alicetiara's blog

What magazines do you subscribe to, and why?

1. The New Yorker

Have for years, probably always will. My favorite magazine by a long shot. I try to read it every week, and often it's the only non-academic reading I do. It's also my only source of really in-depth foreign policy analysis.

2. Time Out NY

It's only $10/year and the best for newcomers to NYC.

3. Entertainment Weekly

I love this magazine and although it's kind of expensive, it's so snarky and entertaining. I barely even have time to watch TV or go to the movies and EW keeps me up to date with all things popcult related.

Other magazines that I like: Wired, Zink, the Economist, Harpers, the Atlantic, none of which I have time to read.

What are your favorite and least favorite words?  Any reasons why?
Question submitted by Byrne.

Great question!!

Favorite words:
* Supercilious
* Conversant
* Problematic / problematize (business-speak/academic jargon)
* A billion more I can't think of right now

My favorite Spanish word is "azafata" which means "stewardess", IIRC from 7th grade Spanish.

Least favorite words
* "Make Love" (ok, that's a phrase)
* Cuddle

So I'm a big cold bitch with a heart of ice, okay? At least I have an excellent vocabulary.

What was your favorite candy when you were a kid? How does that compare to now?

I was a big fan of Gummi Bears and still am. I was kind of a glutton as a kid, especially 7th-8th grade where I was pretty chunky, and my mom would bring home entire pounds of gummi bears from the supermarket and I'd devour them all while sitting in my room writing in my diary and taping Depeche Mode songs off the radio. EMO! Although there was no such thing then.

Now I try to stay away from candy, but I still eat way too much of it. Given my druthers, I pick Twix over everything else. But pretty much any kind of candy works for me.

I like this little quiz:

***Your Linguistic Profile:***

45% General American English

25% Yankee

15% Upper Midwestern

10% Dixie

0% Midwestern

What Kind of American English Do You Speak?

I would have been very sad if I hadn't scored high on Yankee. I feel like I have a lot of weird New York-isms that not everyone has, which I think distinguishes me and my high school friends from all my friends who moved to NYC from some random place.

I grew up in suburban Westchester county. in the US, your grasp of American history is strongly dependent on where you grew up. For example, in New England American history consists primarily of all events leading up to, and including, the Revolutionary War. This is mostly because walking down the street to the church graveyard to do grave rubbings of fallen Revolutionary soldiers is a much cheaper field trip than anything else. This seems to be fairly standard: my friend Sydney grew up in Alabama where the war was referred to as "The War of Northern Aggression", whereas my friends in the Pacific Northwest spent an inordinant amount of time on Lewis and Clark.

Anyway, the field trips that I can remember clearly are:

1. The Natural History Museum in NYC

2. The Museum of Modern Art in NYC (My parents took us here, so I guess it is not really an official field trip, but it was so my brother could do research for his sixth grade project on James Rosenquist, and I remember it very clearly).

3. The police station (woohoo)

4. The nuclear power plant (Indian Point)

5. A LOT of Revolutionary War-related sites, including graveyards, road markers, broken down old houses, and "George Washington Slept Here" plaques on hotels

And then we did a trip to an outdoorsy place called Hillside in fifth grade, which was a big deal because it was a week, and you spent the whole year on Orienteering and Spelunking. In seventh grade you did Nature's Classroom, which was the same thing but worse, because seventh grade is worse than fifth grade, and in eighth grade you did the Washington Trip, which was awesome because you stayed in HOTELS and got to go to the Smithsonian and the Air and Space Museum and all the monuments (and you could shop. I do remember tearing up when I saw the Declaration of Independence, probably due to all the colonial American history I had been exposed to as a child). By ninth grade we were going on band trips to Virginia Beach which were just an excuse to go screw around on the beach for a week.

But the most memorable was one that my sixth grade Gifted & Talented class did, where we went to New York, ate at the Hard Rock Cafe, one girl got her hair cut at Vidal Sassoon, and I'm sure at some point we did something that had some educational value, but I'm not sure what. Oh, I think it was the Museum of TV, Radio and Film, which is awesome, but is in Queens.

What's the oldest digital camera photo you have on your computer? When is it from? Let's see it!

I actually am using my work computer and have no photos, but I did discover an ancient photo album on Yahoo! last year, so here's a few from there. This one is from New Year's Eve 1999.

That's Adam, me, and Joel on Shirley's couch in her old apartment.

Here's one from a few months later (2000 sometime), when I had the classic Bettie Page that was so popular that year:

Shirley's kitchen at a "rock star" party. Stephanie is getting married in Sept. to the same guy she was dating in this picture (six years ago!), Angel is married now and I was her bridesmaid in her wedding this spring. And I still have dyed black hair with bangs, although thankfully not curled under like that. And I would never wear a ringer shirt from Delia*s.

It's a universal truth that a woman in possession of, shall we say, plebian tastes in pop culture is always in want of new trashy teen novels to consume. I still have been unable to exorcise the creeping crud that is the Gossip Girl series (and the new very entertaining spinoff "The It Girl"), but I finally stopped reading "The A List" after there was a VERY long paragraph on how nobody who wore size 8 jeans could ever be considered hot. !!!!! Why that series is still even in print is beyond me.

Anyway, I am a sucker for a) dystopian fiction b) teenagers c) Cory Doctorow, and when he recommended the first two Scott Westerfield novels in the Pretties series ("Pretties" and "Uglies") I snapped them up on Amazon.  

These books are short, with large print, and they are very addictive, so expect to speed through them. I read both in a few hours, but I am a crazy speed reader. They're set in a future world where plastic surgery is used to alter people's looks upon adolescence, where they go from "uglies" (non-surgically enhanced) to "pretties" (symmetrical facial features, big eyes, etc.). There's a lot of tidbits culled from current theories of beauty as protection (e.g. we want to take care of cute things with big eyes). The main character is an reluctant rebel who moves between the various worlds. Part of the fun of the book is figuring out how the world really functions, so I'm loathe to give away spoilers.

If you like cheesy teen scifi, you'll like this, but it's a bit heavy-handed and you're not going to get any major revelations. I will take this opportunity to pimp  my all time favorite teen novel, Feed.  It deals with consumerism and marketing more than beauty, but it does it in a much more frightening way. Pretties and Uglies are fun reads, but they don't make you question your own life the way the best dystopic fiction does.
 

I can't really say that I hobnob with particularly famous crowds. I know a lot of indie musicians, but that's hardly saying much if you lived in Seattle for any length of time. I did meet and hang out with Kim Deal when I was a junior in college, though, and that remains to this day probably my most memorable and braggable experience.

Here's that sleep book I've been reading. I'd definitely recommend it as a light non-fiction read that combines history, science, and sociology. Martin definitely has an axe to grind, but it's a fairly benign one: get more sleep.

He makes a very compelling case, and peppers it with trivia on everything from sleep in the pre-electric era to the difference between blind & sighted people's dreams. Makes good cocktail party / work gathering conversation, and helps you to re-evaluate the role that sleep plays in your life.

I have found that it's one of those books that if i put it down too long I'll never come back to it, so I can't say it's riveting. But still recommended.        Overall grade: B.

Is there any way to add RSS feeds of your other online content to your blog? I'd like to add my tiara.org feed to this blog, but it would also be super awesome if you could add your LJ feed as well. Although my LJ is all flocked, since both LJ and Vox are owned by SixApart, perhaps there could be some sort of seamless privacy integration. Wishful thinking!

I wrote yesterday on tiara.org that the only way to realistically "solve" the "problem" of people (read: young people) exposing personal information online (which then makes parents, resident advisors, bosses, etc. uncomfortable) is to give the  information generators more control over who sees that information, tools for obfuscation, etc. Which I guess is the point of Vox? But then sns companies would argue that the utility of the network is diminished if everyone locks down their profiles, which is how MySpace justifies not letting people over 16 having private profiles. I need to think about this.

Also: note to self: revisit the problem of how the semantic web deals with people (beyond FOAF) particularly w/r/t community applications.