My favorite non-humanoids over at spoomusic.com just released my little brother’s first full-length album, Wrinkles.

Download or listen online here.

In honor of the release, here’s a quick interview I just conducted with McMindreader over the phone:

The courses I’ll be taking at the LSA Institute this summer at Stanford are set! Hooray!

Main Session:

(1) LSA.308 | Computational Psycholinguistics, Levy (T/F 10-12 PM)
(2) LSA.373 | Intro. to Morphology, Spencer (M/TH 8-10 AM)
(3) LSA.317 | Experimental Phonology, Johnson &Ohala (T/F 1:30-3:30 PM)
(4) LSA.323 | Info. Structure & Word Order Variation, Birner & Ward (T/F 3:30-5:30 PM)

Presession:

(1) LSA.106P | Intro. to Minimalist Syntax, McCloskey (3:45-5:45 PM)
(2) LSA.117P | Using Praat, Scarborough (1:30-3:30 PM)
(3) LSA.109P | Math. Refresher for Comp. Linguistics, Moscoso del Prado Martín (7-9 PM)

And if I can somehow sit in on these, too, I want to:

(4) LSA.116P | Using CHILDES, Snyder (9:30-11:30 AM)
(5) LSA.108P | Logic for Linguists, Potts (3:45-5:45 PM)

I think I have one class overlap with Emma & Austin. If only Kyle were going, it’d be perfect! (You’ll be missed, Kyle.)

My pet aesthetic? The more the little critter looks like a monster, the more I like him. I mean, if your pet doesn’t look like a monster, what’s the fun of having it roam around your house?

So I was wandering around the world wide webointersphere when I saw him: small, dark, and handsome, with big bright eyes that just won’t quit. Introducing, my future dream pet.

I’m in love.

Je me suis fait couper les cheveux aujourd’hui!

Chic ou non?

Je obtiendrai une licence universitaire mai 11.

Veux être chouette.

.

I saw this Burberry window display in Orange County’s South Coast Plaza and found it curious. It features two collegiate manboys lustily admiring a Burberry-wearing coed in braces.

I’ve read Nabokov and Ginsberg, and it’s not like I find the concept shocking or even entirely repulsive. Cheap? Sure. Distasteful? You bet. But mostly I find it confusing. Who is this targeting? Men who love girls? Girls who want to be loved by men?

I suspect this display aims to induce anxiety in female shoppers. I mean, what woman wasn’t insecure as a flat-chested, metal-mouthed scamp? I wonder if Burberry hopes insecurity might drive South Coast’s finest into ameliorating bruised egos with expensive scarves and purses. Just look, the awkward youth on the display is wanted! (Maybe you will be too, if you buy that coat.)

And South Coast’s patrons can afford it. South Coast Plaza, the largest mall in Orange County at 2.8 million square feet, has infamously prodigal patrons. It has the highest annual sales per square foot of any mall in California—an estimated $800—according to a 2006 Women’s Wear Daily article. The mall generates more than a billion dollars in annual revenue, making it the highest-volume mall in the United States.

South Coast boasts one or two of every store I can think of, and then a bunch more. Plus the South Coast Repertory Theater, three commercial art galleries, and the Orange Lounge offshoot of the Orange County Museum of Art. It’s huge. Monumental. Busses of Japanese tourists are dumped here daily. And they take pictures in front of it and then blow lots and lots of yen.

So I suppose Burberry’s use of manipulative advertising doesn’t hurt patrons financially. I also know Burberry’s advertising is all about the waif look (à la spokeswaif Kate Moss), and I know prepubescent girls are waif-like in nature. But braces? I feel like this ad is pushing it.

I’m actually surprised no one’s voiced concerns in conservative Orange County. There’s outrage over dinosaurs, but not over the eroticism and commodification of innocents in training bras?

I worry about the effect this sort of thing has on all the young girls who shop at South Coast. A bunch of South Coast’s teenaged regulars attend a nearby high school and, just last year, picked the theme “Moulin Rouge” for their winter formal. No one batted an eyelash. Related?

At least this gives Kyle one more reason to hate on the trademarked plaid.

Actually, I’m sure a little most things have hurt someone. Especially a little most alchoholic things. But mini Chardonnay bottles didn’t hurt me this weekend. They just made my work slightly more humorous.

They also made me wake up this morning feeling as though someone had wrung out my intenstines. No more mini Chardonnay bottles for me for a while. After the one I’m drinking right now.

This week is the last week of classes. Then finals. Then… party! Hooray.

When I first met Eric Martinez, he was a student at Rummel who loved photography and rock music, and who really loved God. But that was a very long time ago. He didn’t know how to rock out yet, but he always came to admire when other people rocked out at shows. You know, except when the shows conflicted with church.

We were something like 14 and 15 years old then.

I have a lot of happy memories tied to Eric. Once Eric got very drunk in Michael Blum’s now defunct guitar shop and renounced the Lord: “I found Jesus in 1994, and look at me now!” he shouted from the floor. That one’s a favorite.

One summer, after I’d been hanging out with Eric at a friend’s place for an hour or two, I asked Eric if he felt like catching a movie with me.

“I can’t. I have work,” he said.
“What time?” I asked.
“I’m working now. I have some sandwiches in the car I need to deliver. I just dropped by to say hi.”
“Eric, you’ve been here for more than an hour.”
“Yeah. I should probably be leaving.“

Eric maintains one of my most favorite blogs in the whole, wide world. He posts his photos and writes about his life, which is always interesting, especially when it isn’t. There’s also his Flickr account.

I have a lot of good photos of Eric, so I put them on their own page here.

Eric still lives in New Orleans and knows I miss him. He bought a really nice house after Katrina and he’s working on fixing it up. I’ll leave you with one more little-known Eric fact: Eric used to be the only Mexican-American in all of New Orleans, but since Katrina, recent immigrants walk up to him and speak in Spanish. (Eric doesn’t speak Spanish.)

Spam filter installed now. So no more registration required to comment. I’ve been meaning to do that for a while.

Conocí a Komega como una o dos semanas después de que me mudé a California. Él vivía en Salinas y yo vivía en Santa Cruz. Cuando apenas nos conocimos, era romántico, pero permanecíamos amigos después de que terminamos. Él es un gran muchacho, un talento estupendo y estoy feliz de haberle conocido.

I met Komega a week or two after I moved to California. He was living in Salinas and I was living in Santa Cruz. When we first met, it was romantic, but we stayed friends after we broke up. He’s a great guy, a super talent, and I’m happy to know him.

Me gustan éstos particularmente estos retratos de él. Él hizo las buenas correcciones, no fui yo.

I particularly like these portraits of him. He did the clever editing, not me.

Mega está consiguiendo pronto un tatuaje de un árbol en su lado. El tronco descansará en sus caderas y las raíces irán debajo de su sintura, donde pocas las verán. Pienso que el concepto es poético e imaginativo. Así como la mayoría de las cosas que hace Mega.

Mega is getting a tattoo of a tree on his side soon. The trunk will rest at his hips and the roots will go below his beltline, where few will see them. I think the concept is poetic and imaginative. Just like most things Mega does.

Gracias to my cousin Marie for correcting my Spanish!

Food 4 Less makes me depressed. I used to walk through the aisles picking things up, examining the food labels, and putting things back down, dissatisfied with the crap contained therein. These days I’ve learned to stick to produce, but I see what everyone else is buying and it makes me sad.

One of the saddest things I ever saw was a young woman buying two industrial-sized boxes of frozen corndogs, a case of generic diet soda, and a handbasket full of Purina® Fancy Feast® Gourmet Cat Food. She spent more on the cat than herself.

Almost as depressing are the families whose shopping lists are dictated by coupons. The woman whose got a pack of Kraft® Macaroni & Cheese, two frozen boxes of Smucker’s® Uncrustables® PB&J sandwiches, a clear 12-pack of Handi-Snacks® Cheese and Crackers, a bag of Tyson® Honey BBQ Boneless Chicken Wyngs, two cases of Cherry Coke®, and two infants in her basket.

And it’s not just the food that’s unhealthy at Food 4 Less. It’s also the products. The Barbie® Dolls aren’t the same ones sold at FAO Schwartz. They don’t carry the classy collectible Red Carpet Badgley Mischka Barbie® or the Golden Angel Barbie® at Food 4 Less. When they carry Barbie® Dolls, it’s the cheaper My Scene® line—Barbie® Dolls with thicker eye shadow, shorter dresses, boas, flamboyant jewelry, pouty glossed-over lips, and platform pumps.

It’s not enough to pump kids’ bodies full of high-fructose corn syrup and preservatives. They have to pump kids’ minds full of garbage, too.

And it’s not just the kids’ minds at stake. As I check out each week, I look at the magazine rack, chocked full of sweepings for women more numb and less lucky than I am. Women who latch onto cover images of chocolate-coconut cakes, sugar cups, and other edible comforts. Women who pick up the magazines to read about miracle diets. Women who are too tired to notice that they can’t consume fatty comfort now and still get slimmer hips in 15 days.

They throw these magazines onto the conveyor belt, on top of brightly colored boxes of junk. They pay in cash and coupons, and then they bag their own groceries.

I hate Food 4 Less. But Garden Grove is too dumb for a Trader Joe’s.

The title of this entry is ambiguous, I know, but ambiguity is funny to me at 2 a.m.

Here’s my ambiguously classified lists of things to know about Rochester:

• First off, I found this Rochester wiki. I like places with their own wiki. Also, Craig’s List.
• Rochester has the largest deaf population per capita in the United States.
• One quarter of the population in Rochester lives below the poverty line, according to the 2000 Census.
• The median age of Rochester is 31 years old.
• Rochester residents have no problem eating something called a “garbage plate” from a restaurant called Nick Tahou Hots.
• Hotdogs can be called “red hots” or “white hots” to distinguish the common (red) hotdog from its local pork-based hotdog variant, which includes powdered milk in its ingredients.
• One of the co-creators of the Java programming language at Sun Microsystems, Patrick Naughton, is from Rochester. The one who was charged with soliciting inappropriate sexual conduct with a minor online.
• Rochester is home to one of the oldest art theaters in the country, Little Theater. Sometimes they show porny foreign art films with no ratings.
• There’s a Penny Arcade in Rochester, but it’s not actually a penny arcade, much to my disappointment. It’s a club that features bands named things like GoatWhore, Suffocation, Hipocrisy, Mnemic, and Crucifist.
• Rochester has a lot of festivals, including Elsi’s favorite, the Lilac Festival, held each May. There’s also the Rochester Hamfest (radio, not meat) and the Rochester Harbor and Carousel Festival.
• There’s a Wegmans Food Market in Rochester.
• Rochester’s alterative weekly, the Rochester City Newspaper, is independently owned. But their website is often down. Like right now.

So my dad races dirt bikes—and likes putting my infant sister Elena into funny poses and snapping pictures. The result? Elena was just named Racer X Virtual Trainer magazine’s “Fan of the Week” for this photo.

Her photo will be up super small on the right of the screen here for everyone to admire all week. Mignonne, oui? Oui.

.

The District, a new Long Beach alternative weekly heavily staffed by ex-OC Weeklyers, premiered this week. The paper was financed by OC Republican attorneys, which, to anyone whose familiar with the writers and editor, might come as a bit of a shock. It did to me.

The paper’s editor-in-chief (and my former boss) Will Swaim quit the OC Weekly ten weeks ago, like many who left, citing “philosophical differences” with New Times (now Village Voice Media) after they became the weekly’s new owner. More on that in the LA Times story.

I have nothing but good things to say about Swaim. He was a great editor and it was a pleasure to work for him. I wish everyone over there the best of luck.

Charlie Todd, comedian/actor/improvitarian at the Upright Citizens Brigade Theater, spends his free time pranking NYC. I should have blogged about this when I first heard of it a couple years ago, but I didn’t. So I’m doing it now.

Todd’s Improv Everywhere “agents” act out scenes in real life. Like throwing surprise birthday parties for strangers, boarding subway busses pantsless en masse, or collectively entering a Best Buy store dressed in blue polos and khaki pants. It’s a cool concept. And, except in cases where it goes horribly awry, it’s often funny.

Yeah!

Stuart O. Anderson and Shaun Slifer built a robot that keeps tumbleweed in motion for the Three Rivers Arts Fesitval Gallery in Pittsburgh. They call the project “Welcome Home, Pioneer”.

Why? Wrong question. Why not? They have a nice write up about the project, the robot, et more on the site, so I’ll let them answer that question more seriously. More info on the installation (robot + tumbleweed) here.

I love robotic installation art.

I’ve officially decided to join Brain & Cognitive Sciences (BCS) and Linguistics at the University of Rochester in the fall.