Halloween

So, I'm trying to come up with a Halloween costume (still open to ideas!). Current options include pirate and Vijay Singh. These are already remarkably better than the past few years, which have included: guy-resembling-the-stuffed-penguin-that-resembles-Sarah, guy-in-Naomi's-black-dress, and, my personal favorite, guy-in-orange-shirt-with-purple-stripes-and-black-hat. Mike and I went to Boston Costumes (open till midnight this week! what a scene!) where he was inspired, though I was not (the $600 velvet cape was tempting). The web wasn't much more of a help; I found out that I should not be Spongebob, since that's this site's top costume this year. Hmm. What a pain! Maybe I can just go as an alcoholic candy fiend.

Back from Aspen (sadly!)

Thanks to Aaron, an incredible weekend in Aspen. Hiked to Crater Lake at the Maroon Bells and biked the Rio Grande Trail and hiked to Grizzy Lake. Beautiful! Exhilirating! Pictures to come.

On the other hand, I love living near Fenway Park

There a bunch of drunken people running down the street. I wonder where they're going? (Postscript: Aaron went and discovered the beginnings of a riot, though he left before things turned ugly.)

Wow, Boston REALLY sucks

So, you, my dear reader, might be wondering, why is Kushal home before bars close in Boston? Well, because Hurricane O'Reilly's decided that it didn't want to let people in after 1. Why? No answer! So stupid! We were following Aaron's cousin to his friend's birthday party, but, alas, the bouncer and manager were far too proud of their power to take our money. This is vaguely analogous to the asshole at the Playwright in New Haven during senior week: "You go to Yale? You should know better than to bring a fake ID to the hottest club in New Haven." I think I would rather be unemployed than be a bouncer. To derive self-worth at the expense of other people's pleasure, that's pathetic.

What I've learned about visiting the Vineyard

Visited the Vineyard Saturday, at Calvin's urging. Awesome! Highly recommended, at least in the off season.

1. If you work for IBM, rent at Enterprise. They waive the (usurious) underage fee. We got a sweet little Volvo. And they're right on Comm Ave.

2. Take 90 (east) to 93 to 24 to 495 to 28 (after the bridge) until you're directed to parking lots near Woods Hole.

3. Try not to barely miss the ferry, although there is a nice bakery near the ferry dock.

4. Ending up at Oak Bluff is good, since that's where the action is. Vineyard Haven is lame, and it's weird that ferries there are more frequent. Oak Bluff has a cool army surplus store and a nice bike rental guy and a hat store and an old ferris wheel and an octagonal church and pretty houses and a little beach.

5. The bike ride to Edgartown is gorgeous, though doing the full loop would be better.

6. Edgartown (or Agerton, as the bike man called it) is supposed to be the center of action, but isn't that exciting, except for the harbor.

7. Black Dog is inexplicable.

8. Try to leave time to visit the cliffs and the nudists. Maybe next time.

9. Taking the ferry back at night is good, because you can see all the stars. And there are tons of them.

VON the road again

Dropped in on VON the other day, which is going pretty well. It was crazy to see everybody again, and the party was fun as always. RevUp Records is in full swing, and East of Autumn played. If VoIPers are anything like the WWW people, I imagine there will be pictures of the conference posted on their web sites soon enough.

Kushal @ 14

Okay, this is truly creepy. The Internet Archive has this new Recall search engine (there's a link from Metabuzz). It's quite slick - I'm impressed how quickly it does its thing. In any case, searching for myself turned up this review of my web page from 7 years ago.

A fun weekend (but a little blue)

(trying to ditch caps again...) thanks to mike and rox, an excellent weekend at tanglewood. saw cassandra wilson (incredible percussion!) and kenny baron's canta brasil, and drank wine and ate cheese and crackers and grapes from nejaime's and sandwiches from loeb's. watched the sunset, saw the stars and mars, played scrabble. saw the norman rockwell museum (with a special exhibit on the berenstain bears!). lunched at betty's pizza shack, brunched at carol's. lenox was a bit confusing...navigation was easier after we found a map. a bit on the chilly side.

sunday, folks came over and i finally watched zoolander, which was everything i was told it would be.

though, were it not for suz's handy contribution of amstel lights, i would have only had mgd to ply people with.... this led to the usual conversation about blue laws, and i did some googling. i hadn't realized connecticut and new york and flordia and delaware were relaxing their blue laws as a way of increasing revenues. weirdly, liqour store owners are not eager to keep their stores open longer. in 1961, the supreme court said such laws were not a violation of church/state separation.

it's hard to understand how any self-respecting government could preserve some of these asinine and idiosyncratic rules with a straight face. case in point: "The Wal-Mart in York, S.C., can sell groceries on Sunday morning but can't sell clothing and hundreds of other items until 1:30 p.m. That means barricading part of the store for more than 13 hours every Sunday."

Hey, look, it's me in Budapest!

Just when you thought looking through your referrer log was getting old, check out what I found. I find it very weird that Seb and I have communicated in public forums several times since then but haven't exchanged email. Blogs really have changed things.

The peanut gallery paper continues to be a popular source of visits, by the way. (And Metabuzz, though I should update it more....) I think I will always give my papers distinct names, since being able to search for "Mining the Peanut Gallery" in Google is quite fun. (And I found my first citations! Relatedly, I've noticed that Citeseer's citation detection is kind of weak...The excellent Cornell paper on movie review classification still shows no citations.)

OpenCourseWhere?

With another school year starting, higher education is back on the minds of journalists, and there were two interesting articles recently. One was the Times mag article on Summers. This was particularly interesting since the whole West thing broke while I was at the Herald and I had spent some time learning about Af-Am Studies. (As an aside, the Globe also covered a controversial academic leader this week, Jordi's old boss.) Anyway, I thought the ideas of teaching more knowledge and fewer ways of knowing, and of teaching more quantitative reasoning were both excellent (and similar to Yale's findings). I also liked their description of Summers who argues with people to sound out their ideas, and not because he disrespects them, something I'm also guilty of.

The other article was in Wired about OpenCourseWare. OCW is an awesome idea and I think it's sad that more schools don't make more content available for free. This was the sentiment behind Thinkquest, and it's an important one. The article had some fun tidbits, like the fact that most popular class is one in philosophy and that the top user is Canada. America wasn't even in the top 10. (Speaking of rankings, Yale was third again but tied for second in the eyes of America.)

Something or brother

I'm still recovering from my my brother's visit. Doing the tourist thing was exhausting but fun....we hit the Freedom Trail first, wandering around graveyards (particularly fascinating after having spent all that time on the death web site) and climbing the Bunker Hill memorial and whatnot. Then we barely managed to get across the Big Dig (near the Bunker Hill Community College stop) to the Museum of Science. The Museum was way cooler than I'd expected, and I particularly enjoyed the math part and the van de Graaf generator. We had lots of fun playing and then we watched the fairly unenlightening IMAX movie Top Speed. The next day we watched the Sox win in the burning (literally) sun (unlike, say, their performance today) for only $40 per scalped bleacher ticket, thanks to a home run by Millar undoubtedly the result of watching himself dance to Bruce Springsteen as a teenager on the Jumbotron. Sunday we wandered around Cambridge and found a street fair and checked out the Gehry building at MIT (site includes cool time-lapse videos!). We also rented 25th Hour, which was filled with ambiguous Sept. 11 references but had some great performances and cinematography, and Drumline, which was just plain fun.

Life's but a walking shadow

Requisite weekend wrap-up:

Went to Tia's. Fun scene. Excellent night.

Saw Macbeth on the Common. Sort of overwrought, favoring pyrotechnics over good acting, and nothing so interesting about the directing. Maybe that's what it takes to put up shows on the Common - after all, they did Carmen in English. But I talked to a lot of people who didn't even bother to sit through the whole thing.

Went to the Cape with folks from work and met up with some cute vets-in-training. Highlight was definitely the police in the town of Sandwich, or, as the sign said, the Sandwich Police. How cool is that? "Sir, don't put that mayo on your sandwich!" "Who do you think you are, the Sandwich Police?" "Why, yes I am."

Go see Bob!

Last night, saw Bob in Midsummer Night's Dream at the Publick Theatre. He was great. The entire production was excellent, in fact....easy to follow, funny delivery, great costumes.... I highly recommend it.

Beach Blanket Bedtime

Busy weekend!

Friendster update: 125,612 through 20 friends. Had a Friendster moment when social-network-surfing made us realize that a high school friend who went to Dartmouth knew my roommate's girlfriend. A little shocked to read that people are selling their friendship on eBay.

Went to Crane's Beach. Nice, but not quite what I expected. Very rural. Good sand. Bummer about the clouds.

Gospel Brunched at House o' Blues. Fun. Excellent music from The Soul Converters. Interesting crowd. A little pricey for an hour of music + food, though still more cost effective than lap dances. Clapped, sang, hugged neighboring strangers. Today is Love Sunday. This little light o' mine, I'm gonna let it shine.

Saw Bad Boys II...a couple of very funny scenes, and some fun if absurd chases. 2.5 hours, though. And a little annoyed at the Public Service Announcement-ish treatment of Ecstasy, especially given how easily the hundreds of people who die on both sides in the movie as a result of the drug war could make an excellent anti-drug war argument.

On a somewhat related note, (finally) reading Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. Sentence of the day: "Harriet Street...looks like about forty winos crawled off in the shadows and died and turned back and bloated and exploded, sending forth a stream of spirochetes that got into every board, every strip, every crack, every splinter, every flecking flake of paint." Sounds a bit like my bedroom. ;-)

Observation: sin taxes impede alcohol, but alcohol impedes syntax.

A quick note

Cool sentence of the moment: "It's a grand opportunity for new bureaucracies and the further infantilization of the public in the name of the greater social good." from (where else?) the Times.

Friendster update: 99,514 people through 17 friends. Chad has me wondering how big my network would be if not for the fictional superconnectors (God, The Dude, etc), though.

Trivial Pursuits

Wow, what a boring weekend! Of course, it did give me a chance to recover from staying out late playing pub trivia at The Overdraught (thanks for letting me tag along Bryan!) and then spending some time at the Phoenix Landing. Got fed Indian food Friday and rented Wall Street Saturday and watched T3* Sunday. Also finished Hedda Gabler audiobook and some Borges stories and started the Moneyball audiobook (all excellent). Everybody seemed to be out of town. Also decided to use miles to have my brother visit, since SAN to BOS tickets are double their usual price.

One random tidbit. I forgot who I had been trying to convince that pink and blue were reversed for baby boys and baby girls at one time, but I found a web page describing it, and, as we all know, everything you find on the web is true.

*T3 tangent: There's a great quote where John is shocked to find out he's going to marry Kate (Claire Danes) and Arnold says something along the lines of, "Why not? She's a healthy female of breeding age." In trying to find the exact quote, I hit some other fun ones at IMDB, this weird parent's guide, and this amusing New Yorker review.

Happy birthday to me

Wow, what an awesome weekend (after inauspiciously locking myself out on my birthday). Friends visiting, sitting outside waiting for the fireworks (beautiful, but why did they have to start sooooooooo late? pretty offensive to make us wait for the sake of the television audiences), going to the beach (thanks Mike!), good dinners. I think every weekend should be a long weekend.

Friendster update: 70,336 people through 12 friends. 39 single girls 21-24 in Boston. Hmm.

Peanuts Acting Like Women?

Although this is one possible origin of the phrase peanut gal-lery (other recent bad puns - what do you call a storm during knighting ceremony? a knightingale! what does a knight ride on? a knightmare! what do you call a knight's shadow? knightshade!), it turns out to not be the actual one. Somebody wrote me asking if I knew where the phrase came from since I used it in the title of my paper (further proof that people are far too generous in ascribing expertise to people who make web pages). I looked it up. First Google result informed me:

Peanut Gallery is American slang dating to 1888 referring to the balcony section of a theater--presumably from hoi polloi eating peanuts in the cheap seats. The term was popularized in the 1950s by the television show Howdy Doody, in which the host Buffalo Bob would call the child audience the peanut gallery. In doing so, Buffalo Bob was combining two different slang traditions.

Peanut is also slang for something small or inconsequential. This use dates to the 1930s. By 1942, the word was being used to mean a small or inconsequential person, or a child. This is the origin of name of Charles Schulz's comic strip, and Howdy Doody got mileage out of both senses of the term.


In other news, I now have 5 friends and 1 testimonial. I'm connected to 26,846 people. How exciting!

Yawn (part 2)

My suitcase finally showed up at 2:10 am. Yuck. But yesterday I stumbled home after Guster and drinks at the 21st Amendment and woke up early enough to go to the gym this morning. Yay me.

Happy birthday to Ayshe.

I am now a denizen of Friendster, though so far I have only 2 friends.

Yawn!

Why am I still awake when I only slept 5 hours on the plane, you might ask? Well, maybe because United left my bag at LAX, and I'm still waiting for it show up. Whee! It was a great trip, though. Caught up on the latest gossip, played some basketball, watched lots of movies, went to an awesome wedding. Far too much to ever hope to recount.