colorlessgreenideas

I've been feeling experimental lately. Not so much that I want to "try new things" any more than usual. I just want to run some experiments and track how they go. For most of these, I lack the means to make them scientifically or statistically rigorous enough to be conclusive. But they sound like fun to me, and I don't give a shit about publication, anyways. I thought this was as good a place as any to list these ideas. Chances are, I could find the "answers" somewhere on the internet or in a library, but that's not the point. I want to find things out myself.

Idea 1: OkCupid profiles with minor differences. How much do spelling errors influence responses? What about grammar? Type of photo (a- smiling at camera; b- brooding into distance; c- looking distracted; d- face not in photo)? Do the books, movies, or shows listed as "favorites" make a difference? Spirituality probably does matter. It'd also be fun to see the kinds of responses each profile gets. Are they well thought-out and articulate, or just a simple "Hey, you look cute"? Do women listed as bisexual get different kinds of responses from other women compared with lesbians?

There are some clear challenges to this kind of study. Other users would notice very quickly that the profiles are practically the same, and that would ruin the whole thing. The only solutions I've come up with are to run the profiles in several cities at the same time, or at different times in the same city. In either case, it introduces confounding variables. But hey, I'm not publishing this anyways.

Idea 2: Effects of various methodologies on student acquisition of verb tenses in English
Yeah, I know that could be a dissertation and then some, and in some ways it already has been. There's a fuck-ton of research on this topic already, and most of it comes down on the side of the communicative approach. So most of what I could do is replicate (to the best of my ability) those studies. But, again, what I really want to do is determine the results for myself. What techniques work best in my classroom, with my students? The literature suggestst that direct grammar instruction is not a good way to acquire grammar, but that's exactly what my students have asked for, multiple times. My students aren't dumb - they know what they're lacking, and to an extent, they know what does and doesn't work for them. One problem I have with a lot of SLA research is that it feels distant from actual classroom realities - it's hard to take the literature and apply it to real students, in my experience. And too many SLA researchers are content to say "Well, learners just don't acquire XY and Z as adults." My students want to acquire everything (at least, the motivated ones do).

Again, there's a lot of problems with this, from a scientific POV. Mainly, they're my students, and I'd be analyzing my teaching. Not exactly objective, but I could do my best. More challenging - I can't just split the class and teach one group one way and another group another way. It's all or nothing, and there's just enough overlap between quarters that I couldn't switch it up then, either. Really, the best I can do here is keep a good journal of what I've done, and try to track individual student progress based on writing samples (I find writing and speaking much better indicators than grammar tests).

- Anna Hathaway impresses me more and more every time I see her in something. Her singing is breathtaking, she oozes emotion at all the right times, and she's gorgeous even when she's bloody and filthy and miserable. It will be an interesting switch for me to make whenever I finally watch her as Catwoman.

- Sasha Baron Cohen as the Innkeeper was perfect. It never would have occurred to me to cast him until I saw him in the part. Brilliant.

- The only actor who underwhelmed me was Russell Crowe. He wasn't bad, but the emotional range of his singing just stayed in a sort of safe range, without hitting any high or low notes as it should have. Maybe he was focusing on hitting the notes and couldn't manage to emote, or maybe I'm missing some subtlety. Or, I'm just really used to the guy who played Javier in the well-known London production, which I have the soundtrack for. On the other hand, the same could be said for every other character, and no one else left me feeling wanting like Russell Crowe did.

- Speaking of Javier, I did think it was interesting how a man whose life revolves around "honesty" found it so easy to become a spy. Sure, it worked towards his own end, but it seemed a little out of character.

- Romantic moral of the story: givin the choice of a "boyish" brunette who's familiar, adoring, and willing to go the extra mile, the object of affection will instead go for the very feminine blonde he or she has just met. I'm so not bitter. But yeah, I might've teared up during "On My Own."

- Speaking of Marius and Cosette. Even though I knew what was going to happen, I half-expected him to drop her after the whole ordeal at the barricades. All of his friends are dead, he's realized that not only was Eponine in love with him, but she died for him, and he was on the edge of death himself. He saw a child killed by soldiers, and felt the rest of the city abandon their cause. That's some serious mental baggage, and Cosette's wanting to just pick up where they left off after a brief conversation and some lusting after each other. I know it would've gone against the romantic feel of the story, but I think it would've been more realistic for him to reconsider, or at least take some time before jumping into the lust again. But maybe he did, and the movie just skipped over all that.

I don't usually write up reviews of films, partly because I can't go back to check on bits after I'm done. Nor do I usually give much thought at all to films by Quentin Tarantino. But I watched Django last night with a friend, and found I have things to say about it.

Django Unchained from what I've heard, has the same basic premise as Tarantino's film Inglorious Bastards, which I never watched. It is, at any rate, revisionist history which has a member of an abused group going after the abusers, and killing them in pure Tarantino fashion. There is blood, and LOTS of it. Somehow, when I saw the premise for Inglorious Bastards, I was unimpressed, and a little bothered. But with Django, I kind of liked it. Maybe it's because the idea of killing Nazis is old hat, but the US, and the South especially, turn a blind eye to slave owners most of the time. While most Americans know, to some extent, that yeah, slavery was "bad," we don't think of the masters as evil. Are they on the same level as Nazis? No, but the biggest difference is that Nazis wanted all Jews, etc GONE. Southern whites never wanted blacks GONE, because there would go their labor force. But they sure thought up some hellish things to put them through. And the whole ideology of racial inferiority was the damn same. That, and you still find Americans willing to defend the institution of slavery, openly and in public. Americans who try to soften the pain that was caused by slavery, by saying that "Well, a lot of owners were nice." Yes, they were, but that doesn't change the institution. Blacks, slave or free, were always at the mercy of whites. It was a white person's choice how nice to be, and a black person just had to take it. A few nice white folks doesn't make that okay.

On to the film, though. The characters were compelling and believable, in so much as Tarantino characters usually are. Django as a master gun slinger worked, and it was fun to see him blow holes in hateful people. Leonardo DiCaprio impressed me as the sadistic master, and it was easy to see both sides of him: the cruel slave owner who has runaways torn apart by dogs, and the cultured man of the time. I was underwhelmed by Django's wife, Brunnhilda. The actress did fine. The problem was that she was really just a pretty face who needed rescuing all the time. Partly, it fit the story's parallel with the Wagnerian epic or Brunnhilda and Siegfried, which Dr. Schultz tells Django during the film. Partly, I think that we as a culture can do better than that, and flesh out our female characters a little bit more.

The gore didn't get me much, but there were definitely parts I needed to turn away from - the aforementioned dogs tearing a man apart, and a man who's eyes are gauged out. But yeah, seriously a lot of blood in this film.

So I read the entire Harry Potter series in German in one year. Done and done.

I already wrote a lot about it when I finished it in Spanish, so I'll keep this brief.
- I can't see Harry and Ginny working together. Harry and Luna would work much better.
- The biggest hole in the Volemort = Hitler metaphor is the lack of any positive association with Voldy. A lot of Germans liked Hitler, and the Nazis used tons of positive images from German cultural consciousness to woo the population to their cause. Voldemort is just bad and everyone knows it.

I grabbed this one last spring when I couldn't find any good lesbian romance at the local Athens bookstore. I think the lack of lesbians put me off for a bit, and it took me a while to get into the story. Once I did, though, I couldn't put it down, even when it got a little upsetting.

The story is told from the point of view of Dana, an educated black woman from California in 1976. She finds herself being mysteriously transported back in time, to 1815, where she saves a little boy from drowning. Over and over again, as the boy's life is in danger, he "calls" her back to him, for longer and longer periods of time as he grows up. At first, the two have a certain understanding, but as he grows into his role as white southern plantation (and slave) owner, he gets increasingly dangerous. He is erractic and unpredictable, but Dana is stuck with him. The story explores the factors keeping not only Dana, but all slaves of the period, in bondage, and how they rationalize their submission to themselves and each other.

One thing I love about living right next to the District is that I can read on my way to work. It only gets tricky when I nearly miss my stop.

I got all emotional at the end of this one, which I hadn't expected. Then I remembered that I hadn't read this one as recently as the others in the series. My Spanish copy of Book 6 went missing when I'd only read half, so it's been several years since I read the final chapters. The corpses under water were suitably creepy, but I do wonder if JK conciously stole them from Tolkein. I also wonder why she didn't just call them "zombies." English (by way of African languages) has a perfectly good word for reanimated corpses, so why make up a new one? Maybe because "real" zombies operate of their own "free will," so to speak, while these were totally under Voldemorts control?

Harry irritated me for almost half of this book. I can understand why, in order to give him more dramatic growth, JK needed him to stay a bit immature here, but holy cow is he full of himself sometimes. He really needs the learn the hard way in Book 7 that he's just not always right about lots of things, before he stops and listens to people. Honestly, I skimmed over most of the "stalking Draco" parts, because it just gets so old. At this point in re-reading the series, if he and Draco aren't having sex, I don't really care to read about the obsession.

The Ron/Hermione romance works perfectly here. Hermione annoys me sometimes in the same way Harry does - she just won't let things go, but she and Ron work so well together. Their relationship is far from perfect, but the portrayal is. They see the worst in each other, and still love and forgive in the end. Harry/Ginny, on the other hand... well, it works okay here. She's a great, strong character, and I love reading her. Which is one reason I don't see her and Harry working long term. She just deserves better. She hated it when Dean kept trying to help her, which is exactly what Harry does all the time - he's constantly trying to protect her, "forbidding" her from getting involved. She would never stand for all that for long.

At first I couldn't figure out why Dumbledore didn't tell anyone else why he trusted Snape, or at least give them a clue as to what the two of them had worked out. But of course, if any of them were captured, the whole ruse would be up, and Snape's purpose blown. For a moment, I almost feel sorry for Snape. Then I remember that he's an asshole.

I got these two audiobooks for my drive back from Georgia end of September. They killed about half of the trip.

#20: Doctor Who: The Stone Rose by Jacqueline Rayner Narrated by David Tennant

This book had the highest ratings on the book-rating websites I found. It was pretty good, if not stellar (stellar wasn't what I needed, anyway). The Doctor and Rose go back to the Roman Empire after finding a statue of her in the British Museum. There are some interesting twists, a pleasantly predictable resolution, and a touch of humor. A few parts were out of character, but most where spot-on, and David Tennant knocked the voices out of the park.

#21: Doctor Who: The Feast of the Drowned by Stephen ColeAlso narrated by David Tennant

Even if this book got lower marks on the websites I saw, I actually liked it better. There was more suspense and I really couldn't figure how they'd get out. Some aliens living in the oceans have taken over the bodies of drowned(?) people, and aim to take over even more. They take over Rose (surprise, surprise) but the Doctor doesn't save her - she saves everyone else, with some group help.

Really, I'd listen to David Tennant narrate most anything. It looks like he narrates a bunch of audiobooks related to How to Train Your Dragon. I'll have to get some of those if I ever drive the kids around.

1. What is your favorite sport to watch?

I like a few, and none of them enough to pay much money for. I like a number of Olympic events, but I like the Olympics itself more (I'm a sap for it). I love women's soccer, but mostly for the women. Oh, and ice hockey. And speed skating.

2. What is your favorite sport to play?

Hockey. It was the only sport I was ever any good at, and the boys actually wanted me on their team. I play left-handed, which comes in handy. Stupid PMS splitting up the teams... *grumbles*

3. Favorite sports team?

Nah. Don't have one. But, I'm not generally any kind of fan of the teams native to wherever I'm living.

4. Favorite sports player?

Abby Wambach. She's phenomenal as a player, but that's not the big reason. I like her attitude and her style.

5. Why do you enjoy watching/playing your favorite sport?

I like watching sports that flow, or have some sort of grace about them. I don't like football, but oddly, I don't like basketball, either. I don't know; some sports just feel better than others do.

Not until after I'd finished this book, and looked to see which one came next in the series, did I realize that I'd actually missed a few books already. It really didn't impact the enjoyability at all. Here, a young sourcerer, under the control of his father (who lives in his magical staff), seeks to control/distroy the world. As a... punishment for wizardry...? Or something. Anyway, evil wizard dad forced the powerful boy to do terrible things, and our favorite Discworld residents get swept up in it all. Rincewind is his usual self, a hopeless coward until he stops being one, turning into even something of a hero, which was fun, if out of character. Death has a very small part, but well done to let the reader in on what's happening while Rincewind is in the dark. The poor Luggage is more abused than anything here. As much as the Luggage is a homicidal maniac, it never goes after anyone who's NOT a threat - so it's really more like a short-tempered Rottweiler, I think. Conina was badass until, for some reason I must have missed, decided to self-identify as a hair-dresser. Maybe she always did? This book, my favorite character is the librarian, especially when he sounds the alarm for the books to get themselves out, and sets about mending the ones who get hurt in the process.

Managed to have not read this yet, so I picked it up at Barnes and Noble with the Jane Austen books in June. It was interesting, to say the least, but that's what I'd expected. The only thing I'd expected but didn't find what more of a linear, logical plot. But, I mean, come on. It's Wonderland. No big surprise there. The language is wonderful, of course, and made me think more of how much the turns of phrase and funny little quirks have become part of our literary discourse. Otherwise, I thought Alice was a brat without much in the way of cognitive faculty. She interupts all the time and assumes that everyone and everything in Wonderland should operate according to her wishes. If someone is offended (as in the mouse, when she keeps talking about her cat), it becomes their problem, not Alice's, even though she's the one who wouldn't stop to consider their feelings.