I got name-checked on Eschaton, for noting (in comments) that an article Atrios pointed to misquoted Kanye West’s famous “George Bush doesn’t care about black people”* in a way that introduced stereotypically “black” grammatical errors.
This can only reinforce my street cred as a massive, massive grammar, spelling, and punctuation nerd. Holla!
* One of my favorite throwaway moments in the last Arrested Development episodes was the T-shirt Franklin had on that read “George Bush doesn’t care about black puppets.” Perfect.
Ajax all over
I had this post half-written in my head about how Daily Kos’s implementation of an Ajax-based commenting system was proof that the typical knock on Ajax technology — that it’s not yet ready for heavy-volume commercial sites — was totally wrong. Daily Kos isn’t a commercial site per se, but it’s hugely high-traffic, so if they’re doing it, that means it works, right?
Unfortunately, the new commenting code is slow and ugly. So, uh, perhaps not ready for prime-time yet after all.
This isn’t the technopr0n you’re looking for.
From the iChat logs:
Friend: so, I tried to look at your blog.
Friend: It is blocked from my work network as pornography
Misha: ?
Misha: !
Friend: yeah.
Misha: ROCK ON
Friend: ahahaha
Friend: I thought you might appreciate that
Friend: of course this is the company that blocked linked in because it was a dating site
Hedda Gabler
Were it not completely sold out, I would encourage everyone I know to go check out the Sydney Theater Company’s production of Hedda Gabler at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, where Cate Blanchett is acting a smoking hole through the center of the BAM Harvey stage in the title role. Her Hedda is by turns terrifying and trapped, violent and weak, petty and brave — all the contradictions held together in the form of a woman who has had to keep all of her anger and ambition inside, where it has rotted and leaked out as a pestilence.
The rest of the cast is fantastic, with a Tesman whom you can actually believe Hedda might have convinced herself she could be satisfied, and a completely unrecognizable Hugo Weaving playing Judge Brock as an utterly charming menace — a combination, I realized when I thought of it, of his two most common screen personae.
I was riveted to the stage by Blanchett’s performance most of all, and in no small part because I could not remember how the play ended. I haven’t read the thing in at least ten years, since I took a seminar in grad school on gender and the 1890s with Martha Vicinus. Vicinus is aptly immortalized in James Hynes’s novel The Lecturer’s Tale as a vampire turned department chair, about which the less said the better. She was also the only professor I ever had, in my all-too-lengthy education, who refused to approve a paper topic that was appropriate for the class because she just wasn’t interested (a New Historicist reading of James’s Portrait of a Lady: she told me she didn’t like James, so he was out of bounds. For a class on gender in the 1890s. Sound effect: my head exploding). So my memory of the class, and the rest of the reading, tends to be colored by her ability to suck the life out of the material we did cover. There was nothing bland about this production, though, and it added a lot to my enjoyment in the end to be watching it half-blind: for all the “aha, right, here we are” of the guns coming out in the first act, there was a “holy shit, that’s right, she destroys it” in the last. I had thought about seeing the awesome-sounding Heddatron before this (it has, sadly, already closed) but I’m glad I didn’t: I got to feel the force of Blanchett’s performance, and the vivid ferocity of the production, without newer memories cluttering my view.
Although I will admit, I do find myself wanting to reread Hynes, or at least the opening department meeting scene…
We are all cyborgs now
Last week, I went to the dentist, and he suggested that instead of living through a lot more not-necessarily-successful dental work on two dodgy back molars, I “proactively” decide to pull the suckers and get implants.
I will admit, I was kind of freaked out by the idea of it — both the thought of undergoing the removal, and the thought of walking around for the rest of my life with prosthetic teeth. Then, after about half an hour, I calmed down enough to realize that I was having this freakout while wearing glasses on my eyes, an iPod around my neck with its earphones in my ears, a partial denture in my mouth, a brace on my right wrist, and my cellphone in my pocket, where I could be certain to feel it if it rang. I am already living my life with a whole mess of detachable artificial parts I either can’t or wouldn’t want to do without*: adding a few that would at least consistently be where I left them would be a nice change of pace.
* allow me to add to this list my work notebooks, which are my outboard brain in the office. I briefly misplaced the current one and was twitchy for hours till I found it.