Philharmonic drinking game

What could possibly make the Philharmonic's concerts in Central Park better? By adding a drinking game, of course!

Every time the audience claps inappropriately (ie, between movements), chug through the length of the applause.

One drink for every time Didi & Oscar Schaffer get a shout-out
...for every fundraising plug
...for every mic glitch

During the pieces, drink when a cell phone rings
...when a cell phone is answered
...when a baby cries
...when someone walks directly across your picnic blanket

In the music, drink whenever there's a false ending
...whenever you can hear the violas
...whenever there's a chromatic scale

If something is repeated three times in the music, drink. This rule actually can increase your appreciation of the music! Tonight's program was Mozart and Beethoven, and it was interesting to keep track of how they each used and manipulated sequences and expectations.

Bonus rule! Drink every time Grace does a prairie dog dance.

The Bus of The Doomed

Despite several years of regular ridership of the Fung Wah bus, I have never experienced buses full of chickens or Chinese chefs preparing raw fish en route or any of the other horrors that old people associate with the Chinatown bus, except for some godawful traffic. Honestly, I feel a little jipped. Where is my bus full of chickens?!

Last weekend, too lazy to schlep to Canal St, I took Bolt Bus instead. Turns out I've been taking the wrong bus line all along. Bolt is the Bus Of The Doomed.*

Bus driver:

"We are now approaching Boston - South Station. Please make sure to gather all your personal belongings, and wake any sleeping passengers. And I mean give them a good knock on the forehead. Last week we had a gentleman on the bus who appeared to be asleep, with his laptop open in front of him, but actually he had passed away in his seat. So please wake all sleepers. Now arriving, South Station."

Umm.

*as the Doctor Who special would be titled, natch.

How my brain works

Facebook: Richard is Alternate Juror #1

Me: Hah, I hope that means he's an understudy in a production of 12 Angry Men. I've never actually read 12 Angry Men. I wonder how the character names are formatted. Like is it :

JUROR #3
Hang him high!

JUROR #9
Chill out, dude

etc? That would get really hard on the eyes. Maybe they write out the numbers, so it's like:

TEN
He's totes guilty.

FOUR
You always say that!

Although then it just looks like the script for a multi-Doctor story. Ooh!


And this is how the words "all 12 Doctors perform 12 Angry Men" appeared in my google search bar.

NYT Fail

In the NY Times Book Review tomorrow, a review of the book "Digital Barbarism" begins as follows:

One of the more trenchant cartoons of the Internet era features a stick-figure man typing furiously at his keyboard. From somewhere beyond the panel floats the irritated voice of his wife.

“Are you coming to bed?”

“I can’t,” he replies. “This is important.”

“What?”

“Someone is wrong on the Internet.”

Anyone familiar with, well, the internet will immediately recognize this as the work of everyone's internet crush Randall Munroe, in xkcd #386.


But uncredited.

The article in question, which can be found here, is about copyright in the internet age, fair use, and outraged internet denizens. Fail.

Also note the interesting assumptions the article's author makes about the relationship and gender of the xkcd characters.

Jenny noted that the article was written by a Ross Douthat, which must clearly be the pseudonym of xkcd's black hat guy. Douthat is pretty much as close to douche-hat as one can print in the NY Times, so I'm gonna go with this explanation. Stay tuned to next week's book review for an extended series on velociraptors.


Major fail, NYT.

Valley Stream pride

There's an escaped lunatic on the loose in Valley Stream State Park. Or possibly an escaped kitty-cat. One of those.

I'm reading in the park, around 6 pm, and a helicopter passes overhead. And again, lower. And it quickly becomes clear that it is circling the park at low altitude. Since a string of ninjas didn't come out the drop door, it seemed safe to assume they were looking for someone.

Near me, a guy in a balaclava (also known as a ski mask) was practicing parkour. A balaclava. Mid-day. Mid-June. While exercising. Definitely a terrorist.

After a half hour, I head out. The entrance to the park is blocked by a police car, and a few cops are at the gate. I know for a fact that the other 7 entrances aren't being watched. I try to head back in to investigate, but they aren't letting people into the park now.

"You guys do know that the other entrances are open, right?"
"We're looking for someone we think is in this area."
"..."

The park, mind you, is maybe a mile around. So because I'm a punk, I bike around the outside of the park and re-enter from another entrance. Because no one ever taught me not to make fun of police officers. The other entrances are all open, as I'd thought, though one is being watched by a couple guys in South Shore Hospital uniforms. Undercover men. Or someone escaped the psych ward.

Back inside the park, two more cops are staring at the trees. There's a trail in there. The entrance to the trail is around a bend from where the cops are standing, out of their sight-line. Okay. Meanwhile, balaclava guy has fled the scene.

At the first entrance, another guy is questioning the cops.
"It's not the crime of the century or anything."
"Oh okay, so it wasn't violent."
"I didn't say that. You move along now."

I'm figuring those darn kids stole Baby Lindbergh from the manger again.

Eventually I got bored of watching my tax dollars at work. Nassau County police are the highest paid in the country. Way to earn it, guys.

I made eye contact with Gerard Butler while doing the Chicken Dance

So there me and Candace were. Minding our own business. Doing the chicken dance in front of Penn Station. Because we had decided to walk from 23rd St. to Times Square by doing a different dance down each block. Naturally. And 34th St. was the chicken dance.

So we're minding our own business, doing the chicken dance, and the "clap clap clap clap!" part was getting a lot of attention. Not as much attention as our zombie walk got on 25th, but heads were turning. Including the head of Gerard Butler. And the rest of him. As well as his personal gentleman. He looked at us like we were crazy. With good reason. But he was dancing on the inside.

I smiled and waved at Mr. Butler. I didn't know who he was (of course). Candace informed me on the corner. And then we continued on our merry way, Macarena-ing down 35th.

The end.

Citing Safety Concerns, Harvard Solves Problem of Race

By Liz & Ben

CAMBRIDGE, MA -- The Harvard Admissions Office announced today that it would reverse its longstanding promotion of equal opportunity through the consideration of race in its decisions.

The move comes in response to the recent discovery that even African-American students who are three weeks from graduation are still dangerous criminal thugs.

"It's a shame", said William Fitzsimmons, Dean of Admissions. "After years of believing we were educating these kids, it's turned out that they are just as black and poor as they were before they enrolled."

Dissatisfaction with current policy reached a breaking point after the shootings in Kirkland house last month, in which Jabrai Jordan Copney of New York City allegedly shot Cambridge resident Justin Cosby in a drug-related incident. The spotlight quickly shifted to Harvard senior Chanequa Campbell, who, to the shock of many, was acquainted with the victim.

"I've known Channy for years, but I never saw this coming" said Chanequa's classmate, Eliot Canaday III. "Who knew she was still "down" with the "street?" Sure, she still looks black, but I mean, this is Harvard."

Widely criticized for failing to prevent this tragedy by properly assimilating black students into Harvard culture, the administration has responded with sweeping policy change. "Decades of occasional effort and perhaps hundreds of dollars have gone into Harvard's attempt to educate all students equally," said President Drew Faust in a video address yesterday, in which she appeared with several armed guards and a pitbull. "But it is time to acknowledge that these efforts have jeopardized the safety of our real students."

Harvard is calling its decision vital to maintaining the 371-year-old institution's educational integrity, but Plummer Professor of Christian Morals Peter J. Gomes disagrees. "This runs contrary to many years of progress towards the true American dream - to take any lump-of-clay students, whether financially, ethnically, or genderly challenged, and mold them into affluent white men."

Outside Cambridge the change has been applauded, except in the handful of newspapers not published by former Crimson editors, and Yale and Princeton have quickly followed suit. "We have been preparing to unroll a similar change for the last 19 months," grumbled an anonymous Princeton official, "but now that the cat's out of the bag: fine, us too." Neither of Princeton's black students could be reached for comment.

Meanwhile, student life has continued as usual. Junior Fulbright A. Rhodes didn't even notice the change. "The black kids, you know, they kept to themselves. Only time you saw them was at school-wide events, like formals and stuff. And even in tuxedos, they always ended up looking like the hired help anyway."

Well, Hello WALL-E

Fun fact:

Jerry Herman, the composer of Hello Dolly, knew last year that he'd licensed some of his songs to Pixar. But he didn't know what they'd be used for. Until he sat down and watched WALL-E. [HuffPo]

Can you imagine? Not only the surprise of having your fifty-year-old songs - by far not the most widely remembered in your songbook - turn out to be a major plot point in this fantastic little movie... but also that this fantastic little movie says your fifty-year-old songs are going to OUT-LIVE CIVILIZATION?!


In other news, despite the unlikely immortality of the b-tracks from Hello Dolly, the Tony Awards last night confirmed that musical theater has jumped the shark.

1:41 am on the LIRR

Announcement upon changing trains at Jamaica:

This is the train to Long Beach. Ladies and gentlemen, as part of our Clean Train Campaign, please be aware that there are restrooms located on every other car of this train. With the combination of alcoholic beverages, fatty foods, and the rhythmic motion of the train, please remove yourself to one of the restrooms if you feel the urge to yak. The next station is Locust Manor.

The Writer's Tale - a gloss

To: Benjamin Cook
From: Russell T. Davies
Sent 23 December, 03:45 AM
Subject: re: re: re: David's arse

I've got it! The great "Maybe" swirling around my head has finally come together into the perfect image: Midshipman Frame! And Ianto Jones! Fighting intergalactic crime! Shirtless! On a giant CGI pterodactyl! And then dying tragically in each other's arms! Oh, I'm brilliant, I am.

I'll have to give the Doctor something to do, don't want to upset David. He can blow up Wales I suppose. But it's perfect! All I have to is cut 2563 CGI days from the rest of the BBC's lineup to pay for it. And we were supposed to start filming three months ago, so I reckon I need to convince the Queen to push Christmas back a couple weeks. But she owes me one.

To: Russell T. Davies
From: Benjamin Cook

Dude, we finished the damn book. Stop using these emails as an excuse to write fan fiction about your own bloody characters.

To: Benjamin Cook
From: Russell T. Davies

I was wrong. I'm a fraud. It's hollow and vapid and fannish and trite, and it can't possibly work. But we're gonna go ahead with it anyway because I haven't got anything better. I need a drink.




[I actually really enjoyed The Writer's Tale and highly recommend it. But it is oh so easy to mock.]

I suck at British

Four consecutive tweets:

Apparently the British for "emergency room" is Casualty. As in "she's going into labor, we have to get to a Casualty." How morbid is that?
39 minutes ago from web

And there's a BBC soap called Casualty (like ER), but for the longest time I misread it as Causality, which sounds like a much better show.
38 minutes ago from web

Crap I meant "she's going into labour." I suck at British. It's labour for all meanings of labor, right? She isn't switching parties...
7 minutes ago from web

oh god and there's no article for hospital. "She's going into labour, we have to get to Casualty." There. Glad I have no British followers...
3 minutes ago from web



Anglophilia fail.

Changes for Samantha

I received a copy of the American Girl catalog in the mail today, for some reason. I used to love the American Girl catalog. I spent most of elementary school optimistically marking up every issue with circles and stars, hoping that I might get more than one new doll outfit this Hanukkah (I never did. I also desperately wanted Kirsten's summer dress, and kinda still do). So I sat down with the catalog, prepared for a happy nostalgia-fest.

I knew the company had de-emphasized the core historical dolls in recent years, in favor of "girls of today." But I was pretty shocked to see that each historical girl (many of them strangers - I aged out of the series somewhere between Addy and Josefina) now only gets a two page spread in the catalog. Where's Felicity's four-poster bed? Where's Molly's canoe? Where's Samantha's school desk, with the wrought iron curliques for hiding notes? In fact... where's Samantha?!

Samantha is going back into the American Girls vault.

This? Not okay.

I know, I know, the American Girl books were designed to sell dolls. Insanely expensive dolls, and their insanely expensive (but oh so charming!) clothing and furniture. But, if memory serves, they were also AWESOME.

The books did an honest job of turning history into understandable narrative, and the dolls turned narrative into interaction. Their stories didn't shy away from tackling the darker issues of the girls' times, either - racism, classism, war, poverty, and child labor were part of these characters' lives.

Sure, the history was sometimes a little vague. I remember being totally confused about Molly's chronology. My interior monologue, circa 1992: "There's this huge war going on, and war is something that happens in the past. But she's got refrigerators and cars and stuff, so clearly this is present day. What war is this? Are we at war now? I'll sound stupid if I ask someone. I think I'll just stay confused until I'm 15."

But I also learned that poison ivy means getting covered with chamomile lotion (Molly Saves the Day). And that little girls with poor parents have to work bare-foot in factories (Samantha Learns a Lesson). And that the black character is always going to have the crappy story lines / accessories (poor Addy*).

My sadness at the loss of one of the original three girls (Molly and Kirsten are safe for now) is especially strong, I admit, because Samantha is MY girl. I had the doll, and her little white fur muff, and her sailor outfit with the whistle, and the change purse with the penny from 1904. We couldn't afford to get the matching clothes for me. But Allison Kresch wore Samantha's plaid dress to synagogue one Shabbat and omigod I was so jealous. So see! It wasn't only the books that taught about class differences!

I fear that Samantha's jettison is another step on the American Girl Company's path towards abandoning the historical line altogether. I hope that they are just cashing in on the Disney Vault concept, and will be periodically shelving each girl for a few years at a time to scare up sales. But it is all too likely that Samantha, Felicity, and Addy are being phased out to make room in the stores and catalogs for the likes of Madison, Brooke, and Taylor, with shiny little dolly iPods and dolly MySpace accounts.

The books aren't going anywhere, but the dolls themselves serve a legitimate purpose in a market glutted with Barbies and Bratz. Yes, they're only accessible to rich kids, and that's pretty gross. But rich kids getting decent dolls is still better than no one getting decent dolls. And if you're gonna buy a kid a $90 doll, she damn well better come with six novels worth of back story.

From left:
my Native American doll Lily (named for Tiger Lily),
my Romanian doll Stashie, and my Samantha.
And a Dalek, but he's a more recent addition.

*actually, Addy reminds me of Martha Jones. Both intrinsically awesome yet really poorly used by their series. Also, Kendra from Buffy. And Uhura.