have you been able to find any good sources on it through google searches?
Just to be clear, I had not been aware of or following the story until one of my best friends started blogging about it in mid-June. As he's been writing about his experiences going down that particular rabbit hole, I've started looking for other sources. Not very hard, to be sure. And I know that I've been on leave from blogging for awhile, but what ever happened to google's blog search? Back in the bad old days, I was at least able to find a wide range of voices on almost any topic, no matter how obscure. But when I search "Guccifer 2.0" on google, I get nothing interesting or new. If I didn't know about posts like this, I would never be able to find them.
There's got to be more out there, right? Are you there, google? It's me, The Constructivist.
This will have been a test of the google search system. This will have been only a test.
I haven't had time to fire up the DVR and watch the long programs in the team skating competition at Sochi, but I have to say that having selected men's and women's singles, pairs, dancers preview their routines didn't do much for me. Maybe it's the obvious home ice advantage in scoring, maybe it's the made-for-tv exhibition aspect of it, maybe it's the fact that it came first and impinges on the individual competition, maybe it was the scoring system (which levelled out differences between skates far too much IMHO), maybe it's just the fact that skating is such a hit-and-miss sport and I'd rather have the drama reserved for one competition.... Maybe it's just the fact that Japan doesn't have world-class pairs or dancers so they didn't have a chance. Whatever it is, I was left underwhelmed. How about you?
Ever since Inbee Park credited her rise to world #1 to her happiness over her relationship with her fiance (see Fairways and Forehands for the most recent mention!), does it seem to you that she's opened the engagement/marriage floodgates on the LPGA? Well, it's time to add Irene Cho (married) to the list that includes Hee Kyung Seo (married), Paula Creamer (engaged), Natalie Gulbis (married), Brittany Lang (married), Mariajo Uribe (married), Brooke Pancake (married), Paola Moreno (married)....
Of course, the bigger question is whether they'll all follow the Juli Inkster track rather than the Annika/Lorena track when/after that first baby is born! But for now it seems Inbee is the role model!
So I'm here in Albany for my union's delegate assembly and had to go to bed early because I'm driving across the state this morning to make it back for my university's senate meeting. Got up early to finish writing a letter of recommendation for an awesome student for a system-wide award and just realized I don't even know who won the Super Bowl. How awful is that?
So if you happened to be watching Golf Channel when they showed Annika Sorenstam teeing off at the PGA Show this morning, you would have seen my brother, as well. He was standing to her left, on the right side of the screen. A little later, they replayed the shot and its aftermath, which included an instant of my brother shaking hands with Annika. So cool!
I just happened to be heading to Albany tomorrow and decided to break the drive up by staying with my parents tonight in Clinton. Of course, they have Golf Channel (unlike me) and they taped the program. So it all came together.
Except for the claim he made in a rushed call on a bad connection that he was going to be on Feherty Live. Maybe another night?
Anyway, if anyone notices Golf Channel has posted the video before I do, let me know in comments. Thanks!
QSMS is of course how onechan first tried to spell Christmas. Speaking of which, we don't celebrate it in this Jewish-Buddhist-not-very-religious Constructivist household--and imoto doesn't like it. So she hung up one of her socks by the fireplace and tried to stay up for Santa as long as she could. I was glad for the company while I was up grading (she was paging through some Simpsons comic books I took out from the local library until they put her right to sleep, but before that we had a fun discussion on whether Santa is real).
Ah, I should call it a night so I'm fresh for Mongolian buffet for dinner tonight! Hope your Christmas is going to be as awesome as ours....
The LPGA's rookie class of 2014 can't catch any breaks. The very same day I finally get their membership right I find out Tiffany Joh has released a new video. I present "What's Up with Lexi?"
'14ers, the ball is in your court. Or rather, you have the honors now....
[Update 1 (9:46 pm): Ugh, I was trying to figure out what T-Joh was parodying and having no luck, but 9-going-on-10 onechan knew right away. Of course, she sent me to a different parody of "What Does the Fox Say" rather than the original, which is when I figured out that I am super-old.]
So we got over 8" of snow here in Hamburg in what feels like the 1st winter storm since 2010 not to suddenly weaken, veer off, or blow through too fast to do much damage. And more may be coming. Yada yada yada. That's life in western NY. Or at least life like it oughtta be this time of year. That's not the weird thing.
The weird thing is that my Versa's defrost went haywire on my way to work this morning and it turned out to be serious enough that I had to get the car towed and will have to pay a boatload of money to get it fixed. Bad luck, right? Well, yeah, but at least I was lucky enough to semi-glide my way to a place to park the car until I could sort things out--lucky not to slide off the road or into the oncoming lane when I was navigating via peering out my driver's side window, that is. But that's not the weirder thing.
The weirder thing is that my Versa's defrost went haywire about a mile before I hit the Thruway entrance on my way to work this morning, at a time that prevented me from renting a car to get down to Fredonia. Snow day! And a pretty good day for it, as there were so many accidents between Hamburg and Dunkirk on the Thruway that they shut down that section of it.
The odds were pretty decent that I might have been involved in one of those accidents. And even better that I would have been stranded in Fredonia overnight--the same night Onechan and Imoto's cousin from Okinawa (whom I'll call Onichan) arrived (safely, if an hour late) for a month-long stay with us.
As it was, I got to experience the utter weirdness of having shovelled the snow out of my driveway into piles up to my chest in places and an hour later driving completely dry roads just 20 miles north on the way to the Buffalo airport. In fact, there was barely any snow at the Wegmans at which we do most of our grocery shopping just 5 miles north of us. Even the Erie County Fairgrounds about a mile north of us got a lot less snow than we did in the village.
That was the weirdest thing. Too bad Onichan was too jet-lagged to really appreciate it.
A buddy of mine forwarded me the following youtube clip. At first, I thought it was fake, but it's real. It's a pretty amazing rendition of Tool's "46 and 2" by a bunch of middle schoolers!
Yes, I am about 3 months behind the internet. That's how we roll here at Mostly Harmless!
Hey kids, here's a little golf tip from the Constructivist! If you ever go a month without touching your clubs, head out to the course on a nice fall morning with no expectations, snag 3 birdies in 4 holes as you make the turn to fight back to +1 through 10 holes (one of your best starts of the year), face the toughest hole on the course (a 230-yard uphill par 3 with an elevated tee that's surrounded by trees with a creek and a mini-gorge all the way up the left), and happen to hit your 1st really bad shot of the day (yanking a 3-wood dead left off the tee), try to keep your temper. Whatever you do, don't try to bang the ground with your club and miss, hitting your left leg a few inches above the ankle instead! That's called adding injury to insult.
Somehow, I ended up salvaging a double, but it turned out to be the 1st of 4 on the back. The weird thing is, I had just managed to play through my 2nd group of the day, I had the rest of the back open ahead of me, with scoring opportunities galore to boot, and the double on 11 with my Callaway ball actually brought the Titleist ball I was also playing back into the match, so I should have been able to shrug it off and enjoy the rest of the round. But between the pain, the heat, my soreness from basketball the day before, my being out of golf shape (physically and mentally), and my lack of a snack, I lost my tempo and my temper quite a bit on the back 9. It wasn't long before I went from limping along to stumbling home. I was in such a fog by the end of the day that I couldn't even enjoy my birdie on the short par 5 17th, despite the fact that it's a very rare thing for me to make 4 of 'em in an 11-hole stretch.
Good news is, my leg is going to be fine and so is my game next year. I've already gained some length from a month at the new gym and some tips from a trainer there who also works at a private club in the area, even though I was only sometimes able to swing like I was supposed to with the move from my 1st lessons in a decade that I thought I had grooved over the summer. Despite the sorry shape of South Shore's greens, they were actually much improved from a month ago and I took only 28 putts, a rare departure from what's been my Achilles heel this summer. If I can keep to my workout schedule and do a lot of indoor putting with onechan and imoto this winter, I'll be ready to make 2014 my best season ever. At least, that's what I'm telling myself if this turns out to be my last round of 2013!
I know it's Masters week, but what better time to let the world know that I'm going to be teaching a summer course on Neil Gaiman and Neal Stephenson from May 28 through June 28 at SUNY Fredonia?
Here's how I've been pitching it on campus.
Summer Session I
Bring on the "Ne(a/i)ls":
Bruce Neal Simon Will Be Teaching Neil Gaiman and Neal Stephenson
ENGL 427 Major Writers: Neil Gaiman and Neal Stephenson
During Summer Session I, we will examine a sample of works from the major fantasy fiction writer and the major science fiction writer of their generation: Neil Gaiman and Neal Stephenson. We will start by pairing some shorter works that made the writers' early reputations (for instance, Gaiman's Sandman: Season of Mists and Stephenson's "Mother Earth, Mother Board" from Some Remarks). We will then pair Gaiman's (and Terry Pratchett's) Good Omens with Stephenson's Snow Crash as hugely popular and influential experiments in narrative, humor, and apocalypse. Finally, we will pair Gaiman's American Gods with Stephenson's Anathem as mature and major novels. If we have the time (and are completely insane), we will also try to pack in their most recent novels, Gaiman's The Ocean at the End of the Lane and Stephenson's Reamde--you know, for fun (these novels will be optional purchases)!
We will consider such questions as what makes a writer "major"? how do these very different writers speak to each other, to their own times, and to us? what connections and contrasts can we find between their characters and settings, characteristic themes and figures, central beliefs and values, writing styles and narrative strategies, and literary and political projects?
This course fulfills the "major author course" requirement for undergraduates majoring in English or English Adolescence Education.
Just finished watching the Golf Channel's coverage of the final round of the Wegmans LPGA Championship and as it was coming to a close I was joking with the Full Metal Archivist that I might show up soon. Well, if you're interested in the man behind the moniker, check out Rich Lerner's intro to the last profile of Ya Ni Tseng. That's me, The Constructivist, in the green shirt and black hat among the Japanese media in the background (they were interviewing Mika Miyazato and around that time I was wondering how low I could hold up my arm at audiotaping level). Oh, and if you have a big enough tv, you'll also be able to find me in the right fairway on 18 in the crowd shot after Ya Ni hit her approach shot and is walking toward the green. In fact, when they zoom in on her and she looks over to her right, nods, and raises her glove, she's acknowledging my cry of "-20, Ya Ni!" If that's my 3 seconds of fame, that's not too shabby!
Check out this Japanese game show with Daisuke Takahashi, Mao Asada, Miki Ando, Takahiko Kozuka, and Nobunari Oda in a heated table tennis match against a couple of comedians (who have never won in this annual competition with different athletes)....
Continuing a Mostly Harmless tradition of Japanese stylewatching for the New Year (Gackt, ikemen, and Jero in 2008, Hikaru Utada in 2009, Star Blazers in 2010), for 2011 I asked the Full Metal Archivist what Japanese trends might go viral this year. Her first idea was changing styles of masculinity, a kind of turn toward the feminine among younger Japanese men, which is interesting in itself but also in the reactions it has sparked at home and abroad. Not that this is all that new for 2011--from the moment I first set foot on a plane to Japan, I realized that my usual cues for reading male sexuality were not all that useful among Japanese men--but what is different is the media attention in the past couple of years devoted to tracking what is being framed as a generational shift in Japanese masculinity.
First, some quick definitions:
Soshoku Kei: This is the now-classic "herbivore/vegetarian" generational tag that started making the rounds in 2009. It resulted in a Japanese movie last year, which was part of a larger dialogue that even Newsweek picked up on, portraying soshoku-kei danshi (which they translated literally as "grass-eating men") as a symptom of Japan's economic malaise: "Toyota's fall from grace caps a 20-year economic malaise that is infecting the popular culture, manifesting itself in a preference for staying home, avoiding risk, and removing oneself from the hierarchical system." Heck, even a Carnegie Council writer put his 2 cents in!
To see for yourself what everyone's talking about, check out this clip from Cool Japan:
Compare CNN International's brief overview from mid-2009:
Otomen: OK, to understand what an otomen is, you 1st need to review the definition of an ikemen. So if an ikemen is a teen idol or male hottie, then an otomen is one with a hidden girlish side. For a drama that has about the same relationship to this social category as Douglas Coupland's Generation X has to the eponymous American generation, head on over to dramacrazy.net and watch the 12-episode J-drama Otomen. Me, I'm wondering if the 1st big musical number from Tangled (you know, the one set in the Snuggly Bunny), which imoto and onechan were brave enough to see in the theater last week (1st time evah in the U.S. for both!), is a parody of this Japanese phenomenon.
Gyaru-o, Chara-o, Sholita: I may be wrong, but I think of these as different styles of being an otomen, with the first being a kind of a male bimbo, the second more of a bad boy type, and the third projecting a kind of boyish "moe" vibe. Let's start with the last, for the super-cute character "Honey" from the anime Ouran High School Host Club is the perfect example. Skipping to the first, PatrickMacias provides two recent examples of how big an influence Ernest Hemingway's posthumous The Garden of Eden has had on female and male hostess/host culture in Japan. It's a little harder to find good examples of the sexier, wilder chara-o look, and Daisuke Takahashi doesn't usually sport it, but this image is what the Full Metal Archivist settled on after a while.
So there you have it. Maybe now you can understand what the Full Metal Archivist means when she sums me up as a "soshoku-kei shoujo manga otomen with no domestic skill." Yay! Happy New year, everyone!
...for you to cure Daisuke Takahashi's whiplash in time for the World Championships!
We know this comes a little late and you're really busy this time of year, but onechan and imoto have been really good, The Constructivist really likes Terry Pratchett's Hogfather and has done animeQSMSpostings the pastfew years, and the FullMetal Archivist is Dai-chan's biggest fan, so please consider this request from a blended Buddhist-Jewish family just this one time.
Sincerely,
The Constructivist, the Full Metal Archivist, onechan, and imoto
p.s.: This isn't just for us, but also for the 2010 Japanese National Champion, Takahiko Kozuka, who accidentally smashed into Dai-chan on the way down from a jump during a warm-up session at the Grand Prix Finals. He really shouldn't go down in history as the guy who ruined Dai-chan's maybe last chance to win the Grand Prix Finals and probably only chance to repeat as World Champion, right?
p.p.s.: Santa, please please please don't let whiplash end the career of a skater who came back from what's usually a career-ending knee injury for skaters faster and better than anyone thought possible! He wasn't even 100% at the Olympics and got the 1st medal ever by a Japanese male figure skater. And he wasn't much healthier when he got the 1st gold at Worlds by a Japanese male figure skater. Obviously he's a quick healer and super-tough, so can't you just speed the healing process up for him just a bit?
p.p.p.s.: Santa, if he could skate like this hurt--and move from 6th to 3rd in nationals--imagine how he could skate at 100%!
Yo, Geoff! You love it when players mouth off about ridiculous (re)designs, right? Well, get a load of what Laura Davies said after her opening 70 at the LPGA Tour Championship left her 3 shots behind leaders Seon Hwa Lee and Amy Yang:
Q. Tell us about the course. It's pretty challenging. What do you think of it?
LAURA DAVIES: This one? It's my favorite course in Florida. We played here years ago in the late 90s and 2000. It's always been my favorite course in Florida. I like the grass here. It's better. It's not so--the weird grass that Florida has. I don't know the difference between them but it's much spongier and I like it. The layout is fantastic, but the grass is good, too. I don't know what they did with the greens. Someone went mental on the greens. I don't know what happened there. Someone said Jack Nicklaus did it, but I don't believe that. Someone said Jack changed it; well, he must have been having a very bad day. (Laughter).
Q. Someone said that he had to oversee it for it to remain a Nicklaus design.
LAURA DAVIES: Well, he might have been in a helicopter above (laughter) or flown over and said "that will do" or something. There's no way Jack Nicklaus designed these greens. They are mental.
So of course the golf gods punished her with a 2nd-round 84 that ended her disappointing LPGA campaign in 2010 on a sour note. But she can still get her 6th LET win of the season next week in Dubai and take their money title. Any of this interesting to you in the slightest?
[Update 1 (11:18 pm): Nice rapid response by the Shack!]
[Update 2 (11:45 pm): Hey, visitors from Shack-land, check out this Randall Mell piece for more on Davies's year!]
[Update 3 (11:50 pm): More Randall Mell, this time with quotes from Brittany Lincicome and Paula Creamer on the greens at Grand Cypress.]
[Update 4 (12/4/10, 12:36 am): Geoff's regulars might be amused to see that I was nice to him here compared to Steve Elling. It's all about the love here at Mostly Harmless.]
Onechan, a 1st-grader, is trying to read a 50-page "Step 3" illustrated story based on The Incredibles--which we've been watching every other day for the last few weeks (not to mention watching the awesome short "Jack-Jack Attack" much more often!). Guess which words and phrases she's been having no problem reading on her own....
"bad guy"
"attacked"
"ran for our lives"
"his own robot"
"after us"
"Syndrome's guards"
"in trouble"
"powers"
"pretend to be normal"
"not a real Super"
"slipped into her force field"
"super speed"
"she set us free too"
"with his remote control"
"We got there just in time"
"turned into a fireball"
"Super-strong little monster"
"We have the best family!"
"save the day"
Oh, and guess who's going trick-or-treating as Violet?
