fauxklore

Celebrity Death Watch: Anna Quayle was a Tony winning actress, who died in August but whose obituary was just published this past week. Marko Feingold was a Holocaust survivor and head of a Jewish community in Austria, who lived to 106 years old. Christopher Rouse was the composer in residence for the New York Philharmonic from 2012-2015. Robert Hunter was the lyricist for the Grateful Dead. Jimmy Nelson was a ventriloquist. Jimmy Spicer was a rapper who managed to die of natural causes. Jose Jose was a Mexican singer. Jessye Norman was an opera singer. Kim Shattuck was the lead singer of The Muffs. Rip Taylor was an actor / comedian. Karen Pendleton was one of the original Mouseketeers. Larry Junstrom was a bassist, who cofounded Lynyrd Skynyrd.

Jacques Chirac was a former prime minister and President of France. I read that this also made him co-prince of Andorra during that time, which is a cool bit of trivia.

Stephen Lukasik was a physicist who led DARPA and the FCC at various times. He played a key role in development and deployment of ARPANET, as well as supporting technology development related to nuclear device development, computer networking, and AI.

Diahann Carroll was the first black women to win a Tony for best actress in musical (for her performance in No Strings), though she was better known for the television series, Julia.

Ginger Baker was the drummer for Cream. He was probably the most influential rock drummer for my generation, spectacular for his use of jazz and African rhythms.


Work Stress: I had a tedious business trip the week before last. Then I was out of the office for a couple of days for Rosh Hashanah. I came back to trying to catch up on paperwork related to the project the trip was for. I need to get caught up on my actual job, but I suspect this other project is going to have lots of follow-up questions here and there, which I will get sucked into.


One Item re: Hotels: I stayed at an airport hotel the last night of the business trip, since I had an early flight. They charged for parking and claimed the room key would open the gate. Let’s just say it was less than obvious where to swipe the card to do so. Eventually, someone came and helped me, but the whole thing was annoying and could have easily been prevented if they had a light allowing the target to be seen at 5 a.m.


Old School Storytelling: I got back in time for a Friday night storytelling show. Which is a good thing, since I was one of the tellers. My story had to do with Class Nite, which was a big deal annual event when I was in high school. This involved a competition between the classes, with events ranging from decorations and costumes, to a song and skit, to assorted sports (basketball, volleyball, various races, tugs of war, and something called cage ball. All I remember about the latter is that it involved a ball and a cage.) The thing is that it was all rigged, so that the seniors won, followed by the juniors, sophomores, and freshman. Of course, we believed it was a fair competition, since it was the 1970’s when we still believed that Russian figure skating judges were unbiased. Anyway, the story went okay, but I was disappointed in it, largely because I don’t think I ever really figured out what the point of the story was, beyond making fun of silly things from my youth.


Speaking of Storytelling, It’s Shameless Self-Promotion Time: I’m in a show this coming Thursday night (October 10th) as part of the Fall for the Book Festival. It’s at The Auld Shebeen (3971 Chain Bridge Rd, Fairfax, VA – entrance downstairs, via North Street) at 7:00 p.m. And it’s Free! The theme is True Lies: Lies and the lying liars who tell them.


Rosh Hashanah: I was not very into it this year. I have plenty of personal issues I need to work on, but having a hard time focusing and prioritizing. This is my usual issue with having trouble doing one thing at a time. I did take advantage of some introspection time. There’s something I should say about how ritual helps with that, but I am not quite sure how to articulate that.


Disenchanted: I finished off last week (i.e. three days in the office writing up stuff from the previous week) by going out to dinner and the theatre with a couple of friends. The dinner part was at Pizzeria Orso, chosen for convenience to the theatre part at Creative Cauldron. I should have gotten pizza, but saw eggplant parmesan on the menu and thought it would be a good idea. I was wrong. It was okay, but not as good as I can do myself. (Assuming, of course, that I wasn’t too lazy to make It myself.)

As for the theatre, Disenchanted is a musical by a man named Dennis T. Giacino about Disney princesses. Essentially, each of the princesses (led by Snow White, Cinderella, and Sleeping Beauty) gets to sing a song about what is screwed up in their story. The pieces I thought best were "Without a Guy" (in which Hua Mulan wonders if she might be a lesbian since she is the only princess who doesn’t end up with a prince), "Finally" (in which the Princess Who Kissed the Frog sings about the commercial potential of a black princess), and "Perfect" (in which the chubby Sleeping Beauty explains that she is just fine as she is). The show was reasonably amusing, but the music was unmemorable and it was a bit raunchier than I was expecting. It was still worth the evening out, but could have been much better.

My friends were appalled afterwards when I told them that the Princess doesn't really kiss the frog - she throws him against the wall. As for Sleeping Beauty, her Prince rapes her and what wakes her up is the pain of childbirth.


WBRS Reception: Sunday night was a William Barton Rogers Society reception at the Cosmos Club. (WBRS has to do with giving $$$$ to MIT.) The speaker was Richard Binzel who talked about NASA deep space projects he (and his students) have been involved in. He was informative and entertaining. Overall, it was a pleasant evening out in a ritzy setting.

Don’t Brits Know the Alphabet? I sometimes watch semi-mindless television in the form of British quiz shows. While they are slightly less mindless than American game shows, I have found something really puzzling. Some games on a show from 2012ish called Five Minutes To a Fortune have people figuring out answers by seeing a series of letters and having to come up with an answer by shifting each letter one to the right. So, for example, if the category were animals, the answer DOG would be obtained from the sequence C N F. I am astounded by how many contestants could not grasp the concept and do this.

On Friday night I went to see American Century Theater's production of One Night With Fanny Brice. This is essentially a one-woman show, written by Chip Deffaa, with a piano accompaniment. It was rather too literal a look at Brice's life, so came across as "I did this," followed by a song, repeat ad infinitum. Though Esther Covington, who played Ms. Brice, had a reasonable voice, her dancing is unimpressive and she has no sense of comedic timing. Combine that with accompaniment by Tom Fuller that often drowned her out and the result was a remarkably dull performance. A show about one of the funniest people ever to perform on a stage should have the audience laugh more than once or twice.

Saturday night was Tellebration! This is an annual evening of storytelling around the world. I performed at the event at the Kensington Row Bookshop in Kensington, Maryland. The Beltway traffic getting there was about the third worst I've ever encountered, so I was glad I had left myself a lot of extra time. I told two stories. In the first half, I told a Mongolian folktale I've used the title "Two Foolish Old People" for, though rechecking the book I got it from (which I also misremembered the title of) it is called "A story of the foolish and silly old people." It's short and funny and, therefore, made a good opening piece. The piece I told in the second half is Border Crossing, a personal story that attempts to answer a probing question an official asked as I entered Karonga, Malawi. It gives me a chance to make fun of weddings I've been to (all of which are real, though not all of which actually involved members of my family). I generally say that all of the stories I tell are true, whether or not they happened that way, and the minor exaggeration in this one is a good example.

As for the other tellers, Anne Sheldon told "The Tiger's Whisker" and a Vachel Lindsay poem about Johnny Appleseed. Bob Rovinsky focused on weddings and dance. His "seven pits" dance (which parallels the 7 stages of man) is always enjoyable to see. Laura J. Bobrow did a clever story about a girl called Rhonda, after the ballet term "ronde de jambe." Last but not least, Cricket Parmalee told a complex Arabic folktale about a princess who defied an order for there to be no women in a neighboring kingdom. Jane Dorfman ably emceed the evening.

The formal concert was followed by an open mike, the highlight of which was hearing Zoe Sagalow tell the circular story about the mice searching for the most powerful husband for their daughter. I had time for a quick browse around the shop afterwards and was seriously tempted by a theremin they have for sale. I may well go back and buy it if they still have it the next time I am in the neighborhood. (Which may not be that far away, as there is a Volksmarch in that area in December.)

Sunday was occupied primarily with knitting group. It appears that every woman I know who is under 40 is pregnant. Well, except for the two who just had babies in the past few weeks. And the other two. At least baby stuff is quick to knit.

Finally, all I can say about this past week's episode of The Amazing Race is that Chad just got what was coming to him.

I am heading off to IAH this evening to start my participation in Starmega DO 2, which I am way too excited about. So here are some quick notes before I go.

1) I am happy that the Giants won the World Series. San Francisco is more of a baseball town than suburban Dallas, so let them have a nice party.

2) The Congressional race in my district is still too close to call. I am hoping (and somewhat expecting) Connolly to pull it out, but we may well have a recount mess that will linger for weeks.

3) The big celebrity death watch item of the week is Ted Sorenson, JFK's speechwriter. But I also want to mention John Olsson, who founded the late, lamented Olsson's Books. Up until the local chain's bankruptcy a couple of years ago (largely due to rising rents), it was a good place for me to drop some cash on my lunch hour.

4) The police in Fairfax County cited a woman who was walking her fox on Halloween. The fox was dressed in a skeleton costume and one would hope that the citation was for humiliating an animal. But it turns out that merely keeping a wild animal as a pet is the problem ehre. Once you can get the permits to do that, you can humiliate it however you please.

5) In the amusing things heard at work category, a launch delay is being attributed to a "holiday seeking rocket," i.e. one that will interfere with somebody's holiday plans. And a plan for a deep space launch involves the satellite in question "stopping at the space station for a potty break."

6) Re: The Amazing Race, I was very surprised that the music challenge proved so much harder than the film challenge. Admittedly, all those pianos in the same room was cacophonous, but two of the three pieces were ones I instantly recognized and could have identified by the sheet music alone. I guess none of the contestants are fans of 19th century Russian classical music?

I normally post entries early in the morning, but I have been in a "getting organized" mood (not that you'd know it from my lack of progress on the chaos that is my den). And I seem to be too tired to write on the nights when I am not too busy. So I am actually using a work break to catch up here, instead of my usual chit chatting.

Crafts: The crocheted coral reef exhibit is opening this weekend. I am hoping to get over to the Museum of Natural History on Sunday morning, before the meeting for volunteers at the upcoming Science Festival on the mall. But what I wanted to mention now was one of the other satellite reefs that I found interesting. It was made by inmates of a women's prison in Indiana.

Celebrity death watch: I should mention the opera singer, Joan Sutherland, but the most recent celebrity death was of Carla Cohen, co-founder of Politics and Prose, an excellent independent bookstore in northwest Washington, D.C. She had been in poor health for a while (and the shop is for sale partly because of that). Until reading her obituary, I had not realized that one of her brothers is Mark Furstenberg, owner of the well-regarded sandwich shop, Bread Line (as well as Marvelous Market, which I am less impressed with).

Amazing Race: Sunday night's episode came down to two things - luck with taxis and attention to detail. The Princeton boys did well (despite taking way too long to find Ghana on the map) because they actually read the clue for the construction materials challenge. And they were the only team who actually found the decoder key for what should have been the easier challenge.

I was annoyed at tattooed guy for his meanness to his girlfriend, though he did apologize when she had the asthma attack. I have also concluded that the doctors won't last much longer, given that they were the only team who had trouble finding the marked path to the pit stop.

Notes to myself: Does anybody have any idea what the possible significance of "303/357" might be and why I wrote it in my planner a couple of weeks ago? Or why I wrote "3200-11" a couple of days later? (Lest you think all of my notes to myself are cryptic and/or useless, I am reasonably sure that one string of letters and numbers was a temporary web password for a site I forgot my password to and had called to get reset. And I actually know that "Elstar" is a type of apple, about which more later.)

Yoga: There is a Baptist minister who has been getting skewered in the press for saying that yoga is un-Christian. I don't see the big deal. It isn't any secret that yoga has spiritual practices associated with it and it should not be surprising that those might be incompatible with other religious traditions. (By the way, I know of at least a couple of synagogues that have special yoga classes that have been designed to avoid some of the practices that are un-Jewish.)

Apples: The farmer's market has been full of apples for the past several weeks. The Elstar apples definitely had an unusual flavor, which is why I made a note about them. They were fine for a change of snacking pace, but I will stick to the Rome and (especially) Cortland apples for the most part. Were I ever going to bake a pie, they have a good supply of Northern Spy, which are the definitive pie apple as far as I am concerned.

Speaking of baking: I baked a chocolate cake for a colleague's 50th birthday. Basically, I used a recipe from Hershey's web site, substituting brown sugar for half the granulated sugar (because I ran out of granulated sugar) and tossing in a bag of chocolate chips for good measure. My ambitions are limited, however, and I used boughten frosting. It was a success and I will use that cake recipe again.

Words: Does anybody else use "boughten" to mean "store bought" or is that something I picked up somewhere obscure?

Endangered languages: I went to hear K. David Harrison's talk at National Geographic on Tuesday night. I picked up a copy of his book, The Last Speakers while I was there. He was an entertaining and informative lecturer and played clips of several speakers of endangered languages. The funniest part involved a love song from a tribe in Papua New Guinea. The lyrics were along the lines of "Your village is swampy and has death adders. I don't want to live there. Come and live in my village where there are no death adders."

I think that brings me up to date.

It is pretty hard to judge teams based on the first episode, but this season of The Amazing Race already has a few who seem likely candidates for melt downs. The couple who have been dating just a few months, for example, were already screaming at each other and screwed up badly trying to find the pit stop. He also annoyed me by having zero appreciation for Stonehenge. Either they will blow it quickly or be irritating up to the last couple of legs of the race.

The idea of a birth mother racing with the daughter she gave up for adoption is appealing, I don't see them being able to work well together in the long run. Admitedly, the problems they had this leg had to do with other things (like not really knowing how to drive a stick shift well) but I just can't see them lasting long. I also suspect that the tattooed couple won't last long since they aren't exactly the brightest people around. I'd kind of like them to stay for the comic relief, e.g. trying to get the flag from the "battle man" instead of taking it from the "battlement" and replying "uh, London?" when Phil asked them what country they were in.

So who do I like? The Princeton guys have an appealing sense of humor. The doctors seem pretty competent and could do well. (But what is with the blond one testing her blood sugar while driving? And isn't 337 an awfully high number?) The Asian father and son coud be interesting, too. I'm less sure about the father and daughter team, which is probably my bias about his backwoods accent.

First, I had an odd moment of creativity the other night and wrote what I think is the chorus of a folk song:

Everyone is someone else's weirdo
Everybody's strange to other folks
No matter how normal, you may think you are
You're just the butt of someone else's jokes

(I have a melody in my head, too, but haven't transcribed it yet).

But you really care what I thought of the latest episode of The Amazing Race. ( click here: spoilers within )

I have, as usual, too much to do.I am scrambling to get things done before back to back trips. The business trip to L.A. is for a conference but I am trying to squeeze in a couple of meetings, too. And I am planning to take advantage of the timing to go to both Long Beach Storytellers and Community Storytellers. I'll have a night at home when I get back and then fly up to Boston, nominally for the Boston Crossword Puzzle Tournament. Somewhere in there I have to deal with life maintenance like laundry and taxes and such.

Sometimes life gets in the way of things I planned to do. I'd intended to go to zumba (or possibly try out a hula hoop class) tonight but the metro got in the way. I did scribble down a few haikus once I finally got on a train, only the first of which is really related to tonight's commute:

19 minutes is
way too long to wait for the
Blue Line at rush hour

Please do not block
the door with your stroller. Have some
common courtesy.

Manual braking
makes the metro ride herky
jerky. I feel ill.

Cherry blossoms may
be nice to look at but they
bring ugly tourists.

I need to sleep at times, also. I woke up in the middle of the night and it took me a long time to get back to sleep, not helped by my deciding that I wasn't going to get back to sleep and doing a few things on-line. When I did get back to sleep for a few hours, I had a dream in which I had managed to lose two cars in the same parking lot. piefessor pointed one of them out to me, but it turned out she had really stolen the license plate and the trunk of my car and installed them on an orange and white PT Cruiser. I was upset that the jar of spaghetti sauce I'd had in the trunk was missing.

But I still managed to watch The Amazing Race. And I will put spoilers behind a cut.
( Clicky here. )

I've been absurdly busy. You already heard about my theatre going last week.

I went to Zumba on Tuesday night and Sunday afternoon, as well as Bollywood dance on Wednesday night. This Wednesday night is the last Bollywood class of the current term and I intend to go. I'm also going to a Central Asian dance workshop tomorrow night, which I am a bit apprehensive about as I have no idea what it will entail. The dance studio is moving to a new place (just a few doors down) and having an open house on Sunday afternoon. I signed up for 15 classes in the next 10 week session (instead of the 10 I've done in the current session and the previous one) and I have no idea where I'm going to find the time to go. I'll continue going to Bollywood and they have weeknight Zumba at somewhat more convenient times now. I'm also intrigued by their new hula hoop class and will at least give it a whirl.

Saturday was the Women's History Month event that Voices in the Glen put on at the Beltsville library. I took advantage of having to drive out there already to stop at Ikea, but I still have not found the ideal solution to my need for a low bookcase under my bedroom window. I told my piece about Sophie Germaine, which went over okay, though I did leave out a detail I intended to include at the end. That's not all that surprising given how many years it's been since I last told that story.

I've been filling up my calendar with more things to do - music, theatre, travel. I have about 95% decided on my next major vacation - namely, the Baltic states. I will probably fly into Finland, take the ferry across to Estonia, then go through Latvia and Lithuania. I am still researching how much of a pain in the neck it would be to go to Kaliningrad (which is of personal interest as my father's birthplace). I'm looking at late September / early October for this. That should leave me enough vacation time to go somewhere appalling in Africa in the December / January time frame.

There are also my attempts at cleaning for Pesach. And, somewhere in there, I managed to watch The Amazing Race.

( spoilers ahead )

Bollywood dance class was canceled tonight, so I was able to go see Khogzhumchu perform at the Kennedy Center. I hadn't actually heard of them before, but I feel obliged to support performances of xoomei (Tuvan throat singing) in Washington, D.C. Also, it was the Millennium Stage, so it was free. They were somewhat more traditional than some of the other throat singers I've heard and very good. As a result of the commentary, I had a minor epiphany. Namely, all of the best xoomei is about horses. Sure, there are songs about other things - nature, love, camels. But horses really work best.(Oddly, I don't think I've heard songs about yaks. But kargyraa, which is the deep droning stuff I particularly like, is supposedly imitative of the grunting of yaks.)

In other news, I've made progress on my arrangements for my upcoming trip to Peru. Specifically, I've managed to buy a plane ticket from Lima to Cuzco. This is harder than it sounds because my credit card company decided this was "unusual activity" and blocked it until I called them. My other internal travel will be by train and bus. I really need to decide whether or not to spring for the large amount of money to stay a night at the Machu Picchu Sanctuary Lodge (the one right at the entrance to the ruins) versus a hotel in Aguas Calientes for a night. It would be nearly half the total cost of the trip (remember, I got an amazing deal on the airfare to Lima) but the idea of seeing Machu Picchu in the early morning is pretty appealing.

Also travel related, I went to Flyer Talk dinner last night. There are actually people who are far more obsessed with frequent flyer miles than I am. I ended up sitting next to one guy who churns credit cards (i.e. signs up for new ones with mileage bonuses) so he can take four or 5 international trips a year. But he travels in coach, which drew the wrath of the guy sitting across from me, who is a fan of buying cheap and complicated domestic tickets to earn the mileage for fewer trips, but in first class. This is something of a religious war and makes me look reasonably normal.

FInally, I am still following The Amazing Race. For my take on Sunday's episode, look behind the cut.
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