Henry

Philadelphia Museum of Art

tahnan@suberic.net — Thu, 03 Jul 2008 05:35:17 GMT

On Sunday, my wife and I went to the Philadelphia Museum of Art. For my birthday this year, we went to the Rodin Museum—I fell in love with Rodin as a senior in high school taking AP Art History¹—and, unsurprisingly, I loved it. I love art museums. I entered college with some intent to major in art history, thanks to that high school class. (Thanks, Mrs. Carnes!)

So I was not expecting to be so sorely disappointed.

The first problem with the museum is its layout. There's a floor plan on their website, which may give you some idea, but basically: each floor has two L-shaped wings, with both lines of the L consisting of a central corridor with rooms on either side. The effect is that you've got two choices. You can walk down one side of the corridor, turn the corner and proceed down one side, come back the other, and return to the first corridor to walk down the other side. That'll give you, for instance, European Art from 1850 to 1930, then Modern Art from 1930 to now, and then Modern Art from now to 1930, and then European Art from 1930 to 1850. It's not a great way to get a sense of continuity. Your other option is to zigzag through the L as you go, bouncing from one side room to the other side room and back, and then just backtracking to get out. That's also not so great, all the more so because many of the side rooms are set up as displays ("A Pennsylvania Dutch kitchen", "Sitting room, New York, 1930", and so on): a great way to see furniture in place, perhaps, but also a lot of dead ends that make it all the harder to really get a sense of the flow of art history.

Now, I say all this about the layout because it genuinely affected my viewing. (Hey, Parenth, remember when you were visiting and I said something at dinner about being able to evaluate how well a museum is curated? Behold.) Part of the problem may be the completeness of the collection itself: there were a good number of Monets and Pissaros, but one Van Gogh, one or two Gauguins; generally, very scattershot. I feel like I missed the entire Renaissance, to say nothing of the Mannerists, and I'm not really sure if it's because they just didn't have much by Renaissance artists, or if it's because walking through the museum I was going, "OK, so this is 1550, and this next room...oh, this is Spain back in 1480. I see. Fortunately, on the other side...is that 1650? I guess I want the door over there back to the main corridor...." I like the history part of "art history", not just the art, and it was terribly frustrating to feel that I was getting no sense at all of how art movements came and went, how Mannerism gave way to the Baroque period and how Caravaggio was startlingly new in comparison to all the bright colors his contemporaries were using—that kind of thing.

And oh, there were other problems as well. Some of the plaques had commentary, but rarely did the commentary say anything about the artist or the style; typically it would explain the subject matter. ("Cupid, seen in the upper left, and Psyche, behind him, were....") Some of the side rooms were small. Really small. The "Current Exhibitions" guide we were given at the entrance told us that Gallery 271 was displaying "Imagining Cathay: 18th- and Early 19th-Century Chinoiserie Textiles and Embroideries from the Collection". By "textiles", they meant "five", and by "Gallery 271", they meant "a room half the size of your bedroom". The exhibit was smaller than its titl.

Mind you, it wasn't all bad. The Arms and Armor exhibit was pretty good: a little lacking in chain mail as opposed to plate mail, and a few composite suits, but also a lot of interesting single pieces and a good number of complete suits, both ceremonial and practical. More firearms than I needed, but cool firearms all the same, and no shortage of crossbows, swords, daggers, halberds, glaives—someone there has a real thing about polearms.

I can assure you that I never expected to leave a museum saying, "My favorite part was the modern art."² But it was terrific. I mean, OK, sure, we didn't care for Cy Twombley's ten-piece Fifty Days at Iliam, which looked like it was done in crayon, primarily because it was. But they had a room full of Brancusi sculptures (and in a room bigger than my bathroom, this time). They had an installation called "Black Cloud", as part of Carlos Amorales's Four Animations, Five Drawings, and a Plague; there are a few pictures here. It consists of a ton of black paper butterflies; they cover half the room they're in, spilling into an adjoining stairwell, and delightfully a few have escaped to nearby rooms. And they have a surprisingly good collection of Marcel Duchamp! They actually have Nude Descending a Staircase, and one of his large glass pieces, The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even (The Large Glass). And I got to see Fountain (and a few other pieces from that era)! As with all art, reading about it and seeing photos isn't quite the same as seeing it.

And there was a stunning piece, also by Duchamp, in a room by itself: Given: 1. The Waterfall, 2. The Illuminating Gas. It's confusing: it's a narrow, bare room with a door at the end. We went in. We looked at the door. We said, "Huh", and I was a little confused that the plaque had mentioned such a wide variety of media, including a motor. I almost stepped away, but I considered the eyehole-sized holes in the door, and peeked in... And through the holes, there was this, well, this scene. The background was painted in a perfect 19th century landscape kind of way, though there was a moving waterfall (ah, yes, the motor) in the "distance". In this idyllic room was a sculpture of a woman, naked and sprawled on the ground. Her head wasn't visible. My wife was disturbed. I was delighted—well, disturbed, but delighted by that. Duchamp had turned the art viewer into a voyeur, peeping through holes to see a naked woman...but one in such a classical scene that it suggests that looking at a Renoir painting of a naked woman might be just as voyeuristic. Her lack of a face...did that make it better or worse, more or less voyeuristic? Was she dead? She wasn't moving...but neither are Renoir's paintings or Rodin's sculptures. The overall effect was, to be honest, profound.

Anyway, that was our Sunday. Perhaps the Franklin Institute'll be better, once we get there.

¹A class that fit into the schedules of exactly three of us. I entered the school a year ahead in math, so I didn't have a math course to take senior year. The other two were juniors who'd just transferred and therefore had some similar free slot based on them having already taken something. My high school wasn't really big on "electives".
²Second favorite part: sitting on a bench not far from "Sunflowers" and having a man in his 60s with a midwestern accent walk past me, calling back to his wife, "Hey, I think this one's by Van Gogh!"

Things That Make Me Happy

tahnan@suberic.net — Tue, 24 Jun 2008 18:37:04 GMT

I should post something substantive, but until I do:

1. Where The Hell Is Matt? - You might have seen it already, but if you haven't...it's beautiful. It really is. Apparently, Matt is just this guy who travels and dances badly, and had made a video of himself dancing in various places around the world. This one is the same thing, with other people joining in. And as a concept, it's stupid enough to be funny...but it's just brilliantly beautiful, because I'm maudlin.

2. Youngme - Nowme - It's just a silly little competition, some sort of zefrank thing, and I don't even know what zefrank is. But this one involves people posting two photos: one of them when younger, and a current photo that attempts to recreate the earlier one. And somehow I just find it really joyful. The care that people put into recreating these old photos of themselves is really cool. Also, it shows dedication and cleverness, and I like dedication and cleverness.

Anyway, I should head to the coffeeshop to work.

A letter to the band at the Green Line Cafe

tahnan@suberic.net — Fri, 20 Jun 2008 00:41:02 GMT

Dear band,

I have no problem at all with musicians playing in coffeeshops. It's often quite pleasant, and I'm all in favor of local musicians getting their start somewhere.

I do have a problem with someone coming up to me at the table where I've been sitting for hours and telling me that, if I'm going to be there while the band plays, they suggest a $5 donation.

By all means put out a bucket with a sign asking for tips. But asking me to pay to hear music I don't care about in a venue where I've already paid my "rent"...screw you.

Love, me.

Needlessly annoyed

tahnan@suberic.net — Wed, 18 Jun 2008 06:47:52 GMT

I'm really annoyed at the commercials for DragonBall Z: Whatever It Is, which features various people yelling what seems to be a battle cry of one of the characters: Kamehameha. Pronounced "KAH-may KAH-may HA!" It makes me want to write a game with the battle cry "Akihito", pronounced "Achy-high-TOE". Jerks.

Huh.

tahnan@suberic.net — Sat, 19 Apr 2008 04:32:56 GMT

...there was a third possibility that we hadn't even counted upon...

Déjà résolu

tahnan@suberic.net — Wed, 02 Apr 2008 09:17:34 GMT

Hey, friendslist puzzlers, especially those who worked for Games Magazine in the '80s.

Tanga, a website I've pointed to in the past for the astonishingly low quality of some of its puzzles, had an interesting pair of puzzles today. Here's the "hard" one; the easy one looks identical but, cleverly, has a different solution. Even the hard one didn't take me long, though.

That's because I'd seen the puzzle before. In fact, it appears in the Games collection The Book of Sense and Nonsense Puzzles (see here; skip to page 9), (c) 1985, so it presumably appeared in Games somewhat earlier.

Question 1: did this guy Arnott ever work for Games? Did he write this crossword? (In the book, it's credited unhelpfully to Margot Seides, which someone clued me in several years ago is an anagram, enumeration "5 7".)

Question 2: anyone, especially anyone with a vested interest in this (e.g. a copyright holder), have thoughts on how to proceed? Because speaking as both a puzzler and an academic, there's pretty much nothing I hate more than plagiarism.

IMDb thoughts

tahnan@suberic.net — Sat, 15 Mar 2008 08:52:35 GMT

I don't want to complain about the IMDb, but...no, wait, yes I do.

It was nearly fifty years ago that Tom Lehrer explained that "the reason most folk songs are so atrocious is that they were written by the people". I think the IMDb is a terrifically useful site, but that perhaps some of its user-created content could go away without any real loss. For instance, there are now, if you missed it, pages for movie and TV characters. These can be useful; you might in fact want to know which people have played Superman. Of course, it gets silly rather quickly, as with the entry for, say, Baltimore State Forensic Hospital Caretaker.

Ultimately, though, the problem at this point is that we're deep into user-submitted territory here. And thus you get the following bio for Jack Sheridan, a character from second-season "Charmed":

Jack Sheridan, a cheeky charmer, was Prue Halliwell's inorhodox rival in the arts trade but gets employed in Rex Buckland's Auction House and becomes her partner, clearly into her but finding her extremely hard to get, yet succeeds becoming her boyfriend for a short period of time in season 2. He and his twin brother, Jeff, play a game whenever they find interest in a girl, checking out the female "merchandize". He and Prue date separate for good when she quits her job at Bucklands.

I'd tell you how many basic grammatical errors there are in that brief paragraph, but frankly I lost count.

You also get the rather unfortunte effect that, according to his IMDb page, Professor James Moriarty is a character from "Star Trek: The Next Generation" (1987).

So, yeah. Perhaps there's a point at which the Wikipedia, anyone-can-contribute model just doesn't really work.

Go fetch!

tahnan@suberic.net — Sat, 15 Mar 2008 06:23:01 GMT

Zooty, the slightly more insane of our insane cats, has coerced us into giving her treats for fetching. Specifically, because she's so fond of bringing her feathered toys into whichever room we're in—including the ones attached to sticks, which she'll blithely drag along the floor behind her—we'll give her a treat when she does.

Tonight, as I was saying goodnight to my wife (she goes to bed hours before me, i.e. around 1am), Zooty came trotting in, only this time instead of the usual light "dink" of the plastic end of the feathered toy hitting the floor, there was an odd metallic clatter. Puzzled, I looked down, and discovered Zooty sitting and waiting patiently for a treat for fetching the one-inch-by-four-inch rectangle of chain mail my wife had assembled earlier tonight.

On the one hand, we really need to make sure these things are out of her reach. On the other, if we encourage it sufficiently, we could rent her out to Pennsic attendees to retrieve arrows and lost armor.

Self-Help Books

tahnan@suberic.net — Wed, 12 Mar 2008 06:45:32 GMT

My wife checked out The Money Coach's Guide to Your First Million from the library. It seems, in general, like decent advice, but I do want to offer you Tahnan's Guide to Writing a Self-Help Guide, based on what I call the ACRONYM system:

Arrange points in sets
Create a mnemonic
Rearrange as necessary
Offer the points together
Never be afraid to stretch things
You should keep going as long as necessary
Milk it for all it's worth

Unrelatedly: if anyone out there does the Atlantic Monthly's cryptic (note to Q. Pheevr: turns out the magazine had changed its mind again, and once again made the Puzzler, and its archives, public), [EDIT: never mind, Jangler explained it to me, bless 'im. Note left up, though, so that the reading public in general, and Q. in particular, can be reminded that there're some well-crafted cryptics out there].

Penguins are so sensitive

tahnan@suberic.net — Sun, 09 Mar 2008 09:30:38 GMT

Because I came to like Lyle Lovett while I was living without a television, it never occurred to me that he probably made videos. Of course, the thing about a Lyle Lovett video is that it's by Lyle Lovett.

It's therefore a tossup as to whether this video is weirder than its song. (Warning: contains Lyle Lovett, and a woman in a furs...wait, is it a fur suit if the suit is furry but the animal in question has feathers? Oh, just go watch it.)

Jumping the helicopter

tahnan@suberic.net — Fri, 07 Mar 2008 06:22:13 GMT

There are many reasons a writer might choose to kill a character. Characters can die nobly for a cause; some die as part of another character's development. On television, characters sometimes die because the actor dies or wants to leave the show, though again this can be handled well or poorly. (On Judging Amy—yes, I know, I know, but it was showing on TNT at the exact time of day that I wanted to avoid working on my dissertation—the actor playing Tyne Daly's fiancé died; the writers worked the character's offscreen death into the script terrifically. Compare that to, say, Tasha Yar on ST:TNG. Similarly, on a TV show I watch, a character dies rather unexpectedly in a later season, but it's done over a few episodes and is written into the plot with some care.)

Far and away the worst reason to kill a character, IMHO, is "we kind of needed to get rid of him." The two most glaring instances of this, I think, are Rosalind Shays (Diana Muldar, L.A. Law, who rather suddenly falls down an elevator shaft; and Robert Romano (Paul McCrane, ER), who had a helicopter fall on him. I never saw the second—I didn't watch the show (in spite of the fact that my uncle co-produced the first season of it), and I've only seen the occasional bits and pieces. But as I was leaving for work the other day, my wife was watching the episode, and when I commented on Romano firing someone, she said, "Don't worry, a helicopter's about to fall on him." In both of these cases, the character was (I gather) too unpleasant to keep around: that is, the writers/producers decide that, well, they just needed to get rid of them.

I mention this because I'm two-thirds of the way through something I've been reading (I won't name it, because, you know, spoilers) in which a character, one who's been fairly central to the plot so far, gets shot, in a relatively random and thoroughly unexpected way. And it happens just after he's delivered a message to one of the central characters, so in fact it's very much the case that the author is done with him and having him still hanging around would only get in the way. In fact, in case there was any doubt, another (morally ambiguous) character who watched it happen admits that he could have stopped it, but didn't because "his task was over". At the end of the chapter, I turned to my wife, who'd finished reading it already, and said, "I can't believe the author just dropped a helicopter on him."

Dropping a helicopter isn't like jumping the shark: the book is still terrific (and I suppose that ER didn't stop being a good show at that point). But I can't pretend it's unflawed, and one of the glaring flaws, in my opinion, is this sudden, random, unexpected, and wholly unnecessary character death.

Sigh.

tahnan@suberic.net — Tue, 26 Feb 2008 18:59:40 GMT

Today my step is a little slower, a little heavier.

I'm not sad; it's just that I got out of a cab, already running late, and stepped with both feet ankle-deep into wet concrete.

Album meme

tahnan@suberic.net — Sun, 27 Jan 2008 23:53:32 GMT

I try to resist memes, I really do. But this one from flynngrrl caught my attention, and it's kind of scary how reasonable the results are.

1 - Go to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random. The first random Wikipedia article you get is the name of your band.

2 - Go to Random quotations: http://www.quotationspage.com/random.php3. The last four words of the very last quote of the page is the title of your first album.

3 - Go to flickr's "explore the last seven days" http://www.flickr.com/explore/interesting/7days/. Third picture, no matter what it is, will be your album cover.

Put it all together, that's your first album.

(Image from MikeJonesPhoto.)

Brooklyn Puzzle Tournament

tahnan@suberic.net — Fri, 25 Jan 2008 09:32:53 GMT

For the first time in a while, I don't have a conflict the weekend of the ~~Stamford~~ Brooklyn Crossword Tournament. I thought perhaps I'd attend this year, after not having attended since 2004.

Except...in 2005, the registration fee was $175. Last year, it was $195. This year: $275. (Plus another hundred for two nights at the hotel, if I share a room with two other people; plus $80 or so for Amtrak tickets.)

I guess Brooklyn's bound to be more expensive than Stamford. But...$275 for a weekend's entertainment, Friday night to Sunday afternoon? The NPL convention is typically less than $200, and that's for 24 hours longer and includes much more of a chance to socialize with people. The difference, perhaps, is that the NPL convention doesn't have prize money—but then, I stand pretty much no chance of winning any prize money.

I'd head into the city, stay with friends, and just hang out at the hotel a little to see people, but it's been made pretty clear in years past that that's not acceptable. In the end, I suppose I could be convinced to come—but does anyone have a convincing argument? Right now, for all that I like the people I'd have a chance to hang out with, I'm not sure I can justify the expense.

That Mystery Hunt Thing

tahnan@suberic.net — Wed, 23 Jan 2008 09:02:55 GMT

I've been resisting writing about the 2008 Mystery Hunt because I've been waiting to see the answers to some things, as well as the overall structure. But, well, it strikes me that I don't want to wait too long, so...

I feel a little pre-empted by Qaqaq's observation that "post-mortems generally focus pretty heavily on the criticisms", because it's true, I'm probably going to end up sounding critical. So let me start by saying that by and large I enjoyed this hunt; there were a whole lot of puzzles I liked. (A few highlights: "What Incarnation...", "Our Unfortunate Aunt Edith", "X2". Also "Cluesome", for being amusing, clever, and short.)

And I have to give a lot of credit to Palindrome for stepping into that much-pondered but never-attempted area of puzzles not grouped by meta. Well, "never attempted" is strong--I gather that, before my time in the '97 Hunt or so, there was something like that. The Monopoly Hunt kind of had that, except that while the puzzles weren't given to you by meta, grouping them into sets was straightforward (after either a single insight into how the dice worked, or else more or less immediately upon solving a puzzle).

And...yet. It's not that I didn't enjoy this year's Hunt; I did. But it felt a little...lackluster, somehow. Here's the thing: if your Hunt is gorgeous but the puzzles are deeply flawed (as, sorry, y'all, hate to say it, but as a number of the Time Bandits puzzles seemed to be), it'll be hard to enjoy. Good puzzles are crucial. But at the same time, solid puzzles without a strong theme are, well, kind of just a bunch of puzzles. And unlike any Hunt since (again, I hate to say it, but) 2001's Hunt of Horrors, I just didn't feel drawn in by the theme.

Part of that was a problem in graphic design. From the Hunt Overview, all you had were a bunch of checkboxes indicating puzzles, with no clue what puzzles they were. From the "little black book" pages, again, you had links to the puzzles but no idea what puzzles they were without clicking through or at least mousing over. This made it very hard to find any given puzzle: if someone said, "Can I get your help on 'Propaganda'?", finding it wasn't easy. And, conversely, when you were looking at the puzzles, you had no way of knowing where it was from--which meta, of course, but that was inherent to the structure, but also no idea which of Dr. Awkward's contacts it corresponded to. The overall effect was that it was very hard to tell where you were in the Hunt, not in terms of how your team was doing, but in a more literal (though metaphysical) sense of where on the map you were. Compare this to previous hunts: look at random puzzles from 2004, 2006, 2007, or even the rather minimalist 2005. The puzzles tell you what round they're part of; and you typically don't have to look very hard to find out, because the graphic design and, often, the thematicity of title or subject indicate it as well. This year's hunt just didn't have that.

Why does that matter? In general, I just didn't really feel very engaged in the story, and that sense of being lost on the metaphysical map of the Hunt contributed. Dr. Awkward had been killed and we had to find his murderer...well, OK, I guess, but I didn't feel emotionally invested in it. (Not like saving the Earth from an insane meteorologist, or helping Chris-Morse-in-a-dress get her inheritance.) To be honest, there was a reason that, in 2003, we picked "the boss you just met gets assassinated" as the fake theme--we wanted something that wasn't utterly boring ("corporate culture") but also something that people wouldn't be sorry to learn wasn't the real theme. But, all right, I was willing to go along with it to determine who killed the good Doctor. Except that, once we were underway, we kind of just had a bunch of puzzles. There was little or no flavortext--that's not a problem in and of itself, since puzzles in the 2007 Hunt also often lacked flavortext (though they did always have a really funny description in the "this isn't a clue" banner), as did the puzzles in 2005. But there was also no discernable plot. Take X2: were we interviewing Horst Bantak and getting a hint from him? were we investigating him? were we...I don't even know, really. We were kind of just solving a puzzle.

So that was the big thing about this year's Hunt, and why I started by saying that "I enjoyed it, and yet": I did enjoy the puzzles. I just had a really hard time connecting with the Hunt itself.

There were other, little annoyances. There were miscommunications: we were explicitly told that we should be looking "first and foremost" at contacts' names to sort them; in fact, at least two groups (Bantak/Foy/Leather/etc. and Eva S./Di Puco/Maia Lian/etc.) had huge grouping clues in their email addresses. There was the frustration that, once an address-book group's dossier had been given to teams, we didn't seem to get anything at all out of solving their metapuzzle (compare Normalville, where you still needed to know the actual power you got from the "normal" metas, or Spies, where meeting with an agent got you not only the next round but also a piece of information you'd need at the end).

That said, I also have some (small) sense of the trouble that Palindrome had bringing the Hunt together at all (and one Palindromian mentioned a few rather particular obstacles), and I'm genuinely grateful to them for running it as well as they did. Seriously, thanks, guys. Best of luck to y'all in the 2009 Evil Midnight Bomber hunt and the 2010 II&F Hunt.

How Not to Write a Puzzle

tahnan@suberic.net — Wed, 09 Jan 2008 09:08:00 GMT

About a year ago, I complained about a puzzle on a website called Tanga which I found particularly, er, terrible.

As part of an ongoing series, then, I offer: this puzzle. You can try to solve it if you want, though I don't recommend it. (Tanga puzzles lead to a single word. Heh.) Or you can read on...

     Step one: recognize that each row represents a hexadecimal color, e.g. 7BA05B or 926F5B. Not especially recognizable, but colors nonetheless.

     Step two: find the name of the Crayola crayon of each color.

OK, already we have a problem. There's a list on Wikipedia, but I'm not convinced those hexadecimal values came from Crayola in the first place. But, basically, what you've got is a puzzle that just involves going to one particular page on the internet and reading the information there. That's not necessarily a bad puzzle (though the less reliable the page, the less interesting it is), but it's not interesting.

That's independent of the typo in line four, which is just lousy proofreading, not lousy puzzle-writing.

     Step three: take the nth letter of each name (where n is given at the end of each line) to get RESDOGMRROTH.

Nothing like gibberish to suggest that you're on the right track, is there? Gibberish to such an extent, in fact, that having miscounted the fifth line and thus being a letter off, I got RESDRGMRROTH and posted it to the discussion, figuring it couldn't possibly be on the right track.

     Step four: read "RESDOGMRROTH" as "Res Dog Mr. Roth", i.e. "Reservoir Dogs, Mr. Roth". Tim Roth played Mr. Orange in Reservoir Dogs.

It's getting harder to stay positive, isn't it? At least it's thematic. But now here's the kicker: what's the one word answer? If you said "orange", you've overestimated the quality of the puzzle.

     Step five: translate "Orange" back into hexadecimal.

So what's the one word...er, the single-string-of-characters answer? If you said "FF681F", which is what Wikipedia lists as the Crayola value of orange...you've once again overestimated the quality of the puzzle. Since Wikipedia seems to be the authority here, you could try the Wikipedia article on the color orange, which gives the color as FF7F00, but you'd still be wrong. Instead, you want the "web color orange", which is FFA500; that's the answer.

Personal aside to II&F members: if you ever write a puzzle like this, you'll be solving remotely from North Dakota next year.

Stupid airlines

tahnan@suberic.net — Sun, 06 Jan 2008 14:39:46 GMT

I've complained before about how much I hate the fact that airlines won't let you change your itinerary. And, OK, fine, Cazique raised good points as to why that's so.

But it still pisses me off that I can give them several hundred dollars, and they can still call me at 8:15 to say "Your 1:00 flight is cancelled." And, let me stress, nothing else; so it becomes my obligation to call them to find out that I've been rescheduled for 8:40 tonight, and then to ask about other flight options (e.g., 4:00pm; why would they think I'd prefer 8:40?).

Life in Minnesota, redux

tahnan@suberic.net — Fri, 28 Dec 2007 03:28:20 GMT

Some people wanted to know what kind of culture shock I might experience in Minnesota. I lived in Minnesota for four years, so it's not the snow, or the accents, or the niceness.

No, to illustrate the kind of culture shock I experienced, I present to you a five question quiz. It's multiple choice, but take a moment to consider your answers before clicking through to the options.

1. On the bedroom door of your five-year-old nephew, you would expect to find a measuring tape and a sign saying, "Watch me grow..."

     (a) "...like a tree."
     (b) "...and help me know."
     (c) "...like Jesus grew."

2. Your brother-in-law roots for sports teams based on...

     (a) Their proximity to his home.
     (b) Their win/loss records.
     (c) The moral character of their players and coaches.

3. At lunch, your father-in-law pulls out a present he got earlier that day: a box of questions to spark discussion. Which of the following is the most likely exchange between you and your hostess's mother in response to "What book would you most like to have memorized?"

     (a) "Something by John Muir, maybe."
          "I was thinking of Semantics in Generative Grammar by Heim and Kratzer."
          "You're sure you wouldn't prefer Earth in the Balance?"

     (b) "That's a good question."
          "I was thinking of Semantics in Generative Grammar by Heim and Kratzer."
          "I can see why that would be."

     (c) "Well, everyone in this room would say the Bible, of course."
          "I was thinking of Semantics in Generative Grammar by Heim and Kratzer."
          "All of that is included in the Bible."

4. Your niece's grandmother gets her a book about a girl who just knows she's a princess, but starts to worry about the fact that she doesn't have jewels or a crown, and that her father is not a king. The moral of the story comes when her father tells her,

     (a) "We are all princes and princesses in care of the earth, and we must reign wisely to protect her and preserve her."
     (b) "You don't need a crown or jewels; you'll always be the princess of my heart."
     (c) "We are all children of a much greater King, and that makes us special."

5. Your sister-in-law relates a story in which a friend of hers, Margaret, had a brain clot. One day, another friend called and mentioned that she had a freind wih a brain clot; it turned out that they each independently knew Margaret. This inspired your sister-in-law and her friend to:

     (a) Thank G-d for modern medicine.
     (b) Thank G-d for their own good health.
     (c) Take this as a sign that they should pray together, then and there, for Margaret.

Bonus question: Your niece gets her mother a pie plate for Christmas, to replace the one she broke earlier in the year. The grandmother (i.e. the hostess's mother from Question 3, and the book-buyer from Question 4) says, full of the appropriate spirit:

     (a) (to her granddaughter) "That was very thoughtful and kind of you, dear."
     (b) (to her granddaughter) "That was very selfless and giving of you, dear."
     (c) (to her daughter) "You should have just taken one of my pie plates; I have so many."

If you failed to pick (c) for any of the above questions, then you, too, could have suffered the same kind of culture shock I did.

Life in Minnesota

tahnan@suberic.net — Tue, 25 Dec 2007 03:47:07 GMT

The thing is that, when you're from where I'm from, the culture shock of being here is noticeable. They just don't do things the way you do them; they don't even think the way you do, and a lot of the basic language is different. Sometimes it's all you can do to get by.

Minnesota's that way, too.

Incidentally, for those Carletonians who missed it: Northfield politics has suddenly started to make Providence politics look sane. From the Northfield News, Mayor refuses to step down; from the Star-Tribune, Northfield mayor loses desk and key. ("When Northfield's embattled mayor refused to resign Saturday, the college town's City Council told him to clean out his desk and turn in his City Hall key.") Phenomenal, really.

My father and the modern media

tahnan@suberic.net — Sat, 22 Dec 2007 08:53:59 GMT

My wife and my father had an argument the other day about a few cartoons in recent media. The first was this cartoon by Mike Luckovich of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution; the second was this set of images in Time Magazine. (Explanation: the images were at the head of columns of polling statistics, hence the "how so and so see their candidates" headings.)

Take a moment to reflect on the two; particularly the latter, in which you should ask yourself, "Is anything striking about these portraits? (Other than the fact that they display a serious lack of talent on the part of the artist, who apparently learned to draw by watching Beavis and Butthead.) In particular, is there any sort of imbalance in the way the eight of them are portrayed?"

My wife's reaction to these two were, respectively, "So, what, a woman can't actually be in charge of her campaign? It must be her husband who's really behind it?", and "Um, why is Hillary naked?"

My father felt that the AJC cartoon was meant to suggest only that Bill in particular was crafty and manipulative, that he was using his wife as a way to get back into the White House. (Though, I wonder: did we ever see the equivalent cartoon eight years ago, to suggest that George H.W. Bush was controlling his son to get back into the White House? It's much easier, IMHO, to imagine W being manipulated than Hillary...) My wife felt that, while it might be true that the cartoonist felt that Bill was manipulative, it nevertheless carried with it the implicit sexist message. My father couldn't see it.

For the Time Magazine pictures, my father pointed out that women do dress like that in professional settings. To which the answers, from our (yes, if it's not clear by now, I side with my wife on these) point of view, are:

(a) what, naked?
(b) what, in off-the-shoulder dresses? Or perhaps straps or something with shoulders, but you can't tell because the artist decided to crop her picture differently.
(c) even if women sometimes wore clothing that revealed significant amounts of skin around the neck, why not put her in something more equivalent to what the men were wearing?
(d) have you ever seen Hillary in a formal setting (e.g. campaigning, debating) wearing anything other than a necklace, collared shirt, and often a jacket? Heck, even her inaugural ball gown didn't show that much of her neck and shoulders.

It was my father's position, through all of this, that my wife was looking for sexism where none existed, comparing her offense to the claims from some members of the black community that the charges against Michael Vick were motivated by racial prejudice. My wife, ah, didn't appreciate this position.

Anyway, I stand with her: the media still has a lot to answer for in terms of its implicitly sexist representation of women in politics (and in general).

(This was not, mind you, the last argument with my father. Earlier today I got extremely mad at him when, as my brother was deciding which of his last two cards to throw in a trick-taking game we were playing, my father showed him his one remaining card. His point was that it didn't matter which card my brother played in terms of affecting my father's score; I found this extraordinarily unprofessional, especially coming from a man whose current occupation is ensuring fair play at bridge tournaments. But that's another story for another time.)

Cat photos

tahnan@suberic.net — Fri, 21 Dec 2007 05:13:08 GMT

Though in a post about a month ago I obeyed Garner's First Law of Modern Cat Ownership ("Blog about your cats even if no one particularly cares"), I rather flagrantly flouted Garner's Second Law, i.e. "Blog posts about your cats must be accompanied by pictures." My apologies.

New pictures of the cats are up on my Flickr page. A few particular favorites below the cut:

A portrait of Rebo	A portrait of Zooty
I mentioned that Zooty likes to be as high up as she can get. There aren't many high places in the dining room, so she improvised with, well, an improviser:

These and more at the above link.

This won't mean anything to most of you, but...

tahnan@suberic.net — Mon, 26 Nov 2007 20:03:57 GMT

Last night I dreamt about Eric Brannen. That can't be good, can it?

Da Nang? Daaang.

tahnan@suberic.net — Mon, 19 Nov 2007 10:41:27 GMT

I should be asleep, but in the meantime, here's what my sister-in-law is currently up to. (And this and others you can find by clicking appropriately.)

Rebo & Zooty

tahnan@suberic.net — Sun, 18 Nov 2007 21:20:54 GMT

So everyone's been asking: how are the cats? Are they happy? What are they like? Tell us everything!^* So here's the news.

Rebo is easy. She mostly lies on the couch or the chair in the corner, with brief bouts of lying around somewhere else; the lid of a cardboard box has become a favorite ever since we put a little catnip in it once. (She does love the 'nip.) She's a little skittish when let out of the living room; she tends to see someone walking and run for her life back to familiar ground. But she's also happily exploring, poking around in the bedroom even though that's Zooty Territory.

She's extremely good-natured, and is quite fond of petting, as well as lying on keyboards. She came to us declawed, which (a) is terrible, especially given that she was found as a stray, and (b) suggests that she's had a little more experience being used to humans. It also means that clawing isn't a behavior problem, and while I hate declawing and would never do it to a cat, I must admit it's kind of a relief to have one less thing to worry about with her. Generally, though, there's little to worry about. She eats well, she plays well, she sleeps a lot, she purrs. She squeals a little when picked up and cuddled in arms, but she has grown accustomed to laps. Foodwise, she's pretty easygoing; she didn't complain at all about the switch from shelter-provided kitten food to adult cat food; she didn't like the hard tuna treats, but the moist chicken and moist seafood went over well. She does have a tendency to eat from the floor instead of her bowl—that is, she'll scoop a piece of food out of the bowl and then eat it—but that's fairly endearing.

She's also a mighty huntress; more than once, she's spontaneously pounced on a toy mouse, batted it around, caught it in her mouth, and meowed triumphantly. And if my students showed half the energy on the homework that she shows in the chasing and capturing of glitterpoms, I'd cancel the final and give them all A's. Her favorite interactive game, though, is "soccer goalie". It involves either a toy mouse or a foil ball; she'll lie there and watch it, but won't get up until you toss it right in front of her, at which point she'll bat it away and wait. No chasing, just waiting for it to come and batting it away. (If only we had a dog who could fetch, the two of them would be like a perpetual motion machine of animal cuteness.)

Zooty is more of a problem case. Among the things she likes: biting, high places, more biting, dragging her water bowl around. (Michelle suspects she prefers water in motion to still water, which is why she pushes it before drinking from it. On our list of things to get: a fountain.) She's athletic; leaping and climbing are not problems. Last night, I looked up to see that she had leapt up to the shoulders of my hanging shirts, balancing herself on the hangers there while pulling herself up to the storage shelf at the top of the closet. That's since been closed, and she has to content herself with the bed, the back of the couch, and the cat tree on top of my dresser. When sleeping in bed with us, she tends to climb up on whichever of us is on our side, that being a higher point than someone's back. Shoulders of people sitting have also proved popular. Today she's discovered a new perch as well, though when she sits on them it does make it hard for Michelle to see her computer. Like Rebo, she's fond of removing food from her bowl, though in her case that means scooping out an entire pawful and then eating them one at a time. Or sometimes scooping out a pawful, eating one piece, and scooping out another pawful. And at least once, scooping out a pawful and then eating from the bowl.

There are, conversely, a lot of things she doesn't like. High on the list is being held while a dropperful of antibiotic is forceably fed to her; I've got the scratch marks to prove that one, and additional evidence can be seen in the way her face is streaked with pink medicine that escaped her mouth while she squirmed. (Related to the antibiotics, she's not fond of having her nose wiped with a tissue. It's easier to wait for her to sneeze, and then wipe everything else in a one-foot radius.) We'd like to reward her for good behavior, like holding still while we medicate her, but that's another point where finding things she likes has proved difficult. We've tried hard tuna treats, moist chicken treats, moist seafood treats, canned tuna cat food, rendered chicken fat, boiled chicken, smoked turkey, goat cheese, cream cheese...nothing. Rebo came in and ate the tuna after she abandoned it (she did paw a little of it onto the floor first). I put the piece of turkey in her bowl; she pulled it out, pushed it away, and went back to the food in her bowl. Similarly with the cream cheese, which Michelle put on a piece of her cat food—she just decided to push that piece of cat food away.

Fortunately, they've pretty much learned to coexist; there's some mistrust, but they can walk past each other civilly, and have no problem being in the same room within sight of each other. This bodes well for the future.

^*Actually, no one's been asking. But even a few weeks of cat ownership have taught me Garner's First Law of Modern Cat Ownership: Blog about your cats even if no one particularly cares.

Back in a Philadelphia

tahnan@suberic.net — Sun, 18 Nov 2007 01:29:04 GMT

I've complained in the past about being "in a Philadelphia", that metaphysical state inherent to this place that keeps you from getting anything you'd actually want, even the simplest of demands.

The website for DiningIn tells me: We sincerely apologize, but zip code 19143 is currently outside the delivery area for DiningIn. We hope to be able to provide service to this zip code in the future. It's not that they don't serve Philadelphia; they just don't serve our zip code. Terrific.

But what really pissed me off tonight is that New Delhi, on 40th and Chestnut, won't deliver to us. They deliver to Center City--that is, the other side of the river--but they won't come eight blocks west and five blocks south.

It's infuriating. It's frustrating. It's, well, Philadelphia.