Infographic: John Munson, Center of the Universe

Figure 1. John Munson's Twitter Photo

Alright, it's been a while. Baby = busy. Facebook = easy place to put short posts and links to funny, interesting, or political stuff. Sorry. I do have some posts in mind for here, but in the meantime, it's time to get back to the intersection of culture and nerdery, where this thing started.

Pictured, right, is Twin Cities-based bassist John Munson. If you were listening to current pop music in 1998, you know his work because Semisonic's "Closing Time" reached #11 on the Billboard Hot 100 in that year, and #1 on their Modern Rock Tracks chart. Or you might know him because you're from the Twin Cities and have listened to Rev 105 or The Zone or The Current. On one of these stations you might have heard music by Trip Shakespeare or The New Standards or Twilight Hours. Munson is in or has been in all. He is also the music director for John Moe's show "Wits" on MPR. He is a busy man who has made some awesome music.

I sat down to create a diagram for keeping track of the bands Munson has been in, and the personnel of each (according to Wikipedia). Here it is:

Figure 2. Not a Venn Diagram.

(Nota bene, nerds: this is not a Venn Diagram. A Venn diagram has to show intersections of each and every set in every combination. So there would have to be someone who had been in The Twilight Hours and Semisonic, but no other bands, and The New Standards and Trip Shakespeare and no others, etc. The inclusion of The Flops and The Suburbs as sets also fouls the Venn-ness of this diagram.)

I wish I'd had this chart in 2001, as it would have helped me keep the Wilson brothers straight. I was at Broder's Deli with some high school friends for lunch one day that summer, and we were seated next to a guy who looked a lot like the lead singer of Semisonic. He was chatting with a friend about upcoming projects, including spending some time in Iceland working with Björk's producer. Being familiar only somewhat with the lineups of Trip Shakespeare and Semisonic, I was pretty sure Matt Wilson was the front man of the latter. When he got up, I asked: "Are you Matt Wilson?" "No, I'm his brother, Dan." "Oh, ok. Nice to meet you." When I got home, I realized my error, and took this as a sign to finally pick up a copy of their new album.

Incidentally, if anyone wants to get me two tickets to The New Standards' holiday show at the Fitzgerald some year and provide a babysitter, that person would be my new hero.

The Artcrimes of George Lucas: those prequels

Hey, stop the presses, I'm a white 30-year-old male and I'm about to complain about the Star Wars prequels on the internet.

There's a guy on Youtube, with the handle RedLetterMedia, who specializes in video reviews of sci-fi movies. He came to prominence with his reviews of the Star Trek series, and has recently gained more attention for his lengthy takedowns of the first two Star Wars prequels and Avatar. Lengthy. Like 70 minutes for each of the Star Wars prequels. That length of time could be easily spent on a laundry list of nit-picks and internal inconsistencies, and while there's plenty of nits being picked, he mostly gathers his commentary into thematic sections around larger-scale ideas. Each is an indictment of what George Lucas has become and what he has turned the Star Wars films into. The bottom line that in the intervening 22 years between trilogies, Lucas traded art for commerce, story for plot, and character for plot delivery device. He illustrates most accurately how Lucas' characters do not behave as real people, but like blank-faced zombies, which isn't surprising given how little they had to act with and react to in the films. None of this surprises, but all points are effectively made. They should be required viewing for all aspiring film makers or critics.

• RedLetterMedia's Phantom Menace Review
• RedLetterMedia's Attack of the Clones Review
• (Language and some imagery NSFW on both)

If you grew up loving Star Wars, both are worth watching in full, but if you must watch only selections, watch the first and last video of each. The reviewer, in the guise of his disturbing Harry Plinkett character, is incisive, funny, and devastating. It's safe to say that many Star Wars (and Indiana Jones!) fans lost a fair amount of respect for Lucas' sensibilities starting in about 1997. These reviews obliterated whatever was left of mine.

[The one complaint I have about the reviews is for elements of the Plinkett character. The joke is that he's a social maladjust who is definitely a kidnapper and is probably a serial killer. This got pretty tiresome in the Phantom Menace review especially, but was improved upon in the second, in which Plinkett and his hooker captive find a common bond in bitching about Attack of the Clones' awfulness.]

I really didn't like the prequels, but like many my age I convinced myself for a long time that they were maybe kind of sort of ok. I recently watched The Phantom Edit and its sequel, Attack of the Phantom, in which a professional editor makes very careful and thoughtful changes to both movies, improving both significantly. Watching those versions, I decided that there were indeed better films buried within Lucas' theatrical releases. But you can't really polish a turd, and the Phantom Editor, in his commentary, makes clear his own disdain for what George Lucas has created.

This was on my bedroom wall for 15 years.

For me, the worst thing about the new trilogy, besides everything, is that it shook my appreciation of the original trilogy. I grew up loving those movies, and long considered Star Wars and Empire Strikes Back among my favorite films of all time, even as I grew up and expanded my cinematic horizons. With how terrible Episodes I-III were, I started to doubt those earlier films, and wonder if maybe they were worse than I remembered. I avoided rewatching them. This is going to sound weird, but I found the RedLetterMedia reviews somehow helpful. They crystallized my thoughts and feelings about the Star Wars trilogies in a way that I hadn't quite been able to put into words. They affirmed the reasons I loved the originals, and the reasons why the prequels were different and worse. Thanks, Plinkett. I feel much better.

The upshot of all of this is that I've come to a decision: I'm going to get rid of my DVD copies of Episodes I-III. We've got limited real estate in our DVD cabinet, and I don't need that crap on hand for future viewing.

Inlouriouser and Inglouriouser

[UPDATED 5/4/10 SEE BELOW]

Been meaning to write this one up for a while. There's a feature on the DVD of Inglourious Basterds, my favorite film of last year, about Geraldine Brezca, who operated the clapboard for Tarantino during its making. She apparently enjoys introducing the takes with non-sequitur words and phrases, often with the effect of making actors laugh as the scene starts. Names of arthouse directors from around the world seem to be one of her primary idioms. So if you would find it amusing to hear a woman say things like "Emeric Pressburger" and "Wong Kar-Wai" in a disaffected tone and Italian accent, now's your chance. Thanks, YouTube!




[NOTE ADDED 5/4/10 12:17PM! Reader "Nels" writes to note that every single phrase or word she uses starts with the letter or letters in the SLATE number cell on the slate itself. Dumbly, I wasn't even looking at the numbers. So there is a method to her madness.]

Incidentally, there's another tradition on Tarantino's recent shoots, and that is for the actors to send greetings to Sally Menke, who has edited all of his films. I seem to recall that the Kill Bill DVD may also have had a "Hi Sally" reel on it:



Here's the thing: in the top montage there are at least a couple of shots being clapped that didn't actually make the cut into the movie. There are two in particular that I'm thinking of. The first is of Oscar-winner Christoph Waltz, as SS Colonel Hans Landa and August Diehl as Gestapo Major Hellstrom sitting next to one another watching a movie. I suspect that this scene was cut from the "German Night in Paris" chapter, and that they are watching "Lucky Kids" with Goebbels to evaluate Shosanna's theater.

The other is a shot of Eli Roth as Sgt. Donny Donowitz, sitting in a genteel living room in a stupid-looking suit and tie, smiling pleasantly and holding a cup of tea. Now, granted, I thought Eli Roth was the weak link among the cast, and would love to have seen the original casting choice, Adam Sandler, in the part.* But I'd also be interested in seeing this scene that was cut. The rough draft of the screenplay, which is available online, has it: before shipping off to Europe, Donny buys his baseball bat in his Boston neighborhood, then takes it to his Jewish neighbors to have them sign the bat in the names of their relatives still stuck in Europe under the Third Reich. The scene we see here is his sit-down with a Mrs. Himmelstein, played by Cloris Leachman, who also writes, and misspells "INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS" on the bat, giving the guerrilla unit and the movie their title.

There is another entire performance that was apparently filmed and cut, that of Hong Kong actress Maggie Cheung as Madame Mimeux, the previous owner of the cinema, ownership of which Shosanna inherits along with an assumed last name. The screenplay draft also includes the scene of their meeting, when Shosanna is homeless in Paris having fled the scene of her family's murder by Landa's death squad.

I do wish Tarantino was in the habit of putting more deleted scenes on his DVDs. He's given us a handful here & there in the past, but he's been weaning us: whereas Pulp Fiction's DVD included a handful of scenes removed from the movie, Kill Bill Vol. 2 included a single additional scene of Bill on an assignment, and now the Basterds DVD includes only extended versions of scenes that were in the final cut of the film. Considering that the cut that screened at Cannes early last year was several minutes longer than the theatrical release, I'd be fascinated to see the other bits, if only to see how shortening a movie can strengthen it. Certainly, reading the screenplay, you get the impression that even the over-the-top final product was an exercise in restraint for the writer/director and his overflowing brain full of movies.

*Incidentally, I'm very glad for the other casting changes that became necessary. Though I like Simon Pegg an awful lot, I'm very glad that his role ended up going to Michael Fassbender, who is terrific. And I cannot imagine Leonardo DiCaprio (!) as Hans Landa. Nor, I suspect, can Christoph Waltz.

What will be stuck in your head for the next two weeks

Time for the Winter Olympics! I love the Olympics in general and the winter games in particular. Perhaps this is because the closely-spaced winter Olympics in 1992 and 1994 occurred for me at that age when your brain's connections are really forming, locking in associations and memories,* or because, to be honest, I was watching a hell of a lot of tv at that age, and saw much of these games. I also have the Minnesotan, growing-up-playing-in-the-snow thing contributing.

Anyway, if you're like me, you're going to be walking around with Olympic music stuck in your head for the duration. Back in the early 90s, I made a copy of a tape someone in my family (either my aunt or grandparents) had of music by film composer John Williams, performed by the Boston Pops under the composer's direction. I was already a fan of Williams' music for the Star Wars and Indiana Jones series, and knew his Superman theme. But listening to this tape, I learned about Williams' long collaboration with Steven Spielberg and the non-movie music he composed, including the first cut, the "Olympic Fanfare and Theme":



Williams composed this theme for the 1984 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles. It has become one of the most well-known themes for the Olympic Games in the US. As it turns out, NBC has an exclusive license to use Williams' music in their broadcasts. So when CBS covered the games in '92 & '94, this music was not used. Williams has had a long association with NBC: he also composed the "Mission" Theme for their nightly news.

At some point Williams re-arranged his 1984 theme as a medley beginning "Bugler's Dream" theme from a 1958 suite of sports music by Leo Arnaud. This has become the most prominent cut used among NBC's musical selections during recent Olympics. Arnaud's piece alone has apparently also been used by ABC when they've had the games.

Williams has composed a few other pieces of Olympic music, used to varying extents by NBC. First is "The Olympic Spirit," comissioned by NBC Sports for the 1988 Summer Olympics in Seoul. This is a sentimental favorite of mine from when I was in a brass quintet in high school and we played a fun arrangement of it. Here's the orchestral version:



When the Olympics returned to the US in 1996, it was time for another Williams theme. This one was called "Summon the Heroes," and has continued to be all over NBC's coverage:



I picked up the 1996 Olympics CD even before the games started, and listened to it during a college-shopping road trip with my family while they were going on. That coming school year I was to be the drum major of my school's marching band, and I ended up ordering the marching band arrangement of this piece and splicing it together with some of the other Olympic themes we had in the music stacks for our homecoming halftime show.

Williams composed one more Olympic theme, this one for the 2002 Salt Lake City winter games. It's called "Call of the Champions," and I can't say I'm familiar with it. If NBC uses it for their broadcasts, it's not in an extensive manner:



In 2006 during the Torino games, I noticed that NBC was frequently using one particular piece that I recognized, and remembered liking, but couldn't quite put my finger on. Then it came back in a flash of SIRE (sudden instant recall effect) -- it was the theme from the early-mid-90s FOX Bruce Campbell vehicle, the sci-fi/comedy western, The Adventures of Brisco County, Jr. The theme, by composer Randy Edelman, fits quite well with Williams' music, and has apparently also been used by NBC for the World Series and MLB All-Star Game when they carry those. I should note that the recording and arrangement of the NBC version are a little less cheesy than the one used in the original series' opening titles:



Finally, there will undoubtedly be at least one overplayed commercial during the Olympic broadcasts that you will have stuck in your head for some time. For me two years ago during the Summer Olympics, it was some local ad for a furniture or mattress store featuring a classic rock sound-alike. Can't remember what song it was imitating, or the store (unfortunately?). In any case, the repeated music is unlikely to be as good as the earworm of the 2006 crop, "Galvanize" by the Chemical Brothers featuring Q-tip, which was in Budweiser Select ads and quickly made it into that year's Beukemix:



*I remember hearing somewhere that there's a theory that because of the timing of neural connections, you are likely to maintain a lifelong affection for the music of your early teens, even if you later decide it was terrible music. Three words: "Informer" by Snow

Good news, everyone!

(Some of you may have heard about it in person or on Facebook. Apologies for the repetition.)

I got some good news on Christmas Eve. I received* a letter from the MN Board of AELSLAGID stating that they need $132, because that's the license fee to be a registered professional engineer in the State of Minnesota, which was pertinent because I passed the PE test in October! I guess the 36 hours of review class and 78 lbs of books worked. And my knowledge of things such as vertical highway curves (pictured) won't be tested again any time soon.**

This is all very good for a host of reasons, but here's an interesting one: because a coworker and I passed this exam, it keeps alive a streak at our company. In the history of our firm, no structural engineer in its employ has ever failed the PE exam or its historical equivalent. I mention the historical equivalent because the firm will celebrate its 100th anniversary in 2010. So the pressure's off.

* ...and promptly dropped in the snow off my front stoop and had to retrieve with a pair of scissors...
** Note: if you have questions about vertical highway curves, I can recommend some people.

What you like is who you are

So suggests High Fidelity, which is apparently my favorite film of 2000. Specifically, Rob (John Cusack) says, "what really matters is what you like, not what you are like... Books, records, films -- these things matter."

You may already be familiar with Flickchart, a site that applies the mechanic of Kittenwar to the rating of motion pictures.* You are shown the posters of two films, and you click on the film you prefer. You do this a lot and it slowly, over time, builds a list of your favorite movies.

Sometimes, you are presented with movies that should never be compared (The Passion of Joan of Arc vs. Bio-Dome). Sometimes you are presented with a difficult choice based on which one you love more (a common one on the site for this is Ghostbusters vs. Back to the Future, which is easy for me: Ghostbusters by a mile). Sometimes, you can't decide which movie you dislike more (Star Wars Episode I vs. Episode II) Sometimes, because a particular movie just hasn't been put up against movies you prefer, it might stay artificially high on your list for quite a while. V for Vendetta is nowhere near my favorite movie, but it was positioned as such for about a week after I first signed on (it now sits at #283, which still feels stupidly high).

As my list took shape, I started to worry a little bit about the picture that was emerging. If what you like does define who you are, then according to Flickchart, I am a nerdy male in his late 20s or early 30s. Dingdingdingding!

I consider myself someone who enjoys movies and has sought to see a wide variety of films. Yet I am struck by how parochial my list of favorites is turning out to be. My top 20 matches in large part the current top 20 aggregated from all users both at Flickchart and at the Internet Movie Database (I do have my limits -- The Dark Knight or The Shawshank Redemption as the greatest movies ever?**); let's just say there is a high incidence of Tarantino and early Lucas.

Even looking year-by-year, I'm finding my favorites very predictable when considering the "nerd canon" of films. I'm feeling like I have a demographic predisposition.

I've decided that my second-favorite movies of these years tend to be somewhat more eclectic and unpredictable. So, subject to a handful of gigantic caveats***, here are my second-favorite movies of every year since I was born:

1979 - Alien
1980 - Airplane!
1981 - The Great Muppet Caper
1982 - E.T.
1983 - Trading Places
1984 - Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom [Seriously?]
1985 - Clue
1986 - Ferris Bueller's Day Off
1987 - The Untouchables
1988 - My Neighbor Totoro
1989 - Do the Right Thing
1990 - The Hunt for Red October
1991 - Beauty and the Beast [yeah, that's right]
1992 - Hard Boiled
1993 - Groundhog Day
1994 - The Shawshank Redemption
1995 - Seven
1996 - Swingers
1997 - Austin Powers
1998 - Dark City
1999 - Rushmore
2000 - Magnolia
2001 - Memento
2002 - Infernal Affairs
2003 - City of God
2004 - Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
2005 - Caché [which I've seen twice, but only on an airplane]
2006 - Casino Royale
2007 - Michael Clayton
2008 - Wall-E
2009 - A Serious Man

Based on these and my above comments, you may very well be able to extrapolate my favorite movies in many of these years.

Please share some of your second-favorite movies in the comments!

---

* A tip-of-the-hat to fellow Grinnellian Adam Kempenaar and his cohost Matty Robinson at Filmspotting for making me aware of the site.

** I realize I'm making a false equivalence of community-proclaimed favorite and "best," but that's unfortunately how Flickchart, at least, describes it. The IMDB at least just calls it "Top 250 as voted by our users."

*** Caveats:
1. Remember, these are in terms of "movies I enjoy and hold as favorites," not "movies I think are 'better' movies."
2. Several of my yearly lists aren't really settled yet.
3. Flickchart defines the release dates of some end-of-year Oscarbait movies as being the beginning of the next year. Thus they call There Will Be Blood, for instance, a 2008 rather than 2007 film.

What I've been up to

(Besides pining for lost corn dogs, that is.)

In case you didn't feel you had a good handle on how much of a geek I am, uh, batten down the hatches.

Back in August I mentioned the then-upcoming Principles and Practice of Engineering (aka Professional Engineering, or PE) exam I would be taking this Fall. Well, it happened, on October 23rd. Here's a peek inside the world of engineering.

I'm trained as a structural engineer. This is a subset of civil engineering, broadly and poorly defined as the technical design of spaces and places and ways to get between them. If I'd been a civil engineering major as an undergraduate, I'd have taken other civil courses, like transportation (roads and rails), geotechnical (soil and foundations), environmental (water and treatment thereof), and so on. I wasn't. I was a physics major, and went to grad school for structural engineering. So my only engineering classes were structural, or related to structural. But, to be licensed to sign structural OR civil engineering drawings in the State of MN (something my employers would like me to be able to do), you have to pass the civil, rather than the structural PE. [Note: my previous company does this differently. They ask their structural engineers to take the Structural I exam, which is 8 hours on structural engineering alone. I will end up taking some version of that in the future, since some states that aren't Minnesota require it to sign structural drawings.] So the upshot is that when it came time for me to take the exam, I was looking at being tested on a bunch of stuff I'd never learned before.

In the Civil PE, everybody takes the same morning session, a four-hour-limited survey of civil engineering topics, which is listed as breaking down something like this (CHARTS!):

So, of the topics, only the last three listed here are ones I have significant background in, totaling 1/5 of the session. In the four-hour afternoon session, you pick which broad topic (geotechnical, water, transportation, construction, or structural) you want to take, so my whole 8-hour day was to break down like this:Hurrah! I was nominally over 50% in terms of topics I had any background in. To increase my chances, I took a PE review course offered by the MN Society of Professional Engineers along with a coworker. It provided a nice introduction to all those non-civil topics, which was then reinforced with some practice problems and sitting down with a couple colleagues who both passed the test last Spring.

There are a whole host of regulations to ensure that engineers taking the test do not cheat. You cannot bring anything that can communicate wirelessly into the room -- they make you leave your phone in the car or check it with them. You cannot bring your own writing utensil or any loose paper. You can only have a calculator from their narrow list of approved models (one or two model lines each of TI, HP, and Casio). The test is open-book, with one limitation: anything you bring in has to be bound, and three-ring binging counts as binding. In the room, you can tell which people are structural engineers, because they bring luggage instead of a box or crate:


So that's eighteen references*, two TI-30XII calculators (one borrowed), the instructions for the calculator, my asthma meds (just in case), the admission ticket for the exam, and Red Harvest by Dashiell Hammett, in case I was looking for distraction at lunchtime. Most of the books aren't mine, but borrowed from the structural & transportation groups at my firm. I did not use all the references, but there were several questions I would not have been able to answer without having brought certain books. Incidentally, that white binder at the top isn't even all of the AASHTO bridge design spec. Just the chapters I thought would be useful. I'm glad I'm in the building business.

So how much does a rolling suitcase full of engineering books weigh? I enrolled the suitcase in Wii Fit the night before the test to find out. I selected for its avatar the Mii based on Robert Evans that I made a couple years back. The suitcase is 3' tall, which with a weight of about 78 lbs gives it a body-mass index of 43.11:

Pretty bad, especially if, as this suitcase, you're only two years old.

Anyway, I felt pretty good about the test, and will find out in another 6-10 weeks whether I passed or not. I'd say more, but I'd hate to have the National Council of Examiners for Engineering and Surveying accuse me of somehow publishing their secrets. I'll let y'all know if I get to put new letters after my name in a couple months.

* For the truly strong of stomach, here is the list of references I took with me, from left to right, top to bottom, as shown in the photo above:

• The Precast/Prestressed Concrete Institute Design Manual
• The American Institute of Steel Construction Manual, 13th Edition
• Civil Engineering Reference Manual (textbook from our class - crucial for the morning)
• Practice Problems for the Civil PE
• The Transportation Review Board Highway Capacity Manual
• The AASHTO Bridge Design Specification (select chapters)
• Kassimali: Structural Analysis
• Nilson, Darwin & Dolan: Design of Concrete Structures
• American Concrete Institute Building Code and Commentary (ACI 318)
  
• The International Building Code (IBC) 2006, select chapters, and various reference and design aids I've collected
• Minimum Design Loads for Buildings and Other Structures (ASCE 7) 2005
• Notes and practice problems from the review class
• Powerpoint slides and more notes from the class
• Gere: Mechanics of Materials
• American Wood Council National Design Specification and Manual
• AASHTO: A Policy on Geometric Design of Highways and Streets (the "Green Book")
• Masonry Standards Joint Committee Building Code Requirements and Specification for Masonry Structures
• ? & ?: Materials for Civil and Construction Engineers (I rarely use this book day-to-day, but I'm pretty sure it got me a point on the test)

Man, I'm glad I didn't have to pay for most of those codes and specs.

Make your nerdy life nerdier!

I've long been fascinated by the ways in which information can be represented graphically. I love maps, charts, graphs, and the like, especially when it is presented in unusual, inventive, or elegant ways. I'm a fan of the work of Edward Tufte, and if his seminars weren't bloody $380 a piece, I might consider going to one (he highlights the chart shown here of Napoleon's army's size during the Russian campaign of 1812 as perhaps the best "probably the best statistical graphic ever drawn"). Likewise, I want to read all of these posters in detail.

It may come as no surprise, then, that I am a visual learner, and like to make use of visual arrangements of information when trying to learn it. And the act of putting said information together myself only helps cement the information. Hence my Jeopardy notebook. But I find myself from time to time doodling lists, tables, or graphs to wrap my brain around something. To explain my own oddities better, I thought I'd share a few with you.

First, a simple one. I found myself at lunch one day for some reason reading about the history of the NFL in Los Angeles. When I was growing up, there were two NFL teams in LA, but both left for greener pastures when I was in high school. I could never remember which teams were where, when (especially since the Raiders were originally in Oakland, then went to LA for a little over a decade, and then returned to Oakland). I decided to make a little timeline:

OK, next is something to keep track of current events, specifically the 2009 AL Central pennant race between the Twins and Tigers. At some point I picked up the habit, inherited from my father, of marking up a Twins pocket schedule with wins & losses. So this is hanging up in my cube:

I added the pre-All-Star-Break record as a midsummer stock-taking of the team. Anyway, with less than two weeks remaining in the season, I decided to start keeping track of not just what the Twins do, but also the Tigers. Last week I stuck this on my schedule:

Green means good and red means bad. The blue number is the Twins' position in the standings relative to the Tigers. From here on out, the Tigers have the "harder" schedule, but when you're in the AL Central, everything is relative.

And I do this all the time. On the practical side there are to-do lists and tables at work. On the self-interested side a calendar tracking Jeopardy contestants who qualify for the 2010 Tournament of Champions (Melissa and I are also keeping a spreadsheet on this one). And then there's the trivial. A hand-filled map of Minneapolis neighborhoods. Colored maps of the 2008 US Presidential primary and general elections. A spreadsheet of Brave New Workshop shows and casts since I started working there in 2001. Venn diagrams of classic rock band personnel. It is a disease.

Facebook is stealing my page hits

Here's a question for you tech types out there.

Back when I was writing Jeopardy posts, I wanted to make the process of adding links to this blog on my Facebook profile. So, I used the Notes Application to Import this blog. Then, every time I posted here, it was imported as a note on my Facebook profile.

Problem was, it imported the whole text of my post, plus photos, to Facebook. So people were reading it, but not here. Thus I had no way of keeping track of how many readers I had. So, I "un-imported the blog," and started manually adding a Link to each post when I posted it.

But the unimporting didn't take. Now, every time I post, I have to manually add a link and manually delete the Note. But I haven't really been doing it right, because I've ended up only deleting the Notes from my News Feed, but not the actual notes.

So: even though Notes tells me I don't have a blog imported, how do I get it to stop reposting my stuff?

So Say We All

Improv colleague Tim Uren works for Fantasy Flight Games, a local board game publisher of international renown. FFG publishes the excellent board game based on the excellent recent version of Battlestar Galactica. This past winter and early Spring, I played several sessions of BSG with Nels and a handful of other folks, including Tim on a couple of occasions. Tim revealed to us that his company was working on an expansion to the game based on the Battlestar Pegasus (the Ship of Dicks, if you're familiar with the show -- seriously, everybody on that thing's an a-hole). And one weekend, we got a chance to play the prototype of the game. All the cards were inkjet printed and stuck in sleeves with Yu-Gi-Oh cards or some such. But the rules were largely in place. The new boards had been laser printed and pasted down on spare chunks of other games' boards. I'm pretty sure I'm still bound by the non-disclosure agreement until the expansion is actually released next month, but it was a lot of fun and I look forward to playing again.

Anyway, yesterday I was alerted to the fact that the rules for the expansion had been posted on FFG's site, and that I should look at the second-to-last page. Here's what I found (highlighting mine):
That's a sizeable chunk of the Twin Cities theater & comedy scene, right there. And we got to help them refine this thing. You're welcome, fellow nerds.

Purple Monkey Dishwasher

Like Lovecraft's cyclopean creatures of the deep, Google continues to extend its suckered tendrils out of the blackness, grasping at humanity. One of their latest offerings is Google Voice, which lets you have a phone number of your choice, to satisfy some need that I'm not entirely sure I understand. Something about linking your phone numbers together. I guess if you've got your cell phone, home phone, work phone, etc., you can get the one number to rule them all from Google, and switch which phone that number will send people's calls to. I suspect that the condition known as iPhone Ownership puts you at risk for another condition called Google Voice Number Wanting.

Perhaps that's why Nels got one. Early this evening, just before I left work, he asked me to be the guinea pig for his new number, and help him test out the message-taking feature of Google Voice. You see, if you enable it, GV will act as your message service. It'll record and store your call, transcribe it, and send it to you as an email. Clearly this needed a field test. And a challenging one at that. I left the following stream-of-consciousness message for Nels, including a Battlestar Galactica reference in a raspy voice, my last name, my company's name (initials), and several other proper nouns:

Ohh, Bill... They killed my Ellen. I am calling from [company name] and my name is Fred Beukema and uh, I don't know what else is a difficult word to say. Sonia Sotomayor was confirmed as a Supreme Court justice today which means she should be ready to serve on the court this fall and David Souter can retire to New Hampshire and his little cabin. Uh, bye.

Here's what Google thought I said:

yo so they shut my land i am calling from [company name -- they got it accurately] and my name is fred you come home and i don't know what else is a difficult would just say sonia some on your was confirm the supreme court justice today which means it should be ready to serve on the the court this fall and gave it to 210 your tires to new hampshire and we'll kevin bye

They're close, but the algorithm needs some polish, I'd say.

Incidentally, I think Souter's cabin looks like it belongs in an Evil Dead movie.

Until next time, this is Fred You Come Home, signing off.

On the Oscars

1. My favorite comment of the evening, regarding the five-former-winner, "This Is Your Life"-style presentation of the acting awards:

"This town hall meeting format favors McCain. "
- Caleb McEwen

I joined the liveblog/chat that Mike Fotis hosted over on his site. 'Twas a fun time.

2. It is clear that members of the Academy as a whole don't understand how sound design and editing work, or Wall-E would have won both awards. I wonder if there's a good sound design blog or message board I can find to read all the nerdy outrage.

Have a nerdy new year

Happy New Year, peoples. As has been my trend in recent years, I will ring in the coming of 2009 at the Brave New Workshop. My lovely wife works front-of-house there, but is typically off-duty by midnight, so I've usually shown up just in time for the festivities, but had a mess of unstructured time to fill beforehand.

Last year I filled this time by watching Helvetica, a documentary about the typeface Helvetica.

Let me repeat: on New Year's Eve, 2007, I happily elected to watch, on my computer, an 80-minute movie about a font.

I had actually wanted to see the movie for some time. It came to the Walker Art Center a few years back, but I missed it and didn't really want to pay to see it. Then it became available on Netflix, crucially as a "Watch It Now!" title. That meant I could watch it without the outlay of additional monies, and without having to anticipate when I would want to watch a font flick. Which is apparently on the biggest party night of the year.

The movie was great. In addition to showcasing the development of the font and how many major public uses it has had over the years (answer: lots and lots, including Target, 3M, AT&T, NASA, Microsoft, airports, the NYC Subway...), it used the font as a through-line to follow the history of graphic design and typesetting in the past century or so. Being who I am, I ate this up like candy.

Tonight I don't know what exactly I'll be up to until 11, but I can guarantee you, it will be nerdy.

'Cause what you see you might not get

Today's topic: lessons in narrative swiped from Russian formalism -- the syuzhet and the fabula.

So have you guys seen this movie Primer? Excuse the language, but it is a mindfuck. The main characters, engineers working on potentially patentable projects in their garage as a side business, discover that they've created a time machine. They use it at first to get rich daytrading, but then one of them gets involved in re-engineering social situations (in particular an incident with a gun at a party). Subsequently, both try to prevent each other, or other versions of themselves from completing certain actions, sometimes taking the place of themselves in conversations they previously experienced and reciting their earlier lines from recordings or notes they've made, sometimes taking an extra time machine inside the time machine to make loops within loops, and so on. On top of all of that, the movie portrays these events in both non-chronological and non-sequential order. Good God.

I saw this movie on DVD a few years ago, and liked it, even though it made my head spin. My head didn't spin for the reason it might watching a movie like Mulholland Dr. (a favorite of mine) or some other Lynch flick that's mindbending for being oblique. Rather, it's mindbending because it's complicated. It's smartly written by guys with backgrounds in math, physics and engineering, so the jargon is convincing. And it doesn't hold your hand to explain anything, even as the plot seems to quintuple back on itself and pile paradoxes upon paradoxes.

A current or recent Grinnell College student who I do not know recently posted on her Plan (text-only blog accessible to people in the larger Grinnell community) her intention to rewatch the movie until it all made sense. She posted a link to this paper (spoilers!) by one Jason Gendler that analyzes the film and attempts to iron out its narrative. The paper repeatedly, and centrally, uses two words with which I was not familiar, fabula and syuzhet. Context suggested that each were somehow components of narrative structure, but to really understand what Gendler was writing, I did some digging.

Neither term had a dictionary.com or wikipedia entry, though they were mentioned in the article on Russian formalism, from which the terms originate. Google brought me to a helpful table from a Penn State comparative lit course that explained them well: the syuzhet is what is presented by the creator of a narrative, what you perceive directly by watching or reading; the fabula is your interpretation of the actual story, of what happened, which may expand beyond what you are told or shown. Here's the table, which is great...

Fabula	Syuzhet
Story	Plot
Constructed by Reader/Viewer	Constructed by Writer/Teller
Chronological Order	Order of Recounting
What we interpret	What we perceive
As many different ones as there are readers	Generally only one, agreed upon by all
Mental	Perceptible

And some examples off the top of my head (spoilers abound!):

Star Wars: In the syuzhet, Greedo tells Han Solo that Jabba doesn't take kindly to smugglers who dump their cargo at the first sign of an Imperial patrol. Han responds that even he gets boarded sometimes. In the fabula, the viewer imagines further the incident described.

The Searchers: In the syuzhet, Ethan Edwards grabs his left arm as he walks out a silhouetted doorway. In the fabula of certain viewers, Edwards is having a heart attack.

The Sopranos (NELS, SKIP THIS ONE!): In the syuzhet, in the final moment of the show, as "Don't Stop Believing" plays on the jukebox, Tony Soprano looks up in response to the dinging bell at the front door of the diner where he and his family are eating. The screen and music cut abruptly to black silence. In MY fabula, Tony has just been shot to death by the guy in the Members' Only Jacket who went into the bathroom moments before.

Memento: In the syuzhet, at the end of the film, Leonard has been looking for the man he says raped and murdered his wife. He has been telling the story of Sammy Jankis, a man who like him, suffered from a loss of any short-term memory. A man who claims to be acting as an ally, but who Leonard killed at the beginning of the film (which comes chronologically last), accuses Leonard of lying to himself, that Sammy was a con-man. In a montage of shots playing under the audio of this conversation, Leonard is shown giving his wife insulin shots, something Sammy did in the earlier stories. In the fabula, it is up to the viewer to decide whether Leonard killed his wife by unintentional insulin overdose, whether he had in fact already had his revenge, whether Sammy was a con-man, and indeed, whether Leonard was what he claimed.

I find these concepts very intriguing and potentially useful for understanding and discussing films. It draws a bright line between what you saw when you watched the movie, and what the film was "supposed" to be about. Thus, David Lynch isn't being an ass when he refuses to explain what the hell was happening in one of his movies. He's just letting the syuzhet speak for itself and leaving the fabula to the viewer. They also help explain my reaction to Oliver Stone's JFK, which Melissa and I watched a couple weeks ago. I find the film's syuzhet masterful: it's well-plotted, scripted, cast, acted, shot & edited. But my version of the fabula is somewhat different from the one Stone presents through the author's voice character of Jim Garrison (Kevin Costner). Granted, this is based on the intrusion of the real world into my interpretation of the narrative, but there it is.

Thanks, Russian formalism!

Just Look Around You

"The brain is basically a wrinkled bag of skin filled with warm water, veins, and thought muscles. Think of it as a kind of modified heart, only with a mind, or brain."

If you found that sentence as brilliantly funny as I did, you're in for a treat. I'm a nerd with a dry sense of humor, so when I found out about BBC 2's "Look Around You" about a year ago, I was delighted.

It's a parody of late-70s / early-80s British educational films, and is done in period style, down to the cheerful, warbly electronic music and instructions for writing certain information in your copy book in each episode. I'm not British, and was barely cognizant in the era this show seems to take place in, but it reminds me of old episodes of "3-2-1 Contact" and "Nova." (Speaking of which, 3-2-1 Contact had an awesome opening song. As did "Voyage of the Mimi," in my memory anyway.)

The first series of the show is comprised of eight ten-minute "modules." Each is full of plausible-sounding nonsense delivered by a knowledgeable-enough-sounding British voice and demonstrated by series co-creator Peter Serafinowicz, pictured, right. Actually, that picture isn't accurate, since in the show, he's almost exclusively seen from the upper lip down.

"Why," you may ask, "should I give a rip about Peter Serafinowicz?" Well, you liked Shawn of the Dead, didn't you? "Of course." Well, he played Pete, the ill-fated roommate of our protagonists. "Neat. Did he also play a role in Shawn creators Simon Pegg and Edgar Wright's previous sitcom, 'Spaced?'" Yes; he played lead character Tim's nemesis Duane Benzie, and in that role he got to repeat a line or two from his most famous role, that of the voice of Darth Maul in the Phantom goddamned Menace. Incidentally, my dear interlocutor, "Spaced" is finally being released on DVD in the United States this July, and you should buy yourself a copy, and then get me one for my birthday.

And to get yourself ready for some of the best recent British comedy around, you can watch all of the first series of modules from Look Around You on YouTube. Please, enjoy:

1. Maths
2. Water
3. Germs
4. Ghosts
5. Sulphur
6. Music
7. Iron
   
8. Brain

In the second series, they changed up the format to include more presenter characters, and seemingly shoved the setting a few years into the eighties. A few chunks of those episodes can also be found on Your Tube. Enjoy them if you encounter them, as well.

Next time we speak of British comedy on this blog, we will speak of Alan Partridge. Aha!

Jeopardy Audition Rundown

Note: UPDATED! See below.

Web-logged accounts of auditioning for or appearing on Jeopardy are thick on the ground, but dammit, it looms large in recent events, so it's my turn.

My Jeopardy audition happened back on March 10th in downtown Minneapolis. See also my previous post about the online test and my invitation. Thanks to the efforts of Kathryn Kienholz, a fellow invitee to the same session, and knitting blogger extraordinaire, there's photographic illustration of our audition experience. All photos in this post are by her, and used with permission.

My appointment wasn't until 3, but I took the afternoon off so I wouldn't be hurried and stressed on my way in. I showed up to the swanky, new Hotel Ivy a little early, and immediately wished I'd shown up even earlier so I could take a quick bathroom break. As it was, I didn't think I had time before things were going to start. They had me fill out a contact info form, including times you know you're definitely NOT available to go to LA for a day or two and, oddly enough, asking if you were involved in Quiz Bowl in high school (I was, and I suspect a lot of contestants have come from that background). They also asked if I'd had any contact with previous Jeopardy contestants, which I had to admit I had (a brief weblog-based exchange with Kate Pedersen, a fellow Grinnell alum who congratulated me on my audition and who had very recently played on the show). They took a Polaroid of me, and soon ushered the group of hopefuls into a small meeting room.

There were twenty of us in a room that could hold twenty-seven of us. An LCD projector and speakers were rigged up to a laptop up front. Head Contestant Coordinator Glenn Kagan (pictured) and associates Corrina and Laurie and tech guy Carlos ran the show. Here was our itinerary:

1. Introductions and description of what is about to happen (Glenn)
2. Showing us how the mock game board works (Corrina)
3. 50-question contestant exam
4. Q&A about the show (Glenn)
5. Rolling mock game and interviews (everybody)

The exam was similar in structure to the online qualifier I'd passed in January. 50 questions, 12 seconds each. However, since it was written, we had the opportunity to correct ourselves as we went along. Thank goodness, too, because it took a while for my brain to warm up. There were two or three extremely basic questions in the first ten that I knew, but couldn't produce to save my life. Once I got going, and those previous answers came screaming back into my forebrain, I was able to fix them. In the end, I felt at least as good about this test as the previous one. Giving a quick glance at my answers once time was up, I counted only ten or eleven questions that were educated or out-of-my-ass guesses. Although they'll never admit it, rumor says 35 is a passing score. So I like those odds.

While Corrina and Laurie scored our tests in the hall, Glenn answered every question anyone's ever had about the show. What's with Trebek's sling? He had an accident puttering around the house. Have you ever had blind or deaf contestants? Blind yes, deaf no. Do you pay for our airfare and hotel if we get on the show? No, unless you win and have to come back another day -- they had to fly Ken Jennings back & forth between LA and Salt Lake City week after week while he was on his streak. And so on... Many of these questions were paired with amusing anecdotes. Glenn's been in the game a long time, and accrued plenty of stories.

The stuff I was curious about was related to the competition to get on the show. How many people took the online test in January? I didn't write it down, but I think they said 11,000. How many of these sessions were they doing in Minneapolis this week? Five. Ok, so that means I was one of no more than 135 to be invited to a Minneapolis audition, which draws not only from MN but the whole upper midwest, since there were folks there from WI, IA, and as far away as St. Louis. That's pretty sweet.

In the mock game, they invited three of us up at a time to get on the buzzer and try our hand. The game board had six categories of three clues each, and every time one was depleted, a new category popped up. They gave each trio about 10 clues each, and may or may not have actually called on people based on buzzer timing -- we couldn't see or hear the buzzer signals, and they seemed to cycle to allow all three folks a chance to show they can speak loudly and clearly. After the questions, they had us put the buzzers down and interviewed us briefly about who we are, what we do, what our interests are, and, vitally, what we'd do with the money if we won. The whole mock game isn't about scoring or otherwise answering correctly. It's all about whether you have any presence or personality, can handle the buzzer, and can follow directions.

I was in the first group up, along with Susan and Norman. We traded questions back & forth. I misidentified the famous guitarist who owns the guitar named Lucille. I got control of the board on a question about the year 1961. And then I got a question nobody else knew the answer to. After the clue was revealed, everybody stared blankly. A beat or two later, I managed to scrape the name of a two-time Bond girl (whose movies I've never seen) out of the back of my skull and coupled her with our first one-term president to get fake presidential couple "Maud and John Adams" (Who are Maud and John Adams, indeed?). This earned me a little round of applause from the room, which felt pretty great.

After being interviewed, I sat down and observed the rest of the mock game and interviews. It was cool hearing everybody's back-story. There were a lot of new or recent empty-nesters and a lot of lawyers. I was definitely the only engineer with improv comedy experience in the bunch. Lots of people who would use Jeopardy winnings to travel, and a couple folks who would use it for a wedding or honeymoon. Since I was in the first group, the idea of using the money to pay off loans and maybe pay a down payment on a house was way less played out when I said it than it was by the end of the session.

I was disappointed that they didn't tell us whether or not we passed the test, which I guess they do at their big contestant calls in LA, in order to cut down the number before playing mock games. I suppose that makes sense, given the relative numbers. Anyway, if I passed the test, which I feel safe in assuming, then I'm in their "active contestant file" for the next 18 months. Anytime during that period, they could call me to be a contestant. They told us in no uncertain terms: do not call or email us; we'll call you. If they don't decide to put me on the show, I'll know after 18 months have passed, at which time I'm free to take their qualifier again.

At this point I've accomplished what I feel I needed to. I still count being on the show as a life goal, and I hope it happens and that it's a lot of fun and I win at least one game, if not seventy-five. But having passed the January test, I felt I needed to have a good showing at the audition and have fun. And I've done that. Hoo-plah!

UPDATED (3/28/08):
I forgot to include two points. First was one of the most interesting bits of Glenn's Q&A. Someone asked if the specifics of the answering in a form of a question are parsed for grammar. For instance, if you responded to He opposed George Westinghouse in the so-called War of the Currents with "Where are Thomas Edison?" or the less weird "What is Thomas Edison?" Apparently not only is that sort of thing ok, but you could also say "Is it Thomas Edison?" They discourage such flippant games, but if you stumble into something like that, they're not going to dock you for it.

Second is that the day after my audition, my wonderful wife sent me delicious brownies at work as congratulations. In the parlance of the medium, she is teh awesome.