Private Universe

Teaching Shadow to drive, stages 6 & 7

2011-09-12T11:50:00.000-07:00

Now that he's used to the idea of weight and the feeling of shafts, he's almost ready to drive in the cart. We gave him some exposure to the sounds of the cart next, pulling it around in front of him. We also had him trot along behind the cart with Liz driving an experienced pony and me holding Shadow's line.

After that, we hitched him up to a cart himself:
I'm still ground driving in this picture, letting him get used to the cart - and letting me work up some nerve to actually get in. (He's yanking on the lines very rudely in this shot...)

And here we are! For the early attempts, we had Liz walking along holding Shadow's head. We have just started taking very short little drives without her as a safety net. I think what's limiting us at the moment is more me being brave enough, rather than Shadow knowing enough!

Teaching Shadow to drive, stages 4 & 5

2011-09-10T11:41:00.000-07:00

After Shadow was ground driving reliably, we went through two stages designed to prepare him for pulling a cart.

Tire:

We hitched him to an old car tire to let him feel what it's like to pull weight. The rope trailing behind the tire was originally there so that Liz could pick the tire up and give him a break, when he was first learning.

That's Baxter following, and farm dog Daisy supervising.

Shaft trainer:The shaft trainer gets the pony used to the feel of shafts on either side. This step was a real challenge for Shadow. He would wiggle one way and Oh No That Pole Is Touching Me!! so he would wiggle over the other way and Oh NO! Pole On That Side Too!!! He also got worried about the shafts coming on and off. He finally got the hang of pushing into the shaft with his shoulder when he had to turn.

Bax thinks that these are all just odd ways of taking a walk.

Teaching Shadow to drive, stages 1 , 2, & 3

2011-09-08T11:24:00.000-07:00

For the Kittitas County Fair, I made a poster for Shadow's door with some photos of the stages of training we have taken him through in the past year or so.

Thought I'd post the pictures up to show all of y'all that couldn't make it to the fair. Thanks to Shadow's owner Liz Lasell-McCosh for taking these pictures of him and me!

Lunging:
We are in a round pen, Shadow is moving around me in a circle. We practiced verbal commands (Walk, Trot, and Whoa) and he learned to wear a surcingle (belly band) and a bit and bridle.

Ground driving:

We are still in the round pen, but now I have two lines running from the bit, through rings on the surcingle, to my hands. This is how we taught Shadow to steer and stop from the bit.

Outside the pen:
Here we are still ground driving but we are outside the pen. Now that he steers and stops (fairly) reliably we are going around the farm and up and down the driveway. He's also wearing a real driving harness in this shot, what he will use to pull the cart. Special thanks to canine assistant Baxter.

tips from Yoga Anatomy

2011-08-27T17:52:00.000-07:00

What I learned from the book Yoga Anatomy, even though I don't know the names of the muscles.

"Diaphragmatic" breathing is a misnomer. You pretty much can't breathe at all without using the diaphragm. The choice you have between breathing into the ribcage/chest (using abs to stabilize the belly) or breathing into the belly (stabilizing the ribcage).

The lumbar curve in your lower back is a unique trait of humans. You pretty much only need a lumbar curve if you want to walk bipedally most of the time. Babies are not born with it; their spines have one long curve from neck to tailbone. The S-shaped, secondary lumbar curve develops gradually between the ages of 1 and 10 years. Will have to remember this if I ever teach yoga to kids younger than 10!

In balancing postures, it is best to breath quietly. Deep "yoga breathing" just disrupts your balance. If it is hard to breath quietly, you may have muscles working (and using up oxygen) that don't need to be working. Relax muscles that are not part of the posture.

When sitting for meditation, hips should be above knees, in order to create a neutral spine (that gentle S-curve). That is part of the point of things like lotus posture. But note that you can get the same effect by sitting cross-legged, with your butt on a cushion. Killing your knees to get into lotus seems unnecessary.

Stretches should be felt in the "belly" of the muscle, the widest part, not at the joints or the places where muscles attach. If you are (say) seated, with straight legs, and reaching for your toes, and you feel the stretch (as I do) in the backs of the knees, one option is to bend the knees slightly, place something to support them, and see if that moves the feeling of stretch into the belly of the muscle.

Janu sirsasana: one leg stretched out in front, the other leg bent with the sole of the foot against the thigh of the straight leg, fold forward. The safest position for the bent knee is fully bent. If it is only partially bent, be aware that your forward fold is putting extra stress on the cushioning inside the knee. For the same reason, cow face posture is risky on the knees; be gentle when knees are only partially bent.

A feeling of tightness in one part of the body may actually be caused by tightness elsewhere. The place you are feeling it may not be the place you need to stretch! Guess we better stretch everything, not get too focused.

Looking at a human skull from the side, the center of gravity is under the TMJ joint, right in front of your ear. But the actual support of the skull is where it sits on top of your spine, an inch or two farther back. No wonder it is so easy to let your head fall forward and hunch over your keyboard.

Sometimes you can really tell that humans only recently evolved to walk bipedally, and we are not quite perfectly adapted for it yet.

Hatha and raja yoga

2011-08-23T14:57:00.000-07:00

I recently spent some time reading Hatha Yoga Pradipika, one of the most respected and comprehensive books on hatha yoga, and it prompted some thoughts about hatha and raja yoga.

Hatha and raja are two different yoga paths - not the only two, but two major ones. Most of the schools and branches of yoga that we have in the west today fall under hatha or raja traditions.

As is often the case with "competing" or rival schools of thought, they each have a sort of cartoon caricature view of the other side.

Hatha is caricatured as yoga that is purely physical, only caring about physical purification, postures, and breathing, not caring about meditation or ethical living until the body is "perfected" first (yeah, right...)

Raja is caricatured as yoga that starts beginners out with the first principle of "do no harm" and won't let them progress to do a single asana until they have "mastered" living without causing harm (yeah, right...)

After going through teacher training in a raja tradition, and then reading this extensive book about the hatha tradition, I have the impression that the two schools have a lot more in common than they have differences.

Hatha does start beginners out with physical purification and postures. But the main concern is that they do not want students "battling" or struggling with their thoughts while trying to sit in meditation. Focusing on the physical is (I think) meant to be more accessible as a starting point. Unfortunately the Pradipika book is not very consistent about telling you exactly where to start. It gives some purification exercises (shatkarmas) that are supposed to be the starting point, but several of them are very very scary (I am NOT going to swallow a strip of cloth and then vomit it back up... thanks anyway) and the book recommends those "for advanced practitioners," so are you supposed to do just the ones that don't scare you? But even for some of those there are caveats and warnings. I'm not scared of nauli, which seems to me like a good workout for the abs. But the book says before doing it, you must learn to do uddiyana bandha. But it also says that all the bandhas are things you learn AFTER you master the earlier stages. In general it's pretty confusing as to what the earliest stages are supposed to be, which makes the whole project seem confusing and overwhelming. Of course you are meant to be studying the book under the supervision of a hatha yoga guru.

Raja does place a lot of importance on the first principle of non-harming, but the way you practice that principle is by keeping it in mind *while* you go about practicing asanas, breathing, meditation, and whatever. As my teacher said, raja practitioners do "everything all the time" - there is no progression of "mastering" asanas before you even try meditating. Good thing, too, because the idea of perfecting *any* aspect of yoga before trying any other aspect is just loopy.

Since you are supposed to do all the aspects all the time, the beginner at raja yoga can start wherever she or he is drawn to start. Want to do postures? learn to meditate? Great. Don't have time for a daily practice? You could start by living with the ethical guidelines for a while - see if you can live your daily life while doing less harm, telling more truth, and so on.

In the advanced stages of practice, hatha and raja yoga have the same goal. The Pradipika acknowledges this towards the end. The idea is to attain a mental state of oneness, where you no longer perceive a difference between yourself and the rest of the universe.

Critic brain and creator brain

2011-08-21T10:00:00.000-07:00

So as a follow-up to the last post, how can you tune into your body's feedback and make your yoga practice your own? It is difficult, because different people do this in different ways. Body feedback can be in the form of mental pictures or messages, or you might feel a particular body part calling for attention (with pain or tension), or you might just get a hunch or a feeling that the next posture should be this.

I asked my teacher about how I could explain this better, and she helped me develop these thoughts.

Writers know about having critic mind and creator mind. Critic mind is the mode of thinking that says this is good, that is awful, here's how it could be improved. Creator mind is the mode where you make things, write things, have new ideas. Writers know that if you accidentally turn on critic mind while you are trying to write, you get nowhere. Critic mind is fantastic when it is time for editing, and it is fantastic for reading other people's work and learning from it. But it stinks at creating. Critic mind is rational, clear-thinking, and has reasons for things. Creator mind is artistic and intuitive, and sometimes is comfortable doing things without knowing the reason.

Yoga practitioners have two mental modes too, a rational and an intuitive. So if you have a yoga practice that you do the same every day, and you designed it carefully to stretch and strengthen all the major muscles, that would be doing yoga in rational mode. If you have a practice where you listen to your body's feedback and improvise from one posture to the next, you are in intuitive/creative mode.

Our culture seems to place a lot of value on rational mode, which is why some writers get blocked. When critical/logical mind never shuts up, creative/intuitive mind never gets to talk. Creative mind is also the one that takes feedback from the body.

There is a need for both minds in yoga practice. If you get stuck in critical/rational mode, you miss one of the great gifts of yoga, which is the chance to work on your mind-body relationship. If you get stuck in intuitive mode only, you can fall into the trap of only doing postures that are easy and feel good, never challenging yourself with things that feel "hard."

This (my teacher explains) is why yoga teachers get so mixed up in front of class sometimes: can't remember which is right and which is left... or refer to the "palms of your feet" and the "soles of your hands"... can't describe a perfectly simple move like "raise your left hand off the mat." We aren't flakes (well, not all of us). We are trying to be in rational and intuitive mode at the same time, and that scrambles up your mind a bit. You have to talk the students into the posture, which requires rational mode (here's how you do it, do things in this order, and here are the reasons why) and then observe feedback from your own body and your students, which requires intuitive mode(how does this feel? will we need a break next, or a counter posture? are they stable and comfortable, or just being polite?) Then once you have the feedback, rational mode has to kick back in (my students felt some wrist pain in that posture, what should I do next and how should I adapt the rest of the class to take care of their wrists?)

So if you are stuck in your practice, this might be one way to determine what is missing. Are you thinking mostly in terms of "here's what I do and why" or mostly in terms of "listening," feeling, or intuiting your body's feedback?

Making your practice your own

2011-08-19T09:57:00.000-07:00

So, while talking to a friend a couple of weeks ago, I commented that doing yoga teacher training had changed the way I did my home practice.

I have been doing a morning yoga practice for years, but for most of that time I did the same routine day after day, or else I consciously chose and planned a change to it here and there. These days, I am more likely to improvise my practice based on what postures feel good at the time, and what goals I'm working on.

One of the gifts of yoga is that it can change your relationship to your body. Most of the time we shut off feedback from our bodies, and ignore or power through any discomfort. In yoga you can change that adversarial "mind-over-matter" relationship and give your body a chance to speak up and ask for what it wants. If your back is twinging after a particular posture, you can alter the rest of your morning practice to take care of it, by doing some relaxing work, even if you "planned" to do more strengthening.

It is hard to establish those lines of two-way communication, but once they start to open up, you begin to get all sorts of useful information about what your body likes and dislikes: foods, exercises, positions that you sit in at the computer, all sorts of things.

One of my teaching goals is to get my students started on the project of listening to their bodies, which (sadly) you don't always get to do in a beginning yoga class. For example, I would like to offer my students a lot of choices in class, like showing them two or three variations of a posture and asking them to find the one that feels the best to them. Oftentimes when yoga teachers do this, they label the posture variations as "beginning," "intermediate," and "advanced," which I think is counterproductive. You don't want your mind making the decision, or choosing the word it thinks best applies to you. "Oh, I'm a beginner, so I'd better not even try the other versions"... or worse yet... "I'm going to show everyone how talented I am by doing all the advanced versions!" You want your body taking charge, and your body doesn't care about the labels. It might like the "beginning" version of one posture, and the "intermediate" version of another.

I am hoping to short-circuit that problem by offering (say) two versions of the posture, and having them try both, while I ask, which feels better for your body?

Gary did a Reverse Namaste easily, the first time he tried, while after ten years of regular yoga practice, I am not even close to being able to. I'm not sure that "advanced yoga student" is a meaningful phrase. Or at least, its meaning has little to do with physical strength or flexibility. A dancer or gymnast might be able to do every yoga posture in the book perfectly on day one, but if they don't have that friendly, open communication between mind and body, I'd hesitate to call them "advanced." Yoga asanas are for getting to know your body and what it wants, not for looking pretty like the Yoga Journal models.

Sun dog

2011-07-03T08:42:00.000-07:00

I see it's been over two months since I posted a cute picture of Baxter. Let me fix that.

Website feedback?

2011-05-31T15:13:00.000-07:00

The website for my freelance commercial writing business is up, and I've incorporated some useful feedback from my brother strangething. If you have a minute, take a look and tell me what you think.

All feedback welcome, including simply "It looks fine/weird/whatever on my computer."

http://jaimewells.com/

Next step is going to be portfolio building. I thought I might approach some of the nonprofits in town and see if they could use some pro bono writing services, in exchange for letting me use the work as a sample...

teaching statement

2011-05-14T10:33:00.000-07:00

I have a sort of clarity about teaching yoga that I never had about teaching college philosophy. I have a clear sense of the kind of students I want and the content I want to teach them.

I hate the image of a yoga class with a super thin, super flexible teacher up front in spandex, while each student tries to out-do the person on the next mat. The people I want to teach are the ones who are the least athletic and the most out of touch with their bodies. Maybe I could advertise Yoga For the Non-Athlete. I think my own average-to-low level of flexibility is going to be an asset when teaching those folks - my version of the posture won't be totally different from theirs.

So many of my friends say that they can't go to a yoga class until they get better at yoga, or get into better shape, and that really depresses me. Yoga is supposed to be about exploring your own mind-body relationship. Being "better at yoga" than someone else isn't about being flexible enough to do the difficult postures just like the models in the Yoga Journal. Being "better at yoga" is being more in tune with what works for your body. Just because someone is super confident about doing headstands or whatever, that doesn't mean she is in tune with her body.

It isn't dance. It isn't gymnastics. It doesn't matter at all whether your version of the posture looks glamorous from the outside. If you focusing on looking like a cool "advanced" yoga student, you aren't doing yoga. If you are focusing on how inflexible and out of shape you look compared to everyone else, you aren't doing yoga. As long as you are hung up on how you look, you can't tune into what your body is telling you.

I want to create a class environment where everyone is able to stop worrying about appearances and actually start doing yoga. I think that'll be easiest with a bunch of out-of-shape beginners. If you already think of yourself as "advanced" then it is really hard to let go of that. I don't want to start out as a teacher by having to beat down everyone's ego.

With luck, teaching this lesson three times a week to my future students will cause it to actually sink into MY head...

Yoga, philosophy, and spooky stuff

2011-05-05T10:23:00.000-07:00

Yoga

Part of what is appealing to me about yoga is the idea of a spiritual path that starts with a list of Things to Do instead of a list of Things to Believe. I like the practical quality, instead of the preachiness that I find in religions sometimes. Yoga invites you to try some techniques (8 limbs of them) and suggests what will happen if you do, but you are not asked to alter your belief system to start out. The goal is a quiet, joyful mind, which is something I can get behind.

Spooky Stuff

Spooky stuff (whether deities, afterlives, energy meridians, chakras, prana) irritates me, not exactly because I disbelieve or think it is nonsense, but I feel like I would just rather not deal with it. I never understood why I was supposed to care so much about whether there is a God or an afterlife. Honestly, I know that is weird, but I just don't feel the drama. Is it really going to make a difference one way or the other, as far as the choices you make *today*?

Philosophy

Philosophers place a lot of value on having a clean, minimalist ontology. By which I mean that you don't introduce new categories or kinds of Stuff to believe in. Different philosophers have different ideas about what categories of Stuff are okay to believe in. But everyone agrees that you'd better have a REALLY good reason to believe in a new category. After all, if you are willing to believe in *any* new categories of Stuff, the sciences would be pretty much destroyed. (Problem: how to reconcile quantum mechanics and relativity? Solution: Physics fairies!!)

Philosophers are also careful about using their own experiences or introspection as evidence. "I can just feel it" is not necessarily evidence. Feelings have to be interpreted, and it is very hard to pick apart the difference between what you are feeling and what interpretation or description you have placed on the feeling. My dissertation topic Charles S. Peirce wrote about this and calls the field "phenomenology."

I can feel the effects of pranayama (yoga breathing exercises). Some ways of breathing are calming and others are energizing. I'm not sure that fact needs to be explained, but if it does, I'm not sure that the best or only explanation requires hauling in a whole lot of theoretical apparatus about energy flows and chakras. Maybe I'll find later that I am wrong about that, and I *do* need the apparatus to interpret what I'm feeling at a more sophisticated level. If so, I might still decide that my interpretation is metaphorical or "storytelling" and is a useful tool for organizing experiences, but not a literal truth.

It's also possible that there is no clear line to be drawn between storytelling/interpreting/organizing experiences versus literal truth. Even processing the the input from our eyes is a certain sort of interpreting that happens without our conscious awareness. Peirce taught me that there is a blind spot right in the middle of your field of vision for each eye, which we don't notice because our brains fill in the gap automatically.

Peirce, from "Questions Concerning Certain Faculties Claimed For Man," (the man was a genius, but catchy titles he did not write) which you can read here if you really want to.

Does the reader know of the blind spot on the retina? Take a number of this journal, turn over the cover so as to expose the white paper, lay it sideways upon the table before which you must sit, and put two cents upon it, one near the left-hand edge, and the other to the right. Put your left hand over your left eye, and with the right eye look steadily at the left-hand cent. Then, with your right hand, move the right-hand cent (which is now plainly seen) towards the left hand. When it comes to a place near the middle of the page it will disappear -- you cannot see it without turning your eye. Bring it nearer to the other cent, or carry it further away, and it will reappear; but at that particular spot it cannot be seen. Thus it appears that there is a blind spot nearly in the middle of the retina; and this is confirmed by anatomy. It follows that the space we immediately see (when one eye is closed) is not, as we had imagined, a continuous oval, but is a ring, the filling up of which must be the work of the intellect. What more striking example could be desired of the impossibility of distinguishing intellectual results from intuitional data, by mere contemplation?

(By "intellectual results" he means interpretation, while "intuitional data" is direct untranslated experience. You might have thought that looking at something and seeing it was a direct experience requiring no interpretation, but look at how much interpretational work your brain is doing, even for something as simple as that...)

Non-spooky stuff

I place a lot of value on self-study after my experience in March, and as we covered the chakras and other Spookiness in class last weekend, a lot of brilliant, amazing self-study questions came up. First chakra: Do you trust the universe to provide what you need, when you need it? Second chakra: Do you feel safe creating intimacy with others? Third chakra: Do you feel a sense of personal power and autonomy in your life? And so on. Using the chakras, which have an order to them, starting at the tail bone and rising up the spine, placed these fantastic questions into a natural progression. In that sense, the chakra work provided me an outline for future self-study, for myself and my students. I don't know that it is important to me to think of a literal wheel of energy at each particular point. The meditations and mudras (hand gestures like so) that go along with each chakra can be seen as a way to help set and hold an intention. It's hard to sit with a challenging question long enough to learn something, and ritual seems like it would be helpful.

Pigeon posture for beginners

2011-04-28T10:34:00.000-07:00

This is a piece of homework from my yoga teacher training. Thought I'd post it up in case anyone wants to learn my favorite yoga posture, Pigeon (Kapotasana). If you want to try it, take your time and be gentle. It stretches some muscles that don't usually get stretched.

Pigeon posture for beginners:

Start on all fours. Walk your hands forward a little bit. Bring your right knee up between your hands, and sit down on your heel. Roll your shoulders back and down, bringing your chest forward (like a pigeon puffs out its chest). Keep your belly button close to your spine, which helps make sure that your lower back isn’t bent too sharply. A really big bend in your lower back is hard on the disks between the vertebrae, so be gentle! Try to make sure your hips are equal distance from the floor; don’t lean to one side or the other. Remember to breathe!

There you are in pigeon!

When you are ready, come out of the posture and return to all fours. Be sure to practice on the other side too, so bring your left knee up between your hands.

When you are done, come back to all fours, and then sit back on your heels. Rest for a few minutes in Child’s Posture by bringing your forehead to the floor. Your knees can be either together or separated, and your arms can be either out in front of you, or by your sides with your hands close to your heels. Or you can put one fist on top of the other fist and rest your forehead on top of them. Try to find the Child’s Posture that is most comfortable for you today.

Namaste!

(I've been searching for a picture of pigeon posture online, but it is maddeningly difficult to find picture of beginner level yoga postures done in safe ways. All the pics are of super-flexible people showing off how super-flexible they are. I don't want my friends - not to mention any future students of mine - getting hurt trying to emulate them. Maybe I should make my own yoga website with pictures that are actually useful...)

Another bear bites the dust

2011-04-14T20:20:00.000-07:00

How to play with a soft toy, according to Baxter:

Gary aiding and abetting in the bear's destruction by starting a tug-of-war:

Proud Bax posing atop his defeated prey:

Baxter's new bear

2011-04-12T20:11:00.000-07:00

Baxter says, when you are given a new soft toy, the first order of business is to remove the tag.

Do not disturb

2011-04-10T20:05:00.000-07:00

Tuesday likes to sleep behind the couch, next to the heater.

She does not necessarily wish to be disturbed in mid-nap.

April Fool's Day

2011-04-02T15:21:00.000-07:00

So I technically finished with my month of self-study as of the end of March, but apparently my self-study gears are still spinning.

Yesterday I posted on Facebook that I actually enjoyed April Fool's Day for what is probably the first time ever. I achieved this by having almost no face-to-face human contact all day. (I saw some other humans while walking Baxter, but they were - as always - distracted by his cuteness.)

Because my gears are still spinning, I started to wonder why April Fool's Day is more fun online than in the Real World. Here's what I learned:

On past April Fool's Days, people walked up to me and said absurd things. I didn't react to the absurd things in any immediate or obvious way, so then they said "GOTCHA" and laughed. Sigh.

The thing is, lots and lots of people walk up to me, NOT on April Fool's Day, and say absurd things. This happened a lot in graduate school (some philosophers argue very hard for very weird claims). It also happens whenever I tell someone what my degree is in, when they say "My philosophy is..." and then say some weird thing or other. (Yes, random dude, actually I minored in Why Humans Are Actually Descended From Space Aliens.")

I also hear absurd things sometimes when I talk to people about politics, religion, morals, vegetarianism, higher education, yoga, the environment, health care, or basically any topic that is more interesting than the weather. People believe all kinds of bizarre stuff and are happy to tell you about it. I don't mean my friends so much - I tend to make friends who have beliefs that are roughly closer to mine, for better or for worse. Just acquaintances or strangers that I get into conversation with.

Last time I was waiting for the shuttle to the airport, I was a captive audience for some guy who had written a self-help book, all about making your wife happy by not allowing her to make any major life decisions. Or something. I was checking my watch a lot (where's the damn shuttle??) so I may have missed the finer points.

So I have spent a lot of time perfecting my Polite Non-reaction for when people say absurd things. It doesn't mean that I believe them. It is a blank expression with the blandest "oh, really?" that I can come up with.

I have used it a lot and it has saved me from some pointless, energy-wasting confrontations. Maybe it would be better to point and laugh at every single silly thing people say, but sometimes you can't (if they are your teacher or your grandmother or something) and sometimes it's just not worth it (because the shuttle's coming in two minutes and with any luck you'll never see Self-Help Man again).

It is practically reflex now, and it is hard for me to remember that it is okay to react to the silly stuff just because it is April 1. So all fricken' day long, it's HA HA you're so gullible. Sigh.

If the prank happens on Facebook, by contrast, I don't have my politeness cranked up so high, and also, if for a brief minute you aren't sure whether something is real or a prank, you can take a minute to gather your thoughts. GMail Motion, for example - it's clear from the goofy video that it is a prank, but upon hearing the concept, my first thought was, hey, we have voice-to-text software, and we have the Kinect for the Xbox, which enables you to play video games by moving your body. How long can it really be before we have technology to translate a gestural language (American Sign Language, for example) into text? We're not there yet, but it's not a dumb idea...

Tin whistle videos

2011-03-31T13:19:00.000-07:00

Hi all. I made some videos of my tin whistle playing (warts and all) to try and ask for some long-distance advice from some experienced whistlers online. Apologies to my friends and family reading this; please don't feel like you have to watch these and/or come up with something nice to say. Why not go and watch some My Little Pony episodes instead.

Unfortunately the quality is pretty bad, which you might expect since I used the built-in camera on my netbook. I will have to try again once I get a better camera set up.

Saddle the Pony

The Boys of Blue Hill

The Kesh Jig, with audience reactions

Edited to add: Okaaayyy, so the audio and video are a good three seconds out of sync. Pretty worthless as far as evaluating what my fingers are doing right or wrong... sigh...

Resources list

2011-03-26T11:24:00.001-07:00

Internet resources I don't want to forget about when my month of self-study is over.

The Fluent Self
http://www.fluentself.com/blog/
Havi Brooks's blog. The last thing I expected was to find a yoga teacher who also teaches about marketing your small business (even though she hates the word marketing and refuses to use it, so I should probably not use it to describe her). She does not draw a distinction between working on your Stuff (your resistances, procrastinations, fears, etc.) and working on your Business (which is kind of like You, only bigger).

Wishcraft, by Barbara Sher
http://wishcraft.com/
Now available as a free e-book. It has a lot of useful exercises for journaling, but the main message is the hardest to grasp and the most important: you should design your life around the things you love (and, the book says, "here's how").

Heart of Business
http://www.heartofbusiness.com/
Mark Silver's website, another resource for uniting the "yoga/self-study" perspective with the "making a living" perspective. It is refreshing to think that you don't have to have a split personality to do both...
Post I particularly liked:
http://www.heartofbusiness.com/the-wackiness-of-resonant-pricing/

Interesting site I have just started to explore:
http://www.productiveflourishing.com/how-heatmapping-your-productivity-can-make-you-more-productive/
I am curious about this heatmapping idea.

IttyBiz, another site I have just started to explore.
http://ittybiz.com/
Resources for very small businesses.

I have been saying for years that I would NEVER EVER EVER want to run my own business. Now I am seriously contemplating the idea of starting two of them at once, yoga teaching and freelance writing. Unemployment + self-study = surprising results.

Self-study

2011-03-17T11:44:00.000-07:00

I was posting every few days for a while there. The reason it has slowed down is that I am keeping a private journal for the month of March and mostly choosing not to share those entries. Our homework for yoga teacher training was to choose one of the yamas or niyamas (yoga's How-To-Live guidelines - sometimes jokingly called yoga's Ten Commandments) and "live with it" until the next workshop in early April. I chose svadyaya, which is self-study, and the journal is one of the main tools I'm using to figure out what's going on in my head.

I remember when I was in school we had to keep a journal for a while, and I got so bored with it ("I went to school. I ate a sandwich for lunch.") that I started to invent stuff and turned my "journal" into serial fiction. I'm pretty sure that teacher was just checking whether we had written something every day. She couldn't have been reading all those diaries.

It is much more interesting now that I have specific things I want to learn about through journaling.

* my relationship with money (turns out I have been carrying around not only a minimum in my head of how much I need to earn, but oddly, a maximum of how much it is "okay" for me to earn. huh.)

* my thoughts about work (assumptions about what kinds of work is acceptable for me to do, what is the right number of hours per week to spend doing it)

* my baggage from graduate school WHY HELLO THERE. (assumptions about what ways of thinking, learning, and living are valuable, track record of being miserable and unproductive with respect to a long-term project, habit of using fear and guilt as motivators while pretending to still be passionate about the work... and so on)

* when in my life have I been happy and full of enthusiasm? What was going on in my life and how was that time different from now?

Havi Brooks is a really inspiring blogger if you want to do any self-study of your own. And her business partner is a duck! Thanks to my friend showingup for pointing me in her direction.

Ego in disguise

2011-03-07T12:52:00.000-08:00

In yoga teacher training, I have been thinking about the ego.

Ego can play a pretty destructive role in yoga, because it constantly tells you to compare yourself with the other people in the class or with your own self-image. It tries to make you push farther than your body wants to, because then you'll look good, like a "real" (experienced, flexible) yoga practitioner. If you listen to it, you might get hurt by forcing a stretch too far.

If you are trying to learn to meditate, it tells you that you aren't doing it well enough, and it tells you so loudly and persistently that it becomes pretty difficult to quiet your mind. Then it says, "I was right, I told you so!"

Today I have been thinking about ego in other areas of life, and I noticed that it can come in sneaky forms. For example, ego can disguise itself as fear or weakness.

I noticed that thoughts of the form "I can't do that; I'd look like an idiot; what if I screw it up" - those thoughts look on the surface like fears, but what they actually are is ego talking.

Of course if I try something new, there is the possibility of screwing it up. And so what? The only danger is that my precious ego might get bruised. What, I'm such a princess that my self-image can't tolerate being seen by other people as less than perfect?

News flash, Ego... people MAY already have noticed that I'm not perfect (you think??) so sit down and shut up, because some other parts of me would like to use the brain space now...

Rolling Stones on the Rocky Road to Dublin

2011-03-02T09:25:00.000-08:00

For their album The Long Black Veil the Irish band the Chieftains invite a bunch of guest musicians to play and sing with them: Sting, Sinead O'Connor, Van Morrison, Mark Knopfler, Tom Jones... The whole album is a lot of fun, but one of the highlights is when the Rolling Stones and the Chieftains play the traditional Irish tune "Rocky Road to Dublin" together on the album. Have a listen:

The liner notes for this track (by Paddy Moloney of the Chieftains) say, "Perhaps the most enjoyable of all our recording sessions. More an ad lib "hooley" than anything we had planned. At one time I thought I was in control. Clearly I wasn't. Each time I tried to end the session, the song just went on and on, with our friends in the studio getting up to dance." Moloney is on the tin whistle on this track (high, chirpy, flute-ish sound).

It definitely has a sound like the Stones are barely restrained. Note 1:05-1:22, when Keith Richards attempts to stage a coup. The Chieftains manage to yank everyone back to "Rocky Road to Dublin" long enough to finish it.

The tune is over at about 1:57 (of a five minute recording!), and there is a gloriously messy stretch before any new direction emerges. It lasts about 40 seconds, during which everyone continues to noodle, but no one really starts playing a tune.

I wonder if this is the time when Moloney repeatedly tried and failed to wrap up the session. Towards the end of the 40 seconds it sounds very disjointed, and if I had been in control of the session I would have been panicking. 40 seconds with no direction, and the tape rolling, is an eternity. But the room is full of experienced professional musicians, and they all keep playing, tolerating the messiness, and trusting each other and the music, that it will go somewhere eventually.

At about 2:38 one of the fiddlers thinks "Fuck it" and confidently picks up another traditional tune called "The Boys of Ballisodare." Everyone follows like a school of fish changing direction. I'm thinking that this tune was chosen on the spot, when the fiddler decided "if no one else is going to make a choice, I will!"

I wonder if the Rolling Stones had ever played "The Boys of Ballisodare" before. If they hadn't, that makes it really funny that someone tells Keith Richards to "take it" at 3:43. (At least, someone seems to say "all right, take it!" and then there is an electric guitar solo that I presume is Keith.) It's a pretty simple tune, and they just played the A part twice, the B part twice, and returned to the A part right before his solo, so he could have had time to get it in his head. It's probably no big deal if you are Keith to learn a tune and then improvise a solo on it on the spot.

That dacka dacka percussion that starts at about 3:00 is an Irish dancer named Jean Butler.

I am highly entertained by the YouTube comment that says "bit heavy on the instrumentation." Did he miss the fact that this is the goddamn Rolling Stones? "Hey, would you guys stop rocking so hard? Try to sound more traditional..." yeah, right.

Give your heart to Jesus (if you want)

2011-02-28T14:25:00.000-08:00

I am finding that my yoga readings are giving me a new framework to relate to people of faith.

Baxter and I took our usual midday walk today and passed a local church whose sign was reading "GIVE YOUR HEART TO JESUS." The first thing that popped into my head was "oh, they're on the path of love." Sometimes called bhakti yoga. Personal devotion and love for the deity of your choice. It's not the path I'm on, but it's going to the same place.

Analytic philosophy is not particularly helpful in understanding religion; some philosophers think that having faith compromises the dedication to reason that they value, and others (like me) think that you can have faith and reason as long as you keep them separate in your head and in your philosophy writings. For example, you can believe in God as a matter of faith and reasonably (in my opinion) expect not to be attacked for your beliefs. That is how freedom of religion works. But once you start claiming that you can prove that there is a God, you should expect your proof to get attacked from all sides. Once you start talking in terms of reasoning and proving, you are playing the philosophy game, not the faith game. At that point it's not fair to complain "stop attacking my beliefs." That is how philosophy works.

Respect and tolerance are good, but I'm grateful to have a little bit of actual understanding.

Grad school wasn't useless after all

2011-02-25T21:12:00.000-08:00

Useful skills acquired in philosophy grad school, now applied to yoga teacher training:

- Am not scared of a dense text. Spent a few years reading Charles S. Peirce, now cannot be intimidated by any of the readings assigned for yoga class. (So far Bhagavad Gita, Yoga Sutras of Patanjali)

- Know my own learning process, including when it is time to stop reading and start writing. Things I haven't written about are never as clear in my head.

- Got used to soaking up unfamiliar vocabulary quickly. Eight limbs of yoga, ten ethical guidelines, each with a Sanskrit name? No sweat. Philosophers make up their own words and expect you to keep them straight.

- Already experienced the terrifying leap from student to teacher. I have already been the person at the front of the classroom with everyone looking at me, and I survived the experience. Thankfully you don't have to know everything before you start to teach; the "student" and "teacher" roles are fluid and you can move between them, like a graduate student who teaches undergraduates.

- Practiced returning again and again to something very difficult. Writing a dissertation is probably not similar to meditation in any way other than this, but at least I know what it is like to come back to the hard project day after day, for several years, until I finally get to the goal. The strategy is to set short-term goals that are possible and achievable, not to constantly expect perfection tomorrow. Sounds obvious, right? If I'd figured that out sooner, I would have finished that damn thesis a lot quicker...

Irish music and yoga postures

2011-02-22T20:15:00.000-08:00

I have been teaching myself to play the Irish tin whistle, off and on, for several months. Whenever I have a new interest, I join an internet forum, so I found and joined one on tin whistling.

One interesting thread a while back was about practicing. Irish music (you may have noticed) can be fast. (Have a listen to Joannie Madden, the tin whistle queen.) Sometimes newbies to the forum post a clip of themselves playing, moderately fast but with lots of stumbles, wrong notes, and a general labored sound. Inevitably one of the experienced players says gently that the person is playing too fast for his or her ability level. The way to learn to play fast is to practice slow.

Practicing at an uncomfortably fast speed means (1) you are practicing getting it wrong, over and over, because you miss notes every time, and (2) your playing always sounds like it is full of effort - because it is. Playing at a speed that is comfortable for you means you get all the notes and have the extra attention to spare to make it sound beautiful. So you are practicing being correct and beautiful. Play it at that speed, however slow it is, a hundred or a thousand times, and guess what - your fingers start to move faster on their own, because they know what to do.

This is a lesson I'm hoping to bring to my yoga teaching later on. Lots of people in yoga classes try to practice a little (or a lot) beyond what they are physically capable of, just like the beginner tin whistler trying to play fast. Either they have a mental image of what the pose "should" look like, or they are trying to prove they are as "good at yoga" as the person on the next mat. Pushing farther into a posture that your body wants to go is practicing doing it wrong. Coming out of proper alignment and forcing the pose is a good way to hurt yourself. And if you are doing that, your yoga practice will always feel full of effort - because it is.

Instead, let your body tell you how far it can stretch today, and how long it can hold a posture today. Stay in good form and practice at a comfortable level. Practice the posture in a version that is right for your body, a hundred or a thousand times, and guess what - your body eventually lets you know that it is ready to go a little deeper, hold a little longer. Now it knows what to do.

The way to practice beautiful yoga is to play it at your own speed.

The path of devotion

2011-02-18T15:39:00.000-08:00

"Those whose understanding is small attain only transient satisfaction: those who worship the gods go to the gods. But my devotees come to me." (Bhagavad Gita 7:23)

I was stunned when I got to this line, because it is spoken by Krishna, who is a god born into human form. Here he seems to be saying that worshiping the gods is one path but not the one that "his devotees" follow. I knew that one interpretation of the Gita is that it symbolizes the higher self (Krishna) talking to the everyday, conscious self (the student Arjuna), but I did not expect such direct evidence for this interpretation right in the text.

Krishna appears to be contrasting his devotees with those who worship the gods, and he seems to say that worshiping gods is a sign of less understanding. By contrast, devotees looking inward to seek the higher self symbolized by Krishna are the ones that attain more than "transient satisfaction." A similar thought is expressed again at 9:25.

Chapter 12 of the Gita is about the path of love, which is presented as an alternative to the path of knowledge and meditation. The path of love is personal devotion to God. Although Krishna earlier sounded a bit negative about the idea of worshiping gods, he is now offering the path of personal devotion to a deity as an easier road, compared to meditation which eventually allows you to perceive the true self. A personal relationship is something that humans can more easily wrap our brains around. The Hindu "pantheon" is really one God that shows different faces so that we limited humans can choose the face that is easiest to love. It is seemingly harder to learn to use meditation and the other techniques of yoga directly see the Divine inside yourself.

The path of devotion may be different from the worship that Krishna is talking about in 7:23; complete devotion to God is a particularly strong and focused kind of worship. It is supposed to be an intense, loving personal relationship. Worshiping the gods doesn't necessarily mean you reach the goal of yoga (your reward may only be transient), but you can reach the goal through this personal dedication.

The same comparison appears in the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali, Sutras 23-26 in Book 1. The path of devotion to God is "the emotional path which is easier than the other methods mentioned before." (page 41) Satchidananda says that an understanding of this path helps you understand the scriptures of every religion.

Many religions do seem to emphasize devotion and submission to God's will. It is interesting that yoga treats this as an alternative path to the same destination. You can learn to understand the Divine in different ways, either by finding it inside yourself or by conceptualizing it outside yourself and loving it where you find it.

Upcoming: This weekend I will be at workshop #2, on the Yamas and Niyamas, which are the moral "do's and don't's" of yoga (the first and second limbs).

Satchidananda on mantras

2011-02-16T13:46:00.001-08:00

"By repeating it constantly, a part of the mind gets linked to that. It is like a person who goes down into a tunnel with a life-rope tied around the waist and one end of the rope fixed to a peg outside the tunnel. Whenever there is any danger he can just shake the rope and get pulled out. In the same way, a part of your mind is tied to God through your mantram while the other part is engaged in worldly pursuits. You dive deep to get all the pearls you want to gather: name, fame, money, position, friends, anything you want. You need not stay away from anything as long as you do not lose hold of the rope."
From his commentary on Book 1, Sutra 28 (page 47)

This is a nice way to think about the question that was worrying me in the last post - do I have to give up wanting "worldly" things to follow the raja yoga path.

Sometimes the answer to one's question is "keep reading."

The goal of raja yoga

2011-02-15T12:59:00.000-08:00

Sometimes I am puzzled about the goal of yoga, or the kind of person that raja yoga is meant to change you into. Sometimes it sounds like a person that I would like to become, and sometimes it doesn't.

The "enlightened" yoga practitioner who has reached the goal, is not emotionally entangled in worldly things. She doesn't get upset at misfortune or happy about good luck. She is steadily peaceful and contented regardless of external happenings. She isn't "attached" to things in the world because she knows they are not the deepest reality.

I'm not sure what it would be like to be this person. I like the idea of unshakable peace, instead of the big ups and downs that we usually experience but have no control over. But what would it mean to be no longer attached? Would I still love music? Good books? cooking? video games? my dog? my family? I know these things aren't "who I am" when you get right down to it. But there is something creepy and almost self-destructive about trying to love less.

Sometimes it sounds like becoming enlightened would be like becoming someone else, a different person. Maybe that person would be better than me in some ways, but I am not sure I am willing to change into her.

Are all enlightened people the same or is there still room for individuality/personality? It seems like the people and things that you love in the world are part of what makes you the individual that you are, and to let go of all of those attachments would be to lose something distinctive and precious.

Maybe you are meant to have moments of understanding when you see everyone is the same, but you don't walk around for the rest of your life like that. Satchidananda - the founder of the branch of Integral Yoga that I'm studying - says that the same energy/spirit is everywhere, in humans, animals, and inanimate objects. This sounds like the true perception that the Bhagavad Gita talks about, seeing that the separateness of different people and things is just an illusion. So the sense in which people are "all the same" is the same sense in which people, animals, and rocks are all the same thing, because there is really only one thing (the universe). But I don't think you could walk around every day not noticing the difference between a person and a rock.

Yoga philosophy

2011-02-05T21:24:00.000-08:00

Yoga people talk about the "philosophy" of yoga, which I am happier referring to as a "belief system." To me, philosophy has to have arguments. If there isn't an argument, it's not philosophy. So far, I'm barely dipping my baby toe into the sacred texts; I'm in Chapter 3 of the Bhagavad Gita. It's a dialog between a student and Krishna (an incarnation of God! eat your heart out, Socrates). My understanding is that this and other important texts are considered divine revelation, like the Bible.

The eight limbs of yoga are not arguments; they are techniques to put yourself into a different mental state. Teachers and texts can help you learn the techniques and follow them, and they can give you small glimpses of what it might be like when you reach the end goal, but you pretty much have to commit and see for yourself where the path takes you.

I want to talk about a bit in the introduction to my edition of the Bhagavad Gita that sounded reminiscent of a well-known western philosopher who used totally different methods. The editor of this edition and author of the introduction is Eknath Easwaran.

In the introduction, Easwaran is defining some terms that will be used in the text, that he was not able to translate into English without being misleading. One of these is "maya." (For my own future reference, pages 28-29.)

In a meditative state (I'm told) you can eventually come to directly perceive the unity (one-ness) of the universe. But most of the time we perceive separate things and people, and the unity is not apparent to us. Easwaran writes, "The sages called the dream of waking life - the dream of separate, merely physical existence - by a suggestive name, maya."

It is suggestive because the original meaning of the word was a magical creative force, such as God used to create the universe. What "maya" came to mean later was the world of separate people and things created by the human mind, when the underlying reality is far different.

Easwaran again: "The mind...observes the so-called outside world and sees its own structure. It reports that the world consists of a multiplicity of separate objects in a framework of time, space, and causality because these are the conditions of perception."

Easwaran doesn't mention Kant's name, but I am thinking he has read him.

Kant argued in the 18th century that we perceive everything in terms of time and space because those are conditions of perception. If we didn't perceive events happening in time or objects existing in space, we wouldn't be perceiving them at all. Objects as we perceive them are heavily defined by the sorts of ways we can perceive. Objects "in themselves" (independently of how anyone might ever perceive them) are unknowable.

To what extent is a perceived object similar to the object in itself? Kant thinks there is no way we can know. But that's not some tragedy. We can still investigate the world that we perceive, and the structure of our mind that allows us to perceive it.

Easwaran seems to be suggesting that we can learn to perceive the world in itself, by learning to quiet the "thinking mind" that sees objects through the senses. One of the eight limbs of yoga is pratyahara, withdrawal from the senses, which may be a technique for learning this new way of perception.

The illusion of separateness and the reality of unity that Easwaran and the Bhagavad Gita are referring to are ideas not found in Kant. If they are right, Kant is off base in even referring to a separate, individual "thing in itself," because there is really only one big "universe-in-itself." But the argument that our perceived world is heavily conditioned by our mind's structure is usually credited to Kant. The Bhagavad Gita is about three thousand years old, so if this idea is present, even in a sketchy form and not argued for, I will be extremely impressed.

Spirituality for the nonbeliever, part 2

2011-02-02T12:10:00.000-08:00

Although I don't believe in a deity, I have no problem with adjectives like "sacred" or "divine." It just seems to me that those qualities originate in humans. The things we hold sacred or experience as divine are just the things we hold a certain kind of respect for.

Many spiritual systems agree that there is a piece or spark of the Divine in each human being. Yoga is one of them. The "Namaste" that your teacher gives you at the beginning and end of class is a salute to the Divine part of you. Raja yoga - the yoga that includes all eight limbs, not just the physical practice - is a way of living intended to put you in touch with your Divine self.

I am interested in getting in touch with my Divine self, and I am interested in learning to perceive the Divine in other people, and treat them accordingly. I am not that interested in talking to any external deity, even if one exists.

Also, I don't feel any need to believe that my higher self is an immortal soul. It may be. I'm not that interested in the question. I have enough to deal with just figuring out how to live this life, and I don't necessarily think it is healthy to spend your time worrying about the next life, or whether there will be one.

My concept of the divine is a strongly humanist one. There is a piece of divinity in each human being. No god is necessary to make that part of me divine; it is the part that is joyful, peaceful, loving, and calm. By calling it divine, what I mean is that I honor it, both in myself and in other people.

Hinduism says that the different gods and goddesses are faces of one God, and that a piece of that same God is in each human being. Oddly enough, I feel like I am more than half in agreement - the gods and goddesses are faces of the divine in each of us. Talking to one of them is just a way to set an intention, in a way that is much more powerful, psychologically, than making an ordinary goal or resolution.

If I am afraid of something, I can tell myself to "be brave," but compare that to the effect of spending five minutes with a mantra to Durga, the protective warrior goddess, and feeling "her" energy - that is, my warrior goddess energy.

Om ma Durga.

Coming soon: Yoga and philosophy.

Spirituality for the nonbeliever, part 1

2011-01-30T11:00:00.000-08:00

One segment of last weekend's yoga teacher training was a brief introduction to the Hindu pantheon. They are an interesting cast of characters.

As I was taught, however, Hinduism is not really a pantheistic religion. The idea is that since humans are limited creatures that can't really understand God, God created different faces to be more accessible. So although on the surface Hindus appear to believe in many different gods and goddesses, the underlying belief is that there is only one God.

The distinct gods and goddesses are useful when you want to invite change into your life. For example, if you would like your business to be more profitable, you can ask Lakshmi, the goddess of prosperity. If you are ready to start something new, you can talk to Ganesh, the elephant-headed god who specializes in removing obstacles and helping new things get started. And (my teacher continued) if there is something in yourself that you can't deal with and can't let go of, you can invite Kali in to kill it for you.

I looked at the picture of Kali in my binder. Here are a few representations of Kali. Yes, she wears a necklace made out of human heads or skulls, and a belt or skirt made out of human arms. Crap, I thought, who the heck wants to invite her into your life??

Then that struck me as an important question, so I thought about it for a while. Who would invite Kali, "come into my life and kill part of me"? ...Someone who was completely, unequivocally committed to getting rid of that part of herself. You don't call up the crazed death goddess if you aren't really sure.

I compared that kind of certainty to the kind of goals or intentions I set for myself, like "I should get to the gym more regularly." I kind of think I should work out more often. But I'm worried about giving myself migraines. Also it's a lot of trouble to go and work out and it is sometimes nicer to hang out on the couch playing video games.

Not all the deities are as terrifying as Kali, but still, someone who calls on a god to make a change happen in her life is serious. Maybe I need a way to make that kind of commitment to change.

Yoga teacher training

2011-01-28T11:45:00.000-08:00

I have decided to do a yoga teacher training course here in Ellensburg. It's offered by my current instructor so I already know and love her style. The course is structured around Patanjali's Eight Limbs of Yoga. The physical postures that you think of as "yoga class" are limb number 3. Of 8. Yeah, there is a lot to yoga. The training will be approximately one workshop per month for seven months.

Anyway, I thought I'd use my blog to keep track of some of my reflections that don't fit neatly into my assigned homework for the class but that I might want to come back to later. Writing about something is the best way to clarify your ideas, and writing about it here means that I won't lose my journal "notebook." Besides, I might get interesting comments from you readers.

Our first class last weekend was about the roots of yoga, so we covered a lot of stuff that might fall under history and comparative religion, and stuff you might call philosophy, though not closely resembling the methods of philosophy that I was trained in. Some of the ideas are actually similar, but the path of getting to the ideas is very different. More on that in a later post.

As previously mentioned on this blog, I am an agnostic. I am not sure whether there is anything resembling a higher power. If there is, I doubt whether any human-created religion has any kind of handle on what the higher power is like. I am therefore unlikely to find meaning, personally, in any belief system that includes deities of any kind.

The roots of yoga are also the roots of Hinduism, although the two systems in their current forms are distinct, and yoga is compatible with any religion, or no religion at all. However, yoga is all about getting in touch with "the Divine," however you define it.

Next on J'aime's blog: "Spirituality for the nonbeliever."

Critter photos

2010-12-08T21:15:00.000-08:00

I thought I'd post some pictures Gazza has taken over the past year.

Rare moment of peace between the critters back in March. We had Baxter only for a couple of months then. I naively hoped that this was a sign of the friendship that would grow between him and Tuesday in the future. Turns out it was just a fluke though.

Good sunbeam back in May. Take a good look at that nice fleece bed Tuesday is lounging in...

Tuesday in August. We were drying our bed sheets on a rack... I mean, we had created a cat hammock.

The demise of the nice fleece bed back in September. Baxter proudly stuck around to be photographed next to his completed work.

I actually took this last one, Thanksgiving weekend. Was trying to get a cute shot of him playing in the snow, but it was too cold.

Too bad I lost the receipt or I could return her to Macy's

2010-11-21T16:06:00.001-08:00

Just noticed that several of my recent posts are long, wordy, and rant-y. Time for cute critter photos.

Tuesday has had the Macy's bag for over 2 months, but she is still enjoying lurking inside it.

Comfy dog.

Kevin Smith's Daredevil

2010-11-11T17:34:00.000-08:00

Recently finished Daredevil: Visionaries (apparently it is vol. 1, but my edition doesn't say so) by writer Kevin Smith, penciler Joe Quesada, and inker Jimmy Palmiotti.

See me sticking to my convictions by
1. Counting artists as co-creaters of a comic, and
2. Avoiding the word "illustrator" when it comes to comics. Comics are not "illustrated" texts.

Anyway, reviewing Daredevil.

Having lived in New Jersey, I feel a strange loyalty to Kevin Smith. Also, Clerks is a piece of pure genius, and I also liked his writing for Green Arrow, for the most part.

I am less than impressed with Daredevil: Visionaries. D:V came out in the late 90s, after Clerks, but before Smith's Green Arrow run. Maybe he got better at comics writing with the experience. Or maybe Green Arrow is a character that is more suited to Smith's style.

D:V is very wordy. Having been a fan of sf/f stories and novels before discovering comics, I don't necessarily mind that. I remember saying of Smith's Green Arrow comics, "if the dialog is this funny, who cares if there is a lot of it?"

Daredevil is a much darker character than Green Arrow, so it should be okay that the laugh-out-loud lines are fewer and farther between. Unfortunately, Smith's forte is really the LOL-lines. His dramatic writing is just a bit stilted, as if he is trying to imitate a style that isn't his own. It rings most false when the scene is the most dramatic, which is just unfortunate.

Here is some narration from page 3, which I will then proceed to trash:

"The average maternity ward is staffed by eight to twelve nurses who spend all but their lunch breaks in a constant state of caretaking for patients they have no genetic ties to. At least twice a day, they ruminate aloud or to themselves about the need for a lighter workload."

"The average maternity ward is staffed by eight to twelve nurses" -- SO? I mean, I'm happy you did your research but...?

"constant state of caretaking"-- If I didn't already know what a nurse was, this would confuse the heck out of me. Who says "state of caretaking"?

"no genetic ties to" - as opposed to other nurses, who only work for family members?? And "genetic ties," yeah, I feel all warm and fuzzy about that phrase, clearly I'd rather help people I have "genetic ties to"...

"ruminate" -- this is just a tin ear for connotation. "Ruminate" is a slow word. When you have plenty of time, you sit and ruminate. Or if you are a cow, you can ruminate. Overworked nurses may have a passing thought, but they do not "meditate, muse, or ponder" while they are rushing from patient to patient.

A few pages later, Daredevil thinks, "You've just made my life incrementally more difficult."

What do you suppose he meant? "Incrementally" means gradually. But from context (victim has fled the scene leaving Daredevil to explain to the police why he destroyed city property and beat up two thugs with no one there to back up his story...) it sure seems like she made his life a LOT more difficult all at once, not gradually.

Reaching for vocabulary that you are not comfortable with, just to sound impressive, is NEVER a good idea.

I could probably put up with that small (if constant) irritation, if there wasn't also a thread of sexist cliche that occasionally rears its head throughout the book. Violence against women is used, story-wise, to create tension or tragedy for the male lead character. Sigh. And there is this one other appalling moment: Daredevil is left unexpectedly alone caring for a baby. Feeling out of his depth, what does he do? Calls up the first female person that comes to mind, hands the baby to her, and zips off before she can say whether she is willing or able to care for it or not. Her name is Natasha. I don't know who she is, but she dresses like a superhero and enters through the window. Dialog of the scene:

Daredevil: "Could you keep an eye on it for a bit? I have to go to the office."

Natasha: "But..."

D: "I promise, I won't be long."

N: "But..."

D: "Would you mind checking its diaper though? I couldn't muster up the guts to change it yet. Thanks, 'Tasha." (Vanishes from scene.)

N: "But..."

N: "Good god -- I was an Avenger!"

JACK. ASS. Cowardly, self-centered, and apparently living in the fifties as far as gender stereotyping goes. Nice one, hero.

Oh, wait, I mean, "TEE HEE BOYZ ARE SCARED OF BABIEZ LOL."

At least the dialog sounds natural, when Smith is doing (or attempting) comedy.

I almost forgave him when I got to the end, wherein Daredevil and Spiderman have a midnight, rooftop heart-to-heart. That was pretty cool.

So, strangething, do you want to read this fine piece of writing next or should I go ahead and put it up on BookMooch from whence it came?

Can anyone be a philosopher?

2010-09-25T10:36:00.000-07:00

Gazza listens to podcasts quite a bit, and sometimes I join him. Recently we listened to a show called Why and heard an interview with Brian Leiter, who is a philosopher at the University of Chicago. You can listen to the podcast here if you are interested.

The slant of the show was clearly intended to be encouraging and non-elitist. Leiter was asked if he agreed that "Anyone can be a philosopher." Any answer that hinted at the word "no" was just setting himself up for a charge of elitism. He made some off-the-cuff progress on this vague question, but it got me thinking about what the question might mean. Here are four things that it might mean to say that "Anyone can be a philosopher."

1. Anyone can think about philosophical questions.

2. Anyone can tackle the training and reading necessary to become a professional philosopher.

3. Anyone can become a successful philosophy professor at a college or university.

4. Anyone can talk to professional philosophers and contribute to the discussion as an equal.

So, can anyone be a philosopher? I say, in order: of course, possibly not, definitely not, and definitely not.

1. Thinking about philosophical questions is useful training for your brain, in much the same way that other facets of liberal arts education are useful. In fact, philosophy skills are probably more useful, because learning to focus on argument structures and evaluate them is a very transferable skill. In one sense, if you use the skill set and think about the right questions, you are a philosopher.

2. Anyone can start studying philosophy. Probably not everyone has the dedication to stick with it long enough to move beyond a Philosophy 101 level.

3. The job market is a nightmare. This comes up at 39.00 in the podcast, although anyone who is interested no doubt already knows that there are an unbelievable number of very qualified philosophers who can't find work at a college or university. So clearly not everyone can be a philosophy professor who wants to.

4. This is definitely the reading of the question that the Why interviewer intended. Can an "ordinary person" without formal philosophical training have insights that can contribute to the discipline or be "interesting" to professional philosophers? (This question comes up at about 17.30 in the podcast.)

The question in this sense is really annoying to me, because it seems to imply some pretty severe criticism of philosophy. I'll explain in a second...

Although the interviewer appears to be hoping for the answer "Yes, anyone can have interesting philosophical insights!" Leiter says, basically, No. He is pushed on what is meant by "interesting," and he says he means ideas that are "new or non-obvious" and demonstrate "clarity of thought and expression." He says, "There is very little clarity of thought and expression and reasoning in public life in the United States, and probably in most other countries." In other words, there are specific skills that philosophers bring to the table, and these skills are not just "common sense."

The criticism that I'm sensing from the podcaster is an accusation of elitism. Is Leiter saying that he will only consider ideas that come with a pedigree and a PhD? So it's not even worth listening to someone who isn't in the academic club? The thing is, Leiter is right, and he is not just being the bouncer of the academic club.

The interviewer brings up the question of elitism to Leiter, at about 34.00. "There are going to be people who hear what you are saying, and interpret it as... Philosophers are the only people who can think... there's good philosophers and bad philosophers and we shouldn't pay attention to bad philosophers. That really narrows the realm of who has legitimacy to make an argument."

Leiter responds, "It is certainly elitist, but it is not artificially narrow. Anyone can make a legitimate argument who can make a legitimate argument. It's not a matter of credentials. I think training helps people do it better... I don't think we should make apologies for what you are calling 'elitism.' In any arena of inquiry, if there is genuinely a discipline that involves knowledge, that involves truths, that involves actual methods of inquiry, then there are gonna be better and worse practitioners of it. This is as true of economics, of physics, of mathematics, as it seems to me that it is of philosophy."

I would add... philosophers are obviously not the only people who can think, but it is equally obvious that they are the people who do philosophy the best. Just like engineers are the people who do engineering the best. There are better and worse engineers, and we should not listen to the bad ones (or hire them to build bridges). Elitist?

Professional philosophers have spent a lot of years doing philosophy as a full-time job. Most of them spend six or eight years in a PhD program doing full-time philosophy before they are considered qualified to seek professional jobs. Think of doing anything for six or eight years, full time. Isn't it common sense that you get better at something if you do that much of it?

What is at the root of the question is the conviction that philosophy is not the kind of thing you can get better at. Lots of people do think that philosophy is about your personal belief set, what makes your life meaningful to you, or simply your opinions. The thing is, if that was all there was to philosophy, what would be the point of taking college courses, or god help us, paying people to teach college courses in it?

Local woman driven bonkers by cat

2010-09-23T10:18:00.000-07:00

Like many cat owners, I have often speculated that my cat is trying to drive me crazy. Today I am getting concerned that she may have succeeded.

Tuesday is staring at the ceiling in the kitchen. All the time. She gets up on the counter and stares up. Then she bounds across the room, leaps onto the table, and stares up. She lashes her tail to look as though she is stalking something. I stop what I'm doing and stare up the ceiling with her, but I see nothing.

Usually Tuesday's attention span is not this long, unless she has some potential prey to watch, like birds out the window, or a spider on the floor. She has been doing this for days now.

I started to get concerned that there was something in the attic moving around. I quieted all the noise in the house as far as possible and listened, while Tuesday stared up. All I heard was birds outside, and the toenails of a curious dog walking across the kitchen floor ("What are you guys doing? Can I play?")

I got Gazza to listen. Nada. We concluded that we were just being paranoid and Tuesday was just being a crazy cat.

This morning: Gazza leaves for the day. Tuesday stares. I listen.

I think I heard something up there.

Listened some more. Tuesday continued to run around and stare up. I heard nothing.

I could be cracking up. I'm afraid to look in the attic now.

"strong women characters"

2010-09-20T19:00:00.000-07:00

An idea that has been cooking in my head for a good long time:

Oftentimes when people are talking or writing about popular fiction, whether in print or on TV, or whatever, one thing they talk about is whether a story has "strong women characters." Since this is also something I care about, I've been in some of these conversations. It took me a while to figure out why I was often so puzzled by them. I think that there are at least three different things people mean when they say they like "strong women characters."

1. Women characters who can physically fight.
If the choice is between a princess to be rescued and a tough chick that rescues herself, okay, sure, I'd probably rather read a story about the latter. But this is not the most interesting way to be a "strong" character. You can write any old cardboard cutout of a character, put a big gun in her hands, and there you go.

2. Women characters who have "strength of character," that are emotionally strong.
At least these stories recognize that there is more than one way to be "strong." These can be good, compelling stories... or they can be complete cliches.

3. A "strong character" who is female. The problem with character types 1 and 2 is that neither kind of strength makes your character well-rounded or interesting. When critics talk about a work having "strong characters," they just mean that the characters are well developed. This is usually what I am talking about when I make a statement about a fictional character.

Of course, a lot of the best characters are blessed with all three kinds of "strength," like Cordelia Vorkosigan or Katara.

Summer's not quite over...

2010-09-17T09:24:00.000-07:00

I have been joking this year that Gazza and I have a policy of one life-changing event per summer.

May-June 2006: graduated with our PhDs and got real jobs (apparently not blog-worthy events at the time?)

July 2007: moved from the East to the West Coast, with our two hamsters in the back seat

June 2008: got married on a beach in Kauai

July 2009: bought our house

We adopted Baxter last January, so that could have counted for our event for 2010. But this summer has been nice and quiet. However, the official end of summer isn't until September 22, and sneaking in before the deadline: I got laid off from my job this week. Sigh.

Urban fantasy & paranormal romance

2010-08-21T17:01:00.001-07:00

I think I'm the last person to notice this, but lots of really popular books right now seem to be a blend of fantasy with another genre: urban fantasy, paranormal romance, and so forth.

My brother strangething got me hooked on the Dresden Files urban fantasy series, which are about a wizard who is a hardboiled detective. If you are looking for a long series of addictive, fun reading I highly recommend them. I have three more to catch up on, and then I will have to wait for more of them to be published...

The fun of the series is seeing the fantasy tropes clash head-on with the noir tropes. Going into trouble, Harry Dresden takes his wizard staff, magic charm, and a hand gun, and uses whichever seems appropriate. There is a non-magical gangster type villain, but also vampires and werewolves. I also like that Harry doesn't observe a Masquerade or try to hide magic from the Muggles. He's in the Chicago yellow pages. "Under Wizard," he says. "I'm the only one." He's not a subtle wizard either, but an old-school, AD&D-style fireball-chucker.

The Amazon forums are a fun place to learn about subgenres that you aren't familiar with. Every forum there seems to have at least one thread for folks making recommendations, so you can learn which authors are popular among the hard core specialist fans. I found that there is another series about a vampire detective in Chicago in the 30s, and another one about an angel detective. It's oddly compelling to see what other people are looking for in their fiction and the responses/recommendations they get from others.

I haven't dipped into any paranormal romances, but they sound like a similar sub-genre mash-up, fantasy conventions + romance novel conventions. Lots of Amazon readers say they started reading them because they had read Twilight and wanted more. That's a lukewarm recommendation to me, but then again, a few years back lots of folks got into fantasy because they wanted more after Harry Potter.

The more the merrier, I say. Maybe we will convert some non-geeks into geeks through these kinds of books, and the world will become a geekier place. :)

Bear skin rug?

2010-07-30T20:03:00.000-07:00

Follow-up to the sad saga of the orange bear. Here is its current state:

We keep thinking about whether it is time to toss it and put it out of its misery, but Baxter still LOVES it. He does a happy dance when it comes down from its shelf.

Project pony

2010-07-18T14:03:00.000-07:00

For a couple of months now I have been working with a Welsh pony named Shadow. Here are the two of us after he's had a bath and is looking very handsome. I'm combing out his tail. He is bored and is fidgeting with his lead rope.

Shadow's owner has too many horses and ponies to work, and I needed a little equine presence in my life, without the pressure of going back to weekly riding lessons (much less buying my own).

So far I have taught him to politely be caught in his field (not run away), to walk/trot/whoa politely on the lead line (not drag behind and then charge off in a random direction), and to stand quietly while I lean some weight on his back and pat him on the opposite side (like a child rider mounting up and swinging her leg over).

Current lessons include picking up his feet on request (and please to not slam his hoof down again before I let go of it, and please to not lean his body weight on my while I am holding the hoof...) and free lunging, where I stand in the middle of a small round pen holding a long whip, and he theoretically will walk, trot, halt, and reverse direction on visual or verbal cues. Halts are particularly hard to get across when you can't touch the pony and don't have a rope attached. There is a learning curve for me too. Luckily Shadow's owner has experience starting young horses and is teaching me as we go.

Asparagus and Hiking

2010-06-20T20:21:00.000-07:00

It is the season for hiking in central Washington. Everything is green and blooming for another few weeks, before the desert summer kicks in, and it all turns dry and yellow.

This is the Coal Mine Trail, starting in Cle Elum and going northwest about five miles. We didn't do all of it this time. It is a nice easy trail though, so maybe another time.

The season for fresh local asparagus is just starting to wind down. Here is a pretty and tasty vegan quiche I made. No soy! It is made of nuts, beans, and asparagus, run through the food processor and baked in a pie crust. Recipe from The Veganomicon. A good vegan cookbook is really helpful if you are eliminating potential allergens (dairy and eggs are common food allergens).

Blog is revived. Bear is destroyed.

2010-06-05T11:43:00.000-07:00

It lives!

Crazy few months. G and I have been on an elimination diet to test ourselves for food allergies. First three weeks: no wheat, dairy, soy, peanuts, citrus, refined sugar, chocolate, coffee, tea, alcohol, or artificial ingredients. Even the semi-vegetarian way that we eat is pretty challenging with no soy, wheat, or dairy. sigh. There was a lot of cooking from scratch for a while, beans and grains. Rice cakes and rice milk are also new friends. Now we are in the testing phase, bringing the foods back one at a time. I am hoping to figure out what foods, if any, are triggering my migraines so I can stop eating them.

Anyway, thinking about food a lot instead of thinking about blogging. We only started this in early April though, so I'm not sure what my excuse is for March. ;)

Baxter finished his obedience course, and as a graduation present the teacher gave him this very cute orange sparkly teddy bear.

Tuesday checked out the bear.

Tuesday says, "Are you crazy giving a nice toy like this to that dog creature??"

"Here he comes now."

"Goodbye bear. Nice knowing you."

"Rarr!"

Baxter: "I earned this bear, and I can chew the face off it if I want to."

Avatar, or Pocahontas In Space

2010-02-06T17:28:00.000-08:00

G and I finally broke down today and schlepped the 45 minutes down to Yakima to watch Avatar in 3-D. I wasn't sure I wanted to devote five and a half hours of precious weekend time to it (drive down, get there early enough to get in, long movie, drive home) but I felt like I was missing an important cultural phenomenon if we didn't.

I have to say, this film's content doesn't deserve either the controversy (OOOH, is it anti-American??) or the Oscar nomination for Best Picture. There is really not enough to it.

It is indisputably great looking, and I didn't get bored of looking at it for three hours. There must be an Oscar category that is more appropriate to it. Cinematography? "Special effects" doesn't really seem to cover a film that is at least half animation. But it's definitely not a "Best Picture."

Plot? Dances With Wolves did it better, twenty years ago. Back then the lack of subtlety was more forgivable. We needed a few noble, humanized Native American characters to counterbalance the many cowboys 'n' Indians shoot-em-ups, even if we had to make the white people stupid and evil. Okay. But it would be nice if things were allowed to be more complex now. Avatar is second verse, same as the first, visuals a lot better but characterization a lot worse.

Beautiful world? Lots of folks love it, a few to the point that they contemplate suicide in despair over its being fictional. (Yikes.) It is definitely very sparkly. I enjoyed looking at it, in much the same way that I enjoy shoujo anime, where there are always cherry blossom petals or snowflakes drifting down in the background behind beautiful skinny big-eyed people.

Aliens? I really loved most of the aliens; the horse-like things, the predators, the little green/blue dragons, the cool big red dragon. They looked nifty, and they looked alien (horses have nostrils in their shoulders, and six limbs!)

Unfortunately, the Na'vi themselves look like they have no biological relationship to any of these cool creatures, but instead were drawn by teenage manga enthusiasts.

Don't you want to go to the fairy land where you too can be instantly tall (taller than ANY of your classmates) and thin (thinner than ANY human could be) and athletic and sexy with a telepathic braid, some cute cat ears and a tail?

Arg. It would be nice if grown-ups try to imagine aliens that aren't super-idealized humans. When fanfiction writers insert an idealized version of themselves into their story, it's called a Mary Sue. That's your original character who joins the starship Enterprise, and happens to be taller, thinner, prettier, smarter, sexier, kinder, and younger than anyone on the regular crew, along with having violet eyes, telepathic powers, and fairy wings, and secretly being a princess of her home planet. Avatar has a whole damn race of Mary Sues.

Oh, in case anyone is thinking, "humans with cat features? sexy?" please, pay attention. It's not only been done, it's been overdone. Not just by the Japanese either. Ahem. To their credit, at least the Avatar design team didn't make the women Na'vi into Playboy Bunnies, which they could easily have done.

Anyway, in case anyone is feeling Pandora withdrawal, there are some real-life sparkly things right here on planet Earth. Here's a link back to some amateurish video I took a couple years ago at the Adventure Aquarium in Camden, NJ. Bioluminescent jellyfish are about 0:12 to 0:45. If you are in the area, go see them yourself!

Cop Dog

2010-02-02T18:03:00.000-08:00

Since dogs have been a major recent subject on my blog, I thought I'd advertise a bit for Cop Dog.

Cop Dog is written by a grad school friend of Gazza's and mine, Steve Peterson. It is a funny, entertaining, kid-friendly detective story about a ghost police dog that helps a kid solve the mystery of his father's death. It has laugh-out-loud moments and tearing-up sad moments. Corin Nemec (of Stargate SG-1) plays a bumbling villain.

You can rent or buy it from Amazon's video on demand service, assuming you have high-speed internet (no one still has dial-up, do they??). There is a link you can follow from Steve's blog, which will earn him a small percentage.

Good and bad

2010-01-31T09:29:00.000-08:00

Bad:
Arg. I'm getting overrun with spambots. I am going to have to turn on the filter thingy. Sorry everyone. I hate typing in those wavy letters to prove I am a human being, but I think I'll have to inflict it on you. :(

*

Good:
Dog is doing great. We have named him Baxter. He's not afraid of us any more, though he is still afraid of all other people. I think he must have had both positive and negative experiences with humans in his past. He takes a little while to start to trust a new person, but now that we are trusted he is a total cuddle bunny.

He and Tuesday are trying to avoid each other these days. We still aren't trusting them alone together - we put him in his crate when we leave.

*

Also good: Jade Empire. I have decided that I am a Bioware fangirl now. The good thing about that is that I've only played two of their games and they have several more. Yay!

Jade Empire is a video game based on kung fu movies. It is a creative universe that is based on medieval China with a heavy infusion of fantasy. So you can not only fight with martial arts and swords, you can also throw fireballs and transform yourself into demon form. You can choose your character's path to be dark and aggressive or heroic and virtuous. I just finished it last night and am kind of sad that it's over. If you aren't too much of a graphics snob I highly recommend it. (I found it very pretty but it is several years old.)

Sorry strangething, I know your video card is not on speaking terms with Bioware games...

*

Good and bad:
The Torchwood miniseries Children of the Earth. Wow. I knew that Torchwood was willing to go to dark places, but wow. (Good because it is good, bad because bad things happen to the characters...) Netflix it! but watch the first two seasons first, or else it will lose some of its punch.

New Dog!

2010-01-23T09:55:00.001-08:00

The big news this week: We adopted a dog!

We haven't figured out a name for him yet. According to the rescue and the vet she took him to, he is about 16 months old, and the guesses on his breeding ranged from terrier cross (don't think so), dachshund cross (maybe), or Welsh Corgi cross (which is what he looks like to me).

They told us he was "good with cats" which was one of the reasons we chose him (besides his cuteness and sweet, low-key personality). He sure is acting like he's never seen a cat before though. He and Tuesday spent about a day staring at one another. Tuesday has now decided that he is really, really interesting. Unfortunately he is still growling at her to "stay away!" We are hoping he will get used to her and tolerate her. At least he doesn't think she is a fun toy to chase; that was my biggest worry.

He spent the first day or two cowering in the back of his kennel, but he is relaxing now and making friends with G. and me, if not with Tuesday yet. ;)

Help us think of a good name for a sweet little brown dog.

Christmas photos 2009

2010-01-02T11:36:00.000-08:00

I'm back!

It wasn't completely my fault; my computer was dead for most of November, and soon after it was repaired, we were out of town for the holidays. We visited my mom.

Here is my Christmas loot. I got some good stuff. :) The brown things are a merino wool hat & scarf from my in-laws in New Zealand.

Here is Gary in his Christmas silk turtleneck from his parents and the scarf my mom made for him.

There were a lot of rounds of this board game, Captain Park's Imaginary Polar Expedition. We used my brother's AD&D miniatures as pawns, which added some drama to the game.

In the south it is good luck to eat black-eyed peas for the new year. I got some photo evidence of our coming good luck.

When we got home, Tuesday immediately laid claim to Gary's new scarf.

Highly satisfactory Christmas all around. :)

Hey Mister DJ

2009-10-11T09:43:00.000-07:00

At work we have satellite radio, and I usually get control over the choice of station, so I listen to a lot of different stuff, including several flavors of classic rock, a couple flavors of the more accessible kinds of jazz, and the folk music station.

Top three things I wish classic rock DJs (satellite and broadcast both) would stop saying:

1. "It's the music of your generation!"/"The music you grew up with!" Um, I wasn't yet born when the Beatles broke up. Thanks for making me feel included. Or don't you want any younger (or older) listeners?

2. "Back when the music was good." Because clearly all of us who like your station are old fogies that don't appreciate anything written after 1975. Because if you like the Mamas and the Papas, Jimi Hendrix, and Pink Floyd, you can't also like Neko Case, Franz Ferdinand, and Fleet Foxes. Obviously.

3. "From when the music finally got good" or words to that effect. Usually this bit starts with a clip of a song by Johnny Mathis, like "Wonderful, Wonderful" or "Chances Are." Then there is a noise of scraping a needle across a vinyl record, and the song changes into the guitar line of something by Led Zeppelin. The voiceover basically says, thank god that rock & roll came along, or music lovers would have all had to shoot ourselves. Because if you like rock music, you can't possibly like big band jazz, or Frank Sinatra, or early bluesmen, or Chopin nocturnes.

Poor Johnny Mathis is always the scapegoat. His songs are pretty sentimental, but his voice is beautiful. Lay off him already.

Top one thing I wish non-rock DJs would stop saying:

- The DJs on the jazz standards and folk stations are always saying their music "is timeless," "will endure," "will be around forever" (either implying or actually saying, "not like that flash-in-the-pan known as rock").

First off, guys, defensiveness is a real turn-off. You don't hear rock or classical DJs blustering about how important their music is. If you didn't worry deep down that rock had destroyed your genre, you wouldn't need to constantly say that you're "not dead yet." Take a few deep breaths. Musicians are still recording jazz and folk, there are multiple satellite radio stations dedicated to each, and besides, both have been strong influences on rock.

Second, jazz, including those "timeless standards," is only about a hundred years old. Rock is already, what sixty years? Get over yourself, jazz.

Third, we have these things called recordings, which ensure that all of our music will be around forever, short of our entire civilization being destroyed by the apocalypse.

In conclusion, all of you DJs stop saying stupid things and just play me some good music.

5 Things

2009-10-03T14:49:00.000-07:00

Taking a page from strangething this week, I thought I'd blog about five things I liked, in no particular order.

1. Finally got to see The Next Doctor, the 2008 Doctor Who Christmas special. (Just released on region 1 DVD September 15, possibly a new record in slowness. I think it got screwed up because of the negotiations over what American network would show the new season.)

I loved the first plot (guy who says he is the Doctor) but thought the second plot (Cybermen doing something incomprehensible) was, um, incomprehensible.

2. Fable II. Having discovered video games even later in life than I started reading comics, I'm gradually learning about what sort of game I prefer. Lately I'm spending a lot of hours on Fable II. Some things about it I love, like the entertaining sidequests, and the sort of "free-play" aspects that gamers call "sandbox" play. You can buy real estate, get married, have children. Your character can get scarred, get fat, or get more muscled. She (or he) can dye her hair and change her wardrobe, and teach tricks to her dog. All that is fun. Pity the main story of the game is a bit lackluster. The guy over at Twenty Sided wrote about 7,000 words of rant about the lameness of the main story, so I feel that ground has been covered. It is just a poorly thought-out story. Luckily, you can play for a lot of very fun hours while totally ignoring it. Of course that is also one of the problems with it: saving the world doesn't feel as urgent as it should...

3. Neverwhere. For some reason this miniseries gets a lot of flak from fandom. It's actually really cool. The writing is as good as you'd expect, given that Neil Gaiman wrote it, and the casting and acting is also very good. And since when do geeks care about production values? We still love the Pertwee-era Doctor Who for cripes sake. Neverwhere is much, much better-looking than that. It looks like a 90s TV show, which is what it was. Everyone should Netflix it.

4. Dollhouse. So it had some first-season issues, but who wanted to see Joss get another series canned by FOX? Season 1 got better as it went, and so far (two episodes in) I think season 2 looks promisingly plot-arc-y. I hope it gets with the pacing and moves things along better this season.

5. The Ellensburg Film Festival. We just came from Mantra, a Buddhist horror film. It was extremely freaky and really awesome. We have two more weirdo films lined up to see today, and then a batch of shorts tomorrow. Life is good.

More fall excitement

2009-09-27T14:46:00.000-07:00

More photos of our exciting life in the new house. ;)

Some friends gifted us with the biggest zucchini and cucumber that I have ever seen:

Here is the unnaturally huge zucchini in our old fridge, next to some normal-sized tomatoes from the same friends:

Here is our new fridge that was just delivered this week. We did not buy it just to make more room for the mutant zucchini, but it is in fact a bit more spacious. Also, it doesn't shower our food with water at random intervals, and the dials for adjusting the freezer & fridge temperature actually work.

The stainless steel door looked cool, sleek, and space-age in the store. Of course I forgot that our collection of fridge magnets and goofy postcards would impact its looks. Here is the interior. The zucchini is in there somewhere, but has been partially eaten by this point.

Though I'm thrilled about our new fridge, this entry seems a bit less exciting when compared to my brother's recent documentation of nature, red in tooth and claw, exemplified by this photo series of a praying mantis eating lunch (and dinner, apparently). My brother can take a picture, can't he?

Hey, strangething, here's how big the mantises get out west:

Gifts from our house

2009-09-17T17:54:00.000-07:00

...and I don't mean housewarming presents, but presents from our new house.

We moved in in July, and in August our peach tree started giving us ripe peaches:

Here's the tree in the corner of our backyard.

Here's a shot of one of our peaches next to some big ones from the farmer's market. Heh.

They were about the size of apricots, but they were delicious.

We also got a whole slew of cat toys. I mentioned earlier how Tuesday found some cat toys under the stove? After those three, we found two more under there, plus several more living under the clothes dryer, for a total of nine. Here's the haul:

(The dangling ones have been washed and are hanging to dry. It is very dusty under the stove and under the dryer.)

Tuesday is excited.

Movies in rodeo town

2009-09-12T17:21:00.000-07:00

You never realize what all you take for granted, until you move to a small town.

Ellensburg had, until recently, two movie theaters. The Liberty was a quirky, picturesque old building with fancy bathrooms, and was fun to go to. The Grand Meridian is your basic modern multiplex, just like multiplexes everywhere.

They had a sort of noncompetition deal so that they never had the same movies. This was fine, except that the smaller, cuter one (the Liberty) was not well run. We went there probably four to five times total, in the two years we've been in Ellensburg, and at least three times had trouble. We watched Iron Man with muffled sound, and Public Enemies with the picture out of focus through the whole movie (despite Gary's going out to complain). They were always stupid problems that any competently run movie theater would be able to fix. So we resolved to stop going there. It was more frustration than it was worth.

Unfortunately, some movies we wanted to see this summer came to the Liberty, such as the most recent Harry Potter, and District 9. This was a problem, but turned out to be only a temporary problem, as the Liberty has just closed.

I tried to be sad, since it was a fun, interesting, historic theater. But really I'm not too sad, because that meant that the Harry Potter movie promptly opened at the Grand Meridian, so we finally got to go see it, in multiplex comfort. Sorry, Liberty: I would have put up with your odd layout, smaller screens, and less comfortable chairs, but I do insist on audible sound and a picture that is in focus. Call me picky.

This is high drama in a small town. In central New Jersey where we used to live, there were two competing multiplexes, fifteen minutes south of us and twenty minutes north of us. If you didn't feel like supporting one, you'd go to the other. Here, it's now either the Grand Meridian in Ellensburg, or else you drive 45 minutes to Yakima, or over an hour to the west side of the Cascades.

We should be good now as far as the major movies (they will come to the G.M.) but one thing that hasn't changed is that we still have no place to watch the smaller movies. There is a film festival every fall for the real art house stuff, but I'm noticing that there is a grey area, where movies are too big for the film fest, but too small for the multiplex (or for the Liberty when it existed). For example, we only caught Moon because we were in Seattle for other reasons. (Moon is great, but AVOID being spoiled for it! Go see it without reading too much about it.) We would have had to go to the west side for Food, Inc. too. Miyazaki's latest, Ponyo, had a brief run in Yakima but left theaters before we got around to making the trek down there. It never came to Ellensburg at all.

On the subject of movies, if any friends or family out there are not Netflix subscribers but are interested, they sent me a code for a free month of membership. Let me know if you would like it. Netflix is awesome.

The Hugos

2009-08-16T10:20:00.000-07:00

The Hugo results.

List of all the nominees here.

Inevitably, every year, most of the winners are things I have never heard of. Traditionally I resolve to go out and read them all, but never get around to it.

This year I happen to be listening to the audio version of the Best Novel (Neil Gaiman's The Graveyard Book). I just read one of the runners-up for Best Graphic Story, and I've seen two of the Drama Long Form and three of the Drama Short Form top contestants.

I have not finished The Graveyard Book yet, but I am fairly underwhelmed by it. I sometimes feel like I am too old for the target audience, which is a strange thing to feel about Neil Gaiman's work. Usually I love all of his stuff. Does it have an amazing slam-bang finale that I haven't got to yet? or am I missing something? or were the pickings really slim for Best Novel this year? Neil says he turned down the nomination for Anansi Boys a few years back, which is a shame, because (in my humble opinion) it is a better book.

I haven't read the Girl Genius volume that got Best Graphic story - that may be a series I should check out. I recently finished the Dresden Files prequel Welcome to the Jungle which I liked a lot: the feel of it matched the novels, and I liked the art. Special commendation to the artist Ardian Syaf for the way women characters are drawn to look like characters instead of fetish objects. And for the way Harry's duster is drawn to look like a fetish object instead of an article of clothing. <3 style="font-style: italic;">Welcome to the Jungle to you.

I haven't seen WALL-E (I know! It's on our Netflix queue) but I'm surprised it won over The Dark Knight.

I'm not sure how I feel about Doctor Horrible winning the Short Form. Neil Patrick Harris was hilarious, of course. Nathan Fillion is love, but his character was a one-joke wonder. Less said about the woman character the better. I guess I think DH was a bit over-hyped by the fans.

Maybe I just don't get it; Joss usually writes great characters, so clearly he was making cardboard-cutout characters on purpose in . I suppose it got extra credit for its historical value - first miniseries distributed on the internet to go mainstream. It is interesting in that context. An experiment or a joke isn't the kind of thing I'd vote for for a Hugo though.

Of the nominees for Short Form, I'm not sure what I would have voted for. Haven't seen the Lost or the Battlestar Galactica episodes. The two Doctor Who episodes are both good. "Midnight" maybe deserved a nod too.

There should be an award for "best season" of a TV show too. I guess it would place a big burden on voters to watch whole seasons of TV. But I appreciate a show that is consistent. Stargate: Atlantis would have been a contender maybe - it doesn't always have flashy standout shows, but it is consistent good SF nearly every damn week, which is more than you can say for Doctor Who sometimes.

Update on the house

2009-08-09T10:42:00.000-07:00

We have moved. Just got my internet connection set up yesterday. If you are trying to reach us, email works now.

Things are a bit in chaos, because we ordered new carpet for the living room, which is supposed to be installed this week, and so we have been living here for over a week without setting up the living room furniture. Books can't go on shelves, speakers can't be set up, Xbox 360 can't be set up. I am in Fable II withdrawal.

Poor Tuesday spent the first day hiding from the world, but now she is getting back to normal. Normal, for her, includes trying to get inside and explore every box, closet, cabinet, and drawer in the place, when she isn't rampaging up and down the hall chasing her toy mouse.

A few days back, she was digging her paws under the stove and pulling out dust bunnies, much to our annoyance. Just as we are saying, "Come on Tuesday, what could be under there that is so interesting? Knock it off!" she pulls out a toy mouse. Not one of ours; we've never seen it before. Gazza got a stick and fished around under there and pulled out three more dusty, unfamiliar toy mice. It was like the cat toy mother lode.

You can bet Tuesday is checking under every appliance and piece of furniture now. Just in case.

Our house!

2009-07-18T09:29:00.000-07:00

Still not dead although you can't always tell from my frequency of blog updates. :)

Funny how when the big stuff happens in life, that is when you don't get around to blogging about it.

We have bought a house!

The plan is to move in the first weekend of August.

Batman history

2009-06-07T11:14:00.000-07:00

One of the interesting things I learned from Batman Unmasked was that Batman's history is even more complicated that I thought. One of Brooker's points is that the fans who complain about the 60s TV series or Schumacher's Batman and Robin not being "true to the original comics" are suffering from selective memory. Both the dark grim Batman and the goofy campy Batman have a long and established history in the comics.

1939. First appearance of Batman. At this stage he was way over on the dark/grim side, even carrying a gun and killing baddies. I don't think many fans would hold those qualities up as part of the "authentic" Batman.

1940. First appearance of Robin & the start of some gradual changes to Batman in response to parents' concerns about violence in the comic. This is when it was established that he doesn't kill, and when Robin brought the series more of a sense of humor and fun.

1954. Psychologist named Wertham hears about queer readings of the Batman/Robin relationship. There are quite a few plots that feature one of the team rescuing the other, or freaking out because he thinks the other one is dead, or worrying that people might find out about their big shared secret. There are also cute panels where they talk over their current case at the breakfast table. Brooker argues that Wertham was actually a decent guy and has been a bit demonized by later generations of writers. (Some hate him for even mentioning the idea that anyone could consider reading Batman as gay. Others hate him for suggesting that there might be something wrong with reading Batman as gay.) But there's no doubt that his observations set off a wave of 50s panic about sexual perversion. My point here is just that the late 40s - early 50s comics definitely don't sound like they were about a dark vigilante loner.

1956. Batwoman introduced.
1961. Bat-Girl (not "Batgirl"/Barbara Gordon, but a previous incarnation) introduced. Women superheroes, yay! Oh, wait, they are just there to "prove" that our real heroes are straight. Sigh. Unfortunately, gay teenagers who are reading Batman and Robin as a couple just interpret Batwoman and Bat-Girl as the beards they are. This interpretation is helped along by the clunky comedic scenes where women come on to Bruce or Dick and get panicky, flustered golly-gee-a-girl! responses. It still doesn't sound like a story about a dark vigilante loner to me.

As a side note, in this light, how funny is it that the new Batwoman is a lesbian?

Anyway, it seems like the dark/grim mood and the comedy/camp mood alternated or were both present throughout 40s, 50s, and 60s comics.

The 60s TV series, then, picked up on the camp side, not the dark side, but it is a mistake to argue over which side is the "authentic" Batman from the comics. Brooker has lots of interesting things to say about the series. He sees relationships to other TV genres of the time, both the sitcoms like Bewitched and The Monkees, and action shows like Star Trek and Man From UNCLE. This dual relationship was what allowed kids to watch it seriously, like the other action shows, while adults picked up on the comedy cues and watched it as a satire. Brooker also talks about the series' borrowing from pop art, which celebrates a flat style, bright colors, a camp aesthetic, and cheap and ephemeral art forms (like advertising - and comics).

Anyway - Batman comics apparently took their cue from the series for a while - it was very popular, after all. Then in the 80s, Frank Miller's The Dark Knight Returns and Year One swung the pendulum back - and I mean WAY back - away from camp/comedy back towards the dark/grim. Well, fine - it was probably time - but calling that a move back to "authentic" comics Batman is at least an oversimplification, if not just flat out wrong.

As far as the feature films, we have had two from Burton (dark and grim) and two from Schumacher (campy comedies). (The IMDB plot summary for Batman and Robin starts out "Batman & Robin try to keep their relationship together" while they fight someone or other... Was it actually meant to be a romantic comedy? Maybe I should watch it again.) And most recently, we have had two from Nolan, back to dark and grim.

The moral of the story, fans, is that you can feel free to state your preference as to which Batman you like best, but you have no basis whatsoever for claiming that yours is the most "authentic."

Philosophy and popular culture

2009-06-01T10:14:00.000-07:00

I just finished reading Batman Unmasked by Will Brooker. He is a cultural studies professor, although he apparently belongs to a department of "Communications." (Is it me, or does "communications" just not sound like an academic discipline? It is one step up in specificity from "Study of Stuff.")

Having invested a lot of time on academia in my life, as well as a lot of time on SF fandom, I'm naturally interested in the spaces where these two things interact. I think Brooker's book is a good example of how they should interact. He is a sharp and thorough scholar but also a loving fan, and he is reflective about how these two roles sometimes reinforce each other and sometimes pull against each other. I will say more about his Batman book in the next post.

I have a standard spiel about "academics take on popular culture" type books, which I don't think has made it onto the blog (until now). In philosophy, these books are proliferating right and left these days, and their editors often have a certain fuzziness about what the mission of their book is supposed to be.

There are three things you can do if you want to do "philosophy and popular culture."

(1) "Hey, this bit of Buffy is just like this bit of Heidegger." This is basically using Buffy as an accessible on-ramp to teach people about Heidegger. Nothing wrong with that; Gazza teaches a popular and successful Philosophy and Science Fiction course that is probably the most fun of all possible ways to learn about philosophy. (I guarantee he doesn't cover any Heidegger though.) But I think people sometimes deceive themselves into thinking that by writing this kind of stuff they are also saying something deep and profound about Buffy. And, really? Not so much.

Unfortunately, a whole lot of contributors to the philosophy and popular culture books seem to do these essays, and after making the point "this is like that!" they may not have said anything particularly interesting about either the TV show or the philosopher.

Looking at the table of contents of Batman and Philosophy, for example, I see articles on Batman and Wittgenstein, Batman and Kierkegaard, and "Aristotle, Kant, and Dick Grayson on Moral Education." I haven't read this book, but these topics really threaten to be This Is Like That topics.

(2) "Star Wars has genre relationships to fantasy and westerns as well as to science fiction." The second kind of mission you can have is using the tools of your discipline to say something interesting about your TV show (or comic or movie or whatever.) This is my favorite approach, because I think that subjects like Buffy, Batman, and Star Wars deserve study in themselves. I aimed to do this kind of thinking back when I was teaching a course called "Aesthetics of Film." About a third of the course (my favorite third) was about genre films - what are genres? should you apply the same standards of quality to a "genre film" versus an "art film"? are art films really genre-less? I saw us as using the philosophy "toolbox" of analyzing/defining/categorizing things, and applying broader aesthetic questions about how to properly judge artworks to case studies like summer blockbuster movies. I really resist the idea that a philosophy of film course should cover a specific canon of films - that is what Film Studies is for. One of the great things about philosophy is that you can do philosophy about whatever you think is interesting. Sometime I should put up my spinoff spiel on Spiderman 2 as an examination and reaffirmation of the superhero genre. I see I never blogged it, though I did review Spidey 3.

(3) I used to think that the above two options were the only choices, but I have been corrected by English/Comp Lit/Cultural Studies folks who prefer a third approach. They like to use the popular culture artifact to say something about the culture that produced it. This is not something analytic philosophers tend to do, but it strikes me as an interesting project.

Brooker is a cultural studies guy, as I said, but he is mostly focusing on #2 in his Batman book. This may be partly because he is a big Batman fan, and therefore (like me) thinks that it is worth focusing on Batman for his own sake. In the next post I will talk about what he has to say about him.

Sasquatch Festival 2009

2009-05-26T12:13:00.001-07:00

Yesterday (Memorial Day) Gazza and I went to the Sasquatch Festival, which is an awesome indie rock festival held annually about an hour from us. (Check out the streaming playlist on their website.)

It is held at this astonishing venue:

Here is the view if you look to your right.

Here are a couple of video snapshots - sorry for the terrible quality.

Fantastic high energy gypsy-punk band Gogol Bordello causes the crowd to bounce up and down in unison. (This song is called "Start Wearing Purple.")

Then we heard some beautiful vocal harmony from hippie folk rockers Fleet Foxes, which didn't record well on my little camera. Actually, I didn't think their sound was very well served by the huge outdoor venue, but go listen to their contribution to the Sasquatch Festival playlist or find them elsewhere online to hear how great they are. I see they are coming to the East Coast in late July, so take note if that's where you live. I'd love to hear them indoors if they would be as awesome as their recordings.

Here is a tiny clip of southern hip hop duo The Knux on one of the smaller stages.

Finally, here is a shot of the main stage after dark - that is Erykah Badu on the screen.

Start making your plans now to come stay with us next May and see Sasquatch 2010.

Wolverine & Star Trek - Spoilers

2009-05-17T11:19:00.000-07:00

Good month for movie loving geeks.

I liked the Wolverine movie, but was kind of disappointed in the Star Trek one. I didn't have one big problem with it, but the string of small annoying things kept on, well, annoying me.

Uhura. Her competence and professionalism get mentioned, but all we are shown is Kirk hitting on her, followed by an underwear shot and after that all of her appearances are as You Know Who's Girlfriend. We barely see her do any work at all, competently or otherwise.

Kirk. Generic Teenage Rebel. It was original when James Dean did it -- in the fifties. Probably perfectly in character for a younger version of the Kirk we knew, but it was still annoying to sit through. And his birth in the escape pod was lame melodrama.

Chekhov. The accent joke again? really?

Huge carnivorous monsters on frozen abandoned planet. What do they eat when Star Fleet officers AREN'T being marooned there? Eco-system FAIL, Abrams.

Speaking of locations, Iowa. Now with its own Grand Canyon. I guess it was supposed to be a quarry? Hey, should we put a fence or something around this bottomless pit we just dug in the middle of the Midwest? Nah, the local kids need something to drive their convertibles off of!

I did love Simon Pegg as Scotty. He brought the funny, which is good, because no one else was going to.

And I was thrilled to see Nimoy play Spock again. I especially loved his scene with Quinto.

Effects-wise, I like the way ships enter and leave warp VERY abruptly. That was cool.

I tried to love it overall, but it was an uphill battle. It strings together a whole lot of silliness and a whole lot of cliche in between the moments of greatness.

Cliches were not absent from Wolverine either. But the biggest and potentially most annoying cliche got turned on its head: what looked like a standard revenge-for-murdered-girlfriend plot (yawn) turned out to be something completely different. Thank goodness.

I was excited to see Gambit on the big screen, even in a small role. (What? it is like a law of nature that straight women Marvel fans have to crush on Gambit. Like Nightwing in the DC-verse. Who am I to fight a law of nature?) He was great, though I wish he'd had a bit more accent. He sounded maybe mid-South, not at all New Orleans. I get that they didn't want to exaggerate it, but they barely even tried. The actor turns out to be from freakin' British Columbia so I guess I should be grateful that there was any southern accent.

Overall, somehow I had fun watching Wolverine and less fun watching Star Trek.

What other films are you geeky friends looking forward to this summer? Of course there is a new Harry Potter in July...

Torchwood season 2: Spoilerful!!

2009-05-06T20:13:00.000-07:00

We have finished watching season 2 of Torchwood. Suddenly we are caught up, with no more new Whoniverse stuff to watch until Scifi gets off their butt and shows us either season 2 of the Sarah Jane Adventures or the damn Christmas special of Doctor Who COME ON SCIFI HURRY UP.

Anyway, season 2 - the online consensus seemed to be that it was better than season 1, and I thought that was true. Looking back at my thoughts on season 1, it's clear that there were no clunkers in season 2 as cringeworthy as the Weevil Fight Club episode was, so we are already ahead of that game.

John Hart the Evil Ex-Boyfriend was pretty over the top, but since it was James Marsters, he managed to keep me involved instead of turning into a cardboard cutout. I even felt sorry for him, though not as sorry as I felt for everyone else around him.

After the first four episodes of this season I was thinking that they were overdoing the darkness. I know it is a darker show that Doctor Who, but there is a point at which you are just manipulating the viewers: tune in next week and we will kick puppies and throw orphan children out into the snow! muahaha!

(That was how I felt after the woman who didn't know she was an alien agent, the time traveler they sent back to die in 1918, and the alien whale who was being slowly cannibalized. Good grief. And please, why can't Toshiko have a nice normal relationship??)

But then there was "Adam" which I thought was a really great episode. Some of the best acting I had seen from Burn Gorman so far. He really didn't get enough to do last season, other than be a jerk and spout the occasional medical technobabble.

Next three episodes I also really liked: nice to see Martha again, and Owen gets an amazing arc. For God's sake, has Jack learned his lesson about the glove this time?? I hope so.

"Something Borrowed" - one of those episodes where the plot depends on everyone being really really dumb. Gwen didn't think about how her parents would feel, thinking she was pregnant??? And everyone forgets every five minutes or so that the bad guy is a SHAPESHIFTER and could be anyone. Good grief. I usually hate Too Dumb To Live plots, and I wasn't nuts about this one, but it had a few moments of such brilliance that I forgave it. Specifically, Rhys brandishing a chainsaw at the alien impersonating his mother. Great zombie-movie-cliche moment. I just wish they had let him chainsaw her instead of yet another Jack-saves-the-day-with-big-gun resolution. I also liked the way Tosh brushed off the idiot groomsman ("Banana" was it?) who was hitting on her. I expected them to write Tosh all flustered, so it was pretty satisfying that she just told him to get lost.

That one about the traveling show coming to life from the film stock - eh. Had to suspend belief pretty damn hard.

"Adrift" - I liked this one quite a bit. It's nice for Andy the policeman to have a little character development.

"Fragments" - Another good episode. I guess no one gets recruited to Torchwood unless something really horrible happens to them first. I can see that, actually. If your life isn't ruined already, then joining Torchwood will ruin it for you. I see why Jack wanted Gwen as Token Sane Person (pity she turned out to be crazy after all).

"Exit Wounds" - hellovalot better than last season's finale. The story with Gray I didn't think was that great. But Owen and Tosh! :( wow.

Apparently instead of a third season, they are making a miniseries to air on several consecutive nights. That'll be interesting, whenever we get to see it over here (airs in the U.K. in June).

Not dead yet.

2009-04-28T19:50:00.000-07:00

New record for disappearing from the blogosphere: over 2 months. Arg.

I have been obsessed with playing Knights of the Old Republic II: The Sith Lords on the X-box. KOTOR I and II have really re-awakened my inner Star Wars fan, who had been in hiding ever since Attack of the Clones came out. Oh man are those games great.

I'm also trying to teach myself to play by ear. I learned to play flute in high school band, and then college private lessons, which means I got one of those school-type musical educations where you learn to read music, memorize the fingering that matches the symbol on the page, and off you go. It's all reading and muscle memory, and your ears are pretty much sidelined. That's why I laugh when people (on rare occasions) suggest I might have musical talent. Anyone can learn to read music, and then you just spend some hours doing drills for your fingers (that part is just like learning to type).

I have had a lot of fun playing like that for a lot of years, but I am finally getting bored and frustrated with it. So I'm trying to learn to play by ear. I was actually pretty intimidated by the idea, but I thought about it and broke it down like so. Think about a song you know well enough to "hear" in your head. Hear it? Okay, you are halfway there. The other half is memorization - only instead of matching a printed symbol to a fingering, you match the fingering to the pitch you need to hear next, in order to match what you hear in your head.

Well, it made sense to me, anyway.

I have hopes that being able to play by ear will open up other kinds of music to me, besides the limited range of classical that is easy enough for me to play. Most other traditions of music (jazz, rock, folk, Irish) rely on learning tunes by ear rather than reading.

Check out flutist Greg Pattillo for some non-traditional playing...

Black Canary, part III of III

2009-02-15T21:42:00.000-08:00

Part three: Black Canary in Birds of Prey. Actually, as strangething pointed out, BoP started prior to the Green Arrow series I was talking about last week. So technically, this should have been part two. Oh well.

This image is the cover of the trade volume Birds of Prey: Of Like Minds, written by Gail Simone, drawn by Ed Benes. This volume was published in 2004.

Post-feminist backlash ahoy!

Black Canary is the blond Barbie. The brunette Barbie is Huntress, and the redhead Barbie is Oracle (the former Batgirl).

Yeah, good thing they have color-coded hair, isn't it? What will they do if they recruit another team member, have her dye hers green?

It's too bad I'm icked out by the way the women are drawn, because this book is really well written for them. BC and Oracle are convincing women friends that worry about one another, laugh together, and bliss out together over great Italian food. Even Huntress, who is supposed to be too scary even for Batman's taste, here has a sense of humor and a secret love of babies. (Too bad about her costume... WTF?)

They get a good storyline too, with a satisfying balance of beating up of bad guys mixed with thinky parts, and all of it with nice teamwork and decent character interactions. BC is written as tough as nails, even though she looks like Porn Star Barbie.

I get that superheros of both sexes are going to have idealized bodies. I guess I wish that our culture was better at appreciating a tougher-looking, more muscled ideal woman. It makes me sad that to be sexy, a woman character can have only one type of look: stick thin, big round floaty boobs, and pouty lips.

I have to admit that I kind of like her anime-girl hair though. ;)

Dishpan Kitty

2009-02-11T19:31:00.000-08:00

I remember during Doctor Who season I tried to make sure that no more than 50% of my posts were about the show. These days I am trying to make sure that no more than half of my posts are cute cat pictures. I'm going soft. :)

When we brought Tuesday home, we didn't have a cat bed, and so Gary improvised one out of an old plastic dishpan held together with duct tape and an old throw rug and put it at the top of the stairs.

We later bought her a nice fancy cat bed, but she never uses it. The dishpan is apparently preferable. She sleeps there every night.

Black Canary, part II of III

2009-02-07T11:53:00.001-08:00

This week, may I introduce you to Black Canary as drawn by Phil Hester in 2002. These images are from the trade volume Green Arrow: Sounds of Violence, written by Kevin Smith (yeah, Clerks, that Kevin Smith).

I really liked this run of Green Arrow. Besides the funny dialog by Smith, we are treated to the best looking Black Canary ever. In fact, she may be the coolest looking woman superhero I've ever seen. Here is my favorite shot of her.

I like how she looks tough and formidable, not Barbie-doll pretty like many female superheroes are drawn. I can believe that she's a martial artist here. I wouldn't want to get on her bad side.

Here she is out of uniform, with her expression of "Ollie, do NOT tell me you are going to be late for our date because you have been goofing off with Hawkman."

I gotta remember to find out what Phil Hester has been drawing since 2002.

The only downside here is that BC is not particularly well-served by the plot. Since it is Green Arrow's book, she is pretty much relegated to the Girlfriend role. And GA is pretty crap at relationships.

So it is a little demoralizing to see this cool woman following around this clueless guy, when she could so clearly do better. She's not lacking in self-confidence. Why is she wasting her time trying to whip GA into good boyfriend material?

I think it is a law of the DC universe that BC loves GA, no matter what. People can come back from the dead all the time, but no way can Dinah permanently dump Ollie.

But hey, quibbles aside, look how cool she looks. :)

Black Canary, part I of III

2009-01-31T12:27:00.000-08:00

Black Canary is one of the longest-lived female superheroes in the DC universe. Because she's been around a long time and because she doesn't have the unchanging iconic status of, say, Wonder Woman, it's interesting to compare the way she is drawn and written over the decades.

Images taken from books I happen to own - I haven't made any attempt to be complete. Sorry for the poor quality, but I hope they are good enough to get my points across.

Here is Black Canary in the 1980s, in Justice League: A New Beginning, written by Keith Giffen & J.M. DeMatteis, drawn by Kevin Maguire.

She gets to be fairly bad ass on occasion. Here she is taking out a baddie (while elsewhere Blue Beetle bitches and moans).

I like her practical look, although of course it seems really dated now. (Check out that 70s hair! and what is up with those gigantic tops on her white boots?)

Unfortunately her dialog is a bit painful. I think one of the writers said to the another, "Hey, I hear tell of thing thingummy called Feminism. Let's make her a Feminist! We'll be topical!"

Other writer: "OK! But how do we do it?"

First writer: "Um, I think those women called feminists don't like being hit on by total jerks. And, um, they are all, um, independent and stuff."

Other writer: "Got it!"

So, they wrote Guy Gardner (the Green Lantern at the time) as a total jerk, and then they had Angry Feminist Black Canary try to verbally slap him down. She is furious yet ineffectual, and he gets to insinuate that she is secretly attracted to him. Hilarity ensues, except for how it doesn't.

Actual dialog taken from the comic:

Guy: "That's the way it always works, Babe -- first they tell me I'm insufferable... then they BEG me to take them HOME."

Black Canary: "Why, you slimy, disgusting...!"

Me: Sigh.

And then they decided that "independent" must include "whiny, childish, and ungracious." I dunno if you can read this page, but it shows Black Canary being hauled up into the sky, then plummeting towards certain death while explaining to another teammate (I think that yellow & blue guy is Booster Gold) that no, she can't fly herself. In the bottom two panels, she is caught by that Christmas-looking dude (I think his name is Mister Miracle).

Dialog of the last two panels, for your cringing pleasure:

Mister Miracle: "Hang ON, Canary -- I'm coming!"

Black Canary: "Go AWAY -- I can save MYSELF!"

MM: "How?"

BC (plummeting): "I haven't figured it OUT yet."

MM: "Don't worry, I've GOT you!"

BC: "But I don't WANT to be 'got'! I HATE being saved!"

MM: "What if I promise to let YOU save ME next time?"

BC: "Swear?"

MM: "Swear."

BC: "Then it's okay. THIS ONCE."

...

Tee hee, aren't those independent girls cute? You really have to humor them, though.

Sigh.

So, partial credit for trying, DC. They put a female superhero on the JLA lineup (admittedly, it's pretty much a second-string line-up at this time), and they drew her pretty realistically - I'd buy that she fights crime in that outfit. She gets to do stuff, violent and otherwise, and she gets to be reasonably intelligent most of the time.

On the other hand, they play her for laughs in a fairly offensive way and they clearly have no idea what an actual independent, confident woman would look like, so they made her bratty and undignified instead.

Cat jungle gym

2009-01-19T20:54:00.000-08:00

My Sunday Afternoon, by Tuesday the Cat.

Almost made it to the top. Then lost my hold.

Yah!!

There.

If only that silly human wouldn't keep folding clothes and piling them in my way. Oh there we go.

Success!

(jaime_sama says: I claim bonus geekitude for my Phantom Menace poster in the background there. I really need a Doctor Who poster to go with it though.)

Eleventh Doctor announced.

2009-01-05T18:48:00.000-08:00

Matt Smith. Huh. Well, none of us has ever heard of him, but then David Tennant wasn't exactly a household name in the U.S. before DW either.

Vegan baking

2009-01-02T16:05:00.000-08:00

After receiving fantastic cookbook recommendations from my friend vgnwtch, I have been experimenting with vegan cooking. I am not vegan and don't plan to be, but I am about a 95% vegetarian these days, and I was getting bored with the same old recipes, and scared by any new ones I came across. You do a search for vegetarian recipes on the internet, and see what scary things you come up with. Who could live off those "2 cups of sour cream and 8 ounces of shredded cheese" recipes?? On the other hand, who wants to eat nothing but sprouted grains and raw vegetables? I figured there had to be a middle ground, and creative vegan chefs must have staked it out. This is apparently true, if Isa Chandra Moskowitz is a fair representative. Here is her awesome book.

Since I'm not vegan, I didn't have a problem using typical egg-containing recipes for pancakes and cookies and things, but since I'm enjoying the soups and entrees out of her book so much, I decided to try some vegan baked cookies and cakes too. They are turning out to be yummy, and easy to make.

Top five reasons to love vegan baking:

1. Cutting back on animal products, even if you don't go totally vegan, is better for the environment, a more efficient use of natural resources.

2. Vegan food is generally, though not always, healthier and lower fat. Canola oil is a lot better for you than butter. There are still some gorgeous, rich, vegan desserts that ain't hardly health food, of course.

3. You can still make pancakes (or muffins, or cookies) when your fridge is bare of perishable food. An unopened box of soy milk lives forever in your pantry. Usually you aren't out of baking powder or flour or cornstarch. But you (or I, at least) run out of eggs all the damn time. Eggless recipes are handy at those times.

4. You can taste vegan cookie dough without fear of salmonella.

5. Vegan baked goods can be SO DELICIOUS. :) With a good recipe, you don't miss the eggs in the slightest.

Gender differences

2008-12-07T10:57:00.000-08:00

This post has been floating around in my head for months, so maybe it's time I wrote it.

Once in a while - fairly frequently, actually - I seem to end up in a conversation about the differences between men and women. Almost inevitably, someone in the conversation will suggest the possibility that the difference in question is or might be innate, usually with some armchair evolutionary theory to explain it, like "men are better designed to do x" or "women are better at y because they have to bear children."

This annoys the heck out of me, and I don't always do a good job of explaining why. Of course there are a few sex-related differences that are obviously innate. Women are better at breast-feeding babies. No denying that. But usually the differences that people are talking about are not obvious biological ones. Usually the conversation is about men being "naturally" better at science, or women being "naturally" more in tune to people's emotions. With the polite understanding that "hey, we aren't being sexist, women and men both have their innate, natural strengths and weaknesses, we should learn to value the contributions that both genders can make" et cetera.

This is infuriating, and the polite, warm-fuzzy veneer doesn't make it less infuriating. Let me make an analogy.

Imagine that you and I decide to see who is the faster runner. Before we start, I shackle some iron weights to your ankles. Unsurprisingly, I win the race. Then I say, "Maybe I'm naturally a better runner than you."

I hope your reaction at this point is total outrage. Why in hell do I think I'm "innately" or "naturally" faster, just because I'm faster when you are handicapped by iron weights?

Then I say, "Good grief, calm down. I'm just suggesting that I MIGHT be innately faster. I think it's a matter for empirical study. Wouldn't it be interesting to fund some scientific research, to find out about the possible innate differences in our running ability?"

I hope your reaction at this point is something like, "IRON WEIGHTS, YOU MORON!!" perhaps accompanied by smacking me on the head.

From birth, both boys and girls in our culture are trained like bonsai trees into their socially-acceptable gender roles. Those roles are like the iron weights in the imaginary race. Of course girls are less likely to become scientifically literate, and of course boys are less likely to become emotionally literate. They are overwhelmingly taught which skills are gender appropriate, and actively discouraged from acquiring skills that are not considered appropriate.

Then you get to adulthood, and some genius notices gender differences. "Hey, look, men are more likely to be scientists, while women are more likely to go into care-giving professions. Why would that be? Maybe there is an innate gender difference!"

This is the point where I want to smack said genius in the head. I'm not saying that there ISN'T any innate gender difference in learning different kinds of skills. I'm just saying that there IS an obvious, huge, iron-weights-type explanation for gender difference staring us right in the face. When people wonder about the innate differences, they tend to erase that explanation. They ignore the incredibly strong, oppressive gender socialization that both boys and girls go through, and the hundreds (if not thousands) of years of sexism that is backing it up.

There have been and are plenty of men and women who fight that socialization, and things are getting gradually better, so that these days there is more support for women who want to be logicians or men who want to be good fathers and good husbands. But those social forces are still telling all of us, every day, what a girl is supposed to be like and what a boy is supposed to be like. If we think of the differences between girls and boys as innate, that means that no change is necessary, because no change is possible. We are enabling those oppressive forces that tell us all which of our talents it is okay to develop.

It's not really the empirical studies about innate differences themselves that are annoying me. In those studies, I want a full acknowledgment up front about the massive social forces that create the non-innate (learned) differences. And I want to know how the study plans to distinguish an innate from a learned difference. And I want to know that the people running the study don't believe themselves to be immune from sexism. If they think that they are purely objective on the subject, then their conclusions ought to be suspect. Some people who want these studies done may have suspect motives as well. But it is perfectly possible to run those studies in a responsible way.

What I really want is for lay people - non-scientists - to shut up and stop telling Just So stories about why men have supposedly evolved to be better at X or worse at Y than women, because the effect is to reinforce sexism and give everyone an excuse to be complacent about it.

Torchwood season 1

2008-11-29T15:08:00.000-08:00

So, we finished watching season 1 of Torchwood on DVD. Much like its parent series Doctor Who, it covers the whole gamut between lame and terrific. You have to keep watching just in case the next episode is one of the amazing ones.

I loved Captain Jack in DW so I was looking forward to seeing him again. Sadly, he is really miserable about having been stranded in an unfamiliar century for so long. Poor Jack, the Doctor really never got called on how badly he treated him.

Jack's mood sets the tone for his team too, because just about every other character is miserable, emotionally clueless, isolated, and self-destructive. (Yay! leadership.) I thought for a while that Owen got the prize for dumbest and least ethical team member. By the end of the season, I still think he is the dumbest, but Gwen has become the front-runner for least ethical. Maybe. It's a tough call.

I kinda sound like I don't like the series. But when it's good, it's really good. Two of my favorite episodes are by Chris Chibnall, the series' lead writer: "Cyberwoman" and "Countrycide". Both were really dark, suspenseful, scary stories. Unfortunately Chibnall also wrote the notorious Alien Sex Addict one (I so wish I was kidding) and the finale episode, wherein Owen is stupid (shocking!) but Jack manages to save the day with a nearly-as-stupid fix. Yeah well.

G and I disagreed a bit about "Greeks Bearing Gifts" - I liked it quite a lot, but he wasn't crazy about it. I was impressed that a show that would do "Countrycide" (basically action/horror) would also do an episode that is pretty much completely about people's feelings and thoughts. There is some plot about a telepathy amulet and an alien and all, but the point is pretty much about Tosh feeling like an outsider, which is doubly sad after we just discovered in "Cyberwoman" that Ianto feels excluded from things. Just who are the cool kids on the team if everyone feels left out and marginal?

It's interesting to pay attention to episode writers; the internet has made that a lot easier than it used to be. Chibnall also wrote "42" on DW - the one with Martha on the space ship slowly crashing into the sun...or something? He must have been aiming for that awesome breathless suspenseful mood that he captured so well in "Cyberwoman" and "Countrycide", but somehow "42" falls flat for me. Toby Whithouse who wrote "Greeks Bearing Gifts" also wrote "School Reunion" (the one with Sarah Jane and K9 and villainous ranting from Anthony Stewart Head). "School Reunion" - though more plotty than "Greeks Bearing Gifts" - still allows plenty of space for characters to have feelings. I like that in an action series.

Two of the sort of near-miss episodes of Torchwood are by the same author: "Out of Time" and "Captain Jack Harkness," by Catherine Tregenna. Both are aiming at being really poignant, and they almost get there, but she just goes over the top both times, and loses me. If she dialed it back just a bit, she'd be fantastic.

For the booby prize, I nominate "Combat" as the worst episode of the season. Yeah, even worse than the Alien Sex Fiend episode, and that's saying something. The sad thing is, "Combat" might have been salvaged if it didn't take itself quite so seriously. If they'd acknowledged that they were doing a Fight Club pastiche, like with a "The first rule of Weevil Club..." line, it could have won me back over. But it is totally earnest, grim, and dumb.

I'm still interested in watching season 2. Come on, James Marsters as special guest villain? and Freema Agyeman as special guest Martha? That's enough awesome to get me to watch right there.

Welcome Tuesday

2008-11-02T11:10:00.000-08:00

I don't always do so great at the weekly blog posts. Here we have had our lovely new kitty Tuesday for three weeks and I haven't even put up her picture.

We had the idea for a while that we wanted a cat; our apartment complex changed their rules so that pets are now allowed, but we decided that we would wait until the end of our hamsters' lives before bringing in any predator pets. Since Lily was our last hamster, we decided now was a good time.

Tuesday was named by her previous owner, but we like the name. She's about 2 1/2 years old, and is playful and friendly, with excellent manners. She doesn't try to steal your food, or chew plants, or scratch us, or pee outside the litter box, and she only claws the furniture a tiny bit. She does love to get into closets and poke around. Maybe she just wants to climb up to the game shelf.

She likes to sleep on the back of the couch, and also sits there when we are watching TV, like she is watching the show over our shoulders.

She will also play a close approximation of fetch with her beloved toy mouse. I swear. Gazza has some video evidence of this over at his blog here. (The video's a bit dark; we'll have to try to get some footage during the daytime.)

In other news, happy belated Halloween:

P.S. I hope all the Doctor Who fans have heard David Tennant's news...

Let It Be

2008-10-08T18:47:00.000-07:00

So in the past few months, I have been discovering the Beatles. I know. The fact that we are just now watching Babylon 5 is one thing... at least there we are only about one decade out of touch with the cutting edge. Nevertheless, I'm now experiencing my own personal Beatlemania. We got the White Album a few months back, and also the first volume of the Anthology, both of which are amazing. I read a book collecting Beatles journalism, and finally a few weeks back, picked up Let It Be. I haven't written about music much, but I thought I'd try to make sense of my obsessive fan-girly love for this album by going through it song by song.

A blues influence is there throughout all of the Beatles music I've listened to, but Let It Be (henceforth LIB) frequently sounds more like blues than rock - if such a distinction is possible. It's like the Beatles got bored with being a rock band and decided to transform themselves effortlessly and brilliantly into a Chicago-style (meaning, electric guitars) blues band. We knew from the White Album how many different styles the Beatles could take on, but I was still surprised by LIB.

All of Lennon's and McCartney's songs are credited to both writers, but the consensus opinion seems to be that by this stage in their careers that credit was more or less a polite fiction. They weren't getting along well enough nor going in the same directions musically by the late 60s. Below, I will credit the songs based on the opinion of the Ever-Reliable Internet, along with the common-sense reasoning that one is a bit more likely to sing lead on one's own songs than not.

Learning about the shape of the Beatles' career and listening to Let It Be gives you such an intense impression of what 1969-1970 were like for them (right before the band broke up). Paul still had hopes and plans for the band, and gradually, heartbreakingly, realized that none of the others were up for it. Once you have that dynamic in mind, it's hard not to see it in nearly every song.

"Two of Us" (McCartney) Wikipedia sayeth that this song sometimes addresses Linda (Paul's wife-to-be) and other times addresses John. It is a gorgeous song about an intense and affectionate relationship (romantic or otherwise). My take is that these lyrics at least are addressed to John: "You and I have memories longer than the road that stretches out ahead."

"Dig a Pony" (Lennon) Don't ask me what the pony is about. :) The "Yoko broke up the band" theory is clearly an unfair over-simplification, but lord, you can see why people thought (still think?) it was true. "All I want is you/Everything has got to be just like you want it to"? Whew. "All" he wants?? John sure sounds like he is choosing Yoko over the Beatles.

"Across the Universe" (Lennon) A gorgeous song about the experience of meditation, how thoughts and emotions come and go, but "Nothin's gonna change my world." Some lyrics are a Sanskrit mantra. This is the only song that, when stuck in my head endlessly, has ever had a calming effect. This song was written earlier, 1968, but included on this album apparently to compensate for the otherwise-sparse presence of John. Though still formally a Beatle in 1969, he wasn't putting much effort into the band, apparently.

"I Me Mine" (Harrison) This song comes out of George's interest in Indian culture and Hindu philosophy, and the challenge of letting go of the ego. I know that, but doesn't it also hint at the mood someone really sick of listening to people fight all the time? "All I can hear/I me mine I me mine I me mine."

"Dig It" (Credited to all four Beatles) Only a snippet of a longer jam session made it onto the album. Somehow I've got to get a hold of the movie Let It Be and hear more. (At the request of the surviving Beatles, the movie has not been released on DVD.) The snippet we do have sounds a bit influenced by Bob Dylan's improvised-sounding talking blues, like "I Shall Be Free."

"Let It Be" (McCartney) Paul says this one is about his mother. The mood of the song is about resignation or consolation.

"Maggie Mae" (Traditional, arrangement credited to all four Beatles) This is a goofy, fun take on a song that is apparently the unofficial anthem of Liverpool. Could represent a moment of nostalgia? It almost sounds spontaneous, but if there is an arrangement they copyrighted, then I suppose it was planned to sound that way. :)

"I've Got a Feeling" Teh Internet sayeth that this is a combination of two unfinished songs, one by McCartney and one by Lennon. It does sound like a sort of mash-up, now that they mention it, and the lead vocals get traded off between the two singers, almost like dueling songs.

"One After 909" This is the first official release of this song, but apparently it was written in the late 50s (credited Lennon-McCartney) and was performed live in concerts, but they never got a recording that they were happy releasing until LIB (1969). In the first volume of the Beatles Anthology CDs, there are a couple of early attempts at recordings that break down in different places. Nice that they finally released a version; it's like the band came full circle here.

"The Long and Winding Road" (McCartney) Another sad song from Paul. The lyric "Don't leave me standing here" is pretty powerful in the context of the Beatles thinking about breaking up. I'm curious to hear the Let It Be...Naked version now, which is supposed to have a version a lot closer to Paul's original intention.

"For You Blue" (Harrison) I love the straight-up blues sound on this track. John plays slide guitar (cheered on adorably by George, "Go, Johnny, go!" & "Elmore James got nothing on this, baby.")

"Get Back" You know, I think I've just heard this one too many times on the radio, so it sounds a bit tired to me now. DJs need to spread the love around to some other songs. ;)

Best and worst

2008-10-04T16:12:00.000-07:00

Of course what I miss the most about New Jersey are our friends. But as I said to Gazza, "place where some of our best friends live" is only an accidental property of NJ, not an essential property. The best and worst things about New Jersey should be things that anyone can appreciate. So here's my list:

Things I miss most about NJ:

- Pizza. There is no decent pizza in Ellensburg, though a place called Papa Murphy's makes a pizza-shaped thing that isn't bad. You pick it up raw, and take it home to bake it yourself. It isn't entirely unlike pizza.

- Bagels. Highland Park, NJ has a high enough concentration of Jews that certain foods get held to a high standard there, such as bagels (and dill pickles, but that's another story). In Ellensburg, they think that if they make white bread into a round shape and put a hole in the middle, then they've made a bagel.

- Restaurants. There are decent ones here, but I still miss two... Makeda (I don't know where the nearest Ethiopian food to Ellensburg is, but it feels like it might as well be Ethiopia. It would be about as accessible) and Shanghai Park (I'd almost fly back to the east coast just to eat those steamed veggie dumplings, and then fly back.)

And just so the list isn't 100% food...

- Larger, more diverse job market in NJ. Ellensburg is just not that big.

- Public transportation. yeah.

And in all fairness, here are the five things I prefer about Ellensburg:

- You can get to actual countryside within minutes. (I mean it; you could fairly easily walk out of town far enough to see cows grazing.) You can get to hiking trails quickly too.

- No rush hour to mention. You don't have to think about timing your trips downtown, and you rarely if ever get stuck in traffic, or even really have to slow down, except for dog-walking pedestrians.

- No parking woes. You don't have to think about where you'll park, every time you go anywhere. There is usually on-street parking wherever you want to go (unless it's rodeo weekend, or the jazz festival).

- Nice people. Even the clerks and baggers at the grocery store will smile and chat with you. I know you folks in Jersey think I'm making that up, but it is absolutely true.

- This one is hypothetical so far, but: Reasonable real estate prices. I think it will be within our reach to buy a house here a lot faster than it would be in central Jersey.

And on a couple points, I think we break even:

- Amazon, Secondspin.com, and Netflix all still deliver here. We have a fast internet connection and accounts on X-Box Live. Who really cares where you live?

- Though there is less going on in the small city of Ellensburg, there is still plenty of high quality stuff. The annual film festival is going on now; there is also a terrific jazz festival every summer, and the university attracts amazing speakers. Last year Gazza and I went to hear Salman Rushdie and Cornel West. The CWU music department is very good, and they have a super string quartet in residence. If there was more stuff to do, we probably wouldn't be finding the time.

Lily

2008-09-19T20:14:00.000-07:00

Our hamster Lily died this week.

Here's a picture of her deciding that it is boring to sit in a plastic container to have your picture taken.

Lily was our first Syrian hamster. After our three previous experiences with dwarf hamsters, she was refreshing in that she learned quickly to tolerate being handled and actually seemed to like us, or at least associate us more with fun and food than with fear.

Lily's big ambition in life was always to get out of her cage and explore the floor, which she did from time to time, whether we wanted her to or not. If we had control, we used to put her in her ball to roll around, which was pretty fun (she would go into it voluntarily) but not as fun as getting completely loose.

I used to let her explore the couch, thinking (foolishly) that as long as I didn't let her fall, where was she going to go?

The last time we let her do that, we ended up turning the couch on its back (carefully!) and cutting a hole in the fabric on the underside, then luring her out of the couch's innards with hamster treats. Fun evening... for someone. ;)

Another time I was alone in the living room, late at night, and I heard mysterious noises... I traced them to the closet, which scared the heck out of me, but finally I got brave and opened the door. Lily popped her head up out of the recycle bin, where she'd been crawling in and out of empty tin cans (clink clink). I had no idea she was loose.

Once we left town, delegating friends to stop by and feed Lily and Ping while we were away. Lily got industrious and chewed a hole in her plastic cage. (It was a repurposed turtle cage. Bad idea.) Our poor friends searched our apartment, caught her, and repaired the cage. Gary took some pictures which are here. You can bet we bought those friends some nice chocolate after that.

Lily liked tofu, peanut butter flavored dog treats, and any kind of fruit. She would eat peas, but green beans apparently didn't count as food (not even worth hoarding for later). She didn't like to be picked up, but if you opened her cage door, she would climb out for a visit. (None of our dwarf hamsters would come out on their own ever.)

We got her from the SPCA near where we used to live in Pennsylvania. They said she was four months old when she and her sister came in. She had (and lost) a litter in the shelter, and was then separated from her sister after biting her in the face. (Syrians are territorial and shouldn't share a cage after they are adults.) If the age the shelter was given was correct, Lily lived about 2 years. Not super old age for a Syrian, but reasonable.

back from San Jose

2008-09-13T21:49:00.000-07:00

Just got back from a trip to San Jose with my boss... one of those trips where you only see airports and the interior of a hotel. I have no idea whether San Jose is nice; I barely saw sun except for casting longing glances out the window at the beautiful swimming pool.

It has dawned on me that I have never been on a single plane without being formally invited On Behalf of Airline X to SitBackRelaxAndEnjoyTheFlight. In exactly those terms. Why does every single airline think that they have to say that?

I also noticed that for me, there is a particular window of height above ground that inspires fear of flying. As soon as we get a certain height, I get scared looking down at the tiny people and cars. Then we reach an even higher height, where the individual people and cars are invisible, and I switch from scared to interested, and I take in the view. I'm not worried most of the flight. Then we go to land, and as soon as we descend back down to the scary level, I get worried again. I think there is a height that is scary, and then there is a level that is too high to make emotional sense at all, so it's just mildly interesting.

Business travel on the company dime is a new experience: it turned out to entail first class plane tickets, a medium-fancy hotel, and lots of room service, along with 10+ hour work days. I'm glad to be home.

Agnosticism

2008-08-17T11:12:00.000-07:00

I'm an agnostic about whether there may be nonphysical things or qualities in the world (including a God, although I tend to disbelieve in any particular version of God anyone specifically brings up). Even some quite well-educated people misunderstand what agnosticism is. I'm not wishy-washy or taking a long time to make up my mind. I have a fairly stable and firm belief that there is not sufficient evidence for us (the human race) to decide this question at this time. In the words of a button I own, I'm a "Militant Agnostic: I Don't Know, and You Don't Either."

I think that faith is fine, if faith plays a positive role in your life. It does for many people. It's important not to confuse what you believe on faith and what you believe on reason. Otherwise you end up with "intelligent design" nonsense. What you believe on faith is not necessarily going to be agreed to by people who don't share your faith, and that's something you're going to have to deal with.

I think that atheism is fine, although I think atheists overstate their position a little bit. Part of the problem is that atheism, and physicalism more broadly, are philosophically trendy this century. I think this causes some philosophers to put a little more confidence in their disbelief than they are entitled to. Occam's Razor is really not as sharp as all that, guys.

In other words, Laplace's statement on God, "I have no need of that hypothesis," is not adequate support for atheism. The argument he's using (sometimes called Occam's Razor) is that the simpler theory is better. Laplace figures that his theories work fine as they are and are simpler without adding God into the equation, so he isn't going to.

Simplicity is certainly a good feature for a theory to have, and it is a perfectly fine way to choose one theory over another. If you can explain your observations equally well two ways, one simple and elegant, the other hugely complex, then of course you're going to choose the simpler theory.

But "God" and "No God" are very very broad theories. They are Theories of Everything, each meant to account for all of our actual and possible observations of the world. Whichever one you adhere to, there are at present still too many things that confuse us about the world. We don't even have *one* theory that explains everything, much less two that we need to choose between. We aren't even close to the point where we could invoke simplicity to choose a Theory of Everything.

"Everything that exists is physical" and "Some nonphysical things exist" are even broader theories, and we have, if anything, even less rational basis for believing one or the other.

The Aesthetics of Comics

2008-08-10T10:30:00.000-07:00

A while back I read The Aesthetics of Comics by David Carrier, and have been meaning to put up some thoughts about it. I have to get in the Serious blog entries between seasons of Doctor Who.

I was excited to run across this book in a used bookstore: a philosopher of art, seriously taking on comics? It turned out to be an interesting book, but I have some problems with it.

(1) The title is seriously misleading, and the author doesn't seem to notice that. It would be more aptly called The Aesthetics of Comic Strips, but there isn't much acknowledgment that the book's scope is limited. Carrier is clearly not a comics fan in the sense of reading superhero comics or Sandman; he has few references to monthly comics series or long form graphic novels. Lots of his examples are from The Far Side - brilliant stuff - and Krazy Kat - which I didn't know of, but is also brilliant stuff. He occasionally refers to longer form comics, just often enough to indicate that he does mean his theories to cover them, but his specialization and his interest is clearly in the short form comic strips. Once in a while he seems downright unfriendly. On Superman comics: "how indeed is it possible to tell a genuinely interesting story about an all but invulnerable hero?" Um, I believe it has been done, Carrier, though probably not in the weekly comic strip form.

There is nothing wrong with focusing your book, and the roots of the comic strip makes a very interesting subject to focus on. But it's a bit like claiming to write a book on "the aesthetics of prose fiction" and then writing only about short stories.

(2) Not so much a criticism as an observation: Carrier's background is more in visual art than in narrative forms. (His author blurb mentions previous books about modernist and abstract painting.) This is probably a good corrective for me, since I am the opposite kind of comics reader, and tend to focus on the narrative and the dialog, short-changing the art. Those of us on both extremes need to struggle towards the middle and appreciate a hybrid art form for what it is. Carrier's efforts to integrate comics into art history (meaning the history of the visual arts) are very interesting but can't really be the whole story.

(3) Carrier seems to think that speech balloons are essential to comics - necessary conditions for a thing's being a comic. This is obviously not true. I don't think it's even true of comic strips. Have an Unshelved comic with pictograms instead of speech. The character Impulse in the DC universe has picture thought balloons like this sometimes too. There are also plenty of examples of comic pages with no balloons at all, where the art carries the action. Carrier is may go astray here because word balloons are so theoretically interesting; they are physically in the picture space, but it is understood that they are not part of the picture. Characters in the comic don't typically see speech balloons (unless it's a meta-level sort of gag). Carrier has an insightful section relating speech balloons to what may be their historical predecessors in the visual arts. But as interesting as speech balloons are, you can certainly have a comic without them.

On a similar note, the art of comic lettering is a bit neglected here, as it often seems to be by critics. It is really noticeable when you try to quote comic dialog in a word-processed paper or blog entry; you can only use bold and italics, but the comic letterer has a huge range of letter size and shape available, to give a different feel to the different characters' dialog, or to emphasize words to a greater or lesser degree. Speech balloons don't exist in the universe of the comic panel, but the visuality of the letters themselves can still be important , in ways that get lost when you try to type out the dialog.

(4) Since I have said Carrier neglects longer forms in favor of comic strips, you can bet manga isn't covered much. He does know about manga; page 58 shows an example of a Japanese comic (in the context of talking about the order you look at the panels in). But he will turn around and say something unfortunate like this: in comics, "the characters are never ideal enough to be beautiful." (16) uh huh.

So, I'm still glad that a philosopher of art took on comics, and I'm still glad that I read it. The art history perspective was fresh and interesting for me. But think of how Scott McCloud, by contrast to Carrier, loves and understands all kinds of comics and envisions the untapped potential of the medium. Overall, Carrier is just not enough of a comics geek.

Who - "Journey's End"

2008-08-04T20:16:00.000-07:00

Okay, how did we do:

- Plot make sense? That'd be a big NO. Great to see Davros again, and how cool is his shout-out to Sarah Jane? but he's gone beyond bonkers. He wants to do what-now? break all matter in the universe down to subatomic particles? Using 27 relocated planets? Somehow? Um? And the Daleks are helping him with this, why? I would have guessed that they were somehow programmed to obey him, which is what he was originally intending for them in Genesis of the Daleks, but he didn't succeed then, and the Doctor seems to think he still hasn't succeeded in forcing their obedience. Did I miss something? I reckon the Daleks would rather kill everyone but take over their planets so they have something left to rule.

Yeah, and the Clone Doctor thing? also making my head hurt. Gosh. You'd think every Time Lord would keep a severed hand in a jar around, if it lets you heal from a fatal injury without using up a regeneration. Of course the hand then turns into a clone of you, which you might not want. Anyway, yeah, I'm not going to try to figure that one out. Let's hope Davies goes back on his meds (or is it off them?) before writing the Christmas special.

- Daleks still scary? Alas, I have to give this one another big NO. Just like the new series in general, this two-parter built them up really well and then took them down too easily. Donna figured out how to? in about thirty seconds? I know she "can think of things the Doctor never could" and all that but this is an enemy that the Time Lords could only defeat by destroying themselves along with them.

Bet that was cathartic for Jack though, blowing the head off of one.

- Jack and Rose? Not much of a moment (only "he's not dead??") But it turns out that we got a little bit of that end-of-season-1/"Boomtown" mood from Jack's interaction with Mickey. I didn't see that coming, but it was great. I like Mickey; he has had a great character arc, more dramatic than just about anyone else's. And he's stayed in our universe this time. And he caught up to Jack just when Jack (I'm pretty sure) was giving a big recruitment speech to Martha. Seems like they are leaving the door open for Mickey to appear on Torchwood.

- Luke and the Doctor moment? Not really, but the Doctor talked to Mr. Smith, which was all good. :)

- Donna moments? I loved the scenes where the Doctor (well, Clone Doctor) and Donna are taking on each others' speech patterns. Very awesome (as long as you don't think about what the heck is going on, and just enjoy the dialog...)

Some Internet fans are really enraged about what happened to Donna (like, she's got to go live under the thumb of her horrible mother and have a miserable humdrum life). Of course it does stink. She's lost the memories of some of the most amazing things to happen in her life. But Donna has always been tough; she's really quite good at standing up to her horrible mother. (Look, she was damn well turning left, and it took a Giant Alien Mind Control Bug to make her give in to her mom's pressuring and turn right...) Donna will do okay.

Poor Davies may have written himself into a corner; in this episode he had to write out TWO popular companions in different, permanent ways without killing them. And both characters were fairly explicit that they'd never leave voluntarily. Still, um, Rose? I might have been sadder about her if her plot's resolution had made any sense at all. If Mickey can stay in our universe, why can't she? Because Clone Doctor can't stay, and she has to babysit him? Admittedly Clone Doctor does seem to need a keeper. But he originated in our universe (somehow) so why does he belong in the alternate? And anyway, does Rose get a vote about where she's spending the rest of her life?

I feel like Davies couldn't quite live with the sad ending Rose got in "Doomsday" and couldn't quite figure out a happy ending (given that the actress wanted out of the show). This is just a weird ending.

I liked the bit where Martha/UNIT and the Sarah Jane/Jack/Mickey team each come up with the same plan and threaten to destroy the planet, and how Davros makes the Doctor feel about that. It's the flip side of the speech Rose was making in "Turn Left" about how the Doctor takes ordinary people and shows them their inner potential. Shiny pretty potential, sure, but also scary dark potential.

Wilf's scene at the end was quite good too. I think he was a bit underused; I kept waiting for an episode where he'd be more central. I like that actor.

No more Doctor Who!! What will I do with Friday nights?? (Okay, I'll still be watching Stargate: Atlantis, that oughta help with the withdrawal...

Who - "The Stolen Earth"

2008-07-31T19:54:00.000-07:00

I was going to wait and review the two-parter at once, but I realized I'd at least like to post up my "wishlist" for what I want to see in part two.

I think the internet consensus is that
(1) this episode doesn't make a lot of sense plotwise
(2) we don't care because we're too busy jumping up and down
and
(3) SciFi fails to understand the concept of a cliffhanger. (Apparently the "Next time on Doctor Who" bit wasn't aired in the UK and they spent a whole week wondering if we were really going to get a new Doctor. Well, those fans who aren't plugged into the internet enough to know that we weren't. Only the American audience got the trailer for next week showing the Doctor with the same face.)

I endorse those points, and I'd like to add that the Daleks seemed scary again for the first time since season 1. Yay! I think Jack and Sarah Jane sold me on the scariness, when they were saying goodbye to their loved ones. I always wanted a scene like those, when the Daleks or the Cybermen would invade, and I'd think about the ex-Companions who were sitting around on Earth knowing what was happening but not able to help...

In part two tomorrow night, I'd like to see:

- the plot make just a little bit of sense. RTD just raised my standards for him with "Midnight," so I feel a little less tolerant of his loopier plots.

- the Daleks continue to be scary. Please don't let them get all talky again like in seasons 2 and 3. Have them shoot first and not get around to asking questions later.

- Jack and Rose get a moment together. They seemed like good friends by the end of season 1, and they must have both thought they'd never see each other again. Be a shame if the plot sweeps her away again before they get to at least hug.

- the Doctor and Luke Smith get a moment together, figuring something out. Sadly unlikely. I think "Who's the kid?" in "The Stolen Earth" is probably going to be it for Luke's big moment. But you know if the Doctor ever does talk to Luke he'll be recruiting him as companion material in about thirty seconds. Until Sarah Jane smacks him one.

- a really good Donna moment (or more than one). I'd enjoy seeing her reaction to realizing how many of the Doctor's ex-companions had/have crushes on him. (no accounting for taste, is there Donna?) Or Donna snapping the Doctor out of a panic like she did in "Partners in Crime." Or puncturing his ego by failing to be awe-stricken. Any good Donna moments. The writing has been consistently good for Donna, so I have high hopes of getting this wish. :)

Who - "Turn Left"

2008-07-21T18:34:00.000-07:00

Another episode that I really enjoyed. My mid-season slump theory must be true, because we seem to be out of it. Hooray!

I like it when we get little glimpses of the Doctor and companion having fun, like the market scene at the beginning of this episode. You gotta figure that not all their stops are about saving the world and nearly getting killed. I liked the shot where the plot is happening to Donna in the foreground, while in the background the Doctor is having an intense, drawn-out negotiation with someone trying to sell him something that looks like a sea urchin.

I am a sucker for outsider/different-than-usual perspectives, which is part of what I liked about "Blink" last season. That's something that Doctor-light episodes are good for. I liked the re-telling of season 3 with no Doctor, and how the show didn't pull its punches; I liked Donna's family having a refugee experience, and pausing to let it sink in that London is destroyed.

It was nice to see more of Rose, though I'm still totally confused about what was going on with her. (I take it I'm supposed to be.) She has changed a lot since we saw her. Her "Don't salute" to the UNIT folks was exactly Doctor-ish. heh! I'd love to hear how she got the UNIT people to take her seriously. I hope we get that in the next episode.

By the way, I told Gazza that Rose's appearances in the season so far were a sign that the Bad Wolf plot wasn't over. I said so! if only I'd put that in writing here, I could be on record with my spot-on prediction. ;)

So now we know, supposedly, what Donna has had on her back since "Planet of the Ood." I don't really get it though. How could it have been on her back that long? It just now got her in this episode. And in the alternate timeline it created, she never met the Doctor or went to the Ood planet. That must have been the Ood seeing her future. Or something.

That giant plastic beetle looks like it came straight from the early Tom Baker era.
Look, here's the one from 1975's The Ark in Space.

(courtesy of the Doctor Who Image Archive)

Here is the Time Beetle from "Turn Left":

(courtesy of the Doctor Who Wiki)

Ah well, I suppose I should be grateful, since a convincing giant parasitic beetle would probably have given me nightmares. The way it kept touching her hair was aimed right at bug-phobes like me.

I have to say that Catherine Tate did an amazing job of selling the plastic beetle, and made the scene where they show it to her really nerve-wracking, in spite of how the thing looked. It was extra freaky because of how calm Rose was, almost but not quite) to the point of being unsympathetic. Did I mention Rose has changed??

More ominous suggestions about Donna's future. oh no. :( What are they going to do to Donna?? I have a bad feeling about this.

I suppose since next year we're only getting a few specials, there may be no regular companion for a while after the end of the season. I'm going to choose to believe that Donna will end season 4 in perfect health, and simply change her mind about staying with the Doctor forever, due to getting a really fantastic job offer. Maybe from UNIT.

Shut up, I can believe that for another two weeks until we get the finale...

Pictures of Kauai

2008-07-19T16:18:00.001-07:00

My brother strangething has his pictures of Kauai up here.

For example:

Not so bad after all

2008-07-13T15:43:00.000-07:00

While we were in Hawaii, we went to a farmer's market in Lihue and bought fresh, locally grown mangos 3 for a dollar.

I was feeling a bit sad at the idea of returning to our mango-less Ellensburg farmer's market.

Of course I'd forgotten that we were returning to Washington state in early July, the peak of cherry season.

Lihue's farmer's market, though awesome, doesn't offer you a choice of bing or Rainier cherries, locally grown with no pesticide spray.

Being home is not so tragic.

Who - "Midnight"

2008-07-12T13:53:00.000-07:00

Whoa, was that awesome!!

Who knew that RT Davies could write a script like that. I think his writing has improved over the last couple years. This is probably his single best episode. It makes me hope he might turn out one now and then even after he's no longer running the show.

I actually found this one a lot scarier than "Silence"/"Forest" that we just saw. A terrified mob of ordinary humans is scarier than your average SF monster any day.

I know this episode was Donna-light, and the next one "Turn Left" is apparently Doctor-light, because they were shot practically at the same time, but it works fantastically having no companion around when the entire mob suddenly turns against the Doctor.

The episode was also very clever about using all of the Doctor's typical qualities against him (mysterious, nameless, talkative, connects with the unpopular person, familiar with technology, not particularly humble...) to make all the other characters suspicious.

Impressive actress they found to play Sky. Lesley Sharp is her name, according to Wikipedia. She can look very scary without doing much, and she can verbally keep up with David Tennant.

The scene where the Doctor tries to trip up the possessed Sky (who is speaking all of his lines in unison with him) is very close in spirit to the famous mirror scene from Duck Soup (though the latter is played for comedy). (If you haven't seen it, the beginning of this clip is Chico locking Groucho in the bathroom and then pretending to be him, for plot reasons that really don't matter. Then Harpo seems to independently think up the same plan... The clip is about 7 minutes, but the mirror scene proper starts around 4.15.)

Wikipedia also says that the actor playing Professor Hobbes is David Troughton, son of Patrick Troughton (the Second Doctor). nice. :)

Who - Silence in the Library/Forest of the Dead

2008-07-07T21:11:00.000-07:00

Catching up on Doctor Who since we've been away in Hawaii.

I enjoyed this two-parter, but I'm getting an uneasy sense of a Moffet formula. It was awesome the first time we saw it ("The Empty Child"/"The Doctor Dances") but it is starting to get just a bit predictable. He's a good writer, so I still enjoy the episodes, but I hope he gets more daring when he's the one in charge in season 5. Otherwise he could just start farming out the writing: put in an A-plot about an army of scary-looking zombie-type things, plus a romantic subplot, and top it off with a couple of quoteable one-liners.

("I'm a time traveler. I point and laugh at archeologists." snerk.)

I do admire his ability to confuse the heck out of us for most of the first episode, and then to sort it all out so that it makes sense by the end. He got a lot of practice for that writing Coupling I suppose. He often did that thing where you see the scene first from one perspective and go "??" and then later from a different perspective with different information and go "oh!" It's cool. :)

I also love the idea of a friend that the Doctor hasn't met yet. That kind of thing would happen to him all the time.

I hope they are not foreshadowing something bad happening to Donna. NO!! not allowed!

Four episodes to go for those of us in the States. I wonder when we'll get more information about the Rose plot.

We're back

2008-07-05T21:59:00.000-07:00

Gazza and I are back from our wedding on Kauai.

Working on some more photos, but here's a sample. :)

Who - The Unicorn and the Wasp

2008-06-15T10:41:00.000-07:00

Meh. Piece of fluff. ;)

I didn't hate it, but I wouldn't say we're out of the mid-season slump just yet.

I still love Donna though.

Free Books on the Internet: An Annotated Link-ography

2008-06-11T19:16:00.000-07:00

Thought I'd post my collection of links to free, legal downloads of e-books. There is a ton of good stuff to read that you can download for free. To be precise, it's my belief that the links below offer free downloads that are legal in the U.S. I have not researched whether peoples abroad are allowed to use these links.

I've been reading them on my AlphaSmart Dana, which is really designed for writing, and was fantastic for banging out a rough draft of the end of my dissertation, but which I've now re-purposed into a slightly clunky but perfectly functional e-book reader.

Free books on the internet:

(1) Project Gutenberg. Read thousands of books free. Most of them are old enough that their copyrights have expired. They have all kinds of stuff, including science fiction and fantasy. They have some of the Barsoom books, which I've been meaning to check out since reading Heinlein's The Number of the Beast.

(2) A Celebration of Women Writers, hosted by UPenn. Here you can read the first of Dorothy Sayers' Lord Peter murder mysteries, and also Georgette Heyer' s first Regency romance. Sayers and Heyer were among Lois McMaster Bujold's influences when she was writing A Civil Campaign. If you haven't read all of the Miles Vorkosigan books that lead up to A Civil Campaign, stop fiddling with free internet books and go get some Bujold immediately. :)

(3) Doctor Who Missing Adventures and New Adventures on the BBC website. If you are interested in the First, Third, Fourth, Fifth, Seventh, or Eighth Doctors, check this page out. These books are out of print and paper copies are hard to get a hold of. Paul Cornell's Human Nature was the original from which he adapted that awesome two-parter in the third season.

(4) There are a couple of other Doctor Who books available on the website of the New Zealand Doctor Who Fan Club. I am particularly excited about Who Killed Kennedy, which seems to be a conspiracy theory parody in faux journalistic style, set during the Third Doctor's time with UNIT. That is a lot of awesome to fit into one book.

(5) T he Baen Free Library. An impressive marketing experiment. They got some big name authors to agree to give away electronic copies of a few books, with the idea being that we would get hooked on a new author and end up buying those books that aren't available free. It could work.

(6) Cory Doctorow, the co-editor of Boing Boing, seems to have released all of his fiction under a creative commons license, meaning you can download them and read them for free. (When you get to his site, click on the book cover, and then look at the top for the "Download for free" link.) Intriguingly, offering free downloads doesn't seem to have prevented him from also selling a fair number of paper copies in bookstores. As marketing, it's working on me, because I would have been unlikely to buy one of his books, but have now downloaded Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, because it's free, and because Doctorow's brave experiment is interesting. And now that I paid attention to it, Down and Out sounds really interesting itself.

(7) Steven Brust has released his Firefly novel, My Own Kind of Freedom, under a creative commons license. Steven Brust + Firefly. So yeah, I'm interested, and have a copy on my Dana waiting to be read, but I'd just like to say, Steven, an "unlicensed tie-in novel" is what we laypeople like to call "fan fiction." It doesn't matter how many novels you have published before, this one is fan fic. It's okay that you wrote fan fic, really, but please call a spade a spade.

(8) On the audio front, you can listen to a completely marvelous Neil Gaiman story - novella? I'm not sure - for free here: A Study in Emerald. I love this to pieces. But you'll love it that much only if you are already familiar with the first Sherlock Holmes novel A Study in Scarlet. Seriously, getting the layered references is part of the fun. And you can get A Study in Scarlet free, guess where? Project Gutenberg.

I also found a couple of short Neil Gaiman pieces for free here. He's good at reading his own stuff too. :)

(9) My friend dr_pretentious - I mean, Sarah Avery (your Internet anonymity is shot now that you are a published author, Sarah hon) has a novella Closing Arguments recently released by Drollerie Press here. It's not free, but it is a mere $3 and change, and is funny and touching and suspenseful. You can read an excerpt here to get you hooked. There's also a page about Sarah and the book here. I know I'm not impartial about my friend's work, but I have a strong feeling that she's going places.

Who - The Doctor's Daughter

2008-06-08T10:18:00.000-07:00

Not the best episode this week, but with a couple of very nice moments.

Stuff I liked:

Making the Doctor talk about the Time War always gets me interested. It looks like it is getting gradually easier for him to talk about it, which is a nice long-term emotional arc. (Rose only got hints, Martha got the basics by prying them out of him. Donna only had to twist his arm a little bit.)

There's a nice thematic tie to the last episodes when the Doctor hated guns (and soldiers) a kind of surprising amount. He does hate soldiers more than he did in the classic series. It's because he had to be one.

And, the Doctor has had more than one child. I'm fairly sure that's new information. The scene where he tells Donna about seeing them when he looks at Jenny is the best part of the whole episode, and I think that's down to Tennant and Tate. They are both quite good at the subtle stuff, which you'd never know from the exaggerated way their characters are sometimes written. That scene felt very honest. I loved how wise and compassionate Donna was: "It won't always be like that. Jenny will help you. And so will I."

How awesome is it that the Doctor is carrying around a wind-up mouse. It's surprisingly useful too. I'll have to get a hold of one. Very Looney Tunes.

I like that Donna had her own mystery and solved it; they keep writing her smart and confident. Pretty cool. I also liked how she told off the guys who called Martha "collateral damage." She barely knows her, really, but they're already friends.

Stuff I didn't like:

Flipping through the red laser lines of doom. Didn't you know instantly when you saw those lines that someone would do that? Dear writers, I'm sorry, but for that to ever be cool again you will have to out-do Ocean's Twelve, which did it with capoeira to an awesome soundtrack. This version is a bit dark to see well, but refresh your memory here.

Tragic deaths of doom. Didn't we know instantly when we laid eyes on Jenny that she would die tragically before the end of the episode? (What else could they possibly do with her?) And sorry, I was also rolling my eyes over Martha's Hath friend. I'm not usually cold towards the deaths of sympathetic one-off characters. "The Voyage of the Damned," for example, handled them very effectively. Here... I was sorry for the Doctor and Martha because they were sad, but I didn't feel sad about the deaths themselves. Too trite.

Woo! Genesis project! (Did it bring her back to life, like Spock, or did she regenerate, like the Doctor, but without changing her face, for some reason? Care to tell us exactly what happened, episode? why no! Happy Ending Whee!) Wikipedia sayeth that Jenny's recovery was Steven Moffat's idea, which I guess means that we could be seeing her return in season 5 when Moffat is in charge.

I was looking forward to a story with two companions. I know in the classic series there was often more than one, and that seems like a good idea to me. Three main characters mean three relationships instead of one, and the characters get that much more developed. Unfortunately the writers for this episode and the last two seem kind of scared to let Martha and Donna have more than one or two scenes together. Come on, writers, challenge yourselves.. . they are different characters with different experiences, outlooks, personalities, strengths and weaknesses, and it should NOT be redundant having them both with the Doctor.

SciFi continues to suck; I don't know about cuts yet but this week they get the prize for Worst Commercial Break Timing Ever. We cut from the Doctor holding Jenny's body - to commercial - back to the Doctor putting a gun to Cobb's head. WAIT WHAT?? Oh, was that part of the VERY SAME SCENE? WHY YES IT WAS. Look SciFi, we're grateful to get to see DW so soon after it airs in the U.K., but could you please try just a little harder?

Overall I was not super impressed this week, but as I recall there were a few weak mid-season episodes last season too (the Dalek two-parter, and "42"...) and it recovered really well with "Human Nature"/"Family of Blood," "Blink," "Utopia"...

So, next week is Agatha Christie, and Moffat two-parter is still to come.

woo hoo! 92%

2008-06-06T20:03:00.000-07:00

I got 92% on the Booze Test. heh.

92%DRUNKARD

OnePlusYou Quizzes and Widgets

Ten items of personal fanon

2008-06-03T19:43:00.000-07:00

Okay, this is a sort of game that comes around now and then on the Doctor Who LJ community.

Ten Items of Personal Fanon

The idea is that they are things you made up about the Who universe (or that someone else made up, but you love) that have little or no evidence pro or con in the actual series. I always enjoy reading these when the game comes around. You have to be a pretty Serious Fan in order to get all of the ones people list, but the confusion is part of the fun. A couple of my favorite recurring ones:

Several people say that the Ninth Doctor's leather jacket used to belong to Fitz (he wore a leather jacket; he's the Eighth Doctor's companion right to the end of the series of novels; then there's a gap when the Time War happens; and then the new series starts and the Ninth Doctor shows up wearing a leather jacket...)

Several people say that Romana is alive and hiding as a human like the Doctor did in "Human Nature." I would sure like to see Romana in the new series. :)

Anyway, here's my contribution of ten made-up facts about the Whoniverse:

1. Time Lords can change gender when they regenerate, but not all of them want to. The Doctor has always had such rocky, traumatic regenerations that he has never had the presence of mind to make any conscious choices about the new body one way or the other. Typically Time Lords have more peaceful lives and deaths than he does.

2. Lots of things are different when you regenerate into a new body, and one of them is your level of interest in sex. This is why some Doctors seem to have a lot more interest than others. (Which are which? left as an exercise for the reader...)

3. The reason Doctor tends not to get romantically involved with humans is that they are (typically) not telepaths. He thinks it's hard to get that close to someone if you have to rely on clunky spoken language. That's how Reinette kind of swept him off his feet in "The Girl in the Fireplace"...he may have formed the mental link, but she made it go both ways.

4. "Time Lord" is a cheesy-sounding title because it doesn't translate well into English. It sounds a lot more elegant in Gallifreyan. It's also ungendered in Gallifreyan. ("Time Lady" is even cheesier-sounding. This secretly annoyed Romana whenever she had to say it in English.)

5. Gallifreyan has a special pronoun for talking about other incarnations of yourself, so that you don't have to struggle with "he... I mean, I."

6. Gallifreyan has a ton more verb tenses than any human language. There is a tense for an event that happened in your subjective past but objectively in the future from the current calendar date, and one for subjective future/objective past. There is a tense for an event in my subjective past/your subjective future, and one for vice versa. There is a tense for something in my subjective distant past/your subjective recent past, and similarly for the future. There is a whole set of tenses for things that happened while (objectively) in transit from one time to another but (subjectively) in your own past/future. There is a separate plain old past tense for talking about the objective timeline objectively, like when discussing history, with no relation to when the discussion is happening. Learning Gallifreyan as a foreign language is next to impossible for most species.

7. The Doctor's TARDIS is unusually eccentric. Most TARDISes obey instructions flawlessly and land their Time Lord on exactly the location and instant of time requested. The Doctor puts up with her because he is pretty eccentric himself, and because he thinks TARDISes deserve a chance to have their own personalities too, not just follow orders all the time. Besides, she sometimes lands him someplace more interesting than the place he had in mind. Not that it's not really annoying sometimes when she gets creative...

8. The naturally-occurring chemicals in tea were controlled substances on Gallifrey - basically, prescription drugs. (We saw the Doctor using tea to self-medicate in "The Christmas Invasion.") One reason the Doctor favors Britain so much is that it's easy to get a hold of good black tea there.

9. The stories we get (episodes, books, etc.) are told to us as the Doctor remembers them. So yes, they are full of contradictions, omissions, and repetitions. We can't make a neat linear timeline out of the Doctor's past because he can't... he doesn't remember it that way. He's really not sure whether the events in "Shada" happened to his fourth or his eighth incarnation. If you picked an event from the Eighth Doctor audio play continuity, and another from the book continuity, and asked him which one happened first, he would remember both events, but have no idea of the chronological order. This is not because he has a bad memory, but because...

10. ...fighting in a Time War has really strange effects, if you are of a species who can perceive changes in the timeline. It's really no good trying to explain this to humans, because ape brains just didn't evolve to deal with this kind of thing. The explanation will never make any sense to us. ;)

Goodbye Ping

2008-06-01T10:33:00.000-07:00

Our dwarf hamster Ping died May 14.

We got her from the animal shelter back in Pennsylvania. She immediately tried to bite us, but we figured she would calm down over time and learn to like us. That turned out to be false. We had her for nearly a year and a half, hand-feeding her treats the whole time, and she never trusted us for an instant. Her teeth were pretty tiny, but she still bit hard enough to discourage us from handling her. Eventually we got the message of LEAVE ME THE HELL ALONE.

Ping liked cheese (as in the picture above), tofu, and broccoli as treats. She picked the millet seeds out of her food mix and ignored the corn kernels and alfalfa pellets. Gary made her a little cardboard balcony (in the picture) with a ramp leading up to it, and she really liked that. When she got excited she would run up and down it. The bottom of the ramp was propped up with an upside-down plastic container, which Ping unexpectedly decided to sleep under. She would flatten herself out, lift up the edge of the container with her nose, and slither under. You could tell when she was waking up because the container would move up and down as she turned around, and then you'd see her nose come out from underneath to lift it up so she could squirm out. I always wanted to get the entry and exit on video, but it would have taken some lucky timing. If she saw humans hanging around paying attention to her, no way was she going to sleep. She had to run around saying I KILL YOU just to make sure we didn't get up the nerve to put a hand in her cage.

I used to like watching her groom herself; she would ruffle up the fur on top of her head with both paws until she had a sort of spikey hairdo. She would groom her sides with her back paw, like a dog scratching itself. The whole grooming process, like everything Ping did, would happen at absolute top speed. You could hardly see her paws, they were moving so fast. The combination of her tiny cuteness and her intense, aggressive personality used to crack me up all the time.

We were told at the shelter that Ping was 11 months old when she was dropped off in early December 2006. We were at least her third home, not counting the interlude at the shelter. If the age they told us was correct, Ping lived to be about 2 years and 4 months old, which is an unusually long life for a dwarf hamster. She hardly blinked an eye at our cross-country road trip last summer; her opinion was pretty much QUIT WAKING ME UP DURING THE DAY, IDIOTS. I hope she had a good old age with us; we mostly fed her and left her alone, which seemed to be her preference.

Who - The Poison Sky

2008-05-31T21:35:00.000-07:00

Donna continues to be awesome. All of the new series companions are pretty cool if you ask me. Anyone who doesn't like them should go watch the boring-ness that was Peri. Too bad Martha didn't get a lot to do in this episode. Even the Evil Martha basically stood around and pressed buttons. The scene the two Marthas had together was pretty good.

oh no, Ross!! :(

"Are you my mummy?" HAHAHA! Too bad Rose or Jack wasn't there to get the joke. God only knows what the Colonel made of that.

"You might as well wear a T-shirt that says Clone. But not around Captain Jack." Did anyone get that? Why not around Captain Jack??

The Brigadier gets a shout. Couldn't they have got Nicholas Courtney to come and do a guest role? cameo even?

I almost started to feel a shred of sympathy for Luke Rattigan - sad when even waving a gun at people doesn't make them take you seriously. But talk about digging your own grave and jumping into it.

Oh, and hey, Wikipedia confirms that was a glimpse of Rose on the TARDIS screen. What's going on??

I forgot to say this about part one, but I love the fact that the Sontarans' big grievance is that the Time Lords had a really good war and didn't invite them.

I really liked the season one finale for The Sarah Jane Adventures, in spite of thinking that the Slitheen are not really that great a villain. Sarah and Luke's separation was genuinely upsetting, and then Mr. Smith turned out to be evil, what a cliffhanger! yikes. We got to hear Mr. Smith's back story; I was wondering if we ever would. And the ending, with the Mr. Smith versus K-9 shoot-out... I can't quite decide whether it was cheesy or awesome, but I had a good time watching it. :) I'm relieved that Maria's dad is in on the big secret now. Was afraid for a while that he was going to be old-version Lois Lane, and somehow miss the glaringly obvious and/or have his memories erased, repeatedly through the entire show. Much better having him on board.

Who - The Sontaran Strategem

2008-05-26T13:02:00.000-07:00

Gah, half of a two-parter the week before the Memorial Day weekend gap. Fate is cruel. But at least I get a chance to catch up on blogging about them.

I enjoyed this one a lot, partly because I'm a big fan of the Third Doctor era, when he was working for UNIT. I think it's hilarious that he's still an official employee. If I was him I'd demand back pay. "Back in the seventies - or was it the eighties" is a reference to a common fan observation that the dates for the Third Doctor stories are inconsistent. But come on, it looked an awful lot like the seventies to me.

It's interesting to think that from a human (UNIT) perspective, it's been 30-ish years since the Third Doctor worked for them; from the Doctor's perspective that was a couple of hundred years ago. (The Fourth Doctor is said to be about 750, and the Tenth claims to be 900, though as I said I think he's lying and is older than that.)

What else I liked:

* The Doctor is uncharacteristically grumpy to the head of UNIT. Ha!! That's got to be an intentional Third Doctor-era reference. Jon Pertwee's Doctor couldn't go one episode without snapping at the Brigadier, who rarely deserves it.

* Colonel Mace (the head of UNIT; apparently that was his name, I didn't catch it, but thank goodness for Wikipedia) has had a bit of a character arc already, in his few scenes. Poor guy, he starts out all dazzled and ready to be impressed - the Doctor's file in the UNIT records must make for exciting reading - and then he gets stomped on for no apparent reason. But just when you think he is going to wimp out, he comes back and calls the Doctor on his BS: "So you do have weapons, but you choose to keep them hidden." He's a fast learner; that bodes well for his future ability to work with the Doctor.

* Donna getting TARDIS driving lessons. That's a lot of trust for her to have earned.
"Getting a bit too close to the 1980s." "What am I gonna do, put a dent in them?" "Well, someone did."

* Donna plays to her strengths, places value on her own life experience, even if it seems commonplace or unglamorous, and comes up with a major contribution. SUPERTEMP. :)

* Martha telling Donna about what happened to her family at the end of season 3. And thank goodness Martha and Donna get along well. If they had fought I would have thrown things at the screen. Martha almost has a moment of jealousy at first, but both of them have too much common sense to start up some dumb rivalry.

* The Doctor likes Ross. It seems to be a Tenth Doctor trait to make friends quickly, which is sort of cute. He sort of made friends with the son of the Pompeii family too, even in the short amount of screen time they shared. It's a little schizoid to make friends with the foot soldier while you try to bite the commanding officer's head off for no reason, but inconsistency is fairly Tenth Doctor too.

"A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds."

Worst thing about the episode:

* Whee, watch me blow up a computer - physically, the hardware! - by inputting contradictory commands! Ms. Raynor, I hate to break it to you, but the Logic Bomb was lame even when the original Star Trek did it and it has not gotten any less lame over time. I tolerate some plot cheesiness in Doctor Who but this exceeds my tolerance level. Steal from better stuff in future.

(Okay, it was slightly funny that the explosion was so small after the Doctor made Ross dive for cover. Still. Lame.)

It's funny that there was a bratty/evil boy genius on The Sarah Jane Adventures the same week as on Doctor Who. Pure coincidence of course, due to the way the SciFi channel is showing season 1 of SJA at the same time as season 4 of DW, which is not how it went originally in the UK. It did make me envision Sarah Jane and the Doctor catching up in a friendly chat. "What, you had one of those too? Is there an epidemic of evil boy geniuses we should know about?"

Prince Caspian

2008-05-25T12:56:00.000-07:00

I liked it better than the first one. They split the four kids up and gave them each their own badass moments and character moments. In the first movie I didn't feel they had any individual personalities.

I did not much like the characterization of Peter though. He is supposed to have learned things from being High King other than pettiness and hunger for power. In the book, there is the same suggestion of tension between him and Caspian about who is in charge, but Peter is strikingly gracious about it, so much so that I'm fairly sure I remember his exact line, "We haven't come to take your place, you know, but to put you into it." It was soon after they'd met, too, not grudgingly at the end of the story.

I know they were trying to express the difficulty of moving between the roles of Narnian royalty and British school kids, and that's a great theme to bring out. It's too bad they chose to do it with Peter character assassination.

Trumpkin was really underdeveloped; we didn't get a feel for who he is at all. The "DLF" joke was funny in the book, but was so badly mangled by the film that they would have been better served by leaving it out.

...!

2008-05-20T19:42:00.000-07:00

So many fans wished for this that it came true. Just like the ending of Last of the Time Lords. Kinda.

Steven Moffat is taking over for Russell T. Davies.

Holy crap, wow.

He starts in 2010, for season 5. Next year there will be no regular series, just four specials, which I guess RTD is producing.

Now the fans are starting to wish Neil Gaiman would write an episode. Maybe if all of us think about it at once we can make that happen too.

They are inspired by this blog entry Gaiman wrote last weekend. Scroll down to the third item in the post.

heh

Who - Planet of the Ood

2008-05-11T21:29:00.000-07:00

I don't have a ton to say about this episode. I thought there were some good character moments for Donna. I liked her freakout at the first sight of an Ood - again, familiar things to the Doctor and the viewers seem new through the eyes of a new companion. I also liked her ability to quickly get used to the idea that the weird-looking alien was a person.

I liked that she wanted to go home (briefly) but changed her mind. There is a learning curve for traveling with the Doctor; people shouldn't be blase about it too quickly.

What is up with Donna's clothes though?? Last season Martha had great clothes. Donna's are kind of weird and unflattering. Donna's gorgeous; they can't find someone who knows how to dress a woman with curves?? (Maybe they can't, given how skinny TV women usually are.)

I'm not nuts about the Ood evolving holding their brains in their hands. Um what? Here I thought that human teeth were a bad design on the part of evolution. Yowza.

Also thought that the explanation of the plot went by a little quick, with the red-eye, the rabid Ood, the guy turning into a Ood, the giant hive brain, and what all, now? all explained in about twenty seconds.

And, hey, another cryptic future-telling for the Doctor. Song is over soon? The music suggested that this one was about Rose too, but it's awfully ominous-sounding.

Trailer for next week's episode: look, it's Martha! :)

...and?

2008-05-10T20:32:00.000-07:00

I've had this post in mind for about a month, I see. My blog is sadly not timely. Le sigh.

Early in April there was an interesting coincidence of two things.

First I read this interview with David Tennant in the Times. It's quite an interesting article, by someone who "knew him when," and talks about him wanting to be an actor from a young age, about what it's like to be suddenly really famous, and how he feels about playing Hamlet this summer. But judging by the headline, what does the Times think is the most important point of the piece? Tennant doesn't care if people think he's gay.

Um, that was a non-reaction, you Times editors. How can "I don't really care" be the most important thing in an interview full of things Tennant does care about?

By the way, here's the red velvet suit that the article mentions. He wore it to Billie Piper's wedding.

Photo yoinked from Totally Tennant.com, completely without permission.

(I think it's kind of an awesome suit. Men always get judged for being interested in clothes or wearing interesting clothes. People need to lighten up. Clothes are fun.)

The same week I read this article, I also heard Neil Patrick Harris as a guest on my favorite public radio show, Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me. You can hear the segment here. I recommend the whole first six minutes or so of Harris's segment, which are hilarious. But the bit I'm talking about starts at about 4:45 into the segment. I had missed this whole kerfuffle, but apparently Harris was "outed" by the press a couple of years ago. It started out as what were supposed to be dark rumors in the rumor-mongering type of media... Neil Patrick Harris might be gay... and it just wouldn't die down. Harris got sick of it, because of the implication that his orientation was a secret and scandalous fact, and he made a public announcement to the effect of "Yes, thanks, I am, didn't realize I was still in the closet considering there's this guy I keep referring to as my boyfriend, but whatever."

I was kind of pleased that both Tennant and Harris seem to express the idea that one's orientation is not particularly newsworthy. As Peter Sagal said, Harris's response was "Yes, and?" In his interview, Tennant's was basically "No, and?"

I reckon it's a bit easier to be out as an actor as compared to a lot of other careers, but still, the way we worship celebrities these days, they might be able to lead the way with their healthy apathy.

(Probably what got me to finally write this post was a lecture Gazza and I went to this past week. Kenji Yoshino is really interesting. I plan to get a hold of his book. People who fuse academia with personal passion - like activism - are amazing and impressive people. Wish I knew how you get to be one of those people.)

BookMooch

2008-05-05T19:20:00.000-07:00

Today I'm giving a plug to one of my favorite websites:

http://bookmooch.com/

BookMooch is a book trading site. You get an account and post a list of books that you have that you'd like to find a good home for, like so. If someone wants one, you get an email message and you have to mail it to the person. You get 1 point if it's within your country, 3 points if you mail internationally. Then you can use your points to get books from other people. Like so.

I adore the site.

1. Motivates me to move books off my shelf. It is hardly worthwhile to sell them to a used book store, but at BookMooch you trade 1 to 1 (excepting international mooches). I am a book hoarder by nature, but I'm actually scanning the shelves these days to decide what I can part with.

2. No money is involved except for postage when you are sending. It's pretty cheap to send one book within the U.S. - $2 to $3. That's about what you'd spend on a paperback at a used book store, assuming that you can find what you are looking for at a local used book store. Internationally, it costs a bit more, but you can decide for yourself whether you will send worldwide.

3. Wishlist function, like so, so that when someone posts a book I want, I will get an email notification, and can bop over to mooch it, unless someone else beats me to it.

4. I enjoy the idea that books end up with people who really want them, not a bookstore or library sale that is just hoping to move them along, and might eventually throw them out.

I reckon there might be a person or two among my friends who is running out of book space, but who still wants more books.

Who - The Fires of Pompeii

2008-05-03T17:32:00.000-07:00

New companions are fun. After a while they get jaded, and then we forget that time travel is cool in itself, regardless of what you do when you get there. Donna's so thrilled to be in ancient times, and she asks a lot of really good questions. (Apparently, harder questions than the Doctor usually gets, heh!)

Lots of good jokes in this episode considering how dark a story it is. I laughed at the running "Latin sounds like Welsh" joke, and at the Doctor's explanation of why no one cares about his anachronistic clothes (in terms of tolerating weirdness, Rome is "like Soho, only bigger"). I also laughed at the yellow water pistol that the Doctor whips out to save the day, and at "I'm Spartacus"..."Me too."

For some reason I'm always watching without Gazza when there is a gag that I think he would especially appreciate. In "Voyage of the Damned" the Doctor lists the places on Earth that (unlike the London street corner) he thinks are beautiful, and New Zealand makes the short list. Then last night the Doctor excuses Donna's oddness by explaining that she's "from Barcelona." Ha! (Of course the Doctor watches Brit-coms. We really should have known.)

The new series has kind of a thing for other characters perceiving secrets about the Doctor or telling his fortune in cryptic terms. Besides the seers in Pompeii, I'm thinking of Reinette in "The Girl in the Fireplace," and in "The Shakespeare Code" both Will and the witch/aliens do it. And then the Face of Boe with the "You are not alone" thing.

I reckon we know who is returning, but what does Donna have on her back?? interesting.

Some fans on the internet have made the observation that the horrible moment of having to actively destroy Pompeii in order to save the rest of the planet may have been meant to parallel the end of the Time War, when the Doctor destroyed the Dalek fleet but took Gallifrey with them. (He destroyed one planet in order to save the rest from Dalek domination.) Wikipedia, unsurprisingly, has a good summary of everything we know about the Time War, if anyone's interested.