Cogito, Ergo Sumana for 2005

# 06 Feb 2005, 09:48PM: The Flesh Is Weak: I neither wanted nor needed to keep the mannequin limbs, so I gave them to a friend of a friend and they will probably end up decorating a nightclub.

I kept the legs covered with my spare clothing until I put them into the car. I enjoy seeing the human form celebrated in art, but I don't feel comfortable carrying nude fake body parts on the street, be the medium plastic or marble.

Yesterday evening, while reconnecting with old acquaintances, I watched a belly dancer and joked that an authentic Middle Eastern belly dancer would wear a burqa. Hours later, I saw several women wearing very low-cut shirts. I actually warned one of them that her right breast was threatening to escape its minimum-security prison. She thanked me and adjusted her display levels. In my memory the red of her tank top arrests my vision. It seems bad user-interface design to make a tank top that can't hold in a woman's chest, but the tank top does implement good UI for the rest of us; we understand and quickly process the wearer's self-labeling as sexually available.

When I read What They Did to Princess Paragon, before anyone had ever told me I was gorgeous, I agreed with one character's argument that Amazonian superheroines would either go nude for comfort or dress warmly. As a binary-minded pragmatist, I welcome the victory of form over function in women's clothing. But now I also want to attract glances, once in a while, and can clumsily calculate the signals I send in draping different cuts of fabric over my flesh. I know that eros comes from stimulus and mystery, that desire can be like a spark that only catches fire if I act the miser with its kindling.

# 07 Feb 2005, 09:57AM: Tons Of Cocaine: Today I decided that I should start every workday with the Evolution Control Committee.

# 07 Feb 2005, 02:13PM: Don't Wish For A World Without Zinc: Life Lessons in Literature by Margaret Berry makes me happy.

I feel mildly ill so I went to Whole Foods and got a pharmacy's worth of placebos and symptom reducers. I got slippery elm lozenges, echinacea-zinc lozenges, Emer'gen-C, and Vitamin C-licorice root herbal tea. Surprisingly, only the tea carries the "These statements have not been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration" disclaimer.

Whole Foods doesn't carry Airborne, Sarah's panacea. I suspect snobbery or a vendetta.

# 07 Feb 2005, 03:12PM: So What If It's In Kenya: I see from the Apple.com trailers site that I can expect Duma to come out soon. It should be about the Russian parliament, but it is not!

# 08 Feb 2005, 12:32PM: Science!: Consumer Reports has put out a compare-and-contrast report on the various types of contraceptives on the market today. If you are in a committed, monogamous relationship and you want to prevent pregnancy but don't have to worry about sexually transmitted diseases, you have a plethora of options!

It is kind of weird that we still don't know why the copper IUD works.

# 09 Feb 2005, 02:55PM: My Folksonomic Tag For 43 Things: Deceivers: My colleague Katharine Mieszkowski wrote about folksonomies a few days ago. She mentioned the group goal-setting site 43 Things. A reader told her to look into the relationship between 43 Things and Amazon.com, a huge company with a big interest in collecting personal data. She wrote up her findings: the 43 Things site did not mention anywhere the fact that Amazon is the only investor in "The Robot Co-op", which produces 43 Things. Pretty misleading.

Check out their privacy policy.

Business Transfers: As we continue to develop our business, we might sell or buy additional services or business units. In such transactions, user information generally is one of the transferred business assets but remains subject to the promises made in any pre-existing Privacy Notice (unless, of course, the user consents otherwise). Also, in the unlikely event that 43things.com or The Robot Co-op, Inc., or substantially all of its assets are acquired, user information will of course be one of the transferred assets.

"Unlikely"? Again, misleading.

Anyway, today I see the Robot Co-op has blogged about their relationship with Amazon and has called the Salon article a distortion. How in the world is the article a distortion? First they start making a deal with Amazon. Then they launch their site that doesn't mention Amazon at all. Then they blame Salon for the article that they won't even link to (maybe because it has an embarrassing quote from a Robot Co-op officer: "Nobody's supposed to know that"), and say the Salon article distorts the story. Who's doing the deceiving and distorting here?

# 14 Feb 2005, 11:15AM: Salad Days: Tonight I am going to a Jonathan Richman concert with a male friend while Leonard works on an Ultra Secret Project. This is in keeping with the "February 14th is just another day" philosophy I have held o these many years.

Leonard gave me a beet, arugula, and chevre salad to eat today. One of the pieces of beet is carved into a heart. This makes me gibber and moon. February 14th is indeed just another day; he does things as sweet as that ALL THE TIME! Leonard, thank you.

A fun Valentine's Day musing from Ze Frank.

# 15 Feb 2005, 07:53AM: Recommendation: Last night Eric and I saw Jonathan Richman and Dengue Fever at the Rickshaw Stop. Jonathan Richman was vulnerable and wacky and touching as always, and made an endearing joke about stars. He played songs from his new album, I think, and each song lasted perhaps ten minutes. Lots of riffing and grabbing of percussion instruments. He loves the jingle bells.

Dengue Fever and the Rickshaw Stop are more awesome than an opening act and a venue have any right to be. Dengue Fever showcases a Cambodian woman singing in her native tongue to highly rockin' rock/pop. There's a sax! And an organ! And sometimes a flute! And the Rickshaw Stop is only a short walk from Van Ness Muni station, and features a friendly staff, three floors of comfy chairs and couches, and actual food! Like soba noodles!

Dengue Fever and Jonathan Richman play the Rickshaw Stop tonight and tomorrow (the 16th) and I urge you to go.

# 16 Feb 2005, 01:04PM: The World Renowned New York City Public Library: "The public library? Are you insane?"

Sumana: http://www.salon.com/mwt/col/tenn/2005/02/16/off_the_rails/index.html
Nandini: what did you think of the advice he gave?
Sumana: I thought it inspiring, witty, and incisive
Sumana: unless you did not
Sumana: in which case it was wildly off-base and likely to send the advice-requester into spirals of turmoil

# 20 Feb 2005, 04:44PM: You Can't Fire Me, I'm Water: Via Leonard, a bunch of jokes. Speaking of jokes, I'm seeing Will Franken on Wednesday at 8 at the Marsh on Valencia here in San Francisco. I urge you to come for his new one-man show.

Tonight some friends and I will possibly go to The Make-Out Room, also in the Mission, to watch other people dressed up as Presidents, First Ladies, and assassins for a Little Fuzzy concert there. Evidently Little Fuzzy is like an early They Might Be Giants but less lyrically gimmicky? I don't know. If we end up there it will be after a dinner and a show at the Hotel Rex -- the show being, of course, "I Look Like an Egg, But I Identify As A Cookie," which Heather has just extended through March.

Filed under: Comedy

# 25 Feb 2005, 12:03PM: I Relish The Experience: Salon's office has moved to Rincon Center near the Embarcadero, nearer the northeastern tip of San Francisco. My commute has therefore lengthened slightly, but I get an obscure pleasure out of maximizing my usage of the BART/Muni FastPass. [The FastPass covers all transit between Balboa Park and Embarcadero stations (the southernmost and northernmost BART stations within the city of SF).]

One Rincon Center hosts about twenty restaurants in its food court, and the Mexican and Thai places are surprisingly good. There's also a hot dog place downstairs, which surprised me by offering a vegetarian dog. I've now eaten there three times in the past week, including for breakfast today. There's nowhere else in the Center to get vegetarian protein (eggs or something) at ten in the morning. Also, I can pretend I am at a baseball game.

# 25 Feb 2005, 04:12PM: CJ Cregg Is Nicer: Jokes from the press gaggle. The White House reporter pool and White House press secretary possibly like each other but also feel very bitter about their relationship.

Filed under: Comedy

# 28 Feb 2005, 12:47PM: Call Me Frederick W. Taylor: I use an RSS aggregator to keep track of the weblogs I read. The aggregator updates once per day and I read stuff it's cached throughout the day when taking breaks from work. Somehow this makes me feel as though I don't need to "catch up" on the blogs because something else is doing it for me.

I use headphones to listen to radio streamed over the Internet. My favorite stations: KXPR, KSCU, KZSU, KEXP, and TurnUpTheSka.com. The music distracts the part of my brain that hates repetitive labor.

I rigged a SQL query to find out how many help requests I've answered that day. The more I've answered, the more proud I feel!

My e-mail client checks for mail only once an hour. That way spam doesn't constantly interrupt my work but I receive important messages within a reasonable period.

Rincon Center makes it easy for me to make up little tasks to perform as breaks from my normal work. I can go downstairs to buy special stamps from the philately room of the post office, or to buy the BART/Muni FastPass from the giftshop.

# 01 Mar 2005, 03:09PM: Presences And Absences In The Sundries Store Downstairs: The store sells: Choco Leibniz cookies, pantyhose, liquorice allsorts [sic], and blank audiocassette tapes.

The store does not sell: Red Hots candies, Red Herring magazine, or any porn that I can see (that last despite a handwritten sign prohibiting the opening and reading of such magazines while in the store).

# 02 Mar 2005, 09:08AM: Not Just Simple Interest: Last night I finished watching The Secret History Of The Credit Card, another great Frontline show. I am going to look up my credit score by getting a free credit report, and investigate credit unions that don't suddenly raise interest rates or fees on their customers for no good reason (unlike most issuers).

I worry about the innumeracy of my fellow Americans. Remember the magic of compound interest from math class? Remember the graph that makes it look so neat to save money and so scary to borrow? Too many people have forgotten it, or never learned.

I can't post about usury without pointing out Daniel Davies on Ezra Pound on usury.

Loan sharks seek out poor neighbourhoods; they don't create them, and the fact that extremely poor people are nevertheless prepared to pay extortionate prices for the ability to move consumption around in time just confirms what a great thing it is to have access to debt...
It is absolutely horrible to be deep enough in debt that you worry about it, and this simple truth about modern life is one which is not mentioned anything like often enough. One of the consequences of having a social relation of debt is that it creates fear and worry in the lives of debtors, and this is a cost which ought to be set against the benefits of an expanding credit-based economy, and to be minimised as far as possible. Specifically, although loan sharks provide a valuable service to the poor, they often do so in an extremely destructive way, and they should be regulated as tightly as possible; also, the bankruptcy law for individuals should be easy and free of stigma.

# 03 Mar 2005, 11:43PM: Thousands Of Things!: Family, job, friends, comedy, food, aaaah! Thousands of neat things happened today! Must sleep and process!

# 04 Mar 2005, 12:11PM: Great Deals On Indulgences: I'm obsessed with religion (Christianity specifically) and money (taxes and loans specifically). In reference to the latter:

Credit unions don't have a huge incentive to screw over their member/owner/customers. Therefore, you might consider joining one and getting your credit through it instead of using a for-profit corporation whose shareholders care about profit above all else. In San Francisco, any resident can join The San Francisco Federal Credit Union or The San Francisco Fire Credit Union.

Speaking of great deals, Amtrak is discounting its LA-Chicago line by 70% this week. Lawrence, Kansas is on that line! Also, 25% off Coast Starlight rides (the LA-Seattle line).

# 06 Mar 2005, 10:38PM: More On Usury, & Eric And Dylan As Shylocks: I have not yet seen the new Merchant of Venice movie. While considering watching it, I came across an essay on Shylock.

....The Magna Carta, the basis for English constitutional law, is itself a testament to the growing unpopularity of Jewish money-lending activities. Two clauses in the 1215 document state that if a debtor dies before his debt is paid, neither his heir nor his widow will be responsible for repaying the debt....
In Shylock's final scene, Shakespeare had him act out another stereotype: a ritual murder. Of course, there is no mention in the play that Shylock would use Antonio's blood in any religious ritual. But the audience would have immediately associated the stage action with the myth. Shakespeare seemed to be giving his audience exactly what they expect from a stage Jew. In Portia, the audience got the means to stop the ritual murder because she would not let the Jew shed one drop of Christian blood. The text specifically says "Christian," reinforcing the "blood libel" legends....

Filed under: Religion

# 06 Mar 2005, 11:00PM: Movies: I got to see Bride and Prejudice recently, as well as Hitch.

B&P was worth watching, but had some truly "whaaaa?" badness. Many of the songs are in English and sound stupid. Due to a charisma deficit and a lack of singing, the male lead doesn't really convince us of why the female lead should love him. The movie contains a tiny bit of class discussion, but the servants are completely ignored! But I'm Indian-American, so I had to watch, and I did enjoy it. Also, you will laugh at how Rai twists the famous first line of Austen's Pride and Prejudice, and non-Indians dancing in Bollywood style = funny.

Hitch is unfortunately not about Christopher Hitchens. It is a very capable Will Smith vehicle and made me laugh and say "awwww". Smith can pull off melodrama that others couldn't, and I found the dialogue and most of the plot devices quite acceptable. Recommended.

Oh, and I got to show Leonard Office Space today. Office Space speaks to an essential truth about knowledge work and the management of corporations. So does The Matrix, which I will probably never get Leonard to see. You'd think I'm playing Airplane with the spoon full of peas.

# 06 Mar 2005, 11:11PM: Don't Get Me Started On The SFO Post Office That's Open 18 Hours A Day Including Sundays: My father, a civil engineer and Hindu priest, and my mother, a homemaker with a master's in literature, founded Amerikannada together. It was a family affair from the beginning. My parents solicited articles from their friends, fellow immigrants from India's Karnataka state. They all spoke Kannada, a language with a rich heritage that my parents wanted to keep alive in the American diaspora. Hence the name. The logo featured a griffin-like creature, half-lion, half-bald eagle.

As my parents processed subscriptions, wrote, and edited, my sister and I stapled, stamped, glued, and sealed bits of paper in languages we couldn't quite yet read. We used the magical bulk-mail stickers, red and orange and green with single-letter codes, and piled envelopes into burlap sacks and plastic bins for the frequent trips to the post office.

It was always my Dad who took the Amerikannada mail to the post office. He was strong in those days, heaving the great bags of mail like an Indian Santa Claus alongside the blue-uniformed workers on the loading dock, the part of the post office most people never use or even see. My sister and I came along, not to help -- how could we? -- but to keep my Dad company.

The magazine died. The Internet entered our lives. My father grew frail. I never saw the bulk stickers again; companies now print barcodes on envelopes for presorting.

Salon moved into Rincon Center in February. I've discovered a post office downstairs. I think my coworkers don't entirely share my glee. Sure, it is convenient for changing one's address and for sending packages. But the most exciting part is the tiny philately department that sells the special collector's stamps. I thought it was a museum at first, since the displays take up so much of the room. I saw stamps of odd denominations, strange shapes, spare designs and colorful ones, and even collector's stamps that are not valid for postage.

A wizened collector stood at the counter, asking for a few rows of a Reagan and a panel of sparrows. He and the seller spoke in code, in mantras, in reverence for these stickers that mean more than simply payment for the conveyance of an envelope.

The next time my Dad comes to SF, I want to take him to the philately room. Maybe they'll have a lion stamp somewhere that I can smoosh together with an eagle stamp. He always did want me to take over the magazine.

# 08 Mar 2005, 04:18PM: The Cloth Pouch Is Really Nice, Possibly The Femininest Thing I Own: I've updated my guide to menstruation products. Excerpt:

The brown rubber Keeper now has a white silicone sister, the DivaCup. I haven't used the latter; here's a compare-and-contrast....
...I visited a vegetarian expo and got to buy a few hundred GoodFriend Herbs Sanitary Pads from Good Friend Biotech at a wholesale price. I approve. They smell nice, but not in an artificial way, even after they are soaked with menstrual blood, and I figure the mint and whatnot can't hurt. You won't see the pads on their site but you can order them via mail, and you'll get a bulk discount even if you're not a distributor or retailer. Disclaimer: at least a few people think GoodFriend pads smell "like dirt", or at least weird.

# 08 Mar 2005, 04:26PM: Best Email Opening Ever:

Dear Sumana
Anyone as prompt as you are will surely go to heaven.

Filed under: Religion

# 08 Mar 2005, 04:31PM: More Theology Comedy: I've never seen Dr. Who and yet all references to Daleks crack me up. Also Triffids.
He'll say it for all of us.
Calling Steve Schultz: this one mentions Ultraman!

Filed under: Comedy Religion

# 09 Mar 2005, 02:45PM: Nerdcore Hop: The Metreon at 4th and Mission in San Francisco has a Dance Dance Revolution machine in an arcade on the theater floor. The machine now runs DDR workalike software called "In The Groove" and most of the songs are in English. Today I got to dance to MC Frontalot's "Which MC Was That?".

Filed under: Comedy

# 11 Mar 2005, 10:51AM: "Sumana" Hasn't Yet Cracked The US Top Thousand: The Baby Name Wizard is a neat site about baby names. If you can view Java stuff in your browser, look at the Baby Name Wizard Name Voyager, which shows you the relative popularity of names in the US in the twentieth century (as long as the names were in the top thousand). Some observations:

People are naming their kids "Genesis". Should this be a boy name or a girl name? How about "Jaeden"? Evidently "Jaeden" is male, while Leonard opines that "Jaeden" "is a name for a Trill." There were quite a few "Deanna"s in the '80s and '90s.

People are naming their sons "Xander" and "Logan". People are naming their daughters and sons "Diamond". (There used to be men named "Pearl" but women have pretty effectively claimed that ground for our own. "Loren" also used to be male and is now female.)

"Rosemary" is sort of down but "Sage" is way up.

"Otis" has been slowly declining for a century.

"Grace" and "Hope" are more popular, which is too bad because I used to like them. Now I won't want to use them if I have kids, and I'll associate them with mewling brats.

"Thalia"??? "Thyra"????

"Porter" and "Portia" have alternated in popularity.

"Scott", "Pearl", "Erin", "Carlton", and "Petra" are out of fashion. "Fern" and "Florence" are nice and unpopular. "Basil", "Douglas", and "Dorothy" are down. "Lois" is on the wane.

"Horace", "Hortense", and "Columbus" have dropped out of the top thousand. Leonard and I both like "Horace" - maybe it's the connection to the old-school writer. There were a bunch of "Cicero"s 100 years ago. "Homer" dive-bombed in the '80s; "Virgil" died later. There were a lot more female "Vergie"s than male "Vergil"s.

I noticed that there are a lot more Josefs than there used to be. Leonard decided that this is "because Stalin is hot, hot, hot."

I noticed that people are naming their kids "Chasity" [sic]. Leonard: "They are naming their kids that to get around spam filters."

Awww, no one is naming their little boy "Columbus" anymore.

Who named their kids "Buddy" en masse in the '30s? We think of "Buddy" as a nickname but back then it was a real name.

There is a big spike of "Kobe"s and "Shaquille"s recently.

MAGNUS! RODERICK! STANLEY!

# 11 Mar 2005, 11:09AM: Or Possibly Joke-hovah: Today's a really unusually wonderful day, weatherwise, in San Francisco. It just calls out for an earthquake from Jerkhovah. Leonard: "I'm still God, and I hate you!"

Filed under: Comedy Religion

# 11 Mar 2005, 03:48PM GMT+5:30: Question Marks: Unitarian Universalist jokes and a Satanism joke: "Satanism seems to be an elaborate prank designed to annoy Christians while having some good parties ... rather than a system one could practically live by."

The classics AND contemporary media sometimes show people doing immoral things, and sometimes we see that these actions lead to their downfall. Kristen, you ask why certain books become classics, and whether classics that portray immoral behavior are smut. I've never understood what smut is. I think smut would be pornography that didn't care about a story or characters. The classics care about story.

Literature explores different ways of being human, as my old English teacher said. I realized, after reading George Eliot's classic Middlemarch and finding in Rosamond's character a reflection of myself, that I should be more emotionally independent and not a self-important parasite like her. But that's not because the story punishes her. It's because Eliot describes Rosamond so precisely, wittily, and devastatingly that I wince at recognizing myself.

And TV shows have taught me stuff, too. Sitcoms teach me that lying and hiding stuff never works; if I'm straightforward and honest with people, my life gets a lot easier. The elegant plot structures and wordplay I remember from Seinfeld (probably a classic) and Mad About You taught me about art before I ever read Fitzgerald.

I'd argue that the movie The Matrix is a classic; if anyone wants me to expand on that, shoot me an e-mail.

Compare-and-contrast: the CAPAlert guy who marks a movie down for portraying sin, even if the movie shows the sinner punished for his sin. His justification is that the very portrayal of the sin might influence a child who had not previously considered that sin. I'm not certain there are any edifying stories that don't depict bad behavior; there has to be a Goofus to make Gallant look good.

In our everyday lives, sometimes good things happen to bad people and vice versa. So morality plays for children will have to be somewhat unrealistic, and stories for adults, aiming to recreate the familiar, will depict these dismaying outcomes. (I hesitate to say the word "unrealistic." I've just read C.S. Lewis's Screwtape Letters, and his scorning comments on the secular world's use of the word "real" to mean "most unpleasant, whether material or notional" make the word "real" stick in my throat. What a funny, disorienting, doubly-directing book, Lewis's Christian edifications feinting behind the Devil's decreasingly convincing instructions.)

Last night I saw Camus's The Just, a hundred-year-old play about terrorists aiming to overthrow the Tsarist Russian state. [Spoilers ahead.] In the end, only one of them dies, but one goes mad. We as adults watching the play know that none of these people comes to a happy end and Russia never gets free, but within the play there's very little explicit punishment for the plotting and murdering. [End of spoilers.] Does that make the play immoral? I really doubt The Just encourages anyone to become a terrorist.

But the main point of your post, Kristen, was about teaching ourselves to act responsibly and accountably. If I could change one thing about the way my parents raised me, I'd work on that very aspect of my rearing. If they'd let me make little choices and suffer the consequences of choosing wrongly, I'd have been more prepared for the stormy ocean of adult life. I think.

Filed under: Comedy Religion Reading

# 14 Mar 2005, 10:35AM: Who Would Need To Say "AOL" To Describe E-Mail?: Two-person Taboo is a relaxing game in improving communication skills and revealing implicit assumptions. Last night, I tried to describe "Denzel Washington" to Leonard by saying, "This is an African-American man who gets paid to pretend things that are lies." His guess: Armstrong Williams.

Filed under: Comedy

# 15 Mar 2005, 04:44PM: A Round Of Music: When I'm turning off my computer at home, and I type "poweroff", I sing "Pow-Pow-Poweroff," like in the old TV ad for "Power Wheels" (a child-sized car).

Susanna gave Leonard and me macadamia nut oil for Christmas. Thank you, Susie! The name of the Nature's Way macadamia nut oil is "MacNut Oil." Leonard and I sing it to the tune of the phrase "Uptown Girl" in the eponymous song by Billy Joel.

Recently I got to watch a bit of The World Of Chemistry, starring Nobel Laureate Roald Hoffman. It has very energetic music over the opening credits and Leonard is quite enamored of it.

# 16 Mar 2005, 02:46PM: People Cleaving To Each Other: Man, all these people are getting married. A coworker, Andrew and Claudia, Joshua Micah Marshall even. This is following a small spate of weddings by Salon workers over the past six months. It's pretty unnerving.

# 17 Mar 2005, 02:54PM: The Summer Founders And The Sunshine Patriots: If you have ever considered founding a startup company, Paul Graham says that now's the time and he's here to help.

# 17 Mar 2005, 03:01PM: Declaring The Pennies On And The Planks In My Eyes: I see that you can e-file for free but I find paper reassuring. My 2004 taxes are complicated enough that I'd prefer the extra reassurance of an accountant. Anyone know a California CPA who'd like my custom?

The Beatles' Taxman has some kinship with, and a mashup with, the theme from Batman.

Filed under: Taxes

# 17 Mar 2005, 05:44PM: Wheee: In a few minutes, Unix will reach a meaningless milestone: the number of seconds since it started will be a bunch of 1s in a row. If you have access to a command line,

perl -e 'print time, "\n";'

might work, as might

date "+%s"

to excite your sense of wonder.

# 18 Mar 2005, 02:31PM: Fame, I Want To Live Forever: Neat! Heather Gold has extended her one-woman show through April. If you'd like to go, let me know and I'll try to hook you up.

Heather's site now includes a QuickTime trailer, featuring my disembodied voice introducing Heather in the first half-second.

Filed under: Comedy

# 20 Mar 2005, 10:07PM: And Of Course "Arrested Development" Blew My Mind: Through the magic in KEXP's internet stream, I've discovered Clem Snide's music and intend to seek more of it.

A full weekend. I met Joel Spolsky at his publisher's party (an Apress rep begged us to blog the party for no good reason I could tell), possibly hooked up an acquaintance with a new job, went to the zoo with Eric (the flamingos did Cleese-esque silly walks and a koala pooped upon noticing us), and watched 2001: A Space Odyssey, Dr. Strangelove, and about ten minutes of Zardoz with Claudia and Andrew. I'd never seen any of these films before, although I think my ex adored Zardoz.

I'm not sure whether I'm more amused at the flamingos or at my own ability to flip an omelet in midair, which I discovered this morning.

Gotta get up early to do work I should have done over the weekend! If one of those items pans out, I will have good news to tell you all soon, and will need to throw a party.

# 21 Mar 2005, 07:51AM: Reverse Foodies: If you have a dietary restriction of any sort, or if you often host parties including people who do, please let me know so I can ask you a few questions. I'm going to write an article about vegetarians, vegans, and people who keep kosher or halal or have food allergies, and their effect on hospitality.

# 21 Mar 2005, 09:43AM: gH: When dismayed, we often say "Gah." If I'm quite dismayed, I'll say "Gaah" or even "Gaaaahhhh!". But how can we quantify our dismay more precisely and accurately?

gH is a measuring tool for dismay. Its scale is akin to the pH scale of alkalinity and acidity.

7 = no dismay.
0 = dismay at murder, rape, and other such awful, barbaric behavior.
14 = dismay at Precious Moments figurines and other such sappy glurge.

Yes, a typo in an instant messaging conversation inspired this model. Coleridge only wishes he was on AIM.

Filed under: Comedy

# 21 Mar 2005, 02:50PM: Frist Post: Leonard and I used to think Bill Frist was a curiosity, and I once flipped through his disaster-prep how-to book, When Every Moment Counts: What You Need to Know About Bioterrorism from the Senate's Only Doctor. Now, as Amy Sullivan points out, "Now that Tom Coburn is the junior senator from Oklahoma, Frist is merely the Senate's only not insane physician."

I harbor a deep and unreasoning affection for the nerdy pun in this post's title.

# 21 Mar 2005, 03:09PM: Fannishness: Eeeee! Aishwarya Rai in Oakland!

# 22 Mar 2005, 10:14AM: We All Fall Down: "A woman's battle for the soul of Islam" and "A 'virtuous pagan' looks at the priesthood" make it seem that every week Salon interviews an interesting woman who's thinking about Abrahamic (Judeo-Christian-Muslim) faith. I think that isn't true, but should be.

Emily Proctor quotes an Indianapolis bishop as saying, "Of course the church messes up. We have to mess up or else we would have to believe the Inquisition was a good thing." I love seeing officials of organized religion admit fallibility. Religious officials as a group tend to emphasize obedience and belief too much for my taste. For example, Bill Keller of LivePrayer will say that he's an imperfect servant of the Lord and that we're all depraved, sinful, and far from the mind of God, which rather makes me wonder why I should listen to him in particular when he tells me that he knows what the Lord wants from us. (His usual defense: circular arguments involving the Bible.)

I think it's a good thing that there is no one Pope governing Islam. Asra Nomani's local mosque isn't being very flexible (and ShaBot would not approve), but Islam as a whole can be. Witness the Spanish imams' fatwa against bin Laden and Nomani's Muslim Women's Freedom Tour.

Maybe a schism is coming. Maybe we'll have Sunni, Shiite, and Nomani Islam. Maybe the new flavor will descend into rigid hierarchy and one of its sects will launch an attack aginst an alien community on Mars. When I speculate about the future of these organized religions, I can't see how they can escape their cycles of schism and fundamentalism.

Geeks say of using "regular expressions" to solve certain computer problems that "now you have two problems." When politicians and religious activists try to solve problems, I feel lucky if they only double them. How do we finally get the bubble of air out from under the wallpaper instead of just moving it from side to side?

Filed under: Religion

# 24 Mar 2005, 01:14PM: No: Is there a television show that balances trash and wit more perfectly than House?

No, there is not.

# 24 Mar 2005, 01:33PM: Take Care: San Francisco Chronicle readers and a Salon editor tell their stories of continuing or ending extraordinary care for family members during severe illnesses. I cried.

Death may be slow and gradual for me or it may be a flash of white and pain. In case someone else has to make that awful decision, I need to write up an advance health directive and a durable power of attorney for my sister to use.

# 24 Mar 2005, 01:40PM: Happy Purim!: I hope those of you who celebrate the Jewish holiday of Purim have a good time. I remember evincing amazement when my freshman-year roommate told me she was supposed to booze till she didn't know good from evil; now that seems completely normal to me. Oh no, I've defined deviancy down!

During some services on the "Jewish Mardi Gras", you get to boo when the rabbi mentions the villain's name. That's pretty awesome.

It is customary to hold carnival-like celebrations on Purim, to perform plays and parodies, and to hold beauty contests. I have heard that the usual prohibitions against cross-dressing are lifted during this holiday, but I am not certain about that.

Filed under: Religion

# 24 Mar 2005, 07:41PM: I New York Kind, I Delaware: I sit in my room and listen to the cover of "Black Hole Sun" on The Moog Cookbook (think rockin', yet Muzak) while composing a review of Good Catholic Girls by Angela Bonavoglia. This morning some subway musicians brought me to tears with Pachelbel's Canon in D.

But the most significant musical experience of the past week has been obsessively listening to a CD by Lawsuit. Lawsuit was a ska band from Davis, California with awesome lyrics and sound. I discovered the band while driving around Oakland and listening to KALX; an infinitely cool DJ played "Oh Boy!", which is about a couch that yearns for a better life. I obtained some of Lawsuit's other stuff. Leonard absolutely adores "North Dakotachrome" above all other Lawsuit songs and can't listen to any others because he worships that track so. That's reasonable, since "North Dakotachrome" possesses upwards of thirty geography puns as well as a catchy melody.

Lawsuit's lead singer died years ago and so there will be no reunions, but you can download the music as MP3s and play the "North Dakotachrome" game. If enough people do this and compile lists of the puns, I might have a contest.

# 25 Mar 2005, 07:49AM: Cole Porter, Genius: Did Malcolm X get his "Plymouth Rock landed on us!" line from the eponymous song of Anything Goes?

The line in that song that interchanges wrong and right and day and night reminds me of The Communist Manifesto on the conveniently changing morality of every age. "All that is solid melts into air" would totally fit into Anything Goes except I don't know how to make it fit the meter and rhyme scheme.

# 26 Mar 2005, 11:21AM: D-D-D-Doctor House in the House!: I originally started watching Fox's medical drama House because it stars Hugh Laurie, better known to American audiences as Bertie Wooster in the TV adaptations of P.G. Wodehouse's Jeeves and Wooster stories.

Now I watch it because of Hugh Laurie, because of the character of Dr. House, because of the banter, and because I want to figure out what they are doing with the female characters. So far I'm disappointed; both Cutty and Cameron get defined by their attractiveness and romantic interest in House. Hugh Laurie is indeed pretty attractive as House, and helps me understand why some women fall for jerks. He's like James Spader in The Practice in that way.

I also watch it because it is basically the only drama I can watch with Leonard. The campaign plots on The West Wing cause him unpleasant flashbacks to his time working for Wesley Clark, and Enterprise is in reruns.

I certainly don't watch it for the variety of plots - it's almost as formulaic as Home Improvement was. But that's soothing too.

# 26 Mar 2005, 11:23AM: Fun-To-Say Word Of The Moment: Atavistic!

This follows Thursday evening's word, hamentashen.

# 27 Mar 2005, 10:42AM GMT+5:30: Litigious Fairy-Tale Queens: From The Fact-Checker's Bible by Sarah Harrison Smith, pgs. 74-75:

Audiotapes of interviews can be a wonderful source [italics in original]. They offer excellent legal protection. In a trial, libel lawyer David Korzenik says, "the factual support for an article needs to be reproducible; tapes are better than notes." He adds, "Everyone thinks they've been misquoted. Most people would sue a mirror for what it shows them in the morning if they could...."

Filed under: Comedy Reading

# 28 Mar 2005, 02:09PM: Also, I Put The Caller On Hold And Then Cursed Them: I bit my own hand as a silent stress relief technique during a bad customer support call today. I must have learned this as a child when my parents did not look kindly upon my shrieks of dismay at some huge injustice.

The tooth marks are gone but I may have some bruises.

# 29 Mar 2005, 11:16AM: And All The Faces Are Female!: Am still blah from boring work and tech disaster at last night's Egg/Cookie show. Lunch with a friend will help. What would also help would be if the huge faceless organizations that are supposed to get back to me about possible projects that would make my life inordinately cool would, in fact, get back to me. I'm talking to you, [redacted]!

Actually none of these organizations are faceless.

# 01 Apr 2005, 08:27AM: Farewell: Alan Dundes has died. His work helped me understand Indian superstitions and I'm grateful for that, and sad that he is gone.

# 01 Apr 2005, 08:54AM: Core Competency: I was about to take Websnark off my to-read list, and then in his April Fool's entry he made me smile with a self-mocking riff on "Diff'rent Strokes Syndrome". OK, you get another week.

Filed under: Comedy

# 01 Apr 2005, 01:32PM: Crate-Building Nuthatch: Do you have the blues? My cure: listen to The Donnas' "Do You Wanna Hit It" and look at Dave Bort's comics.

# 03 Apr 2005, 08:44AM: Fetch!: Pupna is a joke search engine.

Filed under: Comedy

# 03 Apr 2005, 06:11PM: Kneel-Down Comic: Just got to tell someone the most classic riddle (the Sphinx one about "Four legs in the morning..."). He didn't know the answer.

Filed under: Comedy

# 04 Apr 2005, 09:52AM: Salon Music Epiphany: I just realized how much music Salon Premium members get to download. Not only do they get almost forty songs (MP3s) in the most recent Salon Music Mix and archived December 2004 mix, but they can download a new song (MP3) every weekday with Audiofile (which has an RSS feed), and there's a bunch of archived stuff too, some in MP3 format.

True, some of these free downloads are not exclusive to Salon, but Salon selects good tunes to give its members. I don't have the time to scan a billion free song sites and MP3 blogs; Salon performs the filtering.

The standard iTunes price for a song is a dollar, right? Well, Salon Premium costs $35 for a year of membership, so with Audiofile and the Salon Music Mix, the membership pays for itself in a month. You could care not a whit about the writing or the free print mags, and just join Salon Premium for the music! Geeks note: no DRM, either.

# 04 Apr 2005, 04:33PM: Why Not?: When I die, I want my organs donated. So I put the pink "donor" dot on my ID and told my loved ones about my wishes. But what if they aren't around or I don't have my wallet on me when I die? Also, I hope my loved ones would let me donate my organs, but it's tough to ask just-bereaved people to make that decision. That's why I've also joined the Donate Life California Registry.

What if my family members are opposed to donation?
Once an individual has made the decision to be an organ and tissue donor, and has joined the Donate Life California Registry, family members cannot override an individual's decision to donate.

Most "major" religions support organ, tissue, or blood donation, but Shinto and Gypsy beliefs oppose organ donation.

I found the registry, which starts today, through a story in the Oakland Tribune.

# 05 Apr 2005, 10:05AM: Non-Crazy Libertarians?!: Wow, maybe I should actually start reading Jane Galt. Not only does she make a cogent argument against a certain pro-same-sex-marriage argument, but she also actually recognizes the difference between Libertopia and our current situation!

Update: Seth, I do realize that Ms. Galt's argument is not a libertarian one but a conservative one. I mention "libertarians" and "Libertopia" specifically because she identifies as a libertarian but, in this specific instance, keeps well away from a certain species of fallacy to which naive libertarians are prone. Also, please note that I did not say that she had turned me against same-sex marriage, nor that the argument against which she argues is an argument upon which I base my support for legal recognition of committed same-sex relationships.

# 06 Apr 2005, 05:28PM: Yeah: On BART I stood next to three speakers of Russian. I understood maybe every fifth word in Russian, but a few specific phrases in English:

California State Bar Exam
design
OK
blog
pornography

Also, just as English speakers say "yeah" instead of "yes," Russian speakers will make the sound "d" instead of saying "da."

Filed under: Comedy

# 06 Apr 2005, 05:29PM: Before Copernicus: I had this very belief!

Filed under: Comedy

# 07 Apr 2005, 05:14AM: Blogger Turns Mainstream Media: Several weeks ago, I applied for a part-time job copyediting the "Bay Area Living" section for Alameda Newspaper Group (the Oakland Tribune, Hayward Daily Review, et al.). The powers that be liked my writing sample, so they gave me a column instead. My column, "MC Masala," starts today and runs Thursdays in "Bay Area Living."

I'VE BEEN ASKING MY DAD, for about 20 years now, for a handbook to being his daughter.
If anyone were to write a guide it would be him; my father has written more than anyone I know, even the bloggers. He may not be up there with Isaac Asimov, who wrote books landing in nine of the 10 major Dewey Decimal classifications. But compared to him, we're all slouches.

I hope you enjoy it. I'll post a link to the new column every Thursday.

# 07 Apr 2005, 04:37PM: He Is Quite Pleasant: Just met Tom Brokaw.

Update:

Vinay: i think i told you my favorite tom brokaw story
Vinay: let me retell:
Vinay: after the 2001 terrorist attacks, you may remember how all the news anchors were doing 24 hr shifts
Sumana: yea
Vinay: at one point, tom brokaw (probably sleep-deprived), starts talking about peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and he says "PBJs are always comfort food, especially with M&Ms in them."
Vinay: at which point, they cut to commercial break, and it's brian williams when they return

# 10 Apr 2005, 02:48PM: That Never Fails: I couldn't find Pico, my favorite command-line text editor, on my computer at home. Then Leonard helped me discover that I already had Nano, a free Pico workalike. Now I can use that to write my column! Man, my third column is a mess. Trying valiantly to jerk it into shape. I know! I'll use a heavy-handed gimmick to pull the theme together!

# 10 Apr 2005, 03:25PM: I'm Not Dead(line) Yet: On the minds of some US residents: the not-so-automatic four-month extension for filing federal taxes. California residents can get state-specific information.

Filed under: Taxes

# 12 Apr 2005, 10:16PM: The Title Is Much Dirtier Than The Reality: Bookslut needs columnists (check the left-hand sidebar). Many writers who read this journal would be ideal as Bookslut reviewers and columnists. Heck, Bookslut even accepted my review of Good Catholic Girls (the typos aren't mine).

Filed under: Religion

# 13 Apr 2005, 01:26PM: Blissfully Sweating: I have now turned into one of those people who brings hot sauce to work. Today I splashed a fifth of a bottle of Sontava! habanero hot sauce on my lunch. "This is disputed by some, but the habanero is clearly the hottest pepper easily obtained and regularly consumed, though only by idiots."

I love putting hot sauce on the Trader Joe's soy enchiladas. In fact, when I see or think about the soy enchiladas, my mouth waters in anticipation of the hot sauce. Years ago I found a statue of Pavlov's dog and now I'm a prisoner of hot sauce.

# 13 Apr 2005, 05:22PM: Frickin' Epistemology: I was worried because my editor at ANG hadn't sent me any revision requests for my April 14th column. Then I found out that she had none. So, either I underestimate my own writing, or my editor's standards are too low. I'll find out tomorrow.

Leonard will tell me something I've written is okay when I worry, and he constantly undervalues wonderful things he's made. Even though it is so five minutes ago to quote Paul Graham, maybe this is applicable: "I've found that people who are great at something are not so much convinced of their own greatness as mystified at why everyone else seems so incompetent."

# 14 Apr 2005, 07:00AM: I Did Not Write The Headline: Today's MC Masala presents humorous and baffling moments of cross-cultural confusion.

We remember exceptions. Out of hundreds of BART rides, I remember the two ugly ones. A bit of unexpected praise can carry me for three weeks, as Twain said. And, even though almost no non-Indians do wince-worthy or laughable things when learning my name or ethnicity, there are the few.
Some anecdotes, then, to amuse and warn you.

Filed under: Comedy

# 14 Apr 2005, 12:36PM: Rejected Column Titles: A Selection:

Culture Mashup
After Ellis Island
Brown Peril
Red Dot
Spice Mistress
Bangalore to Berkeley
Idli Hands
Citizen Alien
Ganesha Gal
I Contradict Myself
Gandhi Built the Taj
Shiny Shiny
Sumania!
I Took Your Job

# 16 Apr 2005, 08:24PM: The Presses: I've scrap-booked my first two columns and am writing the third. People who know about scrapbooking (viz., all of Leonard's relatives) should feel free to email me with advice on preserving newspaper clippings.

The last time I did this was high school. In my high school journalism class, at the end of each semester, we created portfolios of our articles and submitted them for review by real reporters and editors from area newspapers. I snipped out my best news, opinion, feature, and sports articles, plus the one that had changed the most from inception to print, the one I liked the most, and the one I thought was best overall. (I never had enough sports stories.) In an unusual (for high school) move, the teacher did not look over our shoulders to check that we'd fulfilled our breadth requirements before we turned them in. He held us responsible for checking them ourselves.

The whole process, like much of that class, disoriented me. I was good at memorizing and regurgitating facts and formulae, or at performing very structured and supervised tasks. But at the newspaper I had to take the initiative and solve my problems independently. My teacher was treating us like adults, but I was still a kid. I had no idea how to do that, so I floundered and felt painfully lost for most of the four years I spent on there. (Oh yeah, and my classmates made fun of me all the time. Wow, that hurt so much at the time and I haven't thought about it in years.)

I was so afraid of failure. And yet I was completely fine with running for class president and getting booed by thousands of my classmates. I basically have no idea what was going on in my head. I wonder what I'll think of Sumana 2005 in a few years.

# 17 Apr 2005, 12:06PM: Indian-Style Popcorn: Last night Leonard showed me Goodbye, Lenin!, a funny and touching film about deception, history, and idealism. (Finding a local and independent video place within walking distance has done wonders for our movie-watching.) I'd found my mother's recipe for Indian-style popcorn while searching for tax documentation, so I enjoyed a nostalgia-evoking treat while watching a movie about a lost world.

INDIAN-STYLE POPCORN

Use an air-popper (or the microwave-and-paper-bag method) to pop kernels of popcorn. Use about half a cup of kernels. Discard the unpopped kernels that inevitably make their way into the popcorn.

In a big pot, heat several tablespoons of oil thoroughly but not to boiling. Add a not-quite-heaping teaspoon of cumin seeds, known as jeera in Indian cookery. Shut off the heat. Add a heaping teaspoon of curry powder, also known as rasam powder or saurin puddi. Optional: add a quarter-teaspoon of extra turmeric if you want a really bright color on the spiced popcorn.

Shake or stir the spices in the oil. When you can really smell them, mix the popped popcorn with the heated oil, shaking and stirring. Add a not-quite-heaping teaspoon of sugar and salt to taste.

For best results, pour the popcorn and scrape the hot spicy oil into a paper bag and shake vigorously. Serve while still hot. Makes enough for one person to munch throughout one movie.

# 17 Apr 2005, 12:38PM: Questions To Ask Potential Flatmates: Someone asked me for advice on living with a flatmate or roommate. What questions should one ask in advance to ferret out and defuse potential problems? I have a list. It's huge. Unfortunately, some questions require metacognition in the interviewee.

How will we divide expenses for rent, food, electricity, gas, water, garbage, cleaning products, and plumbers?
Who will be on the lease? Will we pay rent to a master tenant or to a landlord? Who will interact with the landlord? How is the landlord?
When you leave the house, do you turn off all the lights before you go? How about when you go to sleep?
Which locks do you like to lock when you are at home alone? Or when you leave?
When you experience stress, how do you react? Do you take it out on other people, or stoically deal with things yourself, or share your concerns?
Do you want me to be a friend or just a flatmate? Will you depend on me for all your social activity? Are you generally outgoing or introverted? If you are not very talkative with me in the kitchen or living room, does that mean you are unhappy with me?
Do you prefer to keep separate stores of food or to share all food communally? How would you prefer to split food costs? How often do you like to cook meals at home, and do you think cooking meals counts as much as buying the ingredients? What are your dietary restrictions? Will our separate diets come into conflict?
How much reminding do you need from a flatmate to do something you don't want to do? How many reminders to do a chore do you feel comfortable giving a flatmate?
How much TV do you like to watch every night or week? How about rented movies? Do you like to keep the radio or TV on as background noise when you are doing something else?
How much of the common area will you want to fill with your stuff? How about storage closets?
How often will you have friends over? How many friends do you like to have over at once? When is it necessary to inform your flatmates in advance, or apologize? How far in advance should flatmates tell each other about parties they are planning to throw, or about visiting friends who will stay and sleep in the apartment? When is notification enough and when is consent necessary?
Do you get annoyed when your flatmate has friends over and doesn't want to converse with you?
When do you like to use the bathroom and shower in the morning and evening? How long are your showers? Do you ever take baths?
Do you like to keep your bedroom door open or closed when you are inside? How about when you leave the house?
How do you deal with mail for your roommate? How about phone calls and messages?
Do you think of yourself as a neat person or clutter-friendly? How often do you clean the bathroom? clean the living room? do dishes? do laundry? clean the kitchen? What does "cleaning" mean and entail? How should we divide these chores?
What hours do you sleep during the week? on the weekends? Are you a light or heavy sleeper? When should we have quiet hours?
What are your computer habits?
How often do you date? Are you planning on bringing anyone over to have sex or sleep over? Should flatmates tell each other in advance if they anticipate bringing a date home? Is it okay to have sex with a date when your flatmate is home?
What do your religious beliefs or political beliefs say about how we should live at home? What will you proselytize me about?
What are your politics?
Do you enjoy shopping for clothes? for books? for groceries?
How loud is appropriate for music in the common area? in the bedroom? What kind of music do you like?
What posessions and areas are private?
Do you have a car or bicycle or motorcycle? Should we share any of these things?
There is a dirty cooking vessel in the kitchen that you did not soil. Do you wash it when doing the dishes? Is it okay to use someone else's dishes or pots without asking first?
You damage your flatmate's possession accidentally. What do you do?
Do you prefer for common areas to look spare and Scandinavian or cluttered and cozy?
Do you want your home to be a place to socialize? to study? just to sleep?
Are you a miser or a spendthrift?
Have you lived with other people outside your family before? How well have you gotten along with flatmates in the past? Can I speak to a former flatmate of yours?
Why do you want to live with me/move? How long have you lived in your current home? How long will you want to live with me/here?
Do you think you are easy to live with?
What are your questions for me?

# 18 Apr 2005, 10:52AM: Berkeley Day: Yesterday I got to see some Berkeley friends, a species that dwindles a little slower than that of unmarried friends.

I helped the Open Computing Facility install a couch. Alexei introduced me to some friends and we talked about religion. Alice and Steve and I talked about relationship issues and air-quotes. Do the British just use one finger instead of two for air-quotes?

The Jamba Juice category of drinks that have especially healthful effects is "Functional Flavors."

# 19 Apr 2005, 09:11AM: Reruns: At 1000 Howard Street, Unit B, near the intersection of Sixth and Howard streets in downtown San Francisco, there is a used clothing store known variously as Rerun, Re-run, Reruns, and Re-runs. Its actual name is Reruns and every item in its stock sells for a dollar (plus tax). Yesterday I visited, bought a shirt and two pairs of pants, and enjoyed excellent customer service, a huge inventory and low, low prices. Recommended!

# 19 Apr 2005, 09:13AM: "obsessed with clocks" - SO CUTE: I actually believe that people frequently ask these questions.

There are people in the word who abbreviate "collaboration" as "collabo"?! Also, yes, if your paragraph is more than a page long, it is no longer a paragraph. It is a monster.

# 19 Apr 2005, 10:07AM: A Cappella Clips: I used to love listening to DeCadence when I went to UC Berkeley. Now I can buy albums or download MP3s of song clips on their site! Man, I wish I could get a recording of "Pop Nightmare," their medley of something like twelve then-popular songs. It was transcendent.

# 19 Apr 2005, 11:18PM: Good Luck With It: Come see Will Franken tomorrow night at the Marsh.

Filed under: Comedy

# 21 Apr 2005, 09:04AM: Reshma Won't Like This: In today's MC Masala I compare "Namaste America" with "Showbiz India" and "India Waves" and mock my own inability to speak Hindi.

"Showbiz India" also features movie reviews, notices of the week's DVD releases and yet more gossip. Evidently every South Asian except me waits with bated breath for news about Shahrukh Khan's next project. (You may remember Khan from every Bollywood movie since 1996.)

Enjoy!

# 21 Apr 2005, 09:46AM: Chagrin: I used to find the ads for St. Mary's emergency room playful. The billboards show a person about to have a comical accident, and promise emergency room care within thirty minutes. These promises hurt health care workers.

Another source of chagrin: a critic took a column about Indian media as evidence that all I write about is "not being white." Wow! I had no idea that there was nothing more to my ethnicity and culture than a lack of whiteness! This explains so much! Also, all feminists have penis envy!

I can understand a person getting sick of the Amy Tan stuff - "oh, I am so torn and bicultural" over and over gets old. So I started out with those columns, and now I'm pausing those for TV reviews ("service journalism") and other light material. For a person to mistake "Bollywood shows you might enjoy" for "The Mistress Woman Warrior Joy Luck Spices Club" betrays a stunning lapse in cognition.

Oh yeah. The main chagrin: that I let her get to me before realizing her complaint was [expletive denoting worthless matter].

# 26 Apr 2005, 10:24PM: Batteries It Is: The ugly little cubes that plug into a power outlet and recharge a phone or power a mobile cassette recorder or what have you have a special name. The hip call them "wall warts." Tonight I am upending the house in search of the wall wart for my tape recorder. Any wart supplying 3 volts of direct current would suffice. I found 4.5V, 15V, 3.7V, all sorts of mutually incompatible adapters instead. Standards, people!

Filed under: Apartment Life

# 28 Apr 2005, 08:51AM: Nandini Is Not Actually Indianer-Than-Thou: Today's MC Masala references the Indians-drive-Toyota-Corollas stereotype. (Should the plural be "Toyotas Corolla"?) There's a funny and sad moment in Spellbound when a spelling bee contestant who has never heard the word "corollary" wonders whether the word origin has "Corolla" in it.

For future use: The Sideshow reminded me of tips to make prose look less amateurish.

Anyway. Excerpt from today's column:

"I don't care" helps until you graduate from high school, go to a job or college, and realize that caring is the engine that keeps you going when no one is forcing you to do what he or she wants.

Enjoy.

# 30 Apr 2005, 08:38AM: Spoiler: Starring Scott Bakula: I'm writing an article or two for Salon about the end of Star Trek: Enterprise. Paramount sent me plot spoilers for all the remaining episodes, as well as a rough-cut DVD of the final two-parter. I lorded this over my colleagues at Salon. Well, my colleagues in the production/engineering department. I think no one in editorial gives a hoot about Star Trek.

# 01 May 2005, 09:56PM: Made Me Laugh And Sniffle: Saw the Hitchhiker's Guide movie and liked it far more than I thought I would! I especially understood Zaphod, Trillian, and Adams's joyful atheism more than I ever had before. Recommended.

Filed under: Comedy

# 02 May 2005, 02:50PM: Argh: "Status." The word means "situation" or "state of affairs." When I ask you about the status of a person's membership, just consider for half a second what I might mean by that! Valid answers would be "expired" or "valid" or "paid-up" or "current" or "invalid" or "eligible for renewal" or something like that. This is not rocket science! This is not postmodern literary theory jargon! Argh!

# 03 May 2005, 09:47PM: "Illusions, Dad! You don't have time for my illusions!": Leonard bought the Arrested Development DVD and we can't stop watching it. The early episodes, even ones I've seen over and over, still make me laugh. Thanks, Leonard.

Filed under: Comedy

# 03 May 2005, 10:19PM: On Removing Sweeping Generalizations: Me to an editor today:

"I know this paragraph makes me sound arrogant. But I'm right!"

Pause.

"Kidding!"

Filed under: Comedy

# 04 May 2005, 09:02AM: This One Goes In the "Comedy" And "Religion" Categories: While in Utah, I got to meet many of Leonard's relatives, including the Omans. I got to tell them that I really enjoy Nate's posts on Times And Seasons. Today I read just such an example.

Filed under: Comedy Religion

# 04 May 2005, 12:15PM: The Sandman Knows Russian: I discovered a few Russian-language internet radio stations. At first it was nice to listen to Russian again and pick out words I understood. Then I had a nightmare about trying to catch a plane out of St. Petersburg.

# 04 May 2005, 12:36PM GMT+5:30: Bookishness: At Sam Weller's bookstore in Salt Lake City, as I bought books to read on the train ride back home, I considered getting a copy of Pilgrim's Progress to read for the first time. Then I realized that I'd want a copy of the Bible next to me so I'd get all the references. Like many US public school graduates, I don't know nearly enough about the Bible to get all the Biblical references in great works of literature. Mr. Hatch in American Literature ameliorated that but not enough. I was too dumb to understand what he was trying to do and how hamstrung he was.

I bought and read Twain's hilarious Roughing It, which I enjoyed for the whole ride. Am now reading Margaret Atwood's Orxy and Crake, which takes about three paragraphs to get going. My review of Douglas Coupland's new book is up at Bookslut.

Filed under: Reading Religion

# 05 May 2005, 07:20AM: Diversity Daze: My column this week complains about insipid, superficial celebrations of diversity, and suggests possibly offensive measures that would help.

Yet dance and clothes are but the trappings of a culture, and plates of dumplings are hardly informative. If I square-danced up to you wearing a tie-dyed shirt and offered you a plate of hush puppies, how much would you have learned about American culture?
If you don't know why square dancing started, or the social implications of tie-dyed clothes, or the geographic and economic conditions that led to the invention of hush puppies, then I've entertained your senses of sight and sound and taste, but I've left your mind as empty or full as before.

# 05 May 2005, 09:25AM: Department Store: Hugo Schwyzer reprints a poignant poem by Carl Dennis for the occasion of Mother's Day.

# 05 May 2005, 09:30AM: Another Pleasant Internet Radio Station: EggRadio, which purports to appeal to "Geeks With Taste." Songs and interstitial bits include "Fifty Nifty United States," The Big Lebowski clips, and some sort of Muppet coming-out celebration.

# 06 May 2005, 07:26AM GMT+5:30: Oryx & Crake: If you have read Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood, and you believe you understand the ending, please tell me your interpretation. I finished it last night and felt as though my copy were missing two pages. Since this actually happened to me with Gilgamesh it's not TOO farfetched.

Filed under: Reading

# 06 May 2005, 10:20AM: Report A Spam Result: "If your Google search returns a result that you suspect is spam, please let us know using this form....In especially egregious cases, we will remove spammers from our index immediately, so they do not show up in search results at all."

# 08 May 2005, 03:19PM: Uncle Morty's Dub Shack: ImaginAsian TV's Uncle Morty's Dub Shack makes me laugh very, very hard. Think Mystery Science Theater 3000 for kung fu and Bollywood flicks, and only a half hour long. Absolutely worth taping.

Filed under: Comedy

# 09 May 2005, 09:44AM: This Morning On Diversity BART: On my left, a woman read the New Testament on a PDA, probably a PalmPilot. On my right, a man with a yarmulke and a prayer shawl on his head strapped tefillin to his arms, prayed quietly, and then removed all his accoutrements and packed them away. He had a tattoo on one arm, which intrigues me, since I thought Orthodox Jews refused tattoos.

Filed under: Religion

# 09 May 2005, 10:24PM: Totally Blah Experience: Remind me to avoid hospitals as though they were the plague, instead of plague-curers who carry their own other plagues, such as antibiotic-resistant staph.

# 10 May 2005, 09:14PM: Day Quality: Today I got to talk to famous people about Star Trek. And Leonard made me dinner and it had pesto in it. And none of the customers I dealt with made me want to commit felonies. So that was good.

# 11 May 2005, 11:01AM: Requires Flash, But Isn't Flashy: The Morning News pointed me to this great explanation of the Social Security reform issue.

Filed under: Taxes

# 11 May 2005, 12:56PM: I Don't Miss Econ - Maybe I Took It Wrong: I haven't been reading enough history. Brad DeLong reminds me why I love history - the whys!

Filed under: Taxes

# 11 May 2005, 12:59PM GMT+5:30: You Should Know That It Sucks: Things You Should Know by A.M. Homes is very, very depressing. So far, every story I've read has felt like a parody of the "nothing happens" New Yorker style of modern fiction. I now completely understand why Dave Eggers put together a book of adventure/mystery/fantasy genre stories as a backlash.

Filed under: Reading

# 11 May 2005, 09:56PM: Am I The Only One?: Leonard used the word "opportunistic" and I immediately thought "infection."

# 12 May 2005, 08:39AM: Mulling The Uses And Abuses Of Fashion: My column this week has a bunch of Emerson.

Emerson, in my view, backed up my function-over-form lifestyle. I hated to fuss while getting ready in the morning. Why in the world did women waste thousands of dollars and hours per year on clothes, makeup and heels instead of wearing T-shirts, Payless sneakers, and thrift-store slacks? They did it for other people's approval, and I would have no truck with it.

# 14 May 2005, 10:12PM GMT+5:30: Homes Update: I finished What You Should Know. The best story in the collection, which mulls Nancy Reagan's day-to-day life caring for Ronald Reagan during his decline, made me weep. Like A.M. Homes's compelling New Yorker article about her adoption and her biological parents, the Reagan story draws on true events. My conclusion: instead of making up premises, stories, or characters, Homes should restrict herself to fictionalizing true stories from the newspaper. Thus, she will be assured of actually having a plot.

Filed under: Reading

# 15 May 2005, 09:34PM: Validation: Will Franken won a "Best Comedian" award from the SF Weekly. Those of us who were fans several months ago get to nod in snobbish pride, while those of you who have foolishly prolonged the Frankenless portion of your existences can make up for lost time on May 26th, when Franken plays the Purple Onion on Columbus.

Filed under: Comedy

# 16 May 2005, 08:56AM GMT+5:30: What A Dame: I interviewed Diana Abu-Jaber for Saucy Magazine. She said funny and interesting things and you'd probably enjoy it.

Filed under: Reading

# 16 May 2005, 12:28PM: MC Masala Bookmarkable Link: If you'd like to link to my columns, you can link to link to this page, which links to the two most recent articles.

# 16 May 2005, 03:16PM: YAYAYAYAY: Rachel C broke it to me: Fox renewed AD! The thought of losing Arrested Development and Star Trek hit me harder than I'd expected. I'm so glad AD is coming back!

Filed under: Comedy

# 17 May 2005, 03:01PM: Disclaiming, Declaiming: Brendan, you deserve to know that I had notes for questions to ask in that conversation with Abu-Jaber. Yes, notes. And included among them was the note "jalapeno-cheddar bagel," as borrowed from a Heather Gold throwaway line.

Also - there's some fantasy spy novel called Declare, which I didn't much care for but which had a similar plot device to the implied device in this Anacrusis.

# 17 May 2005, 03:02PM: And Just Food, Apparently: KQED has a food blog?

# 18 May 2005, 09:14AM: Reason # 1 I Should Have Had A Pet Growing Up: Leonard thinks Betty is not well. I agree with him. I've transferred her to the small tank and have given her smashed-up peas to eat. Leonard is more distraught than I am. I feel sort of callous and numb. What a rotten pet-owner I am. I hadn't been cleaning the tank and replacing the filter as diligently as I ought. This would be the first time my chronic lack of follow-through has killed a living thing.

# 18 May 2005, 10:34AM: Some Lightsaber Wounds Never Really Heal: Why I'm not a Star Wars fan.

# 19 May 2005, 06:26AM: Grump: Why am I always getting up, every day? Why can't up get me sometimes?

Filed under: Comedy

# 19 May 2005, 07:18AM: Announcement: Betty, my orange goldfish of fourteen months, has died. Leonard dug the grave, made the headstone, buried her, and said the eulogy this morning in the rain in the garden. I stood and couldn't say anything. Now all the pets I've ever owned are dead.

She was a good fish.

# 19 May 2005, 08:53AM: Waiting For Hate Mail: This week's MC Masala: "Jesus and Krishna make the 9-to-5 bearable."

Oh, the place in the underworld I'd reserve for the truth-fudging whiners who want a refund after the 30-day free trial window closes.

# 21 May 2005, 09:16PM: Movie Time: Leonard and I just rented some classics on DVD. Last night we watched The Great Dictator, Charlie Chaplin's great anti-Hitler movie that began production in 1937 and released in 1940. As Kris has pointed out in his comic, our contemporaries decades after the Holocaust think of Hitler as the sine qua non of evil, a synonym for Satan. But Chaplin, a contemporary of Hitler, made a movie that is much more specifically anti-Hitler. The satire is more audacious in hindsight. Leonard suggested that the original title of The Great Dictator was F$&# You, Hitler. It's that sort of spirit. Except the ending. That's a weird ending.

If someone remade The Great Dictator, who would be the new Hitler? Leonard suggests Mugabe but I'm not sure who would play him. Then again, I'm not sure who would play Jong Il, either.

We enjoyed The Ladykillers tonight - not the Tom Hanks remake, but the Alec Guinness original. Every single Ealing Studios film will eventually end up in our library, I just know it.

# 21 May 2005, 10:07PM GMT+5:30: Machiavelli's The Little Prince: A while ago, I read Peter Singer's Writings on an Ethical Life, the reader he put together to fairly represent his controversial views on animal rights, ecology, poverty, abortion, infanticide, and right living. After reading his book, I think activist Harriet McBryde Johnson has a weaker case than I thought she did before reading Singer's book. However, I do think it would be good for us to have more information on the abilities of people with major physical disabilities to have fulfilling, happy lives; I have much less of a problem with the abortion of fetuses with entirely missing brains than I do with the abortion of fetuses with disabilities on the quality-of-life borderline (e.g., Downs syndrome, Klinefelter syndrome).

The weirdest thing Singer says in the whole book is that we can't derive morals from facts. I'm still trying to figure that one out. Maybe I'm like Cindi Lightballoon in Arrested Development misunderstanding that George Sr.'s statement "Faith is a fact" is on the blooper reel.

Anyway, there's a contradiction between Singer's views, as I see it, on the idea of "potential." When it comes to poverty and the responsibility of humans to help one another, he says that we're responsible for the easily foreseen consequences of our actions. However, on the issue of abortion, he dismisses "potential life"; since the embryo cannot desire anything now, aborting it does not thwart any desires, and hypotheticals as to its future wishes are irrelevant. I understand that introducing "potential" into the argument also invites a slippery slope regarding onanism and birth control, but Singer's method of dismissing it seems solipsistic.

Singer's points on euthanasia seem formidable, but Rivka points out that it is practically impossible to administer euthanasia (or Physician-Assisted Suicide) fairly and ethically in this society; the theory does not work in reality because of logistical and financial constraints in the health care system. As she points out, people with terminal illnesses want to die because of depression (curable) and fear of pain (curable with proper pain management). But she distinguishes cessation of treatment from active killing. I'm still struggling with that argument, as am I with Harriet McBryde Johnson's arguments in general.

Singer, Johnson, and Rivka all want better care for all patients concerned. After all, if we all had excellent preventive care, pain management, counseling, and family planning tools, then the ethics of conception and end-of-life care would cause less agony for all concerned. I think they're on the same side of many issues, but Rivka and Johnson infer policy implications from their beliefs and Singer's on the other side. I need to read up more.

Filed under: Reading

# 22 May 2005, 01:13PM: Now Awaiting The "Publish" Cronjob: About four years ago, I wrote a story for Leonard's now-defunct geek humor site Segfault in which I listed nonsensical Salon headlines. A conversation with Farhad Manjoo reminded me of it, so I reproduce it here:

Winglows: XP isn't so bad
HighDander: Drugs ruined my life and I chose neither to write an indulgent confessional, nor to pursue a graduate degree in English
If Code is Free, Why Not Kimchee?: Free software zealots love Korean cuisine...too much for their own good?
If Code is Free, Why Not Flee?: Why open source is doomed
Microgoth: The Redmond raver subculture
E-Toys: How banner ads, Cingular, and spam enhanced my MDMA trip
Pottery Darn: Stop whining, franchises are better than independents anyway
The Conventional Wisdom: It's right, yet again!
Our Fascist Friends: At least the Taliban uses Linux
Salon Reaming 'em: Why you should never feel obligated to pay for online content, unless it's ours

The Microsoft and franchise story jokes are showing their age; I think Salon has now done both of those.

Filed under: Comedy

# 23 May 2005, 02:44PM: The Trendiest Thing Ever: Open-source Islam!

Filed under: Religion

# 24 May 2005, 06:57AM: Despite All Hamminess: I, too, have been an emcee for a gala. It's not fun. Tip: Never hire a belly dancer.

# 25 May 2005, 01:49PM: $10 For Fifty Minutes Of Laughs: I'm seeing Will Franken at the Purple Onion tomorrow night - are you? I apologize in advance for how unfunny Bridget Schwartz will be.

Filed under: Comedy

# 25 May 2005, 04:58PM: How To Get Airplay: How to get your music on the radio. Assuming it's good.

# 26 May 2005, 07:57AM: And She Wonders, Where Is Everybody?: The new MC Masala column is up. I survey recent South Asian and diaspora lit.

AUTHORS from the Indian subcontinent write lots of books. Some are fantastic. Vikram Seth's meganovel "A Suitable Boy" entranced me with its epic scope, its closely observed characters and its implicit history lessons.
And then there are the droning cookie-cutter novels that substitute magical realism for plot and pile on the descriptions of smells and tastes as though that makes for sensuous prose.
Just as smothering raw potatoes with rosemary does not make them homefries, a hundred food analogies will not make your book the next "The Mistress of Spices."

One of the books I review, Asra Nomani's Standing Alone in Mecca, will get a fuller review from me in the June issue of Bookslut. As I started reading the book, I mentioned it to Leonard. I started my sentence, "So, Asra Nomani's 'Standing Alone in Mecca'..." but he thought I was starting a joke. We tried to find a punchline for about half an hour and couldn't figure anything out. Suggestions?

For a lighter literary moment, read an old Salon article by Susan McCarthy on Gary Larson (so old that Premium membership isn't required to read it). I love the bit about switching captions with The Family Circus, and of course the reference to Cow Tools.

# 26 May 2005, 02:36PM GMT+5:30: Recommendations For Non-Light Reading: "Which academic books are fit for human consumption?" This list has added several titles to my wantlist.

Filed under: Reading

# 26 May 2005, 07:33PM: Don't Try Anything: House's second-most-recent episode, "Three Stories," was great. Then the season finale was okay. Just like with Star Trek: Enterprise. Three will make a rule. I'm warning you, Burbank!

# 26 May 2005, 07:40PM GMT+5:30: Caustic Commentary & Time-Fillers: Get Your War On makes me laugh bitterly. On a scale of "how bitter is my laughter?" where ten equals "I am laughing black, black tears," The Daily Show is around a five and Get Your War On is a nine.

For the long weekend, a bunch of free essays by Susan Orlean, Michael Lewis, Calvin Trillin, et al.

Filed under: Comedy Reading

# 27 May 2005, 03:48PM: I Have Six Months: The Bookslut blog told me about The Twentysomething Writers Contest. Yes, I'd be giving up my rights to that essay in case Random House wanted to publish it, but it's not like my writing is a finite resource. So I have about 180 days to come up with between 500 and 5,000 words that define my generation.

# 29 May 2005, 01:29PM: Useful Link: TiVo Tips And Tricks. According to another hack page, you could set the end-of-program button on the TiVo remote to go forward any number of seconds between 10 and 99! 27 seconds? 60 seconds? The choice is yours!

# 29 May 2005, 09:54PM: Huge Trek Post Coming Soon: Anyone who is reading this and who knows Kannada knows that the letter for "ma" is, by all logical standards, the letter that should mean "wu" or "vu." That trips me up all the time.

Yeah, it's basically impossible to have a spelling bee for Kannada. Or for any language where the writing and phonetics of the language match up reasonably.

Busy weekend. Accidentally went to a sci-fi convention, helped make and apply an insane costume for and to a friend (gold body paint was involved), enjoyed barbecued brussels sprouts, found myself attempting to salsa dance, and watched the Star Trek Enterprise series finale for about the fourth time so as to point out its deficiencies to a friend.

Have you ever tried to impersonate Schwarzenegger while saying "L'état, c'est moi"? It works surprisingly well.

Whenever I find myself spending a Memorial Day or a Veterans Day without a proper ritual commemorating their sacrifice, I rationalize it by saying that my freedom and leisure symbolizes or embodies the principles the military protects. What a copout. But at least I send magazines and letters to Any Soldier throughout the year.

I finished Anthony Trollope's Barchester Towers this morning. So, so good! I've been grabbing friends by the lapels to read them the end of chapter 15, where the author rants about spoilers and deception.

# 30 May 2005, 09:35AM: Much Of The Essay I Couldn't Excerpt For Reasons Of Profanity: The Poor Man encapsulates modern US political thought (the second half of the essay).

If people say they are going to do something, and then they do it, and then they say they're going to do something else, and they do that, too, and on and on, you should assume they're going to do what they say they're going to do. Even if they aren't looking at you when they say it.

# 30 May 2005, 09:38AM: Here Come The Oysters!: Mike Popovic's poem that he wrote for his daughter Zoe. I recall that he also illustrated it - where are the pictures, Mike?

# 30 May 2005, 02:00PM: C.S. Lewis in Boulder, Colorado: Celestial Seasonings rooibos tea features, on the box, a very calm lion drinking drom a teacup. Leonard observed, "So he is a tame lion."

Filed under: Religion

# 30 May 2005, 02:03PM: Does It?: Last night I dreamed that Alton Brown had adopted a disabled child that biologically belonged to the British royal family, and that therefore princes and princesses came over to his house all the time. "That explains a lot," I thought.

# 30 May 2005, 07:47PM: Mt. Doom, Elev. A Billion Kajilion Feet: Found a bit of a 2001 article about Lord of the Rings and the problem of evil. Not theodicy, but the more pragmatic question of how we can and should fight evil. SPOILERS AHEAD!

But even the hobbits are not immune, and Frodo himself fails, finally, in his quest. He cannot relinquish the ring of power in the ultimate moment. "I will not do this deed," he cries on the brink of the volcano. "The ring is mine." And so there is not finally in Middle-earth an absolute good to counteract its absolute evil. Tolkien writes expressly about this in his letters. "The power of Evil in the world is not finally resistible by incarnate creatures," he notes, "however 'good.'"
Does the irresistible power of evil then make the hero's quest futile? No -- the hero's effort is necessary but not sufficient. Tolkien's other insight is that evil itself will take evil down....
In the end, it is the greed of Gollum, not the virtue of Frodo, that casts the ring to its destruction. One might even say that the ring annihilates itself, as Gollum's consuming desire is one effect of its evil power over him.

That makes the end make more sense. I always thought it made more sense for either Frodo or Sam to die, taking the ring into Mt. Doom's pit.

# 31 May 2005, 12:23AM: Trying To Want To Sleep: Ebert asks the Heavenly Muse to sing on the new Adam Sandler movie. Speaking of movies, here are some movies I have not yet seen: the second and third Matrix movies, the second and third Lord of the Rings movies, at least one of the Godfather trilogy, Thelma and Louise, the Nemesis Star Trek movie, and the second and third episodes of Star Wars.

The unfinished chores rise around me like water from melting polar icecaps. I wasted too much of the weekend. But -- "nothing is finished, that no matter how strong the sense of lost hope, there is always going to be sleep. And then rising, feet on the floor, blinking hard at the light coming in through the blinds. It is not enough, but it is enough for now."

# 31 May 2005, 05:14PM: Why Use Throwaway Sporks?: Reusable utensils to take with you in a nice cloth carrying case.

# 01 Jun 2005, 05:39PM: Self-Defense Classes: For exercise and self-defense, I want to take a martial arts class. I took judo in college and liked it. Any suggestions for good programs or teachers in San Francisco?

# 02 Jun 2005, 04:05AM GMT+5:30: Stephensonia: About once a month I wake up way too early for no good reason. Today it could be because my body is scared of today's dentist appointment. I woke up thinking about the oral surgeon from Cryptonomicon. Real subtle, subconscious.

Filed under: Reading

# 02 Jun 2005, 03:55PM: We're All In This Together: I try to emulate talented role models instead of finding their total mastery discouraging to the novice. But what am I to do when Jon Carroll writes about public transit the same day I do? From today's MC Masala, "How to avoid being a jerk on buses and BART":

Buses and BART remind me that we have a grand civilization. Mass transit is efficient and environmentally friendly and benefits even those who don't use it by reducing traffic. We don't segregate riders by gender or race. As a society, working together through our democracy, we create mass transit systems that benefit everyone. No one person could do it alone.
But it only takes one jerk to ruin 20 people's pleasant rides.

Darn, I just noticed that "working together through our through our democratically chosen government" got changed to "working together through our democracy." Oh well. Enjoy the etiquette guide.

# 08 Jun 2005, 10:59AM: Illin': Yesterday I took off from work to hang out with my sister. Then I got sick, so today I'm sneezing in sweatpants in a much less planned day off. Blah.

When you're sick-cranky, it feels much more righteous when you actually have something to be cranky about.

# 08 Jun 2005, 12:53PM: Not Coherent Enough To Be Movie Reviews: Leonard wanted me to write about Elf and Kiki's Delivery Service.

Elf made me laugh. And I liked getting to see jokes about children's publishing. But what's up with the belief system? Santa says that knowledge destroys faith, but then seeing the Nice List makes people believe, and the Claus-o-Meter goes up? If the singer had sung a non-Santa-oriented Christmas carol, would it have influenced the Claus-o-Meter? Also, people in the real world also give each other presents independent of Santa, as shown in a few scenes! If Santa really existed, wouldn't he visit children who hadn't previously believed in Santa, thus leaving otherwise inexplicable presents? Or is belief in Santa a prerequisite for bring on the Nice List? What happens to the virtuous nonbelievers? In the universe of Elf, are parents selfishly taking credit for Santa's gifts by promoting nonbelief in their children? You see how this spins out.

I enjoyed KDS. Like Spirited Away, it's a touching and slow-moving story about a brave young girl, with lovely little details and wholesome heartwarming plot points. I especially liked the rockin' song at the end. Unlike Elf and Spirited Away, KDS contains absolutely no malice. No one at all in KDS means any harm. That's overwhelming.

Now that I've been to Japan I know that Japanese people actually speak in that high-pitched/excited/anxious-sounding voice that Kiki exhibits throughout the film at the slightest provocation. That got tiring.

Now I want to read a fantasy novel by Gordon Korman. Maybe his "Jersey" series where children switch places with famous athletes.

# 08 Jun 2005, 01:21PM: Memories and Irritations: Every time I hear that Steppenwolf song about a magic carpet ride, I think about the movie Star Trek: First Contact.

I know a person who prides himself on having scheduled his own life (long-term - finding a wife, marrying her, having a kid, etc.). How irritating are those know-it-alls who have to have the upper hand in every conversation and therefore never allow you to see them surprised? Anyway, the real kicker is that this person, who in theory makes computers do things for a living, can't schedule a software project worth a tinker's dam!

# 08 Jun 2005, 01:24PM: Best Medicine: I need something to laugh at. Maybe I'll read Pratchett.

# 08 Jun 2005, 01:32PM: I Actually Received This "Apology" Today: "I'm sorry I was a bitch. I should have known how you get when you're over-emotional."

# 08 Jun 2005, 04:06PM: The Language Of Sick Is Uni--ah-CHOO!: Feeling somewhat better. Wodehouse and Korman helped. Someday Hugh Laurie will play a THIRD memorable character, after House and Wooster, and completely mix me up. It'll be like how I end up speaking French and Kannada when trying to speak Russian.

# 09 Jun 2005, 08:29AM: I Love My Mom: Today's MC Masala column actually mentions the word "masala" (mix of spices) because it's about my mom's cooking and American food.

The smell of Taco Bell reminds me of going to the coin laundry with my mother. She'd give my sister and me a few dollars and we'd run to the strip mall's Taco Bell, bursting with the desire to choose our own meals. The perfectly flavorless tortillas, the homogenized refried beans, the impossibly unmeltable "cheddar" cheese -- I would taste those and think of joy.

Also includes the line "We used to order pizza from its eponymous Hut."

# 09 Jun 2005, 05:21PM GMT+5:30: Meta-Spoiler Alert:

'But Bertie has no other way of living,' said Charlotte.
'Then, in God's name, let him marry Mrs. Bold,' said Madeline. And so it was settled between them.
But let the gentle-hearted reader be under no apprehension whatsoever. It is not destined that Eleanor [Bold] shall marry Mr. Slope or Bertie Stanhope. And here, perhaps, it may be allowed to the novelist to explain his views on a very important point in the art of telling tales. He ventures to reprobate that system which goes so far to violate all proper confidence between the author and his readers, by maintaining nearly to the end of the third volume a mystery as to the fate of their favourite personage. Nay, more, and worse than this, is too frequently done. Have not often the profoundest efforts of genius been used to baffle the aspirations of the reader, to raise false hopes and false fears, and to give rise to expectations which are never to be realized? Are not promises all but made of delightful horrors, in lieu of which the writer produces nothing but most commonplace realities in his final chapter? And is there not a species of deceit in this to which the honesty of the present age should lend no countenance?
And what can be the worth of that solicitude which a peep into the third volume can utterly dissipate? What the value of those literary charms which are absolutely destroyed by their enjoyment? When we have once learnt what was that picture before which was hung Mrs. Radcliffe's solemn curtain, we feel no further interest about either the frame or the veil. They are to us merely a receptacle for old bones, an inappropriate coffin, which we would wish to have decently buried out of our sight.
And then, how grievous a thing it is to have the pleasure of your novel destroyed by the ill-considered triumph of a previous reader. 'Oh, you needn't be alarmed for Augusta, of course she accepts Gustavus in the end.' 'How very ill-natured you are, Susan,' says Kitty, with tears in her eyes; 'I don't care a bit about it now.' Dear Kitty, if you will read my book, you may defy the ill-nature of your sister. There shall be no secret that she can tell you. Nay, take the last chapter if you please -- learn from its pages all the results of our troubled story, and the story shall have lost none of its interest, if indeed there be any interest in it to lose.
Our doctrine is, that the author and the reader should move along together in full confidence with each other. Let the personages of the drama undergo ever so complete a comedy of errors among themselves, but let the spectator never mistake the Syracusan for the Ephesian; otherwise he is one of the dupes, and the part of a dupe is never dignified.
I would not for the value of this chapter have it believed by a single reader that my Eleanor could bring herself to marry Mr. Slope, or that she should be sacrificed to a Bertie Stanhope. But among the good folk of Barchester many believed both the one and the other.

-Anthony Trollope, ch. XIV, Barchester Towers

Filed under: Reading

# 09 Jun 2005, 05:55PM GMT+5:30: Still No Punchline: I still have no punchline for the set-up "Asra Nomani is standing alone in Mecca..." But you can read my review of her book.

It seems unfair to judge Standing Alone in Mecca as a memoir when it's clearly unfinished. It tells us the history and the recent dispatches of battles within Islam, but the story's barely begun.

Filed under: Religion Reading

# 09 Jun 2005, 06:48PM: Update On Asimovs: An update long overdue (I got the corrective email in March).

# 10 Jun 2005, 04:06PM: Sick Again: Yesterday I was well enough to go to work, where I got hit by a barrage of jerkitude by customers. Maybe that lowered my immune system's defenses, because I woke up today with a relapse and stayed home. I've been doing my job for two years and it's never seemed an immediate threat to my health before. Time for a change.

# 11 Jun 2005, 05:14PM GMT+5:30: Setting Records: I can't remember the last time I was this ill for this long. Thank goodness Leonard is taking care of me. If this lasts through tomorrow then I should seek real medical attention.

Read: Pratchett's Men at Arms - a wee bit taxing for my current state, but of course funny and heartwarming. Also - some Jeeves stories that make me understand what Orwell and Leonard say about him. I'd never seen that amoral side of him before, where he ditches the "make someone happier" objective just to make a few pounds.

Filed under: Reading

# 11 Jun 2005, 09:49PM: Dramatic Turnaround: I went for a short walk and Leonard made his hot-n-spicy noodle soup for me and now I'm 80% better. Thank goodness.

# 12 Jun 2005, 06:04PM: Bah: Leonard thinks I have the flu. Makes sense. Still feeling at sixes and sevens.

# 12 Jun 2005, 07:42PM: The End Of Hu-Mor: I want to laugh at something. I tried watching A Night At The Opera and my face cracked maybe once. I found all the Marx brothers completely annoying. Leonard is currently looking for a Goon Show tape. Is there no hope? Has the flu infected my funny bone? Shall I never laugh again?

Filed under: Comedy

# 12 Jun 2005, 09:47PM: Frowny Face: What kind of life is this? Headache, sore throat, and stuffy nose are beginning to seem normal. If I wake up well tomorrow I don't know how I'll recognize it.

# 13 Jun 2005, 01:30PM: Used To It: Wake up. Eat, read, take placebos, watch TV, repeat. Feel under-the-weather all day. Go to bed. This is my life now.

# 14 Jun 2005, 10:23AM: Better Enough: Going to work. I'm still sniffly and my ears pop but those Salon Premium member questions won't answer themselves.

# 15 Jun 2005, 10:44AM: Nonexistent Sue Grafton Book Title: B Is For Hepatitis

Filed under: Comedy

# 17 Jun 2005, 09:06PM: Far From The Greek Ideal: Physically I feel better. Leonard made me laugh last night for about two full minutes. I'm back to the pre-illness level of health. But my psyche feels pretty battered. I gotta get into tech writing, or proofreading - something in writing or editing that doesn't involve fielding "you suck" calls and emails every day. If you have a lead on a relevant job in the SF Bay Area, please let me know.

# 18 Jun 2005, 04:52PM: Flailing At The Keyboard: dfasdjs asdjhkls euite artwerwe7r ewuir 34uil ,wj rewjg e,jgf er wejka rjwe weyjrtge tgue j rw we,j weyjgrwjh jsd hykudfg sd jsd gejhf sef segyrfsej esj gu dr seutwetgriltguef a;retyweiurt34rt eli8543645 eruit ert weu gwejrg eweguw gwergwel qwe qweilu528652348 jmbxcvbdfsgw, gwio;tqitheqglglegtl4wt5o87 ,jrsdm,fvergr 34ulrt87fglgweqgitwgejdkb,m egrjkegf s chsbergqwe

Don't worry, I'm fine.

# 19 Jun 2005, 11:35PM: J Neo Marvin and the Content Providers are a pretty good band: What a media-centric weekend! At Riana's house, Leonard and I saw "Spirited Away" again, and then they had the Sumana premiere of the 1980s BBC comedy "The Young Ones." I understand Leonard better now. Also consumed and enjoyed: a Gary Larson "The Far Side" anthology, a party at Rachel Chalmers's house, and a new "Uncle Morty's Dub Shack." Produced: a few humorous phrasings, worthy of a minute of stand-up comedy, and a column for Thursday. I'm a consumer at the top of the food-for-thought pyramid; it takes hours and megabytes of input for me to produce a single kilobyte of content.

# 20 Jun 2005, 06:33PM: Developing: I have an extra ticket to a Giants game tomorrow night - 7:15pm, at the Pac Bell park in downtown SF, against the Arizona Diamondbacks. Who wants to join me?

Update - looks like I have someone....not yet confirmed...

Update again - and that fell through! So the ticket is available again. We'll be sitting behind home plate, in what I'm told are two very good seats.

# 20 Jun 2005, 10:47PM: Job Recommendations: I've now applied for a bit of the jobbery. In the past two hours I've sent out two truthful letters that include the line "I believe I'm a great candidate for this position and for your organization." That gets the spirits up. Thanks, Danny and Rachel!

It's scary how well networking works.

# 21 Jun 2005, 09:45AM GMT+5:30: Giving Away Giants Ticket: R.K. Narayan in "My Dateless Diary" does a US book tour. He gets two tickets to some event. "Why two?" he asks. The giver tells him that "two tickets or none" is an unalterable principle in American life.

Update: Gone! Damian will accompany me!

Filed under: Reading

# 23 Jun 2005, 11:28AM: Pillow: A person who just left Salon gave me a small pillow. It had been left here by a previous employee so property rights are sort of nebulous on it (as the Supreme Court would approve). It'll be useful in case I ever have to sleep under my desk again. The last time I did so (election night 2004) I had to make do with promotional t-shirts.

# 23 Jun 2005, 11:40AM: Double Masala: The posting of my column last week got messed up, so today I alert you to my column from last week (about not finding a hairdresser who'll cut my hair short) and this week's column (about cool comedy this month in SF). Enjoy.

P.S. Some baseline data for what I like in comedy: Life At Low Reynolds Number (which I found via the Nielsen Haydens).

Filed under: Comedy

# 23 Jun 2005, 03:34PM: The Royal Tenancy: I like to pretend that I am stately. Also regal. But the word "regal" has to do with a hereditary aristocracy if not monarchy and I wouldn't want that kind of governmental system in the US. Then again, I like the idea of having a powerless yet stately head of state, like the British monarch, who gets to embody patriotism, etc., so that the head of government (president, prime minister, whatever) doesn't have to wear that hat too. I'd prefer that to the current situation in the US: "You don't like the current president or party in power? That means about half the country is traitorous/unpatriotic/hates all that America stands for!"

And some people are monarchs of their own minds.

# 23 Jun 2005, 10:06PM: Joy: It's been a FANTASTIC few days, mild jaw pain notwithstanding. (In a few weeks I'll have wisdom teeth out.)

This person writes like an unholy combination of Leonard, Ryan North, Chris Onstad, Stephenson, and Gogol.

I've gotten lots of email from humans, eaten well, slept well, had a job interview, talked with a socialist about political theory, socialized with friends and co-workers, worked productively, watched fun movies and TV, finished reading a book or two, and gone to a baseball game! There were garlic fries and fireworks!

I use "cyanide pill" as shorthand for the legendary poison pills spies supposedly carry with them so as to die rather than spill state secrets. Supposedly they find comfort in knowing it's there and a spy can hold out longer under interrogation than he would otherwise because he knows he always has the option of ending it all. I've encouraged friends in bad jobs to decide on their cyanide pills. What would make you quit?

Now that I'm interviewing for other jobs, my current one doesn't seem so bad.

# 26 Jun 2005, 12:52AM: Unending Action: I saw a bunch of Will Franken this weekend at his Fringe benefit show. It looks as though he made enough money to get to the NYC Fringe Festival, which gladdens me.

Today I also went to the Monterey Bay Aquarium with Riana and Leonard and will post links to their accounts when I am unlazy. They planned well and enjoyed stuff in an educational fashion while I meandered and oohed and aahed at pretty things. All the blurbs next to the tanks have really good writing.

People don't believe that my trip to Vik's tomorrow is for research purposes. But it is.

Update: As promised! Leonard and R speak out.

Filed under: Comedy

# 27 Jun 2005, 07:45AM: SCOTUS: AAARRRGH re: Grokster and the "you're not common carriers" decision. Yay re: 10 Commandments.

# 27 Jun 2005, 09:15PM: Breaking News: Not Quite All Is Vanity: I don't often look in a mirror except while brushing my hair or checking on the opacity of a shirt. To be more particular, I almost never look at my own face in a mirror. Man, humans look weird! What jumped-up monkeys we can be!

In particular I look weird. I don't think I know anyone else who looks a lot like me. I used to look like Shweta, especially towards the end of my Russia trip, when I let my hair grow and spent a lot of time in the sun. Most Indian women I meet are taller, have longer hair, or have larger waists (not that I'm a stick).

Just as I wonder what it's like to share a name with lots of my neighbors, I wonder what it's like to regularly see people who look like me.

If you know what I look like, and you know someone who looks like me, would you mind sending me a link to his or her picture?

# 28 Jun 2005, 08:52AM: SCOTUS Jokes, Lapsing Into Seriousness: On Kelo v. New London: I keep accidentally calling it Keno v. New London, maybe since it's now a gamble whether you get to keep your land.

Every Native American now gets to say, "How does it feel, beeyotch?"

Out of life, liberty, and property, you'd think this administration would have at least protected property.

On MGM v. Grokster: Fred von Lohmann's pre-decision guide claimed, "No matter what, we've won." Leonard shook his head and said, "Whenever you say that, you've lost." He further clarified that trying to take your supporters' eyes off whether you win is a clear sign you're losing. Remember, he has software development AND Clark campaign experience!

On FCC v. Brand X (FAQ): if DSL is a common carrier and cable internet isn't, does that mean that cable internet providers can (and have to!) monitor usage for illegal activity but DSL providers don't? OK, not so much a joke as a bewildered hypothetical.

More seriously, on Kelo and on Frances's post and the ensuing discussion: I am trying to articulate why this decision seems so wrong, and reading SCOTUSblog's discussion on it to help me. Frances gets at it when she says, "But in this case, it's not the government building a necessary road, it's the government getting in bed with the private sector to construct an office complex on the land."

The whole point of laissez-faire capitalism is that people are free to make their own decisions in the open market. But why should real estate developers be forced to bargain with sellers when they can make noises about tax revenue (foofaraw promises that will disappear as soon as another municipality gives them a better tax break) and get the government to help them force citizens to sell their rightful property?

What is a public works project? It's kind of like Karl Popper said - I can't say what it is, but I can say what it isn't. Maybe a dam. Maybe a road. Maybe a hospital. Maybe a subway. But it has to be something that will end up owned by the people, through their elected government. Not a privately owned mall. Not a privately owned office park. "Our smoke-and-mirrors projections say it'll bring in tax revenues" is not enough.

John: I understand that you were talking about eminent domain in general, not Kelo. And yeah, the building of roads, highways, railroads, and in general the infrastructure of our civilization involved a lot of eminent domain (and a lot of fraud!).

But just compensation at or above fair market value is a given in eminent domain cases. Maybe I'm confused, but I can't figure out how "fair market value" is ever generous. Is "they'll get FMV money for it that they can use to buy something nicer" really generosity when the recipient doesn't have a choice in the matter? If the government gave you a million dollars and forced you to give up your religion, would you consider that a fair trade? Would you be glad it had happened? What happens when the neighborhood containing the Newport Beach temple comes under the lustful, scheming gaze of some city planner or some developer?

I'm not even certain I agree with Frances in calling the San Jose landowners recipients of a windfall. I'd want victims of eminent domain to receive substantially more than FMV to compensate them for the coercion involved.

Unlike Frances, I'm not up on local abuse-of-ED cases. But power corrupts, and some people within government will try to abuse their powers, and grab after expansions of those powers, and work to dismantle the ability of victims to fight back. And after getting all that power, they'll have to give it up and be mad when the next officeholders come into office and use it.

It's like Jefferson said - if men were angels, we wouldn't need a government in the first place. The limitation of the government's power protects the citizenry. And if you're a Republican who has lost interest in that sort of thing, ask yourself - would you be okay with a Democratic Congress and a Democratic President exercising that power?

Filed under: Taxes

# 28 Jun 2005, 09:03AM: Eminem Domain: More John on Kelo!

I'm glad y'all got a good price for the land. (I thought "arable" meant "good for farming.") But maybe your uncles were, you know, attached to the land. Pearl S. Buck's The Good Earth taught me a little about that. The investments people make in land are not just monetary, just as a job is not just an exchange of time for money. We're humans and we make social and emotional attachments to pets, careers, neighbors, possessions, co-workers, and land. Cemeteries, places of worship, and awe-inspiring natural beauties are sacred land publicly, but each man's home is just as sacred to him.

Filed under: Religion Taxes

# 28 Jun 2005, 12:24PM: The Fallacy Of Only Sometimes Noticing Things: I find myself seeing more and more items in the news concerning Kentucky, especially Louisville, now that I know someone who lives there (Brendan). And today I see CafePress has job openings in Louisville! Crazy.

# 29 Jun 2005, 05:37PM: More Comedy: I have a spare ticket to see Bill Santiago tonight at Cobb's in North Beach. If you want to come with me, email me.

Update: Off to the show! No one emailed. Do call if you still want it....

Filed under: Comedy

# 29 Jun 2005, 11:42PM: Back From The Show: Cobb's showcased about seventeen (exaggeration) "comics." Hey, guys and occasional gals? Talking about sex and drugs is not enough! Every few months I forget that mainstream standup sucks but hope grows stronger than hard-won prejudice. More detailed review later. For now: Sheng Wang and Yayne Abeba pleasantly surprised me.

Filed under: Comedy

# 30 Jun 2005, 10:03AM: Superstition: Even in correspondence, I avoid writing a number followed by an exclamation point, since that would be a factorial.

"Good news! He paid $35!"

after all really means

"Good news! He paid $1.0333148 x 10⁴⁰."

Filed under: Comedy

# 30 Jun 2005, 10:12AM: The Traveller: Sometimes Leonard and I watch Iron Chef America. I like the American version better than the Japanese version because it feels less feudal, and I know I'm not missing anything in translation, and I see women on the show more often, and Alton Brown gives good commentary. (But it does have less grandeur.) Anyway, Leonard always laughs when Brown introduces the floor correspondent, "the Thirsty Traveller, Kevin Brauch." I keep telling Leonard that Kevin calls himself and his show that, but Leonard likes to think it's an epithet or insult of Brown's.

Anyway, on Sunday I was a hungry traveller and I went to Berkeley to eat at Vik's. My MC Masala column on the experience has gone up:

The flavors of Vik's take me home in big and little ways. The coconut and mango drinks and the rice hint that India's a wet peninsula near the equator, with a climate I can only stand in the winter. Vik's also serves the slightly different version of Coca-Cola, "Thums Up," made for Indians but imported to the United States for homesick immigrants.

# 30 Jun 2005, 02:59PM: F(e)asting: Tomorrow I have my wisdom teeth out. One of them is causing a classic bony molar impaction. I am kind of proud of being a textbook case.

The multiple appointments and conversations leading up to the surgery have pressed upon me the dietary restrictions associated with going under. So today I had a bit of a feast lunch with work colleagues. We went to the fancy-dancy dim sum place downstairs, Yank Sing. Dim sum makes me feel regal and commanding, but waiters interrupt the conversation every five minutes. At least Yank Sing has several vegetarian options and the staff helped find them.

I mentioned my corporate Slate vs. indie Salon analogy, where Slate is a woman who's gone right from her father's house to her husband's, but Salon is a strong, independent woman who's been raised by wolves.

Tonight I might go to Cafe Andree in the Hotel Rex. I'm coddling my sense of taste as though I am my own mom. Or something.

# 01 Jul 2005, 07:59AM: More Food and Nervousness: Last night I ate at Cafe Andree and of course the ravioli were delicious. Today, eggs and toast because I'm too nervous to eat much more, even though come midmorning I won't be able to eat or drink at all! Even water! Aieee!

Sandra Day O'Connor has announced her retirement, Nina Totenberg is audibly in shock, people in Iraq and Cuba and Sudan and North Korea and the US are dying for no reason, but I can't concentrate on anything but my impending fast and surgery and recovery. Yudhisthira was right, in that riddle session with Yama by the lake, possibly the second most didactic scene in the entire Mahabharata (after the Gita).

Yama asks: What is the most amazing thing in the world?

And Yudhisthira answers: Every day, men see others die around them, yet each man thinks that he himself is immortal. That is the most amazing thing.

# 01 Jul 2005, 10:58AM: Withdrawal: I'm quitting eating and drinking (temporarily) and a colleague of mine is suffering through his seventh or eighth cigarette-free day after years of smoking. We're keeping each other on the bandwagon. I got the saying wrong, I know it.

# 01 Jul 2005, 12:57PM: Pavlova For Pavlov's Dog: My stomach has growled several times in the past few minutes, and my mouth just watered. I acknowledge my addiction to food and reach for the strength to get this monkey off my back.

# 01 Jul 2005, 08:38PM: Gauzy: As the oral surgeon administered the anesthesia, I tried to tell him about the relevant scene in Cryptonomicon, but I went under before I could give him the title and author.

After the surgery, when I saw Leonard, I cried. I blubbered that I was sorry that I hadn't had the wisdom teeth out five years ago when a dentist made a passing comment about them. The assistant said that some people cry and some people laugh when coming out of anesthesia.

Pretty grumpy coming home - a communication and traffic mixup kept me waiting to go home - but Leonard has been taking fantastic care of me, including serving me cups of delicious mashed potatoes and vanilla pudding. I have to use my numb tongue as a conveyor belt or crane between my numb lips and my freaked-out throat.

Soon, sleep.

# 02 Jul 2005, 08:36AM: Weekend Upgrade: Lips: no longer numb. Pudding and mashed potatoes: still delicious! I feel a general disinclination to get up from bed but can successfully putter around the house.

My thanks to Zack for driving Leonard and me home from the oral surgeon's in awful traffic yesterday afternoon. I was grumpier than he deserved. Tip for anyone who has to groggily leave a downtown doctor's office in a car at 5:15 on the Friday before Fourth of July Weekend: have your driver stationed in a nearby parking garage BEFORE you have to leave.

As I found out from the kindly Dr. David Ehsan, as well as the other dentist and oral surgeon I saw during this process, it's better to have wisdom teeth removed (unless they've already come in without causing a fuss) around age 18, before the jaw's fully formed and the wisdom teeth have put down long roots. I feel guilty that I didn't have them out earlier; years ago a dentist made a passing remark that it's better to have wisdom teeth out sooner rather than later. But that's all! From what he said, I figured that wisdom teeth that aren't causing an immediate problem can stick around, like the appendix. He didn't explain that they're almost inevitably problematic, or the financial and medical reasons why it's better for a student on her parents' insurance to get it done some teenage summer, or make any persuasive or expository effort at all. Dentists: don't make this mistake!

# 02 Jul 2005, 10:00PM: Babe: I got to talk to Alyson and Brendan today. (Tomorrow: Claudia?) Also I am only moderately woozy and oozy, and Jennifer reassured me that if I haven't felt euphoria yet then I probably won't get addicted to any of my meds.

I showed Leonard the classic children's film Babe and during the film discovered that I can eat soft solid foods (e.g., well-cooked ravioli) if I cut it into tiny pieces with my incisors and swallow said bits whole. Also: chocolate pudding! Leonard's great.

Susanna and John have almost fully moved into their new place in SoCal. Congrats!

I realize after reading this entry that it doesn't live up to my standard intellectual bar (viz., "would this fit into the classic epistolary novel Microserfs?"). OK. The matrimonial ads of India West include such phrases as "innocently divorced from an issueless marriage." Does "issueless" mean "without children" or "without angry exes" or "without public scandal"? And has any divorce ever been innocent?

# 03 Jul 2005, 08:45AM: Grumpy: Just ate pudding and took meds. Waiting for said meds to kick in. It could be worse - I could be having this experience - but it could be better, too - I could be having this experience.

# 04 Jul 2005, 11:08PM: Independence: As of July 2005, my mouth has achieved independence from my wisdom teeth. Huzzah!

Happy Fourth, everyone. The party went fine. I went social-hostess nuts. Most of my friends mix well with others. Leonard made yummy food. We listened to old presidential campaign songs and laughed.

I should go to sleep. Medicated-up work this week should be fun.

# 06 Jul 2005, 09:25AM: Compare And Contrast: The DC Metro and the NYC subway.

# 06 Jul 2005, 01:03PM: The Saddest Thing: A very sad story. Warning: made me cry!

# 07 Jul 2005, 09:07AM: We are all Londoners today.

Continuing coverage from The Guardian.

# 07 Jul 2005, 05:56PM: Rubber Chickens: I'm going to ask Joe to tell me how accurate this standup comedy FAQ is.

Filed under: Comedy

# 07 Jul 2005, 06:08PM: Comedy & Column: Today's column yells at the standup comedians who infest SF's showcases for being lazy. Tonight I see Patton Oswalt with Joe at Cobb's.

Filed under: Comedy

# 08 Jul 2005, 12:59AM: Writing A Column: Without Wikipedia, it might take more than four moves to get from "Is Cameroon in sub-Saharan Africa?" to "What's the deal with the Illuminati?"

The first is relevant to next week's MC Masala; the second is not.

# 08 Jul 2005, 02:48PM: Amazingly, I Liked Everybody: Joe covers last night's show.

I saw Brent Weinbach for the first time last week and didn't like his act. Then yesterday I saw most of his jokes again and then one or two new bits, and I laughed. I don't understand myself. Maybe it's the pain meds.

I piqued Tony Camin's interest by clapping for the concepts of 99-cent stores and helping people move. Then I mystified him by claiming truthfully that I'd never tried pot. But the kicker: in the leadup to a bit about parades, he asked rhetorically whether anyone ever came home to put on a CD of marching band music. I guiltily thought of the "Greatest Marching Band Classics" album in my CD player and raised my hand.

Filed under: Comedy

# 11 Jul 2005, 06:00PM: Hail To The Remixer: I think every time Lawrence Lessig walks into a room a band should play a verse and refrain of "Blank Baby" by The Presidents Of The United States.

Filed under: Comedy

# 12 Jul 2005, 09:07PM: The French: I got to speak some broken French to two French tourists at a bus stop yesterday. They are from Paris, they said. "We almost got the Games," one added, as though that would jog my memory. Unsurprisingly, I got to spring the "Paris of the West" cliche on them and used the phrase "On y va!" upon my farewell. The title of my high school French textbook comes in handy yet again!

A colleague has seen March of the Penguins and enjoyed it except for the cheesy narration. Leonard and I have decided to wait for the DVD and watch it with the original French soundtrack. Heck, since it's about penguins it's basically a black and white film anyway.

Filed under: Comedy

# 13 Jul 2005, 12:21PM: "Because I do not know what you are saying.": The LiveJournal customers_suck community has gotten me hooked and I have drawn Riana into my web of addiction. This Job Would Be Great If It Weren't For The Zombies: A Series Of Open Letters repays all my devotion.

...I am not deliberately hiding the smoked turkey from you, we just don't have any. I am not being racist, and if I wanted to, I would do it in a more aggressive way than hiding the smoked turkey....

Filed under: Comedy

# 14 Jul 2005, 02:49AM: Stayin' Awake: When I wake up very early, I wonder whether I can get back to sleep. Sometimes a cup of water or trip to the loo will do it, sometimes daydreaming will. But what doesn't help: hearing the following sounds from the street:

firework or gunshot
only a second later, a second identical sound
car driving away from said sounds

So I called 911 and made my calm, lucid report, and now I am definitely awake. Time to write.

Filed under: Apartment Life

# 14 Jul 2005, 03:51AM: Sunset is to Nightfall as Insomnia is to Wikipedia: Wowie zowie, there are some crazy people out there.

Other related modern theories involve Hitler having escaped to the Antarctic, where he joined with a subterranean dinosauroid master race, with whom he now travels inside UFOs underground, generally beneath the South Pole or throughout the center of the hollow earth, but sometimes to a Nazi moon base as well.

Includes the "avatar of Vishnu" theory and its proponent, who went on to write "a fictionalized autobiography and memoir of her favorite cats." Title: Long-Whiskers and the Two-Legged Goddess, or the true story of a "most objectionable Nazi" and . . . half-a-dozen cats.

The history of the swastika is a brand manager's nightmare. Imagine you run a minor hockey team or a beloved cereal or an infantry division, and you've chosen as your logo lightning breaking jaggedly through a circle. Then the jihadists start using it! And off to CafePress you go.

What if some distasteful political movement started using swooshy corporate-style logos? What would it take for PBS or Coke to give up and flee?

Finally: Om saha naavavatu is one of the two mantras I know best, but I'd never seen it written down before. I've only heard my father cajoling large groups of Hindus into saying it before we dug into potluck dinners. Are there prayers like that for people who grew up Christian? Do you remember whether you said or sung them?

Filed under: Religion

# 14 Jul 2005, 09:16AM: Past Current Events + Tastelessness: This Year In Nepal: Hamlet II: Where is Everybody?

Subtitle: "What's all this blood on the floor?"

Filed under: Comedy

# 14 Jul 2005, 09:38AM: Blood Donation Time: MC Masala this week urges you (if you are eligible) to give blood. The blood banks are running low.

So when the blood van pulls up across the street from my office every month, I go and I sit and I fill out the form. I have to answer the list of yes/no questions every time, and they take on a ritual significance, like the Four Questions of Passover.

# 16 Jul 2005, 11:19AM: Harry Potter Spoiled: I have now read Book 6, Half-Blood Prince, of the Harry Potter series. Therefore you can feel free to discuss it with me and speculate about Book 7.

# 17 Jul 2005, 01:04AM: Movie Nights: Through San Francisco's public library, Leonard and I have fully subsidized access to many awesome films (especially classics) that our neighborhood video stores don't carry. I love reserving these great Billy Wilder or Ealing Studios films at my local library and watching them with Leonard on seven-day loan. What indie video store does a seven-day loan? None for free, anyway.

This week I saw Mulan and The Fortune Cookie with Leonard and I read Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince. Potter's Hermione, the eponymous Mulan, and the Ron Rich character (Luther Jackson) from Fortune Cookie all go above and beyond mere adequacy as sympathetic characters. They are the nicest or most competent or smartest or bravest or most altruistic characters in their stories. Should I fault the authors or credit the characters for these superlatives? Hermione has to compensate for being female and Muggle-born, Mulan for being female, Jackson for being black and for a moment of carelessness that leads to the film's main plot device. (I won't fault Wilder. Jackson's character is the most textured and less of a caricature than Mulan's or Hermione's. This makes sense since the film has the least Joseph Campbell-esque plot and character set of the three stories.)

As one blogger comments on a similar situation (a Muslim organization's condemnation of the London terror attacks):

I have to say that it's nice they're being nice. But you know? They don't have to be. They shouldn't have to be nice. It's just another stereotype, really, the opposite number from the Evil Fanatical Muslim Terrorist. How about we talk about your average everyday [sic] who's mediocre and not especially interesting? Who's ordinary and boring, it just so happens he goes to mosque instead of church, and who reads the Koran instead of the Bible. Just like, oh, millions of ordinary average other peole out there. Being noble is nice. But it's not compulsory. It's not necessary and it's not expected. ... [A person] should be able to do whatever the f*** he wants, be as much of a jerk as he wants, without it reflecting on his religion at all. It might reflect on him, but not on his religion.
What it undoubtedly reflects on, though, are the a**h***s who were mean to him because he's a Muslim.

In real life, I absolutely get the blogger's point (with all due reservations about the definition of "religion" and so on). But in fiction, I have to tease out where the story stops and the author begins -- whether the author is delibrately slanting the dataset. In The Fortune Cookie we have several male characters with significant screentime and all but one of them have some sympathetic aspects. The two females that show up the most have no good qualities at all. One is a conniving, betraying siren, and the other a hysterical pest. Did the story just work out best that way? Some women are sobbers or golddiggers, but no one can venture a ratio. Were the writers misogynists? Should I enjoy the movie as a whole and content myself with the cool nun who shows up for two minutes as a fairer representation of my sex?

We humans are pattern-making animals, as I think Elliot Aronson said, and that usually helps us, but it makes racism and sexism and all the other prejudices so much easier to form and so hard to lose! I want the art I see to upend my prejudices, to put me into that disequilibrium that leads to moral growth. That's why good satire hurts and edifies and illuminates.

Of course I overshot reason in my hopes for Harry Potter's plot. In mass transit and in human courtesy I want the studied reliability that civilization produces, but in storytelling I need something wild.

Which makes me wonder whether Billy Wilder was his real name.

Next up: Witness for the Prosecution. I'll report back.

# 19 Jul 2005, 09:13AM: "Everyone Must Go": JetBlue is offering amazing deals right now.

# 19 Jul 2005, 09:23AM: Fairy Tales: Maybe because I saw Mulan a few days ago, maybe because any tales Leonard and I spin for each other inevitably involve frogs....

"I'm a fraud!"

"What?"

"I said I'm a fraud!"

"Oh, I thought you said you were a frog."

"What if everyone who was a fraud turned into a frog? And there was one honest man left, the only man left in a world of frogs? Maybe he would be so lonely that he would tell a lie, so he could be with his people. And then there would be only frogs, and all of their ribbits would be lies."

# 20 Jul 2005, 04:20PM: Obligatory Franken Notice: "Not Quite Thought, Not Quite Speech" tonight at 8 at The Marsh.

Filed under: Comedy

# 21 Jul 2005, 07:51AM: Not "Ironic," Thank Goodness: The SF Zoo has an exhibit/event called "Parrot Encounter." That sounds ominous. More ominous than the old magazine or comic "Tales of the Unexpected." Today I conceived of a similar magazine or comic: "Tales of the Weirdly Apt."

Filed under: Comedy

# 21 Jul 2005, 08:01AM: Christmas Column In July: Today's MC Masala has second and third paragraphs that the Bay Area Living editor, Cathy Schutz, much improved. Thanks, Cathy.

In "Interfaith Dialogue Runs Aground" I recollect a party where I conversed with a former Christian:

The more we talked the less we understood each other. How could he sit with me, a block from the Mission District in San Francisco, eating Christmas pie, and not understand that my conscious citizenship in Western civilization demands that I get a handle on Christianity?

Filed under: Religion

# 21 Jul 2005, 08:21PM: Good Writers: Flea talks about bravery and Brendan gives blood.

Gordon Atkinson is making the kind of decision that you have to make if you're going to give yourself up to the writing. Chain the wolf to the door. I wish him well.

# 21 Jul 2005, 08:39PM: My Patience Is Not Rewarded: Recently I have less and less patience for disrespectful or snarky or dumb blathering. I put on my headphones at work less for the music and more to drown out particular people's incredibly useless yakkety-yak. And online I find myself scrolling past stupid comments on blogs with the unspoken incantation "Screw you, screw you, screw you." That's why I can't read Heather Havrilesky's "I Like To Watch" column in Salon: too much posing and insulting, not enough substance. And that's why I haven't watched Battlestar Galactica yet.

Leonard and I have heard great things about the new BG series on the Sci-Fi Channel. So he set up his TiVo to record them, starting from the beginning, but we didn't catch the miniseries that kicked off the whole saga. I'd like to read a transcript of it, or a very complete summary, but all I could find was Television Without Pity's recap. Reading a TwP recap is slow going at the best of times (example: "The Body" from Buffy The Vampire Slayer), but the BG miniseries recap has the highest noise-to-signal ratio I've ever seen on the site. The recappers seem to actively avoid saying anything positive about, well, anything except their own discriminating tastes.

I've been saying "Screw you" at every paragraph.

So those TiVoed episodes will have to wait.

# 25 Jul 2005, 10:30AM: Tired At 10:30: One awful customer can be such a drag. Soon! Soon it will all be over! I'm not being all "sweet, sweet oblivion in a bottle!" Rather, I'm saying that this incident only increases my Craigslist willpower.

# 25 Jul 2005, 11:50AM: Comedy Reminder: Will Franken's new website tells me that he's performing two discrete shows this Saturday, the 30th. I tell you that I'm going to both shows. They take place at The Purple Onion in North Beach, which has a bunch of fun acts in the next few weeks.

Filed under: Comedy

# 25 Jul 2005, 02:40PM: Seth Stevenson Is Making Sense: "But the house was TOO SMALL!"

Filed under: Comedy

# 26 Jul 2005, 07:59AM: The Five-Minute MBA: Daniel Davies uses grad school principles to talk about policy.

I would put that better except that I've just realized that I have overextended myself in promising to lend DVDs of Will Franken's performances to three or four different people. Hmmm.

# 26 Jul 2005, 02:38PM: Applications For InstaFame: KQED wants YOU to review restaurants!

# 28 Jul 2005, 08:43AM: MC Masala Drippiness: Drippy both emotionally and because the stories happen in the rain.

Did the girls feel lucky, grateful, or relieved? Did they share a quick glance before getting into my car, deciding whether I was a nut or a good Samaritan? Did they tell their friends the story of the weird, friendly woman playing Weird Al at 2 on a Sunday morning?

# 31 Jul 2005, 10:35AM: Mice Are Completely Unfair: How is this fair? The day after I clean the kitchen, I see a mouse. Now I'm stuffing towels in the cracks under my bedroom door as though waiting for firefighters to rescue me from smoke inhalation, and making loud glossomanic sounds before leaving a room so as to scare away the vermin. The neighbors must think I've started a home Pentecostal church. If only I had snakes around my neck - maybe they'd catch this damn mouse.

If you have a cat that catches mice, would you consider visiting me? Soon? With your kitty? I'm allergic to cat hair but I can sweep it up. Mice, no.

I had a moment while writing this where I feared that the mice would read it and learn of my countermeasures. No, these are not The Rats Of NIMH. These are not terrorist mice where it's not politically correct to try and figure out what they want and how to deny it to them. As far as I know, it is one solitary mouse who has succeeded in changing the way I live. Congratulations and damn you.

Filed under: Apartment Life

# 02 Aug 2005, 04:05PM: Feminism: Heather Havrilesky wrote a light trend piece on guys who care about their appearance that I mildly enjoyed until she started using the second person and the plural first person to castigate these men. I don't know who "we" is here. Heather and her friends? Salon writers?

Havrilesky implies that it's okay for gay and bi men and heterosexual women to pay attention to their appearance, but heterosexual men shouldn't try too hard because that would unnerve her. Even I'm not that prescriptive.

# 02 Aug 2005, 04:28PM GMT+5:30: "Add it up": I am really glad that Paul Wright pointed me to a bit of non-glurgy inspiration that's akin to Paul Ford's old chestnut about the water boiling. Maybe I should borrow some Violent Femmes. Over the past few days, I've been using classical, Ben Folds, Guster, Dar Williams, and the Mountain Goats to self-medicate.

Limit your wheel spinning to those five minutes in the shower. Let the steam seep into your pores as you sing along to Violent Femmes. Sing, "Just last night I was reminded of just how bad it had gotten and just how sick I had become." Put on your shiny shoes and fight the good fight again. Fight the good fight until it becomes second nature, until it becomes who you are.

Filed under: Reading

# 02 Aug 2005, 10:54PM: Mild Wonder: An Indian woman living in the US disliked the last bit of an article I wrote. I'm forming a big ol' post on her criticisms, but for now - there's an Amy defending me in her comments! I wonder who that is?

Update: A longer, more considered response.

# 03 Aug 2005, 08:06PM: Feeling Really Blah: Had to talk to a customer service person who was condescending, boastful, fake-friendly, nosy, and generally a pain in the ass in a way that ensures they won't get my business.

Update: wait, no, she just pushed my buttons in the same way that family members do. Not her fault, just bad chemistry/gearcrunching. When will I get over these freaking insecurities and be able to deal with others as the individuals they are?

# 03 Aug 2005, 10:47PM: Trader Joe's Goodness: Am currently eating the frozen mushroom risotto mixed with soy taco filling. It's pretty good.

Filed under: Apartment Life

# 04 Aug 2005, 11:30AM: I Did Not Choose The Headline: Hostess with the most-ess. Dude.

I find myself with two contradictory ethics of hostessing. One, a very rational model, tells me that guests must responsibly learn to express their own needs, as I've learned to. But my parents' older principles tell me there's no excuse for an uninformed, unprepared or uninspired hostess.

# 04 Aug 2005, 11:42AM: "And the dull pain that you live with / Isn't getting any duller": My very first week of high school, I leapt up in an English class to defend Star Trek as an embodiment of our hopes for a better future. Does the Trek franchise need me to guard it from imprecation? Birdie's tale reminds me of how precious sci-fi is. Her children got more Trek-related attention this year, and you can buy relevant merchandise.

Her other stories have been entertaining me as well.

Title from The Mountain Goats, "The Young Thousands."

# 04 Aug 2005, 01:50PM: Day Of Sententious Quotes: From The Big Kahuna:

I'm saying you've already done plenty of things to regret, you just don't know what they are. It's when you discover them, when you see the folly in something you've done, and you wish that you had it do over, but you know you can't, because it's too late. So you pick that thing up, and carry it with you to remind you that life goes on, the world will spin without you, you really don't matter in the end. Then you will gain character, because honesty will reach out from inside and tattoo itself across your face.

# 08 Aug 2005, 11:21AM: Pharmacy Recommend: I really like 450 Sutter Pharmacy. It delivers anywhere within San Francisco (including automatic prescription refills) within a day, and has real live pharmacists on the phone and at the desk. Did I mention that no chain or corporation owns 450 Sutter?

Recommended.

# 10 Aug 2005, 02:00PM: Blah: E-commerce is hard. Let's go shopping.

Will see a preview of the filthiest movie ever tonight. John, Kristen, Susanna, etc. will definitely not want to see it.

Filed under: Comedy

# 10 Aug 2005, 09:49PM: Eh: If you see The Aristocrats, you should probably bring a barf bag. I nearly threw up twice. It has some very funny moments, but as an interview-a-hundred-people documentary, it pales next to Ken Burns's Baseball, and I can watch Baseball with my family and children.

Filed under: Comedy

# 11 Aug 2005, 04:54PM: Over-Earnest Punctuality Is Pernicious Bollocks: Or at least I hope it is. Today's column.

I used to be good at this stuff, back in high school, when my time was heavily structured but I barely perceived my workload as a burden, just as most of us don't curse our own skeletons. (Please overlook that Ray Bradbury story for now.)

# 16 Aug 2005, 04:09PM: Reading Rainbow: I should admit to you all that I've been deleting the Reading Rainbow episodes from the TiVo left and right. All that we've saved: the one with Star Trek bloopers and "Simon's Book" because it contains the great song "At the Bindery".

Right now I'm on a quest to watch two faintly-remembered episodes. The first-ever episode, "Tight Times", includes the song "Check it Out!" in which children and LeVar Burton sing and dance throughout a library. Maybe it was a pilot and I'll never get to see it in the course of reruns.

The second is more elusive. I dimly recall a scene where Burton considers dropping out of a biking or running race, and small devil/angel versions of Burton attempt to persuade him to take various courses of action. Even though Burton (of course) takes the right course of action, people summarizing this episode for the web seem reluctant to talk about airborne demons. So I must guess. It might be "Sports Pages" or "Knots on a Counting Rope," but I'm betting it's "The Tortoise and the Hare". Hey Leonard, a friendly tortoise!

# 17 Aug 2005, 09:40AM: "In Theory": Last night I watched a Star Trek: The Next Generation rerun. In "In Theory," a woman tries to date Data as she's on the rebound from a bad relationship. I remember thinking it was funny when I saw it for the first time ten years ago. But now that I've actually dated, it's acid satire, almost too painful to watch.

I found Seth incredibly likable when I first met him, since I'd already made imaginary friends with Data. But I'm really glad Seth is human. Brent Spiner can really turn up the creepy in a way Seth never could.

# 17 Aug 2005, 10:19AM: Request for Recommendations: If you've really enjoyed a police procedural crime novel set in Israel, please let me know the title and author.

# 17 Aug 2005, 04:42PM: Imponderables: I think twice over the past 30-day period, a man has mentioned to me that his wife is or soon will be out of town. Do they realize how cheesy and pass-y that sounds, even if it's not meant That Way?

Also: if you hear sales types bandying about the term CPM, you may think that it is Cost Per Million of something. Once someone tells you that these are salespeople for ads on the web, you may think the M stands for the initial consonant in "Impression." But no! CPM stands for Cost Per Thousand and the M may or may not have to do with the Roman numeral for a thousand. Why.

# 17 Aug 2005, 09:45PM: Petrarch Innovated The Wacky Twist Ending: Salon published a review of new Nike ads. Sadly, the Salon piece contains no instances of the word "bedonkadonk" or its variant spelling "badonkadonk." It brings to mind a phrase I loved in Salon long ago, "'Our Sportsbras, Ourselves' agitprop."

Anyway. As a companion piece to the Nike campaign critique, Salon anthologizes silly body poems the staff wrote. I have a tortured sonnet-y thing in there; check it out if you'd like.

I've written previous sonnets about chess and my dad.

Filed under: Comedy

# 18 Aug 2005, 10:51AM: Includes Mandelbrot Reference: In case you were wondering how I feel about Indian Independence Day, today's MC Masala column hints.

On Aug. 15, 1947, India broke free of the British Empire and became its own country. The date comes near the end of the summer wedding season, which doesn't quite fit, since it marks the anniversary of India's great divorce, not just from Great Britain but also from Pakistan.

# 19 Aug 2005, 07:46AM: Boombox: I have a small combination FM/tape/CD player in my room that my mother gave me as a high school graduation gift. I adore the UI. For example, the designers put the tuning wheel next to the FM tuning display, and the volume wheel on the other side of the machine entirely. Innovation!

I've gotten used to the analog FM tuner and the lack of a shuffle function for the CD player. But, over its many years of service, my little music box has begun to evince contempt of physical media. It displays recalcitrance when asked to spin up a CD; I often have to open and close the CD door a few times to get the player to start spinning it. Also, if playing a cassette that's been properly rewound to the beginning of a side, the player will play it too fast or too slow, and I have to jiggle with REW, FWD, and even (again) opening and closing the door to get it to play properly.

My mother paid no more than $40 for this lovely, compact little machine back in 1998. Could I get it fixed for a similar or smaller amount? Are there perhaps minute yet pivotal adjustments that I could make with common household instruments? Will this boombox ever learn to love again?

# 19 Aug 2005, 09:06AM: Spicy Quip: Upon seeing that Leonard had spilled peppercorns in the kitchen: "Are you making counter au poivre?"

Filed under: Comedy

# 22 Aug 2005, 02:40PM: From Booze To Booze: Some friends came over yesterday for a lovely luncheon (prepared by Leonard) and a joint expedition to the Costco in downtown San Francisco. Astonishingly, there is room for a Costco in downtown SF. As discovered in pre-lunch beverage discussion, I evidently keep rather more hard liquor on hand than at least one of these friends is accustomed to. It's just more efficient to buy the giant bottle of vodka, and it's not as if it'll spoil.

In an effort to spend less on lunch, I bought Costco supplies of fruit cups and organic-yet-crappy frozen burritos. Today I stowed a burrito in the workplace freezer, subsequently microwaving it and eating it with the boastful Salsa De La Muerte, a vinegar-based hot sauce. Only upon retrieving the burrito did I notice that, for the first time in my memory, there was no booze in the Salon freezer.

# 23 Aug 2005, 12:04PM: Behind The Scene: Jon Carroll, the columnist whose work I follow most closely, warns me of an occupational hazard.

Here's a dilemma: You have to be fairly self-absorbed to write a newspaper column in the first place, so the job self-selects for narcissists. But in order to do the job well, you have to be more self-involved than maybe even you want to be, so it reinforces your worst character traits and pays you for them.

For this Thursday's MC Masala, I could have made nuanced commentary on the BJP and fundamentalism, or deception, or the subjectivity of the good. But it will be a silly anecdote instead.

# 23 Aug 2005, 03:43PM: How And Why The USA Messed Up Healthcare: Malcolm Gladwell investigates.

Filed under: Taxes

# 25 Aug 2005, 08:23AM: Self-Plagiarism As Cannibalism: As I'd sort of warned you, my MC Masala column this week is about a silly anecdote. Specifically, I cannibalized a July weblog entry about seeing a mouse. Enjoy.

I slammed the bedroom door, immediately ceding the rest of the apartment to the mouse's dominion. This was no time for thoughtful action or empowering gestures. This was a time to freak out.

Filed under: Apartment Life Comedy

# 25 Aug 2005, 01:35PM GMT+5:30: Recommended Books: An acquaintance asked for book recommendations. I thought of a few. I'll share them here:

"The Twinkie Squad" by Gordon Korman
"The Way We Live Now" by Anthony Trollope
"The Bug" by Ellen Ullman
"Crescent" by Diana Abu-Jaber
"Stories of Your Life and Others" by Ted Chiang
"21 Dog Years" by Mike Daisey
"The Partly Cloudy Patriot" by Sarah Vowell
"America: The Book" by The Daily Show
"Afterglow: A Last Conversation With Pauline Kael" by Francis Davis
"The Innocents Abroad: Or, The New Pilgrims Progress" by Mark Twain
"First Test" (Protector Of The Small Vol. 1) by Tamora Pierce

Filed under: Reading

# 25 Aug 2005, 08:27PM: Guster: Dar Williams and Guster make my column-writing nights so much easier.

# 29 Aug 2005, 08:00AM: Miscellany: I helped put together a pile of stuff to give away, and a corresponding list, yesterday.

1 brown leather wallet
1 costume 14th Century merchant's pantaloons + codpiece
1 empty tea tin, suitable for storing small objects
1 foot-and-a-half steel pipe, threaded ends
1 mouse pad
1 plastic (costume) fencing foil
3 metal candlesticks
4 plastic squirt guns

Filed under: Apartment Life

# 31 Aug 2005, 12:33PM: The Heartwarming Stuff: People all over the country open their homes to Hurricane Katrina refugees.

# 31 Aug 2005, 12:49PM: On Y Va/Nachalo: The Russian band Tarakani! has a song called "Letter to Britney" that includes the lyric "I live in Moscow." Of course, the song's title is actually "Pismo k Britni" and the lyric is actually "Ya zhivu v Moskvye." I actually understand that line, what with having learned all the vocab and grammar within it during my first semester of Russian. I wonder whether additional lyrics will include "Excuse me, could you tell me where the metro is?" and "I study the Russian language at a university."

There is a song on the same album called "Ya tebya liubliu," or "I love you." Leonard, that one's for you!

# 01 Sep 2005, 07:57AM: Mentions Gordon Korman: MC Masala this week talks about classic stories. Kristen, your discussion of Anna Karenina a few months ago is one reason I wrote this.

He knows that the Kauravas are aching to start a war, and in the end he can't keep that violence at bay. Even as he deliberately walks into the setup, even as he tosses the weighted dice, tragedy approaches relentless.

# 01 Sep 2005, 10:08AM: Nice Moment: The BART conductor told people getting off at Montgomery Station at 8:30am: "See you again in eight and a half hours."

Filed under: Comedy

# 01 Sep 2005, 10:13AM GMT+5:30: Phillip Robertson Is Braver Than I'll Ever Be: I have the freedom to yammer on about literature. I'm not in Iraq.

Hajji Qais had been on Al Mutanabbi street for 10 years and the vendors all knew him. He sold greeting cards for births and anniversaries along with Christmas and Easter gifts, cologne and pens. He wore a beard and was also known as a devout Sunni who had no problem hiring Shia workers or spending time with Christian colleagues. Aside from stocking a few items related to Christian holidays, there was nothing unusual in his shop. He wasn't a known member of any political party, and he was, according to his neighbors on Al Mutanabbi Street, a generous man who often gave money to the poor.
No one in the district will speak openly about who killed him, including his own son.
Ahmed Dulaimi, a young guitarist for Iraq's only heavy metal band, told a story that has been going around Baghdad these last few weeks. There was an ice seller selling ice from a small shop on the sidewalk in the Dora neighborhood. One hot day, a man came up to him with a gun and said, "You shouldn't be selling ice because the Prophet Mohammed didn't have ice in his time." Then the gunman shot the ice seller dead. This story terrifies Iraqis but they often laugh when they recount it, because it is absurd that anyone would get killed for selling ice or shaving a beard. It is also true that the ice-seller anecdote follows a pattern of killings around the capital where Islamic militants have regularly assassinated Iraqis for violating strict, and utterly random, codes of behavior. The point of the ice-seller story is that now, anyone in Iraq can be killed for any reason at all. After Hajji Qais was killed, more than one person mentioned these spontaneous assassinations, and they spoke about them the way they'd describe a sandstorm, an all-encompassing thing that no one can stop.

Filed under: Religion Reading

# 02 Sep 2005, 09:20AM: Life, Liberty and Property: I have been watching CNN. The Houston Astrodome now has its own ZIP code and the people who run it have cleared the Astrodome schedule through December.

What is the proper function of a government? Before everything else - before schools, before unemployment compensation, before alcohol regulation, before the CDC - a government has to protect its citizens from malicious forces inside and out. That's why we have an army and police. Right now there are parts of New Orleans that have fallen into anarchy. Property lost its protection first, but now life has as well. Oh God.

# 02 Sep 2005, 11:55AM: Impulses: What we are now learning about the devastation in the Gulf combines with a growing desire, borne of my working life, to become a manager, a good one.

# 03 Sep 2005, 03:00PM: Message From The Astrodome: "be glad for your jobs, your homes, your troubles..."

# 05 Sep 2005, 10:24AM: Agreement: Like Seth's, my birthday is also approaching, and I would urge that anyone thinking of buying me a birthday present instead donate to one of his favorite charities. Other preferred charities include Fix Our Ferals. Alice and Steve got some laughs out of their friends by informing them that Leonard and I had given to Fix Our Ferals as a wedding gift partially because I don't like cats.

Seth makes wonderful points about altruism.

There is a certain strange randomness to where and when people donate; it's so often reactive rather than following a plan or policy....
There is some diversity in the kinds of problems people are prepared to help with, on many, many, different levels and meanings of "prepared"....
If I showed up in the Katrina disaster zone today, I would be worse than useless....
There is really a dizzying regress that we necessarily run up against when considering how we could become more useful against the problems of the present and the future....
....But after spending five hours yesterday reading about New Orleans, Biloxi, Gulfport, and people who will actually know what I have only heard about in literature, I want to agree with Johnny Gunther that "sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof"; so if you are stuck and dizzy in the Garden of Forking Paths this afternoon, please at least give what you can to the American Red Cross.

# 06 Sep 2005, 07:38PM: Jobs: There are bunch of job openings at Salon. Whether you know marketing, sales, or tech, you might find a place at Salon.

# 07 Sep 2005, 07:07PM: Future Travels: I'm going to be in Washington, DC and New York City in the last several days of October. If anyone who reads this wants to hang out around then, please let me know! Adam, I know you'll be in Estonia, you fellow traveler.

# 08 Sep 2005, 04:21PM: Little Things: My column got moved to Sundays. Will Franken has shows this Saturday. Yesterday was a Hindu holy day celebrating Ganesha. Also yesterday, the Captivate screens in the elevator broke and we saw PC reboot screens instead of news and ads. The sun's been setting earlier. I caused a car accident in late July and I'm still afraid of driving or riding in a car, especially on the 101, where the accident happened. I've had some dreams and nightmares about it. No one got hurt in the accident but I have a bruise from where the airbag went past my hand and it is fading very slowly. I was playing a They Might Be Giants CD when the accident happened and now I have to desensitize myself. My friend Zack just moved away to San Diego. A Salon Premium member, telling me about his trip to Samoa, recited to me the poem carved into Robert Louis Stevenson's gravestone there:

Under the wide and starry sky
Dig the grave and let me lie.
Glad did I live and gladly die,
And I laid me down with a will.
This be the verse you grave for me:
Here he lies where he longed to be;
Home is the sailor, home front sea,
And the hunter home from the hill.

# 09 Sep 2005, 11:34AM: Your Sense Of Disenchantment: "Holy!"

Filed under: Comedy

# 10 Sep 2005, 10:18AM: Correction: As of tomorrow, my column will appear on Sundays in the ANG publications in the East Bay (in Oakland, Hayward, Pleasanton, Alameda, Fremont, and I believe Vallejo), but will appear on Mondays in the San Mateo County Times.

# 10 Sep 2005, 04:21PM: The Play, The Play: It probably behooves me to watch these Indian plays when they appear at UC Berkeley. Anyone want to come with? "Harvest" sounds more accessible than "The Man of the Heart."

# 11 Sep 2005, 05:18PM: Volunteerism: MC Masala column as word-of-the-day calendar. Featuring "supererogatory."

I could be an ambitious capitalist and grow my disposable income, then give many thousands of dollars each year in donations for good works. Then I could hold decadent press conferences, featuring chocolate fountains and booze-spouting statues, listing off the names of cats I've neutered and cheerful multi-family dwellings I've built - indirectly, of course.

# 14 Sep 2005, 12:30PM: Hire My Smart Boyfriend: He wants a new gig.

# 14 Sep 2005, 05:42PM: Spring Break: "Arrested Development" has gotten to me. I am now constitutionally incapable of yelling "Whooo!" without subsequently yelling, "Spring Break!" I'm not the only one.

Filed under: Comedy

# 15 Sep 2005, 08:57AM: KSUM: This morning, during the KQED pledge drive, I heard that they were giving away Salon Premium memberships. (I'd heard rumblings of this a few days ago at work.) Then I heard that another pledge thank-you gift was a gift certificate for Planet Organics, which I also patronize. Guesses for next incredibly Sumana-targeted premiums: date with Josh Kornbluth, dinner at Herbivore (the vegan restaurant on Valencia), the entire oeuvre of Gordon Korman, a donation in my name to the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a BART Plus ticket....

# 15 Sep 2005, 01:53PM: Useful Glossaries: VerticalResponse has put up simple glossaries for direct marketers (shiver) who use email and physical mail.

# 15 Sep 2005, 03:57PM: Table Talk: I have to monitor bits of Salon's forum, Table Talk, to see whether people are stupidly complaining about Salon Premium there instead of, say, emailing for help. There are forums where people aren't stupid. In the "Families Who Think" section, the best is the Word Soundbite Of The Day thread, where people share cute things their kids have said.

In "Work Life" we see "True Tales of the Office" and stories of odd coworkers. And in "Private Life" we see the awesome thread of "Misinformation, mistakes and bizarre misunderstandings".

Unfortunately, any given forum online will eventually, probably, suck. And this is true of Table Talk as well. One thread used to be fine in its stated mission of discussing the Fox TV show "House" but then descended into Television-Without-Pity-esque sniping over the female characters on the show. The thread on "Arrested Development" is headed in that direction.

And then there are jerks who comment on Cary Tennis's advice column. Some of them are nice, but the jerks ruin it, as usual. They almost universally castigate the advice-requester for being imperfect and weak, for not constantly self-flagellating in penance for her crimes (but if she does, what a martyr-wannabe!), for not "Setting Boundaries", whatever. Nope, there aren't real people behind these letters, not at all! They just exist for my amusement, like novels! Fiction, really!

Every once in a while the letter-writer will actually post within the forum. Then sometimes the jerks soften their tune, but of course there will be some intolerant ass who doesn't, just to show the letter-writer how wrong he is, how stupid and selfish and racist and intolerant -- you dare to exist?! to think you deserve my approval?

The letter-writer usually isn't seeking approval. She acknowledges that she has a problem and is seeking help for it. But the jerks ignore the admirable metacognition and help-seeking behavior, and harp on the problem as indicative of moral weakness.

Lots of comments sections all around the Internet fall into the abyss. They fall faster if they are free, if reputations don't persist, if there's no moderator. But people pay to join TT, and there's moderation that stops people from libeling each other, and people's pseudonyms and reputations persist. And the people who run it care, and have clueful FAQs and community standards. And still the stupidity roams. It's everywhere.

# 15 Sep 2005, 05:18PM: Compare and Comedicize: Josh Kornbluth is improvising his way towards a new monologue this Saturday. Perhaps you'd like to watch with me?

Heather Gold is also developing a new piece. I hope it's about law school!

As usual, Will Franken tops other comics:

Thursday, Sept. 22 - The Purple Onion
Headlining with guests Jacob and Sherrie Sirof and friend from Canada whose name we can't say due to legal issues

# 15 Sep 2005, 10:19PM: Considering Trek: We had a boring assembly a few weeks before the eighth-grade graduation ceremony. The ceremony was probably the week after the last episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation. A teacher passed around a clipboard upon which we wrote our full names as we wanted them laser-printed on our diplomas. In a fit of whimsy I put down my middle initial as Q (which it's not). In Trek, Q is omnipotent. My adolescent feelings of powerlessness - ridiculously transparent.

At graduation we had a "Reader's Theater" where all thirty graduates could say a few words. I think they played a Garth Brooks song about a river and a journey. We all held roses in little water-filled plastic cylinders with green rubber gaskets.

I don't remember what I said. Given that I then had an obsession with clever analogies (another reason I loved Snow Crash), it may have been, "Life is like a math book. Some of the answers you get at the end, but some you have to figure out for yourself."

Another Trek fan at school, one of the people who were the closest thing I had to a friend, took my suggestion and Q's words from the final episode. He came up last in the Reader's Theater and said, "All good things must come to an end."

On the way home my parents discovered the Q on my diploma. They were kind of upset and worried that this would harm me in some unspecified way. It hasn't.

# 19 Sep 2005, 07:40AM: Sick Seth: Seth is in the hospital with appendicitis! It looks like he'll be okay, for which we are grateful.

There is a very gross yet interesting word that I'd never seen before in this article about appendicitis.

# 19 Sep 2005, 02:05PM: The Pearl Of Great Price:

I will own any label you please. Crackpot, dreamer, shoddy thinker, weak-minded. None of these matter for I have found the pearl of great price. And the transforming power of that discovery and of that joy lies at the center of my life.

Oh yeah, non-Mormon Christians have a PGP reference too.

Filed under: Religion

# 19 Sep 2005, 02:50PM: We Need Jimmy Carter, We Can't Afford To Settle For Less: Thank you to all who attended my recent birthday party. At least four well-wishers donated in my honor: two to Fix Our Ferals, one to the Red Cross, and one to an unnamed low-overhead charity. And several people made the ultimate sacrifice - listening to me drone about writing the column. (There was no column yesterday because I was an irresponsible flake who didn't get a good one in on time.)

Alice and Steve brought drinks from Beverages & More, including Cheerwine. A colleague and I just tasted it. Cheerwine is like a lighter Cherry Coke, and it has real sugar instead of corn syrup. Recommended.

As at the Fourth of July party, I put on the CD of presidential campaign songs. The lyric that best sums up the 42 songs:

Wait for the wagon
The Millard Fillmore wagon
Wait for the wagon
And we'll all take a ride!

Filed under: Comedy

# 20 Sep 2005, 05:23PM: All Family: Alton Brown's character has an Uncle Morty.

# 21 Sep 2005, 02:11PM: But You'll Never Find The Right Bijou: Am listening to Bargainville by Moxy Früvous right now. How did I go so long between listenings? "King of Spain" should be on anything we send into space to explain ourselves to aliens. Or to cheer them up after a long day of abducting people.

Filed under: Comedy

# 21 Sep 2005, 02:21PM: Instant-Messaging Tidbit Of The Day: Leonard: "i will put the auto-coffinfish on a war footing"

Filed under: Comedy

# 23 Sep 2005, 08:07AM: Thoughts On Violent Movies: Roger Ebert's review of Chaos provoked correspondence between him and the movie's makers.

Your answer, that the world is evil and therefore it is your responsibility to reflect it, is no answer at all, but a surrender.

# 23 Sep 2005, 08:12AM: Sahara Sangeet Awards: It looks as though I will cover an Indian film/music awards show tomorrow, as MC Masala. Some tidbits:

In the film category for best lyricists, exactly two people are nominated, each for multiple movies.

"Deepak Mehta, CEO, Mehta Entertainment, stated this will be the biggest of the innumerable celebrity concerts ever staged in America."

Usually a site map is a conceptual map of the web site, not the venue.

# 24 Sep 2005, 11:20AM: Resourceful Leonard: I was daunted. Then Leonard directed me to Jammer's review of the Battlestar Galactica miniseries. Now I've read it and I'm ready to watch "33" with Leonard, who has been patiently waiting for me for about three months. Onwards.

# 25 Sep 2005, 11:43PM: Sudden Activity: In an abrupt departure from my usual sloth, I went to Oakland Arena for the first time, watched the Sangeet Awards, stayed at Sarah's place, saw Vinay and Alice and Steve, played Girl Genius and Once Upon A Time, and still have hours of Weekend Stuff to do. Early morning wakeup it is.

# 25 Sep 2005, 11:48PM: Trek Memories: MC Masala this week tells you how much I miss Star Trek.

Somehow, in the early '90s, when I needed it, "Star Trek" found me.

# 26 Sep 2005, 07:21PM: Definite Plans: So my friend Angel and I will be leaving the SF Bay Area for Washington, DC on October 25th and returning from New York on Halloween. We haven't yet decided which day we'll go to New York from DC. The Acela sounds nice, but it's $200+, whereas Chinatown buses are around $20. But vacation is a time for splurging, right? But the train costs more than either of the one-way airplane tickets!

We're taking JetBlue there and Song back. If we could only take Ted for a third leg of the trip, we'd be trying all three of Southwest's daughters.

I hope to meet up with friends and acquaintances in both cities. John-Paul, John, Camille, Adam, Sabrina, Jeff -- who else?

# 27 Sep 2005, 10:11AM: A Not-Salon-Premium Exclusive: I covered the Sangeet Awards for the Oakland Tribune and ANG Newspaper Group.

In truth, the show was a concert, a sequel to the 2002 Heartthrobs tour (starring Bollywood's up-and-coming star Hrithik Roshan) and the 2004 Temptation tour, which also featured Shahrukh Khan and Rani Mukherjee.
The celebrities invariably thanked "San Francisco" for its adulation. This didn't seem to bother the people who had driven from Fremont, Milpitas, Mountain View or Sunnyvale.

# 27 Sep 2005, 10:57AM: Uncle Morty's Mansion, Apartment, Shack, House: Evidently Leonard and I pop up rather soon if you use Google to look for information on ImaginAsian's TV show "Uncle Morty's Dub Shack," whose second season premieres on Oct. 14. I just remembered why I started watching in the first place: the weird name. I saw it in the TV listings and thought it might be related to The Asian Dub Foundation. Boy, was I surprised!

By the way, you can watch clips from UMDS online. I particularly like "DisRap" and "Tic Tacs" but almost all of them reward.

Filed under: Comedy

# 28 Sep 2005, 08:43AM: How TV Doesn't Work: Kenny Byerly is blogging intelligently about the sitcoms of the new TV season.

Yes, it's for laughs, but if you continually go for easy laughs at the expense of the show's reality, eventually the whole thing falls apart.

Filed under: Comedy

# 29 Sep 2005, 10:29AM: Bill Nye The Science Stud: Yeah, I'm not the only one who found Bill Nye powerfully attractive. Maybe it's best for me that KQED is not airing Nye's new show.

# 30 Sep 2005, 08:14AM: Subverting Through Capitalism: Last night I ran the merchandise table at a Heather Gold show. Those "One Smart Cookie" shirts are really nice.

I keep forgetting that there are people who actually take astrology seriously. These are the people who tell me I'm a classic Virgo, organized and logical. They have not seen my bedroom or my desk or my inbox. I believe it was Harlan Ellison who suggested initially lying to such people, telling them you are a different sign than you actually are, letting them prattle on about how you are a great representative of the species, and then telling them that you'd lied and you're actually a [real sign]. I think it would take a lot to make me be a jerk like that, but I could see myself doing it.

Astrology is bunk and I've known it for as long as I can remember. Give me some double-blind Myers-Briggs science stuff and we'll talk.

# 30 Sep 2005, 11:16AM GMT+5:30: Uplifting, Inspiring, Secular Art: I'm listening to Dar Williams, "What Do You Hear In These Sounds," and I see Jon Carroll:

It's the making, I think. The making is the important part. If you are lucky enough to be able to make something and earn a living, you should keep making it, because the ability to make something is a gift.
It's the only time we get to feel like gods: when we make something. Of course, not everything we make is good, but God himself has the duck-billed platypus to answer for....And then we do something else. As Samuel Beckett said, we "fail better."

Filed under: Reading

# 30 Sep 2005, 02:29PM: Word Power: As Jon Carroll has noted, book reviews can spoil you in another way:

The review is so wonderful I am almost afraid to read the book; more than once, particularly with the New York Review of Books, I have preferred the gloss to the text.

I won't go that far about today's main story in Salon, but it taught me the words "orthopraxy" and "frangible," and third page just keeps hitting nails on the head, one after another:

...they will retreat behind the carapace of "faith," which is really their projection of how things should be -- their prejudice. And since there is prejudice enough on both sides, we have arrived at an age of really horrifying division: people shouting across a gorge and hearing only the echoes of their own voices....

And the ending makes me think marriage will be wonderful.

# 02 Oct 2005, 07:24AM: Circles: Years ago, when I worked at Cody's Books, I got to introduce Bruce Sterling. I got a giant cardboard blowup of his book cover, and I've never quite figured out where to put it.

Last night I went to a housewarming party and gave it to the hosts. They seemed delighted and really appreciated the design of the thing, more than I ever had.

I also met a random Indian fellow. Yeah, there are many Indian-American experiences, but that doesn't really percolate up to the level of consciousness until I meet an Indian-American with whom I try to make conversation until there is no conversation to be made. (He thinks Shahrukh Khan is a good actor. Also, all the Indian-Americans he meets are "fresh off the boat" or wannabe gangstas.)

Today I'll be visiting the new Cody's in San Francisco near the Powell Street BART/Muni station. I hear one of the employees there is a short Indian female, looks a great deal like me, and in fact complained in Seth's presence about the difficulty of getting a short haircut. Maybe I'm about to meet my doppelganger.

# 02 Oct 2005, 08:07PM: Editors: I only appreciate good editors when I run into an edit that makes my work worse.

# 03 Oct 2005, 11:39AM: Memoirs Of A Puja: MC Masala for this week takes you to a suburban house in boomtown Silicon Valley, a generic place where I remember spending every weekend in the 1990s.

Kids ran around the house, shrieking and playing, too young to behave for the length of the puja. But at the end their parents brought them back for the aarthi: Someone held a tray of oil lamps and moved around the room to bless each person by moving the tray in a clockwise direction three times. The flames danced and blurred. Everyone ate the prasada, the sweet communion pudding. Parents coached their kids on standing still, performing aarthi and giving and receiving with the right hand, never the left.

Filed under: Religion

# 03 Oct 2005, 08:22PM: From Fluffy To Ditzy: Salon carries a series called "Object Lust". The Oct. 4th feature: me on home delivery of organic produce. I go on and on about beets and persimmons, tee-hee.

# 05 Oct 2005, 04:03PM: Dorkeror's Apprentice: There's someone I have to email who works for Multimedia Games. However, every single email I send to any address at that company gets bounced with the error:

500 Mail appears to be unsolicited -- send error reports to spamcontrol@mm-games.com

Just to clarify: email that I send to any address @mm-games.com, including postmaster@mm-games.com and spamcontrol@mm-games.com, gets that bounce.

I find this equally amusing and annoying.

# 06 Oct 2005, 10:55AM: Discomfiting: "The woman was in the 300 block of Niagara Avenue, about a block from the Balboa Park BART station, when about 10 kids -- both boys and girls -- assaulted her and stole her purse, police said." And this was in the middle of the afternoon! Arrrgh! I hope it was just a random crime of opportunity.

# 06 Oct 2005, 03:17PM: Cheery Things: Salon just redesigned its main page. I am basically dismissing out of hand any complaints from the first 24 hours, unless they come from someone whose judgment I trust, because web users are curmudgeonly and before they get used to a redesign they hate it.

But! Two little things cheered me up recently.

My editor likes my column for this coming Sunday.
I heard the last bit of George Harrison's song "Got My Mind Set On You" for the first time, and thus broke into a wide grin as I recollected Weird Al's parody, "(This Song's Just) Six Words Long." This is about the fifth time I've heard the subject of a Weird Al parody years after the parody itself.

# 09 Oct 2005, 02:25PM: Back: Leonard and I have returned from a sojourn in Southern California, where we witnessed the Andrew/Claudia wedding. Congratulations! I'm glad we also got to see Frances, Rachel, Susanna, and John. And Gretel, Frances's dog. Gretel is mellowing in her middle age.

# 10 Oct 2005, 06:37AM: Hamminess And Its Uses: MC Masala this week: an anecdote about a teachable moment.

As I wrote the lesson plan, I had to decide on milestones for our first discussion of Le Guin. I knew where I wanted to start, but which destination would be most useful, and what route would cover the most interesting scenery? What was the right question to ask? Comedians and teachers know that the audience needs careful guidance, that a lesson plan or a set of jokes must flow unexpectedly yet gracefully between fascinating arguments.

# 12 Oct 2005, 03:11PM: Nervousness: Leonard just left CollabNet and thus finished his last day of work there. I'm excited and happy for him but also anxious. I hope it all turns out for the best.

# 12 Oct 2005, 08:02PM: Fame For Jimbo, Trevor, et al.: Salon's newest Arts/Entertainment story: my interview with the writers of "Uncle Morty's Dub Shack."

Trevor: I like the films that have a lot of scenes with just two or three characters having a conversation, because then you can just throw whatever words you want into their mouths and completely twist the story's plotline. The films that are tricky are the ones with a lot of action and not a lot of dialogue. There's a difference between "bad/funny movies" and "bad/bad movies." We've had to scrap movies a week before our deadline because we didn't realize it was a "bad/bad movie" until we were halfway done writing it.

Filed under: Comedy

# 14 Oct 2005, 04:40PM: Friday, 4:30 p.m., Facing Drudgery: I have answered at least 600 emails from Salon Premium users this month.

This week I've spent at least two hours on the phone conversing with customers about the Bush administration, the 2004 election, print magazines, marathons, Salon's redesign, and other such topics of their choosing.

A few readers are acknowledging, in letters to Premium Help, that they simply don't like having to get used to the new design, but are doing so anyway. These people have metacognition and I want to give them all free extra months of access.

The new employee of the hot dog shop downstairs saw my EFF t-shirt and told me that he'd helped build the EFF building. He said he was friends with "Cory and all those kids."

I skimmed a bunch of Salon's archives from 2003 yesterday for a tenth-anniversary project. Wow, there are so many memorable articles in our archives!

A New York Times article a few months ago turned me on to KCRW, the LA-based radio station, and its influential morning show, the obscurely punnily named "Morning Becomes Eclectic." I just got that pun a week ago. KCRW played Imogen Heap's single "Hide and Seek" a few times, I was hooked, and Salon's Audiofile put up the mp3 for download.

Imogen Heap has made this week much better.

# 14 Oct 2005, 06:40PM: Epithet For A Customer: "mega-jerk"

# 16 Oct 2005, 12:30AM: Progress: Yesterday (Saturday) I tidied my room, dug a bunch of seldom-worn clothes out of my dresser and closet, took them and Leonard's rejects to Buffalo Exchange, got a tiny amount in store credit and dumped the BE rejects into their donation bin, washed my sheets, and cleaned some more. And then I went to a party! Parties feel so much better after accomplishments.

I'd wanted to toss some dresses for years. Last night, I finally realized what was holding me back: the internalized, imaginary voices of my mother and sister, who think they are nice dresses and that I should wear them more often. Bah! It's my closet and my tastes and needs shall reign.

Two weeks ago, Sarah gave me some very nice clothes that don't fit her needs anymore. In fact, I am currently wearing my new favorite pair of pants, a khaki-esque dealie that she gave me. So now I feel bad that I did not reciprocate and offer my perfectly nice dresses, pants, shirts, skirts, etc. to my friends and acquaintances. But many of them were not attractive, and I really just wanted them all gone and out of my home and my life.

One can get a high from decluttering. The Buddhists know what's going on.

Filed under: Apartment Life

# 16 Oct 2005, 05:28PM: Progress Redux: It's Weekend O'Minor Renovation! Recaulking the sink, building tacky snap-together furniture, hanging up pictures, sorting stacks of dead tree for shredding and storage, and sending notes to charities asking them to take me off their mailing lists. John, you'll be happy to know that I've been, you know, opening and filing or shredding that old mail you saw.

It's so easy to get over decluttering inertia when I just concentrate on getting one little thing done, get it over with, enjoy the surprising and wonderful change that's made in my life, and ride the high to the next, spontaneously chosen project. The cause could also be the stimulants in my anti-allergy medication.

Filed under: Apartment Life

# 17 Oct 2005, 12:17PM: Music Soothes The Savage Inequalities: Every few months I look around the ShoutCast radio stations and find great selections. Today: flamenco/Spanish guitar. Man, that genre is to me as pink walls are to a PCP fiend.

# 17 Oct 2005, 01:14PM: Decision Procedures: When I go to a restaurant, I limit myself to choosing from a fraction of the offerings at that restaurant. I have made one very big decision (continuing to be vegetarian) that frees me from many tiny decisions throughout my daily life. It is much easier to choose among four equally appealing options than among fifteen. Since I live in an area where restaurants always have a few vegetarian options, I don't lack for variety, but I space the variety out among meals.

Sometimes, I'll go to Greens, or Herbivore, or Golden Era, and find myself gobsmacked at the choices available to me. Just as, after turning 21, I had to rerender my map of the world, reminding myself of each bar I passed that I could enter it freely and legally, I stare at the Lucky Creation menu for minutes, trying to accustom myself to the concept that I could eat anything on there.

I've cleansed my closet and dresser of clothes I didn't want. So now I have a slightly more limited selection of clothes, but all of them are ones I want to wear. I've both created and removed constraints. And constraints are how we get anything done.

Filed under: Apartment Life

# 17 Oct 2005, 04:19PM: Jobs At The Internet Archive: Various levels of tech savviness required.

# 18 Oct 2005, 01:51PM: The Fear Of Jerkitude: Harlan Ellison v. Penny Arcade, and the court rules in favor of no one at all.

It often takes self-confidence and self-immersion verging on the level of sociopathy for creators to get their ideas on film or paper or CD without giving in to all the "helpful" agents and marketers and producers who want to water their vision down. And strong perspectives, especially outré ones, generally produce the most interesting art. I've gotten to interview a lot of my artistic idols over the last half-decade, and guess what? Some of them are just not nice. And so what?

If you have to be a jerk to be a successful and ambitious artist or businessperson, then what of those who don't want to be jerks?

# 18 Oct 2005, 07:25PM: Lies, Durned Lies, and Carrots: I lied to my mother. Or I tried to.

But because he lied, Yudhisthira's chariot falls upon the ground, never to float again.

# 20 Oct 2005, 09:46AM GMT+5:30: "Waiting Waiting Waiting": I laughed out loud at Spamusement! today. Incidentally, the other web comics comprising my daily comic trawl are: Achewood; Toothpaste For Dinner; Something Positive; and Dinosaur Comics.

Filed under: Comedy Reading

# 20 Oct 2005, 04:57PM: Argh: There are jerks in the world. And sometimes I interact with them! And I get frustrated. Argh.

# 21 Oct 2005, 07:05AM: Not The Best Workweek: Yesterday, from conversation with colleague as we left the office to go home: "Aaargh. There are so many bitter, cranky, angry people. And some of them are me."

# 21 Oct 2005, 11:25AM: Bubbles: Today I got new and concrete evidence that two of my colleagues have my back. The comfort of that surprises me. Also, I like to drink Emergen'C - only 20 calories, yet fizzy, and therefore my body interprets it as a treat. So I feel better.

# 21 Oct 2005, 03:35PM: The Ideals: We need more people like Bunnatine Greenhouse.

SFBay Area co-ops for various services and goods.

# 23 Oct 2005, 10:40PM: Decluttering: This week's MC Masala focuses on how to make more from less.

Some people may react to a nomadic past by living lightly, keeping only enough possessions to fit in two suitcases for quick getaways. I lived with someone like that, whose room resembled the cell of a secular monk. I would peek in, awed.

Completely unrelated: Libelous Claims About Large Corporations is a comic strip/blog sort of in the fashion of Spamusement!, but also like that other stick figure one with stories of a cat and a grandmother and whatnot.

Filed under: Apartment Life Comedy

# 23 Oct 2005, 10:44PM GMT+5:30: Didion on Schiavo: You have probably already read Joan Didion on the Schiavo case and watched Didion illustrate, but carefully leave unanswered, more precisely formulated questions about that particular tragedy and the end of life. That piece makes me want to read Life's Dominion and The Year of Magical Thinking.

Filed under: Religion Reading

# 23 Oct 2005, 10:55PM: The Summit Talks Continue: What with my mother visiting and my birthday passing and going to Andrew and Claudia's wedding and being invited to another one, hints have been dropped regarding nuptials that might affect me a bit more directly. But my story is not nearly as elegant as "The Date", a tale of well-intentioned matchmaking.

The muffled sound of our intense conversation no doubt inspired the Walkers to delay their re-entry. Intermittently we heard them shuffle a pot or a pan, tinkle cutlery in the sink, close a cupboard, thus signaling they were still busy and therefore excused.
....
President looked at the longcase clock.
- It's about time we take you back to the station, Evelyne. At least if you want to catch the 9.32 train.
- But, Dwight, Dorothy said, come to think of it: Wilfried is driving back home. Isn't it about half way where Evelyne lives? Perhaps he could take her home.
They must have rehearsed that part of the script several times, including bending the country's geography.

# 23 Oct 2005, 10:58PM: Customers Do Stink: One of the oddest and cruelest pranks I've ever heard of, and I wouldn't believe it had happened except for the length and depth of the story.

In a frame taken from a McDonald's surveillance video that is part of the court record, Mount Washington McDonald's employee Louise Ogborn expressed shock when assistant manager Donna Jean Summers told her that the caller on the phone, who identified himself as "Officer Scott," said Ogborn would have to be strip-searched. One lawyer described the caller as "a freak who plays God."

# 23 Oct 2005, 11:06PM: Poets, Travel: Seth told me about a Sylvia Plath/Ted Hughes exhibit in New York City that features a Hughes poem in reply to a Plath poem on the topic of a rabbit trap. He did that sort of reply thing a lot, and therefore perhaps should have sent a ping trackback to the original in each instance.

I visit NYC later this week and welcome suggestions for dynamite vegetarian cuisine, extraordinary strolls, and great bits of public transit.

Speaking of transit: the Emeryville Amtrak station has a parking lot. This is not a surprise. One must pay to use the lot. Also pretty standard. But the payment system includes little analog (not automatic) slots for coins and folded bills. One must use an attached device, which basically looks like the handle of a key, to push in the folded bills through the inadequate slot for your parking space. This bit of metal is "the stuffer." I cannot find the words to describe this dastardly thing.

# 30 Oct 2005, 06:31AM: Brief Notes On The East Coast: My lips seem to chap more easily here.

Do not take the yummy cornbread home from District Chophouse in DC and then warm a small slice of it in a microwave for two minutes. It may catch fire.

The day that you think you will take the subway a bunch of times, and that therefore it makes sense to get the unlimited one-day Fun Pass, will be the day you take the subway exactly once.

I am having fun.

# 30 Oct 2005, 07:20AM: Sic Transit Gloria Transit: I've traveled using three subway systems, Amtrak, a plane, a taxi, a privately owned car, and my feet this week.

# 30 Oct 2005, 08:18PM: In A Week Of Subways, Writer Considers Accidents of Chance (And Cars): My attempt at an NYT-style headline. About to go to sleep in NYC for the last time on this trip. My new column is up.

I don't remember the crash. I swore, wide-eyed, as I slammed on the brakes and then stared in shock, past a deflating air bag and through an intact windshield, past a crumpled hood, at the car I'd stopped by running into its rear end.
The CD player was still playing They Might Be Giants. I turned it off.

# 31 Oct 2005, 10:08PM: Times Square: Marqueed McDonald's And Rosie O'Donnell: My wonderful friend Angel (who made my acquaintance in high school) and I have returned from a weeklong trip to Washington, DC and New York City. I deliberately took no pictures and bought few souvenirs, so a quick travelogue should go up in but a few days. Thanks are due to Nandini, John, and Adam for hosting, Camille and Sabrina for tour-guiding, and Kenny, Seth, Eric, Jade, Trevor, and other friends for useful suggestions.

I had a fantastic vacation. I haven't laughed so much in months. The New York City Transit Museum instilled in me a deep sense of well-being, and the beatitude lasts even now.

# 01 Nov 2005, 08:18AM: Meta-Political Thoughts: As election time swings round again, Leonard's ponderings from last year come back to relevance.

# 01 Nov 2005, 09:18AM: How Can It Be?: Listening to the new Franz Ferdinand CD as I turn on my work computer and start getting into the customer service tool. How can it be that life is this awesome?

# 02 Nov 2005, 06:40AM: The Inconceivable: According to my mom, my dad is actually okay with the fact that I am dating Leonard.

In many ways, Leonard is like my dad. They are engineers with creative side endeavors. They love puns and trivia. They don't drink alcohol. They are well respected in their communities. And they are dependable workers.

Unlike my dad, Leonard gets along with me almost all the time.

But I love them both.

# 02 Nov 2005, 12:12PM: Quotable Quips: Today I found myself quoting Keynes or Galbraith, one of those: "In the long run we are all dead."

Filed under: Comedy

# 02 Nov 2005, 12:32PM: Music In My Cube At Work: I have some sufficiently non-mainstream music in this pile, so I am going to say bah to my insecurities and share the list of CDs on the shelf in my cube here at Salon:

Margot Leverett and the Klezmer Mountain Boys
The Three Pickers: Earl Scruggs/Doc Watson/Ricky Skaggs
Tarakani! Strakh i Nenavist
Rock Against Bush Vols. I & II
Greatest Marches, various
Future Fossils by Christine Lavin (not actually listening to it that much; requires concentration)
End of the Summer by Dar Williams
Emergency 3rd Rail Power Trip and other CDs by Lawsuit
Freaked Out and Small by the Presidents of the United States of America
a bunch of Moxy Früvous
You Could Have It So Much Better by Franz Ferdinand
If You're Feeling Sinister by Belle & Sebastian
Tallahassee by The Mountain Goats
Stories From The City, Stories From The Sea by PJ Harvey

Right now, The Mountain Goats are soothing me. I cannot resist "Southwood Plantation Road", "Game Shows Touch Our Lives", "Idylls Of The King", or "No Children".

I've got you
You've got whatever's left of me to get
Our conversations are like minefields
No one's found a safe way through one yet
....
I am not going to lose you
We are going to stay married
In this house like a Louisiana graveyard
Where nothing stays buried

and

And I handed you a drink of the lovely little thing
On which our survival depends
People say friends don't destroy one another
What do they know about friends?

and

I hope that our few remaining friends
Give up on trying to save us
I hope we come up with a failsafe plot
To piss off the dumb few that forgave us
I hope the fences we mended
Fall down beneath their own weight
And I hope we hang on past the last exit
I hope it's already too late
And I hope the junkyard a few blocks from here
Someday burns down
And I hope the rising black smoke carries me far away
And I never come back to this town
Again in my life
I hope I lie
And tell everyone you were a good wife
And I hope you die
I hope we both die

I don't know why the songs are soothing, but they are.

Update: I can vicariously feel the hate I would feel in an awful relationship, and hear elegant expressions of it, and I am soothed both by the beauty of the songs and the fact that I'm not either person in this (fictional?) horrible relationship.

# 02 Nov 2005, 12:37PM: The One Thing I Forgot: was the one thing I meant to mention. Kris and Leonard: "Idylls of the King" by The Mountain Goats starts with "This place" and yet is not awful. Also includes "And the shrieking of innumerable gibbons."

If I had listened to Scott Rosenberg and Jim Fisher I'd have been turned on to the Goats years ago. My fault.

# 02 Nov 2005, 04:50PM GMT+5:30: Sweet Lyrics: Reading Vikram Seth's The Golden Gate, a novel in sonnets. I like recognizing the scattered nice (precisely fitted) rhymes, and familiar external and internal locations. I adored A Suitable Boy as I loved Anna Karenina. This one, I don't know yet, but there are some wrenching passages about love:

"...Quit bugging
Me, will you, Ed -- I'm sick of lugging
This tragic burden week by week.
Some light refreshment -- so to speak --
Is what I thirst for. Ed, I love you,
But don't exhume this; there's no sense
In scouring ruins. Why condense
The happiness that floats above you
By seeding it with doubt and pain,
Crystals that force it down as rain?"

and

As Phil talks on, his eyes grow radiant.
Ed thinks of the first time they met.
The weeks have warped the placid gradient
On which his even wheels were set.
Neither the sense, at every meeting,
Of his heart's full and rapid beating,
Nor the abrupt and scalding rush
Of redness to his face, the flush
When he feels Phil's eyes resting upon him,
But something infinite and slow
And tide-like holds his life in tow.
The salt of human love upon him,
To it his leached will yields control,
Whether it stings or heals his soul.

Filed under: Reading

# 02 Nov 2005, 06:38PM: Memento Mori, or, Ashes To Ashes In Your Mouth: I am listening to Tallahassee over and over, not eating enough, staying too late at work, wanting to see The Weather Man.

It is as though I am so happy, with all of this unexpected good luck, with the poker machine suddenly showing me one cherry and then another and another, that I seek out tragedy, feeling sad defensively and ahead of time, overachieving and trying to reach the next game's defeat early, again.

# 03 Nov 2005, 06:00AM: Links Of The Morning, If Old: Doesn't a management training program for tech companies sound like a great idea? Also, how to get your resume read if you apply.

Almost three years later, even I have to strain to get the Berkeley-specific humor from my comedy routine during my appearance on Bear in Mind.

Filed under: Comedy

# 03 Nov 2005, 04:16PM: Free Ticket To TMBG Concert: My college friend Camille is now an independent booking agent for musicians. She showed Angel and me around Brooklyn. More recently, she arranged for me two free tickets to tonight's They Might Be Giants concert at Bimbo's 365 Club, which I hear is a nice venue. Anyone want to be my geek-rock companion tonight?

Insta-Update: got someone, namely Eric. Vinay goes to movies with me, Joe goes to comedy with me, and Eric goes to concerts with me, or so it seems.

# 03 Nov 2005, 11:59PM: Good Show, Old Chap: The They Might Be Giants show was the most fun show I've attended in recent memory. TMBG put on a clinic in effective use of crowd, lights, patter, and sheer rockin'. My slightly heeled boots helped me see over the crowd -- thanks, forecasts of rain!

Wow, John Linnell and John Flansburgh are cute. Do I think this because all rockers look hot on stage? Because I know they must be geeks because they are TMBG? Because they physically fit the stereotypes? Because I associate my attraction to geeks with all the paraphernalia of geekdom, like Linux and Neal Stephenson and TMBG?

Even "Ana Ng," performed in front of a mass of cheering fans who sing along, becomes an uplifting song. And I understand "New York City" much better now.

The opener was fantastic. Corn Mo plays accordion and piano and sings. The old-timey piano reminds me of TMBG or Ben Folds, and the accordion and the lyrics remind me of TMBG or Weird Al. Terrific patter.

Tomorrow TMBG plays a completely different set. I have a strong urge to go.

# 04 Nov 2005, 01:50PM: A Quarter You Can't Understand: Slacktivist, trying to figure out the lowest plausible approval rating for a politician, links to discussion positing "a 27% Crazification Factor in any population".

# 04 Nov 2005, 04:09PM: Start The Editor: A few days this week I've needed some fire and motion.

# 06 Nov 2005, 07:41AM: Reading about Rockin': I'm hesitant to buy clothing advertising my fandom of a band. I'm afraid of being a poser, and of inflicting bad musical taste on others, and even of sharing some rather intense personal sentiments and thus showing vulnerability.

So, at the Corn Mo/They Might Be Giants show Thursday night, I instead bought a Corn Mo CD and a DVD of the TMBG documentary, Gigantic: A Tale of Two Johns. Last night Leonard and I watched Gigantic, me for the second time.

On the second viewing, and upon watching a few music videos in the DVD extras, I find myself understanding some lyrics more than I ever did before (e.g., "Birdhouse In Your Soul" and "She's An Angel").

I laughed really hard at the spoof of The Civil War, and Leonard at the Syd Straw interviews.

TMBG released Mink Car on September 11, 2001 (an event not listed on a huge list of Sept. 11 anniversaries). So we see a lot of video from promotional appearances they made in the days beforehand -- Conan O'Brien, The Daily Show, some local radio gig, and finally, at midnight, a release-party performance at a Tower Records in NYC. Almost every movie or book I see that contains that sort of early-September-2001 buildup does it to counterpoint the sudden tragedy of the terrorist attacks. (Fahrenheit 9/11, predictably, does this to great effect.) But Gigantic doesn't mention them once. I'll have to check the commentary track; I can't believe that two guys who have lived in New York for decades had nothing to say or feel about that day.

# 06 Nov 2005, 07:47AM: Sad And Happy Link Post: "There is something about getting a tattoo in times of severe stress that helps to alleviate the pain. You can put a finger on it, place the pain instead of fingering the emotional parts of you that are better left untouched."

"What I could not understand for the life of me is why she would not get on one of the other many willing exercise machines: stairmasters, bikes, treadmill, rowers. It was as if she made a pact with satan himself (or the CEO of Precor) that she would not use any other machine if her thighs were kept, you know, 'just right.'"

# 06 Nov 2005, 08:13AM: A James Spader Character Shows Up In Table Talk: The sticking point for my annoyance: A Salon reader doesn't care whether s/he is harsh towards people who write to Salon's advice columnist.

I treat [this forum] -- more like a lit-crit class, where the letter is the "text." I don't feel any more obligated to safeguard the [letter-writer's] responses than I would if we were talking about something written by Dostoyevsky or Mark Twain.

For this person, someone s/he hasn't met isn't worthy of empathy or mercy, and heartfelt requests for advice by such a person are indistinguishable from fiction.

People who care will always get hurt by people who don't.

Good faith is so easy to dismiss and so hard to regain.

# 06 Nov 2005, 08:44AM: You Get To Be a Writer By Writing: Politicians love to complain about special interests, doctors about patients who dismiss preventive care, and publishing drones about unsolicited manuscripts: the slush pile. In the comments to that post, some readers find it suspicious that literary agents find a greater proportion of usable material in slush piles than do publishing houses. I find it eminently plausible. Writers who know that agents are useful are probably less insane, on average, than writers who submit directly to publishers. Such writers would also try to find agents who would fit them, instead of scattershooting manuscripts at unsuitable but famous publishers.

I had a lovely dinner at Town Hall (Howard and Fremont, downtown SF) on Friday night with a few acquaintances. One asked me what sort of stuff I'd like to write, were I to write for a living. I find it hard to imagine writing longform well, but right now, I can chug along writing one column a week, and if it were a fulltime job I could probably squeeze out three a week that would be worth reading. I have a lot of practice and life experience left to go before I could be a powerhouse like Jon Carroll, who finds something interesting to say and a clever way to say it five times a week.

Anyway, I'm building a clips file and exercising my various writing muscles. So, on the day I have to send something for consideration, solicited or no, reputation and talent (and connections?) will help. Also, someday there will be a thriving "non-white, non-black woman who can make funny" niche, the way we currently have "white woman writing poignantly and humorously about middle-class single women's romantic mishaps" and "non-white man or woman writing soulfully and magical-realistically about food and love" niches.

# 06 Nov 2005, 08:49AM: Comedy = Tragedy + Paradigm Shift: Leonard's relative Nate Oman is always saying interesting things. Example: "I have always had a soft spot for Prometheus. I figure that to a greater or lesser extent we are probably going to basically fail at most everything that we do. That being the case, fail big. Set yourself a monstrous goal like toppling divinity and go down heroically, I say. The remarkable thing about Mormonism, of course, is that it takes the Prometheus story and retells it as comedy."

Filed under: Comedy Religion

# 06 Nov 2005, 08:59AM: One Box Mushroom Bites @5.39ea: The new MC Masala column muses the receipts we acquire without really meaning to.

It is possible to log something, and it benefits someone to do it, and so it is done, in all these myriad ways. And if someone put her mind to it, she could correlate all these records to get a sense of me, a shell or a skeleton, depicting what I ate and borrowed and bought, the contours of my signature.

# 06 Nov 2005, 11:48AM: Bay Buffet: Just talked to my mom about, among other things, Hindu temples in San Francisco. It's good to know which ones are run by Hare Krishna/ISKCON, which ones are rabidly Vaishnavite/Saivite/whatever, and which ones are primarily spaces for intellectual contemplation. The temples in Livermore, Sunnyvale, Fremont, etc., which the nineties Indian diaspora built, are places where kids run around and Indians chant while dripping ghee onto idols. A "Vedanta Center" is more like a garden/bookstore combo where white people learn yoga. In my experience. Mom says I could enjoy the Palaniswami Temple and Shri Swaminarayan Mandir.

Filed under: Religion

# 07 Nov 2005, 07:56AM: East Bay Denizens & Franken Fans Take Note: Will Franken's one-man sketch comedy performances have traditionally taken place after 9pm, making it hard for people from out of town to get home afterward at a reasonable hour. His current Marsh run, however, includes Sunday night performances at 7pm every week between now and December 3rd. The show lets out before 9pm and it's just a few blocks to the 24th & Mission BART station.

I saw the show last night. Highlights of the set for this run: "Conference Call," the new skit "Voice of God" (which includes a bonus callback to the title "Good Luck With It" bit), "Movie: The Remake/Matrixian Philosophy," "Q&A," and "18th Century." Also, the mix CD "overture" that you hear as the audience arrives and leaves includes a track from "Switched on Bach." So I'd be willing to go again.

This run has the highest per-ticket cost of any Franken show I've seen; then again, there's no one- or two-drink minimum, and for the first time the ticketholder gets an actual paper program. I speculate that any given multilevel performance venue, like The Marsh, uses profits from high ticket prices on select shows to subsidize the low ticket prices for less well-known shows/performers who are trying to build audiences. Franken has gone through that entire cycle, then, at The Marsh.

In other cycle hypotheses, many smart suburban/small-town/small-city Californians I knew went to Berkeley, then moved to San Francisco, and are now moving to New York. I assume they will then move back to smaller towns to have kids. I assume.

Filed under: Comedy

# 07 Nov 2005, 05:40PM: Cheering Exchange: "Hold on, I was thinking about a bit you do in your stand-up act and realized you have a mixed metaphor! Here is a suggested fix." "Oh, thanks for noticing! I'll fix that."

Filed under: Comedy

# 08 Nov 2005, 10:11AM: Yearly Complaint: I hereby complain about California's Proposition 73 and San Francisco's Proposition H.

# 08 Nov 2005, 04:54PM: RIP: Michael Piller, a man whose work lives on in my and so many fond memories, has died. Via Wil Wheaton's tribute.

# 08 Nov 2005, 05:43PM: Sounds Like Satire But Isn't: "In addition, the board rewrote the definition of science, so that it is no longer limited to the search for natural explanations of phenomena."

# 09 Nov 2005, 02:07PM: Limitations Of The Form, or, "There shall be grief.": The webcomic Cat And Girl hits it out of the ballpark nearly every time. The author admits to ripping off Calvin and Hobbes but I don't mind; she gets her nuggets of wisdom across very effectively in the form she's chosen. I've been thinking about certain topics that I want to write about yet are really hard to address in a newspaper column. Jon Carroll made some fine hay of this problem:

However, a flamenco piece crying out for limiting subsidies to agribusiness would probably be unsuccessful no matter how talented the performers, and a newspaper column seeking to tap the deepest reservoirs of pity and terror and hopeless love has a probable failure rate of close to 100 percent.

My current "how could I do that in 750 words?" topics include:

I only really regret a few things I've done, where I hurt others, not the many times I've hurt myself
When good fortune arrives, the disillusioned find it bewildering and long-absorbed suspicions make enjoyment impossible
The role of booze in my life
The tight smile of the despairing fool

# 09 Nov 2005, 05:44PM: Predictable Praise: Last night, to soothe my angst, Leonard played me some Leonard tunes on the gee-tar. Man, his recent stuff is incredibly awesome. I hope he can record it soon.

# 10 Nov 2005, 01:22PM: Thoughts On Maturity: Hugo Schwyzer on becoming a mature person. Cuts at me the same way Brendan's post on the same topic still does.

# 11 Nov 2005, 12:47PM: Self-Contradiction Comes Free With The Unhappy Meal: I hear complaints about Salon's redesign and feel the urge to dismiss them as the rants of a cranky, vocal minority. But now that Arrested Development is either cancelled or about two inches from cancelled, I am that cranky minority. It was the best thing ever! How dare Fox actually listen to its viewers and give them what they want? They need to teach its viewers what to want by giving them good stuff, i.e., things I like. Bah to stupid taste! The pernicious bollocks that is mass media's stranglehold over certain awesome cultural artifacts pains me.

# 12 Nov 2005, 11:49AM: Alan Alda, Terrell Owens, and Merlin Mann: Fred Clark mused recently on the use and misuse of the word "professional." The word these days basically means "polite" or "courteous" rather than "competent at one's trade or craft," but commenters argue over whether courtesy is part of certain job definitions.

My particular life hack when it comes to "professional behavior" is dressing in a business-casual manner when I need to have a productive day at work. It tricks me into working. Or it helps.

# 13 Nov 2005, 09:43PM: Salon: A Wacky Retrospective: Gary Kamiya writes a funny and poignant review of Salon's ten-year history.

# 14 Nov 2005, 08:11AM: Map Of Our Past: When I last saw Eric, we had a wide-ranging conversation. We talked about flatmates, and music (what with being at the TMBG show), and our careers, and the shape of the tech industry. We laughed at the dominance of Goohoo (Google + Yahoo) in sucking available tech talent away from other companies and academe.

I playfully supposed an EU/Airbus-style consortium of minor and obsolete search engines, trying to topple Goohoo's dominance. "I can just imagine Inktomi, Altavista, Excite, Hotbot, AskJeeves, Go, and Northern Light getting together," I said.

Eric said, "It's kind of scary that you can just reel them off like that."

Filed under: Comedy

# 14 Nov 2005, 11:06AM: Tetris Is Awesome: I love Tetris so much.

# 14 Nov 2005, 11:50AM: Yep, That's Optimus Prime: I'm transcribing some comics from Spamusement!. It's made me pay more attention to the details and buried assumptions in many strips, e.g., "its not even funny when you do that".

Filed under: Comedy

# 14 Nov 2005, 12:51PM: Sky-High Praise: And I thought Gary Kamiya's Salon retrospective affected me! The letters to the editor warm my heart.

I grew up reading Salon, if you can fathom that....
Without equivocation or exaggeration, I can say that I've more or less been on an eight-year quest to join your staff....
I am who I am because of Salon.com.
I thank you like a son thanks a mother....

Flattery will get you everywhere.

# 15 Nov 2005, 06:22AM GMT+5:30: It Always Comes Back: I thought Alan Furst's Dark Star would be a science-fiction novel, probably because I confused it with the film of the same name. Now that I'm two-thirds through, I've firmly convinced myself that it's Yet Another Europe-in-the-1930s Spy Novel, and a very good one. I like it much better than I liked Tim Powers's Cold War spy novel Declare, not just because there's no woo-woo fantasy, but because Furst does not hide from the reader important facts and memories attached to his viewpoint character.

Spoilers: Our protagonist, a Soviet journalist drawn/coerced into espionage, travels Europe in the guise of writing for Pravda. Szara witnesses Kristallnacht and reports back to his spymaster:

"And Germany?" [Goldman] asked.
"In a word?"
"If you like."
"An abomination."
Goldman's mask slipped briefly and Szara had a momentary view of the man beneath it. "We shall settle with them this time, and in a way they will not forget," he said softly. "The world will yet thank God for Joseph Stalin."

Pre-WWII Europe seems to have unlimited reserves of irony.

Filed under: Reading

# 15 Nov 2005, 01:38PM: Not So Unthinkable: I wonder how many of these promises their makers kept.

# 15 Nov 2005, 03:57PM: Kris Loves The Bones: So this MC Masala is for him, and for a great biology teacher.

I don't remember his words. I remember that femur landing softly on my lab table....
Mr. Porter reminded me that excellence was a worthy goal, and that finding loopholes and taking advantage of goodwill wasn't the way to get there.

# 16 Nov 2005, 07:58AM: Request to Morpheus/Sandman/Subconscious: Please refrain from giving me more dreams like the one last night. Hugh Laurie is fine; anxiety about seeing a Hugh Laurie performance is not. And term papers and transportation anxieties are right out. In general, avoid horribly driven school buses and giant campuses that are supposed to be my high school or UC Berkeley but resemble neither.

I kind of liked the girls who were rapping at me as part of a school project, though.

But someone thinking I was a model? Uh, no.

# 16 Nov 2005, 02:06PM: Exception: I almost never link to Amazon.com deals. But this is a fantastic deal: both full seasons of Arrested Development for $31.94. Via Wil Wheaton's weblog.

Filed under: Comedy

# 16 Nov 2005, 04:00PM: Hard Lesson Number 5823675: Sometimes jerks are right and "he is a jerk" is not a sufficient reason to ignore his criticisms and suggestions.

# 17 Nov 2005, 10:44AM: Terrible And Inevitable: I have jerky customers, but at least I escape constant profane tirades blaming the worker for outsourcing.

And OF COURSE the Indians who work in those call centers will generalize from their experiences, and begin to believe that USians are generally jerks who think they're entitled to everything. People all around the world separate their disapproval of the US government from their opinions of the population of the US. And these rude, foolish North Americans make it easier and easier to let that distinction slip.

# 17 Nov 2005, 04:37PM: Old Anagrams: I Will Alarm Islamic Owls and Hen Gonads still make me laugh.

Filed under: Comedy

# 18 Nov 2005, 08:27AM: Christmas Suggestion: At Susanna's request I hereby link to my wantlist. If you are determined to give me a physical object rather than donate to a worthy charity or simply wish me happy holidays, you might pool your cash towards this sewing machine which would get a lot of use around these parts. I have a pile of slightly torn clothes that only need five minutes' work with a machine (or me being a putz for hours on end) for repair.

Also, I plan on being in San Francisco the week between Christmas and New Year's (partially because I'm attending a wedding in Oakland just before the year ends), so if you would like to socialize that week, I'll be available.

# 18 Nov 2005, 04:25PM: Mike Daisey Makes Me Laugh: Slate published an excerpt from Mike Daisey's monologue Monopoly!. I may have embarrassed myself by guffawing at length in my cubicle.

Invincible Summer
By simultaneously exploring the bizarre history of the Manhattan Transit Authority's epic subway system and his own gawkish status as a new New Yorker, Mike Daisey tells the story of coming to a new city to make a new life in the last, hot, glorious summer before everything changed....
Invincible Summer ... can be seen for one night only at Long Wharf Theatre on December 10, 2005.

The Long Wharf Theatre is in New Haven, Connecticut. Could I manufacture a reason to be in New Haven in three weeks? or in Maine in late January? I mean, he's going to talk about the history of New York City transit!

Filed under: Comedy

# 20 Nov 2005, 10:05AM: Mourning Russia: According to Freedom House (via an article in the Atlantic Monthly, December issue), Russia is now less free than it was in 1990. This week's MC Masala is "Mourning the Russia that liberated me".

Meanwhile, a representative from a summer language-immersion program in Vermont tried to recruit my Russian class. I met him in a campus food court and listened uncomfortably as he tried to sell me on the great leap forward my language skills would take after only six weeks at Middlebury. Finally, I blurted, "Immersion scares the hell out of me. If I'm going to have the hell scared out of me, I want it to happen in Russia."

# 20 Nov 2005, 05:44PM: Post-Thanksgiving Traditions One Week Early: My family used to see a movie the day after Thanksgiving, and lots of US residents shop for Christmas presents in the three days after Thanksgiving. Instead, I saw the new Harry Potter movie yesterday, and shopped for gifts today. I've finally got a routine for holiday shopping. If I see specific things I think will appeal to someone, or are on Leonard's family members' wishlists, I get them. Everyone else gets a card, a calendar, or a charity donation in their name.

The Harry Potter film was fantastic at atmosphere and suspense, not so hot at the richness of the world, the social relationships that make the universe so textured. And huge subplots went missing. Ah well, someday someone will make seven giant TV miniseries for the books.

# 21 Nov 2005, 03:48PM: Surprise: I still find it surprising that Christmas is on the exact same date every year.

# 22 Nov 2005, 07:01AM: Cute Human Interest Story: Immigrants learn the meaning and traditions of Thanksgiving.

# 22 Nov 2005, 12:57PM: Women Have Hair, Men Don't: Sometimes Steven Frank draws women in a way I find charming. Examples: "she likes peeping on girls" and "if you only had this years ago".

Filed under: Comedy

# 23 Nov 2005, 01:15PM: Data Point: I just mailed a package and bought stamps (American Scientists) at the post office, just an ordinary Salon customer/holiday card-sending transaction, and I felt nervous and dry-mouthed as though I were going on a date. What the?

# 24 Nov 2005, 10:59AM: Nonexistent Shirt: Sumana: Should we dress up for Thanksgiving at your uncle's?
Leonard: No, we don't need to dress up.
Sumana: OK. I'll put on my ripped Poison t-shirt, then.

Filed under: Apartment Life Comedy

# 24 Nov 2005, 11:06AM: Happy Thanksgiving!: Jon Carroll's Thanksgiving column, as annually reprinted.

# 24 Nov 2005, 10:08PM: Thanks, Earth: I can report, not just advise, a happy Thanksgiving. Food and fun, as the saying goes. The fun included Taboo, Once Upon A Time, San Juan, Settlers of Catan, Illuminati, and the film Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy. That film makes such wonderful Thanksgiving viewing; it only seemed better the second time, with a heart full of gratitude.

# 25 Nov 2005, 02:30PM: Links For A Long Weekend: Last year, I received a holiday present from an person I'd never met, sent to my work address. It was We, a dystopia by Yevgeny Zamyatin. It was a great gift, catering to my interests in Russia, sci-fi, and politics, despite the fact that I had already read We. So, the moral of the story.

When are church members, especially bloggers, allowed to criticize church leaders? There was a guy named Martin Luther who answered this question rather a while back.

Hugo Schwyzer, in telling us that atonement theory drew him to Christianity, wrote: "I first came to love Jesus because He died for me, not because some progressive preacher told me that he 'successfully embodied a radical new ethic of inclusiveness and community!'." And that reminded me of something Seth had written: "One thing I notice is that only a tiny percentage of people who call doctrines they don't believe inspirational will spend any significant amount of time studying them for inspiration."

Finally, two of the most appealing pop-culture Christians of recent times -- Fred Rogers and Johnny Cash.

Filed under: Religion

# 27 Nov 2005, 08:29AM: Column and Moving Sale: MC Masala this week recounts the tale of the one and only hickey I've ever gotten.

I gibbered that it was a bug bite and looked, pleading, at the nurse. She saw the desperation in my eyes.

Also, my friends Steve and Alice Shipman are selling stuff at great prices so they don't have to move it across the country. (Bah to friends moving great distances away! But huzzah for neat opportunities and cheap airfares!) There is awesome stuff.

Filed under: Apartment Life Comedy

# 28 Nov 2005, 11:29AM GMT+5:30: Reading Lists: An alternative (of sorts) to Personal MBA. Of Mr. Spolsky's tentative list, I've read:

part of The Mythical Man-Month
The Design of Everyday Things (a.k.a. The Psychology Of Everyday Things)
Microserfs
Ben & Jerry's: The Inside Scoop
21 Dog Years: A Cube Dweller's Tale (formerly 21 Dog Years: Doing Time @ Amazon.com)
Dale Carnegie's How To Win Friends and Influence People

Filed under: Reading

# 29 Nov 2005, 07:08PM: A Champion: Brendan, Ian, et al. are welcome.

# 29 Nov 2005, 09:08PM: Music And Linking: Leonard is practicing a song that intentionally sounds like 1990s alt-rock. It makes me nostalgic every time he plays it.

Cute child anecdote!

Filed under: Comedy

# 30 Nov 2005, 11:10AM: Nonlucid Dreams: A few nights ago: I'm a happy little boy, traveling off to war, hanging off the back of a kindly mentor as we ride horseback up to the eastern shores of Canada. Suddenly - Nazis! We're in the Sudetenland! We have to escape! A guy with a dangling cigarette's smoke obscuring his five o'clock shadow helps lead us out. This guy is my colleague from Salon, Mark Follman.

Last night: I'm sitting in a Catholic church, observing services. A really low-level clergyman who looks like Dave Foley with a goatee hassles me and an old woman sitting near me. Then he has me follow him to an office. I receive a Ziploc food storage container that holds some slightly melted vanilla ice cream, and a Country Crock tub of fake butter labelled AVEDA, and possibly some paperwork and scripture. He tells me I am now an officer of the court. I try to explain that I really shouldn't be, what with not necessarily believing in God or Jesus and definitely not believing in the apostolic authority of the Catholic Church, when I wake up.

Oh yeah, and there was the one a few weeks back where I was in a Fry/Laurie adaptation of Wodehouse, complete with farcical discomfiture over a small dog, and then I took a cooking class that proceeded all around me as I rode a conveyor belt through the course.

# 30 Nov 2005, 03:32PM: Smart Dirty Jokes: Funny interview with an actor who's on Arrested Development. And another and another.

Filed under: Comedy

# 30 Nov 2005, 04:41PM: Chocolate-Milk-Through-The-Nose Hilarious Aside: "(Ben Folds' desolate "Brick" is also set at Christmastime, yet somehow it isn't regarded as a holiday favorite either.)"

# 02 Dec 2005, 05:20PM: Luck: I went to Bakersfield for a one-day visit with Leonard. We attended his grandmother's funeral.

Rosalie was such a wonderful woman. She treated me like another grandchild as soon as she met me, and was the smartest, sweetest hostess I've ever known. I am so lucky that I got to know her, as well as her husband Dalton, over the last few years. Now they are both gone and all we have is our memories, just as after we die all our survivors will have is memories of us.

Leonard spoke at the service and said that we would all be lucky if our lives we as rich and full of love as Rosalie's.

Yesterday and today, I got to talk and visit with Leonard, Frances, Susanna, Rachel, John, and people in Leonard's extended family whom I don't see as often, like his aunts and uncles (Pat, Don, Garry, and so on) and his cousins, like Shannon, Brett, etc. And I got to see Joel and Leah, Shannon's toddler and baby, who are tiny and very sweet.

We ate and shopped and talked and drove around, and I saw The Music Man for the first time ever (what a great musical). And this morning we ate Frances's great French toast, made from Leonard's perfect bread, inside a warm house as the rain fell on the garden behind.

On the way to and from Bakersfield, Leonard and I played the XM radio, and he tried to guess the bands playing the songs he'd never heard, and we ate at Pea Soup Andersen's.

I am so lucky.

# 02 Dec 2005, 06:13PM: Edutainment: I'm going to Will Franken's one-man show Good Luck With It tomorrow, and you should too (if you can). Tomorrow's performance includes an optional epilogue about Tookie Williams. I've confirmed with Will that Good Luck With It repeats on Sat., Dec. 10 and Sat., Dec. 17 at The Marsh.

Yesterday night, thanks to a severely overworked video clerk and John's kind lending of his laptop, a bunch of us watched the wonderful 1962 classic The Music Man. Along with The Producers and Chicago, The Music Man has a huckster as its primary character and has the social construction of reality as a very strong theme. When I think about the suspension of disbelief necessary in watching musicals, and the kangaroo court scene in Oklahoma!, I wonder whether the social construction of consensus reality is the subtext of all musials, especially since so many of them have show business as a plot or subplot (viz, Showboat, Kiss Me, Kate, 42nd Street, Bye Bye Birdie, A Chorus Line, Sunset Boulevard, Cabaret, Phantom of the Opera, etc., etc.). But I figure that, even so, Chicago and The Music Man concentrate especially hard on mass delusion for satiric effect.

"The Sadder But Wiser Girl For Me" is a fantastic song and I can't believe I've never heard it before. The term "Shipoopi" and this business of using the evening star to say good night to someone you love are absolutely not elements of my universe. And the ending is almost as apt and deadly as the ending of Urinetown.

Joe and I saw Dr. Phil Zimbardo and a Polish filmmaker speak at the California Academy of Arts and Crafts this week. We got Zimbarded! Joe's account is quite adequate and I direct you to it, as well as to my other previous musings on the Stanford Prison Experiment.

Filed under: Comedy

# 02 Dec 2005, 06:48PM: Tales Of XM: Every time I hear One Night In Bangkok from the very odd musical Chess (which I have actually seen), and those little rap-like spoken-word bits between the refrains occur, I mentally substitute, "Hot town, summer in the city / Back of my neck getting dirty and gritty" from Summer in the City by The Lovin' Spoonful.

# 03 Dec 2005, 11:46AM: Tip: 450 Sutter Pharmacy is wonderful but their hours are Monday-Friday, 9am-6pm. Not that you'd find that information on their website, argh.

# 03 Dec 2005, 01:35PM: Useful Phone Number: I was reminded last night that many people who have cell phones do not have the phone number of a local taxicab company or dispatcher on their speed-dials. It's useful to have one for many occasions, including ones that don't quite rise to the level of emergency. In San Francisco, I use (415) 920-0715 to reach the Citywide dispatching service, which has never let me down.

# 04 Dec 2005, 09:37AM: Articles You Might Enjoy: At http://www.insidebayarea.com/bayarealiving/ci_3278439 we have my new MC Masala on sitting on BART with my eyes closed. "....I'm not very disciplined, so I have to close my eyes to ignore the outside world...." And at http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/04/magazine/04coach.html we have a NYT story about college football, which sounds boring until you find out that it is by Michael Lewis. It is hysterical.

Filed under: Religion

# 05 Dec 2005, 08:06AM: Wuh?: In my dream, Harlan Ellison was dating a guy I knew. I should have known it was a dream because we all hung out and it was awesome and fun and not awkward at all.

Clarification: viz., dream-Ellison wasn't a jerk.

# 05 Dec 2005, 04:17PM: Worry: Is Malcolm Gladwell really talking about himself?

But if you're the one responsible for those bright new ideas there is no such certainty. You come up with one great idea, and the process is so miraculous that all you do is puzzle over how on earth you ever did it, and worry whether you'll ever be able to do it again.

# 07 Dec 2005, 12:08PM: "House Band" (hat-tip to Leonard): Leonard and I did a silly song about House. You can listen to the Ogg file of the song in iTunes or WinAmp, as well as many other music players.

# 08 Dec 2005, 12:56PM: Quote of the Day: Well, there are probably several, including Scott Rosenberg's instantly memorable comment on a person updating Video Dog ("I think he's walking the Dog"), but the only one I have said is: "Well, too bad Tupper & Reed closed; otherwise I would head over to buy the world's tiniest violin."

Filed under: Comedy

# 09 Dec 2005, 07:10PM: Manufacturing Consent To Laugh: I've come up with a commonsensical procedure for manufacturing observational humor. In fact, it's so commonsensical that I refuse to believe I'm the first to invent it. It won't catapult you to the standup A-list, but as long as you are not an introvert and you have a sense of humor, you can string jokes together into bits and bits together into sets and do a fair job at some open mic.

Think of something you are cranky about, or one of those anecdotes you always pull out at parties. Look at its causes or predict likely outcomes of this incongruity. Extrapolate into absurdity, preferably retaining a kernel of the original truth-in-paradox. Make multiple jokes about each premise for a cascade of punchlines at the climax of each bit. Repeat for each topic.

Construct shortest-path segues, turning your group of unrelated bits into a set. Practice saying your set in a little speech to yourself or to friends who have a sense of humor, testing rhythm and diction, iterating through better and better versions of the set. Preferably you'll have at least three punchlines per minute. Once it reliably makes people laugh, it might not make you laugh anymore, but it's ready for the stage.

Filed under: Comedy

# 09 Dec 2005, 07:21PM: Articulation: I was poking through my blog archives recently. Man, I wrote more substantive and funny posts in November of last year than in most months this year, back before I had a weekly column that soaked up thinking/writing time. Anyway, I followed some links and reminded myself that a single month of John-Paul Spiro is more thought-provoking than a year of a lot of other blogs. For example, he tossed off a great encapsulation of what it is to be middlebrow, which I'll have to send to a friend of mine who challenged my definition of the concept. "I like art that appeals to my intelligence and sensibility, not my education."

# 09 Dec 2005, 07:37PM: The Escalator Of Reason: Hasidic Rebel (who redesigned and started writing again this month) once found himself explaining to his more orthodox wife that learning the arguments against her beliefs might change her beliefs. Perhaps wisely (for her own peace of mind), she told him to keep them from her. I'm reminded of that curious conflict -- which I probably first saw articulated in a tiny story within the ancillary material in a copy of Candide -- when I read this bit of Peter Singer. For good and for ill, it's quite difficult to retreat from unpleasant yet logical conclusions once you start thinking clearly.

Filed under: Religion

# 10 Dec 2005, 07:26AM: On Cutting Through Personal Style: Sometimes I wonder why I like House (properly House, M.D.). After all, in real life, I'd shut a jerk like Greg House out of my life entirely. But then I remember the writing - not of the plots, but of individual bits of dialogue. The conversations between House and his consciously Watson-esque friend Wilson always slay me. Check the Wilson/House conversation when House is about to go on a date with the sweetest woman on the show:

Dr. James Wilson: [House is attempting to put on a tie before his date with Cameron] The wide side's too short. You're gonna look like Lou Costello.
Dr. Gregory House: This is a mistake. I don't know how to have casual conversation. You think you're talking about one thing, and either you are and it's incredibly boring, or you're not because it's subtext and you need a decoder ring.
Wilson: Open doors for her, help her with her chair -
House: I have been on a date.
Wilson: Uh, not since disco died. Comment on her shoes, her earrings, and then move on to D.H.A.: her Dreams, Hopes, and Aspirations. Trust me. Panty-peeler. Oh, and if you need condoms, I've got some.
House: [sarcastically] Did your wife give them to you?
Wilson: Drug rep. They got antibiotics built in, somehow.
House: I should cancel. I've got a patient in surgery tomorrow.
[House moves to the kitchen]
Wilson: And if you were a surgeon, that would actually matter. That's a good idea, settle your nerves. Get me a beer too.
House: No beer.
Wilson: You're gonna eat before dinner?
[House reaches into the fridge and takes out a corsage.]
House: This is pretty lame, right?
Wilson: I think she likes lame.

So my guess is that, after three years of customer service and living in The Real World, I've toughened my resistance to perceived arrogance. I can better derive useful data from what people say, even if I don't like the style, unless the style is the message in 90+% of cases, in which case I stop listening. This is why I've stopped reading Heather Havrilesky's snarky TV criticism and Skot Kurruk's blog. This is also why I keep reading, say, the Nielsen Haydens' lit/politics blog and software/economics essays by Paul Graham; I may not like their style of sweeping generalization, but they are saying interesting and important things, and I'm more willing to put up with unpleasant style for information and wisdom now than I used to be.

Someday I should really do an overhaul of my links page. It's inevitable but not urgent; learning what can wait and what can't is another skill I'm on the way to picking up.

Filed under: Comedy

# 10 Dec 2005, 08:36AM: HOWTO Write Hackish Standup, Part II: Leonard suggested that I follow up my bare-bones standup comedy writing HOWTO with an example. I'll start with some really unsuitable observations and anecdotes, explain why they are unsuitable for the easy procedure I'd outlined, and then take some more suitable ones and develop them into a routine.

Unsuitable observation: The character of Professor Harold Hill in The Music Man is an archetypal Trickster God. Yes, this is true, and I think it is amusing to consider bringing other common gods from polytheistic systems into early twentieth-century River City, Iowa. But observational humor at its easiest immediately connects with the audience. You can't count on most audience members having seen The Music Man and most certainly won't know what the Trickster God archetype is.

Unsuitable anecdote: When I was the stage manager for Heather Gold's one-woman show, I Look Like An Egg But I Identify As A Cookie, various people were in charge of getting the ingredients for the on-stage baking from Heather's house to the venue. One day, when it was Heather's responsibility, she showed up early for the show (which was great) but, as we discovered about 45 minutes to showtime, without the ingredients.

I immediately dispatched a friend of Heather's to go to the nearest convenience stores. When she came back I hurriedly poured and measured everything on the stage, which had no curtain. People had already begun to take their seats. So they witnessed me warming the ice-cold butter by setting it atop the toaster oven and hitting the Toast button. And they watched me take a meat hammer to the block of brown sugar that was masquerading as granite, and then use the spiky side of said meat hammer to grate three quarters of a cup of sugar off the rock and into the little clear bowl. I joked with the audience, announcing that this was not part of the performance but sort of a Hints from Heloise prelude.

This may or may not have been the performance in which we ran out of vanilla extract, I asked the chefs at the hotel restaurant for help, they gave me two whole vanilla beans, and I had to slit and scrape them in a manner I'd only seen done on TV cooking shows.

Anyway, this anecdote is like the observation above; it takes too much setup because audience members won't know what the Egg/Cookie show was. And the ending isn't very funny to people other than me; it may be a "you had to be there" story. I could exaggerate how difficult the brown sugar was to grate, or lie and make jokes about the trouble I had with each single ingredient, or cruelly mock Heather and her friend for imagined incompetences, but I think that's far too much trouble to take for far too little payoff.

A more suitable anecdote: When I was at UC Berkeley, I was (I believe) the only Sumana on campus, so I thought it would be easy to get sumana@uclink.berkeley.edu. But I couldn't because it was already taken by Stacy Umana.

I think this is much more suitable. It's short. Most people in comedy audiences are familiar with email addresses, in particular the username tradition of "first letter of first name and all of last name," and with the mild frustration of not getting the username you want. And people are unfamiliar enough with my first name, and with the last name "Umana," that the incongruity is instantly obvious.

More suitable observation: A popular mockmeat brand, Morningstar, shares its name with Satan, who was Lucifer or "the morning star" before falling from grace.

Like the Music Man/Trickster God analogy, this note is an observation about some bit of religious trivia connecting with pop culture (I say food is pop culture). But it's more accessible. Now, accessibility isn't everything, and if you're as practiced and amazing as Greg Proops or Patton Oswalt, then you can throw in Milton and the photoelectric effect and it works and you've reached a higher plane. But for the first-timer at the open mic, accessibility makes timing and high punchline frequency a heck of a lot easier, because you get through the setup that much faster.

So here is how I might pathetically spin out those premises:

When I was at Berkeley, I wanted my name for my email address. sumana@uclink. And I thought that would be fine because I was the only Sumana on campus. But I couldn't, because there was a Stacy Umana.
People did not use to have this problem. Can you imagine some guy, scratching out [pantomime] name after name on his kid's birth certificate?
"Dammit, there's already a John Smith?"
"Okay, I've got it. John Smith 1111111111."
And the stupidest thing to put in there is the year. I mean, come on. You're going to have that email address for more than a year! When I see crazydaisy98@aol, should I think that you've been on AOL for seven years, or that there are 97 other crazydaisies on AOL?
Names are so useless. I mean, there's this brand of mockmeat, soy bacon and stuff, called Morningstar -- which is another name for Lucifer, for Satan.
So, because I'm a vegetarian, I have to eat Satanburgers?
But I guess this proves that those Christian groups really don't care about the devil. I could open Satan's Used Cars and they wouldn't boycott me unless I hired gay people.
But just imagine how Satan feels!
The strongest and mightiest adversary of God, and all he gets is vegans?
Plus, you know he can't get the email address he wants, because some twelve-year-old goth kid took it.
darklord@hotmail, taken. Damn!

Now, that's the set before iteration through practice to make the thing not suck. But you get the idea. Only a few sentences between punchlines, the punch word as the last word of the punchline, exaggerated-yet-logical extrapolations from the incongruity dressed up with opinion ("stupid") and Satan. Definitely get Satan in there.

Filed under: Comedy

# 12 Dec 2005, 02:52PM: More Cutting-Edge Comedy Theory: There are two classes of Your Mom jokes...

Filed under: Comedy

# 13 Dec 2005, 06:57AM: Conversation From Last Night: [Context: A few of my friends have leads on job opportunities that would be pretty awesome, such as jobs at the Make-a-Wish Foundation and People Magazine.]

"Job interviewers can't ask you your ethnicity, or whether you're married, or a veteran, or disabled, or gay. But they can ask, [Darth Vader voice] 'What is your greatest weakness?'....'I'm a total chocoholic!'"

Filed under: Comedy

# 13 Dec 2005, 12:14PM: Mind Games -- The Good Kind: My column this week discusses party games Taboo, Balderdash, and Once Upon A Time. I also address the fundamental problem to which party games are a solution.

Some of us need a foundation or a skeleton for a get-together, something to provide a structure for the evening, without which unalloyed conversation is as uncomfortable a prospect as a tightrope walk or an impromptu speech.

# 13 Dec 2005, 04:23PM: From Bangalore To Bengaluru: My dad will probably be happy that Bangalore is modifying its name. I have a few questions. Won't outsiders get even more confused about whether Bangalore has anything to do with Bengal? Is "N. Gopala Swamy, a software geek" correct journalistic style these days for a first reference? What'll happen to the potheads who get such joy from the sobriquet "Bongalore"? The answer to that last one: not much, probably.

# 13 Dec 2005, 05:13PM: The Mildest Of Wins:

Worker: Did you just throw money at me?
Customer: I want to pay for my order.
Worker: *pick up the money and hold it out to him* Sir, I am not going to process your order until you treat me like a human being.

Respecting the dignity of the worker at the fast-food place is a wee part of "what we call 'manners', 'civilisation' or 'humanity', depending on the calibre of yokel you're trying to educate."

# 13 Dec 2005, 06:10PM: Work Into Play: At Games of Berkeley the other day, I met the son of the woman who invented Set. An indexing system meant to help her find patterns of genetic inheritance turned into one of the most replayable and challenging games I've ever played.

# 13 Dec 2005, 10:39PM: Has Peak Oil Not Hit These People?: Song and jetBlue have nice sales through this Friday, if you're fine with onerous blackout requirements.

# 14 Dec 2005, 12:33PM: Rent Rent Rent Re-ent Rent: I live in San Francisco, which holds the title bestowed by the National Low Income Housing Coalition for highest rents in the US. You can check whether your rent and your wages fall into any sort of proportion on the NLIHC site.

# 14 Dec 2005, 12:37PM: Request For Suggestions: Is it actually interesting to an outside observer that I did not learn to ride a bicycle until the weekend after my college graduation ceremony? Has everyone else already made a decision as to whether cable stations should cut out blackface song-and-dance numbers when broadcasting fifty-year-old movies?

In any case, if you wish I'd write a column about a particular topic, let me know. Maybe I have forgotten some hilarious, columnworthy story that I have told you.

# 15 Dec 2005, 06:46AM: Unavailability Notice: I'm going to be rather difficult for my friends and family to get ahold of for the next few days. Busy busy busy.

Speaking of busy: on Saturday night I have to attend two different parties on opposite sides of the Bay. One, and only one, requires an outré costume.

# 17 Dec 2005, 06:33PM: End Busy Signal: No parties tonight, just resting and drinking fluids. So, no costume either, except sweats. Is "Reclining Jogger" a costume?

My eyes are burning a bit, which reminds me of the time I finally admitted I had allergies. I was visiting a friend in a poorly ventilated apartment. Two cats lived there. As the hours went by, I developed classic allergy symptoms, including ones I'd never before experienced or properly understood. How can eyes itch?! I'd thought; no more.

Did you know you can get 500 pills, each containing 10mg loratadine, for less than $50? I now know this!

# 19 Dec 2005, 06:30AM: Social Mobility, Greed, and Uncomfortable Timeliness: The power was out for about twelve hours yesterday. Seth - thanks for looking up outage information on my behalf.

While I was lighting candles (do Jewish families ever use menorahs as regular candelabras?), other Bay Area residents were reading my column about the weaver, the barber, and the eight jars of gold.

I could tell a hundred different stories about the weaver, in which his wife killed herself, or he moved to the city altogether, or he performed an extraordinary prayer and Fate rewarded him, telling him that it had all been a test. Based on those different descriptions of what happened to the weaver, I could waggle my finger at the children and say, "Be careful what you wish for," or "A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush," or "Keep your nose to the grindstone," or "God helps those who help themselves."

# 21 Dec 2005, 11:39AM: Big Giant Announcement: I have been extraordinarily fortunate in the caliber of the institutions that have employed me since I left college. I did a tour as a retail warrior at Berkeley's landmark of literacy, Cody's Books. I've now worked for more than two and a half years at another incredible institution -- I'd been reading Salon Magazine for years and couldn't believe it when they called me for an interview, much less hired me.

I've been reading Joel Spolsky's weblog for years and he's consistently given me new ways to look at software, economics, psychology, and a mess of other fields. So I applied for the Fog Creek Software Management Training Program and Fog Creek has done me the honor of accepting me.

Fog Creek's office is in the Fashion District (a.k.a. the Garment District) of Manhattan, in New York City. Within the next month, Leonard and I will sell and give away a lot of belongings, pack, and find and move into an apartment, probably in Brooklyn or Queens, with a reasonable kitchen.

Three and a half years ago:

Paulina, my roommate at the time: "You could go to New York and try to make it big."
Me: "Oh, that's so twentieth-century."

Last month:

In other cycle hypotheses, many smart suburban/small-town/small-city Californians I knew went to Berkeley, then moved to San Francisco, and are now moving to New York. I assume they will then move back to smaller towns to have kids.

It's all happening fast, but it was prefigured long ago.

Please email recommendations, advice, and congratulations.

Filed under: Apartment Life

# 23 Dec 2005, 06:08AM: Praise: Oh sweet blessed haircut. Dry in 60 seconds! A teaspoon of shampoo per wash! Hairbrushes sit, despondent, unused and collecting dust!

# 23 Dec 2005, 10:10PM: Collections Of Links For Advice: Book-shipping advice from one who knows!

The Moving Scams website is being very helpful to me in finding a way to get stuff across the country.

Note to self: join MeFi and ask this user and this user for moving-to-NYC advice, based on hints they've dropped in some threads.

Leonard and I need a two-bedroom in Queens or Brooklyn with a non-awful commute to midtown (Fog Creek is on 8th Avenue around 37th St.). We'll be looking in all the usual places: Craigslist, etc. If you have special magical knowledge of a place with the below-mentioned criteria, please let me know.

Apartment criteria listed in descending order of importance:
 Under $1800/mo
 2 bedrooms
 Brooklyn (Park Slope? Sunset Park?) or Astoria in Queens
 <= 5 minute walk from subway, 10 minute walk maximum
 <= 3 blocks to full service grocery store
 Low crime neighborhood
 Washer/dryer in building
 Low street noise at night, preferably during day also
 Dishwasher
 Big kitchen
 Well-lit by natural light
 Part of house rather than apartment building
 Gas range rather than electric
 <= 10 minute walk to restaurant clusters
 Known responsive landlord
 Little or no vermin problem
 On first floor of building

Things that are okay:
 1 bathroom
 Small apartment building (< 6 units)

Open questions
 How much storage space?

Filed under: Apartment Life

# 26 Dec 2005, 09:09AM: Request For Help: There is one piece of sentimental-value furniture (a large dresser) that needs to get moved down to Leonard's mom's house in Bakersfield, and we'd pay to get that moved. If you know someone with a pickup truck who regularly travels between San Francisco and Southern California, please let us know.

Filed under: Apartment Life

# 26 Dec 2005, 10:52PM: Clutter Chronicles: When I think about the word "clutter," I think that I like the sound of the word, and that I like "decluttering" as well. But then I remember that the Clutter family was the Midwestern clan whose murder formed the premise of Capote's book In Cold Blood. And then talk of joyous decluttering seems in bad taste.

In any event, I've been culling and sorting in preparation for the move. Thank goodness that Frances has opened her garage to long-term storage for Leonard and me; I'd feel wrong lugging my high school journalism clippings to whatever tiny garret we end up renting.

It'll be great to use the sewing machine that Leonard, Frances, John, Susie, and Rachel got me; thank you. Once I mend that pile of clothes in my closet, Leonard and I will be able to pick more effectively which clothes to take east.

On the train back from Bakersfield, as I read the D.H. Lawrence that Frances and Rachel got me (thank you!) and thought about all the things I have to do, I fell into conversation with the fellow next to me, a philosophy professor on his way to interview for a new job at the New York City convention of the American Philosophical Association. He told me about the weird letter from a prospective student who figured that he knew philosophy because he'd read Nietzsche and Rand. He told me of the university-wide essay contest that kept a requirement that the submitted essays had to have been written for a class so the judges wouldn't have to read thirty triumphalist Objectivist rants. And he told me about the student who plagiarized an entire paper from one of Kant's lesser-known works in a class taught by a Kant scholar. And he told me, once I'd mentioned the NYC intimidation factor:

"New York City is so big that it seems like it might kill you. But just remember that it has failed to kill many, many people stupider than you."

The fear of the difficult is just another decadence that I should dismiss, just another piece of clutter to toss.