Mock Turtle Soup

Okay, so Julius Caesar summons an army of undead...

Fri, 10 May 2013 23:52:57 -0600

Okay, so Julius Caesar summons an army of undead British Colonial soldiers to storm Ptolemy's palace, Ptolemy gets killed by Pompey's son, whose mother fingerpaints on his face with Ptolemy's blood, and Cleopatra does the Charleston in jodhpurs and gumboots.

I can dig it.
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WTF and also YES.

Fri, 03 May 2013 11:49:35 -0600

WTF and also YES.
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I cannot handle anti-vaxxers. I cannot handle them...

Tue, 16 Apr 2013 14:42:38 -0600

I cannot handle anti-vaxxers. I cannot handle them. They are more often ignorant than selfish, but their ignorance *is* selfish. They willfully misunderstand how disease and vaccination and herd immunity work, and not only do they put their own children at risk, but they put all children at risk, because of some vague hand-wavy idea that "children have too many vaccinations these days" and "well, who knows what all those chemicals are doing to our kids' development" and "nobody gets measles nowadays, and even if they did, it's probably safer to build immunity the natural way". AGHHHHH. It's becoming part of the liberal parents' party platform: Breastfeeding, anti-circumcision, anti-vaccination. I'm all for breastfeeding, I wouldn't circumcise my son if I had one but I don't think it's my place to dictate terms to cultures that would, but holy hell, anti-vaccination?! It isn't even about autism anymore for these people, as spurious and horrendous as that whole debacle was. They don't say why vaccinations are bad. They don't say what horrible things will happen if they vaccinate. They just think it's counter to the natural, non-interventionist lifestyle that they want to cultivate, and because they don't want to make their kid cry by poking them with a needle. Meanwhile, babies (too young to be vaccinated) are dying of pertussis because the number of unvaccinated toddlers has broken the threshold of herd immunity and provided a reservoir of fatal disease. And what about when these kids grow up, if they do grow up? Because you didn't vaccinate them for chicken pox, you want your kid to get shingles when they're 60? A disease that can cause pain so intractable it can lead to suicide? Do you want your grandchild to be born deaf, blind, and intellectually disabled because you never vaccinated your own child for rubella? The misinformation is staggering. I've seen charts claiming that the startling decrease of childhood mortality and morbidity in the early 20th century wasn't caused by vaccination, but by public hygiene. Public hygiene undoubtedly played a part in it, but the streets were just as clean before the Salk vaccine in the '50s as they were after. The only difference is that children weren't dying or being paralyzed due to polio. The charts also claim that vaccines wear off after a while, so herd immunity is a fictional construct. Yes, some vaccines do wear off. That's why we get tetanus boosters. Even if you only have universal vaccination in children (barring immunocompromised children, who rely on herd immunity to keep them safe) and not all adults retain 100% immunity, you drastically reduce the potential reservoir of infection, because children are more susceptible both to spreading and to contracting (and to dying of) these diseases. Yes, some vaccines carry risks. We stopped vaccinating people against smallpox when the risk of sequelae from the vaccinations exceeded the risk of dying from smallpox. You know when that happened? When smallpox was eradicated. You know why that happened? VACCINATION. You're not willing to assume an infinitesimal chance that your child could have a bad reaction to a vaccine, when by not vaccinating, you're putting both your child and thousands of other children at risk of deadly and catastrophic diseases. All because it makes you seem like a natural-living, trend-bucking, anti-establishment parent. WHAT IS WRONG WITH THESE PEOPLE?!!
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Welcome to Last Night's Hypnagogic Hallucination...

Thu, 28 Mar 2013 07:59:42 -0600

Welcome to Last Night's Hypnagogic Hallucination Theater:

Perky Receptionist: Hello! Workaday Frosting!
Staticky Male Radio Voice: A Train Tennis Bawwwwlllllzzzzzz... *fizz* *crackle* *hiss*

Repeat x200 until loss of consciousness.

And... Scene.
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I should go to the gym more often. ...

Thu, 14 Mar 2013 11:22:37 -0600

I should go to the gym more often.
I should start studying ASL again.
I should get a Python tutor.
I should save more money.

In other news, I think I might start taking recorder lessons.
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I just took the bus (actually two buses) through...

Fri, 08 Mar 2013 09:58:16 -0600

I just took the bus (actually two buses) through the snow from 175th Street to South Ferry. It took almost exactly three hours. It was beautiful.
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Gerald M. Elwood, hamster phlebotomist.

Sun, 03 Mar 2013 11:46:11 -0600

Gerald M. Elwood, hamster phlebotomist.
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Step 1: Google your new primary care provider...

Fri, 01 Mar 2013 14:30:48 -0600

Step 1: Google your new primary care provider (with whom you have just made an appointment to meet for the first time for a routine physical).
Step 2: On the fourth page of hits, discover that she plays Magic: The Gathering.
Step 3: Do a happy little dance.
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7-11 employees in New York tend to be friendlier...

Fri, 01 Mar 2013 09:45:52 -0600

7-11 employees in New York tend to be friendlier and look less stressed out than 7-11 employees I've met in other states. I just realized why. They're not in the middle of nowhere and constantly braced against the possibility of being robbed at any moment.
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I suck at Python, part a million...

Tue, 26 Feb 2013 14:52:08 -0600

I suck at Python, part a million. How long have I been at this, on and off? Since around 2006, I think. Maybe even 2005. How many Python books have I started and then given up on? At least half a dozen. How many tutors have I hired and then let go? Three. How many online courses have I tried? Two. One I passed the first part but dropped out of the second part. The other is Codecademy, which I've been plodding through at a rate of five exercises every week or so. My brain just doesn't take to this stuff, even the simplest, most elementary, most babystepping, handholding elements of it. I've had to look up how to call a key in a dictionary three times in the past two weeks. In the lesson I'm doing right now, I was just asked to find an average of numbers in a list. My solution?

def average(x):
	count = 0
	total = 0
	for i in x:
		total += i
		count += 1
	mean = total / count
	return mean

Then I consulted the hint and saw that I just could have used sum() on the numbers and divided by the len() of the list. WHY. IS. THIS. SO. HARD?!

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I really miss getting new music from the blogmass...

Tue, 26 Feb 2013 09:07:41 -0600

I really miss getting new music from the blogmass. Can we do a group Turntable session sometime soon and all play songs for each other for an hour or two? You don't have to have a Facebook login anymore.
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I got nine hours of sleep last night...

Wed, 13 Feb 2013 10:55:47 -0600

I got nine hours of sleep last night. I feel like I'm swimming through a warm haze of non-exhaustion, so different from the ragged eyeballs and whistling brain that usually accompany me through my morning's work.
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I kind of love the repair shop I'm at right now to...

Fri, 01 Feb 2013 14:05:43 -0600

I kind of love the repair shop I'm at right now to fix the cracked screen on my phone. They have:

* A giant piece of floor-to-ceiling wall art made out of alternately black-painted and chrome-polished hard drives.

* A four-inch-tall leather armchair.

* A beautiful old antique typewriter.

* A poster in a gold-painted wooden frame that reads "Think Before Throw It! Bring It To Us!"

* A flatscreen TV playing extremely strange music videos with the sound off. (When I got here, it was showing this. Warning: Freaky depictions of Dead-Eyed Swedish Dance Fever.)
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So as some of you know, I'm currently captioning...

Thu, 31 Jan 2013 07:58:51 -0600

So as some of you know, I'm currently captioning at a dental school. Last night I dreamed that I'd decided to take the dental board exams just for the hell of it, to see how much I'd picked up along the way. They were being given at an abandoned strip mall in Missoula. When I walked in, I immediately had to sign an affidavit stating that I had not secreted an orangutan in my clothing to covertly perform the drilling part of the exam in my place. I assured them that I had not, and set to work on the written portion of the test. It was in the form of a glossy fashion magazine, with about four pages of clothing ads per one page of dental exam questions. One of the questions was about the role of stenography in film adaptations of Peter Pan, and I remember scribbling a enormous thick blue ballpoint circle around that question, pleased that the importance of my profession had been acknowledged by the dental licensing board. Then I looked up and noticed my high school band director staring at me suspiciously. He'd noticed that I was an impostor. I tried looking for a back door to make my escape, but then my alarm went off and I woke up.
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St. Germain cocktails and Super Mario Galaxy...

Fri, 11 Jan 2013 22:35:14 -0600

St. Germain cocktails and Super Mario Galaxy. That's how we roll on a Friday night round these parts.
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I'm on the couch in the living room, editing a...

Thu, 10 Jan 2013 18:15:05 -0600

I'm on the couch in the living room, editing a transcript.

My girl is in the kitchen, using a zucchini on a mandoline as a percussion instrument to accompany a Fiona Apple song.

Hot damn, I love my life.
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Prosicated asked me to describe what my life was...

Tue, 04 Dec 2012 18:31:30 -0600

Prosicated asked me to describe what my life was like at 17, as part of the "where I was at age..." meme. So here it is.

17 (March 17th 1998 - 1999) was a wonderful year. It was my last semester of high school, the summer of my first job, and my first semester of college.

One of my senior photos.

High school for me was all about drama and band. I remember our band bought the ship's bell from the USS John Philips Sousa and wound up using it in a suite inspired by Moby Dick, which at that time I'd never read. I had no inkling that it would become one of my favorite novels; I just enjoyed playing the bassoon solo in the Queequeg movement. I failed my last semester of math class, but I didn't need it to graduate. I'd gotten my acceptance letter to SJC in October, so I got even slackier than usual about doing homework and studying for tests, though I always went to class. My trumpet teacher offered me a summer gig at the Bigfork Summer Playhouse, and I jumped at the opportunity. It was a hell of a first job. Got to live with 30 actors in a concrete bunker, four to a room, and played Cabaret, The Will Rogers Follies, The Boys From Syracuse, and Grease (bleh!) in repertory. When I wasn't in the pit, I walked around in the woods, swam in the lake, or watered the flowers for the lady who ran the bookstore. It was bliss. Come fall, I went off to St. John's. I started learning Greek, found the Storytellers Guild (a club that sat around a fire with cookies and milk reading kids' stories to each other), who are still pretty much my oldest friends. Sadly, I haven't kept up much with my friends from high school, other than on Facebook in the most glancing and cursory way. It's kind of sad. But the college friendships are still going strong, even after so many years apart. My roommate (who I haven't kept up with, I'm sad to say) was this lovely oboe player who said she didn't mind the everpresent smell of Marmite emanating from my side of the room because it reminded her of when she worked in a bakery, bless her. We played in a wind trio with a tutor for a while, until we got too busy. I wasn't a very good student. Again, I'd go to class and enjoy myself tremendously, and I was good about doing the readings, but I never worked through the math problems, so when I had to do Euclid propositions, I'd just be flailing around. My papers were just godawful, because not only were they always started at about 2:00 am the night before they were due, but at that time I had this winceworthy highfalutin prose style that must have made my tutors seasick just to read through. Freakin' 17-year-olds, man. Pretentious wankers. But I was a happy-go-lucky one, at least. Had my first real crush, though that fizzled quickly enough when I learned how boy-crazy she was. I joined the Pink Triangle Society and was abruptly made archon when the previous archon quit, but it was mostly boys and one long-time couple, so I wasn't exactly overwhelmed with romantic prospects. Still a virgin, never been kissed, etc. I was going a bit nuts from it, but I held up okay. I worked in the dishpit with my beautiful friend Neil, also of the Pink Triangle Society, and we kept each other sane through the turmoil of that first disorienting semester.

My Freshman dorm room

Best Memory: Probably singing in Freshman Chorus. Just being in a big room, standing shoulder to shoulder with a hundred fellow freshmen, most of them not particularly musical, being forced into polyphony, and somehow combining to make this vast, rough-edged, beautiful noise. When I'm sad, I sometimes think myself back into the thick of that class, and it always buoys me up.

Worst Memory: Hearing my crush inform me (speaking about her crush), "I want to drink the sweat from his body." Hork.

Relationship: Zilch. See above. But I was pretty damn happy, for all that. If I'd been able to get into some kind of training wheels relationship before that point, I might not have fallen into such a disastrous thing the following summer, but that's another story...
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Every morning I get out at the 23rd Street subway...

Tue, 23 Oct 2012 07:10:30 -0600

Every morning I get out at the 23rd Street subway stop, and it's like running the gauntlet. First thing I see is one of those disgusting anti-Muslim "Savages" ads, and I'm like "Grrrrr." Then I walk a little farther and see two pro-Muslim ads from Rabbis for Human Rights and Sojourners, and I'm like "Yaaaay!" Then I walk a little farther and I see an ad for the Church of Scientology, and I'm like "Eeuuccch." Then I climb the stairs, get on the bus, and start my day.
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Dmitri Fyodorovich Spermatogonium Amadeus The...

Mon, 03 Sep 2012 20:12:34 -0600

Dmitri Fyodorovich Spermatogonium Amadeus Theophilus Gottlieb Knight. 1994-2012. A beautiful loving grumpy soft stubborn gentle importunate dog-hating loyal generous self-possessed mischievous noble wonderful cat.
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K: Eating Astronaut Ice Cream is like eating the...

Tue, 21 Aug 2012 14:05:34 -0600

K: Eating Astronaut Ice Cream is like eating the ghost of a baby that halvah had with chalk.
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Just had to restore Windows (keeping my files...

Wed, 08 Aug 2012 22:39:49 -0600

Just had to restore Windows (keeping my files intact but writing over the OS) on my old computer, due to a nasty virus that I couldn't get rid of. After the restore, it seemed to be working pretty well, except that the version of Chrome was really old (I hadn't used this computer for over a year), and when I tried to use it to install a new version of Chrome, it wouldn't download. And when I tried to run Firefox, nothing happened. So I used an old version of Chrome to download a new version of Firefox so I could download a new version of Chrome. Silly computer.
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At K.'s birthday party last night, I invented a...

Sun, 29 Jul 2012 17:28:28 -0600

At K.'s birthday party last night, I invented a cocktail I call The Fountain of Youth. I know it was supposed to be in Florida, not Mexico, but they were all Spanish territories once. Anyway, here's how to make one:

Fill a large martini glass with ice.
Add two parts good tequila (I used Patron)
Add one part St. Germain Elderflower liqueur
Add one part tonic
Garnish with a wedge of lime

The idea is to focus on the flavor of the tequila, moderating and deepening it somewhat with the St. Germain, and bringing it all into focus with the bite of the tonic. We tried making one with seltzer and it really wasn't the same. But this version seemed to go over well with the partygoers, so I thought maybe you guys would like it too.
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M: It talks about the Crab Canon, which is a...

Sat, 28 Jul 2012 09:59:54 -0600

M: It talks about the Crab Canon, which is a legitimately awesome thing that Bach wrote.
K: I'm disappointed that it's not a legitimately awesome thing that Bach shot. During the war.
M: Boom! Clack-clack-clack-clack-clack-clack! Boom! Clack-clack-clack-clack-clack!
K: Exactly.
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It's tough to be a heteromezzo... ...

Thu, 26 Jul 2012 02:00:11 -0600

It's tough to be a heteromezzo...

(via Eye Bags)
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M (editing transcript): Have you heard of a drug...

Fri, 29 Jun 2012 18:24:35 -0600

M (editing transcript): Have you heard of a drug called Marcumar?
K: And the Funkabun?
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M (transcribing an ophthalmology interview): Do...

Fri, 22 Jun 2012 18:00:34 -0600

M (transcribing an ophthalmology interview): Do you suffer from Posterior Crocodile Shagreen?
K: No, but I'm afraid I might have a touch of Dorsal Caiman Ennui.
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I usually only caption plays once after previewing...

Sat, 16 Jun 2012 11:22:41 -0600

I usually only caption plays once after previewing them once, but there's one play Off-Broadway (actually in the Village) that I've captioned twice after previewing it twice. I'm captioning it again today and again next month. It's about deafness and stars a Deaf actor, so that's why they've requested additonal captioned performances. Anyway, I just picked up the captioning sign at my boss's apartment, which is a big fancy new condo building in Queens that smells just like the hotel I lived in back in Towson. And then I dropped the sign off at the theater, which smells just like the theater I worked at for four summers in Bigfork. So I'm getting a dose of time-shifted recollection today. Riding through the city in a cab (which I very rarely do) makes me realize how much I love it here, though. Long Island City to Midtown to the Flatiron to Little India to the West Village, and after I finish the gig, back to LIC to drop off the sign and then home to Washington Heights, my favorite neighborhood of them all... It's been almost eight years since I moved here, and I still can't believe my luck.
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Today I made a birthday mix for my mom, but you...

Thu, 31 May 2012 15:11:10 -0600

Today I made a birthday mix for my mom, but you guys can listen to it too, if you want.
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K.: "Does Bugs Bunny have a New York accent...

Fri, 25 May 2012 18:20:54 -0600

K.: "Does Bugs Bunny have a New York accent? He always sounded normal to me."*

*She continues to maintain that it is in no wise authentic, since Mel Blanc was born in San Francisco.
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Online Baroque recorder trainer.

Mon, 21 May 2012 12:54:14 -0600

Online Baroque recorder trainer.
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