If you’re in the city either today or tomorrow, come see the ITP Winter Show, a “two-day explosion of interactive sight, sound and technology from the student artists and innovators at ITP”.
My thesis project hello, can you see me? (a.k.a. 24in48.org) is in the show, please come say hi! I’ll be doing another run of it in New York with 24 brand new participants sometime in February so if you have a cameraphone and are interested in joining the fun then, drop me a line at hello@24in48.org or leave a comment!
Right now I am also looking to do the project in San Francisco and Manila so if you live there and would like to participate, or would like to see it done in your city, please feel free to get in touch.
Show hours:
Sunday, December 19 from 2 to 6 p.m.
Monday, December 20 from 5 to 9 p.m.
Directions:
ITP is on the fourth floor of NYU’s Tisch School, 721B Broadway corner Waverly Place. You can take the R train to 8th St and walk south two blocks to Waverly, the 6 to Astor Place and walk west to Broadway, or the C to West 4th and walk east through Washington Square Park to Broadway.

Too busy to write a full post but I also feel the need to unload a few random but important things, so I apologize for the haphazard writing of this all and the lack of proper segues:
Okay, so hello, can you see me? went pretty well but I’m not done with my thesis just yet—I’ve got to present in front of a panel of critics, my department chair, and whomever else feels like showing up on December 1st. Which is four days away. All my conversations lately have been much like this one:
ranjit: how’s the presentation-planning going?
lia: i just ate a packet of coconut cream-filled chocolate koala biscuits
ranjit: ah, good progress!
Yesterday I was so stressed out that instead of getting any work done I stayed home and ate all day: pasta for lunch (penne with pesto and BACON), pasta for dinner (very meaty lasagna), a bag of slightly burnt buttered popcorn and then the koala biscuits. I finally went to bed at 3 a.m. still painfully hungry after chugging half a bottle of chocolate milk, and the only thing I’d really gotten done work-wise was picking the font to use in my slideshow, Hoefler Text over Lucida Grande, the first time since high school I’ve ever voluntarily used a serif over a sans serif.
Many thanks to Megatron for having me and a few other people over for an intimate Thanksgiving dinner. Oh, and for making the very tasty salmon wrapped in BACON that went so happily into my belly. You can see a photo of us with our respective eyebags here, if you are so inclined.
Many thanks also to Chris for calling me on my cellphone Monday afternoon to check if I knew about the semi-secret U2 show in Brooklyn that afternoon. I hightailed it out of the doctor’s office after that and cabbed my ass down to DUMBO, and had one of the best nights I’ve had all year, certainly one I’ll remember all my life. You can see a photo of us both looking deranged post-show here, if you are so inclined.
Heck, while you’re at it, why not look at a photo of me and Vena also looking deranged post-show here? Thank you Vena for ditching work to come with, it wouldn’t have been half as fun without you.
Jesse James Garrett has returned to blogging, five whole years after he stopped. As Jay said in the comments, welcome back to the fold you helped create, Jesse. I look forward to reading your Hidden Agenda every single day for the next five years at least. (No pressure there!)
Congratulations to two of my favorite bloggers who’ve recently hit their five year anniversaries: Kevin of Ghost in the Machine and Miranda of Geegaw. Many happy returns of the day!
Months and months after most people in the US have forgotten they even have accounts, Friendster will be rolling out mobile services in the Philippines. My thoughts about this are so Shirky it hurts, so maybe when the semester is done perhaps I can sit down and write a paper about it. Or a really long post?
Jesus may own the last week in December but the first two weeks are Jonny Goldstein’s. Don’t try to fight it, you know it’s true.
I have a ticket to finally see Ted Leo & the Pharmacists on December 11, and two days later I get to finally see Cher. So much information about me can be gleaned from just that one sentence. Diagram away.
Oh, and before I forget: there will be a dinner & booze-type thing in the East or West Village on the 1st, after my thesis presentation. You should totally come!

A poem by Ishle Yi Park, the current poet laureate of Queens, NY:

To Nintendo

Before you, life was unbearable –
a flat screen and ping pong ball.
But oh, you sleek grey box,
you already wrapped present!

We sat in front of you, awed
as if you were the first red sunrise.

We burned a horseshoe
of permanent round circles into the rug
with our asses — a communion
of Afghani, Puerto Rican, Korean kids

trying to unpeel the secrets of a mustached
plumber who swallowed mushrooms,
zapped dumb-eyed turtles, warped
to other zones through green maintenance pipes.

We slept to your lullabies, the digitized
soundtrack of our childhood.

Outside, a world of mothers chastising
in accents thick as static. Blocks of white boys
bored and violent, ready to snap gum,
spit, snap us in half with splintered

Louisville Sluggers. Inside — Zelda
and goblins and magic wing-ed fairies.
Enemies you could throw a pot at,
stab twice, and they’d implode and disappear.

10 years later, we’re split
and scattered, half college drop-outs,
Soju drunk, stumbling,
and I recall how we once fought

to keep alive, counting our hearts,
freezing time to gulp Coke, taking turns
to save each other, anything, anything!
To beat them at their game.

Back then, we never gave up,
never walked away —

if the light wouldn’t bling on,
we’d check the plug, blow into the cartridge,
clean out the dust, bang that sucker on any flat surface —

give a small push, close the door, and pray.

Park’s first book of poetry, The Temperature of This Water, was published in August 2003.
[ via hello, nintendo ]

Updates on what’s been going on with me lately, in bullet form because I am too lazy/tired to write real paragraphs just now:

1. I am not dead. Yayy! Regular posting resumes today.
2. My fifth and hopefully final semester at ITP has begun. I’m doing my thesis with Kathy Wilson as my adviser and taking two classes besides that, Social Software with Clay Shirky and Game Design with Frank Lantz (yes, same guy but different class from the one that spawned super nerd meme Pacmanhattan last semester). The two classes are great and feed perfectly into my thesis, which is fantastic luck.
3. Like all the other cool kids, I’ve been moblogging with good ol’ Flickr. I’ll be integrating my photostream on here sometime in the near future.
4. I’ve been getting sideblog envy as of late, so as soon as I decide between using MT or del.icio.us to power it (mainly I have to figure out if I want to have comments for it or not), it will be up.
5. I could never bring myself to use categories on this blog, but I’ve been getting into the use of tags because of Flickr and del.icio.us and will probably be giving Cal Henderson’s MT 3 tags plugin a spin. Anyone installed this or seen it implemented anywhere?
6. Jarvis was Dogster’s dog of the day on Tuesday!
   

I had no idea until I read Tom Selleck’s IMDB bio this afternoon that he was George Lucas and Steven Spielberg’s first choice to play Indiana Jones, only he’d just been signed to Magnum PI and the series producers wouldn’t let him do it and so it went to Harrison Ford instead. Crazy!
Anyway, as we all know, Magnum PI took off in a very big way and soon enough Warner Bros took notice and gave Selleck the lead in an Indy-style movie, High Road to China. TheRaider.net seems to think pretty highly of it, but alas, it’s out of print and barely available on VHS.
Tom Selleck’s a member of and did an ad for the National Rifle Association. Rosie O’Donnell had him on her show to debate gun laws and it didn’t go very well. Cigar Afficionado had him on their cover and did a great interview with him about cigars, his libertarianism, and the strangeness of his career. He did a Celebrity Secrets skit for Late Night With Conan O’Brien a while back, it was okay but not half as funny as, um, Harrison Ford’s, Patrick Stewart’s or George Takei’s.
Also, those of you who are my age or older probably remember the Magnum PI theme as being totally kick ass. I couldn’t find an mp3 of it, alas but this midi version still rocks pretty hard. The Magnum PI theme, like many of the best TV theme songs ever written, was the work of composer Mike Post. Some of my favorites of his are the themes to Law & Order (my current ringtone; but who knows if he was responsible for the Chung! Chung!?), CHiPs, The A Team, LA Law, Doogie Howser, MD, NYPD Blue and the most recent incarnation of Dragnet. Post played guitar on Sonny & Cher’s I Got You, Babe, has five Grammys, and his song for Greatest American Hero is one of only a handful of TV themes to ever hit the top of the pop charts.

Makiko Itoh’s gyoza post is fantastic, especially this bit:

My family has deep emotional ties to the gyoza. My sister Mayumi loved gyoza when she was a teenager. While her schoolmates put little Hello Kitty dolls and such on their school bags, she made a felt gyoza dumpling and hung that from the handle of her bag. I didn’t go that far, but I’ve always loved this little meat-and-vegetable filled dumpling.

Her family sound just like my kind of people! If I was the crafty sort I would make felt soup dumplings for all my friends.
I haven’t had great gyoza since moving to New York (a tragedy, I know—any pointers to tasty gyoza here would be much appreciated) but Alaina mentioned two of my favorite NYC dumpling places, Mandoo and Grand Sichuan International, in her NYC Eats does dumplings round up last year.
In conclusion: dumplings = happy belly. Have some with people you love!

Linguist Amy Perfors, of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, posted photos of men and women on the U.S. Web site “Hot or Not,” which lets viewers rate pictures according to how attractive they find them.

When she posted the same pictures with different names, she found that the attractiveness scores went up and down depending on the vowels, the London-based magazine New Scientist reported.

Men with “front vowels” in their names—sounds formed at the front of the mouth like the “a” in Matt—were considered sexier than men with “back vowel” sounds like the “au” in Paul, she concluded.

I know we all love science, so let’s try a little experiment, shall we?
Do we really think Matt

is hottter than Paul?

My friends, the decision is in your hands. Vote once, and vote wisely!

Choire linked to this on Gawker a few days ago but most of you probably didn’t know enough about Allegra Beck to know that you should be interested, so because I love you I am making sure you see this photo of Beck and her mom, Donatella Versace:

Also if you think Donatella and her perpetual deep tan are nasty, a tipster who’d worked with Jessica Simpson reported in a recent issue of Popbitch that she “has a wrinkly, leathery cleavage from too much tanning.” Which I totally believe from all the episodes of Newlywed that I’ve seen. Just imagine what her skin’ll look like when she’s Donatella’s age! Surely even George Hamilton would not approve?

Friend Skot, talking about the worst rock songs ever:

The Doors? Eternally committed to vinyl is “The End,” possibly the most hilarious example of unfortunate undergraduate prose ever committed to posterity. “I WANT TO KILL YOU!” Hey, that’s interesting! I want to laugh at you! I like to imagine listening to this song with Sylvia Plath, and I imagine her going, “Jeez, what a tool. I want to live!” Then I play her the song again. “Scratch that, I’ll die.”

I want to say that the worst song ever is Celine Dion’s My Heart Will Go On but my hatred of it is of course exacerbated by the fact that it was heavily overplayed for months and months after anyone alive could possibly bear to listen to it without wanting to stab their eardrums with freshly sharpened pencils again and again. Overplaying is also why I cannot stand any version of Unchained Melody, even though the only real offender is the version from Ghost; one of my favorite singers does a beautiful Unchained Melody on her new cd and I love her more for it, but I leave it unchecked on iTunes anyway lest it give me an unpleasant Righteous Brothers earworm.
That said, off the top of my head, here are three songs that make me want to die:

• Loving You, Minnie Ripperton
• Seasons in the Sun, Terry Jacks
• Butterfly Kisses, Bob Carlisle

What are your oven-stuffing three?