Merin’s Neighborhood

If it wasn't already obvious given the near year and a half of silence, this blog is no longer in use. Thanks for all the fish.

Hello.  This is my secondary journal.  

: waves

Um, if you haven't looked over the fantastic people up for auction at Sweet Charity today is a great day to do so!  

I always forget how school absolutely annihilates my reading pace, reducing it to near nonexistence. I started this book -- Atonement by Ian McEwan -- in early August and got through it in tiny installments until last night.

It was superb. I particularly loved it in the summer when I could actually read chunks of it at once, whereas once the semester only let me squeeze in a few pages at a time, maybe every few weeks. So I forgot and reread a lot, exceedingly inefficiently. But I also think the beginning was better. McEwan is awesome at development and building the story up -- if he can do one thing (with plot and organization set aside), this guy can write.

I'm giving it an A-, but only to stay consistent: I've thus far been rating not only the book but also the reading experience for me personally. I think because it took so long, some parts of the novel just felt unnecessarily drawn out -- come to think of it, a large sector in the middle definitely dragged on, and would have even had I read it straight through.

I can't pinpoint anything right now. Sigh. It's Thanksgiving, and my brain isn't supposed to be working. Reviewing books is (ironically) really difficult for me, because I always feel like I need to justify myself about my feelings, but can't, really. This read is a fine one: the beginning is good, the ending is excellent, the middle is worth the time.

Oops, haven't posted in a while. Well, there wasn't much to say, honestly, until this week. We did indeed have a bit of a shake as a 5.6 earthquake rocked the South Bay. It was a good shake and roll, but nothing more serious. My favorite part was the local news breaking into It's the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown!: "We're interrupting this program to tell you about something you're probably aware of." So true.

I've been meaning to post all week, but it keeps not happening. I've been enjoying the return of old television shows and the debuts of some new ones. Verdicts on the new season thus far:

Heroes: Entertaining.
Bionic Woman: Not good, but it has Starbuck being awesome.
The Office: Excellent!
Stargate: Atlantis: Better than expected! I'm hopeful.

The week's most exciting event, however, was my acquisition of a dining table and chairs. Sure, it took me four months, but it's not like I've felt a need for one, other than to fill the wide-open floor space. I could afford to be choosy! We have a large network of mailing lists at work, including one on which people sell their stuff, which is where I found this:

Woohoo! Of course, what you can't see in the photo is the middle section of the table. Rather than being removable, it folds up and tucks in underneath the tabletop. While it's a clever solution, it makes the tabletop that much heavier. I couldn't figure out how to dismantle it, either, apart from removing the legs. The guy who sold it to me helped get it in my car, but the other end was a lot less fun. I spent a long time trying to figure out the proper leverage just to shift it out of my trunk but eventually had to give in and ask a neighbor for help.

What could be more fun that reading my reactions to the mediocre Emmy awards as I thought them?

Here goes:

Red carpet was nice. Clean lines and jewel tones were clearly on top this year, which I am all for. WTF was up with Kate Walsh's hair?

I'm only going to talk about categories I care about, which does not generally include the comedy shows or the miniseries stuff.

-Best Supporting Actor - Drama: I don't watch Lost and I'm all YAY HEROES so I was rooting for Masi Oka. Terry O'Quinn looked like a pimp. That shirt was horrible!

-Best Supporting Actress - Drama: Awwww Katherine! I love her and I bet her mom is going to kill her for calling her out like that. :))

-Best Writing - Variety or Comedy: All the candidate intros were hilarious. Obviously, I was rooting for my Comedy Central boys, but I love Conan too, so I can deal.

-Christina and Tony - She looks lovely, but I'm kind of bored by this number.

-Oustanding Guest Actress - Drama: God, how gorgeous is Hayden Panettiere? And Neil Patrick Harris wins for his "patriotic yet sleazy innuendo". :D Love!

-Directing - Variety Comedy: Oh god, Stephen Colbert's going to have it in for Tony Bennett like he did for Barry Manilow last year.

-Oustanding Variety/Comedy/Music Show: I am a little bit in love with Steven Carrell. OMFG YAY JON STEWART FOR THE MOTHERFUCKING WIN! I <3 him so much. Something else Stephen can be bitter about.

-I could have totally done without that musical number for the Sopranos. :)) Are they doing that because it's over now? Or are they going to do that for all the drama nominees? Maybe they could play Adrian Pasdar's YouTube videos together with "You're So Vain" as the soundtrack?

-Blah blah blah, I don't care about miniseries or made for TV movies.

-Oh man, MASI OKA! he's too freaking adorable. And dear old Al Gore. He's really found his niche and seems happy.

-Oustanding Performance - Variety, Musical, Comedy: Man, Stephen Colbert has a new nemesis. He's going to get SO MUCH MILEAGE out of this. I hope Tony will be as good a sport as Barry Manilow was last year.

-I love how Ryan Seacrest totally embraces his Gay. He embraces it, plays with it and totally gets mileage out of it. Henry VIII indeed.

-AHAHAHAHA STEPHEN! LEAF BLOWER! WIN! IT RUNS ON AL GORE'S TEARS! I LOVE THEM! WHO CARES ABOUT THE AWARD!

-OH GOD THAT IS THE MOST AWESOME THING EVER. They should run around the stage and hug more often. Steven Carrell, Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert could be the best things about this show. Ever.

-Actress in a Comedy Series: Awwwww, Sally Field, you still look amazing. We really do love you! She's so flighty though.

-Yay America Ferrera! I don't watch that show, but I really like her.

-I second <a href=http://ckc.vox.com>Carrie's question to me in chat: Who even watches Boston Legal? James Spader? Okay!

-Oustanding Comedy Series: Wow, 30 Rock won? I've only watched an ep or two, but it's funny, so whatever. Meta about the industry, so I'm not really surprised. I would have wanted the Office and expected Ugly Betty to win.

-You know, they should have "contingent commercials". Half price, and they get cut if the show's running over. I know there's no way in hell, but I'm just saying. *drums fingers*

-Oustanding Drama Series: COME ON, HEROES! I know the Sopranos will probably win...

-AND, I was right. Whatever. Last time they can get it, I guess.

-I will still be wanky and say HEROES WAS ROBBED! *shakes fist*

-Aaaaaaaannnnnnnd we're done. That was a mediocre show. The round thing was ridiculous, and I really hope they don't do that again next year. Stephen Colbert and Jon Stewart presenting was probably the best part of any of it.

So, you might have seen me bitching about this experiment I've been running. :) Part of the setup for the experiment involves playing some altered audio files into the room, and the base audio (which is still perfectly audible) is compiled from selected snippets of telephone conversations. The corpus that we used for this is the LDC CallHome Corpus (details here), built from telephone conversations between people in the US and elsewhere in the world; from listening to the conversation, the most common locales for non-US participants in these conversations were located in Israel and various European countries, although there are also conversations with people in Asian and various N. African areas.

I've been working with this particular corpus for a year now, listening and reading transcripts and coding for various qualities. I've chopped up the signal, remixed for channel strength and waveform and filesize - I KNOW these snippets of conversation v. well.

And here is what I have heard:

• On a long distance phone call, almost everything is always going OK. I don't know if it's just because people are so glad to speak with people they aren't in close contact with (this largely predates the time when everybody had email, remember) or what it is, but these are almost all happy conversations.

• A bride planned her wedding using the LDC's dime pretty extensively - she's in England and there are separate conversations with her mother, brother and father. Savvy.

• In 1996, it cost 9 new Israeli sheqels to buy a Whopper at the only Burger King in Israel. The meat was kosher, and they served no cheeseburgers, but it wasn't really kosher because the store didn't observe Shabbat.

• There was an American-born jazz musician blowing his way across Europe and Asia, using phrases like, "the jet set" and "fantastic, man" and "this girl singer I met" completely without irony, and he has amazing phone charisma and incredible energy and talks WAY too much about how much money his band just spent on new music stands.

• When someone is telling you how wonderful something is, over and over and over, sometimes that is code for "omg please shut the hell up about your fabulous granddaughter and her new book."

• There is no getting out of motherhood without bearing your children's excess worry and pain. One daughter cries to her mother not because anything is wrong, but because she has too many wonderful things to choose between, and how can she ever make the decision? Another mother speaks to her daughter, living in Germany with her military husband and just recovering from surgery, and worries about Congress shutting down the federal government just before Christmas. (Update: they did, and this is when we all learned to hate Newt Gingrich.)  

I do not know these people. I will never meet them, and they probably barely remember placing these phone calls, if they remember it at all. But it will be a long time before I stop wondering what happened to them. Did the marriage go OK? Is this man who is a throwback to another era still "going and blowing"? Those people who were so delighted to see American activity in Iraq in the 1990s, are they as frustrated and appalled as I am now? And it's odd, because this is how I feel when I finish a great novel, but these people are real, and they are somewhere out in the world, and 10 years later, I'm hoping that it's all still going OK. 

After a few fairly low-key weeks, I was busy again last weekend, and for very good reason: I was in Atlanta, GA, for Dragon*Con! From the website, it's "America's largest, multi-media, popular arts convention focusing on science fiction and fantasy, gaming, comics, literature, art, music, and film." And it was huge. The official word is 30,000 people, but most of us who were there think it was higher but they won't admit it due to the problems they already had with the fire marshal. It was spread over three hotels and featured just about everything you can possibly imagine being at a convention, including an amazing array of costumes.

I can't recap the experience in its entirety here, mostly because it's a big blur. There was so much going on every day, I hardly had time - or desire - to stop for food and a quiet break. Lest you think I spent my whole Labor Day weekend indoors, I assure you I spent several hours outside waiting in lines. ;-) I've been to individual days at Comic-Con before, but never the entire weekend for a con on this scale, and overall, I give a big thumbs-up to the experience.

Pictures, you ask? I don't want to upload them to Vox, so here's a link to my Picasa album for the event: Dragon*Con 2007.

The indoor pictures mostly suck, except for Monday, when we had front row seats and therefore decent lighting. The parade on Saturday morning was the highlight of the event, watching a major downtown street be taken over by Klingons and Stormtroopers and every other crazy thing. Enjoy!

Nothing can really be as exciting as last weekend was, but this weekend had a little bit to offer. It was the annual Mountain View Art & Wine Festival, three convenient blocks from my apartment. It's your standard craft fair gig, but larger than I expected. I wandered around for a few hours yesterday; didn't buy anything, but I enjoyed looking around.

I wish I could say I'd be having another adventure next weekend, but my car's developed a new "quirk" that might take over next weekend if it keeps up. Oh well.