Today I learned that I actually really like Valentine's Day. Is that okay?

Favorites include:
2004: Performing Mozart's Requiem with Holden at ACDA*
2007: Beauty & The Geek party. And The Little Mermaid? Or was that '06?
2009: Gallo pinto in Cambridge UK
2010: 10-person dance party, and Disney 'n' pizza


*interestingly, only my third favorite Mozart's Requiem memory, following the (life-changing) first performance in December and the Eliot JCR singalong during comm choir '05.

Today I learned that chocolate-covered bacon is disgusting.

Today I learned a whole ton about World's Fairs. Like, way more than I could write up here. Because I also learned that when my homework is awesome, I will go above and beyond. Watch a half hour of vintage Coney Island footage, you say? See you in four hours...

So we learned last week that the word panorama originally referred to the Imax 360 of the 19th century, and only subsequently did the suffix -orama get applied as an indicator of great scale and awesomeness. Keep this in mind as I tell you about the 1939 World's Fair's Futurama - the awesomest thing to be called Futurama until that other Futurama.

The Futurama was, first of all, the grand-daddy of the Disney-style dark ride: a narrated trip in moving seats through a vivid diorama (there's that suffix again), in this case depicting the world in twenty years, as envisioned by Norman Bel Geddes for General Motors. The principal feature of this world is the existence of an interstate highway system - build us these roads, GM told taxpayers, and we'll sell you the cars to drive on them. The thing is that although GM's argument worked, we didn't follow their instructions very well. Bel Geddes designed a utopic highway system that was carefully calibrated for ideal traffic flow - the rural elevated highways depicted in the early parts of the ride have seven lanes, with two transition lanes on a lower level, bringing drivers safely from 25 to 50 to a cruising speed of 100 mph(!).

But of course, the system we actually built was not so idyllic. Dan Howland of The Journal of Ride Theory sums it up in one of my favorite quotes on the topic: "If we lived in the Futurama, we'd be home by now."

I highly recommend this film of the Futurama itself: http://www.archive.org/details/ToNewHor1940 Highlights include the dirigible hanger in the airport (floating in a pool of water, so it can easily rotate to suit the wind direction!), and the odd reference to the Gloria Patri at the end. If you watch it, please talk to me about it - we didn't talk about it at all in class, so it is not out of my system.

Today I learned a new Harvard building! You know that building to the right of Lamont? Me neither till today! In all these years, I have not only never been inside that building, or known what it is, but I've never even really registered its existence. So today I walked in and announced my presence to the dude at the desk:

Me: Hi! I've been here five years and have never been in this building. Where am I?
Dude: This is the Houghton rare books library.
Me: Whoa, that exists?
Dude: ...yes.
Me: I mean, I always thought it was just one of those Hollis designations for a particular collection, not an actual physical location.
Dude: Rare books generally need to be stored somewhere secure. And physical.
Me: This makes sense.

Next up: Liz learns to navigate new Lamont floor-numbering, avoids further embarrassing attempts to locate Shakespeare in the government docs stacks.

Today I learned - well, I've been learning this for two weeks now, but today was another reminder - that I really don't like singing Bach. Or the St. John Passion, at any rate. I love playing Bach, but singing him seems to be a whole 'nother matter. It's the reverse of Mozart, who is great to sing but lousy to play. It's interesting that although alto and cello lines often share many characteristics, I can have such strong opinions on whose work I'd rather sing vs play - the same line has totally different fun-ness properties depending how it is produced.

Sometimes, however, the finger can really be pointed at the composer. Yes, I'm looking at you, Ralph Vaughan-Williams. Fantasia on Tallis AND God Bless The Master? Really? Really?

Thankfully, today I also learned to preserve the quality of my day through a Bach rehearsal by tying up my good mood in one of Jim Marvin's Santa Claus bags and throwing it into the balcony for safe keeping till 6:30.

This weekend I learned that the church choir experience is completely revolutionized through the addition of a neck pillow. Reverend Gomes, you are a lovely man, but your sermons are very long.

After years of struggling to pithily describe the majority of my high school classmates in a way that doesn't:

• involve ethnic stereotyping ("guidos")
• inspire the listener to turn the claim back on me ("JAPs")
• sound too douchey / loaded for people who actually know their Marx ("lumpenproletariat")
• seem better reserved for describing the Five Towns ("nouveau riche")
• seem inaccurate since most people do go to college ("townies")

I finally learned the perfect word for summing up my hometown - chavvy.

Today I learned that vertiginous means vertigo-y. Can you use it in a sentence? Why yes, I can!

The soundscape in Birnam Wood is vertiginous.

There ya go.

Today I learned about panoramas. Originally, panoramas were buildings that housed a 360 degree painting. These were super popular in the 19th century, and they sound a bit awesome.

Check out this cross-section of a standard panorama. The cupola overhead prevents the viewer from seeing the border of the painting on top, the artificial floor conceals the border on bottom.Fancier panoramas used projection, meaning massive amounts of Victorian mechanicalness and gas flames and roaring motors, and all in all were less like a tranquil view of the countryside and more like an awesome way to get conflagrated.

I am wondering about the Allegory of the Cave. For half a century, a significant chunk of the population has been first introduced to Plato through the Chronicles of Narnia. I'm sure this affects interpretation - the Cave and the Shadowlands are synonymous for me. There's no real conclusion to be drawn here, but I just think it's fascinating that C.S. Lewis gets to be the gatekeeper of Plato.

Bless me, what do they teach them at these schools?

Today I learned that I am the first person in the history of the internet who has blogged about something related to her job, had her boss find it, and had this lead to praise and approbation. :)

I am wondering about a presentation given to one of my classes today by a producer at WGBH. The only time she defaulted to a masculine pronoun (the only time anyone ever defaults to a masculine pronoun in children's programming) was when referring to the writers. FML.

This weekend I learned that having someone read to you for seven hours is an extremely engaging and rewarding experience, especially when you're in a theater full of people, and the thing being read to you is The Great Gatsby.

And while buying school supplies I was walking through Staples with an Englishman, who pointed at a tape dispenser and exclaimed "oh look, Sellotape!" I stared at him for a moment and then realized: THAT'S WHY SHE CALLED IT SPELLOTAPE!!! Good one, JK!

I am wondering how I can arrange it so that every weekend is as awesome as this one.

Today I learned that cool institutions will sometimes let you do cool stuff for them if you just ask. :)

I'm adding another category to my What I Learned In School Today posts. Inspired by Project Zero's cheesy-but-surprisingly-effective See Think Wonder thought routines, I will also, when applicable, list something I am wondering about.

I am wondering about the orchestra pit. Specifically, about the point in architectural history when theaters first started concealing the orchestra in a pit (this was with Wagner's Bayreuth Festspielhaus, which is something I learned yesterday). I'd never really thought before about what a huge innovation the concealed orchestra is. Would we have ever gotten modern musical theater without it?

Today I learned academic things! I had the first meeting of my class at the design school, which is on the history of immersive entertainment spaces - aka the history of awesome. We were discussing various attributes of immersive experiences, including artificial synesthesia, loss of boundaries between self and context or others, and cognitive overload.

Also on the list was the loss of agency. I argued that this attribute should be more accurately listed as just a change in one's level of personal agency, not necessarily a loss, because some immersive experiences (I specifically named Sleep No More and the holodeck) are characterized by extremely high levels of agency within a narrative space. The professor pointed out that what I identified is really just the flip side of the same coin - in order to have the illusion of agency, the designer must have an incredibly high level of control over all the elements. The greater the illusion of agency, the less agency the individual actually has.

This blew my mind, a little.

Today I learned that lady-senators have absolutely no decency when it comes to choosing the color of their lady-suits. The only rule necessary for the State of the Union drinking game is "drink every time some lady's lady-suit makes you cringe with its yellowness."

Today I learned that it was Australia Day. That's about it, I reckon.

Today I learned how to use Constant Contact and Google AdWords. I also learned that Big Brother is watching like whoa. Did you realize that they know whether you click on the links in an email??

What I Learned In School Today:

The plural of planetarium is planetaria. The plural of stadium is stadia. The plural of penis is penes.

What I Learned In School Today

This semester, I am going to write down one thing that I learned every day. I'll do it here, so that we can all learn together. Yay learning.

Today I learned that the Graduate School of Design is way cooler than the Graduate School of Education, and has far more interesting classes and far more attractive (and plentiful) men. I also learned that chocolate-covered Goldfish are awesome.


. . . I am hoping that once classes start, I'll be learning things slightly more academic. But I won't hold my breath.