knowitallgirl

So long, and thanks for all the fish!

In celebration of the cinematic premiere of the Hitchhiker's Guide movie this weekend, I dug up one of the photos taken of me interviewing Douglas Adams when I was an undergrad at UC Irvine in 1993. I won't reprint the article, which should remain buried, but I spoke with Douglas for about 20-30 minutes before he gave a reading from Mostly Harmless. I don't recall the circumstances, but he had fallen quite badly before he arrived at UCI, and was in extreme agony and hopped up on painkillers. Despite probably needing to go to a hospital, he insisted on showing up and doing the reading (as well as signing books and towels afterwards), and even gave me an interview as scheduled. He was as sweet as sweet can be, and besides being bowled over at interviewing one of my favorite authors, he impressed me with how determined he was not to let his fans down. At one point during the reading, he swooned and almost toppled over, but managed to grab the podium and keep on going. Douglas Adams, you are truly missed. Let us hope your memory has been honored and not desecrated with this new film.

$5 peas

Oddly enough, just five minutes ago I finished shelling a $5 bag of peas I bought at the Ferry Plaza Farmer's Market last weekend. Looking over my yield of - maybe - two cups of peas, I was thinking that the FPFM is truly out of control and I needed to renew my pledge to stop blowing my cash there and visit the humble Alemeny Farmer's Market instead. Returning to my computer to peruse the New York Times, suddenly I find an article on this exact topic: "Tourists at Market to Look Crowd Those Who Cook." $8 tea, $9 grass-fed beef sandwiches, $3 peaches. My favorite quote:

"You go with $40 or $60 cash and you're out of money within 15 minutes, especially if you want to get a sandwich or something. I go with $20 or $25 to Alemeny and I'm eating salad all week."

No one wears Prada at the Alemeny farmer's market, either. So refreshing.

Avatar playtime!

What do you do when you have overwhelming amounts of homework to do and aren't motivated to do it? Play with your Y! Avatar! This is my favorite one so far - I love the Lucky Charms-esque background, the hyper artificial xmas tree, and my ever-present pet frog.

Fun with cameraphones

Picture006.jpg, originally uploaded by kingjen.

Heh heh. Salted butt. Heh heh heh.

Calling all Nancy Drew fans . . .

My college friend Chelsea's new book is out, Confessions of a Teen Sleuth. If you are a Nancy Drew fan, this book is for you. The New York Times Book Review loved it! I'm reproducing the review here since NYT will make it unavailable in a few more days:

Secret of the Old Crock By MELANIE REHAK Published: March 27, 2005, Sunday

Confessions of A Teen Sleuth
A Parody.
By Chelsea Cain.
Illustrations by Lia Miternique.
160 pp. Bloomsbury. $15.95.

She wears flimsy lingerie! She's secretly in love with one of the Hardy boys! She's (gasp) middle-aged! Reader, this is not your mother's -- or even your -- Nancy Drew.

Then again, maybe she is. Chelsea Cain's gleeful parody ''Confessions of a Teen Sleuth'' affectionately hits all the formulaic high points of a Nancy Drew mystery, sending up and yet saluting America's favorite girl detective. All the unspoken truths about money, social status and teenage identity crises ordinarily crammed between the lines of her adventures are outrageously exposed, and the book is no less endearing for it. Nancy's tomboy friend George (no, it's not short for Georgia) ends up first at Smith College and later living in ''an area of town where many young women with short hair and boys' names lived.'' Nancy's ever-plump chum Bess develops an eating disorder and eventually runs off with a younger man. And Carson Drew, Nancy's widower (or so you thought!) father, whom she now calls ''the world-renowned attorney-turned-judge-turned-losing-city-council-candidate,'' at long last exchanges noble bachelorhood for a tacky second wife who summarily disposes of all of Nancy's sleuthing mementos.

As for Nancy, we first meet her in a posthumously published introduction. Now married to her longtime sweetheart, Ned Nickerson, she reveals that her college friend Carolyn Keene has made a fortune by ripping off her stories, and that she has entrusted a manuscript disclosing the true details of her life to Chelsea Cain. From there, we follow Nancy and her trademark flashing blue eyes and blue car through a series of absurd mysteries that take place from 1926 to 1992. Nancy goes from cloche hats and pencil skirts to Jazzercise and New Age cruises. Cain has a great time poking gentle fun at all the tics -- physical and otherwise -- that make us love Miss Drew so much.

''It's good to see you looking as slim and attractive as always,'' Frank Hardy tells her just before their love affair is consummated, in a very un-Nancy way, in the back room of a suspicious cafe. As the plot unfolds, Nancy's all-American good looks fade -- at one point in the 1970's she is late to a crime scene because her hair and makeup take so long, and the phrase ''slim and attractive'' recurs here with hilarious regularity -- but she's still in charge. When she decides, daringly, to enter a spooky, deserted speakeasy, her hapless suitors are reduced to mere sheep: ''I took a step inside. Frank followed. Ned followed behind Frank.''

Apparently being a go-getter runs in the family. It turns out Nancy's mother isn't really dead, but a suffragist who ran away from the oppressive stability of River Heights in 1913. Not only that, Mom is also the sister of Nancy's beloved housekeeper, Hannah Gruen, who, among other things, is arrested for being a Communist spy in the McCarthy-era section of the book. These are just a few of Cain's doozies. She drags in a host of other fictional teenage detectives, including Cherry Ames (who comments that ''You're wearing the exact same skirt you had on when we met. . . . And it's looking a little tight around the hips''), Tom Swift Jr., the Dana Girls and Encyclopedia Brown.

Along with all the high jinks (as Nancy puts it at one point, ''everything goes catawampus''), there's a big dose of perhaps the only thing missing from the original Nancy Drew Mystery Stories: reality. But even that can't stop the girl sleuth. By the end of the book Nancy is wearing control-top pantyhose and has crow's feet, but somehow, she still manages to speak for her loyal fans. Arriving at the scene of a murder, all vim and vigor, she tells us pertly, ''I may have been middle-aged, but I was still a teen sleuth at heart.'' Amen to that.

Don't blog this

We had a speaker today in one of our classes, a SIMS graduate and blogging/usability domain expert who is widely known in the Silicon Valley blogging echo-chamber. She asked us not to blog her lecture as she wanted to share some information with us that she didn't want publically shared.

Having worked as a journalist, I'm used to people asking that their comments be "off the record." But that's usually something that's said to people known to be journalism professionals where it's a possibility a speaker's comments could end up in print. Though she is of course hyper-sensitive to this problem, it still struck me as indicative of how much the world is changing that you have to ask people not to blog something. "Normal" people really are becoming media producers (not that an audience of SIMS grad students is normal by any means, and in particular far more likely to have a blog), which means that the many ways in which your words or likeness can be captured and distributed to the public outside of your control are infinite.

Welcome to the world of hyper-surveillance. Anything you say can and will be used against you at any time in ways you can't possibly imagine. How long until people go out on dates, blog them, google one another's names to find out how much the other person is into them, and then break up via their blog? I'm sure it's happened already . . .