jodi's Journal

8:36pm: this fourth of july weekend my neighborhood, usually bustling and traffic-riddled, was a veritable ghost town on saturday and sunday. when i left for work in the morning i saw no moving cars and not a single person until i got down into the subway. it was like living in a small town!

i saw a woman at the gym wearing a t-shirt:
http://www.bustedtees.com/finderskeepers/?gclid=CKnS48nvxJsCFU1M5QodlX8IBw
and i found that i was greatly offended by it. i get that its a stupid hipster joke shirt but the social and political implications of this joke was as offensive to me as a racial slur. do people really think that the moon is "ours" or that getting to the moon first negates the soviet space programs triumphs (in every single "first" except the moon, really). how could anyone wear such a ridiculous shirt! how could someone see this sentiment expressed on a shirt and think "wow! i need to pay twenty dollars to emblazon this on MY chest!" if one of my friends wore this shirt, i would seriously ask them to change.

some recent movies i've seen (june and july) that i would recommend ( i will spare you the ones that i wouldn't):
- The River
an early 80s Mel Gibson movie that was gripping and that portrayed farm life very well.

- Son of Rambow
a recent indie movie that was hilarious and awesome and that everyone should see. highly recommended

- Away We Go
i went into this movie thinking it would be a lighthearted comedy without a whole lot of substance. it was actually very thought provoking on how my generation lives and plans and imagines how their life is supposed to be. highly recommended.

- Recycle
a documentary about a man in Jordan, his life and his politics. the filmmaker did an excellent job presenting the story of the man in an honest and artistic way.

- Black Book
a Paul Verhoeven movie of a WWII story in the Hague. if you liked A Very Long Engagement, you might like this, too.

- The Boston Strangler
1968 based-on-a-true-story movie that was incredibly well directed and uses split screen techniques to a very good end.

- What a Way to Go
a 1964 comedy with campy fun and silliness and a lot of big hollywood names playing shirley maclaine's character's husbands.

10:01pm: i don't post nearly enough.
an homage to hexagonalcarbon's recent update that reads like hemingway's dayplanner (everyday activities in short sentences) as well as an homage to samuel sewall:

got up today after 2 snooze-button indulgences. showered and did sundry other morning things. wore clearance rack dress that looks awesome. rode subway to work under threat of rain. met for breakfast with 75% of coworkers (compliment on dress). laughed uproariously and ate egg+mushroom. continued to work in a pack, opened museum. first hour was a walking errand to NPS-HQ and state house museum. dropped off poster, disseminated schedules, begged for maps, stopped at CVS, visited post office. mailed package to nieces and nephews (NOLA souvenirs, music on a thumbdrive, and ?) and this months cd club packets. interpreted museum and had early lunch of nuts and lemonade. studied house tour notes for impending practice tour. interpreted house and served in ticket booth. successful practice tour resulted in approval and confidence. interpreted house and chatted with coworkers. did not get to watch any of the silversmithing demonstration (but i saw it last fall). crush of people in the late afternoon. inconsequential rain. walked with coworker to the red line at park street. disembarked at porter to meet at grocery store. took the stairs at porter station (12 stories?). ate salad bar and talked of work(s) with z. walked home via mass ave and stopped for apples at co-op grocery. sunny and humid day with 1000 tourists catches up and immediate relaxation is sought. clicking. zipcar reserved for imminent air conditioner pickup/ goodbye dinner tomorrow. emailed friend. made tentative plans for tuesday and wednesday. passively read various social networking sites. contemplated a job application but slated that until day off tomorrow. have scratchy throat- drank lemonade. humidity continues in week two of rain-every-day extravaganza.

12:06am: Three albums that I don't currently own and can't for the life of me figure out why:

3) Bjork, Post.
This album came out in the late 90s and had some great songs on it. Now, I'm not a huge Bjork fan, per se, but the deal with this album is that I did actually own it at one point. Then Nichole gave it to me. Then Nichole gave it to me again because this album seems to slip through my fingers like water. Maybe it is cursed. Maybe I'm just an ungrateful friend. Maybe I now own 3 copies of this CD somewhere and this is payback for being disorganized and irresponsible. I don't really need to own this album as I have the songs from it to which I would listen but the sheer power of it to disappear needs to be noted.

2) The White Album.
When things like this come up I can usually say, "...but I own(ed) it on vinyl..." but in this case I've never owned a copy of this Beatles album. At one point in my life, I acquired a smoke-damaged copy of the CD version of the second disc and may still have those files in my computer but that is no substitute for the full version. There are a lot of bands that I like more than the Beatles so it might not seem like a big deal but I can testify that this album is so ubiquitous that I can actually notice the cultural holes from not being familiar enough with its contents.

1) Tom Wait's Heart of Saturday Night
A decade or more ago, I had this album on a cassette. Since this album is so excellent that the cassette was played over and over again until the tape got stretched out and slightly slowed down. I once drove from the Twin Cities to Wall, South Dakota with only this cassette playing. Nichole can attest to many many hours logged listening to it on the drive to or from Duluth. Unlike the Post album, which I really don't need anymore and the White album to which I am simply culturally obligated to listen, this is an album I actively desire. This is one of the few albums I can and would listen to in its entirety as a whole album -- a rare thing for me. It can still affect me as deeply now as it did then (and to find something capable of such a powerful calming effect when in the midst of my not-so-calm 20s makes me doubly appreciative of its substance). How on earth did this one slip by me?

5:17pm: Media Consumption: The First Third
This year I had decided to keep track of the movies that I watch and the TV that I consume and the books that read and etc, etc. The list is growing so I am taking this opportunity at the one-third mark to list what the spring has wrought thus far. What I've learned is that I need to read more books that don't have to do with research, that I watch a lot of junky movies when i am surfing the internet (embarrassingly junky), that we rarely go out to eat, and that I would only recommend about a third of the movies on my list to others:

BOOKS:


Burning Bright
And Only to Deceive
Rhode Island Red
Flour Babies
Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass
Colonial Soapmaking: It's History and Techniques
The Diary of Samuel Sewall, Volume I
The Diary of Samuel Sewall, Volume II: 1709-1729
The Children Who Stayed Alone
The Secret Diary of William Byrd of Westover
The Holyoke Diaries, 1706-1856
A Hessian Diary of the American Revolution
Another Secret Diary of William Byrd of Westover
The American Journal of Ambrose Serle
A Colonial Quaker Girl, The Diary of Sally Wister 1777-1778
The Puritan Family
Diary of A common Soldier in the American Revolution, 1775-1783...
Visible Saints: The History of the Puritan Idea
Under Copp's Hill
Coming of Age in Mississippi
The Autobiography of Malcolm X
Lorna Doone
Middlesex
Walt Disney's Paul Revere

MOVIES

Wedding Crashers
Chinatown
Good Will Hunting
Tess of the D'Urbervilles
Spacecamp
Role Models
Nick and Norah's Infinite Playlist
Central Station
After the Fall
Courtship
1918
On Valentine's Day
The Tailor of Panama
Mystic River
Star Trek: The Movie
Dawn of the Dead
Dawn of the Dead (2004)
Bride Wars
Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan
He's Just Not That Into You
Petey Greene: Adjust Your Color
Choke
The Powder and the Glory
Cadillac Records
Gran Torino
The Wrestler
Steelyard Blues
Separate But Unequal
Picture Perfect
The Accused
The Lost Coast
Igor
Iron Man
The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford
Working Girl
Color Adjustment
Slapshot
Slapshot 2
The Pacifier
El Norte
The Inheritance
Riverworld
Milk
Clue
A Year of Living Dangerously
Places in the Heart
When the Levee Broke
In Bruges
Bob and Carol and Ted and Alice

TELEVISION SERIES (Complete)

Lark Rise to Candleford (season 1)
Mad Men (season 1)
Mad Men (season 2)
Arrested Development (season 1)
Sons of Anarchy (season 1)
Ugly Betty (season 1)
Arrested Development (season 2)
Ugly Betty (season 2)
Make 'Em Laugh (parts 1-6)
Arrested Development (season 3)

PLAYS or CONCERTS

Shear madness
Frost/Nixon

MUSEUMS

Amherst University Art Gallery
Eric Carle Museum of Children s Book Art
Paley Center for Media
The United Nations Headquarters
The Museum of Modern Art
The National WWII Museum
The 1850 House
The Presbytere (Exhibits of Zulu Crewe and Mardi Gras Traditions)
Mardi Gras World
The Cabildo (Louisiana State History Museum)
The Pharmacy Museum
The Audubon Insectarium

TRAVEL DESTINATIONS

The Five Colleges Area in Western Mass
New York City
New Orleans

NEW RESTAURANTS

Paul and Elizabeth's (Northampton, MA)
Cafe 2 @ the MOMA (NYC)
Romolo's Pizzeria (New Orleans)
Zing! Pizza (Cambridge, MA)

8:37pm: for nicholay and ethel and their ilk
Call For Papers
-Mystery Science Theatre 3000
Book collection of Academic writings

In the fall of 1988, on a small public access channel, KTMA, in the St. Paul/Minneapolis area of Minnesota, a bizarre show appeared. It featured two hand-made, robot appearing puppets and a man who was watching a movie and making comments to the screen. Little did its creator, Joel Hodgson, know that he had created a world-wide, popular culture phenomenon known as Mystery Science Theater 3000 (MST). The show lasted ten seasons, and spawned a theatrical feature film. Twenty years later, the show still has fans the world over. The show has received a coveted Peabody Award for excellence, and was nominated for an Emmy Watching episodes of the show today, one still has to scratch his/her head and wonder how such a show could ever last one season, much least ten. However, when one delves deeper into the show, one discovers that it is one of the funniest, cleverest programs this side of Monty Python. Comedy scripts are arguably the hardest type of material to write and be consistently good. But the team that wrote MST, along with head writer Mike Nelson, created something that has lasted and is even more popular ten years after its cancellation. I am putting together a book that looks at MST and its cultural implication, the Internet, and the creation of similar shows (Rifftrax and Cinematic Titanic) which were created and are written by former MST people, who have kept the spirit of MST alive.

Some topics that could be discussed and some questions that might be answered include:

The MST Hour and Mike Nelson?s portrayal (mimicking) of Peter Graves
MST, Comedy Central and the special Thanksgiving marathons
Fan Culture and MST: The Misties (who are they and why)?
The original Sci Fi MST Game
Roger Corman and MST: A Match made in Heaven or Hell?
Gender roles, Women and MST
Frank Zappa and MST
Comics and MST including Trace Beauliu?s stab at creating his comic Here Come the Big People
MST precursors (Fractured Flickers and What?s Up Tiger Lilly)
Best Brains (the company which owns MST) and its relationship with the fans (e.g.,sanctioning the fan made episode, MST3K-The Home Game,?the
Sci-Fi Channel aired this movie during which on-line MSTies could make funny comments)
The rise of ?forgotten movies? which were used as MST episodes (e.g., Manos the Hands of Fate which is now more popular than ever, and has now been made into a musical?there is a documentary about the film which would never have happened were it not for its rediscovery via MST)
The rise of B-Movie popularity as a result appearing on MST
Christmas Movies and MST
World Without End and MST LIVE
Cinematic Titanic-Live Gigs which are more popular than ever?now selling out all over the country
The cultural world of Riffing and the influence of MST The cast of MST today Cinematic Titanic compared with Rifftrax
The recently made flash web cartoons of MST robots, and how these cartoons fit into the mythology of MST in 2009/2010
Jim Mallon and Kevin Murphy before MST working the film Blood Hook (an analysis of this film and whether one can find any direct connections between what would come later in MST)
A Guide to Fan Made MST films (I would write this one)
Mike Nelson as head writer or why was a head writer needed for MST?
The pre-MST comedy careers of Joel Hodgson, Mike Nelson, Bill Corbett, Mary Jo Pehl, and Trace Beaulieu
The KTMA years compared to the Comedy Central Years compared to the Sc Fi Chanel years.
Zombies and MST (a good topic in light of the popularity of Zombie studies)
Movies that deserve the MST treatment but never received it.
How Rifftrax can actually take good movies (e.g., Star Wars, The Dark Knight, and Halloween) and make them seem as though they deserved riffing all along Mental Hygiene films and MST
The legal battle between Best Brains and Mr. Sinus Theatre (the roots and causes of this battle)
The post-MST career of Joel Hodgson
The Wheel and other failed experiments
Why did MST become so popular ten years after its demise?
Why did Rifftrax and Cinematic Titanic become so popular after the demise of MST?
What were/are the cultural implications of the original invention exchanges in those early episodes of show?
What are the differences in the styles of Mike Nelson and Joel Hodgson as hosts for the show?
Why did Joel leave the show in 1993? Why weren?t he and Jim Mallon not seeing eye-to-eye?
The theatrical feature film attempt, MST 3000 The Movie (trials and tribulations of getting director Jim Mallon?s big budget version of MST to the screen)
Jim Mallon?s genius as producer/director/character
The culture of MST and riffing in general
Modern companies, such as Laugh Tracks, and MST?s influence on them
Mike Nelson as musical composer
The differences of Tom Servo and Crow (difference in style and tone)
Actor Joe Don Baker and MST a perfect marriage
Spy Movies and MST
Monsters and MST
Attempts at creating continuity within the ?host segments??what worked what didn?t (the difference in continuity between Comedy Central episodes and Sc Fi channel shows)
Cast Characters (e.g., Mad Scientists, Evil Mothers, and weird aliens)
Which were the most consistently funny seasons?
The hardcore statistical analysis found on websites by crazed fans (e.g., riffs per show and other weird statistical data?reasons for these weird
statistical things)
MST and the Web?how did the Internet help create such a rabid following?
Popular music and MST
Mary Jo Pehl, Bridgett Nelson, and the influence of women writers on MST
MST fan culture and university culture
The MST influence on the show Freaks and Geeks
TV?s Frank and MST and Frank Coniff?s role in America?s Funniest Home Videos
The ?more? adult humor of Cinematic Titanic and Rifftrax compared to MST
Compare and contrast the cancellation of MST from Comedy Central to that of Sc Fi Channel. Why were both attempts to save the show unsuccessful?
Mike Nelson?novelist, writer of essays and children?s books, and general Pop Culture Guru
Kevin Murphy At the movies??? Why did he do it?
Bill Corbett as a playwright and performer
MST and Tape Trading Culture (Keep circulating the tapes some of the MST episodes admonished the fans; compare this with Grateful Dead tape trading or other official sanctioned bootlegging. Why did this type of sanctioned bootlegging endear the fans but infuriate the ?suits??)
The Shorts: Why are they some of the best?
The rarest episode of all: The MST CD-ROM video game.
Good Idea or not? (MST, Rifftrax, sitcom, television, episode and cartoon riffing)
The lost episodes of MST: The Green Slime, Thunderbirds etc., Where are they? What were they like? Will we ever see them??
Crow, Tom Servo and the bots in Popular Culture: Non-MST appearances (which continue to this day)
MST and the First Amendment to the Constitution: Why did the show always thank the authors of the First Amendment? How did the show use it? Did it push boundaries constitutionally???
KTMA and MST: Just how could a show like this get on cable access television in the first place? How did it become a movement? Were they are glimpses of the greater things to come in those earlier episodes or not? Torgo and Ortega: Cult Figures and MST why so popular with fans? The worse a movie is, the funnier and better an episode of MST: Why is that?
During the early years of MST, it was watched by many families who gathered around the television to see each new episode. Why did it particularly resonate with children? Did the show project a sense of wonder that appealed to children? Given that many of the jokes were very sophisticated, how is it that children related to the show?
Monty Python and MST?compare and contrast writing styles and ideas
Paul Chaplin unsung writer on MST
The MST writers were, and continue to be, masters of Popular Culture in all its forms (film, music, politics, etc.)
Movie references and MST?cultural and historical implications
MST terms and the vernacular (e.g., ?Movie Sign?, ?Poopie?, ?Huzzah?) and their adaptation into everyday language)
What was Josh Weinstein?s role in those early MST episodes and his post MST career as producer?
Cataloging and Metadata related to MST3K and libraries

These are just a few ideas, off the top of my head, about topics that one could write about. I?m sure there are plenty of others. Please note this will be a scholarly collection. Essays should be 5,000-9,000 words in length (including endnotes and bibliography). The editor will send out a style manual to potential writers at a later date, which must be followed exactly. Please keep in mind that these essays will be Peer Reviewed, and any essay that is not up to standard may not see final publication.

Please email me if you have any questions.
Date for Abstracts is October 2009, but can start taking them now
Final Articles due January 2010

Robert Weiner Humanities Librarian, Texas Tech University
Rob.weiner@ttu.edu
Rweiner5@sbcglobal.net

5:51pm: things to do today:
done! sleep for ten hours
done! yummy breakfast
done! burn 1000 calories
done! walk a mile to campus with the loudest most violent hiccups ever (so sorry i scared you, fellow pedestrians!)
done! type up three pages of notes/outline-y stuff pertaining to historic house tours
done! return library books that i've had since before christmas break

still to do, i think, is some laundry, some dishes, and some making up of a new to do list for tomorrow and next week.

since i have only a mon-wed classroom obligation and next week is spring break, i can safely say that i am currently on spring break until two mondays from now. except i am in my quasi-office and getting way more done on my spring break than i have in the last week.

the crocuses are not only up (in front of the apartment building) but are beginning to bloom.
perhaps i will ride my bike to work tomorrow morning. i come home after dark but i take my bike home on the subway in that case because it is just plain silly to ride after dark in this city if you don't have to.

perhaps z and i will take a weekend trip somewhere around the eastycoasty area during our not-very-overlapping spring breaks. then i will be in new orleans in early april for a conference. i've not been there before and there are dozens of excellent reasons to look forward to a psuedo-vacation there. my mother and sister and niece1 are coming to visit in mid-may for a long weekend.

this year i thought it would be fun to keep track of all the books i read for the year. i started last year but lost steam as i tend to read a lot of books for homework-like purposes but i tend to read bits and pieces for predatory reasons and this felt untrue to the list and somewhere along the line i neglected to keep track. but then i decided to keep track of the movies i watched, and then i added television shows of which we watched a full season, then i decided to add in travel destinations, new non-fastfood restaurants, museums that we visit, and plays or concerts, too. we shall see what things look like at the end of the year!

back to work!

1:03pm: recently, we've watched both version of dawn of the dead. the primary difference (besides the obvious societal optimism/pessimism) is the game changing speed of the zombies. i would like to her your collective opinions on this issue. romero's 1960s and 1970s zombies are the old style of slow moving and shuffling zombie. in the last few decades, there has been a shift towards either real-time speed or super-fast animalistic speed that is featured in the 2004 dawn of the dead. were the zombies fast or slow in shawn of the dead? in 28 days later? i would like to see a chart that graphs zombie speed over the last 100 years (this is probably a job for s4). would it go up continuously or would it zig zag? in any case, why the shift to speedy undead? canonical? societal response to the general world situation? genre innovation for innovation's sake? please discuss. i am not a dedicated zombie movie watcher so i am soliciting all opinions assumingthat most people on my friends list have seen more zombie movies that i have.


relatedly (no, really, it is), i was at barnes and noble with a coworker yesterday to pick up a gift for her nephew (he asked for a book specifically, good job, kid) and while in the kids section i noticed the american girls series. these came out when i was just slightly too old for them so i never read them but i recall that there had been several girls added in the series since the beginning. (for those unfamiliar, these are elementary school level books of historical fiction with a small series of books centering on each of a handfull of american girls in different time periods; there is Pioneer era Kristen in Minnesota, Colonial era Felicity, Victorian era Samantha, etc etc.) over the years, several girls have been added to expand the series. WWII era Molly, then an early 1800s era California girl and a depression era girl and a native american girl. it is a reputable series because they don't butcher the history and they are centered on everyday life in that era and not on extraordinary vents in most cases. i saw a new book in barnes and noble and asked my coworker (who is younger and also buys more kids books for her family members) "who's this julie character?" "oh, she's new. its set int he seventies." color me surprised. this impresses me on two counts. one, the temptation is great to set historical books in the 1960s if you are choosing a post war era. ii think the dear america series even went that route. most of the pop cultural "historicizing" of our past stops short of the 1970s with the (large) exception of things like that 70s show. the 60s are viewed as a watershed moment in history (especially '68) and the 70s are simply not thought of in any such way. I,, however, think of the 70s as a pivotal era in american history and would love to see it explored in a way that fits this view. most u.S. history courses blatantly stop at watergate and treat this as a coda to the 1960s and thenthe semester ends. this drives me crazy! notonly are the 1970s and 1980s important but they are long over; there are no students in those classes that remember the 80s as sanything more than the decade in which they went to kindegarten. the institutional neglect of the everything after the 60s needs to stop. i am pleased that the american girl series did not fall into this trap. second, they seemed (from the books' descriptions) to address some of the larger cultural changes in the era without reorting to Julie's Watergate Adventure" or something equally stupid. the character is dealing with divorce, title IX, and other changes that would have amde a difference in the everyday lives of a girl in that era. the series consistent responsibility is a pleasant surprise and i am happy that the world is moving forward, even if it has to be done through fiction books written for ten year old girls.

7:25am: for anterastilis:
http://www.amazon.com/Pride-Prejudice-Zombies-Classic-Ultraviolent/dp/1594743347/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1233162321&sr=8-1

5:24am: a51abductee and I were eating pistachios the other day and were talking about pistachio ice cream. when is the last time you had or saw pistachio ice cream? we decided that this was one of a handful of ice cream flavors that can now be associated with old people because the younger generation has been conditioned to expect other kinds of ice cream technology. the best old-person ice cream flavor: spumoni. i don't even think i have ever had spumoni. what are some other flavors you might designate as old-person ice cream?

8:28am: this is partly for bohemianrapsody and her love of her 1980s years in L.A. hanging with hair bands:

the super-angsty-teen-show Gossip Girl* is going to try to spin-off "the generation before" instead of the "generation after (a la 90210 after Beverly Hills, 90210). A flashback-intensive May 11th episode will serve as pilot for a potential spinoff series focusing on one of the main character's mother and black-sheep aunt when the pair were hot young adults living away from their parents in hair-band-happy 1980s Los Angeles.

i find this intriguing on a couple of different levels. have there been adaptations of prequel/origin stories before? do tell.

I totally watch gossip girl. I require at least one teen-angst source at any given time and since the powers that be have seen fit to first destroy Veronica Mars and then cnacel it like a mercy killing, Gossip Girl will have to do.

9:28am: today at work i was chatting with a young (early 20s) woman from central florida. somehow the topic of bike taxis came up and i told her that i've always thought being a bike taxi driver would be an awesome job. she countered with "when i was little my "awesome job" wish was to be a weeki wachee mermaid." she still consideres it each year when the time comes around for her to decide that sort of thing.
what was she talking about? this:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iWYnrr8lAdU
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HIMI4qktOSY
http://www.roadsideamerica.com/story/2068
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G52eNM4wsaY

also, i was thinking about some of the annoying episodes of globe trekker we've watched lately 9there is one host who drives us nuts because she is such a typical blundering american about everything she does) and how some travelers go through their journeys interacting with others as if they are just that-- "others" instead of fellow human beings. that led me to think of the various ways that friends of mine have found to break the ice with strangers in a different place, often when they do not speak the same language.

for example, andy kedl brings a length of string to whatever countries he travels through and plays string games (cat's cradle, etc) in such fun places as the subway and no language is needed. he meets people, learns new string-things, and has some great experiences and makes connections.* tell me a string story, andy!

my own somewhat less-interactive version is my penchant for taking pictures of other people (with their cameras, so that a whole group/family can be in a vacation photo). i only have a photo of me at the badlands because someone offered to take a picture and i still remember the somewhat stilted negotiations that led to a stranger taking a group shot in ronda, spain. that's a great picture and a gift from a stranger. i like to be able to offer people that same sort of gift when i am out and about (i also do this at home, as well, because there are a lot of tourists in this city and i feel bad for the poor relative who is always not pictured).

in what ways do you choose to interact or not when you are among strangers in a strange land)

* andy is such an awesome traveler that i once brought him to the 1870s and not only did he bring his string with him and taught and learned some string games but but he also ended up teaching a farmer how to splice rope.

6:40pm: posted just so that nicholay can be sorry she doesn't live in my city:

MIT EVENTS: Mystery Science Theater 3000 clips and shorts on Sunday, Jan. 18th. (Note on the 17th, Joel Hodgson will shows clips and discuss the show. $5 suggested donation. See MIT events calendar for details.)

6:45am: i am sick!
it took an entire week of sharing space with the already-sick a51abductee to catch the plague he likely got (via me in the first place) from billmurray8 and dcontaminant.

i was just watching film of dinah washington's "ain't nobody's business" as sung by gladys knight, chaka khan, and etta james. first gladys sings and it is good. then chaka khan takes a turn and next to gladys she sounds just a touch watery. then it is etta's turn and its over. seriously, the ability to make gladys knight sound like an amateur is overkill but i'm not complaining.
discussion topic: beyonce knowles playing etta james in a movie- horrible? tolerable? good fit?

and the original "mojo working" by ann cole: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sP0crYPCHV0
i have, however, an inexplicable soft spot for the canned heat version
and an even bigger soft spot for the surahoolies version played at countless red carpet shows throughout the late nineties.

oh, no! it's bobby darin's version of mojo! Is that a xylophone! oh my god you have to click this link!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dq6cSepmXXE

10:32pm: i like the plain aesthetic of this performance: all band members in a line with their respective giant amps behind them. the organization of it captures the frenetic pace of the music nicely
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T8__EwAT8VM
the ventures are so dorky. they are one of my favorite bands for all of the following reasons. they play lots of instrumentals, they play surf music, they play lots of covers, and they try to put some fun into their performances with tiny bits of obviously rehearsed temptations-like steps but always manage to look like a group of overly talented sixth graders at a talent show dressed up as their fathers. here's a video of them from the 70s just to prove they didn' look like a polka-band for their entire careers: nevermind, they still looked like a polka band with long hair and giant sideburns...aaaand back to looking like fathers in teh 1980s: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T8__EwAT8VM

1:20pm: Since it rained for about three day straight, some of my workday yesterday was spent in 300 year old basements monitoring sump pumps and sweeping excess water towards the drain. Not exactly stressful but very frustrating when you can see water actively trickling in from various places.

I was on subway last night with the entire United Nations. Okay, it was the entire Model UN from Harvard, but that's a lot of countries to fit onto one green-line train car. I was between Algeria and Peru.

At the theater last night, the stage manager had his 10 year old daughter and her sleeping-over friend at the show. Pre-show, she was having some fun by showing her friend how it was possible to make it from one end of the house to the other by crawling through the legs of the director's chairs that make up the center row. This is somewhere between spelunking and basic training belly crawling and she was mocking the Army commercials by providing her own voiceover, "My parents said I was strong...now I'm Army strong." To which her friend replied, "Your parents said you were weird...now you're Army weird!"

4:01pm: for billmurray8:

http://filmdrunk.uproxx.com/?p=7130

1:40pm: attention!
very important!

if you have helped, in any way shape or form, to orchestrate, implement or solve any part of nicholay's birthday puzzle quest over the last 6 to 9 months, there is an important event tomorrow that you should attend.

if you know what i am talking about, then chances are you are an agent, a conspirator, a fellow travel, and you definitely go. you may actually get to see some more of what you have been hearing about or had helped to create. (there are about a hundred of you, all told, so get on it!) if you don't have a clue what i am talking about but still know who nicholay is, then you should, also.

nicholay has reached a point in her puzzle quest where she has been summoned to the following show and instructed to bring everything she has accumulated so far. perhaps this is the end for our heroine? maybe this is just another checkpoint? maybe the cake is a lie?

The Danger Board's Thanksgiving Leftover Show
[11/28/08] When you get done shopping, be sure to come down to the Kitty Cat Klub (seriously!) on Friday night to see The Danger Board's incredible Thanksgiving Leftovers Show. Possibly with mashed potatoes. Probably with local wunder-band Marvelle. Definitely with guitars (and music).

12:40pm: you know those advertisements for classmates.com that say "SHE married HIM!?!" and have two yearbook photos of two people who do not look like they would ever match? a friend of from high school contacted me through facebook and her situation is just like those ads. i thought to myself "she married who?" and then she said she had a fourteen yr old and a ten yr old. "wha?!" between things like this and today's undergraduates being born when i was in junior high, i can no longer even stretch the definition of young to cover me.

my bond-obsessed friend at tufts invited z and i out to see the new bond movie last saturday with her housemates. while it was enjoyable if obviously deficient in plot, it wasn't until i read a review of a completely unrelated movie that i realized what i was really missing from the experience. the review was celebrating a healthy dose of camp and humor in a movie where one would not expect it.

this latest bond movie doesn't have a sense of humor at all, in my opinion. since when do we need bond to be so gritty-realistic that there is no humor, no style, no reason to like him at all? even the latest batman movie did this. batman was so hyper-real-guy that the storyline completely unfurled. i didn't root for batman in that parody of a movie and i did not find myself rooting for bond in quantum of solace. there was never any reason for me to. he was so real that he was just one of us. a news item. so what. z put it best when he said "he's just a thug." there was never a good reason given for his stupid behavior and overblown grudges.* there was never a single iota of reasoning provided for women being attracted to him. all the suave mystery is gone in this installment. not every superhero needs to be de-suited, people.

now, i realize that there is a cultural reason behind media. there was a reason that super-spy bond was written into existence how and when he was, a reason behind how he operated, and there is a reason behind the trends of who is bond's enemy, where he operates, and what the big-crime is (in this one is was global ecological ruination, how predictable). so why do we need our** decades old heroes to suddenly get so serious and real and show us how they became who they are? are we as a culture (western or american) suddenly trying to go back and figure out how we bacame this way? are we looking for an origin story of the u.s. and its role in the world? i think so. i think we are trying to write a prequel to our own era, trying to explain why we are who we are by showing the poor messed up men inside the thuggish worldpower superhero mask. you don't fool me, movie rewrites, we can't go back and claim victimhood willy nilly.

* this movie does not work as a stand alone movie. if i hadn't seen casino royale i would have had zero idea of what was going on and even less reason to think that daniel craig was playing the hero of the film.
** and by "our" i'm referencing mostly american spheres even though bond is uk-issue because hollywood is where the media is shaped

1:00am: i wish i could have this in my mp3 player to love and pet and sing along to its catchy refrain. and i'm not even that big of a star wars fan compared to my friend-group of mega-fans:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lk5_OSsawz4

now, you may be thinking to yourself: that is the dorkiest thing ever!
NOT SO!
behold, this is easily more dorky by some unnamed exponential power:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=79aQBVDZ6rk

they are quite known for their song choices, for eaxmple:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UyqpjkCwEI4&NR=1,
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KyaB5jKuZ60

but why reference the west coast when my own campus is a vortex of weird a capella singing?
the top a capella group at my own school, the amalgamates:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4pIwysGXbzg (the one on the right is one of my fellow grad students)

there are easily a dozen a capella groups at my university,
there are males groups such as the all male beelzebubs seen here doing
bringing sexy back:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=59z_bXKuv9E

there is the all female jackson jills:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NtnbAgq31a0

there is an endless amount of instrument free singing on my campus. nothing says nerdy more than a dozen suit-wearing dorks interpreting the pokemon theme in perfect harmony for an enthusiastic crowd! that star wars guy seems so normal now!

in totally unrelated news: i saw 433's doppelganger working at the H&M in downtown crossing. this was not just an instance of me seeing someone that vaguely looked like 433! this guy had the same hairstyle (sans blue), same build, same eyes, same mouth complete with same smirk!
433'd doppelganger has full sleeve tattoos, though, so this is how we will tell then apart of they try to trick us!

8:44pm: baking-without-recipes experiment #2

with this batch of cookies i decided on some additives (chocolate chips and crushed cashews bits). added more vanilla than necessary because the bottle was almost empty and the copyright on the label said 1986, so i decided to end its tenure in my supply cupboard. also, i forgot to add any salt.
butter, white sugar, vanilla, flour, baking powder (out of soda), banana, choc chips, nuts, a splash of water

because we rarely have eggs in our fridge, i usually leave them out. experiment #1 was delicious with no eggs and no egg substitute, but this time i added a banana as a binding agent as it is sometimes suggested as a way to sub for eggs.

first batch was baked for about 14 minutes somewhere above 400 degrees. they turned out okay but they had a noticeable banana taste. the cookies seemed like they would have been better without the chips and nuts, though, as if the tastes just didn't merge.

second batch was much better. the dough had been in the fridge for a day. i baked them at a lower temp (375ish). while i set the timer for 16 minutes, i failed to start said timer. when i finished watching the tv show that was playing in the corner of my screen, i suddenly heard the ove fire up and realized that the cookies were in there. they probably cooked for over a half hour. they turned out perfectly done. they had spread more than the first batch, the chips and nuts seemed to belong. the edges were a little crunchier than i'd personally prefer but i'd personally prefer cookies in dough form if given the choice so that detail doesn't matter.

the banana taste was not evident at all in the second batch (better cooking time and temp eliminated it). i don't think that the consistancy was improved over binding-agent-free batches, however, so i wouldn't choose to add it again.

recipeless baking (now with 100% more mystery as to temperature and timing!) is much more fun that regular baking.
i encourage my baking minded friends (pants? others?) to bake without a recipe and report your findings. it's not only fun but full of suspense!

11:44pm: a51abductee and i were watching an episode of our favorite travel show "travelscope" this evening and i said that the host was so awesome that if we had a dinner party, he's be a great guest. then i thought of who would make up the best "PBS Dinner Party."..
we decided the must-haves would be
Joseph Rosendo from Travelscope* http://www.travelscope.net/
Martin Yan from Martin Yan's Chinatowns and Yan Can Cook http://www.yancancook.com/
if dead people are coming then Mr. Rogers and Bob Ross, for sure.
We are also fans of Gwen Ifill and a couple of the supporting characters on Hometime.
Who would you invite to you PBS Dinner Party?

Travelscope closes each show with a Mark Twain quote:'Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry and narrow-mindedness'

6:47pm: via boing_boing today, there was this small item about differing understandings of intentional behavior.

Do people with Asperger Syndrome understand intentional actions in a different way than people without Asperger Syndrome? Edouard Machery, a philosopher of psychology and an experimental philosopher in the Department of History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Pittsburgh, says they do:

Consider the following probes:

The Free-Cup Case: Joe was feeling quite dehydrated, so he stopped by the local smoothie shop to buy the largest sized drink available. Before ordering, the cashier told him that if he bought a Mega-Sized Smoothie he would get it in a special commemorative cup. Joe replied, ‘I don't care about a commemorative cup, I just want the biggest smoothie you have.' Sure enough, Joe received the Mega-Sized Smoothie in a commemorative cup. Did Joe intentionally obtain the commemorative cup?

The Extra-Dollar Case: Joe was feeling quite dehydrated, so he stopped by the local smoothie shop to buy the largest sized drink available. Before ordering, the cashier told him that the Mega-Sized Smoothies were now one dollar more than they used to be. Joe replied, ‘I don't care if I have to pay one dollar more, I just want the biggest smoothie you have.' Sure enough, Joe received the Mega-Sized Smoothie and paid one dollar more for it. Did Joe intentionally pay one dollar more?

You surely think that paying an extra dollar was intentional, while getting the commemorative cup was not. So do most people. But Tiziana Zalla and I [machery] have found that if you had Asperger Syndrome, a mild form of autism, your judgments would be very different: You would judge that paying an extra-dollar was not intentional, just like getting the commemorative cup (Zalla and Machery ms).

I don't 'surely' think anything of the sort. I completely disagree with the majority here and agree with the supposedly asperger -affected understanding of the situation.
Not only do I think this psuedo logic puzzle is ridiculous (as well as the oddball academic department that it came from) but I cannot actually see why anyone would think that the two situations differed at all in regards to the intentions of the action.
Please tell me what you think of this.

9:44am: i'm quite enjoying other peoples' description of post-election euphoria
i especially liked hearing about the crowds in the streets in birdfigment's D.C. and the reactions of spidertangle's random neighbors in amsterdam.
my neighborhood: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K5cnMUG4dYQ
the band is one of the activist street bands one would see in the Honk! festival. the street is busy but residential. it was a slightly different crowd celebrating than when the red sox win the world series.

my enthusiasm for hope and change, sorry HOPE and CHANGE, notwithstanding, i was a little off-put by the emphasis that this was solely a black victory for and by black people (without using the word black, of course). yes, yes, i understand the great milestone achieved here and if someone had asked me three years ago whether i ever thought we'd have a non-white (or female, for that matter) presiddent in my lifetime, i would have said no. this can be counted as a move forward for many people who are not black, so, media strategists, stop trying to claim that the fight is over and now there is no more racism and black people are totally re-enfranchised with a pat on the back to say, "whoa, you sure had to work hard to get back up here, but we knew you could do it!"

flags everywhere! it's just like an iron-curtain national parade! branding and image is extremely imporatnt.
a51abductee pointed out that the part of the victory speech that emphasized that "we will always be the UNITED states of america" was the same as gorbachev's 1991-era speech where he emphasized "we will always be the UNION of soviet socialist..."

it has been difficult to get anything useful done in this past week. the stress of the election has compounded my own natural inability to deal with stress (of which there is much this time of the school year). this post is a five minute break between "holy crap, this deadline is getting closer" and "must. write. faster." erg.

7:50pm: blech. someone in our building is doing something hideous and major with drain cleaner or bleach. the smell has come up through our kitchen sink drain and filled our kitchen and dining room with fumes. it smelled like a swimming pool before we opened the windows. i am reporting this from the least polluted room in the house. double blech.

we voted today in the early afternoon. our wait was about an hour and fifteen minutes. reports from neighborhood livejournalers put that wait time at about typical. the lines were a little longer mid-morning when i went to campus.

in the very-democrat state in which i reside, the ballot is quite hilarious. there are multiple choices for president, of course. there is long-standing democrat john kerry up against two rivals. the rest of the representatives and whatnot? uncontested democrats to the bottom of the page. i am more interested, like most people, in the rest of the country's voting patterns, anyway.

6:40pm: If you live in Minnesota, remember to vote yes for the Clean Water, Land and Legacy Amendment. This is PH’s official endorsement for the election season.
http://yesformn.org/