polyglot conspiracy

I’m very behind in lots of pop culture things, e.g. pop songs, and so I come very late to the song Cater 2 U by Destiny’s Child, which I heard tonight for the first time (new car = actually listen to non-NPR radio sometimes). So I know I’m 2 years behind in pointing this out, but good lord! Seriously? I guess you can be a survivor and also cater to your man, but

I Promise You (Promise You)
I’ll Keep Myself Up (Oh)
Remain The Same Chick (Yeah)
You Fell In Love With (Yeah)
I’ll Keep It Tight, I’ll Keep My Figure Right
I’ll Keep My Hair Fixed, Keep Rocking The Hottest Outfits
When You Come Home Late Tap Me On My Shoulder, I’ll Roll Over
Baby I Heard You, I’m Here To Serve You (I’m Lovin It, I’m Lovin It)

Um, if you come home late and I am sleeping, please do NOT tap me on the shoulder to wake me up - I have to go to work in the morning, thanks. Not that tapping me on the shoulder would work anyway; you’d have to ring the alarm.

Also, today I took my cat to the vet and they referred to her as a “geriatric kitty” (she’s 13 but still *adorable*). Is there a human formulation that’s equivalent to this? “Old girl” is the only one that comes immediately to mind, and I don’t think it means quite the same thing.

The other day I heard Neil Conan on Talk of the Nation say something like,

So tell us, what are the implications of these verdicts yesterday?

This is *really* weird to me. You want

What [are [the implications [of [these verdicts [(that were handed down) yesterday]]]]

but when the rest of the modifying phrase is elided, [yesterday] seems to modify the implications, not the handing down of the verdicts. And if you’re asking what the implications are today, it’s hard to parse them as existing yesterday.

Better explanations are, as always, welcome (Ed? syntax buddy?).

Cute story on All Things Considered yesterday about TV bleeping. Gratuitous mention of my favorite TV show ever, so I have to love it. But it really made me think how the bleep has a meaning now completely separate from the taboo words it’s presumed to cover up for - and the meaning is certainly no milder.

Pay special attention to the bit about lip-flap.

Moviefone.com has a clever little AIM interview with Steve Carrell. What do we think? Clever and effective format, or just clever marketing? (of COURSE it’s marketing, but whether it’s clever or not - and whether it’s *entertaining*, readable, etc….that’s what I’m asking)

Some of you may know that I hate Powerpoint. Haaaaaate it. I’m finally to the point (!) where I can actually create a conference presentation using the technology that doesn’t drive me batty within the first ten minutes of trying to use it, but my presentations are still boring, simple, and visually unengaging. And, quite frankly, this is fine with me; I’d rather funnel the time into making my personal presentation style clearer and more charismatic rather than making my visual aids do the work. [At the CLASP conference a few weeks ago, one of the presenters was congratulated on the excellence of his slides. He said, "Oh, I am *totally gay* when it comes to Powerpoint." I, on the other hand, am so heterosexual it hurts.]

Well, now there’s SlideShare. Have you seen this? I’m sure you have - I’m usually late to the game on these things. Alice brought it up at AoIR, and I just had to look into it. It’s a repository for people’s PowerPoint presentations. Is it supposed to be a group knowledge project? A source of aesthetic inspiration? I am not sure, but the best capability (for academics) that I can see is a central place to go for all the talks you just saw at a conference, or for a conference that you missed. For instance - not suprisingly - there are a few up from the AoIR conference itself last week.

Of course, as a teacher, I can’t help but think that this will just increase the easily-gankable packaged material available on the web for students who don’t care to question it. But this just means, yet again, that it’s incumbent upon us to teach students - really, really teach them - about what counts as “original,” what does not, what’s “plagiarism,” what needs to be cited….then again, I had some intense conversations with people in Vancouver about how our seemingly-accepted definitions of “originality” are getting obscured by things like mashup/remix culture, so we need some serious thinking about all this.

Here are some slideshows about “language.”

This is kind of like the whole ASSU thing at Stanford, but the AoIR conference was held at Simon Fraser University, which presents itself as SFU. I don’t know about you, but it’s awful hard to see this over and over again without inserting a t in there in my head (i.e., STFU).

So I’m sitting at Henry Jenkins‘ keynote address last night at AoIR in Vancouver, and he’s talking about participatory culture and fandom’s potential to spur civic engagement, and it’s really interesting and all. Then all of a sudden, he throws up a slide with a screenshot of the Harry Potter Alliance’s homepage, the HP Alliance being a prime example of precisely what he’s talking about. And I’m all whaaaaa? You see, the HP Alliance was started by one of my dear-but-now-distant friends, Andrew Slack, of the Late Night Players. Because I’m not myself a fan of Harry Potter, the Alliance is basically equivalent to Andrew to me: when I hear about it, see a bulletin by it on MySpace, I just think of Andrew; I don’t really think beyond him to the group of people as a whole who are involved. And so it was a phenomenally strange experience to be sitting in a room full of academics, who typically intersect in no way whatsoever with my personal life, and have the keynote speaker - a key contemporary public intellectual about internet culture, no less - talking about something that felt so personal to me as soon as he mentioned it. It was weeeeird. Through some google searching I come to find out that Andrew gave a talk at MIT’s CMS (where Jenkins teaches) program last month. Worlds converging.

Also, I went to a tap class on Thursday night at the Vancouver Tap Dance Society, to find out that the teacher of the classes knew some people I knew from the Philly tap scene. Convergence! It’s about more than media.

There is a lot of talk here (as always) about needing to interrogate the dichotomies of “online/offline,” “real/virtual,” because they presume that what we do on the internet/through the computer is not real or it is inherently inferior. I think this is absolutely true, but I think the problem can simply be put: it doesn’t say anything meaningful about how life experiences are sliced up. We’ve always had (or at least, since we’ve been mobile and severely individualist) life divided up into different parts that relate to different identities - work, school, activity, family, self, location. We have assigned this other-division to what goes on on the internet (which relates to earlier utopian visions of the internet as disembodied yada yada yada) as if it’s something completely separate from Life, without perhaps recognizing that experience is always already compartmentalized; that’s how we manage it and that’s how we negotiate it. The internet just adds another kind of compartmentalization, another means of management, and possibly another different slice of life - but by no means necessarily one. Anyone have a reference for me on this stuff? Send it on.

I just saw a marquee at an A&W restaurant in Vancouver that said

Teens
2 for $6

I have absolutely, utterly, completely NO IDEA what this could mean.

???

I wake up naturally there around 7 am, which is about 3 hours earlier than I usually wake up naturally (i.e., I wouldn’t wake up before 10 am EST if I didn’t have to, ever. No seriously - EVER). Because of the convenient 3 hour time difference, this makes it possible for me to wake up unprompted and go for a nice run before the first activity of whatever activity I’m out West for happens. This is a good way to get used to being in a new city, especially somewhere like Vancouver which has a fantastic harbourside running trail downtown, even if it is still dark, raining, and very very cold at 7 am.

This is my best suggestion for dealing with pre-conference anxiety, though: make sure the conference is West from wherever you are, so you can run out the jitters before anything even begins. Of course, this plan comes back to bite you in the ass when the jetlag from going East back home, combined with the inevitable post-conference hangover, debilitates you for three days afterward. But still, it makes for a good start. (It also creates a great excuse for downing every possible bad-for-you food item that is made available at the conference without feeling absurdly guilty.)

1. The word “Vancity,” which the first time I saw it I thought was actually “Vanity.” The second time I saw it I parsed it as “Van city” and thought it was an autovan dealership. The third time, I realized what a stupid American I was and that this was indeed a clever way of referring to the city of Vancouver.

2. A flier for “HILLBILLY ‘HELL’OWEEN” up at the bar next door to my hotel. I took this at first as a musician named Hell Oween, like Hell Owen with an extra E. Ah yes, it was a long day of travel. But then I got to thinking: hillbillies? in Canada? Really? Then I remembered all those “country doctor” skits from Kids in the Hall and it sort of made sense.

3. The MuchMusic VJ/news anchor who looks like a Ken doll. Seriously, looks. like. Ken.

4. The bartender asked me if I enjoyed my “mac.” I have never heard anyone refer to it this way before; it’s always “mac and cheese.” You?

5. At the same bar, they list an advertisement for a free beer upon ordering any “appy.” I have heard appetizers referred to as apps, starters, and pupus, but never appies.

6. J.Lo started out as a backup dancer for MC Hammer. Whaaaa? She was also ridiculed on the set of In Living Colour, but “as with all adversity, the insults only fueled her fire.”

Yeah, so I’m in Vancouver for AoIR, enjoying the requisite hotel room cable. I’ve only been here 4 hours, and look at all the fun stuff I’ve found to post about already.