New Environs
We are, by this point, mostly settled in to our new place in Portland, Maine. The town seems great. Its tiny size relative to Chicago is already coming through, as we run into people we’ve already met far too often when wandering around downtown. In a similar, but small world, remarkable coincidence, one of the landlords whose apartment we toured at first is dating an old friend of one of my close friends from college. And then we ran into them at the local pizza restaurant.
Today it snowed, but it feels like winter is letting go.. It has been warmer for the past week and none of the snow is sticking. I think it cracked the fifty degree mark a couple of days ago!
The job hunt continues…and once that is done, everything should be settled into place for a while. I think there will also be a lot of opportunities to juggle around here too.
Too..Something
I enjoy reading about the creation/evolution debate. I like seeing science and reason defeat lunacy. Lately, the blogs have been a-roaring over the Expelled brouhaha with PZ Myers and his mystery guest. Tonight served up some more delicious drama when PZ crashed their promotional conference call.
This is all, of course, tangential to the truly important thing I discovered tonight, buried in the comments of that thread.
At first glance, I thought this was creationist-made, in support of that Expelled movie. After several more delightful viewings, I have come to the following conclusion. This video required far too much talent, too great of rap skillz, and to much genuine humor to have possibly been made by a religious fundamentalist or creationist. It just has that certain…je ne sais quois. I cannot stop laughing at the Daniel Dennet..and the Sam Harris..and the Darwin…
And I love it.
Summer shows
Yesterday was the first of my shows for this season with Newton Learning, the education-y company I juggled for in the fall. They run after school programs, funded by No Child Left Behind, at schools that perform low enough on whatever standardized testing is the current..um..standard. Where last year all of the shows took place at school events around the start of the academic year, this time the company is reaching out early. I juggled yesterday at the Newton Learning booth at the Chicago Puerto Rican Children’s Parade. The actual folks running the booth were friendly, which was nice. It’s been a little awkward for me showing up at these things and meeting the people who are actually involved in the tutoring process, when I’m just the attention-getter hired to bring the kids and (hopefully) their parents to the booth. The people are never rude, so maybe it’s just me feeling awkward.
When I do these shows, Erica always teases me about how I’m an example of the way that funding for this huge educational drive gets funneled away from actual education. I suppose it’s true, and may be a tiny example of how the right wing Everything-Free-Market model can be counterproductive to what you’re actually trying to do: money goes to glitz and promotion and bright flashy colors instead of substance. On the flip side, of course, I’ve never seen the actual tutoring programs in action, and maybe they are really great. I certainly hope so. Heck, sometimes I even hope that the promotional funding must come from the company itself, and the government money is mandated to go directly to the tutoring programs. And, while this system is in place, I don’t mind doing these shows and hoping that my flashiness actually does help steer some kid towards tutoring and, I hope, an improved education who might not otherwise have signed up. At least, that’s how I’m justifying doing these shows. Besides, they’re fun.
Estrogen Fest happened a couple of weeks ago. I think our two nights went quite well, although I felt slightly better about my performance on the second night. There was videotaping going on, and my understanding is that we will get a copy once everything is put together.. Stay tuned.
The Secret Crapola
I finally got around to watching The Secret this week, with Erica and Kate. I first learned about it through a coworker, and then some months later read up on it as Oprah started endorsing the damn thing. Now, there are many, many, critiques out there already, and I don’t really plan on attacking the whole thing. It is rich with material for fisking. Leave us say that I think The Secret is at best irresponsible, and, much more likely, a cynical attempt to make money off of people when they are at their most desperate. Oprah’s endorsement lends it an undeserved air of credibility, and has helped push it up the bestseller lists.
What stood out as I watched, and I think deserves some comment, is one particular testimony from one of the “medical” talking heads on the program. He had just finished suggesting that people use the Secret to improve their health, delicately attempting to prevent future lawsuits by encouraging people to, of course, rely on traditional medical help for serious illness, but to turn their minds to exploring other paths at the same time. He then went on to describe how sometimes, doctors have given patients a sugar pill, telling them it was medication. Lo and behold, these patients healed just as quickly as those on actual medication, if not quicker! And this, he tells us, is the Secret.
Now, disregarding his likely skewing of any actual data on such studies, this man has just come out and all but stated that the Secret is nothing more than a placebo effect. A placebo effect! The Secret is just a sugar pill you can take, and tell yourself that you feel better. I’m surprised they included that, for I would have thought it a bit of a giveaway that this snake oil they’re hawking might not actually do much.
So then I realized this blog needs more metal.
I have been listening to almost nothing but metal lately, (with a little Bangles and Roy Zimmerman thrown in), and I’m pretty excited about it. Since I’ve finally figured out embedding in this thing (I just turned off the Rich Text Formatting stuff) it seems like a celebratory YouTube dump is in order!
First up, super speedy cheese with Dragon Force. Check out the dueling solos! Burn!
Next up, Nightwish! Finnish symphonic metal. I was puttering around iTunes and YouTube when I discovered them, and immediately sent this video to all my friends. For some strange reason, no one else was nearly as excited as I was. Still, Hiromi bought me a cd for my birthday. Long intro, but stick around for the operatic vocals, and the keyboard solo!
Finally, we have Arch Enemy! Swedish melodic death metal with a supremely badass German vocalist, Angela Gossow.
On a side note, I suspect that metal has developed such intricately differentiated sub-genres just so that fanboys can fight over which one is best, and over which bands epitomize each one, and which bands don’t belong in their sacred chosen sub-genre.
Lame and Cool at the same time..
So I still haven’t figured out embedding video in this WordPress thing… Lame. Erica and I put up a couple of videos of ourselves on YouTube, though, which I think is pretty cool. Still lame that I don’t have the videos sitting nicely in the middle of this post.
So here is the bit Erica and I did for Girlie Q in August. We’re planning to keep developing it and performing it elsewhere.
And here is Bruce and me passing eleven balls. I’ve had it for a while and been meaning to put it up.. Bruce does a fancy kick after we mess up!
That’ll be all the videos for now.
Oh..I’m also lame because I didn’t log on here for so long and thus missed moderating Mark’s comment on the last entry.. Sorry Mark!
Ten Years of Winter
I always very much enjoy the start of winter in the midwest. Back at the end of high school, whenever I told anyone that I was considering attending college in Iowa, the first word out of their mouth would always be either “Why?” or “Cold!” It became pretty hyped up in my mind, and I had some trepidation that first year…would I be able to handle the Iowa winter?
Well it worked out fine. I loved the snow, the cold did not bother me, and I grew to like it more over time. It also became somewhat symbolic each year, as the weather turned from the familiar to something I had never encountered back in Austin, of moving away from home or even growing up. The temperature drops and I am reminded that I’m kind of an adult now, on my own in a new, or at least after these years different, place, and it’s in a way reassuring.
And I still have to go outside to see the first snowfall of the season, each year.
Pals
So the other day Erica and I were walking out of the apartment, when she paused to look through the mailbox. I stood on the steps, heard a noise from the tree directly in front of me. I turned to look just in time to see a bird of prey (hawk?� our guess..) come flying out of the tree towards me, holding a dead pigeon. It veered off, landed on an suv half a block away, and dropped the bird. We investigated, the hawk flew up to a building top, and we had a quick look at the pigeon. All of its neck feathers were removed, leaving a strange skinny bit between shoulders and head. We moved off quickly, and when we returned later in the evening, pigeon and hawk were gone. A bit of wildlife in the city…it colored my whole day…
So about two years ago I decided that I wanted to write palindromes. Off and on I work on it..rarely making much progress. I haven’t been able to make any long ones that make sense. Here are my best so far. If you’ve heard them already, let me know. sigh.
Drowsy sword
No parts strap on
Amoral aroma
God for evil onsets at ten; net tastes no liver of dog
Something of an Anthem
So Weird Al has a new cd coming out in two days.. I’ve been enjoying and sharing his latest music video as I wait to rush out and make my purchase…it’s great! An excellent parody of Chamillionaire’s “Ridin’ Dirty” song…. Enjoy!
In fact..September seems to be a big media month for me.. Scott Mccloud has a new book out, Making Comics. I already picked it up and am in the middle of my second reading. Excellent stuff.. A comic about the craft and techniques involved in making sequential art.
And then, there’s the new Jet Li movie, Fearless. I’m hoping to catch it either this afternoon or tomorrow evening. Very excited..whenever Jet Li works with Yuen Wo Ping for fight choreography, I rest assured that the results will be very impressive.
Breaking my silence on Chris Bliss, and not writing anything myself
So I’ve gone back and forth a number of times, trying to decide if I should post anything about the Chris Bliss video. When my upper elementary school teacher sent it to me, the first person to do so, I thought, that’s a nice little video, and forgot about it. When other family members and friends started sending it to me I thought, that’s odd, this plain little video is really getting around the internet. When I started coming across it on my favorite blogs and it continued to arrive in my e-mail, I started getting annoyed. I considered writing a crotchety post about why this video’s success annoyed me…but the idea seemed too sour. Besides, as a certain young lady I happen to live with kept half-jokingly pointing out, I was probably just jealous and would love to have a juggling video of MINE suddenly explode like that, regardless of the quality. There may be some truth to that, so I decided not to write anything. I vented a little to friends, a little to family, and that was that.
Then a friend of mine from college, someone I hadn’t heard from in five years, found me on myspace, and sent me a video. It was Chris Bliss juggling, this time to a Fatboy Slim song. Seemed like a music video. I sighed. She had sent it as a comment, so it would show up on my myspace profile. I just couldn’t bring myself to approve it.
Now, my friend Mark comes along with a nice explanation of why many jugglers have felt some inner exasperation at that video. I present to you Mark Hayward with some thoughts, and two new videos. Apparently, there is now a contest to make a juggling video to that Fatboy Slim song. Vova Galchenko made one, with Mark Bakalor. Mark Hayward links to both the original with Chris Bliss and the Vova version.
I like the Vova one a lot. Technical juggling at astronomical levels. My favorite bits, though, are the neat little three club, and five ball tricks scattered throughout, particularly in the second half, that create interesting visual patterns and body shapes.. I mean, it’s amazing that Vova can do those under the leg combos, but they’re not so visually interesting to me after a while…same thing with the pirouettes. But check out what Mark Hayward has to say on this for a non-crotchety response to the Chris Bliss explosion. I agree with him..and I really do wish that it was a better example of juggling that had exploded..a video with truly great juggling, both technical and artistic. I’ve seen so many phenomenal juggling acts at festivals and the like…I know it’s out there..
