just how far apple has come in cornering the concept of cool electronica

(Cambridge Wii party. Not my arm. I did win the resulting match.)

The Wii party here in Cambridge was a rousing success despite having only six attendees. So much so, in fact, that the party was broken up by an annoyed knock from my downstairs neighbor at an hour I will not disclose here because as it would undermine my public presentation as a basically considerate human being. Eek.

The women did not dominate boxing as was the predicted and actual experience at the Madison Wii party. Also, strangely, while 19 out of the 20 fights in the Madison Wii tournament ended by knockout, only 1 out of the first 6 fights at the Cambridge party did.

Anyway, one attendee at the party who was very impressed by the Wii insisted on looking at the box before believing me when I said the Wii was not manufactured by Apple. And, after acknowledging this, the person did take the view that the Nintendo was basically copying "style" from Apple. As far as I can tell, the reasoning for why the Wii was copying from Apple was that it was (1) white and (2) cool. You know a company has really accomplished something when they lay an intellectual property claim in some people's minds to "products that are cool" and "the color white."

BTW, I bought the Wii trauma surgery game, although that'll have to wait to be a post of its own sometime.

BTW-BTW, I have a headache, as would be predicted from my effort to go tepid turkey on Coke Zero (tepid, not cold, because I'm just cutting back to one a day). I will persevere. I think.

game night in cambridge!

(Here I thought I was just going to be hanging out and drinking some wine with friends. I didn't realize I was going to crush a world record as well.)

So, several of the fellows in my program convened to, among other things, play this board game one of us (Damon) had invented. He currently calls the game "Tetrapolis", which literally means "four-part city", although we mostly liked its earlier name of "Tesselation", which literally means laying little colored tiles of different shapes down on a surface. The game involves laying little colored tiles of different shapes down on a surface. It's sort of a visual Scrabble for people who are good at thinking spatially and not good at spelling. The game is actually really simple and clever, although the rules sheet has a couple sentences like "In this sense, the game board is torosoidal" that might need to be edited by someone less mathematically-inclined than Damon before he starts selling it as "Ages 10 and Up."

Damon has been having friends and family play the game but is still tinkering a bit with the rules. The above picture was taken to commemorate the fact that, on the first turn, my partner Kathleen and I laid down what was apparently the highest scoring Tetrapolis/Tesselation turn in the history of the game, and which Damon attempted to legislate out of existence as we were playing it. We also used all of our tiles (the equivalent of a "bingo" in Scrabble) on the second turn, establishing ourselves as the best known Tetrapolis players in the world, and causing everyone else to decide either to leave or steer the party toward playing Taboo instead.

it should not take an hour for me to be able to use my research account to buy some stupid pens

(Pardon the expression of anguish.)

At least I was able to buy red and blue pens individually (my preferred colors for writing), without having to buy a bunch of creativity-stifling black pens along with them.

When I was an undergraduate and did more creative writing, I went through this period where I would only write on blue legal pads. Being the days before online shopping, it was not always easy to find blue legal pads, but they seemed as much a necessary condition of textual production as, say, knowledge of the word 'the.' I can't imagine writing on a blue legal pad now; I'm not sure I could even in some sort of prose emergency. (Besides, I don't really write on paper anymore anyway, I just have to have paper with me to work out sentences while I write on my computer.)

to serve and take notice

Around Boston, business folk are very fond of backing up statements that you shouldn't do something with the threat that police will take notice. Three examples:


(private parking near Inman Square--which, incidentally, is the home of Magnolia, my new favorite Cambridge restaurant)


(laundromat near where I live)


(no parking sign spray painted on wall in theatre district, Boston; includes me with horrible red-eye)

Is it just me, or is the idea that police will take notice not exactly the scariest threat in the world? Even, maybe, does it not seem like much of a threat at all? Every time I see one of these signs I think, "And then what?"

I've never seen one of these signs in the Midwest. (Or if I have, I haven't taken notice.) Is this a Boston area thing? An East Coast thing? A cities larger than Madison thing?

of course, it would probably just get stolen by the people who run the zombie restaurant down the street

The other day I provided an example of how not to recruit people around Harvard for a project. Here, however, I present what seems to me like a positive example for Harvard recruitment. There are all kinds of posters around here offering you money for clinical trials. I haven't seen another one offer you a picture of your brain along with money, though. Moreover, Harvard seems just the kind of place where you have people who are not easily motivated by modest recruitment fees but might think A picture of my brain? How cool is that!. And, it's not like you can just step into a brain-photo booth at the mall and snag one.

Okay, so I confess: While I have a complicated travel schedule coming up--not to mention numerous work deadlines--I do fit the gender, age, handedness*, and language requirements, so I might call and see if they are still looking for people. A picture of your brain! I mean: A picture of my brain? How cool is that! If I do, I'll let you know what happens.

* If you didn't know this, (virtually?) everything you've ever seen reported in the press about neuoscience findings from fMRI studies has been based on samples of right-handed people only, as southpaw brain structures are different and the samples of these studies are so small as to not make subgroup analysis feasible. Plus, who cares about lefties qua lefties?

advice to authers

I saw this poster last night, taped to the side of a pay phone across the street from Harvard Yard. Obviously, this is almost certainly a project borne from some very unpleasant story. But, if one wishes to recruit informants for your expose' from around the Harvard campus and thinks it would help to emphasize that one is a published author, one really wants to make sure one spells "author" correctly.

little house on the crimson prairie

Last week featured a visit from A Certain Friend, a private person who has said she would be happy if she was never again mentioned by name on this blog.* While walking around Harvard Square, ACF started listing her all-time ten favorite books, which included Ulysses and a book about how to live your life like Jacqueline Onassis. She also listed a memoir of Julia Child's, and said: "Do you know she lived in Cambridge?"
"I was told her house is like 2-3 blocks from where I live."

Like Vulcans with the Pon Farr, we could then talk or think of nothing else until we visited this house. Luckily, we were able to text-message a friend with Google skills who found the address for us (103 Irving Street).

I'd walked by many times, not knowing its culinary-cultural significance. According to ACF, Julia Child refers to the house repeatedly in her memoir as her "little house in Cambridge." This is what counts as a little house in the world of Julia Child:



* Or even indirectly mentioned, she added, but don't you think that's a little too much to ask?