Simphonatic

All Kinds Of Yummy

2009-07-08T00:20:00.003-05:00

taking my parents to lunch at a random thai restaurant on 2nd avenue in nyc last week was such a great experience. not only did we eat excellent $6 entrees (in new york city!) -- which led them to discover the amazingness that is drunken noodles, and which were accompanied by free appetizers! -- but we also chanced upon the best dessert in the world: mango sticky rice.

i ordered it again tonight at a thai place near dupont circle, in dc (since nikita and i were clearly not done with our marathon during-dinner conversation!). this, my friends, is a clear, clear winner. succulent, thin, cool, slices of a kind of mango that is about as close to alphonso as you can get; warm bites of starchy long-grain rice that lend grace and positivity to terms like "clumpy" and "gelatinous"; coconut milk and sesame seeds to add interesting flavours.

slurp!

(if you haven't been to your local thai place recently, go now. run!)

All Books, All The Time

2009-07-04T13:56:00.002-05:00

i have no idea what the criteria were for this list, but it reminds me how much there is out there, from the last century alone, that i've been wanting to read... now if only i had a year off grad school to actually read post-1900 stuff!

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen [x]
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien []
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte [x]
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling []
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee [x]
6 The Bible []
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte []
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell []
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman []
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens [x]
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott [x]
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy [x]
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller []
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare []
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier []
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien [x]
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulk
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger [x] (it counts as an x even though i didn't finish it, because the book was horrendous and i made a conscious decision to stop!)
19 The Time Traveler’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger []
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot []
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell []
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald []
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy []
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams []
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh []
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky []
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck []
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll [x]
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame []
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy []
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens [x]
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis (the complete series) []
34 Emma - Jane Austen []
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen []
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis []
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini [x]
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres []
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden [x]
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne []
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell []
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown [x]
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez [x]
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving []
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins []
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery []
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy []
48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood []
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding []
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan []
51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel [x]
52 Dune - Frank Herbert []
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons []
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen []
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth [x]
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon []
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens [x]
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley []
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time - Mark Haddon [x]
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez []
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck []
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov [x]
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt []
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold []
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas []
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac []
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy []
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding [x]
69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie [x]
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville []
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens []
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker []
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett []
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson []
75 Ulysses - James Joyce []
76 The Inferno – Dante [x]
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome []
78 Germinal - Emile Zola []
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray []
80 Possession - AS Byatt []
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens []
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell []
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker []
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro []
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert []
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry []
87 Charlotte’s Web - EB White [x]
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom []
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle []
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton [x]
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad [x]
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery [x]
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks []
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams []
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole []
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute []
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas []
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare [x]
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl [x]
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo []

Dude, Why's Your Bike Here?

2009-05-13T21:22:00.002-05:00

i bought a bike yesterday -- so exciting!

imagine, then, my chagrin, when i took it downtown for the first time, thinking to run errands, locked it up on 17th and chestnut, and came back from the shops to find that some idiot had locked his bike next to mine with my brake cables in the u-loop of his lock!

omg! i'm a new biker, but even i know that that's terrible bike etiquette! i was so pissed! (and totally made sure to tell him so when he came back, ipod'ed, sunglassed, completely duh and apologetic enough to make sure to call me "honey" while he said sorry...)

what does one have to do for an uneventful ride in this town?

Groceries

2009-03-24T20:55:00.003-05:00

for the last week and some, i've been eating out or eating gautam's cooking. the situation needed to be rectified, for the sake both of my independence and of my stomach (which is still not quite 100% after the bout of food poisoning i suffered in cuba).

there is nothing better, in my opinion, than a stocked kitchen just waiting to be raided.

bananas, grapes
chana, rajma
mushrooms, tomatoes, red/orange peppers
avocados, peas, asparagus, spinach
tofu (super firm, cubed)
onions, scallions, ginger
soup (mmmm, soup)
ciabatta rolls (to go with soup)
coconut milk
pre-chopped stir-fry vegetables (for thai curry)
empanadas, pierogies (mmmmmm!)
lipton teriyaki and thai sesame noodles

tomorrow's goal: edamame replenishment. shop 'n' bag needs to start stocking it, stat.

Interiority

2009-03-23T21:41:00.002-05:00

reading hamlet for the 18947th time will get you thinking about inner wiring, for sure.

after this morning's lecture, i was wondering whether it's possible to teach, really teach the play today, when everyone's heard all about it and been taught it before and watched branagh or hawke or someone else play the troubled procrastinator in the movies.

well, sometimes the trick is to scan it all, line by line.

kinda like what this guy does: <http://www.radiologyart.com>, via <http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/24/science/24scan.html>

(the barbie doll is especially creepy!)

Bubbly

2009-02-16T16:41:00.001-05:00

i just bought another gorgeous titan watch!

pick@flick[r]: <http://flickr.com/photos/girlfish1303/3317092197>

it's the most delicate, petite thing i've worn on my wrists in a long time, but i like it a lot.

(see my post about my first purchase here: <http://simran.nomadlife.org/2007/05/pretty-pretty.aspx>)

***

update, sunday, march 1, 2009:

in case the post title doesn't make any sense, it's because the watch is supposed to look like a bottle of champagne, with the crystals representing bubbles. (also because new bling makes me happy, but that's secondary.)

Such A Ham!

2009-02-06T01:32:00.002-05:00

karaoke is fun for me because i get to lord it over everyone's ears. apparently i also do a good job when i'm up there. the singing, not so sure about, because it was hard to tell what i sounded like while blasting sound away from myself into a whooping crowd of fellow grad students (who were getting progressively drunker and louder). but the performances, they said, were "amazing".

two duets ("the scientist" with jonathan, "killing me softly" with kara), a solo ("you know i'm no good") and a slice of birthday cake into the game, i had had enough for the night, and headed home. but at heart i am still a performer -- confirmed even more so by my smooth on-stage dance moves tonight!) and if you let me, i'll belt. even if i don't hit the notes quite right. (cf: the tryst with bryan adams. i was 18 years old, people, and a superstar for 15 minutes. i think that might be where my unabashed teaching confidence comes from, too.)

now i only wish they had karaoke for mushy hindi love songs... can you imagine the field day i would have?!?!

Thanks Are In Order

2009-01-05T22:56:00.002-05:00

to all that is holy.

thank you google, thank you thank you thank you, for finally bringing out the picasa for mac application for which i've been waiting and waiting.

(i don't have boot camp, so i couldn't have run the PC version on my mac.)

<http://googlephotos.blogspot.com/2009/01/announcing-picasa-for-mac.html>

i was just thinking yesterday, as i uploaded my pictures from my winter break travels to picasa web albums, that iphoto is really not an intuitive or user-friendly piece of software. although the slider thing where you can choose how many pictures you want to see in each row in your albums is pretty neat, and although some of the edit features (especially the special effects like sepia and vignette) are cool, too, those are about the only front-end features in iphoto that are actually exciting to me.

(i just recently discovered "smart albums", and even that is strictly OK, because i can totally see how the conditional logic it requires would fail quite easily given how i work with my photos).

so yeah, other than silly cosmetic things -- ugh. i mean, what on earth is an "event"? and why can't you see all of them in the left-hand bar if you want to? why is "last import" the only pre-set viewing option, instead of a nice calendar-like thing like picasa has? why can you not trash photos from within your albums, making you go back to events view all the time? why can you not view photos larger and click between them using simple arrow keys?

this is not even to mention the features i was missing out on by not having picasa installed on my mac (although these, admittedly, are failings on google's end). like, why does the picasa web uploader for iphoto only allow uploading and not downloading (the entire album download feature is the best thing ever!!!)? and why does the uploader not integrate more intuitively into iphoto, such as by being housed in the "share" menu and not the "export" menu?

on and on i could go. but i'll stop now, cuz i wanna go download the thing asap, already. i bet it'll be sleek, and pretty, and exciting. yessss!

Lucky Duck

2008-12-16T15:59:00.003-05:00

i would just like to announce -- as i take a quick breather during yet another hazy day of final-paper-writing -- that i am the luckiest girl in the world, because someone loves me enough to make me a container each of rajma and customized tabbouleh for when i'm hungry.

this stuff is delish!

What's Wrong With This Picture?

2008-12-01T14:41:00.004-05:00

this ad (click for larger pic @ flickr) --

was on the front page of the delhi edition of the hindustan times on friday, november 28, 2008. see?

the bombay edition for the same day --

did not feature this ad.

HT, you should be ashamed of yourself.

below, part of an email/facebook note i sent out/posted last night. i've heard back from several people saying that they've written to HT. maybe something will come of this; maybe not. but at least we're doing something, and having our voices heard.

No matter what your personal politics are, I hope will you recognize that my aim here is simply to raise awareness -- to highlight how the world of politics has already begun leeching off the events of this past week, and how, too, certain sections of the Indian media seem to be more about money/TRPs/ad sales than the objective, sensitive, non-partisan dissemination of information. Yes, emotions and stakes are high during elections, but higher when national security and citizens' lives and liberties are at risk. Now is hardly the time or
the occasion for rabble- (and vote-) rousing -- especially by a party which has been unable (or unwilling?), during its various stints in power, to circumvent several acts of "brutal terror".

I have already written to the Hindustan Times to put on record my disgust that they would choose to run this ad at all (the political clout of the ad's sponsor notwithstanding). If you would like to contact them, too, you can do so at:

Email: feedback@hindustantimes.com

**UPDATE**: The feedback@ email address seems to be bouncing messages. You can email letters@hindustantimes.com, instead -- and be aware that this is the "Letters to the Editor" column, and your content may (if they believe in representing all angles of feedback to their publication) appear in print.

HT Media Limited
Hindustan Times House
18-20, K.G. Marg
New Delhi - 110 001, India

Phone : +91-11-6656-1234
Fax : +91-11-2370-4600

if you have a few minutes to spare, join the movement, small though it be. make a difference in (y)our world.

PS: Facebook, I See What You're Doing.

2008-11-26T21:06:00.001-05:00

in the midst of the most unsettling evening of news-watching and numbly-calling and helpless-feeling, i got this laughable missive from facebook (i can blog about this because it's petty, self-contained, and far from home -- unlike what's going on in bombay as i type):

From: Facebook
Date: Wed, Nov 26, 2008 at 19:32
Subject: Please reset your email notification settings.
To: [me]

Unfortunately, the settings that control which email notifications get sent to you were lost. We're sorry for the inconvenience.

To reset your email notification settings, go to:

http://www.facebook.com/editaccount.php?notifications

Thanks,
The Facebook Team

listen up, zuckerberg et al. don't boast about having 120 million active users when you can't even save their preferences for not being harassed by your gratuitous email notifications. (i've unsubscribed from most of them, and my inbox is the healthier for it.)

also, just btw, it might have been nice to address me by name, or even as "Dear Facebook user", or something. didn't they teach you manners at harvard?

Google Rules The World?

2008-11-25T17:03:00.003-05:00

perennial suspicion of the big company seems like such an american thing... privacy issues, monopoly issues, ethical issues, freedom of choice issues, blah blah. ironic, when america basically is the big company that owns and runs the world.

here's yet another conspiracy-theory type article on the evil tentacles of "goofy-lettered" google....

<http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/24/business/media/24carr.html>

Google Seduces With Utility

By DAVID CARR

Not long ago, someone invited me out to the Googleplex, the nickname for Google’s headquarters in Mountain View, Calif.

The fact is, I already live there. And it’s starting to worry me.

Having grown up in the vapor trail of the ’60s, I learned to be wary of large, centralized organizations, and yet Google, a huge enterprise with a market value of $80 billion, is my ever-present wingman.

My increasingly exclusive relationship with Google started with search, of course, when I switched from Yahoo years ago. Eventually I accepted an invitation to Gmail, with its oodles of storage and very granular search function, and it has oddly become my default database — deep, rich and personal.

I added the company’s calendar because I needed one I could share both inside and outside of work. And then the calendar and e-mail started talking to each other — and to me, I guess — by asking whether I wanted to schedule an event that was mentioned in an incoming message. Although it sort of creeped me out, the answer was yes, which it almost always is when it comes to Google.

Google has begun to crowd out other brands. I was a loyal MapQuest guy, but as Google Maps added features, it seemed cumbersome to go elsewhere. And even something as specific as HopStop, an elegant tool I used to navigate the New York subways, is left behind as Google gets smarter about the difference between the N-R line and the A-C-E.

I’m getting ready for the Oscar season, so I needed to set up some relevant R.S.S. feeds, and Google Reader was handy, so there’s that. It’s easy to update my status under my chat icon while I’m on Gmail, so I tend to update that mood ring with more frequency than my Facebook status. When Google acquired YouTube, it gained another chunk of my mindshare.

And then a few weeks ago, I noticed there was a steady march of new little camera icons on the Gmail chat function. I looked around and saw a colored button at the top of my e-mail page that was a link to Google voice and video chat. I clicked it, hit the download button, and within 20 seconds, I was ready to go.

It’s not the first video chatting that I have done, only the first that actually worked well. Within minutes of downloading, I was talking live on my PC to my 11-year-old daughter on a Mac, a process that in the past would have involved everything short of splitting the atom. Then I told my twins away at college and yes, my mother-in-law about it, and before long we were all chatting away in an easy, friction-free future.

Score another one for the Googleplex.

You could credit Google, the largest ad seller in the world, with being a brilliant marketer and advertiser, but when was the last time you saw an ad, not served up by Google, but about Google? Not very often. That’s largely because Google’s Web platform, in all of its high-functioning glory, is its marketing.

“The most powerful form of advertising is to be exceptional,” said Ranjit Mathoda, an investor and technologist who blogs at Mathoda.com. “Google has created an ecosystem that perpetuates itself by being useful.”

Take video chat. Many other companies would take that kind of quantum leap and shout it from the rooftops, but Google just did a smallish blog post about the new feature and left it at that.

“We do have a philosophy that our products should speak for themselves. We tend not to make a lot of noise,” said Jeff Huber, senior vice president for engineering at Google.

As always with Google, the price point is appealing: zero, if you don’t count the amount of personal data that I am trading for all that utility. With Google, it is always simple, and any engineer will tell you that simple is hard. There had been a lot of talk within Google about creating video chat as a PC-only application, a much easier endeavor for the company, but it would not have been simple for the consumer.

If Google owns me, it’s probably because I am in favor of what works.

“I’m glad to hear it,” said Eric E. Schmidt, the chief executive of Google, who was in New York last week. “We want a little bit of Google in many parts of your life.”

Mission accomplished, at least on my desktop, but I asked Mr. Schmidt if I shouldn’t be worried that I am putting all of my digital eggs in one multicolored, goofy-lettered basket.

“That depends on what you think of our company and our values,” he said. “Do you believe we have good values?”

Mr. Schmidt seems nice enough, but I sometimes wonder if I will come to regret the easier, softer road I have chosen. A record of my surfing lives on its servers for 18 months — not by name, but still. Google continues to insist that my IP address is not me, but a motivated government with a subpoena in hand could find me, lots of me, on Google’s servers.

Most data privacy experts would call me a fool to index my life into any one company so deeply, and diversification in all matters is just common sense.

Mr. Huber countered that I am free to come and go as I wish.

“The nice thing is that we don’t force you to use only our stuff,” he said. “It is not tied tightly together, and the content is all easily exportable. If you feel like we are letting you down, or you don’t like our products or we are failing to innovate, you can pick up and go where you want.”

But with video chat now enabled in my Gmail, how likely am I to click away? Some people worry that Google will take over the world. Through the sins of competence and innovation, the company has quietly and efficiently surrounded me.

“That’s our business model,” Mr. Schmidt said.

E-mail: carr@nytimes.com

epic 2014 <http://www.robinsloan.com/epic>, anyone?

Bullseye Bridal

2008-10-21T08:35:00.005-05:00

dailycandy <http://www.dailycandy.com> did a weddings-on-the-cheap special today -- RSVPs online, cupcakes instead of a three-layered white cream monstrosity, the whole shebang.

but, as someone who has lived in 2 cities now that have disproportionate quantities of bridal boutiques (replete with silent, desolate white window displays, and often showing off several dresses i don't think anyone in their right mind would buy) in their downtown neighbourhoods, what really surprised me was this:
<http://www.target.com/b/ref=in_br_display-ladders/602-4643302-5076628?ie=UTF8&node=347006011>

izaak mizrahi wedding wear for under $100. not bad stuff, either. you can order online, with free shipping, and your choices even include a pantsuit in case you want to be all gender-neutral or business-like or whatevs.

wow. now that's the kind of wedding shopping i'd like to be doing. no bling, no crazy bills, no debt.

(i wonder what their return policy would be on this line... and how funny it'd be -- hypothetically, of course -- to see hungover brides coming in the next day to stand in the customer service line, tags still attached.)

(before anyone starts freaking out, no, i will not be picking out a dress to match the $42 ring i wrote about here last year <http://simran.nomadlife.org/2007/09/ring-of-truth.aspx>.)

Charting The Cost Of Living

2008-10-08T20:12:00.005-05:00

erin was just blogging the other day (see <http://squishsquasher.blogspot.com/2008/10/living-beyond-your-means.html>) about one of the causes of the latest financial meltdown -- over-reliance on credit cards.

this old new york times article (admittedly, from 2002!) points out a bizarre cost correlation which it would make me smile to think of as a cause-effect relationship:

NYC; Beware The Price Of a Slice

By CLYDE HABERMAN
Published: January 12, 2002

It was too early to pop open the Champagne, but ordering a celebratory slice at the local pizza parlor did not seem out of line. Giddiness over imminent good times faded, however, when a colleague pointed out that the price of pizza suggested that the subway and bus fare would be raised before too long.

Huh?

Beware the Pizza Connection, he said, and he wasn't talking about a drug ring. He had revived a forgotten variation on the interplay of markets, New York style.

Strange though it may seem, the cost of a subway ride has traditionally paralleled the price of a pizza slice. (We're talking here about a regular slice -- mozzarella and tomato sauce, with none of those fancy-shmancy toppings that muck around with one of civilization's great achievements.) Call it, if you will, the Fasel Corollary, named for George Fasel, a vice president at Bankers Trust who made the link in a 1985 article on this newspaper's Op-Ed page.

He got it right. In 1960, for example, the fare was 15 cents. So was a slice of pizza. ''I do believe there is some kind of historical correlation,'' said Gene Russianoff, a leader of the Straphangers Campaign, the subway-riders advocacy group. It wasn't difficult to get him waxing lyrical about his boyhood in the early 60's, when he could venture forth with a dollar in his pocket, take two subway rides, buy two pizza slices and a 10-cent soda, and still have 30 cents left.

In the early 1970's, the fare rose to 35 cents. So did pizza. Through the years, the increases went more or less in tandem. Just before the price of a subway token last went up, in 1995, it stood at $1.25, lagging behind the $1.35 typically charged for a slice. Obviously, it was time for a fare increase. Thus did the $1.50 token come to be.

It remains at $1.50. But pizza prices have not stayed put. In fact, the pizza-token gap is so large these days that it is hard to see how the subwaymeisters can hold out for long. The grease-ateria around the corner from home on the Upper West Side charges $1.75. In Midtown, pizza parlors routinely charge $1.90 and even $2.

With that kind of market pressure being brought to bear, how can the $1.50 fare survive much longer?

The problem is especially acute when you consider that New York City Transit expects an operating deficit this year of $255 million, in large measure because few New Yorkers actually pay $1.50. Far from it, said Albert O'Leary, spokesman for New York City Transit. With all the discounts created in recent years, he said, ''we realize $1.06 on the average fare.''

The Pizza Connection is not New Yorkers' only worry.

What if the Jets, who play today in the first round of football's post-season, go all the way to win the Super Bowl? That isn't very likely to happen. This is a team that has not even made it to the Super Bowl in 33 years.

But should Jet lightning strike, the stock market could be headed for trouble in 2002, despite its splendid run in those first five days. Historically, stocks have fallen in the year of a Super Bowl victory by a team from the old American Football League. Like the Jets. The advice here is to choose your rooting interests wisely.

Bear this in mind, too. After every World Series appearance by the Mets -- in 1969, 1973, 1986 and 2000 -- Wall Street fared poorly the next year. You think this is silly? Fine. But do you have another explanation for the Crash of '87?

The far more frequent presence of the Yankees in the World Series usually leads to rises in the Dow Jones industrial average. But the Dow has also tended to do even better when the Yankees lose the Series. So their defeat in November, however painful, may be another sign that Wall Street will sparkle this year.

With the subway fare, Gov. George E. Pataki has ruled out an increase in 2002. This is, remember, an election year.

Ah, but what about 2003? That's a bit far down the road for predictions. But the way things are going, the next governor, whether Mr. Pataki or his Democratic opponent, may see no choice but to raise the fare.

There is an obvious way out, though. The state could restore traditional parity by giving pizza makers subsidies to lower their prices. Anyway, it's something to chew on.

(see more of the same at other times in recent history: july 2002: <http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9B00E2DD1730F93AA35754C0A9649C8B63>, june 2005 <http://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/21/nyregion/21nyc.html> and july 2007 <http://select.nytimes.com/2007/07/27/nyregion/27nyc.html>.)

except that nothing in this market is smile-worthy, really. i mean, my grad student stipend will still keep coming, but what about the rest of the world economy, which is on the down and down?

still -- facetiously speaking, and given that if pizza and the subway can be linked then everything financial is somehow linked -- if that this, too, is an election year, and if the base subway fare is now at $2 and not $1.50 as it was when this old article was published...

what might this mean for (a) pizza prices, which have been rising at searing rates the last few months (see <http://cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/03/06/mmm-pizza-a-slice-but-at-what-price/> for evidence of the meteoric increase!) and are now at close to $3? (b) -- in turn -- future subway fare increases (put off in the recent past due to much straphanger angst)? (c) -- in turn -- all those unemployed bankers who won't be taking cabs anymore?

This Is A Library?!

2008-09-30T20:07:00.003-05:00

i will admit to having been spoiled silly by my undergraduate library. not only did i work there for a year after i graduated, thereby earning for myself joys and privileges that most students could never have (e.g., facetime with the college librarian, quality time with rare books, sitting on the friends of the library steering committee, and being on a first-name basis with the ILL and circ staff), but i also just found it to be a pleasant, appealing, comfortable place to work. my carrel, #423, which overlooked longfellow pond and lake waban, while cold, was home to me my senior year. and the books were organized in a sensible fashion (i.e., in alphabetical order) across the four floors that held them.

penn's library, by contrast (and with the exception of rare books and manuscripts, which has stellar collections and a lovely staff), is a piece of shit. and i am being kind. the books are all over the place -- i'm talking A, B and Z on the 4th floor, P and my carrel on the third, and several other alphabets on the 5th, as well as stacks and stacks of dewey books on 3 and 4 -- with lippincott taking over sections of shelves in the main building, not enough bathrooms, missing books on cramped shelves, an electronic catalogue that times out every 10 minutes, no self-checkout machines, and the most angry/bitter/unhelpful circulation staff of any institution i've ever seen. this is not even to mention the horse and pony show that is opening your bag when you leave so that the security guards who aren't paying attention can nod perfunctorily at you to tell you you are good to go. even things that seem like pros are not (for instance, being able to check books to your carrel -- this only means that they show up on catalogue searches so that people can go to your carrel and look at them, which in turn means that they have occasion to grow legs and walk away. also, didn't anyone tell these people that sticking ugly blue carrel tags in the books to designate them "carrel books" ruins the pages and leaves residue?). finally, what about the ridiculously lax policy on bringing food in?!!? the undergrads eat mcdonalds and all manner of other food while studying -- messy, aromatic or whatever. god alone knows what gets into the books and the stacks. i know i am more curmudgeonly than most on the matter of respect for books, but this is seriously uncool.

i remember the research/reference librarian liaison person who did our (3-hour-long!) library introduction my first semester of grad school saying that the library where a person does her graduate work is the library that will be closest to her heart for the rest of her life. no way, buddy bob, no freaking way.

Hah, What A Hoot!

2008-09-30T19:55:00.002-05:00

google turns 10, and decides to go back in the cyberspacetime continuum to 2001 (which, obviously, is not 10 years ago, but is still highly entertaining and amusing!):

<http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2008/09/2001-search-odyssey.html>

Life Can't Be That Bad

2008-09-23T21:11:00.004-05:00

the last few weeks, i've been having bad hair day after bad hair day.

a) my new shampoo + conditioner combo, while it smells great, has undetermined effects on the sheen and bounce of my hair -- i'm testing it one more time, and if i see negative after-effects i'm taking it back to CVS for a refund.
b) the stress of the 50 book exam has been making my hair fall out in large quantities. (yes, even now. what, you thought everything would go back to normal as soon as i walked out of the slaughterhouse?) as someone who has always had thick, thick hair, i'm disturbed.
c) i haven't been swimming as much, but the chlorine is doing terrible things to my hair, i just know it. i've started wetting my hair pre-pool, and have even gone back to using dabur hair oil (i smell just like i did in school -- brahmiaamlakeshtel types!) but i don't know how much of an effect that's having yet.

but today, as i was standing on the steps outside the gym waiting for the shuttle so that i could get home, a random, mildly cute indian guy changed his trajectory down the stairs just so that he could stop by me, look me right in the eye, and say, "you have lovely hair."

... and voilà, life is good again!

Subliminality

2008-09-22T19:31:00.003-05:00

what does it mean when you log on to amazon.com and, five times out of ten, the "recommended for you" display is the "#1 in engagement rings" category?

eep!

God Is In The Rain

2008-09-09T09:48:00.003-05:00

for my first ten days in my new apartment, i couldn't open any of the windows in my living room, as they had been painted shut by my landlord's apparently-unconcerned maintenance folk.

a considerate maintenance person came by and knifed them open this morning, about an hour ago. i jumped at the chance to get some fresh air by opening them all, propping one up precariously with a bug screen (there's no chain on the window to keep it open -- evidently my apartment windows have long been neglected!)

then, five or ten minutes ago, it started to thunderstorm. the air is cool, electric as i sift through my email. my living room and i are refreshed. grey skies or not, it will be a good day!

You're Kidding Me, Right?

2008-08-20T17:35:00.005-05:00

i'm not much of a drinker; in fact, for a large part of the past two years, i've been better known to abstain than to drink. and although i now enjoy a glass of wine every so often, i'd say i'd still be quite happy to have a cranberry/lime/soda replace a glass of wine -- sweet, no surprises, and i'm clear-headed when the night is done.

this summer, apparently, mocktails are in. good for me! (wait, who am i kidding? i haven't been following trends in the bar world, i've been busy studying/working/being lame on the phone!)

but mocktails it is, says this NYT article: <http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/20/dining/20appe.html>, so it must be true.

and yet... even "all the news that's fit to print" sometimes can't disguise pure idiocy:

... no amount of passion fruit purée will hit the spot for cocktail purists of the dry martini ilk. For them, Sheridan Square in the Village offers what might be the most restrained mocktail in town, the Mineral Cocktail. Made with Badoit sparkling water, mineral drops and mineral water ice, it’s the brainchild of the chef Franklin Becker and the bar manager Rainlove Lampariello, designed to be healthful, light, and easy to knock back.

I haven’t sampled one, but Mr. Lampariello swears it tastes “like putting a pebble from a river in your mouth.”

a cocktail made of... three different kinds of expensive water!? that tastes like a pebble?!? give me a break. next you know they'll be charging for the privilege of air on tap. oh, wait, oxygen bars... i'd forgotten the world is full of rich nutjobs who'll even pay to breathe.

In Anticipation Of A Normal Life, Resumed

2008-08-20T15:50:00.004-05:00

in 2 weeks i'll have moved into a new apartment *and* finished my 50-book exam.

i've been reading for the exam since memorial day (minus the several weeks in july that i was on vacation and at rare book school in charlottesville), so i've been feeling rather studious/nerdy/exhausted for weeks now. but the packing just began today, at full speed -- and already there are about 8 boxes worth of books/kitchen stuff/sweaters/linens/random trinkets sitting in my living room, waiting to be joined by the other 8 (and the 4 suitcases of varying sizes) that will get packed over the next ten days.

i can't wait!

Thank God For Senuti

2008-08-19T20:07:00.003-05:00

3188 songs, 10.2 days, 13.63 GB... all locked up, thanks to the fact that macs control ipods better than pcs do. maybe i was doing something wrong, but getting one's music off one's ipod is well nigh impossible on a mac -- just as is getting one's photos off one's sony digital camera without erasing the contents of the memory stick. it has something to do with the files being invisible, i think.

but then brian and adam told me about senuti ("itunes" in reverse -- genius, eh?). simple download, one-click install, native to mac, and easy as pie. it looks just like itunes, except that it works in the opposite direction, allowing you to (see large green arrow) transfer music to a hard drive.

i think i've made one gross mistake by not fiddling with the preferences, so that all my music is currently getting sorted by artist and album (so many folders! gah!), and i'm a teensy bit sad that my nice [artist] - track name.mp3 naming system has been replaced by a rather more primitive trackname.mp3 system, but these are the days of front-end-not-back-end computing, so who's complaining?! at least my beloved music is safe -- and i get to keep the ratings and the playlists, too!

CityLurve: Philly (Redux), or: The Changing Eatery Scene In My 'Hood

2008-08-11T22:39:00.005-05:00

admittedly, i've only lived in philly for a year... and i don't spend as much time exploring the city's culinary variety as i would like to.

but my most recent return to the city, after a month away (i was in bombay and charlottesville, which explains the radio silence on this blog), has been awesome, not only because it feels like a real homecoming, but also because i've noticed that change is on the food horizon.

it began earlier this summer, in fact. mid-may, i noticed that a large, empty ground-floor store on the same block as my new-apartment-to-be was getting frantically painted and polished. turned out it opened soon thereafter: the newest iteration of the green line café -- see <http://www.greenlinecafe.com/2008/06/new-green-line-on-locust-now-open.html> for the joyous news on the green line blog. it looks large, and welcoming, and it brightens up the whole block. i'm not a coffee drinker, but it looks like i'll have to start!

mid-last week, after my return, i was walking from the english department to the pool and noticed that the jeweller on 34th and walnut had finally closed while i was gone -- about time, as it had been threatening to do so all spring. coming in its place: the naked chocolate café (<http://www.nakedchocolatecafe.com>). excellent!

and then, as i found out on friday night while poking around centre city for outdoor-seating BYOB options, melograno (on 22nd and spruce) has just closed down (although apparently it will be reopening in the fall at 20th and sansom). to come in its place -- something called memé. if it's anything like its neighbourhood buddies audrey claire (<http://www.audreyclaire.com>) or tinto (<http://www.tintorestaurant.com>), or even its former avatar (which made up for its lack of website by having outdoor seating, accepting major credit cards, and serving up delicious mushroom-filled food), i will be pleased.

i like knowing where one might go to try out a particular cuisine/feature in philadelphia -- whether BYOB, or wine+cheese pairings, or ethiopian, or sushi, or most recently (after today's bout of research on yelp and citysearch), dim sum. (my answers: audrey claire/mercato, tria, almaz cafe, swanky bubbles, ocean harbour/joy tsin lau.) what's even better is the assurance that more good things keep happening in this town. bring it on!

Coincidences?

2008-08-03T10:39:00.003-05:00

just yesterday i was listening to a dutch woman tell me how she and her three closest friends in philadelphia -- all dutch, too! -- all had birthdays in the latter half of march.

then i saw this on my facebook sidebar, under upcoming birthdays:
Amanda H***
Anna K*****
Alisha P****
Aude W******
Arshiya B***
Ameya N***

i like finding patterns in the most uncommon of places. i think that's why i like being a bibliographer so much -- there's patterns everywhere, and almost nothing is a coincidence (as long as you can find physical evidence for it, like binding threads or ink squash). it makes my librarian side inordinately happy.

happy birthday to all 6 august 4th a's!

Ignominy

2008-06-30T06:44:00.002-05:00

gautam tambay, you are a shady bugger.

that is all :P