Areas of Unrest

15 March 2000 - Shmuel's Survey

QOTD: "Restlessness is discontent. And discontent is the first necessity of progress. Show me a thoroughly satisfied man - and I will show you a failure." - Thomas Edison

Reading: The two books in my briefcase to read during my upcoming trip are The Killing Dance by Laurell K. Hamilton and Cod by Mark Kurlansky.

Listening to: Nothing, since I'm at work, not home.

I've got a few hours between this week's trip to Boulder and going up to San Francisco for a conference, so here's a quick entry to tide you over. The Boulder food pornography report recommends Rhumba and, in particular, the voodoo conch chowder. The shitake mushroom pie that followed was good, but the chowder was remarkable. Mary Joan was very happy with the sea bass she had. Neither of us ordered dessert since we were stuffed to the gills and the creme brulee of the day was mango, which sounded way too unlikely. Then we stopped by Rue Morgue, which was open late for a signing by Nancy Pickard. I was very restrained and only bought two books; Mary Joan bought an armload, remembering that they ship.

We did some work, too, but that included sitting through the most tedious meeting I've been to in ages. I would have stayed through today, but our illustrious travel people (who never actually travel themselves, of course) wouldn't let me fly directly from Denver to San Francisco. If I had to come back to L.A., it was worth sleeping at home. I'm sleep deprived enough as it is, as evidenced by my having forgotten two basic principles of business travel: 1)always bring an extra pair of pantyhose and 2)if you are wearing a white shirt, eat only white food. (Fortunately shampoo doubles quite nicely as detergent.)

I was apparently way too subtle when selecting my brother's birthday card. He sent me email asking if I was alright, since I am usually sarcastic, but the card had such a nice warm sentiment. True, the text read something like "Happy birthday to my big brother who taught me everything I know about survival in the world." Somehow, he entirely failed to notice that the drawing showed a little girl staring at a dismembered doll. He's only a year and a half older than I am; he can't be losing his sense of humor to old age yet, can he?

Before I sit down and do what I'm supposed to be doing right now (answering some email and setting up some more travel), here are my answers to Shmuel's survey. Enjoy!

Either/Ors:

• The Simpsons or South Park?

  Definitely The Simpsons. I've never actually seen South Park and, from its reputation for vulgarity, I'm not really interested in seeing it.

• Root beer or cream soda?

  I hate root beer. Cream soda is okay, especially the Jamaican cream soda I used to be able to get in Boston. Good ginger ale (e.g. Stoney) is better still. Schweppes Bitter Lemon is best, but I still haven't found a place to buy it in Los Angeles, sigh. I have, however, promised not to rant anymore about soft drinks lest I bore everyone in the known universe to death.

• Arcade games: '80s or '90s?

  I don't think I've played any '90s arcade games and I barely remember the few '80s ones I played. I'd love to own a pinball machine though.

• To be, or not to be?

  In terms of general existence, definitely to be. But there are plenty of things I sometimes am that I'd rather not be. I'd like not to be quite so cynical, to start with.

Short answers:

• How do you like your toast?

  I like lightly toasted whole wheat English muffins, with just enough butter that they aren't dry.

• How has your name been misspelled?

  My last name is rarely misspelled, though I get an odd extra l at the end now and again and I have one colleague who can't get it into his head that I'm not Nagel. It's rarely pronounced correctly on the first try though. (Long a, short e, slight stress on second syllable. The latter is what throws people off, as they tend to turn unstressed vowels into a schwa and mispronounce the a.)

  My first name is mangled in numerous ways, few of them reasonable. Miriam does not, in my opinion, sound anything like Marian, which is probably the most common mistake. The most bizarre error (and it's one I've had happen several times) is to somehow conflate my first and last names and come up with Nadine.

• What's your favorite Monopoly property?

  Marvin Gardens is my favorite single property, just because I like the name. But I like to buy up the red and green properties, in terms of playing strategy.

• What's your favorite Internet mailing list?

  I'm on a few private lists, which are far better reading than the public ones, for the most part. Of the public ones, I like Timcooks, which is for people who play the TinyTim MUSH and like to cook. It is very low volume and never off topic. And Storytell is often useful, though the volume is excessive and it sometimes degenerates into irrelevancy.

• If you could have any one superpower, what would it be? Why?

  I wrote a whole entry on this subject so I won't rehash it in detail. The ability to speak any language instantly is my overall choice right now, largely because I realized that I am going to be deeply in over my head in August with my one year of Russian, one word of Tuvan ("ekii" means "hello") and nonexistent Buryat, Mongolian and Chinese. (The latter may be remedied, by the way, because I just got the latest UCLA extension catalog and there's a 2 weekend Mandarin immersion class I am contemplating. I won't be able to carry on a conversation with an adult, but it may help me feel more comfortble about meandering about Bejing on my own a little.)

• When you write, do you prefer to work in silence, or with something (music, television, etc.) on in the background?

  I usually write with music on in the background. I have a fairly eclectic collection and I don't think I could assign a particular genre to much of what I listen to. There's a lot of music I like that I can't write to, though, since I either have to get up and dance around the living room while it's on (e.g. most Cajun stuff) or I sing along and the lyrics creep into what I'm writing (e.g. Gilbert and Sullivan, a lot of cast recordings in general). So a lot of the music I write to is instrumental or has words in languages I don't speak.

• You're a guest on Sesame Street, and they want you to sing a song with the Muppet(s) of your choice. Which song would you sing, and with whom?

  I don't think I've ever seen Sesame Street - or at least not in English. (I sometimes watch children's television in Spanish, in a moderately futile attempt to improve my vocabulary.) The only Muppets that come to mind are Big Bird, Miss Piggy and Kermit, so I'd have to go with Kermit because I like green better than yellow or pink. Might as well have your Muppet compliment your coloring after all! They'd never let me get away with it, but the right song to sing would be "The Vicar and the Frog," a ballad that tells the story of a vicar who sleeps with an enchanted frog to break the spell and wakes up with a choirboy in his bed. Thus rests the case for the defense.

Long answers:

• Choose two of the following, and suppose that they have joined forces in a corporate merger. Describe the resultant commercial:
  • Old Navy
  • Taco Bell
  • Tampax
  • Any car dealership
  • America Online
  • Pfizer
  • Any phone service

  Every reply I have seen so far has used Old Navy, but I can't work with that since I've never been in any of their stores or seen any of their commercials. In fact, I rarely notice commercials at all; the single exception this year is the Mervyn's commercial with the throatsinging. The only thing I can think of that could be relevant is those old commercials for a local used car dealership. Cal Worthington always had some absurd animal (e.g. a lion) that he introduced as his dog, Spot. Substitute Steve Chase for Cal and "go get AOL, go get AOL, go get AOL."

• Finally, this one's almost cliche; by now, but what the heck... You have the opportunity to kill Hitler while he's still in the cradle. Do you do so, or not? Why or why not?

  I'd really like to kill him, but that creates a paradox. Without Hitler, my father probably wouldn't have left Lithuania, so he wouldn't have met my mother and I wouldn't have been born. So I don't see how I could do it.