Unlearned

2010-03-12

Blog address: http://polykleitos.livejournal.com/

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2010-03-12

Dumbledore is gay, JKR confirms

Sat, 20 Oct 2007 13:55:04 -0700

I woke up two hours ago expecting a dreary weekend of paper-writing, lesson-planning, and mechanical device-designing. Instead, I also get to watch fandom explode over J.K. Rowling's announcement that Dumbledore is gay. Brilliant!

Okay, so it's not exactly news for most of us here. We started shipping Dumbledore/Grindelwald almost immediately after finishing the seventh book. But I honestly didn't expect it to ever be anything more than subtext. I won't bother arguing whether JKR's interviews are canon are not, although I will say that I've never understood the great debate about that -- don't we all pretty much have personal canon anyways? As for complaints about why she didn't out him in the books, I'll just agree with gmth's post (ETA 10/21/07: and wikdsushi's post) and leave it at that. Did I mention that I love JKR just a little bit (okay, maybe a lot)?

As always, Harry Potter provides a great distraction. I needed one this weekend: this getting a year older thing is freaking me out a bit. Bring on the wank!

ETA 10/21/07: And there's wank. This is seriously the best birthday present ever.

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Curioser and curioser

Sun, 26 Aug 2007 01:13:16 -0700

Sometime in the middle of last week, I realized that I had forgotten this journal was no longer on hiatus. So much for posting everyday. I honestly don't know how I used to do it. Weekend posting works for me and my schedule, though, so I'll stick with that. (ETA 10/20/07: Should have said, I'll try to stick with that. Heh.)

Here are a few random tidbits from the past week:

1. xkcd's Rule 34. Slash fans in particular should like this one.

2. One of our news editors has taken to printing out copies of LOLcats and taping them around the office. Even when I'm in the real world, I cannot escape the cat macros! (Speaking of LOLcats, you can easily make them using LJ post subject titles here.)

3. According to Morbid Fact Du Jour, when Albert Einstein died in 1955, his last words were spoken in his native German, a language that none of his friends could understand as he died in the United States. Thus, his final words went unrecorded. (Gacked from this post on useless_facts.)

4. For happy Heroes casting news, see this Ausiello interview. TV Guide also provides a sneak peek into the fourth season of House.

5. And lastly, via Warren Ellis, I bring you designer Eelko Moorer's Stilts, footwear designed in 2003:

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Underwater

Sun, 19 Aug 2007 22:23:14 -0700

As promised, I'm posting a pretty picture today.

Gacked from moosl's post; more underwater photos here.



Unrelated, it seems we must say goodbye to Weekly World News. The magazine's Aug. 27 issue will be its last.

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One year later ...

Sat, 18 Aug 2007 22:58:31 -0700

It's about time I dusted this off and started posting again, I suppose.

Not that I don't recognize that this is a rather inconvenient time to start up my blog again, what with a good percentage of my LiveJournal friends fleeing to this other journal site or that in the wake of Deletegate and all the LJ/6A/Strikethrough/Boldthrough/LOLcat-posting/news-post-filling/t-shirt-burning madness. (Oh, Potterdammerung, how differently I thought you'd turn out! Although the unexpected return of Msscribe wank earlier this week did break up the monotony nicely.)

While I'm not exactly filled with warm, fuzzy feelings toward LiveJournal and SixApart right now, I'm going to stay where I am. My journal was never all that fannish to begin with (and will likely be less so from now on) and most of my LJ friends are staying put as well.

But never let it be said that I'm not a sheep! You can also find me on InsaneJournal (here), GreatestJournal (here), and JournalFen (here). I won't be updating any of those (no using Semagic to post to all four journals at once; I tend to edit my posts and having to do that in four different places seems slightly torturous), but I will be using them to keep track of the fen and fannish communities that have set up operations elsewhere. (I considered getting a DeadJournal as well, just to round out the set, but the place creeps me out a bit. InsaneJournal creeps me out too, but as that seems to be the journal of choice for much of fandom nowadays, I suppose I had to get one.)

As for how I'm doing, I'm feeling slightly overwhelmed at the present time. I'm looking at two full weeks of non-stop work. This upcoming week will include wrapping up my two part-time summer jobs with a lot of writing for one and lab results and conclusions and possibly a presentation for the other, as well as doing my best to plan for a week of daily newspapers (oh, I'm the editor-in-chief for my school paper now, did I mention that?) while writing as many news stories, art reviews, and possibly opinion columns (it depends if I can think of any opinions) as is reasonable in a week. The following week, we will be publishing the above-mentioned daily newspapers, while I have to try to be perky so that I don't scare away potential journalism staff members.

And, of course, school starts the week after.

I just realized that this post is quite different from what I was typically known for; I tended to get to the point more quickly in the past. (I should say that I'm not all that fond of teal deers now. I fully expect to revert to my usual laconic self in my next post. Tomorrow. Watch, I'll just post a pretty picture.) That's not the only difference. If you were to look at my posts from last year (which you can't, because I feel more comfortable with my younger self's thoughts locked away), you would see an overabundance of emoticons -- mostly of the smiley face variety (":)" and ":D" and "^_^" when I was feeling particularly Asian) -- and exclamation points ("!") used in an exclamatory way and not a sarcastic one!

I feel quite different too. Older. Maybe wiser. I feel like I did a lot of learning this year, though none of it in class (possibly because I hardly ever went to class). And I suppose I'm also more jaded than I was (you can blame The Tech for that!); I don't consider that to be a bad thing, though. And then there's BARCC.

I started volunteering for the Boston Area Rape Crisis Center in January. I'm a medical advocate, which means I sit with and support sexual assault survivors when they are at the hospital, usually in the emergency room. With volunteers going on vacation during the summer, I've picked up a lot of extra shifts and have been on a lot of cases lately. I always walk out of the hospital feeling this weird combination of usefulness and helplessness, optimism and frustration, and anger. And it always takes me a while to get my head back where it needs to be for me to get any work done. (Today's case in particular was quite bad. To take my mind off of it, I ended up re-reading all of Aspen in the Sunlight's A Year Like None Other. All 97 chapters and 760,000+ words of it. You'd think I'd at least make an effort to read a real book for which I could write an arts review.) The point is that working on these cases really puts things in perspective for me. I need a hard knock on the head once in a while to remind me not to worry so much about the often trivial things that keep me up at night.

But enough about me, I have links for you! A whole year's worth, in fact. Although, today, I only want to share one: shoiryu writes about her experiences in a behavior modification camp. Not a happy post, not at all, but one that deserves to be read.

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Many goodbyes

Fri, 18 Aug 2006 18:48:02 -0700

I found out this morning that my professor Vernon M. Ingram, the one who had fallen on Tuesday, passed away sometime during the night.

It was a complete shock. We all thought he was going to be fine. When the parademics took him to Massachusetts General Hospital after his fall, he was perfectly alert and was acting like himself. As they poked and prodded him to find out what was damaged and asked him if it hurt, he had answered, "Well of course it hurts. You're poking me." And late Tuesday when one of our postdocs left MGH to return to the lab, Vernon had apologized, saying that he was sorry that he was "being so dramatic."

Just yesterday, I had been told that he was going to be transferred to the MIT Infirmary soon, that we could visit him there on Monday. Seeing as how he's no stranger to surgeries or stays at MGH, we all thought that was going to be back in a few weeks with his arm in a cast.

But it seems that his injuries were more serious than we had thought. He died because of post-surgery complications, possibly a blood clot. I'm sure we'll know more details later.

A lot of people stopped by the lab today to talk about Vernon, offer condolences and remember him. But, mostly, it was the five of us -- the three postdocs and two undergraduates in the lab -- who gathered in the office and talked about him, how much he loved the work that he did, how much he loved the student, how he worked until the very end just like he would have wanted, how he lived a long (82 years) and fulfilling life, how at least he didn't have to suffer through the long and grueling recovery that the severe shoulder injury would have required.

I think that's when it really started to sink in for me; I had felt pretty numb up until them. Then it just felt horrible.

And all I could think about was how the light in his office was still on from when he was there on Tuesday. No one had unlocked the door to turn it off.


Here we all are at lunch just a few weeks ago.
There's EunMee, Madhavi, Barbara, Atta, Vernon and myself.
The head of the biology department came to see us in the lab, mostly to talk about the fate of the postdocs, students, grants, papers and the lab itself. The postdocs will probably be absorbed into other labs. The other student and myself will probably just look for another UROP somewhere else. The grants needed to be renewed soon anyways, so I think they'll just be allowed to expire. There were two papers in the works, one of which was written by two undergraduates. The paper also has the names of many people who contributed to the project in many different labs, including myself. That manuscript's fate is uncertain. We'll need to find a faculty member who can take over and deal with the submission and revisions. I really hope it gets published; Vernon spent so much time working on that in the last few months.

And, of course, we talked about closing down the lab. I guess it had to happen.

When I got home today, I retched and cried and called my parents and cried some more. My heart actually feels heavy, which I always thought was a cliched saying, but it really does. I also had to tell the students who were in the advising seminar with me last year and the students who I'm advising this year. And now I have to find a way to tell Larry Benedict (Dean for Student Life); when I interviewed him on Wednesday, he wanted me to send him an update on Vernon's condition as soon as I heard anything. I don't want to send an e-mail about this, but he wasn't in his office, and I'm not really sure what to do now. Then again, I probably don't have to do anything. I'm sure the school will let everyone know.

Vernon was one of the first people that I met when I got to MIT last year. He was my freshmen faculty advisor, taught a seminar that I was in, and was my UROP research advisor for close to eight months. I was going to be his associate advisor for a group of incoming freshmen this following semester for the same seminar. I guess I'm probably going to be re-assigned now. Hopefully, though, I'll be able to stay with the freshmen. I've gotten to know all of them already.

I started looking up information about him, since we're going to have to run an obituary in The Tech. He is considered the Father of Molecular Medicine and discovered the genetic defect that causes sickle cell anemia. He was a photographer who liked to take pictures of the inside spaces of flowers. His office had quite a few of his pictures. He was the housemaster for one of the graduate dormitories for years, and the students loved him and his wife Beth so much that they had an asteroid named after him. He even has a playlist online.

You know those professors that people always talk about, the ones that come into your life and challenge the way you think and who you always remember? Professor Ingram was one of those. I'm really glad that I got to know him.

***Today is the second anniversary of the very beginning of my LiveJournal. I was originally planning a rather self-important announcement post about it, but I neither have the presence of mind nor the inclination to do that now. (I have also lost all interest in seeing Snakes on a Plane this opening weekend; and since the crowd this weekend is what will make the movie, I doubt I'll be seeing it at all.)

The long and short of the announcement was that I would be closing this journal today after exactly two years of posting in it daily. I've been thinking about it for a while and finally made this decision earlier this week. With this LJ, I chronicled two very important years of my life -- my last year of high school and my first year of college -- with posts getting both longer over time and more and more repetitive. I predict that my posts this next year, if I were to make them, would be about one of four things: pulling yet another all-nighter, stressing out about journalism as I have done for many years, cramming for an exam, or giving out a link that could easily be found on Google News. So, you see, you wouldn't be missing much.

I will not be deleting anything, but the posts will slowly be made private until such a time when I can decide what I want to do with them. I will continue to read other LJs; I did before I created my own, so I don't see why I should stop now. It's also very likely that I will post again someday. Maybe I'll start up again in exactly one year; maybe I'll chronicle my last year of college and my first year of medical school.

But until then, thank you for being such wonderful readers. My best to all of you.

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Revere Beach, Boston

Fri, 18 Aug 2006 00:37:41 -0700

This picture was taken by my good friend Ji (beibeijiqqii). She sent me the photo so that I could post it.


Here we have one of the entries in the New England Sand Sculpting Invitational 2006. I don't believe this one placed, but it still looks very cool nonetheless. It reminds me of the movie All Dogs Go to Heaven, which is one of my favorite movies -- probably not the intention of the artist. ;)

Links: Interview with Abu Ghraib Whistleblower - link from throwingstardna || Residents wonder if dead animal is legendary mystery beast (Boston Globe) - it seems the animal was "a rare wolf-dog hybrid" - link from officialgaiman || Vote for fictional class president at UGO.com - characters that are in the running include Hermione Granger, Veronica Mars, and many others.

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Closed

Thu, 17 Aug 2006 09:09:12 -0700

Feel free to leave a comment if you need to get in touch with me. I'm still around.

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Twelve planets and counting

Wed, 16 Aug 2006 22:21:36 -0700

Plan Would Add Planets to Solar System (ABC News)

"'Yes, Virginia, Pluto is a planet,' quipped Richard Binzel, a professor of planetary science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology." The proposal could change, however: Binzel and the other nearly 2,500 astronomers from 75 nations meeting in Prague to hammer out a universal definition of a planet will hold two brainstorming sessions before they vote on the resolution next week.


Press Release: Draft Definition of "Planet" and "Pluton" (IAU)
Short timeline of 'paradigm-shifting ideas that rocked our worlds' (LA Times)

This is all so exciting. I love that I'm around to see changes like these.

News: Suspect arrested in JonBenet Ramsey case (CNN) - "A law enforcement source identified the suspect as 41-year-old John Mark Karr, a one-time schoolteacher and American citizen who has lived in Conyers, Georgia." It's hard to believe that this was 10 years ago. o_O

P.S. I am completely in love with the Boston Public Library. Madly, passionately, deeply in love. :)

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Oh, crappy day

Tue, 15 Aug 2006 20:15:45 -0700

My boss took a fall at work today.

I arrived back at my building after lunch to see an ambulance, lights flashing, parked out front. I remember thinking, "Oh shit. I hope that's not Professor I." But it was.

According to another person in the lab, there was a gash on the professor's forehead that was bleeding quite profusely, and his right side was causing him a lot of pain. An update from the hospital a little later confirmed that his arm (or it might have been his shoulder) was broken.

A few people speculated that the newly-waxed floor might have been the reason for his fall.

Now, I'm sure he's going to be just fine; he stayed conscious the entire time and was quite alert. According to the technician from another lab who was the first to find him in the hall, he still exhibitied his usual British wit. But, for an 82-year-old man, no injury is minor and recovering is going to be a bitch.

We spent the rest of the work day very distracted, waiting to hear updates from the postdoc and the other professor who went along in the ambulance. We called other people in the lab to let them know what was happening and spent some time trying to get the blood off his very bent-up glasses.

Other things that helped make the day crappy: 1. a transmission electron microscope that refuses to work properly; 2. having to really, really rush to move the rest of my things to my fall room assignment because I missed the check-out deadline (not that I get in trouble for that or anything -- it was just annoying); and 3. finding out that the microwave in our old suite lounge has vanished.

Links: 9/11 Detainee Released After Nearly Five Years With No Charges (AP) - link from throwingstardna || Breast implants save Israeli woman (Daily Telegraph) - link from jwz - "During the war she was wounded in the chest by shrapnel that got stuck in the implants instead of penetrating further." || The HP Reversathon 2006 Masterlist - from fluffyllama

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The things you see outside your window (+ laptop battery PSA)

Mon, 14 Aug 2006 20:01:13 -0700

My last day in my summer room assignment (also known as today) started off in a strange way. During the night, signs had gone up around the dormitory announcing the window washing that would take place throughout the week. The announcement added that windows should be closed to speed up the process, and that curtains should also be closed for privacy.

Well, like I said, the signs went up during the night, so I didn't see them. Thus, I slept with my bed next to the window and my curtains wide open as usual.

This morning, I woke up with a man hanging by some rope right outside my window. It was not at all something I expected to see living on the seventh floor. He was nice enough, though. We had a short conversation, where he apologized for waking me and told me to go back to sleep and pretend I was dreaming. Gladly, I said. Gladly.

And now I get to bust my butt tonight and move back to my fourth floor fall room. :)

***PSA: Laptop Batteries Might Catch Fire - it seems there's a design flaw in some batteries which causes them to occasionally burst into flames - from copperbadge (Dell Recalls Batteries, NY Times)


Links: Journal of Mythic Arts - link from kaiz - "An online journal for the exploration of myth, folklore, and fairy tales, and their use in contemporary arts." || Celebrity Nursing Home Yearbook - see what some of our favorite celebrities might look like, all aged up; some of these photo manips are very impressive - from ohnotheydidnt || Announcing the Snarry Art Olympics - from djin7 || What my assistant does - Neil Gaiman column - from officialgaiman || Your Band Name Sucks: 50 of the Inexcusably Worst - link from jwz

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The Quotation Meme

Sat, 12 Aug 2006 20:42:00 -0700

Gacked from iulia_linnea: Go here and look through the random quotations until you find five that you think reflect who you are or what you believe. Repost them in your journal (with this information) and tag five friends to complete this meme.

1. "All love that has not friendship for its base, is like a mansion built upon sand." -- Ella Wheeler Wilcox

2. "The greatest pleasure in life is doing what people say you cannot do." -- Walter Bagehot

3. "Let me tell you the secret that has led me to my goal. My strength lies solely in my tenacity." -- Louis Pasteur

4. "Science is nothing but trained and organized common sense, differing from the latter only as a veteran may differ from a raw recruit: and its methods differ from those of common sense only as far as the guardsman's cut and thrust differ from the manner in which a savage wields his club." -- Thomas H. Huxley

5. "There is only one way to defeat the enemy, and that is to write as well as one can. The best argument is an undeniably good book." -- Saul Bellow

So many good quotes, so little time... :)

Links: On the UN Resolution - from ziasudra || CW Mall Domination Tour - for those who live near The Grove in Los Angeles (like redtigerlily_3 and outeeyore, for example ;)) definitely take advantage of this - from ohnotheydidnt || L.A. Pulse Premiere Pictures - with a few really cute ones of Kristen Bell - from veronica_mars || How to write dialogues - from naatz

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Untitled

Fri, 11 Aug 2006 18:09:02 -0700

Today has been long and quiet and incredibly tedious.

No postdocs, no research associates, no professor, no one except the other undergraduate student and myself bothered to show up to the lab to work today. It was really bizarre; the lab is usually a little more lively than it was today. I'm assuming that no one was actually slacking off; they were probably all at a big, important biology poster session or other event that we, the two students, were not invited to. Still, it would have been nice to have been told beforehand. That way we would have known that we needed to look for someone with the master keys to open the lab door for us, for example.

My task today pretty much called for a great deal of waiting. (Actually, make that present tense: it calls for a great deal of waiting. Because I'm still here.) Soon, my 8-hour incubation will be done; I'll spot the EM grids, and then I'll be able to leave. It's really a good thing I'm not experimenting with a 12-hour time point.

Links: 'Baby, Give Me a Kiss' (LA Times) - link from ziasudra - "The man behind the 'Girls Gone Wild' soft-porn empire lets Claire Hoffman [Times Staff Writer] into his world, for better or worse." || Unbelievable - from stoney321 - a homophobic e-mail is sent to all those subscribed to a gardening company's mailing list, a rather stupid thing for the president of the company to send. || New LJ notification system - currently, only Permanent account holders can preview this new feature - from permmembers || Vanished Press Kit - quite elaborate and very impressive - link from vanished_tv

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Cracking up

Thu, 10 Aug 2006 10:36:54 -0700

A corner of my laptop broke off last night.


It was bizarre and unexpected. I decided to reattach the piece of plastic with Scotch tape. It now looks rather tacky -- glue might have been a better idea -- but at least I no longer have a hole in my computer. I wonder if my Dell warranty covers this kind of thing.

News: Airline terror plot 'close to execution' (CNN) - "Terrorists were in the final stages of planning to blow up planes heading to the United States from Britain, U.S. Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff said Thursday." This stuff is just incredibly scary. :-(

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World eBook Fair (Monday's post)

Wed, 09 Aug 2006 13:37:23 -0700

I can't believe I only just discovered the World eBook Fair today. (I found it through iulia_linnea on the daily_snitch.) In celebration of Project Gutenberg's 35th Birthday, there has been free access to the site (i.e. free ebooks for download) for the public. The site states that there are approximately 1/3 of a million books. The fair began on July 4 and was originally slated to end on August 4. The end date was then extended to August 11 due to popular demand. So, there are a few more days.

I have personally been going slightly crazy with all the downloading; there are so many cool things that I want! I believe my first reaction may have been to start flailing and jumping up and down, going "oh happy, happy day!" If yesterday's very wordy and tl;dr post about books didn't already give away the fact that I'm a total nerd, I'm certain that reaction will.)

The best part is that plans are underway for another ebook fair in October. If you're interesting, make sure to look out for it. And now I will go back to downloading sheet music. :)

Links:

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Untitled

Wed, 09 Aug 2006 12:39:15 -0700

I don't know what it is with me and posts with lists lately; I never used to enjoy making them quite this much.

1. Two of my friends (more like acquaintances, really; we lived in the same dorm entry, but I always did think the two of them were cute together) recently got engaged. He proposed on Killian Court, which is probably the prettiest place on campus, and said some pretty mushy things, according to her blog. Hee! I'm so happy for them. Congratulations Mollie and Adam! :D

2. For those who have been friends with me for a while, you may remember my post about Gizoogle.com, a site which can translate text into Snoop Dog speak. Well, now, there's also Bork Bork Bork! for Firefox users (link from dondarkstalker), which gives you the Swedish Chef version.

Even better than both of those, though, is WorkFriendly.net (link from iibnf), which can make any Web site you look at appear as a Microsoft Word document. Work friendly, indeed.

3. What do Paris Hilton and Darth Vader have in common? Why, Hello Kitty, of course!

Click on thumbnails for larger photos.


Paris graphic taken from this article describing the new Hello Kitty doll (it even has a little chihuahua!); Vader picture gacked from rosebudfrznpeaz.

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When book memes attack (+ a request for recs)

Sun, 06 Aug 2006 15:22:55 -0700

Gacked from johncwright, here. I'm a total book worm, so I just couldn't resist.

1. One book that changed your life?

No doubt the writer of this meme, when choosing this question, was thinking of those books that have completely changed your outlook on life, those books whose words have led you to some epiphany or realization, whose themes resonate within you much longer than it takes to close the back cover and shove the book back on the shelf. Well, the books that changed my life really did none of those things. (I'm not sure any book that I've read up to this point has done that for me.)

You see, the Harry Potter books by J.K. Rowling -- I'm sure you've heard of them -- tell a story that is imaginative and funny and infinitely relatable but not particularly life-changing in itself. The good-versus-evil and love-conquers-all themes aren't exactly new to anybody. What was new, for me anyway, was this intense interest in the fandom itself.

It was spring break, ninth grade. I finished the first four books over the course of three days, and I probably glued myself to my glowing computer screen for the rest of the week. Fanfiction wasn't at all new to me, as I had probably read through millions of words of Sailor Moon and Buffy fic, but I don't think I've ever consumed quite as much un-betaed, angst-ridden crap in such a sort period of time in my life. (It took longer than that first week to find the good stuff.) Anyways, from the first fanfiction stories I read, it was only a few short steps to discovering slash and LiveJournal, pornish_pixies and RL friends on LJ, Queer As Folk and memes, episode downloads and metafandom. Oh, and wank. And Ms. Scribe. You can't forget those.

In fact, I can probably trace most of my current knowledge of the workings of the Internet -- from furries to fandom history to viral marketing to the somewhat vague concept of Net Etiquette -- back to LiveJournal and thus back to Harry Potter in some way. Add to that a lot of perspective on sexuality and race and people in general and additional knowledge of the writing process and the way blogs fit into media and journalism, I would say these books have had quite an impact. For better or worse. (And it's only worse because I'm currently posting on my LiveJournal instead of doing something that might be more constructive. Reading more books, for example.)

2. One book you have read more than once?

I really enjoy reading books more than once, especially if time has passed since the first reading. Part of me is usually worried, though, that I book I used to love will somehow lose its appeal during its second read-through. It happened with The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien, which totally sucks because I absolutely adored it for years.

Most recently, I re-read Breathing Lessons by Anne Tyler. The second reading was definitely worth it; I think I was too young to understand some of character dynamics and themes when I read it years ago. A lot of real life can be seen in the pages of that book. But, unfortunately, even a second reading couldn't make the main character any less frustrating to me. Oh, Maggie Moran, you and your goodhearted intentions. You just can't help sticking your nose it, can you?

3. One book you would want on a desert island?

The kind of book seen in many an Alias and at least one Veronica Mars episode, the kind that has a false back where a cell phone or some radio transmission device could be held. Then I'd be able to call someone to pick me up.

4. One book that made you laugh?

The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams and its sequels seem like a pretty obvious choice. But they certainly did make me laugh, out loud and often.

5. One book that made you cry?

A Prayer for Owen Meany by John Irving. I was bawling at the end of it, which is quite impressive because very few books do that to me. But very few books have such a great narrative with such wonderful characters. I highly, highly recommend it. Owen Meany and his Voice is one of a kind, and his friendship, his faith, and his courage are truly inspiring. Oh, would you look at that, I'm tearing up again.

This book also completely redeems the practice of writing dialogue in all caps, which JKR so woefully abused.

6. One book you wish had been written?

A History of Magic by Bathilda Bagshot. I would imagine it to be something similar in information and style to History of the Modern World by R.R. Palmer, which was likely my favorite textbook in all of high school.

7. One book you wish had never had been written?

Our newspaper reviewed Snakes on a Plane by Christa Faust in the most recent issue. I haven't looked at the review, and I haven't read the book, but in my opinion, the movie is definitely enough.

8. One book you are currently reading?

For books that I'm reading at home, I'm currently in the middle of Eastern Standard Time by Dina Gan, Terry Hong, and Jeff Yang and I just started The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood and The Dime Novel in Children's Literature by Vicki Anderson. Whenever I drop by the humanities library, I plop myself down in couches and read books in the Browsery. There, I'm currently working my way through The Genius of Language edited by Wendy Lesser and The Complete Peanuts: 1955 to 1956 by Charles Schulz. (I love "Pig Pen.")

9. One book you have been meaning to read?

One book? But there are so many to choose from! 1984 by George Orwell, Dune by Frank Herbert, Foundation by Isaac Asimov, A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole, Villete by Charlotte Bronte, Emma by Jane Austen, ttyl by Lauren Myracle, among others, are books that I've been meaning to get to.

Most recently, so_urbanslicker recommended The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini in her journal. I believe she may have described it as beautiful and life-changing, so that's probably where I'm headed next. And when Virgin: The Untouched History by Hanne Blank (misia) comes out, I will be reading that.

10. Now tag five people.

I would love to tag Hermione Granger, fellow book worm that she is, but for some reason I don't think she'll respond.

***

And now, I would like to request my friends to give me a few book recommendations. I have a few weeks of summer vacation left, which means that I have a few weeks of time to do some real reading, something I have sorely neglected during the school year.

News: Happy 15th Birthday, World Wide Web (BBC) - it's almost hard to believe the web is younger than I am.

Fandom: Harry Potter and the mystery of an academic obsession (The Guardian) - an outsider's look into Lumos - link from emmagrant01 and shocolate

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Giant spider webs

Sat, 05 Aug 2006 21:37:51 -0700

Gacked from jwz:


See more spider web pictures at jwz's journal here and here.

Links: Introduction to Arithmancy - from emmagrant01 at arithmancy101 || Domesday Book online - link from alchemia || Mel Gibson and The Politics of Bigotry (National Ledger) || National Zoo - pictures - from aaronparsley || Jenna Jameson wax portrait - link from jwz

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Sharing in the Colbert love (among other things)

Wed, 02 Aug 2006 21:38:14 -0700

1. I was just invited to join the 'Angeline' is the greatest name ever! Facebook group. (Oh, global Facebook groups, you really are pointless. ^_^) I suppose I can no longer say that I don't know anyone who shares my name, but I can still say that I haven't met anyone with it.

2. Shamelessly gacked from Wikipedia's article on the Colbert Report, via fieryphoenix and dondarkstalker:

"Colbert has frequently mentioned Wikipedia on his show, and in the July 31, 2006 'The WØRD' segment he coined the portmanteau of Wikipedia and reality, Wikiality. Wikiality, by his definition, means the alteration of reality by making some fictitious edit in Wikipedia. He checked Wikipedia to determine whether Oregon was California's Canada or Washington's Mexico before deciding to declare it Idaho's Portugal and pretending to change Wikipedia to make it so. He also instructed viewers to change the elephant article to say that the number of elephants has tripled in the last six months. He goes on to express his love for Wikipedia as it presents a philosophy similar to Colbert's own truthiness (that intuition is more true than fact) as 'if enough people believe something' it becomes true."

As fieryphoenix points out, because of that, both the Colbert Report article and the article on elephants are currently in lockdown. It really is a thing of beauty. :D

For more on Stephen Colbert, check out stephs_shades's post, which includes hi-res scans of Newsweek, Giant Magazine, and Men's Vogue articles on Colbert and "Truthiness." issyadore also has a very humorous picture of Colbert in her post today.

3. Real-Life Werewolves (ABC News) - Five Generations of a Family Suffer From Excessive Hair


Danny Ramos Gomez has a condition
called hypertrichosis, which runs through
five generations of his family. (ABC News)
This was the saddest part of the article: "The brothers are known for their daredevil feats in a Mexican circus. But when they were little, it was different. They were both part of a freak show, exhibited like animals and called 'wolf children.'"

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Birthday explorations (Saturday's post)

Wed, 02 Aug 2006 14:09:59 -0700

I spent the day celebrating the birthdays of two of my close friends, Ji and Elise, one born July 29 and the other July 30. We decided to pick a part of Boston that was mostly unfamiliar to us, start there and explore.

The day began with a very amusing turn of events. Both Ji and Elise had decided to wear the same dress. Since they're both Asian and have the same coloring, it was even more difficult than usual to tell them apart. :D While I promised that I would not put the photos up on Facebook, I didn't say anything about not posting them on LiveJournal, so here they are, the two birthday girls.


In a kitchen in New House.
We started at the North End, which is officially my favorite place in the entire city. I had only been there once before and hadn't had a chance to really appreciate the area. It is filled with wonderful little shops all named after people like "Ida," "Lulu," "Mike," and "Anna." (The CVS store seemed very, very out of place.) The buildings are old and full of character. And there is a sign that tells you to take the first right and then turn left if you want to see Paul Revere's house. The North End always seems to have something going on, whether it is a parade like the one I saw the last time I was there or a festival like today. We ended up cooling down at the "Gelateria," where we each consumed some rather expensive but delicious ice cream.

I probably would have liked to explore the North End a little bit more, but my impression was that Ji and Elise would prefer to head toward Government Center where we could do some real shopping. (When I say "we," I really mean "they." You see, shopping isn't my thing, but I'm happy to tag along as long as I can take pictures.) Besides, there are always amazing street performers in that area.

As we literally walked from one side of the street to the other to get to our destination, I think we were all a little bit surprised by how close everything was. Coming from Los Angeles, Calif., it's always going to surprise me just how small and pedestrian-friendly Boston really is.


Walking toward Government Center.


Quincy Market.


Cow sitting in front of Quincy Market.
Part of the Boston CowParade.


What is it with all the cows, anyways?


At first, I thought he was a statue.
But no, he's just a man who has painted himself silver.


Street performers. I saw this same group last year.
They're pretty amazing.
On our way back home for a quick shower and change of clothes, we dropped by Haymarket. I believe I bought something like 9 plums, 4 bundles of scallions, 2 baskets of strawberries, 5 cucumbers, and 10 tomatoes for $5. And even though half the plums turned out to be bad, shopping for groceries like that is still amazingly satisfying. While we were there, Ji and Elise kept getting comments about their apparel choice: "Are you two twins or did you get a 2-for-1 deal on the dress?" :D

Our evening -- after Ji and Elise changed out of their matching outfits -- was spent in Cambridge, more specifically Harvard Square. A bit more exploring of the neighboring shops and streets was done as we waited for our table at Fire and Ice; we even caught the beginning of an escapist's act that was being held near an "International News Stand." He was being tied into a strait-jacket just as the restaurant's hand-held gadget-thing started vibrating and ringing and flashing to let us know that our table was ready.


At Fire and Ice.
Look how Asian my friends are.
A few of us opted to walk back to MIT after dinner. It seemed like the smartest thing to do as we all needed to walk off the excess calories consumed that night at the all-you-can-eat grill. We remarked on the number of furniture stores that lined Massachusetts Avenue and pointed and laughed at the small, somewhat sad-looking building with the sign in front declaring it as the Cambridge Chamber of Commerce. I also couldn't help but notice at how the number of book stores seemed to dwindle as we got closer and closer to Central Square and MIT.

What I'll always remember about that walk, though, was the discovery of the basement level of the Harvard University Bookstore, where all the used books are kept. That is definitely my new happy place. Ji, Julia, and I spent a lot of time looking through the "Children's Books" section, remembering the days when we used to read Nancy Drew and The Boxcar Children.

Along with last night's trip to the Museum of Fine Arts, there has definitely been a great deal of walking this weekend. :)

The last two hours or so of Ji's birthday was spent watching the first three episodes of the new season of Project Runway. I think I may have gotten her hooked on yet another television show. She's already addicted to Veronica Mars, Grey's Anatomy, and Bones because of me. Oops. ;)

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Invisibility, plastic surgery gone wrong

Mon, 31 Jul 2006 23:02:20 -0700

Gacked from andromeda1706: Scientist thinks invisibility possible in future (Reuters)

Dr Ulf Leonhardt, a theoretical physicist at St Andrews University in Scotland, believes the most plausible example is the Invisible Woman, one of the Marvel Comics superheroes in the "Fantastic Four".

"She guides light around her using a force field in this cartoon. This is what could be done in practice," Leonhardt told Reuters in an interview. "That comes closest to what engineers will probably be able to do in the future."

***All over the local news: Couple charged after woman dies during home liposuction surgery (AP)

A Brazilian couple who authorities say came to the United States to perform illegal cosmetic surgeries were charged Monday with unauthorized practice of medicine after a woman who had liposuction in a blood-stained basement died.

Authorities said the death of the woman, identified by neighbors as 24-year-old Fabiola de Paula, raises health concerns for people in the Brazilian immigrant community who are undergoing the underground plastic surgeries.

Links: Things we like about America - from azad_slide || Gallery of Strange Buildings - from moosl || Interview with Alan Rickman - from ptyx || Harry Potter actor to star in 'Equus' on London stage (Reuters) || MTV names 25 influential pop stars (UPI)

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HTML Symbols

Fri, 28 Jul 2006 01:13:08 -0700

Gacked from moosl's post here. Thank you, Moose, for the copy of the table code! It really is incredibly useful. :)

If you would like a copy of this table code, email me asking for it.
‘		‘	left single quote
’		’	right single quote
‚		‚	single low-9 quote
“		“	left double quote
”		”	right double quote
„		„	double low-9 quote
†		†	dagger
‡		‡	double dagger
‰		‰	per mill sign
‹		‹	single left-pointing angle quote
›		›	single right-pointing angle quote
♠		♠	black spade suit
♣		♣	black club suit
♥		♥	black heart suit
♦		♦	black diamond suit
‾		‾	overline, = spacing overscore
←		←	leftward arrow
↑		↑	upward arrow
→		→	rightward arrow
↓		↓	downward arrow
™		™	trademark sign
	!	!	exclamation mark
"	"	"	double quotation mark
	#	#	number sign
	$	$	dollar sign
	%	%	percent sign
&	&	&	ampersand
	'	'	apostrophe
	(	(	left parenthesis
	)	)	right parenthesis
	*	*	asterisk
	+	+	plus sign
	,	,	comma
	-	-	hyphen
	.	.	period
⁄	/	⁄	slash
	:	:	colon
	&#59;	;	semicolon
&lt;	&#60;	<	less-than sign
	&#61;	=	equals sign
&gt;	&#62;	>	greater-than sign
	&#63;	?	question mark
	&#64;	@	at sign
	&#91;	[	left square bracket
	&#92;	\	backslash
	&#93;	]	right square bracket
	&#94;	^	caret
	&#95;	_	horizontal bar (underscore)
	&#96;	`	grave accent
	&#123;	{	left curly brace
	&#124;	|	vertical bar
	&#125;	}	right curly brace
	&#126;	~	tilde
&ndash;	&#150;	–	en dash
&mdash;	&#151;	—	em dash
&nbsp;	&#160;		nonbreaking space
&iexcl;	&#161;	¡	inverted exclamation
&cent;	&#162;	¢	cent sign
&pound;	&#163;	£	pound sterling
&curren;	&#164;	¤	general currency sign
&yen;	&#165;	¥	yen sign
&brvbar;	&#166;	¦	broken vertical bar
&sect;	&#167;	§	section sign
&uml;	&#168;	¨	umlaut
&copy;	&#169;	©	copyright
&ordf;	&#170;	ª	feminine ordinal
&laquo;	&#171;	«	left angle quote
&not;	&#172;	¬	not sign
&shy;	&#173;	­	soft hyphen
&reg;	&#174;	®	registered trademark
&macr;	&#175;	¯	macron accent
&deg;	&#176;	°	degree sign
&plusmn;	&#177;	±	plus or minus
&sup2;	&#178;	²	superscript two
&sup3;	&#179;	³	superscript three
&acute;	&#180;	´	acute accent
&micro;	&#181;	µ	micro sign
&para;	&#182;	¶	paragraph sign
&middot;	&#183;	·	middle dot
&cedil;	&#184;	¸	cedilla
&sup1;	&#185;	¹	superscript one
&ordm;	&#186;	º	masculine ordinal
&raquo;	&#187;	»	right angle quote
&frac14;	&#188;	¼	one-fourth
&frac12;	&#189;	½	one-half
&frac34;	&#190;	¾	three-fourths
&iquest;	&#191;	¿	inverted question mark
&Agrave;	&#192;	À	uppercase A, grave accent
&Aacute;	&#193;	Á	uppercase A, acute accent
&Acirc;	&#194;	Â	uppercase A, circumflex accent
&Atilde;	&#195;	Ã	uppercase A, tilde
&Auml;	&#196;	Ä	uppercase A, umlaut
&Aring;	&#197;	Å	uppercase A, ring
&AElig;	&#198;	Æ	uppercase AE
&Ccedil;	&#199;	Ç	uppercase C, cedilla
&Egrave;	&#200;	È	uppercase E, grave accent
&Eacute;	&#201;	É	uppercase E, acute accent
&Ecirc;	&#202;	Ê	uppercase E, circumflex accent
&Euml;	&#203;	Ë	uppercase E, umlaut
&Igrave;	&#204;	Ì	uppercase I, grave accent
&Iacute;	&#205;	Í	uppercase I, acute accent
&Icirc;	&#206;	Î	uppercase I, circumflex accent
&Iuml;	&#207;	Ï	uppercase I, umlaut
&ETH;	&#208;	Ð	uppercase Eth, Icelandic
&Ntilde;	&#209;	Ñ	uppercase N, tilde
&Ograve;	&#210;	Ò	uppercase O, grave accent
&Oacute;	&#211;	Ó	uppercase O, acute accent
&Ocirc;	&#212;	Ô	uppercase O, circumflex accent
&Otilde;	&#213;	Õ	uppercase O, tilde
&Ouml;	&#214;	Ö	uppercase O, umlaut
&times;	&#215;	×	multiplication sign
&Oslash;	&#216;	Ø	uppercase O, slash
&Ugrave;	&#217;	Ù	uppercase U, grave accent
&Uacute;	&#218;	Ú	uppercase U, acute accent
&Ucirc;	&#219;	Û	uppercase U, circumflex accent
&Uuml;	&#220;	Ü	uppercase U, umlaut
&Yacute;	&#221;	Ý	uppercase Y, acute accent
&THORN;	&#222;	Þ	uppercase THORN, Icelandic
&szlig;	&#223;	ß	lowercase sharps, German
&agrave;	&#224;	à	lowercase a, grave accent
&aacute;	&#225;	á	lowercase a, acute accent
&acirc;	&#226;	â	lowercase a, circumflex accent
&atilde;	&#227;	ã	lowercase a, tilde
&auml;	&#228;	ä	lowercase a, umlaut
&aring;	&#229;	å	lowercase a, ring
&aelig;	&#230;	æ	lowercase ae
&ccedil;	&#231;	ç	lowercase c, cedilla
&egrave;	&#232;	è	lowercase e, grave accent
&eacute;	&#233;	é	lowercase e, acute accent
&ecirc;	&#234;	ê	lowercase e, circumflex accent
&euml;	&#235;	ë	lowercase e, umlaut
&igrave;	&#236;	ì	lowercase i, grave accent
&iacute;	&#237;	í	lowercase i, acute accent
&icirc;	&#238;	î	lowercase i, circumflex accent
&iuml;	&#239;	ï	lowercase i, umlaut
&eth;	&#240;	ð	lowercase eth, Icelandic
&ntilde;	&#241;	ñ	lowercase n, tilde
&ograve;	&#242;	ò	lowercase o, grave accent
&oacute;	&#243;	ó	lowercase o, acute accent
&ocirc;	&#244;	ô	lowercase o, circumflex accent
&otilde;	&#245;	õ	lowercase o, tilde
&ouml;	&#246;	ö	lowercase o, umlaut
&divide;	&#247;	÷	division sign
&oslash;	&#248;	ø	lowercase o, slash
&ugrave;	&#249;	ù	lowercase u, grave accent
&uacute;	&#250;	ú	lowercase u, acute accent
&ucirc;	&#251;	û	lowercase u, circumflex accent
&uuml;	&#252;	ü	lowercase u, umlaut
&yacute;	&#253;	ý	lowercase y, acute accent
&thorn;	&#254;	þ	lowercase thorn, Icelandic
&yuml;	&#255;	ÿ	lowercase y, umlaut

Link: The Autobiography Project - link from siukong - "In honor of Franklin?s 300th birthday, the Benjamin Franklin Tercentenary and One Book, One Philadelphia invited today?s Philadelphians to submit a memoir of their own, using no more than 300 words."

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Because lists are fun to make

Thu, 27 Jul 2006 18:54:49 -0700

1. It seems that Lumos 2006 is underway, as evidenced by a great deal of delighted squeeing and excitement on my friends' page. To my LiveJournal friends who are attending the Harry Potter Symposium (which, for those who don't know, is being held in Las Vegas this year) have a great time and update often so that those of us who will not be there may live vicariously through you. ;)

2. Shiny new objects that are catching people's eyes: Vox and LJTalk. As if we (read: I) don't spend enough time on the Internet as it is. (I will do my best to ignore the shininess.)

3. Lance Bass, formerly of boy-band 'N Sync, has come out of the closet, People Magazine announced this week. (Go, Lance! ^_^) What amuses me, besides the fact that no one seems particularly surprised, are the headlines that various national, local, and celebrity rags (oh, right, did I mention that this is headline news that every single paper absolutely must report on?!) are sporting today regarding Lance. For instance, there are song references: "Bye Bye Bye, girls: Lance Bass is gay" (Statesman.com) and "Bass Says Bye Bye Bye to the Closet" (Showbuzz). My favorite, though, is probably this one: "Lance Bass is the first 'N Sync member to admit he's gay" (Celebrity Stink). I see, so we're expecting more then? XD

4. Gacked from jwz: CowParade turns heads in the city (Budapest Sun) and Beefs over bovine's butt (Budapest Times)



5. A Grand Gesture to Celebrate Everwood, also known as the Ferris Wheel Project. A group of fans parked a ferris wheel at an elementary school (with permission) in Burbank, Calif. on July 21 "to let The CW, Warner Home Video and ABC Family know that Everwood still has loyal and supportive fans." (I don't know how I missed this. I was still in Los Angeles that day; I totally could have showed up to take a ride on the ferris wheel!) Along with the Cloud Watchers campaign to save Veronica Mars earlier this year, I must say yet again that I'm very impressed.

News: 15,000 tons of fuel oil cover Lebanon's coastline (Al Safir) - translated by glass_garden, link from cedarseed

Links: The White List - a list of writers, editors, and other publishing professionals that have LiveJournals or LJ RSS feeds - from archer904 || Single Block Holds Longest Race (Reuters) - link from vaud || Saying "I love you" without the words - multi-fandom - from liviapenn (and for QAF Brian/Justin specifically, suzvoy has created this post) || Morlock technology - very cool pictures - from jwz || Shiloh wax figure unveiled - from ohnotheydidnt

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"IQ" + Emmy Counter-programming

Thu, 27 Jul 2006 06:19:35 -0700

Gacked from lil_soleil, who I believe got the same score as I did:


I've been spending some time on Fandom Wank and ohnotheydidnt lately. Both sites, although the second one especially, are eating my brain. (I haven't felt my brain cells dying just yet, but I'm sure it's bound to happen sooner or later.) While there is something to be said about the impressive level of snark found on F_W, ohnotheydidnt is pure celebrity gossip, which can't possibly be good for you.

I did find this post amusing, though. It seems that ABC is upset about Lost and Desperate Housewives getting snubbed in the nominations and is counter-programming the Emmy ceremony by airing "Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl." The Hollywood Reporter reports that ABC and USA paid $20 million for the right to broadcast the film.

This is what Conan O'Brien, host of the Emmy's this year, had to say:

"Yeah, I'm actually feeling like this is an attack on me. And so I'd like to announce that we're going to counterprogram with the second 'Pirates of the Caribbean' movie. I've gotten Disney's permission to take my poor-quality bootleg and project it on a wall of the Shrine Auditorium sometime about mid-show. We're gonna wind up losing about 15 categories, but I feel like it's worth it."

Haha. If I watch the Emmy's at all this year, it'll be for Conan. :)

Links: The White List - a list of writers, editors, and other publishing professionals that have LiveJournals or LJ RSS feeds - from archer904

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In the news, July 2006

Tue, 25 Jul 2006 01:04:40 -0700

On Israel and Lebanon:

Border Clashes Intensify as Israel Hunts Militants (NY Times, July 25, 2006)
To Flee or to Stay? Family Chooses Too Late and Pays Dearly (NY Times, July 24, 2006)

The photos in this post were taken from entries made by throwingstardna (here and here), azad_slide (here), and cedarseed (here), the last of whom is currently posting from Lebanon. Some of the entries that I have linked to also have further links to more information. I also believe that this post from cedarseed is worth reading.











***Other News (the most recent near the top):

Grounded Teen Killed Family Before Going to Prom (CNN, July 22, 2006)

"A jury convicted a man Friday of killing his father, stepmother and two stepsisters 17 years ago inside their church parsonage home so he could attend some high school prom events."

Marshals: Innocent People Placed On 'Watch List' To Meet Quota (The Denver Channel via kaiz, July 21, 2006)

"You could be on a secret government database or watch list for simply taking a picture on an airplane. Some federal air marshals say they're reporting your actions to meet a quota, even though some top officials deny it."

Geneticist Is Convicted of Sex Abuse (Washington Post, July 20, 2006) - an additional article that provides more information can be found at Pasadena Star News

President Vetoes "Stem Cell Research Enhancement Act of 2005" (Whitehouse.gov, July 19, 2006)

Reaction: Bush's first veto: making nobody happy from mmmmjournal
Related: Note to sperm worshippers from misia.

YouTube Lawsuit Emerges In Grokster's Shadow (IP Law360 Newswire via fandom_lawyers, July 19, 2006)

"A potentially groundbreaking copyright case is taking shape in California, after popular online file-sharing service YouTube Inc. was sued by a news reporter who claims the copyright for his famous footage of the L.A. riots has been infringed."

Dismissing ?Sexist Opinions? About Women?s Place in Science (NY Times, July 18, 2006)

"Perhaps it is inevitable that Ben A. Barres would have strong opinions on the debate over the place of women in science. Dr. Barres has a degree in biology from M.I.T., a medical degree from Dartmouth and a doctorate in neurobiology from Harvard. He is a professor of neurobiology at Stanford. And until his surgery a decade ago, his name was Barbara, and he was a woman."

Woman killed when part of ceiling falls in Boston's Big Dig tunnel (AP, July 11, 2006)

"At least 12 tons of concrete fell from the ceiling of one of Boston's Big Dig tunnels, crushing a woman in a car and again raising concerns about the integrity of the massive highway project that is the central artery through the city." Follow-up articles can be found here.

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Columns

Sun, 23 Jul 2006 22:24:19 -0700

Okay. So the news post that I promised a couple of days ago probably won't be up until tomorrow. I'm afraid that while I was writing it up and searching for links, I became distracted by a few shiny columns and op-eds that were lying around the Web. I love reading columns. They are short and sweet and really allows a writer's style to shine through. I'm convinced some of the best writing comes in column-form. (I'm specifically recalling a series of columns published by my high school newspaper written by then-editor Todd Grabarsky, columns that I would link you to if only our high school newspaper was still available online. Oh well.)

Columns can also be a blast to write, in my opinion, although the (very few) columns that I've written in my life are probably best left to janitors to take out with the trash. (Thank goodness our high school newspaper is no longer available online. Haha.) You have this newspaper space where you can pretend to be insightful, it can be structured however you want, and what you write probably faces very little editing. (It reminds me a lot of a blog, actually.) And the best part? You can make it all about you. Who doesn't like talking about themselves? :)

Anyways, I just wanted to declare my love for Simon Dumenco's AdAge Columns, snarky and sarcastic commentary on the media, a topic that is always interesting to me. I've been reading them for hours. His latest: You Have Got To Be Kidding Me (Please Tell Me You Are). The Yahoo!Group simond also has some of his other writings archived in the messages section.

***Links: Can Semen Cure the Blues? (Salon.com) - link from isiscolo - "A researcher says male ejaculation may act as an antidepressant -- but other scientists aren't swallowing his theory." || General Theatre Etiquette - from theregoesyamum || List of words made up on The Simpsons - link from mmmmjournal

Fandom: Tell me your best HP Book 7 theories - some of these are quite fascinating with very convincing evidence - from accioslash || On summaries, rather than warnings - discussion - from isiscolo || The Slash Fanfiction Writer's and Readers' Responsibility or Lack Thereof - from iibnf || In-character Hate Meme - from ella_w || Harry won't die, says literature expert (HPANA) - link from daily_snitch

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In the blink of an eye

Sat, 22 Jul 2006 00:11:43 -0700

I never truly appreciated the unchanging (read: beautiful, sunny yet not too hot, practically perfect) days of Los Angeles, Calif. until I moved out here to Cambridge, Mass. Even after living through a bitingly cold winter (although I've heard it was really nothing compared to the biting cold of last winter), I still didn't realize exactly what this week has taught me: just how quickly the skies can change.

Monday, July 17, 10:47 p.m.: I remarked in my post that quite a few of my LJ friends had commented on the heat that day. josanpq reported that any activity was "moisture-producing." I'll quote sylvadin's very apt response once again: "Is 'moisture-producing' weatherman-speak for 'so bleeping muggy that simply breathing will make you feel like you're standing in a Turkish sauna'?"

Tuesday, July 18, 12:13 a.m.: azad_slide posted this weathermap. Her subject line? "Entire Country Tilts Republican."



Wednesday, July 19, 2:47 a.m.: I was sitting on my bed, looking out toward the Charles River that I could only see because of the lighted buildings that were reflected in the water, using a file folder as a fan, watching lightning flash across the sky. Living in the tallest building on this side of campus, I had a very unobstructed view. It was quite awesome. (Strangely enough, though, I don't remember hearing any thunder. Maybe my music was on too loud.)

I wouldn't come to this conclusion until later, but I really think the lightning storm broke some of the heat. The rest of that day was practically perfect, with the relatively cool wind from the Charles a welcome relief.

Thursday, 8:12 p.m.: The day wasn't quite as nice as the one before; it was overcast and had even started drizzling by the end of the small art tour I had taken around campus. While still humid, I had high hopes that I would actually be able to finish unpacking when I got back to my room. The task had been abandoned on Sunday when I realized that lugging around suitcases and clothing produced giant buckets of sweat. (Eww.)

Unfortunately, that while the rest of campus seemed much cooler, my dorm room was still moisture-producing and made me slightly delirious. I finally checked to see if the heater was on. It was. (Apparently, whoever had inhabited this room during the winter and then the spring had never bothered to turn it off. Argh!) Funny, I never realized the heaters actually worked -- they didn't seem to during the winter. :P

Needless to say, the unpacking still isn't done. Instead, I have contented myself with living in a space that looks like a small hurricane ripped through it, with barely any room to walk and clothing everywhere.

Friday, July 21, 5:37 p.m.: The television could pick up no signal for most of the episode of Home Improvement that was airing at the time, and reception is still spotty at best. If I was impressed with Tuesday night's lightning show, it was nothing compared to tonight's. It started all of a sudden. (Had I left work even 10 minutes later, I would have been caught in the pouring rain.) I missed the first flash of lightning (but caught all the others -- they were quite blinding) and so was not at all prepared for the first roll of thunder. This time I didn't miss it. It was loud. Very loud. I think I now understand why young children can be so afraid of thunder. During the course of the storm, I know I flinched quite a few times. Ouch!

mclachlan probably described it best:

"Holy lightning strikes, Batman.
Holy thunder booms that set off all the car alarms on my street, Batman."
I'll add that I heard quite a few sirens as well. I hope no one was hurt. (Oh, and mclachlan's subject line? A very apt "O_O".)

I should probably point out that even despite the cooling down of the past few days, it's still hot. Very hot. (And humid. Can't forget that.) It is after all, a record-breaking heat wave, and not just in the United States. The heat wave death tolls are rising in both the U.S. and Europe, as reported by BBC News. Global warming isn't real, my ass.

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It's like the Buffybot!

Fri, 21 Jul 2006 17:28:54 -0700

Gacked from toft_froggy and valerie_z:

Japanese Scientist Creates Android Replica of Self (Wired News)


"Hiroshi Ishiguro poses with his android clone, Geminoid HI-1. Constructed of silicone and steel and powered by pressurized air and small actuators, Ishiguro's life-size doppelgänger is uncannily realistic since it was made from casts taken from the roboticist's body."

I'm just glad that you can tell that the one on the left is the robot. Or is it the one on the right? o_O

P.S. There is quite a lot happening in the world lately, most of it incredibly sad. I haven't been very good of keeping track of it lately, so expect a (much) more substantial post later tonight or early tomorrow with a link round-up of the recent news.

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Shit it's hot

Mon, 17 Jul 2006 22:38:45 -0700

There seems to be two main topics of interest on my friends' page today:

1. The heat. I believe it was sylvadin who described today as "so bleeping muggy that simply breathing will make you feel like you're standing in a Turkish sauna." I must concur. I must also follow in mooncharm's footsteps and declare my love for processed air. It is really quite unfortunate that my dormitory has none. My little 4-inch fan that I picked up at Wal-Mart last week is trying but failing to make up for the lack. I do believe I will be arriving at work early and leaving late tomorrow, if only to take advantage of the blissful air conditioning.

2. President Bush and the word "shit." Apparently, Bush cursed Hezbollah during the G-8 luncheon today, letting the little four-letter slip out. "See the irony is that what they need to do is get Syria to get Hezbollah to stop doing this shit and it's over," Bush told Blair as he chewed on a buttered roll. The microphone also caught a few other rather amusing tidbits. But I have to say that of all the people to say that particular word today, President Bush's little slip-of-the-tongue didn't really surprise me.

At least, it didn't surprise me as much as hearing my 82-year-old British biology professor say "Oh shit!" on the phone as I waited outside his office to get a word with him. I must say, I was greatly amused.

***

Blog-Word! for polykleitos
first
Your word buddies: clothsprogs@livejournal.com momodesu@livejournal.com shrydar@livejournal.com divided_alien@livejournal.com katallen@livejournal.com
@ aboutmylife.netblogger.comblogs.gnome.orgblogspot.comdeadjournal.comgreatestjournal.comlivejournal.commyspace.comspaces.msn.com
Created by Grahame

Links: Hell In A Handbasket - links, information and some commentary on what is happening in Lebanon - from throwingstardna || International Blog Against Racism Week - icons and information - from oyceter || The Internet is a "series of tubes" - brought to you by Senator Ted Stevens; the post includes a link to the Daily Show on Stevens - from almostnever || Best Places to Live 2006 (Money Magazine) - I don't think I've heard of half of these places - link from theunknownuser1 || Jim Rigby: Real Christians Don't Gay Bash (The Huffington Post) - link from nenyaentwhistle || || Discovery returns home, makes Florida landing (BBC News) - link from astronomy

Fandom: Amadeus Q&A Transcript with Randy Harrison (and others) and Toronto Q&A Transcript with Dean Armstrong - for Queer As Folk fans - both from the_hor_house || CW Exec Session - Ausiello reports, among other things, that the new seasons of Gilmore Girls and Veronica Mars will premiere on Sept. 26 and Oct. 3, respectively - from veronica_mars || VMars Season 3 information - mostly about casting; may contain spoilers - from veronica_mars and bigboobedcanuck

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Airport goodbyes

Sun, 16 Jul 2006 22:54:38 -0700

Airports are the perfect places for melodramatic, teary-eyed goodbyes.

Or at least, they are in the movies. In reality, airports are quite congested and stuffy and full of people who are either already late or close to becoming late. (Los Angeles International, especially.) I'm usually quite annoyed and frustrated and sometimes down-right pissed off by the time I make it through security at LAX, which leaves no room for tears or long, drawn-out farewells.

But last night was a little bit different.

For once, everything went perfectly smoothly. No problems with the e-ticket because of a misplaced driver's license or with the weight of my luggage at the bag check or with a airport worker who just wouldn't see that if you squished the large-ish bag a certain way it would in fact be small enough as a carry-on. (:-P) Nothing. I wasn't annoyed, frustrated, or pissed off at all. And that left me susceptible to any and all other emotions.

When my seven-year-old sister started crying as she invariably does every time I go off to college, I couldn't help myself. Standing with my parents, in an adorable dress accessorized with the beaded necklace and bracelet that we had made together that day, watching me through the glass as I worked my way through security, she just looked so heartbroken. Rubbing her eyes as the tears fell, crying her little heart out, reaching her hand out toward the glass that separated us. (Oh, the drama.) She was even restrained by a security guard when trying to run past the metal detectors in the perfect movie moment. Who could resist? So I started crying too, even as I laughed at myself for doing it.

We ended up talking to each other on the phone as I waited for my flight to board and she and my mom waited for our dad to bring the car around to the front of the terminal. And we continued to talk until she fell asleep in the car and I continued to wait for my flight to board as it was delayed for the second time that night. (Oh annoyance, there you are!)

My call home this morning when I landed confirmed that my little foray into the melodramatic was indeed over, as my sister sounded perfectly ducky on the phone, which is also par for the course. The changing emotions of a seven-year-old are really quite the thing to behold.

As for me, I'm back at Eastern Standard Time. And back to work.

Links: Wrong Side of the Tracks - it's Mac/PC slash OMG, you know you wanna read it ;) - from ingrid_m || A Beginner's Guide to Faking Your Death on the Internet (YouTube) - link from maeglinyedi among others || Convicted Thief Robs Judge During Trial (Reuters) - *snicker* - link from copperbadge || Highly Politically Incorrect 5-minute FIFA World Cup 2006 - from deadspeaker || Breakfast foods discussion - I'm not sure why this is so interesting, but it really is - from misia || 'Geek version of the Art Of War' - also known as The 48 Laws of Power, by Robert Green and Joost Elffers - from azad_slide || Police: 911 isn't a dating service (CNN) - oh my - link from ptocheia

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Pirates (+ Runway)

Fri, 14 Jul 2006 00:01:21 -0700

I saw Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest yesterday with redtigerlily_3 and spent part of today reading through various commentary on the movie from LJ friends and friends of friends. (Quite a perfect sequel, in my opinion.) Much of the commentary comes from people who have seen the movie more than once and thus contain a great many insights and details that I missed. (That's part of the reason I love fandom.) I must say, Dead Man's Chest is a lot more philosophical and thematic than I had expected. Good stuff.

I decided to post a few of the links that I thought were especially worth reading (apologies to those who are sick of hearing about it), mostly because of the missed insights and details mentioned above. There are spoilers, obviously.

'I have every faith in your reconciliatory navigational skills' - from angua9
An illustrated long-ass commentary on the themes of PotC: DMC - from shadowcaptain
'Jack Sparrow is a dying breed...' - from fernwithy
Fifteen men on a dead man's chest - from xylodemon
Memorable Quotes - from monkeyscorpion
Cast Interviews and Pirates 3 spoilers (Film Focus) - It just tickles me that there are so many spoilers for the next movie already. Although, personally, I can never have enough spoilers. :)

musesfool has saved quite a few more links to interesting posts here. (the_dala, especially, has some great posts analyzing the characters. In my opinion, anyway.)

Otherwise in entertainment, I have been spending the last two days or so watching a lot of E! and Bravo. I don't get either of those two cable channels at school, which is a real shame because Project Runway is very close to becoming a new obsession. Of the reality television shows that I actually like (very few and far between), I have to say that this one is my favorite.

Links:

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Column One

Tue, 11 Jul 2006 13:58:11 -0700

Column One of today's Los Angeles Times is incredibly moving and incredibly sad. I think I might have cried when I got to the end.

Link from changwufei801:

First to Fall, First Forgotten (LA Times)

"He can't drive. He can't tie his shoes. He can't count past 11 or remember your name. He lives next to the Brighton Beach boardwalk and can smell the salty summer air, but he must strain to see the ocean. His left eye is gone; sight in the other is half what it was. He gets by on a wheelchair and a walker. A stroke during his recovery left his right side all but useless, his hand permanently twisted.

Louis Pepe is a former corrections officer at the Manhattan federal jail. He is 48 years old and lives with his aging mother. His sister is his legal guardian.

Almost a year before the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, Pepe became the first victim of Al Qaeda terrorists in America while he was on duty at the jail. A top lieutenant to Osama bin Laden stabbed him in the eye, but his name has barely registered outside New York. Unlike the Sept. 11 victims and families, Pepe has struggled to recover in almost complete anonymity."

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Scattered thoughts

Tue, 11 Jul 2006 01:00:39 -0700

1. My seven-year-old sister likes to watch Fear Factor. o_O I find that ironic, because she's still afraid to dunk her head underwater. To be fair, though, she only started learning how to swim last week.

2. Everyone seems to be talking about Zinedine Zidane and the headbutt incident at yesterday's World Cup final, wanting to know what was said to him to provoke that kind of response (BBC News). Expert lip readers (Times Online) are trying to piece something together from video footage (YouTube). Zidane is expected to break his silence later in the week.

I'm always amazed (read: ) at how creative people on the Internet can be when it comes to these types of things. So, here we have Football vs. Futbol (via darthbeckman), Zidane scoring a 6-point hit (via the_autumn_knew), and a site where you can make Zidane do the headbutt (via yanks02). Alas, that last site has exceeded its bandwidth. According to mmmmjournal, the top 11 sites at YTMND are all Zidane headbutt-related, like this one here: Zidane Owned.

Also, Zidane won the Golden Ball award for the World Cup's best player (BBC News), which I think is cool.

3. I visited my middle school today and will again tomorrow to talk with one of the last teachers that I know who still teaches there, but that'll probably be it for a long time. My family has moved a lot, so there are still a handful of schools that I'll probably never go back to. But after dropping by my elementary school and high school last week, I'm feeling decidedly less interested in walking through old halls. Schools can change so quickly. Of course it's nice to hear that old teachers have moved on to bigger things, but without the people, the buildings just don't make up the schools that I remember.

News: Football Players Accused of Raping an 11-year-old (ABC News) || Chechen Leader Behind School Slaughter is Killed (LA Times)

Links: Dog Wins A Game Of Simon Says (YourDailyMedia, video) - link from iibnf || Battlestar Galactica Season 3 Spoilers - from scribbulus_ink || Favorite Stupid Jokes - from misia || Entertainment Weekly predicts HP 7 deaths - link from annecatherine - I love that EW thinks Snape will die a martyr. Hehe. || Best Testicular Cancer Commerical Ever - link from throwingstardna || Slasher's Guide to Rome - this thing is very cool - from emmagrant01

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Television Meme (+ 'Simpler Spelling')

Sat, 08 Jul 2006 01:36:25 -0700

Since the instructions tell us to add up to three additional shows, I'm sure there are dozens of different versions of this meme floating around. In addition to adding my three shows, I decided to take the show lists that outeeyore, fiercediva, and spazatron posted and put them together. It got very long.

Instructions: Bold all of the following TV shows you've seen three or more episodes of in your lifetime. Bold and italicize a show if you've seen every episode. Add up to three additional shows (please keep the list in alpha order).

24
7th Heaven
Adam-12
Adventures of the Gummi Bears
Aeon Flux
ALF
Alien Nation
Alfred Hitchcock Presents
Alias
All Creatures Great and Small
All in the Family
American Idol/Pop Idol/Canadian Idol/Australian Idol/etc.
American Gothic
America's Next Top Model/Germany's Next Top Model
Andromeda
Angel
Are You Afraid of the Dark?
Are You Being Served?
Arrested Development
Babylon 5
Babylon 5: Crusade
Battlestar Galactica (the old one)
Battlestar Galactica (the new one)
Baywatch
Beavis & Butthead
Beverly Hills 90210
Big Love
Birds of Prey
Blackadder
Blossom
Bonanza
Bones
Bosom Buddies
Boston Legal
Boy Meets World
Buffy the Vampire Slayer
Bug Juice
Carnivale
Chappelle's Show
Charlie's Angels
Charmed
Chip 'n Dale Rescue Rangers
Cheers
Chicago Hope
Columbo
Commander in Chief
Coupling - UK
Cowboy Bebop
Crossing Jordan
CSI
CSI: Miami
CSI: NY
Curb Your Enthusiasm
Dancing with the Stars
Danny Phantom
Daria
Dark Angel
Dark Skies
Davinci's Inquest
Dawson's Creek
Dead Like Me
Deadliest Catch
Deadwood
Degrassi High
Degrassi: The Next Generation
Designing Women
Desperate Housewives
Dharma & Greg
Different Strokes
Dinosaurs
Doctor Who
Dougie Howser, M.D.
Dragon Ball Z
Dragnet
Drake & Josh
Duck Tales
Due South
Earth 2
Emergency!
Entourage
ER
Everwood
Everybody Loves Raymond
Extreme Makeover: Home Edition
Facts of Life
Family Guy
Family Ties
Farscape
Father Ted
Fawlty Towers
Felicity
Firefly
Frasier
Freaks and Geeks
Friends
Futurama
Gargoyles
Get Smart
Ghost Hunters
Gilligan's Island
Gilmore Girls
Gomer Pyle, U.S.M.C.
Green Acres
Green Wing
Grey's Anatomy
Growing Pains
Gundam Wing
Gunsmoke
Hannah Montana
Happy Days
Hercules the Legendary Journeys
Here Come the Brides
Hex
Highlander
Hogan's Heroes
Home Improvement
Homicide: Life on the Street
House
I Dream of Jeannie
I Love Lucy
I Spy
Inuyasha
Invader Zim
Invasion
Iron Chef (Japan)
Iron Chef (US)
It Takes A Thief
Hell's Kitchen
JAG
Jackass
Jeopardy
Joey
John Doe
Keen Eddie
Kingdom Hospital
Kitchen Confidential
Kolchak: The Night Stalker (original)
Kolchak: The Night Stalker (reincarnation)
La Femme Nikita
LA Law
Late Night with Conan O'Brien
Law and Order
Law and Order: SVU
Law and Order: Criminal Intent
Laverne and Shirley
Life On Mars
Little House on the Prairie
Lizzie McGuire
Lois and Clark: The New Adventures of Superman
Lost
Lost in Space
Love, American Style
M*A*S*H
MacGyver
Malcolm in the Middle
Married... With Children
Melrose Place
Miami Vice
Mission: Impossible
Mister Roger's Neighborhood
Mod Squad
Monk
Moonlighting
Mork & Mindy
Muppets Tonight
Murder She Wrote
Murphy Brown
My Life as a Dog
My Three Sons
My Two Dads
NCIS
Ned Bigby's Declassifed School Survival Guide
Nip/Tuck
Numb3rs
One Tree Hill
Oz
Penn & Teller's Bullshit
Perry Mason
Pokemon
Popular
Power Rangers
Prey
Prison Break
Profiler
Project Runway
Quantum Leap
Queer As Folk (US)
Queer as Folk (British)
Queer Eye for the Straight Guy
Quincy ME
Reba
Red Dwarf
ReGenesis
Relic Hunter
Remington Steele
Rescue Me
Road Rules
Rome
Roseanne
Roswell
Sailor Moon
Sapphire and Steel
Saved by the Bell
Scrap Heap Challenge
Scooby-Doo, Where Are You?
Scrubs
Seaquest DSV
Seinfeld
Sesame Street
Sex and the City
Six Feet Under
Slings and Arrows
Smallville
So Weird
South Park
Space: Above & Beyond
Spaced
Spongebob Squarepants
Spooks/MI-5
Sports Night
Square Pegs
Star Trek
Star Trek: The Next Generation
Star Trek: Deep Space Nine
Star Trek: Voyager
Star Trek: Enterprise
Stargate Atlantis
Stargate SG-1
Starsky & Hutch
Strange Luck
Strictly Come Dancing/Dancing with the Stars etc
Sugar Rush
Superman
Supernatural
Surface
Survivor
Taxi
Teen Titans
That 70's Show
That's So Raven
The 4400
The Addams Family
The Andy Griffith Show
The A-Team
The Avengers
The Beverly Hillbillies
The Bob Newhard Show (1970s)
The Bold & the Beautiful
The Brady Bunch
The Champions
The Colbert Report
The Cosby Show
The Daily Show
The Dead Zone
The Dick Van Dyke Show (1960s one, not 1970s)
The Flintstones
The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air
The Golden Girls
The Goodies
The Honeymooners
The Invisible Man (2000s)
The Jeffersons
The Jetsons
The L Word
The Love Boat
The Magnificent Seven
The Man from Atlantis
The Man from U.N.C.L.E.
The Mary Tyler Moore Show
The Mighty Boosh
The Monkees
The Munsters
The Muppet Show
The Mythbusters
The O.C.
The Office (UK)
The Office (US)
The Outer Limits
The Partridge Family
The Phoenix
The Powerpuff Girls
The Practice
The Pretender
The Prisoner
The Professionals
The Real World
The Rose of Versailles
The Saint
The Sentinel
The Shield
The Simpsons
The Six Million Dollar Man
The Sopranos
The Suite Life of Zack and Cody
The Sweeney
The Tonight Show with Jay Leno
The Twilight Zone (original)
The Twilight Zone (reincarnation)
The Unit
The Waltons
The West Wing
The Wire
The Wonder Years
The X-Files
The Young Ones
Third Watch
Three's Company
Threshold
Top Gear
Touching Evil (UK)
Twin Peaks
Twitch City
Undeclared
Veronica Mars
Whose Line is it Anyway? (US)
Whose Line is it Anyway? (UK)
Wild Wild West
Will and Grace
Wings
Wire in the Blood
Without a Trace
WKRP in Cincinnati
Wonderfalls
Xena: Warrior Princess
X-Men: The Animated Series
X-Men: Evolution
You Can't Do That On Television

Speaking of television, here is a full list of this year's Emmy nominations. 24 came out on top, but those who were rooting for Veronica Mars will have to settle for being disappointed. The TV IV also announced the IVy Award nominees, which I personally like a little bit more.

Link: Push for simpler spelling persists (Yahoo News) - link from briarwolf - just reading this article made my head hurt. (The scary part, though, is that I didn't have any trouble actually reading it, and the historical parts of it were pretty interesting. It was just the idea of simplifying spelling that made my head hurt.) Please tell me that isn't ever happening. Or should I say, "Pleez"?

I keep thinking about how the Chinese language was simplified after the Communists took over to make it easier for people to learn and raise literacy rates in China. I'm trying not to draw too many parallels, though.

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A fresh angle

Thu, 06 Jul 2006 00:29:56 -0700

In journalism, it is always important to find a new angle with which to report the same news story, a fresh take on the news that every other media publication is also writing about. That doesn't mean that you can't find some of these other angles to be amusing and somewhat ridiculous. Here's an example:

Ken Lay's death prompts confusion on Wikipedia (Reuters)

Seriously. Let's make this about Wikipedia.

I have to admit, though, that the article was pretty interesting. But more than anything else, it tells me that some journalist somewhere was checking the Wikipedia entry on Kenneth Lay since after the story broke, maybe checking it every minute. I don't really know what to think of that.

Here are a few other articles on the same story:
Enron founder Ken Lay dies of a massive heart attack (CNN)
Lay's Conviction: Gone With Him (Time)
Enron money eludes victims: Lay's death slows wheels of justice (Boston Herald Column)

Links: Put away the flags (Pittsburgh Tribute Column, by Howard Zinn) - link from azad_slide, here - definitely worth reading and thinking about || The long road from Gaza (In The Fray Magazine) - link from ziasudra || Ken Jennings on the Unauthorized Seinfeld Trivia Book case - link from fandom_lawyers, discussion here.

ETA 10:23 p.m.: Lady Liberty Trades In Some Trappings (NY Times) - link from jwz - "As the congregation of the World Overcomers Outreach Ministries Church looked on, a brown shroud much like a burqa was pulled away to reveal a giant statue of the Lady, but with the Ten Commandments under one arm and "Jehovah" inscribed on her crown." I'm speechless except to echo what one of the commenters said, that she really does look like she's warding off vampires! o_O

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A day of friends and family; how very schmoopy :)

Wed, 05 Jul 2006 02:37:43 -0700

I saw The Devil Wears Prada today with outeeyore, redtigerlily_3, and starrym00nlight. I really enjoyed it. Even though I've heard that the movie has quite a few differences from the book, which I haven't yet read, this adaptation certainly works very well.

There was one thing, though, that kept randomly cracking me up during the movie. I couldn't help but think, Yes, the devil wears Prada. But, then again, so does the Pope. ;)

The evening was spent at a family barbecue at my uncle's house, an event that might actually become a tradition. We don't have very many of those. (Well, maybe not yet a tradition, but we did do it last year too.) I find that mine is a rather strange age to be at these events. I'm not quite young enough to play Pokemon Monopoly with the seven- to 14-year-old kids, but I'm also not quite ready to gossip with the parental figures either. Instead, I spent my time with the youngest of all of them, three-year-old Alex and four-year-old Jason. They think I'm funny, apparently. (All the while, I was trying to keep my sister from screaming her head off as she acted the part of the damsel in distress with a dragon after her. She seems to have a flare for the dramatic. She's also very loud.)

During the fireworks, while I was snapping picture after picture of the brightly colored flares, I answered question after question posed by 10-year-old Ariana, who wanted to know how fireworks changed colors in the sky, if the falling remnants would cause a tree to catch of fire, if the fireworks would hit an incoming plane among many other things. Although I couldn't answer most of her questions, I was able to say something about that last one.

You see, last week when I was flying home, I had spent most of the flight staring listlessly out of the window. The sky was very clear that night. At one point, I was able to see fireworks from the plane. It was completely unexpected but totally awesome, something that could only be the product of some pretty perfect timing. Anyways, they were tiny. Definitely no chance of getting hit. :)

Related to July 4th: The International Dialects of English Archive - link from misia - here is a way to check out dialect and accent samples from across the U.S. || Letters from Benjamin Franklin - link from copperbadge || July 4th Trivia - from josanpq - includes a wonderful little story about Lewis Carroll. || Happy Independence Day from Sam and Dean Winchester - from ltlredhairdgirl - :) || The HasselFest - in honor of Independence Day - from perigee

Other links: Cats vs. Dogs Poll - dogs are trailing cats by quite a bit as of now - from emmagrant01 || Recommend fics for hpficmasterlist - from dreaminoflorien || Japanese man eats record 53.75 hot dogs (Reuters) - link from ziasudra

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The 'King'

Tue, 04 Jul 2006 02:32:22 -0700

Gacked from url_girl's post, here:

I just thought that I should do my part in spreading the evil scariness that is Burger King/Quaker Oats slash. *shudders* Seriously, though, I wonder how successful the Burger King advertising campaign was considering that I don't know anyone who doesn't find the silent, hovering "King" to be nightmarish material.



News: The real, ugly face of America - from azad_slide - "A former U.S. soldier has been arrested and charged with killing four Iraqi civilians after raping one of them." This is just fucked up on so many levels. :( || NEA to challenge 'No Child Left Behind' (Yahoo News) - link from ziasudra || 'Bionic' limb breakthrough made (BBC News) - link from jwz

Fandom: A brief history of fandom wankage - from junediamanti || 'Gilmore', 'Mars' stars in the spotlight - this time it's the two best friends at a local CW upfront, Agena and Daggs - from veronica_mars

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The good ol' days

Sun, 02 Jul 2006 02:33:47 -0700

My memory lane is a dusty dirt road lined with palm trees that sits under a merciless sun. Today, I spent about six hours on the road with my dad from Los Angeles to Riverside County and back, with the fan in our pick-up truck on high, reminding me that I did indeed live in a desert for the majority of my childhood.

Most everything was where I left it the last time I rode through town, near the end of 2004, with the exception of a few inevitable marks of progress: the brand new, absolutely ginormous Wal-Mart that now sits near my grandparents house in still-rural Banning, Calif.; the extra portable, "temporary" classrooms that take up what used to be our playground at my elementary school, as well as a new "California Distinguished School" sign which was cool to see; computers in classrooms that didn't used to have them; and the extension of the University Village mall in Riverside, which now includes at least two Starbucks shops, but used to only be a small movie theatre that would show old movies for $1.

I used to live much closer to my grandparents. Whenever I visited, I would mark my height on a specific door. It was the only really permanent record I ever had. My family moves quite a bit -- I move even more -- and my grandparents house was the only constant for a while. My little sister has only visited a few times -- Los Angeles is so much farther to Banning than Riverside -- but she also has a few markings of her own.

Since my family is moving yet again at the end of September, I decided to copy down the heights and dates attached from both my grandparents' house and our current apartment and give the information an only slightly more permanent, but definitely a much more accessible, home on the Internet.


Me:

Markings with no date attached (too young to write a date, I guess) - 4'6", 4'8", 4'10", 4'10.25", 4'10.75", 4'10.875"

October 8, 1998 (almost age 12) - 4'11"

January 30, 1999 (age 12) - 4'11.8"

February 14, 1999 (age 12) - 5'0.5" (I'm somewhat skeptical about having grown half an inch in about two weeks; I can only assume that I overestimated because of an intense desire to prove that I had actually gotten taller even if I hadn't.)

March 25, 1999 (age 12) - 5'1.5" (Again, I'm skeptical about having grown this much. I think the times when I visited less often, mostly after I moved to Los Angeles, probably yield more accurate results.)

April 1, 2000 (age 13) - 5'3.75"

January 14, 2001 (age 14) - 5'5.25" (For some reason, I decided to record my weight during the visit as well. 104 lbs.)

August 23, 2001 (age 14) - 5'6.4" (Because I did it during the last visit, I'll record my weight again! 110 lbs.)

December 24, 2004 (age 17) - 5'7" (High school was a very busy time for me, so I hardly visited at all. I guess I was either too cool to write down my weight or the bathroom scale was misplaced.)

July 1, 2006 (age 18) - same as above. (I'm probably not growing anymore, even though my parents insisted that I looked taller when they picked me up from the airport last week. I'll attribute that to my having lost some weight, which would make me look thinner and thus taller. Still no bathroom scale.)


Lil' Sis:

December 12, 2002 (age 3, apartment) - 3'5"

May 4, 2003 (age 4, apartment) - 3'5.5"

May 23, 2003 (age 4, grandparents') - 3'6" (I attribute these difference in heights to the error introduced by using two slightly different scales, one in the current apartment and one in the grandparents' house.)

September 12, 2003 (age 4, grandparents') - 3'7.25"

December 24, 2004 (age 5, grandparents') - 3'11.5"

June 17, 2005 (age 6, apartment) - 4'

April 30, 2006 (age 7, apartment) - 4'1.5"

July 1, 2006 (age 7, apartment) - same as above. (Since I was standing right there, I guess my sister couldn't overestimate her height the way that I used to.)


The door in the apartment also had quite a few markings below the 1'6" mark, which I was confused about. We didn't start measuring how tall my sister was until she was old enough to stand on her own, and I'm pretty sure she was taller than that by then. My confusion was easily cleared up, though, after a quick conversation with her. She had decided to measure the heights of all of her stuffed animals as well.

It was all very surreal. As I walked through still very familiar halls, I began to remember things that I didn't realize I had forgotten. I spent most of the car ride home frantically jotting down everything that I had recalled, not wanting to forget them again. I also realized that I now organize my memories differently than I used to. It was always "before moving to LA" and "after moving to LA," and I thought it was still that way. But, today, I was confusing Riverside and Los Angeles street names and even the teachers from my elementary and middle schools, which couldn't have been more different. It seems that I now organize my memories in "before MIT" and "after MIT" files.

And no roadtrip with my father could possibly be complete without a trip to Fry's Electronics. (I learned to drive by going back and forth between my home and the nearest Fry's.) As my dad purchased a few things for himself and an external hard drive for me, I watched what was playing on the advertised plasma screen television. I watched it so long, in fact, that my dad got rather impatient. He tried calling me several times, but it seems that there's no cell phone reception inside the store. Oops.

The moral of that second story was just that Animusic is very cool. :)

***
Links: Video series of a live autopsy - link from copperbadge - definitely worth watching if you're interested in biology or anatomy or medicine || The Slash Closet - discussion; very, very interesting - from fairestcat || Hamburger baby - from issyadore - the post is about more than just this absolutely adorable picture, but the baby is just so cute - :) || Fanfiction Fiction - short comic about apostrophe!love - from cranky_editors

P.S. Happy Canada Day! soleta_nf is hosting the Canadian Friending Meme, "for Canucks and those who love them." :) And siukong posted a few Canada-related news topics, which were all very interesting. In fact, I was just discussing the government's apology regarding the Chinese head tax with my father while on the road today.

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Lightbulbs in strange places

Fri, 30 Jun 2006 12:12:26 -0700

Gacked from copperbadge, here:

Operation removes lightbulb from anus (Reuters)



"Fateh Mohammad, a prison inmate in Pakistan, says he woke up last weekend with a glass lightbulb in his anus. Wednesday night, doctors brought Mohammad's misery to an end after a one-and-a-half hour operation to remove the object. Mohammad, who is serving a four-year sentence for making liquor, prohibited for Muslims, said he was shocked when he was first told the cause of his discomfort. He swears he didn't know the bulb was there."

Dude. How do you not know? o_O

Link: Coffee Found to Reduce Risk of Diabetes (ABC News) - link from aubrem

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Untitled

Wed, 28 Jun 2006 19:44:58 -0700

Starting since Monday, I've been helping my little sister write and illustrate a book featuring three of her stuffed animals, Princess Jasmine from Aladdin, and Sailor Moon among other characters. I tried to encourage more original characters, but she wouldn't hear of it. Heh. I suppose seven years old isn't too early to start writing fanfiction.

As for the LiveJournal Dungeon Adventure, I played it quite a few times. For something with so few graphics and descriptions that don't really make much sense, it's still so very hard to stop playing.

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Back into the world of Harry Potter

Mon, 26 Jun 2006 23:21:11 -0700

I found the latest JK Rowling interview to be immensely entertaining. The spoiler-y Book 7 information which really wasn't all that spoiler-y was interesting of course, but I also really liked hearing about some of her insights into her characters and the Wizarding World.

As far as I know, there isn't a transcript online that I can point you to, but The Leaky Cauldron has video files of the interview that can be downloaded, and the AP and Reuters articles both have quotes. I have to say, though, that I find both headlines very misleading. I would recommend watching the interview yourself if you can. I don't think I've ever seen video footage of JKR speaking before (I've only ever read transcripts of her interviews), and I have to say that really like her. I also really the hosts of "The Richard and Judy Show." They're very personable and asked some really great questions.

Interestingly, while it seems to be scaring a lot of people, the information JKR revealed about the next book is actually very exciting to me. Sorry. ;) When it comes to epic battles between good and evil, I happen to love large body counts, which is what I think is implied.

Links: Refresher Course: Dialogue Punctuation and Speaker Attribution - totally worth a look-see even if you think you know the rules - from furiosity || The Interview JKR Never Gave: Epic Romance and Teenage Romance - meta and discussion - from amanuensis1

P.S. I seem to have Harry Potter on the brain today, as you can probably see from the post. One of the first things I did when I back to Los Angeles this weekend was to make a trip to the library to check out the fifth and sixth book so that I could re-read them yet again. It's good to be home. :D

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Aaron Spelling dies at 83

Fri, 23 Jun 2006 23:35:14 -0700

News gacked from missirish9's journal:

Prolific television producer Aaron Spelling dies at 83 (AP)

"Aaron Spelling, a onetime movie bit player who turned to television production to create a massive number of hit series from the vintage "Charlie's Angels," "Dynasty," "Love Boat" and "Fantasy Island" to "Beverly Hills 90210" and "Melrose Place," died Friday, his publicist said. He was 83. Spelling died at his mansion near Beverly Hills after suffering a stroke on June 18, according to publicist Kevin Sasaki." (Emphasis mine.)

I'm going to assume this article in the Washington Times made a mistake when it said that he died of cancer...

Links: A blog dedicated to cats that look like Hitler - link from fisherama || URLs of the Day - from kaiz || Cowboy!Jared - what is with all the cowboys these days? Not that I'm complaining or anything ;) - from ltlredhairdgirl || Coulter or Hitler? The Quiz - from throwingstardna || Idol news about Katherine McPhee - apparently, she used to be bulimic - from aaronparsley

ETA 12:47 a.m.: It appears that I was mistaken earlier this week when I thought that the Ms. Scribe wank was over, because it just goes on and on and on and on. It's really too bad that there isn't free Internet access during my flight tomorrow, because that would be the perfect time to read this stuff.

ETA 12:51 a.m.: Can I interest any of you in the Interests Meme? ;)

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Interests Meme

Thu, 22 Jun 2006 07:06:46 -0700

I gave this meme a shot and "waxed rhapsodic" on slytherincess's journal about the first amendment:

Reply to this entry with your name and post these instructions in your own journal. I will go poke around your list of interests on your profile and ask you one question about one of them. You wax rhapsodic on the subject of your interest for the edification of all and we'll learn something keen about you.

Don't feel obligated about posting these instructions in your journal if you don't want to, but do reply! And feel free to ask me about any of my interests if you'd like. I think there's a lot of potential with this meme for us to learn something new about each other. :)

Link: What's Your Favorite Novel? - link from kaiz's post here - "A recent survey of men's and women's favorite books points to a more fundamental question ? and a fascinating answer."

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A post for the first day of summer

Wed, 21 Jun 2006 21:34:57 -0700

The sky is all kinds of cool. Gacked from useless_facts:

Photo in the News: Rare "Rainbow" Spotted Over Idaho (National Geographic)



"It looks like a rainbow that's been set on fire, but this phenomenon is as cold as ice. Known in the weather world as a circumhorizontal arc, this rare sight was caught on film on June 3 as it hung over northern Idaho near the Washington State border.

The arc isn't a rainbow in the traditional sense ? it is caused by light passing through wispy, high-altitude cirrus clouds. The sight occurs only when the sun is very high in the sky (more than 58° above the horizon). What's more, the hexagonal ice crystals that make up cirrus clouds must be shaped like thick plates with their faces parallel to the ground. When light enters through a vertical side face of such an ice crystal and leaves from the bottom face, it refracts, or bends, in the same way that light passes through a prism. If a cirrus's crystals are aligned just right, the whole cloud lights up in a spectrum of colors.

This particular arc spanned several hundred square miles of sky and lasted for about an hour, according to the London Daily Mail."

Other thoughts:

1. I'm in quite a contemplative mood today. I'm feeling slow, lethargic, very calm. Well, what do you know, I guess it's the summer. :)

2. I saw a broken bird lying on the cement today. I wasn't sad, really, even though it was a sad sight. It just really struck me as a powerful image, something that seemed so wrong and out of place, and not even because the bird was dead but because of the way it was just lying there, seemingly abandoned, person after person walking past it, on something hard and unyielding like concrete. I took a picture. It reminded strongly me of the man I saw a few days ago, propped up on the side of a convenient store, seemingly asleep, person after person walking past him as well.

3. I should re-learn the grammar rules for "lay" and "lie," because I have no idea if I used the correct words in the above comment.

4. I spent over an hour today doing a free-write in my spare time at work. It's been a while since I've done that, actually jotted down my thoughts on paper. It felt good, cathartic. I'll have to do it more often.

Links: CON.TXT Spelling Bee Word List - I'm impressed; these are tricky words - from ellen_fremedon || Bill Gates Announces Retire Plans (PC World) - he's planning to leave his day job in 2008 || New Randy Harrison pictures - from suzvoy || A meme to spread the love - from legomymalfoy

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La TeX and Bad Penny

Tue, 20 Jun 2006 18:00:15 -0700

During MIT's graduation ceremony a little over a week ago, The Tech, the school newspaper that I write for was hacked. And quite brilliantly, I might add. The paper looks eerily identical to the real student paper, except that the articles are outrageously satirical and the name of the paper is La TeX (as in "latex").

Some of the articles include (and I'll just add in another reminder that this is satire):

Wind Tunnel Blows Away Asian Girl
Summers: Women Are So Dumb, I Will Only Have Sex With Men
Caltech Steals Transparent Horizons
Admissions to Use Facebook Profiles in Lieu of Applications

I was just waiting for someone to put the issue online before sharing it: here. Happy reading. :)

***The Ms. Scribe Story: the Unauthorized Fandom Biography, by charlottelennox

I realize most of the Harry Potter fandom and a great many others have already read this (or at least looked at it and decided they didn't want to read it) and many are already sick of hearing about it, but I also know that quite a few people who have me friended don't follow fandom and haven't seen or read it. I really think many of you may be interested. (darthbeckman, I don't know why, but I want to see your reaction. XD) It's worth taking a look at, if nothing else. Thus, the pimpage.

It's Harry Potter, it's wank, it's fandom, it's "ancient history," it's absolute insanity. Riveting stuff. I've read all 10 chapters, most of the comments and most of the follow-up posts that were made, and it has really given me a lot to think about. I won't bother posting my reactions or my thoughts publicly (they're all happily tucked away in a private post, actually), because there's really nothing that I can add to the thousands of comments and multitudes of posts that have already been made. (I'm quite amazed, frankly, by the sheer number of people who have been following the entire thing.) All my opinions are already out there somewhere. ^_^

I will say that since I'm in a such fandom-y mood (and Merlin knows I haven't been reading enough about fandom lately :P) that I think I'll tackle mina_de_malfois now. I meant to get to it sooner but hadn't had a chance. Happy reading for me, too. :)

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Art is really subjective, isn't it? (+ some Father's Day fun)

Mon, 19 Jun 2006 01:05:58 -0700

Gacked from copperbadge:

Art gallery loses its head, displays plinth (Reuters)

"One of Britain's most prestigious art galleries put a block of slate on display, topped by a small piece of wood, in the mistaken belief it was a work of art. The Royal Academy included the chunk of stone and the small bone-shaped wooden stick in its summer exhibition in London. But the slate was actually a plinth -- a slab on which a pedestal is placed -- and the stick was designed to prop up a sculpture. The sculpture itself -- of a human head -- was nowhere to be seen.

The academy explained the error by saying the plinth and the head were sent to the exhibitors separately. 'Given their separate submission, the two parts were judged independently,' it said in a statement. 'The head was rejected. The base was thought to have merit and accepted.'"

Gee, I wonder what the artist's reaction was?

Links: Ohio proposed ban on abortions - link from misia - "...even in cases of rape, incest, or where the life of the woman is at stake..." At least there's almost no chance it'll pass. || DNA test to clear up Confucius confusion (Reuters) - "How the scientists had obtained a sample of Confucius' DNA was not explained." My mind goes to weird places, Rambaldi- and Alias-shaped places. Haha. || Grotesque Scandal Rocks the Human Tissue Industry (Newsday) - link from jwz - it's a bit scary how similar this is to one episode of Bones || Enter the Wasteland and related links - our poor oceans - from throwingstardna || Journalistic integrity? (video) - Fox News anchor loses objectivity when interviewing a crazy homophobe - link from emmagrant01 || Avenue Q in London (Playbill.com) || IBM and the Holocaust - very interesting stuff - from useless_facts

Fandom: Epic is the Watchword - Can you feel the LoVe tonight? (I'm lame, I know. ^_^) - link from bigboobedcanuck || Interview with Kyle Gallner (Popgurls.com) - some interesting insights into the season finale of Veronica Mars || Slag Off Your OTP Day - from theregoesyamum|| Fandom is a Meritocracy - from ranalore - definitely interesting to read || Gained and lost from being in fandom - from gmth || QAF Star Randy Harrison embraces Amadeus Role - link from fiercediva

***This is one of those perfectly embarrassing stories that I know I'll love to tell for a laugh.

Today was quite an exhausting day, not because of anything that I actually did but because of the blistering heat. I spent most of the afternoon in Boston Common, volunteering for a Father's Day event called "Dad's Make A Difference." There were the usual arts and crafts, the scary-ass clown making balloon animals, free food, a moon-bounce... Very typical activities for an event that is really all about the children.

I signed up for the event via an online volunteer search site, not noticing the group that I was volunteering as a part of: Singles Volunteer Boston. The group has a demographic of around age 25 to 35, singles who like to volunteer who are perhaps looking for that special someone. I didn't realize my mistake until about an hour into the event. Something about the kinds of questions that kept getting asked, about where people were from, where they lived, what they did for a living, tipped me off. I spent the rest of the afternoon perfectly happy quietly folding chairs, desperately hoping to be ignored.

No matter. I'm still glad I was there to help. And the live music and free food was good. :)

Happy Father's Day!

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Fairy tales

Sat, 17 Jun 2006 22:38:32 -0700

I love studying fairy tales.

I haven't done very much of it yet, but I plan to change that soon.

I would say that my fascination with fairy tales started in the sixth or seventh when I was taking my art class at Webster Middle School. I can't remember my art teacher's name anymore, but he was Asian, very typically Asian. Thin, tall, kinda hot, kinda mean, possibly gay, not that this discussion is typically Asian, but it does describe him quite well. He could also tell a mean horror story.

I believe in was this art teacher who first read to me the Grimm's version of the Cinderella fairy tale, and I've remembered it until this day. It resonated with me greatly and combined with the recent psychological material about fairy tale archetypes that was presented to me in class, fairy tales are definitely one of my favorite areas to study.

I started by reading The Annotated Brothers Grimm, edited with a preface and notes by Maria Tater and with an introduction by A.S. Byatt. Here is the introduction, typed up, which I greatly enjoyed reading and would like to read again. There is quite a bit woven in to think about, the historical context, psychological, how the stories relate to similar stories from other cultures. A lot to think about and study.

Introduction
A.S. Byatt

This is the book I wanted as a child and didn't have, the book I'd have liked both to give to my children and keep for myself, the book I shall give to my grandchildren. It took me some time to see that what I thought of as a "real" fairy tale was almost always one collected by the Grimms. But as a child -- and even more as an adult -- I had an instinct for the power and the -- somewhat dangerous -- delight of their collection.

I acquired a hunger for fairy tales in the dark days of blackout and blitz in the Second World War. I read early and voraciously and indiscriminately -- Andrew Lang's colored Fairy Books, Hans Anderson, King Arthur, Robin Hood, and my very favorite book, Asgard and the Gods, a German scholarly text, with engravings, about Norse mythology, which my mother had used as a crib in her studies of Ancient Norse. I never really liked stories about children doing what children do -- quarreling and cooking and camping. I liked magic, the unreal, the more than real. I learned from the Asgard book that even the gods can defeated by evil. I knew nothing about the Wagnerian Nordic pageantry of the Third Reich. Nor did I have any inkling that the British occupying forces in Germany after the war were going to ban the Grimms because they fed a supposedly bloodthirsty German imagination. Indeed, I retreated into them from wartime anxieties.

I didn't have a book at that stage that was specifically the fairy tales of the Brothers Grimm. But I learned to disgtinguish between them and the authored tales of Hans Anderson (and de la Mare and Thackeray). My developing idea of the "real" (authentic) fairy tale centered on the Brothers Grimm. It included also some of the Nordic stories collected by Asbjornsen, some Perrault, and some English tales -- "Jack and the Beanstalk," for instance. These tales might be funny or horrible or weird or abrubt, but they were never disturbing, they never twisted your spirit with sick terror as Andersen so easily did. They had a discrete, salutary flatness.

It is interesting how impossible it is to remember a time when my head was not full of these unreal people, things, and events. When I ask friends and colleagues what is their first precise memory of a fairy tale, they almost all come up with shock administered by that psychological terrorist, Andersen -- the little mermaid walking on knives, Hans in the icy palace of the Snow Queen. But these shocks happen to people and children who already know and inhabit the other world which gets into our heads and becomes necessary -- a world of suns and moons and forests, or princesses and goose girls, old men and women, benign and malign, talking birds and flying horses, magic roses and magic puddings, turnips and pigs, impenetrable castles and petrification, glass mountains and glass coffins, poisonous apples and blinding thorns, ogres and imps, spindles and spun gold, taks and prohibitions, danger and comfort (for the good people) after it. The tales collected by the Grimms and older, simpler, and deeper than the individual imagination.

It is very odd -- when you come to think of it -- that human beings in all sorts of societies, ancient and modern, have needed these untrue stories. It is much odder than the need for religious stories (myths) or semihistorical stories (legends) or history, national or personal. Even as a little girl I perceived its oddity. These "flat" stories appear to be there because stories are a pervasive and perpetual human characteristic, like language, like play.

What are fairy stories for? Freud gave an answer -- they were related to daydreams and wish-fulfillment fantasies, in which the question self meets helpers and enemies, and in which the ending is always happy. He wondered if myths were the "secular dreams of youthful humanity" but distinguished myths from fairy tales by claiming that myth is "related to disaster." It can also be argued that myth is related the human need to know what was before, and what will be after, the individual life, the living society. Myths are concerned with origins, the fear of death, and the hope for the overcoming of death in another world. The universe of Asgard and Valhalla, of Olympus and Hades, is not the fairy-tales unreal world with its visiting suns and moons, castles, and undifferentiated forests. We don't put it together in our imaginations in the same way. There is neither explanation nor teaching in the true wonder tale.

Other things which are not essentially part of true fairy tales are character, psychology causation, or real morality. Princesse are virtually interchangeable -- they are either kind and modest and housewifely, or vain and stupid and inconsiderate. They are called "princesses," but peasants and merchants' daughters have the same limited and recognizable natures. Simpletons and gallant princes have the same chance of solving riddles, obtaining magic feathers, or keys, the same insect or fishy helpers. Lazy girls are caught out by boasts that they can spin flax into gold, and are helped by strange brownies or dwarves or other creatures. The best single description I know of the world of the fairy tale is that of Max Luthi who describes it as an abstract world, full of discrete, interchangeable people, objects, and incidents, all of which are isolated and are nevertheless interconnected, in a kind of web or network of two-dimensional meaning. Everything in the tales appears to happen entirely by chance -- and this has the strange effect of making it appear that nothing happens by chance, that everything is fated.

Luthi even points out that folktales have certain colors -- red, white, black, and the metallic colors of gold and silver and steel. The fairy tale world is called up for me by the half-abstract patternings of Paul Klee, or the mosaic definition of Kandinsky's early "Russian" paintings of horses and forests. Luthi makes the point that green, the color of natue, is almost never specifically mentioned in folktales. It is interesting in that context that the Grimms' preface to volume II of the first edition of the Children's Stories and Household Tales, praising their "genuinely Hessian" Low German narrator, Viehmann, and the precision of her oral narrative, remarks that "The epic basis of folk poetry resembles the colour green as one finds it throughout nature in various shades: each satisfied and soothes without becoming too tiresome."

This is an image derived from Romantic nature poetry and is called up in support of the Grimms' claim for the German-ness of the tales. German perception of German folklore is bound up with the Germanic sense of the all-importance of the surrounding Wald, the forest. As a child, and now, I respond instinctively more powerfully to this mysterious wood than to the courtly manners and ladylike godmothers of French writers like Madame d'Aulnoy. But I think it can be argued that the Grimms, however they romanticized and fantasized the oral and German purity of their sources, understood, as tellers, the peculiarly flat, unadorned nature of the true tale.

An all-important part of our response to the world of the tales is our instinctive sense that they have rules. There are things that can and can't happen, will and won't happen -- a prohibition is there to be broken, two of three brothers or sisters are there to fail, the incestuous king will almost always dance at his daughter's wedding to the prince in whose court she has found refuge as a kitchen slave or a goose girl. Luthi brilliantly compares the glittering mosaic of fairy tales to Hermann Hesse's Glass Bead Game. As a little girl I compared it in my mind to the pleasures of Ludo and Snakes and Ladders and Solitaire played with cards, in which certain moves only are possible and the restricitons are part of the pleasure. As an adult writer I think that my infant synapses grew like a maze of bramble shoots into a grammar of narrative, part of the form of my neuronal web as linguistic grammars are, and mathematical forms. Vladimir Propp's analysis of the structural forms of the folktale is exciting because it makes precise and complex something we had already intuited -- that the people and events are both finite and infinitely variable. Another thing Luthi finely says is that these are forms of hope. We fill our heads with improbable happy endings, and are able to live -- in daydream -- in a world in which they are not only possible but inevitable.

Italo Calvino, in "Cybernetics and Ghosts," makes the inevitable connection between storytelling and myth. He describes the storyteller of the tribe telling about the younger son getting lost in the forest -- "he sees a light in the distance, he walks and walks; the fable unwinds from sentence to sentence, and where is it leading?" To a new apprehension which "suddenly appears and tears us to pieces, like the fangs of a man-eating witch. Through the forest of fairy-tale the vibrancy of myth passes like a shudder of wind." Calvino himself knew a great deal about the workings of the stopped-off, rule-constructed tale, but he also knew that it is haunted by the unmanageable, the vast, and the dangerous. The Grimms too were interested in the borders between Germanic myths and folktales. They liked to draw connections between fairy-tale trees and the World-Ash, between Briar Rose and her thorn-surrounded sleep and Brunnhilde in her wall of fire. They included Christian legends at the edge of their world -- the Virgin Mary find strawberries in the snow of the forest.

The opposite experience, perhaps, from coming across of the whiff or real danger, terror, or mystery that is myth, is the precise experience of meeting real individuated characters in a tale, people one begins to imagine in three dimensions. Looking back on my own experience, it seems to me that I inhabited stories with characters in a way I never inhabited the true fairy tales. I fell in love with Sir Lancelot and held long conversations with Robin Hood and his men. I went on new quests with them, rescued them and was rescued. I even ventured into the Asgard tales -- I brought water secretly to the disguised Odin suspended between two fires, I fell in love with ironic Loki. But I never loved or was loved in the context of a fairy tale. Dickens claimed that wanted to marry Little Red Riding Hood, which to me is a category error. Either he had seen a pretty actress in a red hood in a pantomime, or his hugely animating imagination could even insinuate itself into the closed box of finite gestures. Character feels wrong in folktales.

In this context Luthi gives a fine example of how the Grimms' narrative style moves from the impersonal oral to the "authored" story with psychology. In Wilhelm Grimms' "Rapunzel," he says, "The prince became overwhelmed with grief and in despair he jumped from the tower." Whereas in oral tellings derived from Grimm, a schoolchild from Danzig said "When the witch saw that it was a prince there, she threw him down," and a Swabian narrator said: "She gouged out his eyes and threw him down" -- in both cases replacing psychological suffering by a physical blow.

The point is clear, but it is a long step from there to Andersen telling us the suffering of his mermaid, or Hoffman frightening us with the Sandman. As Maria Tater observes, the Grimms' revisions of "The Frog King" simply make the tale more flowing -- they may take away the stark flatness of the oral "and then... and then... ," but they preserve more of the flat quality of the tales than the French courtly ladies, who exclaim and moralize in every paragraph. Most interesting of all in this context is "The Juniper Tree" which is an authored tale by Philipp Otto Runge, a work of art which entirely understands the arbitrary nature of the shape of the tale, and the repetitive form of its events, and yet inserts both psychological terror and pity, and as the Grimms feel able to suggest, is aware that the magic juniper tree is related to the Tree of Life. Narrators are free to vary or extemporize on the elements of the tales, which nevertheless constantly reassert themselves. Anyone who has looked at the 345 variants of the Cinderella stories collected by the redoubtable Marian Roalfe Cox in 1893 will know how the nmosaic pieces slip, slide, and recombine.

What use do make of fairy tales? The Grimms, as we see, thought, among other things, that they were recovering a German mythology and a German attitude to life. They saw themselves as asserting what was German against the French occupying forces of the Napoleonic Empire. The Allied occupying forces in Germany after the Second World War briefly tried to ban the Grimms because it was felt that their bloodthirstiness, gleeful violence, heartlessness, and brutality had helped to form the violent nature of the Third Reich. Some of the tales are unpleasant -- very unpleasant -- and it is good that Maria Tater has collected one or two of the more heartless ones here, including one that is certainly anti-Semitic. There are places where a collection of folktales shaeds off into those other narrative forms, gossip and communal scapegoating anecdotes. But it is important to distinguish between the effects of tales of bludgeoned outsiders or gleefully tormented Jews and the folktale machinery of swallowed and regurgitated children, severed limbs miraculously restored, and even the dreadful punishments of the wicked stepmother of sisters, in barrels or nails or red-hot iron shoes. A modern child -- or adult read -- needs both to remember the more brutal world of public hangings and public burnings or earlier times, and to understand that much of this suffering and restoration -- not all -- is the same as the endless hammering, drowning, flaying, flattening, stretching, snipping, and boiling of Tom by Jerry in the cartoons. There are moods in which -- as child and woman -- I could not bear to see these cartoons. And moods in which I laugh cheerfully. In a real fairy tale the eyes will usually be restored, the hands grow onto the stumpds, the sleeper will awaken.

The most terrifying tale I have ever read in the Grimms is the one-paragraph tale about the obstinate child, in German das eigensinnige Kind, which means literally "the child with its own mind." In German a child is neuter in gender. All we are told about this one is that it would not do what its mother wanted, that God had therefore no goodwill toward it, and it died. When it was buried, it kept pushing its arm up through the earth -- until its mother came and knocked its arm down with a stick. After that it was for the first time peaceful under the earth. The real terror of that is implicit in its bleak little form and the complete absence of character (we do not know if the child was boy or girl). It doesn't feel like a warning to naughty infants. It feels like a glimpse of the dreadful side of the nature of things.

I am not sure how much good is done by moralizing about fairy tales. This can be unsubtle -- telling children that virtue will be rewarded, when in fact it is mostly simply the fact of being the central character that ensure a favorite outcome. Fairy tales are not -- on the whole -- parables. The king's three sons in "The Three Feathers" have ntohing in common with Christ's succinct parable of the talents, where both psychology and morals are precise about what the three servants do with what they are given.

Psychoanalysts have revealed some of the ways in which the tales represent our secret fears and preoccupations -- from being devoured to having a mother or stepmother who either starves you or stuffs you with food in order to eat you up. But all too easily psychoanalytic crticism can become overdetermined, constaining and limiting. Burno Bettelheim turns the tales into dream-imagery and paradigms of what he sees as essential sexual development. I remember being very excited by the idea that Sleeping Beauty represents the teenage laziness of the latency period, as also by the idea that the pricked finger represents either menstrual bleeding or a symbolic defloration. It is possible for a good modern writer to use those images in those contexts. But is somehow diminishes the compact, satisfactory nature of the tale itself to gloss it in this way. It takes away, not deepens, its mystery. In the same way many modern feminists defenses of the witch against the docile daughter (Snow White, for instance) take apart the form of the tale and leave us with not very much. It is interesting, as Maria Tater suggests, how little attention has been paid to resourceful heroines, or suffering heroes, in revisionist criticism. We are overinfluenced by Disney -- the great witch in "Snow White," the sacchrine heroine-doll. And I at least feel manipulated when modern films too obviously try to make contrary energetic heroines. Keats deprecated poetry that had a design on you. One of the true qualities of the real fairy tale is that it does not.

Writers have always used the forms of the fairy tale -- if my idea that they form, or until recently formed, the narrative grammar of our minds is correct, writers much have done. The happy endings of fairy tales underpin the comedies of Shakespeare -- we have the comfortable sense that tribulations will result in safety and reconciliation. The absense of those things is an intensifying part of the horror of King Lear, which could have ended differently. There is a layer of most nineteenth-centry novels that is pulling with, or against, the fairy-tale paradigm. Mansfield Park is "Cinderella." Middlemarch contrasts the diligent and lazy daughters, the white and red of warmth and cold, and pulls against the paradigm with gritty moral realism. Witches and dwarves, ogres and wolves, lurk in Dickens and Hawthorne. Elizabeth Gaskell reunited the fairy-tale characters in a fantasy French chateau, in a tale of her own, and also played realist narrative games with stepmother and daughters in Wives and Daughters. Both Gunter Grass and Virginia Woolf use the tale of "The Fisherman and His Wife." In Woolf's case, particularly, one of the novelist's purposes is to show that there is more than one way of telling the world, of imagining ambition and danger and safety.

In recent times Angela Carter and Salman Rushdie both claimed that there was more energy in the old tales than in the recent social realism. Carter made a glittering fantasy world of her own in which wolves and woodcutters, beauties and beasts, Bluebeard and his butchered wives, made new-old patterns. When she came to edit The Virago Book of Fairy Tales she had become suspicious of the popular culture and the social forms that underlay the old stories. She said that even in Perrault's day there was a sense that popular culture belonged to the past, "even perhaps, that is ought to belong to the past, where it posed no threat, and I am saddened to discover that I subscribe to this feeling too; but this time it might just be true."

Terry Pratchett too -- a fantasist who both invents otherworlds and observes their limitations from outside them -- writes the old stories into his plots in order to criticize their unthinking narrative constrictions. Godmothers and witches and princesses and frogs and woodcutters can and should be free to behave differently. We should beware of what stories can do to the way we put the world together. We live in a world very far from woods, castles, and gibbets. We live in a wolrd of urban myths -- aligators in sewers, grandmothers on car roofs, and as Diane Purkiss has suggested, a burgeoning virtual world of gossip and storytelling, real and fantastic, on the Web.

But we continue to love and need to Grimms' tales, and to be curious about where they came from, what they mean. Maria Tater is the most exciting scholar I have read on this subject. Her Norton Critical Edication of The Classic Fairy Tales -- variants old and new, authored and traditional, of six great tales -- is full of wit, information, and unexpected revelations. Her book The Hard Facts of the Grimms' Fairy Tales is a profound and gripping exploration of the darker aspects of the Grimms' tales -- sex and violence, eating and being eaten, ogres and monters, victims and cruel stepmothers, husbands and enchanters. Her attitude to our taste for these things -- as children and as adults -- is wise and complex. She is a true scholar, who writes beautifully, not a theorist making use of the material for her own ends. Her new translation of the Grimms is clear, full of life, and enticing. This collection contains the essential favorites, from "Rapunzel" and "Hansel and Gretel" to "Snow White" and "Rumpelstiltskin" by way of "Cinderella" and "The Frog King." It also contains slightly less well-known stories which I found even more magical as a child because I hadn't been told them -- "Mother Holle," "The Worn-Out Dancing Shoes," "Snow White and Rose Red." And tales many people may not know before they venture into the world of this book -- "Godfather Death," "The Golden Key," and the unforgettable "A Fairy Tale About a Boy Who Left Home to Learn about Fear." The annotations and the delicious added quotations from entranced writer-readers will encourage the curiousity of both adults and children, who, like me, belong in a tale of "The Child Who Always Wanted to Know More." (That was why I loved the grown-up Asgard book so much.) Maria Tater has a rare combination of steady good sense and an infinite taste for the uncanny and the marvellous. This book is a delight for the story-hungry and the curious and intelligent together.

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Programming Bugs

Fri, 16 Jun 2006 09:25:30 -0700

Gacked from dondarkstalker, here. I happen to think this is entirely too funny. :D

Make a new text document in Notepad.

Type in "Bush hid the facts" without quotes.
(The B can be capitalized or not, but there cannot be a period.)

Save and close the file.

Open it again.

So, what did you get? Probably little boxes, right? I got some very random Chinese characters that I'm pretty sure don't string together to mean anything: ?????????, which is likely why I find this so much funnier than I expect others will. Haha. :)

ETA 10:28 a.m.: New LJ Userinfo Page? I suppose I mostly don't like it because I'm not used to it yet. Ew.

ETA 10:46 a.m.: Breast milk and horse penis, a few interesting Chinese cuisines, from jwz. o_O

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No more confiscated cell phones

Tue, 13 Jun 2006 19:50:14 -0700

Gacked from andromeda1706, here:

Students find ring tone adults can't hear (AP)

"As people age, many develop what's known as aging ear ? a loss of the ability to hear higher-frequency sounds. The ring tone is a spin-off of technology that was originally meant to repel teenagers ? not help them. A Welsh security company developed the tone to help shopkeepers disperse young people loitering in front of their stores while leaving adults unaffected. The company called their product the 'Mosquito.'"

Today's randomness:

1. I really love being awake early enough to see the sun rise. (And by that I mean that I like waking up early, not staying up very, very, very late.) The sky is a different kind of beautiful than when the sun is setting, and its reflection in the Charles River is a great thing to wake up to. Goshdarnit, where is that camera when I need it?

2. I freaked out a tiny bit today when I was in our lab's 37-degree Room. I couldn't get the door open, and a fate of dehydration and death flashed briefly before my eyes. Who says I don't have an inner drama queen? ;)

3. When you share a common space (like a kitchen) with a group of people and something of yours is stolen (like dishwashing liquid), your response when you need to use the object that was stolen (like when you need to wash a few dishes) is to use whatever is lying around (there are two other bottles of dishwashing liquid at the sink) even if it belongs to someone else. After all, didn't yours just vanish into thin air? The problem in this situation is that those two bottles of dishwashing liquid belong to people who probably didn't steal mine. Instead of getting back at the thief, you would just end up spreading the misery. Le sigh. I'll drop by the store and buy more tomorrow.

Links: 2006 Web Cartoonists' Choice Award Final Nominees - link from copperbadge || The Rock, Paper, Scissors Championship - apparently, it's pretty intense; the prize is $50,000 - links from kaiz || Bubble Wrap Love - everything you ever wanted to know - from useless_facts || South Central California Farmers Eviction - this really sucks - from azad_slide || Spreading the QAF Hate - I'm sorry, but I am so very amused - from qaf_hate

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Cat vs. Bear

Mon, 12 Jun 2006 12:54:20 -0700

Gacked from redtigerlily_3:

Jack the Cat Chases Black Bear Up Tree (AP)


"Jack, a 15-pound orange-and-white cat, cat sits under a treed black bear in a backyard in West Milford, N.J., Sunday, June 4, 2006. When the bear climbed down, the cat chased it up another nearby tree. Neighbor Suzanne Giovanetti thought Jack was simply looking up at the bear, but soon realized the much larger animal was afraid of the hissing cat. The cat's owners called it away, and the bear ran off."

Link: From Across the World, Coins Converge in the City's Meters (NY Times)

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Wellesley News and Net Neutrality

Sun, 11 Jun 2006 22:03:44 -0700

The top news story tonight for at least one of the local Boston news stations was worrisome. Apparently, human tissue was found near Wellesley College, tissue that the District Attorney's office believes may be from a human placenta. The finding suggests there may be a woman or a baby in need of immediate medical assistance. What is especially scary is that the authorities were searching the nearest body of water, though they won't explain why.

Regarding the other topic of this post, four or five people on my friends' list has linked me to jediboadicea's post on The Loss of the Internet. The U.S. House of Representatives passed the controversial Communications Opportunity, Promotion and Enhancement Act, the COPE bill, and it seems to be something that we should worry about.

"What the COPE bill does is continue to utterly destroy the concept of 'net neutrality' that was first gutted by the Supreme Court and the FCC just last year. This new law says that all internet service providers will now be able to create a two tier internet. Every person or company who wants to run any sort of website will have to now pay additional money - money on top of what they pay to buy webspace in the first place - to the telecom companies in order to have a website that loads smoothly and more quickly than those who don't pay. It means that if Google wants to load as quickly on your browser as it currently does, they will have to approach the internet service providers in every region individually and pay additional money to get premium service. Otherwise, Google will be relegated to the lower tier, and load less quickly."

News: Abu Musab al-Zarqawi Killed in Bombing Raid (Fox News) || Cervical Cancer Vaccine Approved by FDA - from misia

Links: The Vintage Mac Museum - this brings back such memories of my old Macintosh IIsi, the one that is still sitting in my grandparents living room; I'm pretty sure it still works :) - link from kaiz || Evil Link of the Day - be careful, you may not want to see this - from ishtar79 || "The Bible is fanfiction" - from flamingsword || The Gay Animal Kingdom - homosexual behavior as a survival characteristic - link from iibnf || Day After Roe - very interesting; worth the read - link from belleweather || Artificial Retractable Foreskin - to overcome the effects of circumcision - from jwz || On the Jon Stewart and Bill Bennett interview and breastfeeding in public - from heidi8

Fandom: Detailed Description of Vanished Pilot - from galedreamer || Snarky X-Men 3 Rant - from laurel_tx || Singer says Superman is not gay (The Age) - I don't know why, but I found this article very funny - link from viciouswishes

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A post for Wednesday

Wed, 07 Jun 2006 04:40:44 -0700

I was awake, so I thought I might as well post early. Today is going to be a very long day.

Link gacked from annecatherine:

On what day of the week were you born?
If you're curious how the computer figures it out, the various algorithms are described in this Wikipedia article. The Doomsday algorithm is my favorite. :)

I was born on a Wednesday.

ETA 5:44 a.m.: It seems my mother was also a Wednesday baby. Heh.

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6/6/06

Wed, 07 Jun 2006 00:22:51 -0700

Besides being the Devil's Day, today is also the National Day of Slayer, National Hunger Awareness Day, and the day of California's primary elections, among many others.

I knew that I wanted to post something about today -- after all, these days only come around once every century -- but I was at a loss as to what to write about. I decided to check Google news for ideas and was somewhat surprised at the amount of coverage. There were quite a few stories that stated what I feel is pretty obvious, like "Dreaded 6-6-06 not really that beastly" and "Some Spooked by Date." Many other articles very seriously asked the question, 6-6-06: Is This the End?, and inevitably quoted the Bible or interviewed a religious figure or expert. Most of the stories, though, were entertainment articles about the movie remake "The Omen". Could the producers have picked a better day for release? :)

There were a few other interesting stories: Schools increased security today because of rumors of Columbine-style attacks that were making their way around the Internet; four old college friends reunited on Route 66; and a woman in North Dakota had her 66th birthday. That last story was only interesting because an article (albeit a short one) was actually written about it. There has to be more than one person who turned 66 today.

I also thought it was pretty funny that while most expecting mothers tried to opt out of giving birth today, one couple in Kansas City planned their wedding specifically for today.

Lastly, I'll leave you with a joke from Jay Leno's monologue last night. Apparently, prior to today, quite a few people were taking bets on whether the world would end. Most of the bets were promotional for the movie and most said the world would go on. But still, if the world had ended today, how would collect your win? :P

Links: Dancing Dude Video - fun(ny) to watch - link from plumsuede || Harry Potter on Robot Chicken - the Trio takes on the monster Pubertus - recommended by iulia_linnea || Period: Full Stop? (Washington Post) - this scares me just a little bit; I think I need to learn exactly what the biological consequences are of skipping your period completely || Wal-Mart and China - jwz || Received any e-mail from yourself lately? - email security PSA - from furiosity

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San Fran

Sun, 04 Jun 2006 21:59:44 -0700

Summer so far has felt like a very, very long weekend, with a lot to do but absolutely no motivation to get any of it done. The good thing is that this inactivity has afforded me the time to catch up with my little sister; I've spoken to her on the phone practically every day this week. I miss her to pieces. (Watching both seasons of Dead Like Me this weekend didn't help matters much. Even though the two of them are really nothing alike, Reggie from the show reminds me so much of my sister.)

I also miss California. As much as love Boston, I'm totally heading back to the Pacific Coast after college. That's probably why I love the answer for this meme (gacked from theunknownuser1) so much: San Francisco is the home of my dream medical school. It would be awesome to end up there. (I'm not sure I would consider myself a "hippie," though. :-P)

You Belong in San Francisco

You crave an eclectic, urban environment. You're half California, half NYC. You're open minded, tolerant, and secretly think you're the best. People may dismiss you as a hippie, but you're also progressive, interesting, and rich!

Links: Roger Ebert's Review of An Inconvenient Truth (Sun Times) || You're the only one with the Star Trek notebook paper - totally awesome, must-see links ahead - from viciouswishes || Bloggity bloggity boo - discussion on blogs - from fabularasa || The Five Word Story (of Doom) - join in! - from furiosity || LJ HitBox is on again - from faramir_boromir || Embrace Microbiology - includes some interesting science links - from azad_slide

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'Not entirely human'

Fri, 02 Jun 2006 23:34:14 -0700

Gacked from a post on useless_facts:

We are not entirely human, germ gene experts argue (Reuters)

"We are somehow like an amalgam, a mix of bacteria and human cells. There are some estimates that say 90 percent of the cells on our body are actually bacteria," said Steven Gill, a molecular biologist.

I have to agree with one of the commenters on the original post -- this doesn't really seem like news. But, it does remind me of some interesting conversations I used to have about the theory that our mitochondria evolved from free-living bacteria. I always thought it was interesting how perceptions would change. All of a sudden, it became "them" and "us." While previously, we always thought our mitochondria were a part of us, now they were foreign. That never really made sense to me. I suppose I could go on about how this situation parallels any self-respecting identity crisis, where we learn something new and possibly unpleasant about overselves and have to reconcile it with how we envision who we are, but I won't go into it now.

I will mention that this is probably why I never really enjoyed reading Lives of a Cell, by Lewis Thomas. It was a summer reading book from high school. If I remember the book correctly, I never really agreed with

I think I've mentioned before that I tend to think too much -- and usually about random and inconsequential things. Don't mind me. Instead, focus on the happy and mostly fandom-related links below. :)

Links: HP Education Fanon, Inc. - from heidi8 || LJ Scavenger Hunt - from yahtzee63 || More Vanished Promos - from url_girl || Snarry Olympics Wrap-up - includes a link to the masterlist - from snarry_olympics || "I hear the bells" - the cutest pre-prom fan moment that I've ever heard about - from veronica_mars || The police blotter can be amusing - from gatewaygirl

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One in a million

Wed, 31 May 2006 23:52:43 -0700

Link gacked from throwingstardna's post, where there are some rather interesting comments.

Woman Hit By Lightning While Praying (AP)

Worried about the safety of her family during a stormy Memorial Day trip to the beach, Clara Jean Brown stood in her kitchen and prayed for their safe return as a strong thunderstorm rumbled through Baldwin County, Alabama. But while she prayed, lightning suddenly exploded, blowing through the linoleum and leaving a blackened area on the concrete. Brown wound up on the floor, dazed and disoriented by the blast but otherwise uninjured.

Fire officials think the lightning likely struck across the street from the couple's home and traveled into the house through a water line. The lightning continued into the couple's backyard and ripped open a small trench.

I won't comment on the rather obvious situational irony. Instead, I'll question why I always thought that the inside of your house was supposed to be a safe place to stay during a thunderstorm. (Actually, one of the safest places is inside a car, which probably doesn't make much intuitive sense at all, but it's true.)

Links: LiveJournal Restricts Use of Breastfeeding Photos - press release - from boob_nazis || Candidates for the Special Hell - join in and add a few yourself ;) - from misia || Fanartists vs. Fanficcers Photo Meme - from squirmy || 40 Years of Star Trek Auction - link from iibnf || Pictures of Point Pleasant, NJ - from throwingstardna || Ginny's Actions in HBP - discussion - from alchemia || An alum's guide to getting through university - from copperbadge

P.S. A special link for any Beverly students or alums: Joel Stein at BHHS Career Day (LA Times). Prepare to laugh and be mildly offended. :)

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One arm too many?

Tue, 30 May 2006 17:54:59 -0700

Link gacked from jwz:

Baby Born With Third Arm (AP)


The baby boy, named Jie-Jie, was born in Shanghai earlier this morning with an "unusually well-formed third arm." According to the article, the boy cried when either of his left arms were touched but smiled and responded normally to other stimuli. The hospital is looking into various surgical options.

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IMDB

Mon, 29 May 2006 23:54:34 -0700

Some days, I can easily spend hours upon hours surfing through various pages at the Internet Movie Database. It's like an extended game of "six degrees." As inaccurate as the database can be -- it's not hard to find mistakes -- it's still so very fascinating. There are so many movies that I want to see now. Among others, "The Piano" is high up on that list. Since it was way too hot to spend any time outside, today became one of those days.

I only took breaks to eat and watch Alias and Candlepin Bowling, which, I have to say, is like my new favorite "sport" to cheer for on television.

Other things:

1. I saw X-Men 3 last night. Some of it I liked, some of it I didn't, which is probably as vague as I can get. All I have to say is there will need to be some major 'fixing' if there's going to be an X4.

2. I can pick up so much more noise from my seventh floor window now than I could when I lived on the fourth floor. Strange.

3. Did I mention it was hot? Because it really, really is. And I get to go back to work in this heat tomorrow. The three-day weekend was the extent of my summer vacation. At least until the end of June, anyways.

Link: Doonesbury to come to MIT (MIT News Office)

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'Disregard First Book'

Sun, 28 May 2006 22:24:18 -0700

Cosmopolitan rarely prints anything that I would consider particularly thought-provoking. That's probably why it's so much fun to read every now and then. Yesterday, though, as I was flipping through an old issue, I found -- somewhere between the quizzes and the sex tips and the badly-written softcore porn -- something worth reading, a New York Times Op-Ed from this January that I had somehow missed at the time.

Modern Love -- Paradise Lost, by Terry Hekker

Back in 1977, Hekker had written another Op-Ed, and a book as well, about why she advocated being a homemaker instead of a working mother. Well, now, she takes it back, and the situation that prompted her to do so totally sucks: her husband left her for a younger woman and with no way to support herself.

"My anachronistic book was written while I was in a successful marriage that I expected would go on forever. Sadly, it now has little relevance for modern women, except perhaps as a cautionary tale: never its intended purpose. So I couldn't imagine writing a sequel. But my friend Elaine did come up with a perfect title: 'Disregard First Book.'"

This reminds me of a NY Times article from last September, about the many women at elite colleges who plan to become stay-at-home moms. Some of my friends wondered why Cynthia Liu wanted to go to law school at all if being a mother was her goal. Well, this probably provides a good answer; at least, if anything happens, she'll have options.

Link: Visual Thesaurus - very, very cool - link from furiosity

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Moving Day

Fri, 26 May 2006 23:43:54 -0700

I'm not sure I'm going to be able to move tomorrow.

Classes are over and summer is here, which means that, among other things, it's time to move into my summer room assignment. I spent the entire day going up and down stairs, carrying hastily-packed boxes, suitcases, and bags up to my new room almost exactly three stories above where I'm living now. I must have made at least 40 trips. Who knew you could accumulate so much crap over the course of a school year?

Plus side: my summer room has a Charles River view. :)

News: Pentagon sources: Iraqi civilians likely killed by Marines without provocation (CNN)

Links: In praise of exercise - from painless_j || Snarry Olympics Drinking Game - from dementordelta || Money Myths Quiz - from andromeda1706 || Fandom Politics - discussion - from gmth || Video of Jason Dohring and Enrico Colantoni (E!Online) - Oh, Jason, I do believe I have melted - link includes other interviews as well

ETA 12:50 a.m.: Um, what? Ewan McGregor in a tomato costume, and Judi Dench in a lobster? You simply must see this picture; the link goes to lennongirl's post.

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The Homunculus

Thu, 25 May 2006 11:23:40 -0700

I'm just doing some last-minute cramming for my psychology final -- it starts in about an hour -- and I thought that I would share an image in neuroscience that always sort of freaked me out, even though it's really very interesting. This image is known as the sensory homunculus. It shows what a man's body would look like if each part grew in proportion to the area of the cortex of the brain concerned with its sensory perception.


What's especially interesting is that there is another such image that shows what a man's body would look like if each part grew in proportion to the area of the cortex of the brain concerned with its movement. This is known as the motor homunculus. (A picture can be found on this old post of jwz.) What's one way you can tell the difference between the two? The male genitalia are much larger for the sensory homunculus.

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Fraternity rivalry? (+ hacks, links, and a bit on finals)

Mon, 22 May 2006 22:25:42 -0700

"Domino's Finals Week Pizza Give-A-Way," the flier states. "For finals weeks, get a free large cheese pizza and a two-liter Coke!" It goes on to describe this limited offer, allegedly sponsored by the Undergraduate Association and Association of Student Activities. "MIT students only. Limit one per student."

A very impressive flier, that's for sure. I certainly thought it was real. I probably would have called the phone number printed in large black letters right beneath a very tasty-looking pizza had someone not told me that the phone number doesn't go to Domino's at all.

The number is for the Phi Kappa Theta fraternity house. The flier was made by another frat; unfortunately, I don't know which. It was posted pretty prominently around parts of campus. I wonder how many phone calls PKT has gotten since last week. Hehe. ^__~

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Speaking of other hacks (or pranks, or whatever you'd like to call them), here's another one that I find pretty amusing. It seems Alex Doonesbury from the comic Doonesbury is trying to decide which college to go to and is down to three final choices, one of which is MIT.

There was a poll where we could vote. IP addresses were logged so that you could only vote once. But, of course, there are ways to circumvent that. (Hehe. Awesome!) I'm assuming the poll is still there, and I'm somewhat curious how it's going. (I don't really care where she ends up going to school, though.) But, now, unfortunately, it seems that anyone using the Internet here on campus is blocked from the site. Ha! XD

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Links: Urban Dictionary does Harry Potter - LOL - from gmth || The Joys of Working in a Porn Store - LOL, again - from useless_facts || Captions and Thought Bubbles for HP Screencaps - one last LOL; not very worksafe - from accioslash

P.S. One last thought on final exams: I had two today -- physics went much better than organic chemistry. All in all, though, I'm confident that I got the requisite 65 percent on both to keep my A's in the classes. *sigh* Two more to go.

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Fortune Cookie Meme

Sat, 20 May 2006 23:30:26 -0700

Taking a short break from studying for final exams to share this fortune cookie meme, gacked from ziasudra. It's somewhat cryptic, but I think it's telling me that I'm going to sleep soon. Oh, how I wish I could.

Polykleitos's Fortune for May 20, 2006 Fortune by myYearbook.com the World's Biggest Yearbook! Find Out Your Fortune! Name: Age: Sex: MaleFemale Birthday: Month----------JanuaryFebruaryMarchAprilMayJuneJulyAugustSeptemberOctoberNovemberDecemberDay---12345678910111213141516171819202122232425262728293031,YYYY

Links: Interspacial Harmony (YouTube) - Shatner singing to Lucas - link from iulia_linnea || Evolutionary Biology: Dirty Eating for Healthy Living - essay by Jared Diamond - posted by azad_slide || X-Men 4 Confirmed - from x_men_3 - hmm; maybe the network executives should wait to see how the third movie fares first? || Hardball with Chris Matthews - transcript for May 18 show; interesting Bush quote - link from throwingstardna || Eurovision 2006 - from naatz

ETA 12:48 a.m.: Jumping the Lesbian Shark: Network TV (AfterEllen.com) - "In the 2006-2007, almost ten years after Ellen came out on her ABC sitcom and made lesbian TV history, there is not a single regular lesbian character slated for scripted primetime TV." - very interesting column - link from viciouswishes

ETA 12:50 a.m.: "We need more babies," said John Gibson of Fox News - link from misia; azad_slide's response is here.