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!

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* 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.

Marriage Equality in NY

I know you can't swing a dead cat on the internet today without hitting this clip of NY State Sen. Savino, but it is such a good speech that if one of you few who read this blog haven't seen it and watch it here, then the relink is worth it. As you may know, the NY legislature earlier this week voted to approve gay marriage in the state, as they have done twice before. Yesterday the state senate took up the measure. Sadly, it was defeated, 38-24.



Two of the more interesting reactions I've read to the vote are:

Here, a good overview of the vote and the background to it from Gay City News. I guess a number of Republicans had privately expressed their support for marriage equality. Not a single Republican voted for it. And several of the nay-voting Democrats have benefited greatly from gay support. As Andrew Sullivan notes, all but one (the Democratic Pentecostal minister from Brooklyn) of the Nay votes did not say a second word about their vote on the floor.

Here, where DougJ at Balloon Juice, a Democratic resident of a Republican-represented district of Upstate NY, expresses his confusion about why his otherwise gay-friendly Senator would vote against this. He correctly points out that fighting equality isn't just socially backward; it's economically backward.

The Annotated Beukemix, 2009

Liner notes! As usual, the links are to mostly-representative versions of each song, which may not be the exact version in the mix. And the visuals may just be somebody's World of Warcraft interpretation of the song. Be forewarned. 

(2021 Edit -- listen to something close to this mix on Spotify! It's missing the piece from Inglourious Basterds.)

Key: HS = Horn section HC = Hand claps

1. The Underdog – Spoon I don't understand how this wasn't the opening track on Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga. The pounding opening track demands that you batten down the goddamned hatches, because here comes the album. (HS, HC)

2. Après Moi – Regina Spektor It doesn't feature any of her trademark glottal stops and has less vocal bending than some of her songs. But it starts with just her and the piano and adds instruments, to a chamber ensemble at midsong and a full orchestra at the climax. And it's in three languages (including a refrain in her native Russian)! Sold! The xylophone bits sound very Saint-Saëns/Danse Macabre. (HS) 

3. Watching The Detectives – The New Standards Elvis Costello's original version of this song was spooky in its own way (thanks mostly to the backup vocals), but this cover is darker and more menacing. I know that the song has a meta-narrative to it, that the "she" who is watching the detectives is doing so on TV, but this version makes it sound more like she is a character in Twin Peaks. Cellophane-wrapped, indeed. The New Standards are a Twin Cities jazz combo made up of Chan Poling of The Suburbs (and Mr. Eleanor Mondale), John Munson from Semisonic & Trip Shakespeare, and Steve Roehm on the vibes. They've released two albums of pop music covers that I stumbled upon in the last days of 2008. They are excellent. (HC)

4. Ulysses – Franz Ferdinand Another fine, clockwork beat from Franz Ferdinand. Seems to be more James Joyce than The Odyssey, although of course the former was informed by the latter. (HC)

5. I Feel It All – Feist After hearing her on The Current for a couple years, I finally listened to The Reminder, and really liked it, in particular this song and 1234. I think 1234 went into the mix cd penalty box at some point in the past year, so I went with I Feel It All. (HC)

6. It’s Not My Birthday – The Fluid Ounces Easily the best song on a They Might Be Giants tribute album called Hello, Radio.

7. Behind Blue Eyes – The Who I always liked this song, but I learned to love it playing the drums on it in Rock Band. Keith Moon gets to sit quietly for several minutes as the song slowly builds, and then has a minute-long frenzy, and then stops.

8. Five Years – David Bowie My favorite Bowie songs, from before he went to Berlin and shouted at microphones from the other end of a concrete room, are cinematic and emotionally exhausting. Like this one. Here are two excellent live versions: Bowie on TV in 1972, and with the Arcade Fire in 2006. 

9. Use Me – Bill Withers This year I joined the horn section of an R&B band. The band played this song, but it was one of only a few in our repertoire without horns. So why pick this one? The riff and the drum rim knocks at each chorus would be enough, but what puts this song over the top is the hand claps. There are three of them, and they occur once. The only song I know of with more effectively restrained use of hand claps is Elvis Costello's "Welcome to the Working Week," which has two, right at the end of the song. (HC)

10. Boombox – The Lonely Island ft. Julian Casablancas This is the only really funny song off the Lonely Island's album that hasn't already been an SNL Digital Short. My favorite line occurs at the end of the bridge. (Not counting the drum-machine hand claps on this one.)

11. For Once In My Life – Stevie Wonder The Robinson Caruso Organization rehearsed this song a couple times this summer. It may in fact now be in our repertoire (I've been on hiatus). I hope so, because it is amazing. (HS)

12. Flathead – The Fratellis My friends Joe and Troy both repeatedly extolled the quality of the Fratellis. They're a Scottish band, practitioners of rock music that is fun and doesn't take itself too seriously (thanks, Allmusic!). I swear I'm not purposefully selecting songs that were in iPod commercials, and haven't even seen the one with this song. Honest. (HC)

13. Main Theme from Dark Of The Sun – Jacques Loussier This was in Inglourious Basterds. It is good. (HS)

14. Reckoner – Radiohead This song, especially the a capella break, stunned me into putting down the sandwich I was eating to give it my full attention. And I like sandwiches.

15. All My Friends – Franz Ferdinand This summer, Pitchfork put together a list of the Top 500 songs of the '00s (with additions expected at the end of the year). The original of this song, by LCD Soundsystem, was #2 on the list (between Outkast's B.O.B. at #1 and M.I.A.'s Paper Planes at #3, both songs on past Beukemixes). I prefer the Franz Ferdinand cover, which was a b-side to the original's single.

16. Hey Bulldog – The Beatles When The Beatles: Rock Band was released in September, this was the only song in the game I didn't know. It was also the first song the game selected for me to play. It's off of the Yellow Submarine soundtrack, and one of only two songs original to that album that are worth a damn (the other is "All Together Now."). I actually like the edit that the game makers made to the song: near the end, when McCartney yells "Quiet! Quiet!" the song ends immediately instead of fading out. 

17. I Cut Like A Buffalo – The Dead Weather This is the third distinct band featuring Jack White whose songs I've put on Beukemixes. He could've gotten on last year's for his duet with Alicia Keys if their song from "Quantum of Solace" hadn't sucked.

18. While You Wait For The Others – Grizzly Bear Heard this on the Current. It's bass-heavy and atmospheric, and thereby right up my alley.

19. You Don’t Have To Be A Prostitute – Flight of the Conchords My favorite song from the second season of FOTC (although Too Many Dicks On The Dance Floor and Demon Woman come close, too). In an interview, Brett describes the song thusly: "It was just doing a song like 'Roxanne,' but it's got a judgmental—it makes a lot of assumptions about the profession. Singing a song about prostitution, like 'I'll stop you from being a prostitute with this song.'"

20. Heaven Can Wait – Charlotte Gainsbourg ft. Beck I added this to the mix last night after seeing the video on Andrew Sullivan's blog. The lyrics sound like classic Beck, and come to think of it, the visual oddities, which I guess are all actually culled from internet art images, could have also been taken from lines crossed out in the margins of Beck's notebook ("pancake astronaut skating on burgers"?). (HS)

21. My Lover’s Prayer – Otis Redding Being in Robinson Caruso has deepened my appreciation for the output of Stax Records in general and Otis Redding in particular. I first sought out this song after hearing it on the Sopranos years ago. Over Thanksgiving, my brother-in-law was spinning songs on his laptop, this one popped up, and I decided it would be a fine way to end the mix. (HS) 

FINAL SCORES Horn Sections: 6 Hand Claps: 5 Horns win!

Obscure song bleg

UPDATED! see below

I'm in California right now for Thanksgiving, having come out here a little over a week ago for a memorial for Melissa's grandmother Linda, who was a remarkable, funny, vivacious woman. Melissa and her mother have been trying to figure out a song that Linda was singing at Thanksgiving last year. We've struck out on Google, and so now I turn to you, dear blog reader, for assisstance.

We know very little, only a fragment of lyrics and melody. The words are probably only partially right. Any of us could sing the portion of melody (which is just sort of a repetitive stepwise thing) we know, but here are the lyrics, such as they are:

"He puts me on his income tax /
and writes me off as [beat] property improvement"

Any ideas? The subject matter almost suggests a Marylin Monroe ditty, but as I mentioned, our Google efforts have been futile thus far. So, if anyone knows anything about this song, let me know in the comments!

UPDATE 11/27
Via Facebook, fellow Grinnell alum and all-around great guy Evan Schnell has found it. The song is called "He Takes Me Off His Income Tax," and is from a broadway musical revue called "New Faces of 1952," which launched the careers of Paul Lynde and Eartha Kitt, among others. Some of the songs are from other shows, while some, including apparently this one, are original to the revue. Part of the shtick from the show seems to be that the woman singing it is interrupted every time she sings it, several times throughout the show. So the recordings available online are all medleys of that song plus another, it seems. Thank you, Evan, for saving the day!

Weeklypedia #20: Semiannuapedia

Well, it's taken even longer than usual to put this quiz together (I started it on May 20th!), but here it is. Due to the longer time, it's also more disjointed than usual, and has some really stupidly obscure stuff in it. Trivial, you might say. The last three clues were all added in the last week, and are, I think, the strongest.

As usual, feel free to add your answers in the comments, and I've now posted the answers to my last quiz(es). With this kind of a gap between quizzes, it forces me to essentially play each quiz in order to write the answers.

1. After Hasbro bought Avalon Hill, makers of the game "Diplomacy," the pieces in that game representing armies and navies were replaced with metal howitzers and battleships, cast from the same dies used for pieces in this other Hasbro title.
2. BEFORE & AFTER: Star of "Munich" and "Hulk" who's a word game played with tiles stored in a bag shaped like a piece of fruit.
3. On July 3rd, 1940, a British Naval task force attacked and destroyed a portion of the fleet of this future ally, fearing that its ships would become part of the German Navy and demonstrating British determination to continue fighting.
4. Prior to the upcoming Winter Olympics in Vancouver, this was the westernmost location to host the winter games (Note: for these purposes, the international dateline is defined as the western end of the map).
5. As of 2009, it is the only country in the Southern Hemisphere to have hosted any Olympic games.
6. One of the two directors, other than Quentin Tarantino, to have directed films written by Tarantino.
7. It is a more common name for the typographic character called the asperand or amphora.
8. According to "Chicago" keyboardist Robert Lamm, this song's title refers to the time 3:35 (or 3:34) AM.

Kumail on Letterman

My friend and freshman year roommate Kumail Nanjiani will be performing standup on Letterman tonight. Kumail and I put together a standup night in Fall 2000 at Bob's Coffeehouse on campus at Grinnell college because we each wanted to try putting an act together. We followed this up with another show the following Spring, and then he went to Chicago after graduation, where he started climbing the ladder of standup comedy in Beef City. I ended my "career" after my third performance, when I visited Kumail and other Chicago-based Grinnellians in the Spring of 2002 and went to an open mic with him. He was by a wide margin the funniest person on stage that evening, and he has continued to swiftly rise from there.

He capped off his years in Chicago with a tour leg opening for Zach Galifianakis through the midwest, and with Unpronounceable, a one-man show about his experiences going from a traditional Islamic background in Pakistan to one of the most liberal colleges in the US. Then he moved to NYC, where he has performed constantly, appeared in speaking roles on SNL and The Colbert Report, was a writer and regular on Michael and Michael Have Issues, and recently had a feature article written about him in the NY Times.

Tonight he'll be on Letterman. There is one other scheduled guest, some other up & comer by the name of Mariah Carey. Check him out: he is very funny.

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.