I feel as if my head is about to implode. None of my experiments have been going very well the past two weeks. I have deadlines for various things all within days of each other. The transportation out here really, really sucks. And on top of that, I'm going to write a 50,000 word novel in 30 days starting in less than 6.5 hours.
A New Twist on a Childhood Favorite (and a Q & A Session)
How many small kids can you pack into a theater? Apparently a lot. And they like bouncing around in the chairs and shouting aloud during the show. Some parent also brought a crying baby with them. This sort of situation is unforgivable, say, at a performance of The Phantom of the Opera, but this show was as far as you can get from an Andrew Lloyd Webber binge-fest.
If you haven't read the book before, it's about a class full of extremely unruly students who always take advantage of their good-natured teacher, Miss Nelson. One day, Miss Nelson fails to show up and a substitute teacher arrives, Viola Swamp. "The Swamp" is as mean as Miss Nelson is nice and she makes the kids behave right quick. But when Viola Swamp shows no sign of leaving, the kids begin to ask, where is Miss Nelson? They go so far as to hire a private detective who couldn't remember anyone's name.
The book was illustrated by the prolific James Marshall who has a distinctive style of making all his characters pudgy-faced and pointy-eyed. Marshall made Viola Swamp into a vision of gothic dominatrix with a bad complexion so I was interested in how people could pull of a live-action musical from this.
And it turns out that the musical is a lot more modernized than the original text and had a lot of subtleties that perhaps only the adults in the audience would get (like the part where Miss Nelson asks the class, "Who's the president of the United States?" One kid answers, "Arnold Schwarzenegger!" and another answers "Howard Dean!" and the two start a mini-fight in the classroom before Miss Nelson could break it up). Instead of a real scary witch like the original Viola Swamp, the musical's version was a whirlwind of gaudy neon pink, yellow, and black with a wig in the shape of a matador's hat and the face of the Wicked Witch of the West in The Wizard of Oz.
It was hilarious. I was in stitches when Viola Swamp decided to give the class homework which went something like this: "For math, do all the problems at the end of chapters 6, 7, and 8--due tomorrow!; read pages 95 to 175 in your history book and write a 500 word essay on the fall and decline of Rome--due tomorrow!; for spelling, study the next 45 words--the test will be tomorrow!; for philosophy write a 1000 word essay on the different views of Aristotle and Plato--due tomorrow!; for physics, write a report on quantum mechanics and string theory--due tomorrow!; and also find a cure for cancer--due tomorrow!"
Obviously Miss Nelson is Missing is neither serious or deep, but it's a fun show and you'll be grinning from ear to ear even if you're surrounded by a bunch of six-year-olds.
There was also a question and answer session after the show, but all the questions where asked by very young kids--and they were all "technical" in nature but I'll reproduce the ones I remember anyway:
Question: How old are you [the cast] really?
Answer: (Samantha Butler, who plays the student named Allison) We're all twenty-something.
(Brian Priesman, who plays the student named Adam) I'll volunteer my age. I'm twenty-seven.
(Jill Pennington, who plays Miss Nelson and Viola Swamp) He's the oldest.
Q: When did you start acting?
A: (Alex Wolfson, who plays Pop Hansen, Principal Blandsford, and Detective McSmogg) We all started when we were pretty young, around your age. I started when I was about six.
(Matt Lang, who plays the student named Gregory) It's actually never too late to start anything, although I got kicked off the wrestling team when I was in eighth grade. (Lang has a very slight build.)
Q: How did you decide to do this musical?
A: (Priesman) Actually we didn't decide to do this musical. The artistic director and technical director back in Omaha got together with parents and teachers from Nebraska and from the rest of the country to decide what kids like you would like to see.
Q: How long are you doing this musical?
A: (Michele Freeman, who plays the student named Cheryl) We started this in September and rehearsed for about three weeks before our first show. The run will end sometime in May and we'll be in 80 different cities around the country.
Q: Why do you use microphones?
A: (Butler) Actors learn how to project their voices when they're on stage, but when you're doing something like this often, you have to preserve your voice so we use microphones so all of you can hear us.
Q: How did you get the props on stage?
A: (Lang) We used the elevator near the loading dock. It took ten, no eight trips. The props all come in pieces so on stage we have to nail and hammer everything together like a puzzle. It takes about two hours to get everything up.
Q: Who made the props?
A: (Priesman) Back in Omaha, the set designer Mark Lewis made all the props. He has read all the Miss Nelson books and from that, he made a lot of drawings for what he thought the school, Miss Nelson's house, and the detective's office would look like. After that he got a bunch of carpenters and technicians together to help him build this.
Q: Are those glasses real?
A: (Lang, who wears the said glasses) Nope. This is a prop.
Q: How is it like being Miss Nebraska?
A: (Pennington) [to the rest of the audience] If you haven't looked at the program, I was Miss Nebraska in 2000. I thought it was great. I met a lot of people and made some great friends and got to go to the Miss America pageant. In fact later this week, I'm going to meet up with Miss Maine, Miss Vermont, and Miss New Hampshire from my year.
Q: Who made Viola Swamp's dress?
A: (Pennington) The costume designer, Sherri Geerdes made the dress. In fact, she either bought or sewed all the costumes you see here tonight.
Onesome: Cheap-- Cheap thrills? Are you and yours doing anything for Halloween? Parties? Trick or treating? Staying home with the lights out and an axe visible in the window?
Twosome: wax-- Hey, are you a 'candle person'? I mean, is that one of your decorating motifs? ...or does this fall under something like the "No Sharp Objects" rule in your life?
I like burning candles and incense but I don't because I'm paranoid that even a little smoke will make the smoke detector go off. Around here, if you make the detector go off, it triggers the alarm at the fire department. And if the fire department comes, that's $300 out of my own pocket if it's a false alarm.
Threesome: treatment-- Speaking of treatments: do you decorate for Fall? Halloween? Thanksgiving? ...or just pretend that deceased plant in the corner really just lost its leaves for the winter?
I have noticed that people who own Windows-running machines tend to get real pissed off at their computers and say, "This stupid piece of junk!" whereas people who own Macs say, "Oh, it'll eventually work," when they're confronted with a computer glitch.
Personally, I don't think any operating system is perfect and I am a bit perplexed by people's loyalties or intense hatred at one particular brand. Most error is human error and I think that is where the divide lies--do you deny your error and transfer the fault to something or someone else or do you just deny the error altogether?
Metafilter is a major time sink: 3D Stress Ball. This is way too addictive even at the easy levels. Do not look at this if you are trying to wean yourself away from games. Pattern IQ Test. I'm skeptical of IQ tests in general, but this one will either make you see patterns all day or make you tear your hair out. I think it was the timer that got to me--timed tests always make me nervous. All I will say is that I got a score to the right of the bell curve.
Well, I had cross-posted one of yesterday's posts over at Blog Sisters (yes, I do occasionally post there in the vain hope that someday it will not be completely political) and one of the commenters made a good point that all those models aren't real to begin with. Graphic designers have erased, airbrushed, photoshopped, and even completely replaced the woman with an artificial computer drawing.
Maybe the real goal of advertising agencies is to train males to be attracted to something fake. Men won't be attracted to real women and as a result there will be no kids unless people take to using sperm banks.
Read-it-straight-through, all-text books won't vanish, of course. But having a taste for spending a lot of time with them may very well come to be seen as a rather special, even odd, thing, like the taste for reading poetry or going to the ballet is today.
The 2Blowhards also point out that writers are dingalings, that the real creative people are the editors and agents and publishers, and that kids these days only read Nascar biopics. Yay for being an old fart even in my own generation.
Two fifty-something-year-old men stared at a white car that was parked in front of a stop sign.
"That's a nice parking spot," said one.
The other one sighed in resignation. "That's Hanover for you."
I tell you, people around here are crazy. And I mean crazy with a capital K. Three inches of rain fell just this morning and a flash flood warning was issued and do you know what people do? They go jogging in the rain in their t-shirts and shorts. And it wasn't just one lone jogger. I saw hordes of them. Bad weather around here attract people like flies to honey.
The previous resident of the apartment forgot to cancel her catalogue subscriptions so for the past couple of months, we've been getting tons of clothing magazines. They've been piling up on the coffee table next to the door and the corner of the living room. We haven't been reading them (let alone ordering from them) and I've been thinking of chucking them into the recycling bin, but what's the point when we've been using them as placemats for hot pots and trays from the oven?
What pisses me off the most about these catalogues, though, are the pictures. Normal people don't look like these models. The clothes are not going to look the same on me as they look on them. I suppose the goal is to make the buyer think that she will look like the model if she wears those clothes. Or if the buyer is like me, she would know that she would never look like the model. Do advertising agencies want to make half the population neurotic and insecure? There's already enough in the world to make one worry. It's like those catalogues just want to add insult to injury.
And I absolutely despise those pouty expressions the models are made to mimic, especially on those underwear catalogues. They're marketing their product to the wrong demographic, that's what. Maybe a better home for all these magazines is a needy frat house.
Most of us know that judging people by how they look is a bad thing. But people do it anyway and, well, we just have to live with that and wear our clothes and comb our hair accordingly no matter how much we hate it.
I dress like a college student. I am a college student so maybe that's not so bad. I'm not as deceptive as those kids who dress like they're going to office-cubicle-world every day. But still you can immediately form a picture in your mind, can you not, when I say I often wear bleach-splattered jeans with holes and a t-shirt with an educational institution logo emblazoned on the front. It doesn't help matters much by the fact that I'm always carrying around a battered bookbag and have my hair cut in a pageboy style because I can't be bothered putting it up.
What people do and what they say is of more importance. So it speaks volumes to me when I'm trying to contribute to a conversation but I'm abruptly cut off by another person who just can't exercise her jaw muscles enough. And perhaps it speaks even more of me when I just give up on the conversation and turn to something else.
But enough of that. Today was an excellent day for people-watching. I'm sure people would disagree with me--it was perpetually gray all morning and afternoon, not particularly pretty or interesting weather-wise. Some might say that people are inherently like that. If you stop a random person on the street and ask him about his life story, you'd be bored to tears in ten minutes. But I only think that's just the consequence of not everyone being natural storytellers.
The first person who struck me as interesting was a thin girl with her hair pulled up. Under her left armpit, she had tucked in a fluffy brown dog who looked as comfortable as can be in that position. It was a lapdog turned armpit-dog. And why would someone carry her dog around town like that?
Not too far away was a small boy (eight, nine, or ten) standing beside a dog that was larger than himself. The dog looked like a cross between a rottweiler and an afghan--a huge black power puffball on legs. Two even smaller boys (five or six) dug around in the dirt with branches.
In a parking lot, I observed three Indians struggling with large bouquets of flowers. Is there some sort of festival that I am not aware of? The two men were suited up impeccably in Western dress--white shirt, tie, pressed pants. The woman was richly garbed in a gold and red sari--bright, vibrant, could stop traffic.
Speaking of traffic, I cannot forget to mention the two gung-ho young men standing on the street corner wearing white t-shirts with the name "DEAN" printed in navy blue. They were waving around political posters and generally trying to call attention to themselves. The drivers, I noticed, gave them no heed and generally zoomed past the traffic lights. Nearby, a young woman sat at a picnic table. She was wearing a shirt that said "UCLA" and she was gabbing non-stop into a cellphone.
I call this the "Faux Blogger Template Version". The little monster with the mask (borrowed from The Creatures in My Head) on the right actually explains a lot on my philosophy of blogging. Weblogs and websites are only "masks" that we put on to show the world. If you peel that away, we're just ugly little monsters like everyone else.
I just realized that tomorrow is Daylight Savings Time. I have to go to lab tomorrow for some timed experiments; I need to make sure I don't go at the wrong time.
It's sort of weird having your housemates bring their boyfriends over to stay the night. At least during my undergraduate years filled with loud music at 3AM I've learned to sleep through everything.
Yes, there is some sort of ridiculous homecoming thing, but I just remembered that there is going to be a big fire. A huge one. One that will engulf a tremendous pile of wood that has been accumulated on the Green in two days. I'm not missing a fire that will bring out the worried firefighters even if I do have to brave the hordes of crazy undergraduates running around the streets and the bonfire 107 times (with some occasional streakers) in some silly ritual.
Colleges typically hold "concert series" throughout the school year, usually to be more cultural and well-rounded. I go for the sake of witnessing art and always, I find two types of audience members. One is obviously the student. Like me, the student goes to the concert because he or she wants to go. Attire is not paramount. Jeans. Wrinkled jacket. A large backpack filled with books from the library. Then there is the other audience member, the older more "sophisticated" listener who is well-groomed and looks like he or she has been recently fitted by the law firm. Pearls. Heirloom earrings. Discretely expensive watch. Silk ties. These people find the intermission vastly interesting because its optimal time to "network" with others of their kind.
These two types of audience members do not naturally go together. An older couple behind me pointed to my row which coincidentally seated many college students and sneered, "That must be where all the kids sit." I was more than vaguely offended and had half the mind to turn around and ask, "How many times have you heard the quartet? Do you have any of their recordings? Have you even heard of them before?" College students aren't ignorant kids who go to a cultural event because mommy and daddy told them to.
At any rate, tonight's concert by the Emerson String Quartet (violins--Eugene Drucker, Philip Setzer; viola--Lawrence Dutton; cello--David Finckel) was absolutely fabulous. I had seen them in concert before as well as possessing their recordings of the Beethoven quartets so I am, for a lack of a better word, a fan. The Emerson String Quartet, stationed in New York, is one of the best in the United States let alone the world. I think my own chamber music appreciation is helped by the fact that I'm a musician and have played in a quartet before.
The program was actually quite diverse. The opening was one of Haydn's unfinished quartets (String Quartet No. 68 in D minor, Op. 103 Hob. III: 83) which although was quite experimental for Haydn in his doddering old age sounded rather conventional to modern ears. It had a "nice melody" but sounded more like warm-up material for the more demanding pieces ahead.
The Quartet No. 9 in E-flat Major, Op. 117 written by Shostakovich for his very young third wife was technically intense and very energetic. It was moody and I loved the interaction the members of the quartet had with each other--the visual cues and the creative flairs. One could easily tell they were really immersed in Shostakovich's world and it wasn't a surprise to find out they had done a large stage adaptation of Shostakovich's work not so long before.
My favorite piece of the entire program was Debussy's Quartet in G minor, Op. 10. I have a recording of this piece by the Keller Quartet and it is really gorgeous. Listening to the piece in concert is even better--the music itself sounds alive and pulsating with its myriad melodies all intermingled with each other. I literally almost cried.
The encore was a middle movement of Mendelssohn's Quartet Op. 13. This little ditty was rather humorous and reminded me of jesters roaming among the stalls of a Renaissance fair. It was actually rather surprising--most of the pieces that I've heard before by Mendelssohn are a lot darker and romantic. Perhaps he is not as one-sided as I thought he was.
There was a question and answer session after the concert which I will semi-reproduce here (considerably edited since I can't remember everything):
Audience Question: Why were you (the violin and viola players) standing up?
Emerson String Quartet: When we were playing for a Haydn festival, we found that it worked a lot better if we, the fiddle players, stood up. Of course, that was three hours long and during rehearsals we got to sit down but standing up gives us a lot more freedom. It allows for more expression when we're playing. When Joshua Bell comes [to Dartmouth] ask him that question and he'll probably tell you the same thing.
AQ: Why did you choose to name yourself the Emerson String Quartet? I noticed that none of you are named Emerson.
ESQ: We named the quartet after Ralph Waldo Emerson because he was an American artist who echoed a lot of the same goals we have for creativity and philosophy. No, we haven't read all his works or analyzed his essays. We don't own copies of all his poetry. Another reason is that "Emerson" is also easy to remember and easier to publicize.
AQ: Do you play any of the Shostakovich backwards?
ESQ: No. Do you? [Laughs] Do you mean literally playing the last note and back or changing the order of the movements? We can play the movements in a different order. Sometimes experimentally we might try playing a piece facing away from each other. You don't get any visual cues but you can feel how the music is moving instead.
AQ: Is your heart more into Shostakovich or Mendelssohn?
ESQ: It's difficult to say; they are both of very different characters. Perhaps if we had played the stormy first movement of the Mendelssohn (Op. 13) we could compare. Our hearts are into both of them. We're also very much into whoever we are working on most recently. We just finished a stage production of some Shostakovich pieces (broadcast on the BBC) and are currently working on a compilation of Mendelssohn quartets with an octet as a bonus.
AQ: How much do you think Debussy owed to César Franck?
ESQ: Debussy owed Frank a lot actually, but even in his earlier work, you can already see his own style coming through.
AQ: How do you decide on a program?
ESQ: (answered by Philip Setzer, violinist) I actually decide on the programs. In our earlier years, we might choose certain pieces because it would get us a gig, but nowadays we pick pieces that we like, want to do, and to bring it to an audience. We also perform pieces that we will record in the future. Recording is much different than playing in a concert, but performing a piece first gives us preparation for the recording. Also we play pieces that we have recorded to publicize the records we have made, so yes, there is the business side.
For the program, I draw up a list of pieces to perform for the season. I send it out to the other members of the quartet for suggestions and comments and then change the list accordingly. There are some places where we have several concert series so I need to make sure that we're not repeating any of the pieces. Then we send out a list of suggested pieces to the program coordinators of the venues and they get a say in what gets performed. On their part, it's a lot like picking different items on a Chinese menu.
Onesome: Breakfast- It's the most important meal of the day. Do you eat it every day? What's your favorite breakfast?
It depends on how late I get up. If I'm late, I don't eat breakfast. I haven't had breakfast yet, but that's because the class I'm going to in a couple of minutes provides breakfast.
Twosome: Lunch- Where's your favorite place to go out for lunch? Or do you brown bag it?
I have to brown bag it. I'm in lab and most of the time in the midst of experiments so I grab whatever time leftover to eat.
Threesome: and Dinner- Do you cook at home or prefer to grab burgers on the way home from work? What's your favorite meal?
I cook at home. I can't afford to go out every day on a graduate student's salary.
NaNoWriMo: Now you too can be a writer! Yep, another elitist person. I noticed that in the bio, the author of this essay is a microbiologist. Well, as a microbiologist myself and participating in this "self-delusional" endeavor, I'd have to disagree that it is diminishing in any way the accomplishments of "real" writers. If anything, NaNoWriMo is more of a support group for writers. Plenty of "real" writers think this is a good idea. There are also a number of published authors participating. Science is also a lot like this--there are plenty of professional scientists who get paid for what they do but they are by no means demeaned by all the kids who work on science projects or people who serendipitously stumble on a discovery. A microbiologist, of all people, should understand that.
I wish I had this teacher as my freshman English teacher in high school.
This is not to disparage the woman who was my freshman English teacher, but to be honest, I had been extremely intimidated by her. She was the quintessential southern woman with the sharp nails, coiffed hair, and cool eyes. She made everyone read a kazillion books over the summer and memorize forty vocabulary words each week. If she had been my introduction to English, I would have been scared off the language.
She only gave us two opportunities for "free reign"--to do book reports on a biography and a fiction book of our choice. Of course, it had to be approved by her so I felt like I was stuck between a rock and a hard place. I had to pick something relatively serious or she would look down her aquiline nose and say in that thick southern drawl of hers, "Pick something else." I chose an incredibly large tome about Thomas Edison and The Phantom of the Opera (located, predictably enough, on the classics shelf of the bookstore).
Those weren't bad books by a long shot, but only now do I wish that at the time I had the gumption to pick something I wanted to read and then write about.
It was probably because of that rigid structure for English class that I started up a secret writing life that I told nobody about. There was plenty of homework, but I would do it all at school. At home, I would write my own stories on yellow legal pads, loose-leaf notebook paper, and the primitive word processor on my Dad's computer. I think I finished my first fantasy novella sometime that year--it was thirty or forty pages single spaced.
This proved that I could do something myself but then I also realized that it would never be accepted by the establishment that my freshman English teacher represented. And even after her, writing professors had always set restrictions and conditions on what students could or could not write.
It's very human to want to be accepted for one's own work. But in reality, I find myself toiling in a vacuum. If only I had some sort of mentor like the teacher in the link who cared that I could write whatever I wanted. Maybe then I wouldn't have such low morale every time I started a new writing project.
Finally! This totally explains why I got rejected from The Ageless Project. It probably also explains why I got rejected from one of the Nanowrimo webrings too. Maybe I should of picked a pseudonym that was more believable, like "Jennifer Huang." Huang is a pretty common Asian last name and all the Asian girls are named Jennifer.
The last time I saw 2001 was probably around seven or eight years ago during summer vacation. Everyone kept telling me it was the sci-fi movie that every geek had to see so I borrowed a copy from the library to see what the fuss was about. I think I tried watching it during the afternoon, but it was after lunch and I fell asleep after the sequence with the apes.
Of course, after that, I didn't think much of it. Big hairy deal. I returned the tape to the library and put the film out of my mind.
I haven't read any of Arthur C. Clarke's books so maybe I'm missing out on the bigger geek culture scene (then again, maybe I'm missing out on the geek culture scene entirely, I haven't read a lot of the cult speculative fiction that everyone has been blabbering about). But at least I'm going into it with a fairly fresh mind.
So when I heard about 2001 being shown in the college's relatively large theater, I thought, why not? Maybe I'll give the movie another chance and hopefully this time I don't fall asleep after the apes figure out how to make tools.
I arrived at the theater rather early and picked a choice seat in the center/front section. I ended up beside a pair of aging baby boomers who reminisced that all the people they knew who saw 2001 in the theater back when it was out had been under the influence of drugs. In front of me was a father and his young elementary school aged son. Ten minutes before the movie was about to start, "music" began to churn out from the speakers. I put music in quotation marks as this can only be termed modern and dissonant, the kind you sink into during horror movies. I personally thought something had gone wrong with the movie projector and that only the sound was coming out and not the picture.
But soon enough, the movie started with "The Dawn of Man". In the dark theater, the apes took on a rather sinister cast. It was rather obvious that the monolith had somehow opened up the animal mind for something higher, but we aren't shown how these apes make their lives more sophisticated. Instead, at the climax of the Also Sprach Zarathustra, we're given scenes of death. This did not bode well for the rest of the film's message.
It is a bit sad, though, that 2001 is already two years in the past and we have yet to have an operational space station orbiting the earth or even a moonbase. Although with China recently launching a man in orbit and breakthroughs in other scientific fields, maybe our future will be far from the strictly mechanical achievements that sci-fi visionaries of old would have predicted.
Anyway, there's a lot to be said about the corporate logos plastered throughout the film and artificial intelligence (in the form of HAL), but I think those things are besides the point--they are but mere subplot and filler as are the extended panoramic sequences cut with The Blue Danube (which I have played before several times in a live orchestra in the midst of ballroom dancing fanatics but in the film it has somehow taken on a more apocalyptic tone).
The meat of the film's message is in the last segment, "Jupiter and Beyond the Infinite." Only drugged out deadheads would have thought the psychedelic visual effects as a religiously expanding cool trip. And only bored and desensitized coeds such as last night's audience would exclaim, "WTF?!" as the credits rolled.
I will not pretend to know what Kubrick and Clarke were trying to get across. But I will guess that this is their version of what "beyond" would be like, an incomprehensible and nightmarish landscape where in the end, we are after all still in that little box concerned only with our animal needs. The monolith, which appears so ominously in so many scenes, is the carrot that is always dangling out of our reach. Like the fetus-thing dominating the screen at the end, we are still new and dumb in this universe no matter how sophisticated we may think we are.
So I decide to hide out in the dimly lit sub-sub-basement of the stacks where nobody ever goes because it's just too "scary." Nobody is ever going to find me here, I think. But am I ever wrong! Somebody is now sitting next to me. Won't anybody leave me alone?
The news articles are just starting to be churned out for NaNoWriMo.
Novel challenge for writers. It's just like the BBC to emphasize that people have gotten published from their Nano efforts. This will only serve to disillusion people with hopes that National Novel Writing Month will jumpstart their writing careers. Sure, I'm a serious writer, but I take Nano as it is--something fun to do during November.
Want to write a novel? Really quickly? This article is more in the spirit of the thing although I wouldn't go so far as to write out every acronym or quote government documents.
Some gung-ho graduate students, apparently, are planning a tailgating party for the "homecoming game." Why is it that whenever I hear the word "tailgating," I always think of rednecks perched on the back of a truck chugging down cheap beer? At any rate, I'm planning on barricading myself inside during the height of this "homecoming game." Last year I was stupid and went out only to be almost mobbed by hundreds of crazed undergraduates.
Link Dump: Foetus with three parents created. Well they're only using the shell of an egg so technically the only genetic material is that of the DNA of another woman and the sperm. However, they don't say anything about the mitochondrial DNA. Was that also removed or did they only remove the nuclear DNA?
I Love Egg. Cute flash animation involving eggs in various disguises.
Face Values: How Portraits Win Friends and Influence People. "Like any celebrity, Newton was active in fashioning his public persona. Some pictures show him as an elegant, sociable gentleman, while others reflect stereotypes of obsessive scientific genius." If you looked at various portraits of Newton, you'd realize that he looks totally different in all of them. Yes, this means that Newton deliberately tampered with his own image to make people think better of him, but this also means that everyone else is extremely biased when judging people on their looks. Somehow, I doubt that has changed today--even though scientists are as diverse in appearance as the rest of the population--people still have an idea of what one would look like.
Onesome: MT-- So, are you running Moveable Type? ...and have you had to deal with comment spam? If so, Jay Allen's MT-Blacklist Plugin is one cure ....and did you know T-3 regular Shawn has written a scripting hack to allow it to work with the comment notifier script? Ah, the geekiness of it all...
No, I do not use Moveable Type. However, I have had my comments spammed in the past so I know this isn't restricted to one type of weblog. Unfortunately, some people are just determined to turn the internet into one big billboard.
Twosome: Black-- Hey, can you do "basic black"? ...or does your wardrobe consist of everything but black? Inquiring minds want a look into that closet!
I have some black t-shirts if that's what you're asking about. But you have to realize that black does not make you look chic. It makes you look old.
Threesome: List-- Are you a "List Person", one of those people who cannot make it through the day with out a to-do list? ...or maybe "listfull', with yellow sticky notes all about you? ...or are you "listless" and wandering about randomly getting things accomplished?
I only make a list for the current day with the times I'm supposed to be doing things--that's because a lot of my experiments are timed. If I make a to-do list for something else, I almost never follow it.
Sometimes I wonder if I'm just a little too paranoid.
I got to the library at a time when it was still "relatively" empty so I got my pick of seats. The desks are arranged in clusters of four, but they're sort of cubby-holed so that you can't see the people across from you. However, you can see the person beside you.
You know bathroom etiquette? You typically take every other stall and only start taking the next stall if the rest are filled. It's like desk occupation etiquette. If a lot of desks are empty, find your own cluster of four so you don't disturb anyone. If every cluster is filled, then start taking a desk at a cluster that is already occupied but that is opposite of the person who's already there so that he or she doesn't have to see you. And if the library is filled to capacity, well, then it's okay to take any opening that's available.
So I was a little surprised when someone took the desk beside me. It's a Wednesday (one would expect it to be crowded during Thursdays and Sundays instead and it's not even midterms) and the weather is rather horrible. I would expect most people to be in their own rooms yakking on the phone or playing with the computer.
You can imagine my annoyance that after working over an hour with someone metaphorically breathing down my neck I looked up and noticed a multitude of other empty desks which could have been occupied without a detriment to my own need for space. So why did this person choose to sit with me? If anything, previous experience has taught me that no one voluntarily sits with me. Did this person fear sitting alone? Do I look harmless compared to the other people in the library? Does this person want to sneak a peek at what I am doing? Do I bear an uncanny resemblance to someone this person knows?
Why do people choose to sit next to a stranger? Would it make a difference if I said what kind of person this was?
A question just occurred to me: How much does environment effect sleep preference? When we are in grade school, we have to get up early. In college, we have no one to tell us what to do so most students just sleep until noon if they don't care about classes. In various labs I've worked in, most people don't really get productive until 10 AM which is fine with me. However, in my current lab, things really start up around 8 AM. Just that two hour difference is a bit hard to take. Wouldn't there also be people in the multitudes of shifts in between the extreme day and extreme night shift individuals?
On a short walk this afternoon, the strong wind tore leaves from trees and turned the air into a cloud of golden sparks.
Why some of us are early risers. On a slightly unrelated note, wouldn't it be a great post-apocalyptic sci-fi story to have humans differentiating into two different sub-species, one that works during the day and another working during the night?
The Blogging Iceberg. "Of 4.12 million hosted weblogs, most little seen, quickly abandoned."
Women Bloggers. A large list of women bloggers. Interesting, I suppose, but these days, I don't see the point of separating things by gender. I don't automatically find people more interesting to read simply because they are women.
Getting a massive allergic reaction is not fun. I tried to wrack my brain for something unusual I did the last couple of days but came up with nothing. I went to the doctor and she was as mystified as I was despite telling her a detailed account of what I did and ate during the weekend. She gave me Benadryl which helped some but not a lot. She also prescribed a stronger medication which is also supposed to conk me out for the rest of the night. Hopefully this will work--I don't want to squirm in my seat during the all day symposium tomorrow.
By the way, if you're in the area and want to hear some cool research, The Annual Dartmouth Symposium is a great event. It's free (unlike certain weblog conventions at other Ivy League institutions) and this year's subject is directly related to the work of this year's Nobel Prize in chemistry. What's not to like about it? It's open to the public and there's free lunch included too.
I give up. I'm not going to the goddamned Nanowrimo forums anymore. Yes, I'm egotistical, but I've had enough of people ignoring me, trying to correct me, and implying that I'm not a real writer because I appear to be a prude and that I don't open up myself enough.
Good grief. Can people stop with the acronyms? I just discovered what SAHM means. "Stay At Home Mom". I thought it was some weird religious caste in Hinduism or something.
Spellbound (directed by Jeffrey Blitz): This documentary on eight youngsters attending the National Spelling Bee is both funny and sympathetic. These kids come from a wide variety of backgrounds but they all have one goal, to win. One wonders how much of this ambition is their own or their parents. I (and the rest of the audience) really identified with these kids and when one missed a word, everyone would groan aloud in disappointment.
In one way, spelling is brute memorization. These kids literally just go through dictionaries and tutors. Their superior skills in spelling may be impressive, but they remember little of those words' meanings.
Like most people, my spelling is terrible. Just take a look at my older archives when I didn't use spellcheck. I remember having spelling tests until 11th grade and they were all nerve-wracking affairs. My first and only "spelling bee" was in third grade between classmates. I got out on my first word "grey" which I had spelled "gray". I think I was too young at the time to know that there were alternate spellings of words.
The only thing I can compare it to my own experience are math contests and quiz bowls. But I was never really "hard core"; I was never the best at any of those things. I didn't even really try either--I never studied and only practiced when the teachers held sessions a few weeks before the competitions. Maybe I had the bigger picture or maybe I was just plain lazy--just do enough to get by. The rest of my life is not going to depend on pointless trivia.
Yet another documentary, Stone Reader (directed by Mark Moskowitz), is one man's journey to find the author of one of his favorite books: The Stones of Summer by Dow Mossman. Mark Moskowitz, our narrator and journeyer, reminded me a lot of my high school geometry teacher--bald, bewhiskered, bumbling, but articulate. In 1972, The Stones of Summer came out with rave reviews in the New York Times but was promptly forgotten. With his film crew, Moskowitz decided to hunt down the publishers, reviewers, and the author himself to find out why the book virtually disappeared and why there were no more books written.
I find it interesting how the director points out that a good book acts as a communication tool where the author shows himself through his writing to establish a relationship with the reader. I've always thought that it was somewhat the opposite: a good book is when the author succeeds in writing a story that engrosses the reader--the author himself is supposed to be irrelevant to the prose no matter how much he has poured himself into the words.
What's probably most important to any would-be novelist (which includes everyone taking part in the madness on November) is that the film shows that writing a book--a polished book--can take years of hard work. You have to write at the same time you're working a job that actually provides money to live on. Writing is a "hobby" yet it's a dangerous one. Writing can take away your sanity. Both success and failure can break a writer.
Yet it's funny how this film has brought back the return of an out-of-print book. It only shows that as a novelist, if you've touched just one person, it can be enough.
Onesome: Saturday- Is Saturday a day to relax, maybe do something fun, or is it a day spent on the run, chauffeuring kids to activities, yourself to the gym and getting the errands done before it's back to work on Monday? Do you need a day off to rest from your day off? Tell us about your day!
I'm sometimes in lab on Saturday and Sunday. I do errands on those days. The only thing good about the weekends is that I get to sleep in a little bit longer.
Twosome: Morning- What's different about your weekend morning routine than the other days of the week?
See above.
Threesome: Cartoons- Do you have a favourite one? Do you still watch it and/ or other cartoons?
Unfortunately, I'm in one of those writing funks where I feel like no one is paying attention to me (well, no one ever pays attention to me, but somehow, I feel it even more acutely this month than, say, January). It's very hard to justify doing anything when everyone views you as nothing. I'll probably post the memes that I usually do, but otherwise, I'll be pretty sparse the next couple of days.
The Nobel Prize for physiology and medicine was awarded today to Paul C. Lauterbur and Sir Peter Mansfield for their seminal work in the field of MRI or magnetic resonance imaging.
Also of note, I attended a lecture by Thomas Cech who won the Nobel Prize for chemistry in 1989 for the discovery of catalytic properties of RNA. This, of course, brought about the revolutionary idea that earth may have begun as an RNA world with self-replicating RNA.
However, the seminar was of little relation to RNA. Cech's currently working on the problem of telomerase--the enzyme that is involved in elongating and capping the ends of chromosomes called telomeres. A common misconception in the public is the idea that if we are able to harness the mechanisms of telomerase, we may also be able to control our own mortality. This idea stems from data that shows a correlation between telomere length and lifetime. What it only indicates is that immortality is gained for the cell and not the organism as a whole. An example is cancer--cancer cells have defective telomerase and thus proliferate unchecked.
Most of the lecture dealt with the biochemical mechanisms in which the enzyme interacts with the ends of chromosomes. To make a long story short, Cech and his colleagues have discovered telomerase is especially picky and species specific. One base change at the chromosome ends can wreak the delicate balance of chemical bonds telomerase must make with the DNA. That's just the surface though. They have yet to figure out the myriad of other functions of the enzyme.
Last night, I got to see Pirates of the Caribbean. I won't bother with a review or even a synopsis--I'm sure most people have already seen it or heard about it. The movie was the "surprise" hit of the summer despite being a spin-off from an amusement park ride. My favorite character was Captain Jack Sparrow--an absolute scene stealer. Without him, this fun film would have been completely lackluster.
The 2003 Ig Nobel Prize Winners. Winners include Murphy's Law, sheep dragging, taxi drivers' brains, a bronze statue that fails to attract pigeons, chicken preferences for beautiful humans, and dead duck humping.
Also stay tuned for the real 2003 Nobel Prizes. The one for literature has already been announced last Thursday for John Maxwell Coetzee, a South African author who writes about apartheid.
This documentary of McNamara, the U.S. Secretary of Defense during the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, is perhaps unintentionally Janus-faced. On one hand, we have the former Secretary of Defense who is remarkably well-spoken and earnest about what he believes. And on the other, we have the director and the composer (Philip Glass) who are trying to force a particular atmosphere and mindset.
McNamara was, despite his admission of making mistakes, exceptionally one-sided in his view of war. By trade, he is an expert statistician. Before being appointed by Kennedy to the post of Secretary of Defense, he rose to the top of Ford by turning around the company's slumping sales. After his stint in the Johnson administration, he was the head of the World Bank. McNamara saw war similarly to running the company--to maximize the efficiency to achieve an objective no matter the cost. Thus two of McNamara's lessons, "maximize efficiency" and "in order to do good, you may have to engage in evil" are deeply intertwined.
I am still not quite sure what to think about the dichotomy between McNamara and the makers of the film. Philip Glass's brooding score was a good match with the archival video. However, I found Errol Morris's "artistic license" a bit too obvious to digest. One example is that of human skulls falling down the dorm stairwells of Cornell only to be smashed into smithereens at the bottom. Another heavy handed instance is the repeated image of dominoes falling across a map of Vietnam. Anyone with a modicum of knowledge about American history will already have encountered the "Domino Effect" of communism. I also disliked Morris's quick, MTV-like, cuts of words out of context and statistics. The scientist in me cringes at this deception of hiding the rest of the articles and showing information at subliminal speed.
Clean, moody, biased. And also extremely pertinent for the current political quagmire. The eleven lessons can be found in this review. This film is going to be shown at the New York Film Festival before opening to audiences in New York and Los Angeles in December. It will open nation-wide next year in February.
You know those sites that you always go to for e-mail like Yahoo and Hotmail and for the weather or for the news? The advertisements are driving me up the wall. Why don't they just do textads like certain search engines we all know and love? Flashy colors, enormous words, ridiculous animation. I was trying to check my e-mail when an advertisement popped up with a model in skimpy (and risque) lingerie. I don't open up suspicious spam or go to questionable websites, but this is insane. I'm not a prude, but it totally offends my aesthetic sensibilities. Besides, does the advertiser want people to be fired from work because they have questionable ads on common websites? Fired people don't have jobs and people who don't have jobs won't have money to spend on anything let alone their questionable products.
In honor of NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month):
Onesome: Great- Who's the greatest influence in your life? ...and could you write about them? (Hey, it's NaNoWirMo!)
I would say my parents are the greatest influence in my life, but I would not write about them. Well, I might, but it would have to be part of their life before I came along. I think I "dullified" them, as much as I hate to admit it.
Twosome: American- Who do you consider to be the greatest American writer of all time? Counterpoint: whose books are sitting on your nightstand?
I don't really think of writers in terms of "great"--it's a very subjective descriptor, and I think "favorite" might work better. I like Mark Twain. But other than that, I think all my other favorite writers are British. I don't have a nightstand, but there are a couple of books that I am currently reading. I am partway through the biography of John Adams by the Pulitzer-winning David McCullough (who incidentally, gave the commencement speech at my institution this past June), and once I finish that, I'll be reading The Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood. And then, after that, some trashy Elizabeth Peters mystery--but I really shouldn't be planning so far ahead. I always get derailed.
Threesome: Novel- What's your favourite book/novel? Hmmm... What's so special about that one book?
It will have to be The Blue Sword by Robin McKinley. It was quite the happy accident that I stumbled on it. I think what appealed to me the most about it was its heroine who didn't sit around for anyone to rescue her but took things into her own hands to save her adopted culture.
Anne Rice Sale. An amusing piece by NPR about the writer of vampire novels holding a rummage sale. If she held the sale on Ebay, people from elsewhere might have a chance at her stuff.
Want to write a novel? Here's your chance! Go to Nanowrimo right now and sign up!
For October and November only, I will have Writing Sya on the left of this page. I have a weblog-update-journal-thingee over there that will detail my progress and my moaning about writer-centric stuff. Occasionally (like today) I will cross-post an entry here.
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A Writer's Egoism
So this is my third year going into this. I am both excited and slightly bitter.
Bitter?!
Yes, bitter. I'm not going to have any friends to cheer me on. It's that whole academia/fun/you-know-what-you-should-really-be-doing kind of conundrum. The people who know that I write think I'm insane. Scientists don't write. They're supposed to be chained to the lab bench. (However, if my hobby had been mountain biking, everyone would be totally excited. Around here, mountain biking is sexy. Writing isn't.)
I can't coerce other people to do this. I'm at one of those, you know, major universities, and it's sort of foolhardy to divert someone from their studies for something that is both fun and hard only to see them crash and burn. I don't want to be responsible for that. And there's also the air of pretentious snobbishness that completely intimidates me. Maybe that makes me a coward. But at least I'm a safe coward.
This year's Nano novel is also going to be placed online as I write it. It's more to keep myself on track. No one paid attention to the novels the previous year. Hardly anyone commented on them out of their own volition. Almost no one actually read my work. I posted copiously on the forums the previous years, but did anyone care? No. I don't expect anyone this year to follow my progress either.
I have to admit, I feel really jealous when another Nano novelist posts something about participating in Nanowrimo and then gets a whole flurry of comments by people who are dying to read their work. Where's my recognition? When someone asks me what I did during November and I reply, "I wrote a 50,000 word novel." And they respond with, "That's impressive!" I'm not mollified. I don't feel like a writer who has done her job. I feel like a four-year-old who has been studiously ignored while I try to show off my fingerpainting.
