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04 Oct 2001, 07:20AM: Authorship and Air Hockey:

I feel the need to point out that I receive no explicit credit for number of jokes and other bits that Leonard posted at the backup site whilst crummy.com was down. Namely, I came up with:

None of this is to malign Mr. Richardson, who, if he wished to cite all of his sources all of the time, would find considerably unpleasant aesthetic effects accruing towards an oblivion of footnotes and parentheses.

Unrelatedly: Yesterday I beat Adam Parrish at air hockey. His friend Jeana Jorgensen is a whiz who consistently beats me by ridiculous margins. There's some sort of balance there.

Originally published by Sumana Harihareswara at http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2001/10/4/222042/352

09 Oct 2001, 11:20AM: The leaking pen in the shirt pocket of my life:

I've recently been told I have a way with insults. So is it good or bad that I rarely use them?

I'm archiving my old K5 posts on a site over which I have more control. Eventually I'll switch to posting there, primarily, and maybe copy-and-pasting to K5 if I have the time.

So far, in Useless Lecture, I've written a sonnet, almost finished a letter or two, and come up with a semiworkable Guy Noir treatment. This may be my most productive period of the day.

Originally published by Sumana Harihareswara at http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2001/10/10/22026/308

10 Oct 2001, 09:38AM: Joke, links, ruminations on hippos, Russian, war:

It's been almost a month since the terrorist attacks on the US. Usually, when I find out how long it has been since some major news event, it seems as though it's been not too long, when actually it's been a year (cf. Florida and the 2000 election). But, looking back, September 2001 seems like a September That Never Ended. (cf. Jargon File)

From Today's Papers, a confirmation of stuff some of us mulled over a month back:

"The WSJ passes along a dust-up in Great Britain: An hour after the Sept. 11 attacks, a top aide to Britain's transportation secretary sent out an e-mail to colleagues advising, 'It's now a very good day to get out anything we want to bury.'"

Modern Humorist is making the best and most jokes on the current war. I especially like Jai al-Leno.

My midterms are half over. On Monday I didn't have enough time to reveal my deep and abiding ignorance regarding the causes and effects of the Pugachëv rebellion. Next week or so I get to blab about cognitive dissonance and the like.

On Monday, in honor of that Russian History test and a Russian language test, I wore my "Ni pukha ni pera ... k chyorty!" t-shirt and something like three or four Russian speakers noticed it approvingly.

Yesterday I had a fun dinner with Anirvan; today I have a fun lunch with Steve.

In conclusion, a joke, told to us yesterday by Zhenia the Russian TA.

A circus act is taking place in which a hippopotamus plays the piano and a crocodile sings. A bystander says to the proud trainer, "That's impossible! How did you do that?" The trainer replies, "I have a secret: the hippopotamus plays the piano and sings."

Originally published by Sumana Harihareswara at http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2001/10/10/123816/20

12 Oct 2001, 12:00PM GMT+5:30: Blood, social psych, glass, Enterprise, &tc.:

So this entry is really an agglomeration of a bunch of stuff that's been floating in my head the past few days. Pick and choose from the smorgasbord of Sumana!

Air hockey. When I played against Steve on Tuesday after lunch, I beat him 7-4. But it was close at a few moments! He considered it a very respectable showing. It reminded me that for a great deal of last semester, my weblog entries often seemed to consist of only "lesson plans and hockey scores."

Racial profiling. So now it's happened to one of my friends. Anirvan reported rather clear evidence that officials at four out of five security checkpoints stopped him -- a brown bearded man -- much longer than they did a practically identical Taiwanese man when they flew to and from some spot in Canada recently. I have mixed feelings. It's demeaning. It's also slightly rational. As Michael Kinsley noted, if all we know about the terrorists is their physical appearance, should we really bar ourselves from using that in preventing future hijackings? Then again, given the heightened secutiry measures, will they try to hijack again, or will it be some other method that we aren't expecting? (The elsewhere-in-Slate "we must make the unthinkable evil thinkable to get inside the minds of terrorists" argument by William Saletan.)

A bunch of Russian-related stuff. How should a family decide what to watch on TV? The answers revealed us as very different people. In my Russian class, Cinzia said that people should take turns, easy-going Sean agreed, I facetiously argued that *I* should pick the program (my putative spouse preferring to read), Makiko said that the husband should decide, and Jeff recommended having two television sets, backing it up with an anecdote from a wacky friend. That's our class in a nutshell. Well, there was the time when we talked about people we admire, and I mentioned my old English teacher Sam Hatch, and Sean talked about a musician friend of his, and Makiko talked about Mother Teresa, and Jeff talked about God. Perhaps that's a better nutshell, but it doesn't include Cinzia, since she was absent that day.

Russian children's cartoons. That's what we've been watching. I love them. They have this absurdist sensibility that I've been missing in children's programming for ages.

Almost all of us in the class have some prior experience in French. The most common words for which we accidentally use the French are "with" and "and" and "but." However, on Monday, I think, Jeff said "Apres" for "after" and didn't know how it had happened.

Zhenia, my Russian instructor, is still sick. The FBI just put out a warning that said, in effect, "we're expecting another big terrorist attack, but we don't know when or where. Just soon." Some NBC employee in New York just tested positive for anthrax. It would be paranoid to connect the dots and conclude that Zhenia has come down with B. anthracis, right?

Wednesday.

TV. I watched The West Wing and Enterprise. Both could have been better and could have been worse. That afternoon, I had expounded to a few of my Russian Imperial History classmates on the merits and failings of each show, touching heavily on Enterprise. I theorized that:

West Wing was certainly better in the season opener per se, the opener qua opener, than it was last week in its Very Special Terrorist Attack episode that writer/producer Aaron Sorkin wrote in something like a day. As one commentator put it a week ago, "Can we get Sorkin back on crack? This is horrible."

Poor CJ. This show trumps the book Spin Cycle (which was one of my great splurges my freshman year) (I wonder where that book is. Did I loan it to someone? Is it in Stockton, along with the Lost Jacket that Garrison Keillor autographed to me three years ago?) for making a citizen sympathetic to a White House press secretary's job.

We can work it out. I took a shower after handball. It almost made me late for Russian, but goodness that feels nice. It reminds me of a year ago, when on Tuesdays and Thursdays I would shower after judo and tromp off to Steve Weber's excellent International Relations lecture. I think I liked that semester. Funny, I can't recall what I was taking, aside from IR, judo, and Russian. Oh, yes, American Political Theory with Michael Rogin, and I liked his lectures in that class so much that I took the 1939 Through Films class with him and Professor Moran the next semester, and that wasn't nearly as good. I am glad that I got to see all those movies, though. I feel more cultured now.

My closer friends who work out regularly number about three. The two white ones do yoga. The Indian one does not. This amuses me.

Russian history. Professor Reginald Zelnik, the Imperial Russian History professor, is great. He lectures at exactly the right pace, he has this low-key sense of humor, and he makes this material interesting when a lot of lecturers could mess it up. He's a craftsman -- not showy, not bombastic, just producing reliably good work. I admire his lectures for the same reason that Leonard admires the work of Stephen King: reliable craftsmanship.

Thursday.

First blood donation, ever. Exactly a month after the terrorist attacks in New York and D.C., my blood donation appointment arrived. Via the radio in the donation room, we heard Bush's press conference. Not very relaxing, to me -- I talked on the phone to distract myself from the process. (I wonder if they'll find my blood useful -- is there still a shortage? -- or tasty.)

Because I was donating blood, I missed a free showing of a Russian-language film, Mirror. Oh, well. I fell asleep during the one last week, anyway.

Social psychology. Elliot Aronson wrote an outstanding sociology textbook, The Social Animal, which you could almost certainly find on Bookfinder and which clarifies my thoughts on psychology and sociology every time I pick it up. Reading this book may be the best thing to come out of my Political Psychology class this semester. Not only does Aronson convincingly explain causes of and possible solutions to such phenomena as self-justification, aggression, and prejudice, he also gives out how-tos on liking, being liked, making relationships more authentic, and persuasion! This is a terrific book, folks, and I'm not even selling it. (I am, however, composing a note of gratitude to send to Dr. Aronson, a professor at the University of California at Santa Cruz.)

Dr. Aronson mentions the "chillingly manipulative" title How to Make Friends and Influence People (the classic self-help text by Dale Carnegie). I read that book my sophomore year of high school, because my journalism teacher, Mr. Woo, advised me to. I hadn't gotten a page editor position on the newspaper, he and the editor-in-chief said, because I lacked "people skills." And so I got a position that they made up to use my proofreading skills -- "Copy Editor" -- and I trotted off to the school library and borrowed the book and read this book that he had recommended. I don't know whether it helped at all, although I suspect it did, if only in articulating lots of those little rules of social engagement that I'd never learned. I'd never learned them because my family had moved around a lot when I was young, and I'd eventually shut myself off and withdrawn and read books and watched TV while other kids were out there learning social skills.

Once upon a time, I justified my maverick attitude by arguing that friends only hold one back. My analogy was: it always takes longer to make a decision and to get going and to get somewhere with more people rather than fewer. This implied that I was actually avoiding making friendships. In retrospect, that was probably a lot of sour grapes. I probably couldn't have made enough friends to slow me down even if I'd wanted to.

My own tendency to make sour-grapes rationalizations is something about which Aronson, and this Political Psychology class in general, are helping me learn.

And that convoluted sentence structure is the sort of thing that's absolutely fine in Russian but which I find suboptimal in English. Gotta stop that.

Candleholder glass. More than a year ago -- almost two years ago! -- I assisted my father and mother in performing a wedding in Tilden Park here in Berkeley. The happy couple was Lori and Himanshu. Everybody got some knickknack to take home: a red candle in a small glass cup, a sticker on the side reminding one of the blessed occasion.

I only started using the candleholder a few months ago. A few times I've had a wick burning rather close to the glass. I replaced the candle when it burned down all the way. When areas of the glass discolored, I thought it was just soot.

A few nights ago, as a candle burned in this holder, the glass cracked loudly and a piece of it fell off. Fractures remain. I blew out the candle and marveled at the beautiful crack in the dark glass. It looks like obsidian. I think it's the most beautiful thing I've seen this week.

Nobel, info asymmetry, parking space. So one of the three Economics Nobel laureates this year is a UC Berkeley economics prof. This trio worked on the problem of information asymmetry in markets. Hurrah! That's the term I've been using for years to describe what happens to people with weblogs. Seth is forever running into people who know far more about him than he does about them. Me, for instance, before I started keeping a weblog. It hasn't jarred me yet that someone knows far more about me from a weblog than I do about her. Usually I just get jarred because I have a bad memory for meeting people and I think it's the first time we've met when actually we've had three classes together or something.

Oh, and the Daily Californian reassures me that the new laureate will receive the free lifetime parking space, as per campus custom. No kidding. If you look around LeConte and other such buildings, you will see permanent signs marked "Reserved parking for NL." It took me more than a year to get it.

Comedy Night! The Heuristic Squelch is holding a Comedy Night on Tuesday, 23 October, at Blake's on Telegraph. I intend on going and doing open-mic stand-up. It'll be a great relief from my Political Psychology midterm earlier that day.

The two TAs. Two graduate students teach discussion sections for my Political Psychology course. I only have to go to one, but I attend one by each teaching assistant (TA -- but the preferred term is GSI, Graduate Student Instructor). One is by-the-book and very peppy, thoroughly dissects the readings, makes comprehensive handouts, and encourages discussion. The other drawls out a stand-up routine that clearly, systematically, and hilariously covers all the material that the professor covers less well in lecture. Thursday might become my favorite day of the week.

Guy Noir analogies. I'm trying to come up with Dashiell Hammett/Raymond Chandler-style analogies for weather and for beautiful, troubled dames. It reminds me of the "Funniest Similes Written By Students" page that I found at the now-defunct laughpage.com and showed to Angel Ayon and Karl Neuharth and the like back in high school. Angel and I still laugh about it.

Wow, all I had to Google was "hummingbirds analogies" and I got it. Google keeps impressing me.

Doonesbury. The recent strips have made me laugh.

The Onion as unreliable narrator. I recently realized that unreliable narration is the trick, the gimmick, behind most of the fake editorials in The Onion. [Fast voiceover: Other works employing the device of the unreliable narrator include The Raven by Poe and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain.]

Fresh Robots. Tonight I intend on showing Leonard the magic and beauty that is the Fresh Robots, a San Francisco-based comedy troupe. I found out about them because I met Sunil through Dan, and then Sunil met my sister, and then he invited a bunch of his friends to see them perform at a San Francisco comedy club, and that's where I met holeburning and Aaron and remet Laura (now Nandini's housemate) and met Lia, whom I introduced to Leonard and with whom Leonard watched the remastered Monty Python and the Holy Grail. And it was a terrific show, even besides the six-degrees business.

Which reminds me, one last link or two: A good "Why don't I know anyone who died in the Sept. 11 attacks?" Slate piece linked to a neat six-degrees meditation. I wonder if I'm like Lois Weisberg. Alexei and my sister and my parents are the Lois-y people I know. On Tuesday, I asked Alexei whether he had ever clocked the length of time he can walk on campus without recognizing someone. Yes, he said -- about two minutes. Oi!

Originally published by Sumana Harihareswara at http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2001/10/12/15031/428
Filed under: Reading

15 Oct 2001, 12:00AM: More smorgasbord of Sumana: More smorgasbord of Sumana - 15 Oct 2001

More smorgasbord of Sumana

Silly ads. "'Never again?' This is not the Treaty of Versailles."

Comedy, schmomedy. There will be a Comedy Night on Tuesday, October 23, at Blake's on Telegraph, as I've mentioned before. I will probably do some open-mic stand-up comedy relating to Russia, Halloween costumes, and my job search.

Speaking of the job search: I'm considering Teach For America -- what do other people think of this program? (And about the fact that they sell polo shirts?)

Left-handed compliment. I got a B+ on my Imperial Russian History midterm. Regarding the essay, my grader said,

A fair essay, but pretty bare-bones. You need more historical detail. The simplicity and clarity of your writing saves you.
Well, at least I know that Strunk and White paid off. (Tip from Ellen Rigsby, my old Rhetoric teacher: "to be" bores the most of all verbs. Throw it out whenever you can.)

Russian-studying people: This InPassing quote reminds me of John Stange. The other thing today that reminded me of John was a line in a Russian short story that I read for class tomorrow; translation: "The thing of it is..."

Speaking of people I know from my Russia trip, I'll be seeing Katie this week, since Reed has this weird tradition of a "fall break." In addition, of the five or so Russia-trip people whom I emailed several days ago, each and every one has now replied. Rasa was last, but that's more excusable since she's still in Russia.

From last week:
I conversed with a credit card vendor near the Martin Luther King Student Union. His table was festooned with all sorts of examples of the "free stuff" one gets for filling out a credit card application. I was walking past his table on my way to the Open Computing Facility.

Him: Hey, are you a student?
Me: Yes, but I don't want any of your stuff.
Him: Why not? It's free.
Me: No, it's not. I have to sign up for something to get it.
Him: That means it's free. You don't have to pay anything for it.
Me: You're such a sophist! (stalks off)

Also from last week: Nobel zaniness!

The great inventors Thomas Edison and Nikola Tesla never won Nobels because their egos got in the way: They hated each other so much that they literally refused to stand on the same stage together. Disgusted, the Nobel committee withdrew its offer to honor them jointly.

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2001/10/08/MN111567.DTL

Pedantry. In Political Psychology the other day, a fellow desribed anthrax as "a virus, a bacteria, like Ebola," and I sounded pedantic when I corrected him.

Russian textbook lies! p. 253: "The formation of present active participles is easy." All right, it is relatively easy, compared to, say, the past passive participle. But it's still not a piece of cake.

Reconnection. On a happier note, I just got back in touch with Micah Roy and Mitchell Davidson, politically aware guys I knew back at Tokay High School!

Asimov. Following a link from Seth's page, I saw three recommended orders in which to read the Foundation series by Isaac Asimov. Other zany factoids also await you at the Asimov FAQ. Now with the scoop: Isaac Asimov did not write at least one book in every major Dewey Decimal System division!

Reminiscing too soon. The prospect of leaving Cal in what, six months? inspires in me a rather inappropriate nostalgia. I've been at UC Berkeley for less than four years, but I've gotten used to it, and I always dislike leaving something that I feel I've mastered. I know shortcuts through campus, and I know many faces and names, even though I'm losing acquaintances via graduations and other attrition.

Especially on an unseasonably warm day such as this, I look around Sproul Plaza or the halls of Dwinelle and envy the freshmen their youth. *chuckle* My head knows that I probably have years and years ahead of me. My anxious heart grasps at the past because neither it nor my head knows what lies in that future. I thought I'd have goals by now.

Brill's Content has died. More nostalgia. I remember reading that and liking it. The Bill Gates mugshot hanging on my door in the old dorm days came from a Brill's September 1998 cover. Brill's informed me that Scott Shuger likes USA Today. I think of Steven Brill as sort of the RMS of journalism, and Brill's two years ago was somewhat akin to the FSF.

Joel Explains It All: "The moral of the story is that with a contrived example, you can prove anything." Poking around Joel On Software reminds me of:

Michael Kinsley's equivalent of "Why the September 11 Attacks Mean We Should Implement My Policy."

Flag-wearing. I received a small American flag pin when I gave blood on Thursday. What should I do with it? I think there are enough flags in my immediate vicinity. Flags, to me, imply patriotism of the "my country, right or wrong, my country" variety.

Recipe for a great Sunday evening. Take a friend to the Berkeley Rose Garden on a warm October night. Play for the first time ever in the playground on the other side of the street. Watch the sun set while breathing in the aroma of thousands of flowers. On the way back home, stop for ice cream.

Originally published by Sumana Harihareswara at http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2001/10/16/0545/2481

16 Oct 2001, 08:47AM GMT+5:30: Some of the best things in life might be things.:

"Man is born free..." Can you find the Rousseau reference in this picture?

Immaterial! I was looking through my stuff this morning for various reasons. I have quite a few books and some good CDs. I can get pretty attached to my stuff -- I'm still distraught that I can't find a little red notebook in which I wrote a lot of stuff in Russia -- but overall, I try to remember that the most important things in life are not material objects.

Still, material objects help a lot. They can trigger memories, and keep us comfortable so we can concentrate on more interesting things (cf. Maslow's hierarchy of needs). And yesterday, my friend Alexei had a crisis in which he lost his bags in which he carried his journal and other notebooks. They contained all the writing he had done this semester. He was pretty upset. I think that his notebooks and journal have been returned to him, but certainly it reminded those of us who were with him that little McGuffins can become important, even to people who try not to get attached to mere physical objects.

So I was poking around my books, and realized that I have two copies of Democracy in America by Alexis de Tocqueville. As well, I own a number of perfectly good CDs which carry music that I just don't care for anymore, if I ever did. I'm going to try to get rid of this stuff. I think I'll give away/sell a bunch of stuff that I'm just holding on to so that I have artifacts around me that remind me how cultured I am.

Books in particular. I'm more than halfway through The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco. I can't recommend it wholesale, the way Seth and his ilk do. I put it down more than a month ago because the plot wasn't advancing quickly enough for my taste. I picked it up again about a week ago. Now both my reading and the plot have picked up momentum. Unfortunately, because I've read some of Existence and Uniqueness, I know how the book will end. But I knew how Anna Karenina would end when I read it about five or six years ago (wow), and I still enjoyed it. In fact, it was reading Anna Karenina that allowed me to realize why some people like soap operas.

Speaking of Tolstoy, War and Peace was supposed to be in my hands by now. It and about five other books comprised the contents of the box that my host mother mailed off to me about two months ago. I imagine it's lost forever. Argh. More "it's just things/but they're things I wanted to keep and have around" Alexei-ish mixed emotions.

Oh, and the other day I was poking around my domicile for a copy of the Constitution. I found it in a textbook on American politics and government that Sam Hatch, an English teacher who taught me my junior year of high school, gave me. He infiltrated my senior year English class and left it on my desk before I got there. It contained a note: 

    Sumana,
	Congratulation on your AcaDec
triumph.  I hope this volume is
helpful to you in Mr. Berkowitz's
class.
	Excelsior!
		-SamH.

Note that I was in Academic Decathlon in high school, that I was the "team captain" and highest scorer my junior and senior years, and that Mr. Berkowitz was the teacher of the honors economics/government class. This book didn't help me much in that class, since the standard textbook and Mr. Berkowitz's time-honed lectures contained the entire and relatively meager quantity of information that I needed and didn't already know. Mr. Hatch's gift did help me study for the Advanced Placement exam in U.S. Politics in Government. I studied for this exam almost entirely on my own (in contrast to the help I got from peers and/or teachers in taking the AP exams in European History, U.S. History, Calculus, and Literature and Composition), and I did very well. It was the only AP exam on which I earned a 5 (the highest score possible). My grade pleased me because I didn't have to worry that I hadn't studied hard enough.

There are four more stories behind my AP agonies and triumphs. I should tell them, so as not to lose them.

Art Spiegelman. Mike Spiegelman, the Fresh Robot who made the anthrax joke that Leonard referenced, has a father named Art. However, Mike Spiegelman's father did not draw Maus. However, Mike Spiegelman's father has conversed with the Art Spiegelman who drew Maus, and evidently they both like, as Mike puts it, "bad jazz."

I found this out because Leonard and I arrived an hour or so early to the Marsh's Mock Cafe and I got to converse with this particular Robot, who was also in the cashier's booth. I was the first person in the history of the Mock Cafe e-mail newsletter to mention it and get the two-for-one admission offer, Mike noted.

You're listening to Pterodactyl Edition. Leonard and I have been having fun with the hypothetical screech of the pterodactyl. But we haven't been having nearly as much fun as Alex Chadwick of National Public Radio. Last week sometime, he was hosting Morning Edition and expressed surprise/dismay at some news item with a very pterodactylic cry. "The baby weighed fourteen pounds -- rrraah! You're listening to Morning Edition."

No wonder that's not in Russian! I played some of Tarakani Live! this morning whilst doing Russian homework. It's one of the CDs of Russian music that I got back in Russia. The first track of Tarakani Live! reminded me of tracks on Rock by Naif. If you ignore the lyrics in Russian, you'd think the sound came straight out of mid-nineties Seattle.

More amusingly, it reminded me of an evening back in St. Petersburg. I had just bought Rock and some other CD, possibly Tarakani Live!, in a music store on Nyevskii Prospekt. The grandson of my host mother had a CD player. When I listened to one of the CDs, I thought and remarked that it sounded an awful lot like, I think, Limp Bikzit or some such. The similarity progressed. Finally, I actually recognized that it was a Limp Bizkit/Blink 182/whatever song, and investigated, worrying that I had just bought a CD of bootlegged Western songs, and found out that the CD player, which contained a three-disc changer, was actually playing a Limp Bizkit CD belonging to the grandson.

Fully Committed. Alexei and Steve want to do food-socialization things soon. Wednesday night, tomorrow, I concede to two hours of the telly. Thursday night Katie (of Russia-trip fame) visits. Friday night I think I have some other commitment. Saturday I'm spending with Seth and possibly going to a Dar Williams concert with him. And in the midst of all this I really should study for the Political Psych midterm on Tuesday, and prepare for some open-mic comedy that night at Blake's.

Nandini, Vinay, Nathaniel, Dan, Anirvan, and I saw "Fully Committed" something like a year ago in San Francisco. It was a quite funny one-man show concerning an elite restaurant and its overworked reservation agent.

More Guy Noir. I finished and sent in one outline for a Guy Noir script for A Prairie Home Companion. I'm working on a new one now.

Originally published by Sumana Harihareswara at http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2001/10/16/234754/20
Filed under: Reading

18 Oct 2001, 03:37AM GMT+5:30: Eco, handball, worrying, and the teevee.:

Wednesday.

Finished The Name of the Rose. I stayed up until something like 1 am on Wednesday morning finishing The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco. This is a book that Seth and Leonard and the like had liked and recommended to such as me.

And after I read it, I read the author's postscript, and then I went to sleep, and the next day I spent something like half an hour telling Leonard how little it had done for me, and that I loathed the book viscerally. I feel less intensely about the volume now, thank goodness.

Point-by-point breakdown follows:

Handball. Terrorists. Exactly. So I got this newsletter in my handball class Wednesday morning. It was a standard little association thing, desktop-published by some soul at the Northern California Handball Association onto fourteen orange sheets five times a year. In this Issue were hall of fame inductees, a treasurer's report, a silly column, tournament results, a calendar, some other items of the same type, and an article entitled "Cupertino Courts at Risk," by Jack Murphy.

The Cupertino Parks & Recreation Department is planning public forum [sic] for the purpose of hearing from users of the Sports Center about the type of programming they would like to see at the new Cupertino Sports Center. This meeting is scheduled for October 11, 2001...

...have consistently pointed out that Racquetball-Handball is a sport that does not support itself with enough members to warrant a continuation of its facilities....There is even talk of having any new courts (if any) shared with other activites, such as kids taking tennis lessons, which has devastated the quality of the courts in the past and tended to stymie our sport...

I urge you to coordinate all your efforts on behalf of Racquetball-Handball with...

All well and good. All fine. This is exactly the civil society of which de Tocqueville and Madison spoke, what? And then there was a note at the end, in italics:

Editors [sic] Note: Jack lost two relatives at the World Trade Center attack. We offer our condolences to Jack and his family. Please support Jack and handball players everywhere by helping to save these courts.

If I may, What the hell? We'll return to No-Connection Theatre right after these messages...

Telly.

Mom, I'm not going to contract anthrax. I wish my mom didn't worry so much. I really doubt I'm going to come down with anthrax, or eat so little that my body doesn't get all the nutrition it needs, or get trapped on the BART when terrorists strike. Yes, I'm taking extra precautions these days because I'm brown and really stupid racists could think I'm a Muslim or from the Middle East. But I don't think she needs to worry as much as she does. I imagine I'll be just as much of a worrywart if I have kids. I'm well on my way already, especially when it comes to my personal life.

Seth's diary.

Thursday.

PHC is third-wave! Lookee here, you can submit greetings for Garrison Keillor to read on the air. Some people don't quite get the point.

John's great email. My old friend from the University of Maryland, John Stange, wrote me a terrific email complimenting my recent Segfault stories, "Top Ten Signs You're Using Windows" and "Heinlein Maneuver" (the latter inspired by a Leonard comment). I love praise.

Katie visits. More on that in tomorrow's entry.

Islamic terrorists and Kress. A while back, I wrote that I didn't like how Nancy Kress made Muslims into terrorists in her Beggars series. It seemed too stereotypical. Jennifer Sharifi wasn't what I wanted her to be. But right now I feel less prone to object.

Originally published by Sumana Harihareswara at http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2001/10/19/63758/104
Filed under: Reading

19 Oct 2001, 10:16AM GMT+5:30: Carrot Stick:

Latin translations, probably bad. "Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum viditur (Anything said in Latin sounds profound.)"
"Cogito Ergo Doleo." (I think therefore I am depressed.)

Thursday night.

So Katie came over, Katie of Reed College fame, and she whirled me off to a folk concert and then to a shindig at her friend's place. And I got lots and lots of stories to tell about this evening.

Utah Philips and Rosalee Sorrels. Fun folk singers and folk storytellers. I probably shouldn't tell the most memorable lines and stories. I'm lazy, but in addition, the delivery helps a lot, and I wouldn't want to spoil anyone in case s/he goes to see either Philips or Sorrels sometime.

Hymnals. The event happened in the First Congregational Church at Dana between Durant and Channing in Berkeley. I glanced through the New Century Hymnal. I wish I knew that many songs. I wish I'd been in an organization, when I was younger, that had disciplined my singing voice.

Aphorisms and stories. "A bird in the hand does you no good if you're trying to blow your nose." Okay, I spoiled you on one. There are many more, including some extended and hilarious anecdotes, where that one-liner came from.

Xenocide. The fella sitting near us in the pew was reading Orson Scott Card's Xenocide, third book in the first Ender series. Katie remarked, "I thought everyone who would want to read Xenocide already did."

In addition, almost everyone she knows, she maintains, has read part of The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. Le Guin, but not all.

Juggling. After the performance (I fell asleep a bit during the last bit, but only because I was tired and the music was slow), Katie and her friends had scheduled a shindig. But they had just made friends with a girl who was attending a circus school and carrying a "Bag o'Fun," i.e., a bag of juggling balls and pins." So, inside and outside the church, Katie's friends juggled for about 45 minutes. Very amusing. I'd like to learn to juggle. I've tried, but not very hard.

"A few degrees short of cheddar." What does that mean? Even the coiner didn't know.

The Anecdotes From the Party. "The Evil Circus" and "Please don't tell me his name is Mateo Car" and "Lying in a Language I Don't Know to the Chief of Security of Beijing to Get an Exit Visa." These are great stories and I will tell them in person to anyone who asks.

World travels. Peter and David are jugglers -- street performers! they do this for money! -- and recently traveled the world for a year together, performing in various locales around the globe, such as Rotterdam and Hong Kong. I hope to someday do something half as neat.

Penn and Teller. While at Peter's place, I skimmed a volume entitled Acrobats of the Soul that profiled clowns, magicians, and the like. I had never before considered how Penn and Teller consciously involved the audience in their deceptions as a political act. I'd like to see some more of them, or read some of their texts.

Tea. I have never before taken part in such an elaborate tea ritual as the one I did early this morning. It's a Chinese ritual, with a smelling cup and a drinking cup, and probably the caffeine I consumed was one reason why I stayed awake till something like 5am before falling asleep. Another reason, of course, was how Newton's Cannon engrossed me. Thanks, Jeana and Adam!

Friday.

Good diction. The Infidels Newswire pointed me towards an editorial by another Leonard, this time a Miami Herald columnist. "This is a man who purports to speak for God? God ought to sue for slander.....God help us if this guy represents anything beyond his morally illiterate self." Morally illiterate! At least I didn't call that credit card vendor that. Just "such a sophist."

Both/and thinking. Food AND Bombs. Bringing justice to them AND bringing them to justice. A carrot stick.

Oychen prosto! In Russian class, we listened to and reenacted a dialogue between a candidate for president and a journalist. The candidate said oychen prosto ("very simple") three times in describing his proposals, and every time he proposed a policy -- four times! -- the journalist responded with Da, eto konyeshna khorosho ("Yes, of course that's good"). I'm really glad that McGraw-Hill ginned up this dialogue, because that means they faked it. Right? Right?

Friday night.

I read more of Newton's Cannon, prepared and consumed ravioli, and visited two parties. Nothing very, very exciting. One amusing discovery: a few months ago, Seth called Michelle's cousin, Lia, and asked whether she had just gone to a movie with Leonard. The answer is no. Different Lia. Extra hilarity.

Originally published by Sumana Harihareswara at http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2001/10/20/11636/395
Filed under: Reading

21 Oct 2001, 01:34AM GMT+5:30: Is a puzzlemint.:

Puzzles. This is the first time in ages and ages that I'm hearing Weekend Edition Sunday for any length of time, and therefore the first time in ages and ages that I'm hearing the Sunday Puzzle with Will Shortz. I guess I did really like puzzles once upon a time; I remember sitting in my room in Stockton trying to solve the puzzles along with the hosts and the guest. I was pretty good at it, as I recall, almost always as good as the guest. Perhaps practice would help me get back up to that level so that I would not find humiliation in the kiddie section of Leonard's copy of Games Magazine.

I only have the radio on this morning to wait for "A Prairie Home Companion" to come on at 11. But that means I have to listen to "Car Talk." Ew. I'll turn it off and trust myself to remember to turn it back on at 11.

But here's the NPR Weekend Edition Sunday puzzle. Take the letters N Y X M. What comes next? It may or may not be a letter of the alhpabet, and, as it's an "international" puzzle, doesn't rely on the English language. Send an email to puzzle@npr.org -- 1 entry per person -- by Thursday, 3pm Eastern time (USA), with your name and daytime phone number.

Weekend with Seth. Friday night I went to a party or two. I'd have had more fun if I hadn't been so severely sleep-deprived from staying up late that night with Katie. Goodbye, Lia, and best wishes to Laura, and I have to go now to sleep.

Seth and I went to San Francisco the next day and I read the second half of Existence and Uniqueness and was very impressed. As I told Seth later, if I had a copy of his poem at my house, I would probably read little bits of it as often as I read little bits of Cryptonomicon. Certainly it affected me and triggered many thoughts regarding love and my personal history.

Duncan was kind enough to drive us to Sixth and Mission or so, where Seth and I ate dinner at a recommended Vietnamese restaurant, "Tu-Lan."

We went to a Dar Williams concert at the Warfield, nearby. The security searched my bag briefly -- the first time since Russia that an authority figure has searched me or my stuff. And I saw Darin there! Darin, who wheedled me into joining the OCF, and whom I met one day on Dwinelle Plaza by complimenting him because he was wearing a PGP shirt (I think).

The opener, one Matt Nathanson, was really a stand-up comedian disguised as a rock star, or, as I put it, a rock asteroid.

"This song, like many of my others, has lyrics that don't really make sense. I do that a lot. I mean, lyrics not making sense -- that's rock. That and signing breasts. And since I don't do any of the latter..."
Both Nathanson and Williams play the guitar, which reminds me of Leonard, and reminds me faintly of some musical criticism that Dan and I once did of "The Kids Ain't All Right" by The Offspring. Also, a few people in my high school journalism class -- of which I was reminded recently by looking through my sister's high school yearbook and seeing pictures of me and stories I wrote -- sometimes hung around and played the guitar instead of working. I've always been a sucker for an acoustic guitar.

"You can guess this one, since all my songs start in G."

There were a lot of other fun moments at the concert and I might refer to them in a later diary. I like Dar Williams's low-key sense of humor, and her songs made me want to write more poetry. I'll be posting my first sonnet in years here in a few days.

Plumbing. My toilet has developed a clogged drain thanks to (I assume) an overdose of toilet paper. Plunging and drain unclogging chemicals don't seem to work yet. Next step: calling the manager of the apartment complex.

Reading. I'm not yet done with Newton's Cannon, and I'm almost halfway done with Good Omens by Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett. This is the third time that I've picked up Good Omens, and I hope this time I'll finish it. Other stuff always gets in the way, somehow. I really like Good Omens and I'm starting to see why people rave about both Gaiman and Pratchett.

Link. John pointed me to Seanbaby's dumb-lawsuit expose. I'm assuming he especially liked the preposition-buzzword form on the first page.

More both-and thinking. "Make love AND war."

"A Melody Out of Darkness" is the one-man show by my new friend David Poznanter, whom I met at Katie's friend's party on Thursday night. Neat fella. It's "about a young man struggling to come to terms with his family's Holocaust experiences as well as his own experiences with anti-Semitism." Traditional Yiddish folksongs and music performed by Estradasphere accompany the drama. It's Friday, October 26, at 8pm, at Porter College Dining Hall at UC Santa Cruz. Cost: less than $8 for most of y'all. More info at 831-459-2857.

Originally published by Sumana Harihareswara at http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2001/10/21/163442/41
Filed under: Reading

22 Oct 2001, 10:37AM GMT+5:30: Usability, Wobegon, Segfault, Potter:

Today in my life. An hour and a half of handball (making up absences) rather than just half an hour, a Russian test on which I probably got some type of B, a good history lecture about the Decembrists, a spurt of UNIX learning, more fruitless attempts to get NewsBruiser running on my OCF webspace (durn CGI wrapper), and a bit of studying and reading Good Omens sandwiched among constructive conversations with Leonard, Alexei, and my sister.

Tomorrow: a test and a comedy show! I referred to both of these in diary entries in the past week, in case you want to know more.

"Gay hero emerges from hijackings." A fella who graduated from my college and who happens -- happened, I should say -- to be gay helped avert the hijacking on Flight 93 on September eleventh. ("He didn't emerge. He died. His heroism survived," a friend nitpicks.) This reminds me of statues to Crispus Attucks.

Segfault sez: "If Shakespeare Wrote Error Messages" has jumped to #14 in the Top Stories of All Time! I'm glad. Up from #15. Yee-ha. Public approbation: terrific.

No false patriotism here. Fraudulency is still up, despite any alleged obligation of patriotism and support for our kind-of-elected leaders during "all of this."

Heavens, they're tasty! What is so "tasty and expeditious" about Prairie Home Companion's Powder Milk Biscuits? My private explanation: they're high in fiber and help "shy persons"; connect the dots. Incidentally, I scored 8 out of ten (would have been 9 if I had better motor skills) on the Lake Wobegon trivia quiz at the Prairie Home site.

Usability issue. Okay, I'm not sure whose fault this is. I think it's mine. Because there's sooooo much documentation out there for new *nix users, right? So it must be my fault that I have never, until today, read some useful, clear documentation on how to install software on a Unix system. I came across this, half-despairing, after about a year of trying and failing to find the answers in man pages, my O'Reilly Running Linux, and HOWTOs. This lecture finally told me, in plain and simple language, what the several steps are for making something useful out of some foo.tar.gz file. And, since that's the format for almost everything I've ever run into, argh that I lost a year of useful computing because .... well, because not only do I get no signals from my environment as to what to do, but even when I sought out directions, I couldn't understand them.

Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Taliban. Er, Azkaban. But seriously, folks, Goblet of Fire, the most recent Harry Potter novel, certainly alludes to terrorism, albeit magical.

I think I gave that book back to Dan, but maybe I could skim some passages again at a bookstore or something. The Harry Potter books really do get more thought-provoking and morally complex as the series progresses. I'm looking forward to seeing J.K. Rowling's next work.

Originally published by Sumana Harihareswara at http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2001/10/23/13712/233
Filed under: Reading

23 Oct 2001, 06:27PM: First post!

23 Oct 2001, 11:20PM: Just saw and performed in the Squelch! Comedy Night at Blake's on Telegraph. That last sentence had an unusual number of capitalizations, I must say.

Al Madrigal, the second banana, was much funnier than Mickey Joseph, the headliner, who forged on with his act despite his Berkeley audience's decidedly cool response to racial-stereotype humor.

My puns didn't go over so well (perhaps the intoxicated members of the audience couldn't parse "Pepsi and Coke are known vectors of E-Cola" quickly enough), but my "Berkeley questions for a Berkeley sex advice column" bit got 'em laughing and I exited relatively gracefully.

Poor Seth tried to come by and couldn't because he lacked a photo ID. Grrr. But I did see Leonard and Sunil and other acquaintances.

24 Oct 2001, 07:02AM: Leonard: Happy Wodehouse anniversary.

I must mention that Leonard, with his characteristic fiendish cleverness, used a plunger to unclog my toilet the other day. The nonstandard drainpipe shape didn't daunt him. Huzzah!

24 Oct 2001, 08:04AM: Salon's Mulholland Drive dissection reminds me of Kafka's The Trial. I read that in a seminar my freshman year of college. I'm glad I read it, if only so that I can knowledgably call situations "Kafkaesque."

24 Oct 2001, 08:41AM: Who knew I'd ever be messing with server-side includes?:

I'm working with Leonard to get NewsBruiser running at my OCF webspace. Well, that's a lie, as it's already working, but the address is the unwieldy http://www.ocf.berkeley.edu/~sumanah/cgi-bin/index.cgi, so I'm learning about server-side includes. I've played around with 'em this morning, and must be doing something wrong, even though I can't tell what.

http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2001/10/24/114148/21

24 Oct 2001, 09:02AM: Who knew I'd ever be messing with server-side includes?

I'm working with Leonard to get NewsBruiser running at my OCF webspace. Well, that's a lie, as it's already working, but the address is the unwieldy http://www.ocf.berkeley.edu/~sumanah/cgi-bin/index.cgi, so I'm learning about server-side includes. I've played around with 'em this morning, and must be doing something wrong, even though I can't tell what.

(Originally posted at http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2001/10/24/114148/21)

24 Oct 2001, 09:40AM: So I'm done archiving around a third of my Kuro5hin.org diary entries. There are around 200 of them. I'm glad that I now have at least that many in webspace that I control, but I really want to just complete the transition, convert all of them to entries that NewsBruiser understands, and be able to point people to my personal site and just post a link to K5 every once in a while.

Gotta get dressed and ready for handball.

24 Oct 2001, 01:34PM: Handball really tired me out. More sleep would have been better. By the end of the 35 minutes, I could hardly even serve worth a darn, much less hit serves that came off two walls before I could reach them.

In Russian, I made a puppet out of a brown paper bag, and learned that the word "vrag" means both "marriage" and "deficiency."

Lunch with Steve at Mario's La Fiesta. The cashier noticed that my hair has grown much longer, and complimented me on it. Sometimes I forget how attentive service personnel can be when they see me day after day after day.

On our way to lunch, we passed through this Berkeley USA patriotism fest. Flags, Garth-Brooks-sounding music, flags, signs (a few dissenters, thank goodness), flags, flags, flags. People passed out flags and flag representations.

Obnoxious guy: "Everyone needs a flag!"
Me: "You're wrong."
I felt physically nauseous. Patriotism of this sort, emotion unalloyed by any logic aside from "My country, right or wrong, my country," can find itself used for good and for evil equally easily. Don't they know that? Have none of these people ever taken a history class?

24 Oct 2001, 06:39PM: I should not have forgotten to mention that today, as part of our lunch extravaganza, Steve gave me some CDs of music, and that we had one of the first geeky conversations I've ever felt comfortable having. Perhaps this was because I participated equally and never felt in over my head. (We were discussing, among other things, the problem he recently had with sendmail and the problems I had recently installing NewsBruiser.)

Also, I got to see the "scary chemicals" box in his lab. I think some of that stuff is twice as old as I am. And something like a million times as deadly!

25 Oct 2001, 10:47AM: T-shirt, seen yesterday: "Bush isn't any smarter than he was on Sept. 11th." Yes, I live in Berkeley.

Also yesterday, I met a fella on the BART who used his ticket to Burning Man as a bookmark for his Foundation Trilogy volume. His e-mail domain was avocadolounge.org, which reminded me of Seth's ex.

I unreasonably love the sight of West Oakland from a BART train, especially after emerging from the tunnel under the Bay. I love the lights at night and the industrial yards in the daytime, especially the early morning. I think it appeals to me partly because I have a perfect view, neither on the ground nor miles above (as in a plane), but skimming along 50 or 100 feet up.

25 Oct 2001, 10:50AM: The Peter Thomas Hair Salon at Virginia and Shattuck in Berkeley (510-843-0697) puts classified ads in the Daily Cal asking for models for free haircuts. Today I'll take advantage of their offer for the third time. It's a good place with very expensive stylists, and they always satisfy me, so it's worth the two hours with a trainee. Also, the owner has a lovely British accent, and sometimes I get to hear it.

Since the haircut will take place from 5 till 7 pm, I'll miss the Objectivist lecture on "How the Ivory Towers Destroyed the Twin Towers" or whatever. Oh darn.

25 Oct 2001, 10:58AM: The Daily Californian amuses both deliberately and inadvertently. The most reliable source of amusement of either sort usually arrives in the Daily Horoscope by one Sydney Omarr. (Syndicated, I hope.)

Every weekday, I read the celebrity birthday paragraph, which usually tries for some inappropriate astrological spin. Often Omarr tries to convince us that such-and-so appreciates and uses astrology in her everyday life, or that the stars have something special in wait for her. Today: Billy Crystal. The killer passage:

His "ruling" planet, Neptune, makes him sensitive to the degree of being psychic. It turns out that Billy Crystal can make you laugh and at the same time read your mind.
This is no surprise to those of us who saw Analyze This.

25 Oct 2001, 04:29PM: I sat in on the other TA's discussion section of Political Psychology but left early. A fire alarm interrupted Russian. Political Psychology lecture might have been useful, but I fell asleep and didn't care so much.

On the up side, I got to eat well on my sister's dime at a place called Downtown at Addison and Shattuck, I made a large painting of a happy face, and Stephen McCamant at the OCF helped me understand the not-so-unreasonable reasons why I had difficulties -- and still do -- with server-side includes.

I have to go get my haircut now.

25 Oct 2001, 07:16PM: I actually like the quote/fortune that the bottom of Slashdot featured for me just now:

"But this one goes to eleven." -- Nigel Tufnel

25 Oct 2001, 11:24PM: My haircut reminds me that my previous hair arrangement did not look terrific. I like this one a great deal better.

Earlier today, something -- perhaps some idle notion that someone "had issues," or was neurotic -- reminded me of "She's Got Issues," a song by The Offspring. The one and only time I have ever seen the video for "She's Got Issues," I was in a bad restaurant, "Cafe Fiesta" or something, on Nyevskii Prospekt in St. Petersburg, Russia. The television played Russian MTV and for some reason this video played as I ate my fries and ketchup. Ketchup costs extra, most places in Russia.

25 Oct 2001, 11:30PM: Trials and Travails

I'm writing several times a day now at the new location, http://www.ocf.berkeley.edu/~sumanah/cgi-bin/view.cgi/weblog, and working to get some less bulky address working as well. Today: I got a haircut and reminisced a bit about Russia.

(Originally posted at http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2001/10/26/23023/162)

26 Oct 2001, 12:09AM: I'll just stay up long enough to archive July, and then I'll go to sleep, I promise.

26 Oct 2001, 12:49AM: All right, I lied. I won't be finishing all of July tonight. Maybe if I have some free time tomorrow morning. I'm not setting my alarm, I'll tell you that right now. I'm sleeping as much as my body wants. (Of course, it'll panic and wake me at 7 or 8, but that'll be its fault and none of my own. My misfortune, yes, but not my fault.)

26 Oct 2001, 09:47AM: Oi! Five messages in my inbox when I wake up, and four of them are from actual people I know, including Susanna wishing to see a picture of my haircut (perhaps next time I see Leonard and his Magical Digicam?) and the guy I met on the BART train. (It's so nice that I can just say "Google me" instead of giving out e-mail or URL.)

Dan e-mailed me in his capacity as www@ocf to give me tips with regard to my NewsBruiser problems. I find this humorous.

As out-of-context pictures of Bill Gates go, this one rocks.

26 Oct 2001, 10:21AM: I am assuming that, if one searches for "sumana" via any relevant search engine, one of the last URLs that will actually refer to me is the alt.fan.dave_barry FAQ. That list is how I met Josh Brockman, of Maine, now at Washington University in St. Louis, which is where Steve Weber did his undergraduate work. Steve Weber is now a professor at UC Berkeley and I do research with him on the organization of open-source projects. Josh was one of the first people I ever met -- well, I never met him in meatspace, if it comes to that -- who made me feel inadequately geeky. He's a Mac guy, like Dan. Last I checked, Josh liked making golf clubs and hot-rodding cars and Ben Folds Five.

Enough reminiscing. Gotta eat a complete breakfast of toast and Nutella and get to Russian.

26 Oct 2001, 10:28AM: Last night, boarding the 43, I think I might have seen Eve, the pseudonymic administrator of InPassing.org. A nice-looking girl holding an O'Reilly book was a bit exasperated when some other woman accused her of trying to cut in line when she had only seen no one else going forward and had, thus, done so herself. Certainly everything I saw in her demeanor fit my "Eve" internal representation, but perhaps that means little. I'd just like to think I'm in on the secret.

26 Oct 2001, 12:19PM:

"But doctor, why? Why did you create a bomb to destroy all of pop culture?"
"People have become obsessed with the nonsense that the mass media tell them is important! People never talk about anything real anymore, like love! Or Israel!"
-paraphrase of an excerpt from a Fresh Robots act

26 Oct 2001, 12:50PM: I'm tired and blue and I misspelled "brag" as "vrag" a few days ago and I spend this weekend without most of my friends.

But I received a substantial injection of cheer this morning in Russian when Zhenia, my Russian instructor, put a video on. It was "Live from Moscow, Stage II"! John spoke of it so highly, back during the summer! I met Misha and Dennis and Olya and Tania! Olya and Zhenia resemble each other a lot.

26 Oct 2001, 01:17PM: I used to do tech writing for money during the summers. If I'd had fun stuff to write, like this, maybe I wouldn't have gotten sick of it.

26 Oct 2001, 03:10PM: I'm not certain what in my Russian Imperial History class reminded me of Shirin Bakhshay and a song by Cake, "Going the Distance", that she liked back when we were in French class together in high school. Shirin is now at Cal, where I'm sure she's doing well.

It's not a bad song.

26 Oct 2001, 03:18PM GMT+5:30: It's easier to trace the mental map to my next reference. Russia in this period had serfdom, autocracy, all sorts of arbitrariness in its political system.

"I am not a Know-Nothing. That is certain. How could I be? How can any one who abhors the oppression of negroes, be in favor of degrading classes of white people? Our progress in degeneracy appears to me to be pretty rapid. As a nation we began by declaring that "all men are created equal." We now practically read it "all men are created equal, except negroes." Soon it will read "all men are created equal, except negroes, and foreigners, and catholics." When it comes to this, I should prefer emigrating to some country where they make no pretense of loving liberty--to Russia, for instance, where despotism can be taken pure, and without the base alloy of hypocracy [sic]." -- Abraham Lincoln, Letter to Joshua F. Speed, Aug. 24, 1855

I didn't know those first few sentences there until just now. Also, I predict that someday someone will search for "Degeneracy," looking for the game, and will find this entry, which has nothing to do with the game.

Filed under: Reading

26 Oct 2001, 03:27PM: It's Sunday. Yes, it's always Sunday here at Sumana's Journal. Even when it's Friday, as it is today.

I don't know why NewsBruiser is stamping every message with "Sunday" when all the rest of the timestamnp (month, date, time, year) is correct. I've told Leonard, and I gave him all the info he asked for, so I assume he's on the road to fixing it.

Maybe this is some sort of cosmic balancing act, involving several people, that makes up for TGI Friday's.

26 Oct 2001, 09:04PM: Leonard done fixed up a heap of stuff for me. So real soon now you'll be seeing bits of the diary on my homepage or something really convenient like that.

Also, he discovered some weirdness with how the OCF's installation of python handles strings. This is what made the timestamp on all my entries think it was Sunday. So, until that gets resolved, the day-of-the-week portion of the timestamp is on hiatus.

27 Oct 2001, 09:06AM: I'm still messing around with site design, but now I at least have a reasonable this-month newest-entry-first page up at http://www.ocf.berkeley.edu/~sumanah/ces.shtml. And, as you may have noticed, the new name of the journal is Cogito, ergo Sumana, which is an offhand creation of Leonard's and is possibly the best wordplay on my name that I've ever heard.

27 Oct 2001, 09:47AM: I'll be busy this weekend, so I won't be updating much till Sunday evening, I expect. At least I've gotten some more archiving done.

27 Oct 2001, 06:13PM: Idea for a really patriotic bumper sticker: "My other car is an American flag."

27 Oct 2001, 06:29PM: At least I know people will miss me now that I'm leaving Kuro5hin.org as a diary-hosting site. It's always nice to know I'm missed when I leave something or someone behind.

I've been thinking recently about how it'll be when I leave UC Berkeley, and I'll probably move to some new city, maybe even outside California, and how lonely I'll be and how much I'll miss my friends, and how I'll wonder whether they miss me. E-mail and even chat are no substitutes for dinner and walks and conversation. And phone calls get expensive. I wonder whether I might indulge my taste for solitude and actually get creative work done, or whether I might find new opportunities to make friends (Linux User Groups and bookstores and the like). Or both.

27 Oct 2001, 06:47PM: So last night I dreamt that -- much as in the movie Antitrust that John and I mocked in the plane on the way to Frankfurt -- some young hotshot programmer got chased down by henchmen of a Microsoft-like company. In my dream, the company was Microsoft, and the Ryan Phillipe-type had pointed out privacy and/or architectural problems with Passport and/or .NET (in hopes of impressing MS with his skillz such that they would give him a job). For this, goons tracked him down until he and his family levitated to Prague.

I don't quite get that last part.

28 Oct 2001, 03:53PM: Back from my 30-hour trip to & from Stockton via Davis and Sunnyvale. I have a lot of stuff to say. First of all, though, I have to remember to set my few clocks back an hour. Daylight Savings madness. Dave Barry once joked that DST was a mad plot by drunken government employees to see if they could get the citizenry to change its clocks twice a year without knowing why. So far, so good.

28 Oct 2001, 03:56PM: I dreamt last night that I reconciled with my old archnemesis from high school, Suzanne R. She goes to Stanford now. I'll send her an email sometime soon asking how things are going. I've changed an awful lot in three-odd years. Maybe she has, too.

28 Oct 2001, 04:02PM: I am sure that I am not the first person to note that the openings to Dar Williams's "The Christians and the Pagans" and the Indigo Girls' "Closer to Fine" are pretty darn similar.

Have the Indigo Girls ever performed "Mood Indigo"?

28 Oct 2001, 04:19PM: An incomplete list of stuff I've lost.

28 Oct 2001, 07:31PM GMT+5:30: It would be completely unscientific to conclude, on the basis of one evening's anecdotal evidence, that people who ride the BART on Sunday night tend to read more highbrow material than the average BART rider. But an hour ago, the folks transferring at MacArthur were carrying such works as:

Just after I noticed this, Kavalier Man and I struck up a conversation. He asked what good books I'd read lately. I suggested The Orwell Reader, Lady Chatterley's Lover, and Newton's Cannon, and gave my considered disapproval of The Name of the Rose. He said that he read a lot in high school and then tired of reading all the time. I didn't get a chance to tell him that I now spend a lot of time with friends that I used to spend reading, and that I now actually consider declining social activities to make time for books.

Filed under: Reading

28 Oct 2001, 07:39PM GMT+5:30: Oh, the last thing that Kavalier man said to me before we parted ways was, "Have you read Siddhartha?" Yes, I have! Siddhartha and Steppenwolf, I think, are the two Hesse works I've read. Right after I acquired them, I recall sitting in a restaurant with Dan when some stranger asked me whether I knew the names of four works by Hesse. I almost got it. Steppenwolf, Damien, Siddhartha, and another. I forgot it then and I forget it now.

Filed under: Reading

28 Oct 2001, 07:47PM: From Leonard's favorite philosophical tract this week:

Then we replicate in drama what we were spared in history.

Darn, and I got a hall pass, too!

28 Oct 2001, 09:50PM: Today I had lunch at a house with a Silicon valley couple and its tot. I played with the kiddie's Tinkertoys, the first time I've ever played with Tinkertoys that I can remember. I wish I'd played more with such toys as a child. Maybe now I'd be more of an engineering type and I wouldn't have to worry as much about finding a job.

The father, an Oracle employee, asked me for some explanation of IBM's pro-Linux strategy, especially in view of direct competition between AIX and GNU/Linux. I explained it as follows: IBM understands that, in the end, the conflict is between Microsoft's closed standards and the rest of the world's open standards, and since IBM had to pick a side, it realized that it's best to ally with the player who won't eat you.

I'm not certain why I felt uneasy giving this explanation. It's just an obvious application of open-standards advocacy rhetoric to a real-world situation. I think perhaps I'm just not comfortable giving these opinions as my own when I didn't come up with them and yet I can't cite any one source where I got them.

28 Oct 2001, 10:00PM: Before I turn in for the night -- Rick Starr has returned to campus! He's a lounge-singer type what hangs around Sproul Plaza -- usually nearer Bancroft Way than Sather Gate or Ludwig's Fountain -- and sings Sinatra-type songs. He used to hold a microphone whose cord trailed off into nothingness, but I didn't see it when I saw him last week.

What sort of destructive nostalgia makes me glad to see someone with probable mental illness and a tragic personal history return to entertain me?

29 Oct 2001, 09:26AM: At Balboa Park BART station I often see an ad for Contentville. The poster's background features several -- maybe forty -- words and phrases which ostensibly represent subjects one could research via Contentville, e.g., snowboarding, brain surgery, Colin Powell. One of the phrases is "Kevin Mitnick." The only two I didn't recognize were "Joseph J. [something]" and "Herbert Marcuse."

This reminds me of the time that Leonard and I took a practice Miller Analogies Test. Leonard did better than I. Grrr.

29 Oct 2001, 09:30AM: Alexei and I discussed a while back the myth-motif of The Woman Who Has A Secret And You Can't Ask Her About It Ever. Examples abound. Usually the man falls in love with the woman, and she makes him promise never to ask about, oh, the way she kills each baby a day after she gives birth, or where she came from, or where she goes every Sunday morning. And then he asks and something horrible happens.

Well, Modern Humorist's take points out the other side of the coin, and I love it.

29 Oct 2001, 12:39PM: It would seem that John Searle got picketed at one of his public appearances. We in the OCF made great fun of this.

"People who protest John Searle are just making him feel more important than he really is."
"So, what, people stand around with signs reading 'Computers Can Think'?"
"No, all the signs are in symbolic logic."

29 Oct 2001, 12:45PM: Even before I knew consciously how absurd most marketing tactics and political rhetoric sound to a conscious ear, The Tick made me laugh very, very hard. Today's IMDB quote:

Tick: Everybody was a baby once, Arthur. Oh, sure, maybe not today, or even yesterday. But once! Babies, chum: tiny, dimpled, fleshy mirrors of our us-ness, that we parents hurl into the future, like leathery footballs of hope! And you've got to get a good spiral on that baby, or evil will make an interception!

29 Oct 2001, 01:04PM: My two main TV-watching experiences this weekend belonged to "Touched by an Angel" and the TV-edited version of In & Out.

Touched by an Angel. This CBS prime-time drama/anthology (Saturday nights) has s very heavily (if implicitly) Christian point of view. Angels come to various parts of the USA and help people with their problems and losses of faith in the Lord. This episode focused on Jews, surprisingly. Then again, I imagine Christians and Jews are really the only groups the show can do before running into real difficulty reconciling its Christian mythos and point-of-view and the possible goodness of the human characters. (It's high time for Monica, Andrew, and the rest of the gang to run into some sympathetic Muslims, I think.)

I generally disagree with the arguments presented in this show, and Saturday night's episode confirmed the trend. For example, in earlier episodes the Internet has been portrayed as a family-dividing porn conveyor belt. Er, no. And this time, a Jewish cartoonist who mocked Jewish foibles (the plot of the show had it) encouraged skinheads to vandalize a synagogue. Not all culture-specific humor is offensive, I'd venture.

One interesting point in the show, to me, came when the angel claimed that a Jew had interpreted a bit in the Torah too strictly. At least the show got the text-based nature of Judaism right.

More on In & Out later.

29 Oct 2001, 02:00PM: Lunch with Brandon.

"So, I have it from reliable sources that, in case of catastrophe, war, plague, famine, whatever, we only need a thousand people to survive. A thousand people, and the human race can go on."
"But that's only if they're in the same place. They have to find each other."
"You're right. We need to arrange a meeting place, right now!"
"Is Sather Gate good for you?"

29 Oct 2001, 02:03PM: I wanted to go see Barbara Ehrenreich speak from noon to one. But she was speaking at North Gate, which is a rather distant walk from Dwinelle, where my 11-12 Russian class meets, and I'd have had to leave the talk early to meet Brandon for lunch. I'll just make do with what I've read by and about her in Salon and Slate.

I have learned more about politics and political science from reading Slate than I have from at least one of the political science classes I've taken at UC Berkeley.

29 Oct 2001, 04:01PM GMT+5:30: Why must Bad Subjects texts be such wankery? Why is "I was ready for punk rock." the first simple declarative sentence in this analysis-cum-memoir of The Prisoner?

Filed under: Reading

29 Oct 2001, 04:26PM: In & Out: This 1997 Kevin Kline comedy focuses on an Indianan high school teacher whose former student says he's gay when he's not. Amusing and farcical.

I first watched this flick with Angel, years ago. I had forgotten that the "I'm Spartacus!" scene at the end of the film actually works. Joan Cusack, as the teacher's fiancée, seems too over-the-top (I liked her better in High Fidelity) -- perhaps this is what doomed the recent ABC comedy "What About Joan?". Finally, I gladly noticed the open ending; less hopeful than Dave, perhaps, but I can live without the saccharine hope of Dave for a while.

29 Oct 2001, 04:58PM: The Sunnyvale Hindu temple -- one of the temples where my family regularly worships and socializes -- renovates and renovates and renovates. But the altar is always there, the children always run around and play, the women always sing, the bell always sounds the same when the priests ring it, and the shoes always lie askew on the ground and the floor near the shoe-shelves.

For years, in one of the multipurpose spaces, a large advertisement has hung on the wall. It reads:

SPICE HOUSE
www.HATHIBRAND.com
"The HATHI BRAND People"
[a seal depicting two elephants' heads, raised in joy, and the words "HATHI BRAND TRADE MARK"]
Union City, California

This poster has hung in that temple for years. Yesterday I visited the website. After a fancy animated splash screen, most of it displays a fancy animated "Under Construction" logo.

In the five years since that poster went up, you'd think they'd have had time to add some product info. Maybe it took this long to animate the "Under Construction" image.

29 Oct 2001, 05:21PM: Joel Spolsky points to a paper on writing, written by a Harvard philosophy prof for his students.

First, texts on good writing depress me, because I usually treat them as a hypochondriac would guidelines on good health. "I'm not doing this or this or this. Oh, I'm so awful. I can't do anything right." And so on.

Second, the professor's advice on overusing connective words reminds me of Mr. Hatch's warnings on the same topic. The professor says, "Don't throw in a 'thus' or a 'therefore' to make your train of thought sound more logical than it really is." Mr. Hatch warned us against using such signposts as "toothpicks in the swamp."

Finally, philosophy as a discipline also gets me down, since I already feel as though I'm not really learning anything in college, and I don't have the rigor of mind to pick apart dense arguments. I suppose the way to combat that feeling might be to go home and catch up on some reading.

29 Oct 2001, 08:23PM: I just received a spam...wait, is "spam" a collective noun, like "water" or "meat," or some item, like "can" or "book"?

Anyway, I received an unsolicited commercial e-mail advertising life insurance. One line: "Attention All Smokers, you may qualify for special reduced smoker rates!" Shouldn't smokers, since they die earlier and thus pay in less money in premiums (premia?) before they cash out, have higher rates? Are the actuaries completely out to lunch on this deal?

30 Oct 2001, 08:09AM: Seth: Thank goodness I'm not the only one who confuses Jakob Nielsen and Joel Spolsky. I assume Spolsky would take that as a compliment and Nielsen wouldn't; I see references to Nielsen on Spolsky's page but no references to Spolsky on Nielsen's.

I read Spolsky for my usability wisdom, since he writes more entertainingly than does Nielsen, but I know that Nielsen's more of an "expert."

30 Oct 2001, 08:11AM GMT+5:30: By the way, I finished Newton's Cannon and liked it. Now I need to read the rest of The Age of Unreason. I'm just glad that this sequel addiction doesn't go for, say, history. "Well, I just read a history of the Civil War, and now ... I don't know what happens next! I need to read about Reconstruction!"

Actually, I can imagine saying that.

Filed under: Reading

30 Oct 2001, 08:30AM GMT+5:30: I've actually caught up a tiny bit on my Russian Imperial History reading, which is quite fortunate, since I have a midterm tomorrow.

Two passages particularly caught my eye. The first, I excerpt from "Memoir on Ancient and Modern Russia" (1811) by Nicholas Karamzin. Karamzin was a conservative historian who didn't like Tsar Alexander I's reforms.

Russia, after all, has been in existence for a thousand years, and not as a savage horde, but as a great state. Yet we are constantly told of new institutions and of new laws, as if we had just emerged from the dark American forests!

Second: One cannot discuss the history of Russian revolutions without mentioning the Decembrists. In 1825 tight cadres of (mostly) educated nobles, officers in the army, tried to overthrow the government. One reason for their dissatisfaction: during the Napoleonic Wars and subsequent occupations, Russian officers spent time in Western Europe. How embarrassing they found it to say, "We are fighting for the freedom of humanity, against Napoleon's tyranny," and have to answer for Russian serfdom!

A. Bestuzhev wrote, in a letter to Tsar Nicholas I analyzing the uprising:

The army, from generals to privates, upon its return, did nothing but discuss how good it is in foreign lands. A comparison with their own country naturally brought up the question, Why should it not be so in our own land?

At first, as long as they talked without being hindered, it was lost in the air, for thinking is like gunpowder, only dangerous when pressed....

Filed under: Reading

30 Oct 2001, 09:35AM: So a bunch of flies decided to make my apartment their home for the winter. This was very, highly, intensely gross to me. I've only partly recovered from extreme childhood phobia of insects.

But half of the grossness of a *shudder* infestation *cringe* is not the critters themselves, but the steps one takes to get rid of the things. Which are grosser, live flies or dead flies? I hate insect spray but I use it anyway.

30 Oct 2001, 01:21PM: The BEARCade, UC Berkeley's gaming facility, is selling off some of its arcade games for a few hundred bucks each. Galaga, SMASH TV, Rampage, Soul Caliber, and Tetris. That last one costs only two hundred dollars. I won't buy it, but you might want to.

You can (as far as I can tell) contact the manager of the arcade, Janet Bilbas, via email (j_bilbas@uclink4.berkeley.edu) or phone (510-642-1269).

30 Oct 2001, 01:34PM: At least three of my partners in diarizing have somewhat recently encountered insect problems in their homes: Steve ("Everyone dies, even the queen"), Seth (ants and peppermint oil), and Leonard ("political intrigue").

30 Oct 2001, 01:44PM: So Leonard was singing "Big Rock Candy Mountain" the other day, so of course I sought the lyrics:
http://www.niehs.nih.gov/kids/lyrics/bigrock.htm
It does seem a little bit absurd to me that, on the one hand, this page encourages kids to learn the song, and on the other hand, it takes such pains to tell the kiddies that actually living among cigarette trees and lakes of gin would not be a good thing.

30 Oct 2001, 03:58PM: Directors who want believable crowd scenes often (I've been informed) give the extras rather random/nonsense words to repeat. Is this, to coin a tongue twister, an oral lorem ipsum?

30 Oct 2001, 04:00PM: Charlie Chaplin and Adolf Hitler looked very much alike. And both of them hated it.

I found this out last semester in my 1939 Films class.

30 Oct 2001, 05:31PM: I'm never certain how to feel about the Berkeley College Republicans. Aside from the fact that its webpage is out-of-date and Javascript-laden, the organization puts out The Patriot, a magazine that generally contributes little to political discourse and prefers sophomoric attacks and smug back-patting. Yes, I've read an issue or two.

The most recent email from the Berkeley College Republicans might reveal how smug the leadership feels on the "liberal" Berkeley campus. Regarding the Teddy Bear Drive community service initiative:

This is one of our last two community service projects, so please get involved. This is very easy, so no excuses. You are putting a smile on a child's face - a great chance to show we really care and rub it in some crazy liberal's face.

When SANE says that atheists are a marginalized group in the USA, I believe it. I'm less apt to sympathize with the "victim" status of a campus group whose Director of Community Service Initiatives seems comfortable referring to "some crazy liberal" as though those words go together.

30 Oct 2001, 10:15PM: Today I got to read some more of Kenny Byerly's work. I've known Kenny since our freshman year in college, when we both lived in Freeborn Hall. I told Kenny about Segfault, the geek humor site, before I had even met Leonard, and Kenny submitted "Microsoft Bankrupted by Foolish E-mail Giveaway" and now it ranks even above my "If Shakespeare Wrote Error Messages" in the Top Stories of All Time.

Kenny writes terrifically, and I enjoy his stand-up comedy, and he's overall a fun guy with whom to hang out. It seems so even more today than it did three years ago when I watched MST3K for the first time ever in his room in Freeborn. I wonder how much that's because I've changed, and how much is because he has too.

30 Oct 2001, 10:23PM: For about three hours I studied -- well, studied in between conversation -- with Robin for my Russian Imperial History class. The Napoleonic Wars confuse me because there were so many of them and countries kept switching sides and forming Grand Coalitions. I know the knowledge will solidify in my mind eventually, but probably not before tomorrow at 2 p.m.

Tomorrow at 3 p.m. (West Coast time) passes the deadline for applying to Slate's Book Club. I think I'll write something during my lunch break and send it on in, either on Name of the Rose or on Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone. If I'm feeling adventurous, maybe one on each!

31 Oct 2001, 09:03AM: Ray Bradbury is still alive, I infer from his announced public radio appearance (well, not appearance, since it's radio, but you know what I mean) later today.

I'm probably attending at least one Halloween party this weekend. I wonder what I should do for a costume. The really tasteless idea is to go with a friend and have us dress up as the twin World Trade Center towers. The really scary idea is to dress up as John Ashcroft.

31 Oct 2001, 12:15PM: Today is Hallowe'en, Reformation Day (the anniversary of the day that Martin Luther nailed up his [Windows] 95 Theses), and the third day of South Asian Awareness Week at UC Berkeley. So walking on Sproul, I see even more weird garb than usual, I hear familiar Hindi film music, and I stop in my tracks at a table with a sign reading "Tell Us Why You're Not A Christian and We'll Give You a Treat." I thought that last one was a SANE parody of the Christian associations' "Answer One Question and Get a Cookie" table, but it was some other Christian association celebrating Reformation Day.

The people at the Reformation Day table seemed quite amiable. I told them that, although I'm an agnostic, I believe that if there's a God, you don't need a priest to mediate your interaction with Him.

"You're so passionate! You should be a preacher."
"Yeah, 'I'm the agnostic preacher! I don't know, and I'll tell you why!'"

31 Oct 2001, 12:45PM: Susie (of OCF fame) says that "everybody and their mother" has a blog, and proclaims that she will soon set up a parody site with her "blargh." I applaud the endeavor.

31 Oct 2001, 12:57PM GMT+5:30: Yesterday, as I walked home in the dark at 5:45pm or so in the pitch-black night interrupted by soft haloes of streetlights and harsh beams of auto headlights-- the time change still disorients me -- I stopped for a few minutes by Pegasus Bookstore at Durant and Shattuck. Some employee posts poems in the window, and the selection changed a few weeks ago. Last night I read Lewis Carroll's "Jabberwocky" for the first time, I think. I also read a poem entitled "Try to Praise the Mutilated World" by Adam Zagajewski, translated from the Polish by Clare Cavanagh.

When I searched for the text and author of the poem just now, I found that many people have cited it as an appropriate poem to read and think about in the wake of recent terrorist attacks, and that the New Yorker published it in its Sept. 24th issue. I liked it too.

One reason that I really enjoyed "Try to Praise the Mutilated World" is that I thought the imagery struck the right balance between vivid, evocative language and personal interpretability. I like poems that I can closely read to see more. Example: "leaves eddied over the earth's scars."

It's been a while since I read poetry that didn't disgust me. It was uplifting.

Filed under: Reading

31 Oct 2001, 01:15PM: Two dreams.

I've had two dreams recently about the destruction of the world. Usually I don't have nightmares like that, and so I think I can safely say that anxiety about terrorist attacks has influenced my nightlife.

A week or so ago, I dreamt that aliens were going to kill us all or subjugate us, and that they were sending us insidious subliminal messages in artifacts and videos that people watched en masse. At one point, I despaired and thought, "I wish this were a dream," but dismissed it as wishful thinking. (Just after that, a girl and I flew for a bit, under our own power, but this didn't seem too unusual.) I didn't get to see whether the aliens succeeded.

Last night, my dream started out confusing and film-noirish. I was dating someone whom the police were tracking, and agents stodd right outside my bedroom door. But the clear, clear part borrowed from Speed, Big Trouble (the Dave Barry novel), and recent attacks. I carried a duffel bag down an escalator, and if it got to the bottom of the escalator with me, it would explode. My sister and someone else fought me and tried to take away the bomb, but I wanted to destroy, I know not why, and I fought back and got to the bottom of the escalator with the bag, which, now that I think about it, reminds me of Leonard's shoulder bag.

I knew as soon as I saw a flash of light that the bomb had gone off and now it would destroy the entire universe. In one long moment I could see a blue wind and all around me the faces of all the people I had just consigned to oblivion. And I hoped with all my might, hopelessly, that it was a dream, and I felt tremendous sorrow at the infinite loss that I had caused. I had completely destroyed all the precious potential that had ever existed, and it would never return.

Then, I fuzzily remember, I played a large-scale SimAnt game while talking with comedian and actor Paul Reiser. As in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, the middle was more powerful than the beginning or end. Possibly the most powerful dream I've ever had.

31 Oct 2001, 01:33PM GMT+5:30: I applied to join Slate's Book Club using a modified version of my anti-Name of the Rose screed. Wish me luck, less on that than on the midterm I'll take in half an hour. Tsar Nicholas, Tsar Gicholas.

Filed under: Reading

31 Oct 2001, 03:25PM: Done with my last Imperial Russian History midterm, probably the last ever. The questions seemed to ask very little, which made me panic and babble so as to cover the material "thoroughly" and fulfil my expectations of their expectations of an hourlong test.

I used a small bluebook instead of a regular-sized (8 1/2 by 11) one, which might have helped to throw me off.

31 Oct 2001, 10:05PM: Pretty good episodes of West Wing and Enterprise.

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