll, she damn well better come with six novels worth of back story.

From left:
my Native American doll Lily (named for Tiger Lily),
my Romanian doll Stashie, and my Samantha.
And a Dalek, but he's a more recent addition.

*actually, Addy reminds me of Martha Jones. Both intrinsically awesome yet really poorly used by their series. Also, Kendra from Buffy. And Uhura.

Unpopular Opinion Monday

2009-04-20T13:32:00.004-04:00

Susan Boyle ain't much of a singer.

I enjoyed the clip from "Britain's Got Talent" as much as anyone. It was a fabulous five minutes of television.

But you know who deserves credit for that excellent video? It ain't Susan Boyle. I'm sorry, internet hordes, but she's just not much of a singer. Strong voice, but untrained and with no range (can *you* hear the "but the tigers come at night" low note? which isn't low at all?). She is no different than anyone else on these Idol shows - she's just uglier.

The people who really deserve credit for the Susan Boyle video are the people who put it together - the director and editors who took the raw footage and made it heart-tugging. In fact, I just spent ten minutes trying to find the program's credits, to give the crew some truly deserved props by name, but even ITV's website snubs them.

Congratulations to the crew of Britain's Got Talent - your video went viral. Congratulations to Susan Boyle - you lucked out, big time.

And for the rest of you... You can stop patting yourselves on the back. It is no different and no better to be wowed by Susan Boyle because she sang better than you expected, than it was to expect a joke in the first place.

...Plus I've had Les Miz stuck in my head for a week now and it's really not okay.

Twitter

2009-04-15T23:46:00.003-04:00

I have been talked into joining Twitter. Or rather, Jeana said "why aren't you on Twitter?" and I said "dunno."

http://twitter.com/LizWeinbloom

Facebook's jumped the shark anyways.

Little Einsteins; or, the decline of civilization

2009-04-01T15:19:00.004-04:00

I am a big supporter of children’s television, but I have long been skeptical of preschool programming. With the very notable exception of Sesame Street, which is designed to be awesome for parents as well as toddlers, television for preschoolers is largely inscrutable to grownups. There’s just no accounting for the taste of 2-year-olds. Probably because they shouldn’t be watching tv at all.

Often, preschool programs employ the “interactive” model of Blue’s Clues and Dora the Explorer, in which the viewer is asked direct questions by a protagonist who blinks far too infrequently for comfort. On some level I eagerly anticipate the art that will someday be created by a generation whose concept of the fourth wall was demolished so early on – in my day, kids’ tv only got as meta as the seriously over-branded Where’s Waldo, which froze the action intermittently so we could run up to the screen and, you know, find Waldo. But on the whole, these “interactive” shows (and I will never ever call them interactive without a liberal dose of scare quotes) are labeled as educational, while being benign at best – and, far too often, actively idiotic.

Today I watched Little Einsteins. You might have heard of the Baby Einstein brand. The tv version is a Dora-style show on the Disney channel that promotes arts literacy or something. [Note that the actual baby Einstein was deemed to be no Einstein; irony is an undeveloped muscle in the world of preschool programming].

Now, I have no quibbles about the value of arts literacy. I myself once wrote a pitch about talking paintings, though largely to cannibalize art puns from a failed project about singing paintings. And then I discovered that Sesame Street had already done it, as there is no good idea that wasn’t done first and better by the Muppets. Twice.

My quibble is not with the end, but the means. The thought process behind the Baby Einstein franchise is that context-less exposure to Mozart and Picasso at an early age will stay in the system – like acid – and conveniently resurface sixteen years later in the presence of a Harvard admissions officer.

In practice, this means assigning each episode a painting and symphony (in the episode I watched, “Go West, Young Train,” these were a Navajo basket and a phrase from Bizet’s L’Arlsienne Suite #2), and randomly inserting them into a Dora-style problem-solving adventure. But the problem is not at all related to the art. A little red train in the Old West was on its way to a hoe-down, you see, and its bag of goodies – including three violins that ghost-bowed the Bizet, because what’s a hoe-down without some French ballet scoring? – was stolen by an evil jet plane.

Sure, whatever. How about that art? Well, the Navajo basket was not woven into the events, but served as a backdrop. The little red train chased the evil jet into a cave (don’t think too hard, now), and the cave happened to look like the basket. Not that the basket was used as a map or anything. The idea is to divorce the art from its context, remember? They just went into a cave that happened to resemble that basket we saw in the opening credits.

On the music side of things, four measures of Bizet are sprinkled liberally through the soundtrack. A time-honored way to ~~exploit the public domain~~ teach classical music, though Bugs Bunny was a bit more willing to get past the opening phrases. But Little Einsteins goes one better than “What’s Opera, Doc” and uses the Dora model to teach real live music vocabulary too.

Dora’s claim to fame is, of course, the Spanish words. Her dialog is punctuated with random Spanish exclamations (“clap your hands mas rapido!”) that may or may not increase children’s comfort with bilingualism, depending on who sponsored the study. But when Little Einsteins borrows this technique, the result is dialog like this:

“The little red train is going andante, but the evil jet is going allegro! Help the little red train go more allegro!”

What. the. fuck.

Let’s ignore the fact that words like andante and allegro are completely useless for anyone who isn’t, say, sightreading a score or writing liner notes. This vocabulary is not only completely useless, but decontextualized to the point of meaninglessness. Tempo and velocity are NOT THE SAME THING. You can’t “go allegro”! You don’t walk allegro any more than you play the piano at 55 mph. Granted, I have had several conductors fond of obliterating traditional boundaries of units of measure (“the sopranos are two octaves behind and a golf course sharp!” – Dr. Jameson Marvin). But this is ridiculous.

Programs like Little Einsteins will not make your kid smart. They will quite possibly make your kid stupider. But at least they’ll be able to hum four measures of non-Carmen Bizet. And that’s more than you can.

Photo linkage

2009-03-27T20:04:00.005-04:00

This post is solely so I can link back to this photo in an io9 comment.

Nothing else to see here, moving on...

[well, actually, I suppose there's the photo to see. Which is of some excellent people wandering the streets of Cardiff dressed as 10 and Jack.]

[comments on this photo in its facebook album:
Reha - Captain Jack's heels are the best thing ever.
Me - Not quite authentic though - you know the real Jack's heels would be three inches taller and sparkly.
Reha - Haha, they surely would. Possibly the kind with fish swimming inside, except they'd be ALIEN fish out to destroy the world.
Me - ::goes off to write that story:: ]

Point-missing, Spoilery, or Otherwise Amusing Translations of Movie Titles

2009-03-04T05:35:00.004-05:00

It was raining a lot in Sevilla, so Jenny and I amused ourselves by making this list in a FNAC.

Point-missing, Spoilery, or Otherwise Amusing Translations of Movie and TV Titles
(key below)

Mejor... Imposible
Desayuno con Diamantes
Atrapado en el Tiempo
El Invisible Harvey
Urgencias
Expediente X
A dos metros bajo tierra
El Sueño de mi Vida
Descubriendo Nunca Jamás
El Caballero Oscuro
La Guerra de las Galaxas
Padre Made in USA

(the originals)

As Good As It Gets
Breakfast at Tiffanys
Groundhog Day
Harvey
ER
X-Files
Six Feet Under
13 going on 30
Finding Neverland
The Dark Knight
Star Wars
American Dad

Bonus book section!

Los Cuentos de Beedle el Bardo

Also, Harvard fails at policing unauthorized uses of its image overseas, apparently:

The rain in Spain stays mainly...

2009-03-03T11:02:00.001-05:00

on me.

Stupid southern Spain.

2009-03-02T12:38:00.003-05:00

I bought more underwear. It was cheaper than doing laundry.

Also, Seville has a shocking lack of barbers.

Not the planet Barcelona

2009-02-23T19:46:00.005-05:00

Which is to say, I'm probably gonna post more now, because now it doesn't have to be prose.

I sent an email to CERN when we got to Switzerland the other day, asking about tours. I addressed it "Dear CERN or Madam."

This may explain why I have not heard back.

Tomorrow I'm going to Barcelona. Don't get up.

Song starts at 1:20.

2009-02-23T15:22:00.003-05:00

I think I'm going to be giving up this travel blogging thing, because typing up my journal really takes much longer than I expected. So I say au revoir (with a really revolting French accent, but Jenny is tutoring me) with a couple lists.

Favorite names for Underground stops:

Elephant & Castle
Tooting Broadway
Cutty Sark
Cockfosters
Barking
Ickenham
Bounds Green
Swiss Cottage
Wembley Park
Canada Water
Heron Quays
Shepherd's Bush
Mile End
Stepney Green
Burnt Oak
Chalk Farm

Favorite names of varieties of roses in Regent's Park, as indicated by little signs next to thoroughly dead twigs in the ground:

Perestroika
Top Marks
Yesterday
Buff Beauty
Golden Celebrations
Wife of Bath
Vidal Sassoon
Eye Paint
Eye Opener
The Times
Razzle Dazzle
Bruce
Summerfield Miranda
Tiddles
Conspicuous
Dr. Eckener
Narrow Waters
Tall Story
Falstaff
Cardinal Richelou
Mayor of Casterbridge

Bon voyage! (you mean bon voya-guh)

"You're going to Cardiff? Why?"

2009-02-20T19:11:00.008-05:00

The Doctor and Rose Tyler walk down a snowy Victorian street. Rose is gleeful, but the Doctor glances sullenly at a newspaper.

Doctor: I got the flight a bit wrong.
Rose: I don't care!
Doctor: It's not 1860, it's 1869.
Rose: I don't care!
Doctor: And we're not in Naples.
Rose: I don't care!
Doctor: We're in Cardiff.
Rose: ....right.

Caerdydd! Home of Doctor Who, the Millennium Centre, and, um, a castle. Rather lovely, rather dull. Perfect place for a day trip, if you do it right. Which I did not. I was in Cardiff for a total of 23 hours, but only eight of them were at all viable.

My train got in at 3 pm, and after checking in at the (really nice, highly recommended) NosDa hostel, I walked down the river to the bay. Predictably, I started at the Doctor Who exhibition, but... it was a bit unthrilling. Just costumes and flashing lights and the occasional panel with an episode summary - like anyone visiting a DW exhibit would need such a thing - and some animatronic Daleks. Even the gift shop was pretty lame. So the most obvious stage of my Doctor Who pilgrimage was a bust.

But outside was the Millennium Centre, which really is impressive in its own right. Welsh is a beautiful and absurd-looking language, so a massive carved wall of Welsh really does make for an interesting and worthy city icon. From there I started a walking tour I'd printed from the BBC website, which was theoretically supposed to take four hours. It actually took 20 minutes. There's just not all that much to see. Roald Dahl Pass is just some pass named after Roald Dahl. And there's, like, a church. Meh.

But I turned on the little boardwalk around the bay, and lo! There was the entrance to the Torchwood hub! I was very impressed to find that the geography of the hub's area, as shown both on Torchwood and the parent show, is consistent with the real world (ie, Jack was running from the right direction in LOTL, etc). The hub's door is covered by a rusty grille, with some old newspapers tacked up behind it. I took a closer look. "New Mayor, New Cardiff" announces a headline, under a photo of Margaret Blaine, nee Slitheen. Squee! Enormous squee! I guess it's just been chilling there since they filmed Boomtown in 2005. You can keep your animatronic Cybermen and life-size talking Daleks - this is the sort of thing that fills my heart with fannish glee. I was grinning like mad for a good ten minutes.

There was one other happy fan moment of note - spotting 10 and Captain Jack waiting for a bus. If you're gonna do cosplay, boy, wandering around Cardiff dressed like Jack Harkness is the way to do it. Plus there are few images more hilarious than the Doctor boarding a public bus.

Alas, after having exhausted all the outdoor sightseeing, I suddenly discovered that it was 5:30, and EVERYTHING had closed. The restaurants and bars were open, but that's of no use to a solo traveler. Also, everyone appeared to be in high school.

And so, at a loss for what else to do on a Tuesday night in Cardiff, I went to the movies. And by "went" I mean "accidentally snuck into." And by "accidentally snuck into," I really do mean "accidentally snuck into." I think they use an honor system or something? Whatever. I was on an escalator, and next thing I knew I was in a cinema, and a movie was about to start. So I sat down to watch it.

It was "Twilight."

Okay, so, I really enjoyed it! Which is to say, I really enjoyed it in the way that I didn't enjoy the Dirty Dancing musical. Here was some awfulness that you could really sink your teeth into! Fangs, rather. ::rimshot::

I'd sort of gathered from the zeitgeist of Twilight-hate that the most objectionable element was the pro-abstinence shilling, but that is so very much the least of its problems (and not at all present in the first movie). Rather, in the very established tradition of classic vampire stories (cf, Dracula), Twilight is a rape fantasy. And a stalking fantasy. That huge creeper in bio lab is not a huge creeper if he has dreamy eyebrows. Being stalked is not only okay, but desirable! As is ditching your friends, family, and life for a guy. And ignoring all warning signs, of the flashing neon variety as well as menacing folktales from your token Magic Red Man, that the guy is a huge creeper. Who watches you while you sleep. And follows you around town. Oh my god I feel dirty just thinking about it.

Twilight actually made me cry. I cried from frustration, and anger, and sadness that in 2009 I was watching this movie in a theater full of 10-year-olds and their mothers. It was the sexuality, gender, and genre issues that were tackled by Buffy, but with all the nuance, awareness, and problematizing thrown out the window. Poor, poor Joss. He tried, he really did.

After that exercise in frustration, I hung out at the hostel bar for a few hours with a sargeant in the American army who just finished a ten month tour in Afghanistan, and a street magician on his way to a magic convention in Blackpool who currently lives in Spain but migrates with the tourist season. I didn't tell them a thing about myself, because jeez did I lose on the interestingness count in this crowd.

In the morning I visited the Cardiff Castle, which despite being many centuries old was entirely gutted in the 1890s, so that was also a bit unimpressive. Mostly I liked the pen of falconry birds, who were there not to put on a show for the tourists, but to keep pigeons and squirrels out of the castle. I was particularly enthralled by the bold orange eyes of the eagle owl, though I don't know if I found him terrifying or wanted to give him a cuddle. And then I wandered through the very nice city center till my train back to London, and discovered that Cardiff has great shopping, if only you're there during daylight.

So for anyone planning a trip to Cardiff: Travel at night. Bring a friend for the bars. And dress like Captain Jack.

Cambridge, UK-flavour

2009-02-16T16:26:00.004-05:00

Cambridge, Cambridge, Cambridge. I just returned from a weekend in Cambridge, and oh my. It is just so excessively, ridiculously beautiful and ancient.

When you see Harvard for the first time after seeing other colleges, you may find yourself thinking "Oh, so that's what they're trying to do." And then you see Cambridge. And no, no - THAT's what they're trying to do. I think this may even be an appropriate situation to get a bit Platonic, vis a vis C.S. Lewis. Harvard is the Shadowlands of Cambridge. It's nice enough in its own right, but Cambridge is the real thing.

However, the first thing I did in Cambridge was to... see a lecture by one of my old Harvard professors. About Harvard. I was visiting my wonderful friend Con, who is a Harvard-Cambridge fellow, and he and the other fellows were attending a lecture by the Reverend Peter J. Gomes, Professor of Christian Morals and all around enjoyable fellow. It was the tenth anniversary of something or other (possibly the tenth anniversary of the 300th anniversary of something else?) and so Gomes was invited to speak.

The Harvard fellows and I were the only people at the lecture who were 1) not in academic gowns, and 2) not white old men. Gomes himself excepted on the latter, of course. His lecture was on the historical connection between Harvard and Emmanuel College, and though the topic was more interesting in Gomes's hands than it would have been in anyone else's, it still got a bit dull. I did perk up at an unexpected Radcliffe Choral Society shout-out, though! We performed at the tricentennial of something or other, apparently. Guess the Glee Club has somewhere more exciting to be for that one.

After the lecture, Con and I explored. Con hadn't explored most of the Cambridge colleges, and he takes very seriously the rules about not walking on the grass and not wandering past fences marked "private". I, however, remember fondly a very silly evening exploring Jesus College with Jenny and Kavita and a video camera, and additionally have a personal mission of helping my more rule-laden friends to unburden themselves of these issues, so explore we did. We even walked on the grass. A little.

In typical Con fashion, he got himself a concussion last week, so he couldn't drink and forgot the odd English word here and there. At dinner, he said something like "I'm glad I had food, my poor concussed brain needs the primary sources." I looked at him, puzzled. "Oh, wait, I mean... raw materials! Needs the raw materials." I found this a fascinating slip. I, and many people, would replace a forgotten phrase with something that sounds similar, or something of like context. Con's brain used a phrase that was conceptually equivalent in a completely different frame of reference. I have smart friends.

On Saturday, Con and I took a walk to what he'd called a magical discount shopping heaven, which turned out to be... T.K. Maxx. Like T.J. Maxx but, umm, with a K for some reason. Only difference seems to be that at the UK version, they sell Dalek voice-changer helmets at the checkout line. I am both pleased and disoriented to be in a land where my obscure, esoteric obsession is the stuff of discount center checkout queue doodads.

We spent rather a long time at the grocery, because we like groceries, and had a lunch of random items from teh deli counter, each of which turning out to be another unappetizing variation on greyish meat wrapped in dough. Oh, Britain! Then we went to a JCR-type thing back at Trinity and cooked... casado! Well, actually, gallo pinto. Rice and beans. (this is because the last time I saw Con was when I stayed with him during Costa Rica tour, after having spent the previous three weeks eating nothing but rice and beans). We had a lovely Valentine's dinner party for all the Cambridge Harvard lonely-hearts.

And then Sunday we were supposed to go punting, but the punt rental companies disagreed due to some bothersome rain. So we went with our plan B of walking over the meadows to Grandchester. Rain and snow meltage had turned the meadows to marsh and the path to mud, but we decided to sacrifice our shoes and sludge ahead. It felt very authentically British, slogging a half hour through mud on a grey day to reach a tea place. Sunshine would have been lovely but wrong. And anyway, Sylvia Plath used to do this walk regularly (along with a litany of other literary figures, as the brochure at the tea place was quick to note), and she never would have stood for sunshine. And it was still quite beautiful, if squishy. Over tea in Grandchester, we decided that the only person worthy/capable of sustaining a relationship with Peter Gomes would be Garrison Keilor. They could orate anecdotes at each other from across a very long breakfast table.

Then a sludge back to Cambridge, and a lovely choral evensong at Trinity Chapel, and more exploring and hanging out. Cambridge is a wonderful place, and it sounds like students there are held to amazingly higher standards than at Harvard, and actually receive, like, educations worthy of the institution's reputation (whoa, novel idea), and basically I am jealous and want to stay.

In other news, Jelly Babies are surprisingly good.

London, day 1

2009-02-14T08:28:00.004-05:00

12 February 2009, 16:30

Today is the bicentennial of the birth of Charles Darwin, and I am sitting in Westminster Abbey, waiting for a ceremony in his honor. I think this is nine kinds of awesome. But it is bloody COLD.

My hostel in London is just down the block from Southwark Cathedral, home of the John Harvard Chapel and a particularly sparsely attended RCS tour concert in 2006. After arriving from the airport and checking in, I popped in to Southwark to see if there were any visiting choirs I could go support, but sadly, there are none. Unless their pubmen are slacking. I gave a hello to the Harvard chapel and got trapped in a noonday prayer. At least I didn't get trapped in the dressing room this time...

I walked along the bank of the Thames for the next few hours. I love listening to people talk as they walk past - there's so much variety in British accents! Even within the London accent. I can't place the accents, of course, though I'd like to pull a Higgins and write out speech patterns in IPA, but at least it is in my ear well enough now that I can hear the variance.

I spent a couple hours at the Tate Modern, which is my favorite modern art museum. Granted, I'm only comparing it to MOMA, but I can only enjoy MOMA ironically. Outside, a street musician was playing Bolero on a steel drum, and if you bear in mind that Bolero's sole reason for existence is as an exercise in orchestration, you'll gather the silliness of the arrangement for solo steel drum.

After a couple hours at the Tate (favorite piece: Roy Lichtenstein's vamp on Monet's haystacks), I continued down the embankment till I hit the London Eye, the big ferris wheel. Now, I'd meant to do my Doctor Who tourism all in one set, but hey, there I was. So I ran across the bridge to the Parliament side and stood by the Royal Air Force memorial and imagined that the blue-ish smudges on the pavement were from the TARDIS. ::shame::

13 Feb 2009, 15:00

Evensong was lovely, and afterwards we huddled around Darwin's grave for a wreath-laying and some words. From there, I was expecting a public forum on Darwin and (vs.) God, so I made my way through the cloister to the event.

At the door, a vicar was checking names on a list. Odd. My name wasn't on any list, but he let me in anyway. At the next door I was handed a glass of wine. Also odd. With a little investigation I determined that this was actually a book launch, invite only, and the debate I had in mind was actually in May. Ah well, might as well enjoy a book launch!

I had a lovely chat with an archivist of Darwin's letters. The whole evolution/creationism divide that stirs up so many emotions in the States is, apparently, quite unknown in the UK. The book being launched, "Darwin and God", was the first on the subject to be printed in the UK. She asked me why the fuss that's risen at home in the last few decades, and I could only guess at the causes. Reaction to increasing secularization of public life? Political rise of the Christian right? An exceedingly potent production of Inherit the Wind? Or perhaps Americans really are, on this as well as a host of other issues, rather a bit stupid.

A waiter came around intermittently, re-filling wine glasses, and I had to actually keep a close count this time, as I had the rare occasion to invoke my "# of drinks < # of hours slept out of previous 48" rule. A good rule, and a rule that should probably go without saying, but on such occasions it can be quite necessary.

However, the rule only works to prevent disaster - it is not an efficient safeguard against standard issue poor-decision-making. And, oh, did I make a poor decision.

You see, I accidentally went to a musical. How does one accidentally see a musical? Let me tell you how one accidentally sees a musical. One accidentally sees a musical by walking through the theater district. Alone. At 7:30. With nowhere else to be. Tipsy. That's how you accidentally see a musical.

It was Dirty Dancing: The Musical.

I have seen some pretty bad theater in my time. I don't mind bad theater - I mean, I DO, in that it is a frustrating loss of time and money, but often you can learn as much from seeing it done wrong as from seeing it done right. And Dirty Dancing really is a promising candidate for musicalization, whatever your feelings on the film itself. Cult following + strong clear emotions + intrinsincally theatrical subject matter + period setting = musical.

However. Dirty Dancing: The Musical was not a musical.

There were no original songs. But it wasn't a jukebox musical either. Convention would be to put contemporary popular tunes into the mouths of the characters, but Baby and Johnnie never sang. So they danced their emotions, right? Well, they did dance... to the songs in the movie soundtrack... but they never danced outside the "we're practicing for a performance" context. And yet, it had a musical book. This was a libretto that someone wrote before finding a composer and lyricist, and then decided that composers and lyricsists are totes overrated, and staged it without 'em. Dirty Dancing : The Musical is a musical. Just someone forgot to write the songs.

I left shortly after intermission.

A Much Better Start

2009-02-12T07:02:00.003-05:00

21:00

Oh my god. I am NEVER FLYING COACH AGAIN.

We've all walked through business class on our way to the not-so-cheap seats, and marveled at the absurdly spacious armchairs, and at the same time wondering at the suckers who would pay through the nose just for a nice chair. Well, let me tell you. I am now finishing my first hour on the other side of the curtain, and as God as my witness, I am never going back.

I am here through the grace of my cousin Jeffrey, who works for Delta and hooked me up with stand-by tickets. And stand-by, aside from being much cheaper than regular rates, also comes with a very high chance of being put in business class. Because really, who the hell is going to actually *pay* for these seats?

Ah, the seat. It has eleven different configurations, as well as a reading lamp, a real pillow and duvet, and personal viewing screens. I've only ever had a personal screen on one flight before - also a red-eye on which I was supposed to sleep, but instead watched the entire Godfather trilogy.

But best of all, I had not one but two mimosas in me before we even reached the runway. And lord almighty did I need them (cf: passport drama).

After take-off, we were also offered today's NY Times (I guess it will be yesterday's London Times upon arrival?), and hot towels, and a goody bag containing such useful bits of awesome as an eye mask, ear plugs, mouthwash, hand cream, toothbrush, lip balm, and hospital socks. I LOVE HOSPITAL SOCKS. And while I wrote that last sentence, I was delivered a plate of salted nuts (I guess people with allergies aren't allowed in business class) and a glass of red wine.

My plan: see if my private telly has got any Doctor Who. Eat and drink everything put in front of me. Get thoroughly tanked. Repeat until London.

A girl could get used to this...

22:00

Another glass of red wine down, and the future seems a good deal more cheery.

I just had a first course of Moroccan crab salad, cream of asparagus soup, and a Greek salad, while listening to an excellent recording of Beethoven's 7th on fancy noise-canceling headphones, and all is well with the world.

Next up: beef and Mussorgsky.

23:00

Dinner: Grilled fillet of beef (very good!) with bearnaise sauce, accompanied by potato gratin and broccolini with hazelnuts. The planned Mussorgsky was replaced by Madonna (same difference?), and I could hardly touch my dessert platter of fruit and cheese.

When the plates were cleared, I curled up under the duvet with my third (fourth? who knows) glass of wine and watched The Fires of Pompeii, which is much more marvelous than I remembered, and daydreamed about how cool it must be to be James Moran and get to watch your own episode on airplanes. By the end of the episode, all that wine had done its job; I was knackered. And though I would love to continue enjoying the television sampler, sleep is now necessary. Sad!

09:00 (London time)

I slept till the end of the flight. Right through breakfast, I'm afraid to say. The bloody flight was just not long enough. And how often do you get to say *that*?

10:30

On the Picadilly line, en route to central London, and I miss my flight already. It was looking yesterday like I'd miss my flight in the more conventional sense of the expression, but I daresay I prefer this sort of missing...

An Inauspicious Start

2009-02-11T17:00:00.001-05:00

(I'm gonna backdate (backtime?) entries that I write by hand to reflect when they were actually written)

For two hours this afternoon, I could not find my passport.

It had been in plain sight for, oh, six months. It was my primary id in November, when I lost my wallet. It spent several months atop a pile of stuff in the den. It came to Florida, quite unnecessarily, just a few weeks ago.

Question was - did it come home?

For two sickening hours, I thought the answer was no. Or rather, for one hour I thought that Mom had stuffed my passport in a drawer in a cleaning fit and forgotten about it. And then for another hour I was convinced I'd left it in Epcot and that was the closest I was ever gonna get to Europe this year.

I was nauseus, I was panicked, I was deer-in-headlights'd, I was plotting how I could go into hiding for the next few weeks so I wouldn't have to tell everyone what happened.

And then I pulled the den couch forward, and burst into tears. Thank fucking god.

Back to packing...

2009-02-11T10:07:00.004-05:00

What's the best thing to do when your economy has gone to hell? Go spend money in someone else's!

This blog is going temporarily travel-style. Tonight I fly to Heathrow to begin a whirlwind European tour, featuring... London! Cambridge! Cardiff! Tours! Geneva! Sevilla! Granada!* Barcelona!** ***

I intend to update from each city. Say hi if you're checking on me, so that I bother spending a euro at the internet cafe.

Time to pack!!!

*Or maybe Madrid instead of Granada? Opinions welcome.
**The city Barcelona, not the planet Barcelona.
***Don't get up.

Most re-watched tv moments

2009-02-06T01:25:00.000-05:00

Considering how much I care about the few shows I do watch, I watch very little television. I'm currently following two programs (the ones with the word "house" in their titles), and that's a lot for me.

I am, however, a re-watcher. But I don't re-watch entire series. I rarely even re-watch entire episodes. I just watch scenes. And some scenes I watch more than others. a LOT more than others. Particularly the short ones that are under 3 minutes. Like, some scenes I just put on the way I would put on a song. Is that weird?

On the train today, I made a list of my most-watched tv moments. Because I like making lists. Shut up. And I noticed something very interesting.

None of them had dialog.

Or minimal dialog, whatever. The dialog wasn't the important part. They were all visual moments with very strong music cues. Which works nicely with my scenes-as-songs analogy. But conventional wisdom places television closer on the spectrum to theater than film, in that its primary language aural, not visual. But the fact that my go-to list of tv moments are about images and not words is a helluva reminder that it is a visual medium after all. And that a good song cue is key.

Anyway, here's my list. And this is not my list of my favorite moments, or the best moments. Just the ones I have bookmarked on youtube, because I watch them that frequently.

The beginning of Life on Mars

Also the party scene from the first season finale, and the rooftop scene from the second season finale. These are all the same scene, of course. And yet collectively they out-pace everything else on this list by a mile.

The Master's Scissor Sisters dance break

At first I thought the trend in the list was going to be "things that star John Simm."

I could also include Sarah Jane Smith finding the TARDIS in School Reunion. 10 in the wardrobe in the Christmas Invasion. 9 and Rose dancing. And the part of Doomsday before Bad Wolf Bay (the hugging the wall bit). No wonder I'm a Doctor Who fan. That show is MADE for watching only the many isolated moments of brilliance while disregarding the crap around it.

Josh Lyman breaks down during Yo Yo Ma

Nothing beats this. I don't care how the editing put awkward repeats and cuts into the piece. (I do care about the awkward repeats and cuts in the piece) Still.

Dana & Casey's first kiss

Only schmoopy romantic one on here!

Once More With Feeling is disqualified. Because I really do watch that as songs. Because they are.

The Firefly theme song. Yes.

Whatever man, it's a great opening sequence. It's all about that shot at the end of the Serenity zipping over the horses.

Not everything is about you, Mulder

The only one with no music cue on the list. Viva la MASHEO.

as Napoleon never said...

2009-02-04T17:31:00.005-05:00

Jenny and I were having a very serious discussion about the class system in England and the USA… as relates to Bertie Wooster.

Jenny: I love that Bertie never has money problems. It just makes him so innocent and free to have relation-induced mishaps

Liz: I love that class of British people who just have income without doing anything, like the Darcys. We don't have that in America. Even the absurdly rich, their money comes from somewhere. Generally some scrappy great-grandfather who invested in trains or somesuch.

Jenny: Whereas in England, money coming from somewhere is a low-class idea.

Liz: Right.

Jenny: Money, like wine, gets better with age.

Well, that is a fine aphorism, is it not?

Liz: Did you just make that up?

Jenny: I think so

Liz: You should embroider it on something, or start using it as an aphorism and see if it gets picked up.

Jenny: You mean I should just drop it into conversations?

Liz: Yes.

Jenny: All those conversations I have about old versus new money?

Liz: No, just irrelevantly. And, introduce it with "as they say.”

Jenny: See if it gets picked up as conventional wisdom.

Liz: Or give a different citation every time! Like, “as the Good Book says, money like wine gets better with age.”
Jenny: Or "as the Bard tells us..."

And then we got a little carried away…

Liz: As we’ve seen with President Obama...

Jenny: As I learned from Sesame Street...

Liz: as my grand-pappy Old Reliable used to say...

Jenny: as the Eskimos teach us...

Liz: as can be inferred from a close reading of Durkheim...

Jenny: as it says on Mount Rushmore...

Liz: as Ben Franklin, Mark Twain, Oscar Wilde, and the Marquis de Sade all said at one point or another...

Jenny: as I learned on my first day at Hahvahd...

Liz: as my years in the circus taught me,

Jenny: according to the great clown himself...

Liz: as the prophet speaketh to me...

Jenny: as you yourself have noted...

Liz: as the ancient runes translate...

as is scribbled on this cocktail napkin that I'm waving in your face...

Jenny: as Dumbledore said to Harry on page 519 of the Half-Blood Prince, 12.2 lines from the top...

Liz: As Justice Brandeis noted in the fourth footnote of the Carolene decision...

Jenny: As Joan of Arc herself was about to say...

Liz: as Napoleon never said...

as was viciously mauled in the substandard translation of Hugo's Miserables...

Jenny: as Madame de Pompadour probably said, before everyone forgot why she was famous...

Liz: fanTAStic gardener.

(that will be funny after you watch Doctor Who)

as my alphabet soup spelled last night...

as Jim Marvin once said while demonstrating the proper distance between Mars and Spain...

Jenny: as it probably says in Doctor Who, but I couldn't tell you because I still haven't watched it even though I have this friend, see, who makes references to it all the time, and I think I'm going to have to watch it soon or she's going to come after me with a broadsword in my sleep, and maybe like cut off my ANKLES, or something, or possibly my entire lower half, and anyway, I think there was an aphorism in here somewhere...

Liz: as the negative infractions of the patient's pituitary gland suggest...

as it says on the manufacturer's label, which you really shouldn't have removed, really, that was a bad idea...

Jenny: as the surgeon general might warn you...

Liz: as she said....

You get the idea. And that’s right, folks - this is the duo that’s spending two weeks together in Europe. By the end of which we will either have begun speaking entirely in an incomprehensible invented language of inside jokes and Buffy references, or will have jumped off the train somewhere in Spain and run screaming in opposite directions across the plain. In the rain. Mainly.

Liz: Jenny, why are we SO AWESOME?

Jenny: I don't know, Liz, but I think we just can't help it. It is our burden to bear.

Follow-up: my response

2009-01-24T23:55:00.003-05:00

Follow-up to people over thirty shouldn't be allowed on facebook:

I decided that I want to try to bait Eric into saying even more ridiculous things. I drafted a couple replies that were sarcastic "what a great suggestion!" things, and a few attempts to scam him out of money. But I have decided to go the "willful misunderstanding" route, and respond as an Angry Feminist... while getting completely wrong what type of plastic surgery he meant. Hopefully this will both thoroughly embarrass him and force him into awkwardly clarifying. Props to Ben for the concept.

Eric,

That was really out of line.

First of all, I have met you exactly once. You may have a reputation for extreme "honesty" among your friends, but I don't think you quite have the right to count me among them - we just don't know each other very well. And there is no way for a mere acquaintance to justify offering such drastic advice, completely unsolicited.

Secondly, you are a married man. A married man with a baby! I really find it unacceptable and more than a little bit creepy that you have been so closely examining my appearance in my facebook pictures. If you don't like what you see, don't look at it. In fact, just don't look. It's bad enough when men objectify women for their body - you take it to a whole new level by telling me I'm not good enough to be an object.

And the latent anti-Semitism of your remarks is horrifying. You are criticizing my appearance on the basis of it being too Jewish. You latched on to a single joke in my profile - yes, my religious views are listed as "look at me" because I know I have very traditionally Jewish features - and interpreted it as dissatisfaction with my body. What, exactly, makes you think that I'm not perfectly happy with my appearance the way it is? I assure you that most men are quite approving of my figure - and Ashkenazi Jews certainly do not have a monopoly on large busts!

You have issued an unsolicited and completely inappropriate recommendation for a cosmetic, elective version of a procedure that for some people is legitimately medical. You have no way of knowing if I have back pain and the assorted other health problems that sometimes accompany my body type. But your advice was based not on a concern for my health or comfort, but for some imaginary version of my social life. Oh yes, by all means, I should undergo elective surgery to conform with mainstream standards of beauty, within which a b-cup is a small chest and a c-cup is a large one and all other sizes are abnormal. Perhaps if I artificially manipulate my body to look like everyone else's - the way you made your wife and will no doubt make your daughter some day! - then perhaps I will have a chance at a life full of success, happiness, and multiple sexual partners.

I have a fantastic rack, and it ain't going nowhere.

-Liz-

people over thirty shouldn't be allowed on facebook: a case study

2009-01-23T00:51:00.010-05:00

An email I received from the founder of the Harvard Pops Orchestra , of which I was the president in college. Eric is mid-30s, married with a kid, and I have met him only once, several years ago.

From: Eric D.
Subject: a random thought

Liz--I'm a very honest and open person, and it takes people a little aback at first, but in the end they accept it about me.

I was looking at your pictures, and, you know something? You're pretty cute. You really are. And you know something else? (Here comes the honesty:) You would look even cuter with just a touch of plastic surgery. My wife had it done, and she's never looked back. Your twenties is a period where you should be dating like crazy, figuring out exactly the type of individual you want to spend the rest of your life with. You deserve to feel self-confident about your looks, not listing yourself in your profile as "Jewish...look at me." I personally think you're an amazing person, so I really do hope you take this the right way. Just know you've got a fan and friend in your corner...you can hit me later.

Sincerely,
Eric

It's like a checklist of offensiveness. Bonus points for anti-Semitism and insulting your own wife!

Any ideas how I can make this guy into one of those internet micro-celebrity douchebags?

Follow-up: my response

We have overcome.

2009-01-20T15:38:00.005-05:00

I am not in DC for the inauguration. I am not in DC for the inauguration, because my ride left without me. My ride was with my parents. How's that for pathetic?

But I went to BAM's screening of the festivities and watched in a big happy crowd of semi-employed hipsters, complete with enthusiastic cheering at every mention of Bush leaving, and mass waving at the departing Marine helicopter. Buh bye!

Anyway, some thoughts about the inauguration. Predictably(?), they are almost all about the music.

It's a little bit sad that John Williams is the closest thing we've got to a national composer.
That being said, his Simple Gifts arrangement was 1) less annoying than Copland, and 2) significantly better than that of Aretha's song. Seriously, wtf was that? The hat made it okay, though.
Hail to the Chief ain't got nothing on Domine Salvum Fac
and relatedly, anyone else notice that inauguration is just Harvard commencement on steroids?
OMG playing reed and brass instruments in 11 degree weather. Ow ow ow.
The folk who own Yo Yo Ma's cello probably weren't too thrilled either...
I have an entirely irrational love of Stars & Stripes Forever. I know, wtf right? But I hope that, somewhere, John Philip Sousa is happy that his tunes are still the default for anything patriotic and/or outdoors.

Joking aside, it's so rare that we have an opportunity to actually feel patriotism - and even rarer if you omit patriotic feelings inspired by by 1776 or an episode of West Wing. Today, when the CNN camera swooped past an old black woman holding a WE HAVE OVERCOME sign, I felt that shiver of glee that's usually reserved for fictional or historical politics.

Thank you, President Obama, for making it okay to like our country again.

Nerdy neckwear

2009-01-09T00:54:00.006-05:00

This fine lady is knitting me a Doctor Who scarf! Okay, well, technically I suppose she is knitting my sister a Doctor Who scarf, to use in an act. My sister is the Mama Rose of Alpha Psi Ecdysia, the SUNY New Paltz burlesque troupe (yes.) and in her nascent fandom, she has latched on to the idea of developing a Doctor Who act. Which would be understood by approximately nine people in all of New Paltz, but, whatever. Maybe they can do a tour to Old Paltz - that's probably somewhere in England, right?

Anyway, Jess is knitting us a 4th Doctor scarf (season 12, for those who care about such things), which Jenny will use in an act, and which I will then get to wear.

I have decided that scarves are truly the way to go in terms of under-the-radar nerdiness displays. I already have a Gryffindor scarf (or at any rate, a red and yellow scarf that I declared a Gryffindor scarf long before "official" such things existed). And my sister has, yes, a RENT scarf. And when Madame Nostradamus is done, we will have a Doctor Who scarf. That is three nerdy-reference scarves. Three equals a collection.* So now we must accumulate other nerdy-reference scarves.

Problem is... we can't think of any other fictional characters with distinctive neck wear. Help?

*other things I have three of, and therefore constitute collections:

times I have performed in public on instruments I do not know how to play
recordings of great works of American literature that should not have been made into operas
friends named Ben who play the ukulele

Well, I've written a play.

2009-01-03T21:14:00.004-05:00

It doesn't have a title yet, and it is still at least two full rewrites away from performable. But Draft 1.5 is done enough that I made Columbia's deadline last night, by the skin of my teeth (I love you, 24-hour emergency window at the big post office by Penn Station!), and it should be a real second draft by my next deadline on the 9th.

Things I Learned About My Writing While Working On This Play:

I cannot write in a vacuum. This was by far the biggest project I've ever undertaken that did not involve either collaboration or feedback from a workshop. It is MUCH harder alone. And also much less fun.
Conclusion: don't write in a vacuum. Things improved exponentially when I finally showed my sister a draft, and I should have involved her earlier.
I am incapable of not writing jokes.
Conclusion: Lampshading it by having consciously joke-making characters is working so far...
I am very good at ending scenes. I am okay at starting scenes. I am rubbish at the middle parts.
Conclusion: You know what has lots and lots of short scenes? Television.
All of my characters sound vaguely British.
Conclusion: I watch too much British television.
My plots have a tendency towards the "slow reveal of a complicated backstory" style because I get too into world-building.
Conclusion: Uhh... Work on that?
Alternative: Become a tv show-runner.
I am excellent at banter (see #2) and casual or casual-seeming conversation. And pretty good at pacing big reveals. I am very self-conscious at Talking About Feelings, and generally make someone leaven it with jokes (see #2) because, well, I don't like Talking About Feelings.
Conclusion: Get used to it.
Alternative: Sitcoms.
Second alternative: Musicals. The feelings are the lyricist's problem.
It is much, much easier to write two-person scenes than any-other-number-of-person scenes.
I tend to forget that in non-musical plays, you can have things like protagonists with vague motivations (no need for an "I want"!) and you don't need "finales" or any of that jazz. But that does mean you need to replace the 11 o'clock number with an 11 o'clock Scene of Awesomeness That Keeps People Awake, which is harder without dancing and trumpets. And sadly, you have to take care of the emotional stuff yourself, instead of letting it be the lyricist's problem. (see #6)
Conclusion: The fact that I'm in a librettists' workshop and read/see far more musicals than plays probably isn't helping my effort to not default to musical format...
I am very good at writing my way out of corners.
Conclusion: More corners.

I will probably add to this list as I think of more lessons learned.

Oh yes, the story! It's about two young graduate students working in a lab in the Netherlands, developing a Large Hadron Collider-style particle accelerator that, according to one guy, might accidentally invent time travel. And might also accidentally destroy the world.

Here's an impressive picture of the real Large Hadron Collider. I don't expect my set to look like this:

Next stop Willoughby

2009-01-01T00:36:00.001-05:00

Rather than any customary festivities, I am write write writing my way into the new year. This is because I have a play to finish by Friday.

I'm going to consider this a good omen for 2009's productivity, rather than a poor one for its socialness.

My new year's resolution is to do my work tomorrow instead of watching the Honeymooners and Twilight Zone marathons. Long-term resolutions never last past Jan 1 anyway - might as well give them a built-in expiration date.

Profound thought

2008-12-29T03:03:00.000-05:00

I hate straight plays. They don't have any songs in them. The characters have to actually talk about their feelings and shit, when a dance break would get the job done perfectly well while being much less embarrassing for all involved. Grumble.

Back to work.

Sober Train

2008-12-28T16:12:00.002-05:00

I spend a lot of time on the Long Island Rail Road and, as such, I am constantly running for trains and dodging random high school acquaintances who somehow always seem to remember significant details of my biography. Sample conversation:

Person I've Never Seen Before In My Life: Oh my god Liz [Surname]! How was Harvard? Do you still play the cello? I heard you went to South Africa awhile back, how was that?
Me: Hey... you.

I appear to have been inexplicably famous. Or just really, really recognizable (the hair's usually a giveaway).

Anyway, there is a benefit to my LIRR dependency - namely, the Saturday night 1:42 am train out of Penn Station. Because it is hilarious. Much funnier than the 3:07, by which point everyone's sobered up in an hour of waiting around the train station, the 1:42 provides endless amusement in the form of underage intoxicated persons sharing their wisdom with those fortunate enough to share their train car.

I present you with a rough transcription of the highlight of a recent ride home:

A young man, probably 18, is standing at the head of the car. A half dozen of his friends, representing various levels of consciousness, lie in the surrounding seats. Our hero is singing.

YOUNG MAN
It's beginning to look a lot like Christmas! Eeeven thooough I'm a Jeeeew!

I shall spare you the remainder of his song, for it would be impossible to fairly transcribe his truly impressive feats of "making six words fit in the the space of one". Suffice to say, after several minutes, he ran out of the song, and began extemporizing instead. I wasn't ever quite able to hear the responses from his more lungpower-deficient companions - our hero, however, never failed to maintain a more than satisfactory volume.

YOUNG MAN
You didn't know I was Jewish? Oh man I am so Jewish. I don't believe any of that shit though, like the God stuff.

FRIENDS
[inaudible]

YOUNG MAN
Yeah, that's right, I'm an atheist. Total atheist. Ayyyyyyyyyyyy...theist. I like being neutral, you know? I don't just pick a side to be controversial or whatever, I look at both sides of an issue. I don't wanna say I'm a Republican or a Democrat, I'm neutral, i'm an Independent. And I'm not religious, I'm an atheist, cuz I'm fucking neutral.
My religion has a first name, it's A - T - I - E - "Est"!

FRIENDS
[inaudible]

YOUNG MAN
What? Oh yeah, of course I believe in God. Whatever. I just don't care about that religion shit, because it's shit! I don't like picking sides, you know? I don't, like, think there's no god or anything, I just don't want to be part of any religion, so I'm an atheist.

FRIENDS
[inaudible]

YOUNG MAN
Yes that is what it means! What, is there another word for it?

HELPFUL GENTLEMAN DOWN THE TRAIN
Yes, "agnostic."

YOUNG MAN
That's it! Thanks man! I love you! I'm totally agnostic!

ME
::facepalm::

Resistance is Futile

2008-12-27T20:48:00.002-05:00

My sister watched The Next Doctor with me last night [verdict: best thing ever, as long as you don't think about it too much], and was totally floored by the dreaminess of David Tennant, so this afternoon I gave her my dvds so she could give the whole shebang a try.

I walk into her bedroom just now, and she's sitting there with tears streaming down her face.

Me: Jeez, up to Father's Day already?
Sister: No, I just... I can't...
Me: What is it?
Sister: He told Dickens his books are gonna last forever! It's like "and his music just left the solar system"* all over again! Did the real Dickens know?? He knew, right? Tell me Dickens knew!! Oh god the Doctor is amazing. [::cries more::]

Conversion complete. Heehee.

*West Wing, re Blind Willie Johnson

Errata

2008-12-22T17:13:00.000-05:00

I just noticed that in a post a few weeks ago, I wrote the following:

Excerpted from a letter I wrote to Quentin this evening (so, Quentin, don't read this or I'll have wasted 32 cents.)

32 cents? Really? What decade am I living in?

The answer is "1995-1998." Seems appropriate, actually. And the price of stamps has gone up a dime in a decade? Well, that explains why y'all aren't getting Christmas cards this year. You know, that and other reasons.

And if I actually did put a 32 cent stamp on that letter to Quentin... well, he should probably pop into his DeLorean to pick it up in 1996 then. And maybe go to a Spice Girls concert while he's there.

[re the stamp in the picture: "Perry! I'm married now!" "Mary Ellen! I'm gay now!" Good times]

Hello, strangers.

2008-12-19T13:15:00.000-05:00

I seem to have accumulated a rather significant amount of google traffic, thanks almost entirely to the "ate a violin" post and everyone's internet crush Randall Munroe. I made that post not actually to draw people to my blog - seriously, if that were the intent, I'd have more consistent content round these parts - but because I was curious how many people would read the XKCD blog, search the first term in that post, and then follow through to the resulting links.

The answer: a lot.

Hullo, xkcd fans! ::waves::

And while I'm getting all this random international traffic...

Can anyone recommend a graduate-level dramatic writing program in the U.K.?

I'd like to consider studying in the U.K., but my anglophilia does not extend to the university system and have absolutely no idea how to go about finding good programs. I'm talking to you, random Welsh stranger reading this - if you're thinking "well obviously she knows about the blahdiblah program, but I don't know of anything other than that", then you should leave a comment telling me about the blahdiblah program, because I in fact do not know about it.

In other news, the Doctor Who Christmas special airs in six days. (which is to say, there are six days till Christmas). This is excellent because:
1) new Doctor Who to reward me in the middle of my awful never-ending application slog!
2) spoilers, real actually spoiling-y spoilers, now abound on the internet, which means I have to avoid the internet, which means I am forced to focus on my awful never-ending application slog. Yay?

2008-12-17T02:53:00.000-05:00

I am writing an awful lot at the moment. This is because grad school apps are due in two weeks. Cue panic.

The first fluff piece I write when I emerge will be a sketch about the Christmas substitute for a minister who has taken the holidays off. The sub will be a Jew. Because Jews always work on Christmas.

Ate a violin

2008-12-06T01:18:00.001-05:00

The xkcd blog yesterday featured a list of phrases with no google hits, like "aww, a baby hooker!" and "unlike normal furries." At the top of the list was "ate a violin." How could there be no google hits for violin-eating?!

I sorta feel... jipped? In a way. That radio play I wrote senior year, it featured a space monster that ate a violin. It was a decent little gag. But if only there were a proper description of the radio play on the Pops website (and perhaps then they'd remember to sell it at concerts?), then I could have ever so briefly gotten Randall Munroe's attention! Which would be like winning the internet.

Follow-up: Hello, strangers!

I have no pictures of our violin-eating monster, since it was radio, but here's our man-eating viola:

2008-12-04T09:47:00.000-05:00

Another io9 post! Hot Flashes: Ten Uses For Lightning That Ben Franklin Never Guessed

Writing these things is so very bad for me. The instant gratification is like crack! I cannot stop myself from obsessively monitoring the progress of my articles. Thankfully, they've been doing quite well, so it's happy crack, but still crack.

"Do you think you could find a Godzilla menorah for me?" - my editor