Tattoo Girl

Yesterday, my good friend and I went to see a play produced by the university's Department of Theatre and Dance. The play was entitled Tattoo Girl, written by Naomi Iizuka. And honestly, this is one of the best plays that I have ever seen.

The play was produced in the Blac Box Theatre. This is a theatre in the university that is rather flexible in design, and this is the third play that I have seen in this venue, the previous ones being Spring Awakening and The Shape of Things. And I suppose third time's the charm.

This is a surreal comedy, blending together ideas from the ancient martyr Perpetua, a soldier in the early 20th century, and the gymnast Nadia Comaneci. The stories in this play flow in very different directions, and the storylines are just surreal and non-linear. This play takes a different mind to entertain. While watching this play, I was laughing hard and thinking all the time that this must be stream of consciousness, at least in the theatre mode. I could totally see this play as being a depiction of how my mind would work perhaps.

Anyway, I liked the way the Theatre Department produced this play. The actors were always in their character, and as always, I am impressed at the quality of their performances. Just ten people playing many different characters, even including a talking dog, was just awesome. I love how they nailed the various accents required in the play, from Romanian to French to whatever the accent Marshal Foch had to have, although it seemed he was German rather than French given the accent that he had.

So, overall, I had fun on a quiet Friday night. While the rest of the world is partying in rather bizarre costumes, I had fun in my own way.



(Writing on the Ceiling, from my Sackler and Freer Collection Series)

Book Review: My Name is Red by Orhan Pamuk

This is a complicated read. It took me a month to read this, which was somewhat unexpected. So, what is this book about?

My Name is Red is a story about a murder, set in 1600 in Istanbul. An illustrator is found murdered, and the book weaves a story where the reader is kept guessing as to the identity of the murderer. Along with it is woven a story of love and sex, and family relations in the Islamic world.

The book is written in a post-modern style, and after reading this, I understand why the author garnered a Nobel Prize for this book. Every chapter has a different narrator, so the story is told through various points of view. Even atypical narrators are utilized in this story, including a gold coin, a corpse, a picture of a horse, and so on. With that I am impressed with the creativity of the author.

However, it took me a long time before I grew to like this book. Several factors came into play, for this to be the case. First of all, I am not at all familiar with the cultural references that the book has with respect to Istanbul and the Islamic World in the Middle Ages. The fact that there are several narrators also made things complicated, since I had a little bit of difficulty keeping track of who was who in the stream of events. It was after I finished half of the book that I started liking this novel, when the possible murderers were narrowed down to three.

No matter how I do not like the story, however, praise should be given to the structure. This is not just a simple airport novel. This is literature. I had to make full use of my brain when I was reading this. This was no simple read, and it required me to analyze and exercise some critical thinking in order to understand this novel.

All in all, I believe this is a very mature novel. People who only want some swooning mystery or romance will not find this enjoyable. Only people who want something that stimulates the brain will find this a great read. If you're one of those people, then by all means pick this book up.

See my other book reviews here.



(Women Statues, from my Sackler and Freer Collection Series)

Feel Good

Earlier today I had a conversation with a former student. And that was just a feel good moment.

See, this former student of mine took my 100-level class two years ago. It was a class that basically introduced the different languages that are found around the world, and how they are similar and different when it comes to structure. Basically, this was a class that a trivia person would dig.

So, I bumped into this former student of mine, and he told me that he is now a minor in Linguistics, and that it was after taking my class that he got interested in the whole field and decided to do a minor in it. Wow. I didn't realize that I can have an effect in other people too.

See, the thing is, I have taught this class for about three times now. He happened to have been a student when I taught it for the third time. I have this idea that I basically turned away a lot of people when I taught it the very first time. I looked back and saw my syllabus for that class, and I was so over the top. I required tons of stuff, considering this was a 100-level class. So when I got to teach it again, I revised a lot of stuff, and so when I taught it the third time, I myself enjoyed it.

So there, I saw people who were majors in Linguistics when I taught the class the very first time, but ceased to be a major, perhaps due to me, but now I learned that I am also capable of the other way, of inspiring people to take up a field simply because they found my class interesting.

I felt good.



(Fertile Woman, from my Sackler and Freer Collection Series)

Categorical Likes and Dislikes

When you like a song, do you like the song because you like the singer? Because you like what the song is about? The voice quality? The whole band? Same thing when you dislike a song. Do you not like the song because it is a certain band that is singing it, or because of the voice quality, or because of the topic of the song?

The thing is, I have a few bands that I like most, if not all of their songs. Bands like The Cranberries, Chevelle, 30 Seconds to Mars, Garbage, Smashing Pumpkins, and so on.

My good friend on the other hand dislikes several acts categorically, and by this, she means that she dislikes whatever song these acts sing, such as Lady Gaga and Katy Perry.

Which is fine, I don't have a problem with that. The thing that we disagree however is whether one can categorically like or dislike a singer. My friend believes that one categorically dislike songs by virtue of who sings it, but one cannot categorically like a song just because a certain singer sings it. I on the other hand believe that it is both possible to categorically like or dislike a song based on who is singing it.

The thing is, one argument for being able to categorically disliking a song due to the singer is that if one really dislikes the way a certain singer sings, then no matter what song the singer sings, then it will turn out bad. The content of the song is variable, but the quality of the singer's voice and style is assumed to be constant in this view. Now, according to this view, the reason why it is not possible to categorically like a song due to the singer is that one is never sure what the content of the song is going to be. Thus, if there is a very crappy song by its content, no matter how good it is sung by the singer, it will still be disliked.

I believe otherwise. For me, everything is variable. Voice quality is variable, so is style and content. However, my model is a statistically sound model, by integrating previous data points and then using these data points as predictors of whether future songs from this singer will be liked or disliked.

Case in point: I like the band Chevelle a lot. I discovered their music back in 2001, while watching a show in MTV where they were featuring rock music for the whole hour. I like their extraordinary use of guitar, and the way Pete Loeffler sings. I have a copy of all their albums. And so based on the impression that I get from their songs, chances are, if they come up with a new album, I will also like them. See, what I am doing is making a predictive and probabilistic model of whether I would like a song or not. I have always liked the voice quality of Pete Loeffler, not as a stipulation, but based on evaluating every song I have heard that is sung by him. I always liked the topic of their songs, again, not as a stipulation, but by evaluating the topic every time a Chevelle song would play. And thus, these factors all increase the probability that whenever I hear another Chevelle song, I would like them. Thus, I can confidently say that statistically speaking, I can like a Chevelle song, whatever the song may be. I can therefore claim that I can categorically like Chevelle music.

Let's take another example: Colbie Caillat. This is a singer that I feel ambivalent about. She has two songs that I didn't like: the one that talks about toes and picking your nose (aka Bubbly), and another one that featured a very repetitive word, "realize" (which is titled the same way). I hated the first song for being silly, and I hated the second song for using that word over and over again. However, I saw a video of her singing a rendition of the song Don't Cha by the Pussycat Dolls. This is a song that I didn't like at all, but when Caillat sang it, it was transformed into this very beautiful song. Another song that I liked that Caillat sang was Fallin' For You. It is being played in the radio nowadays.

So, what is Colbie Caillat's track record when it comes to me liking her? Well, sometimes I like her, sometimes I don't. So statistically speaking, liking her is not a reliable phenomenon. Thus, I cannot say that I can categorically like Colbie Caillat's music.

So, what do you think? Can you categorically like or dislike music?



(Dramatic Mask, from my Sackler and Freer Collection Series)

Comparing Two Means

So I finally got to make SPSS to work. Well, not really, but I was able to do it in a round-about way.

The thing is, the experiment that I am currently running and is about to finish involves asking people about their grammaticality judgments. I presented them with sentences that are manipulated using various factors, and I ask them whether they think it is a good sentence or not. Of course, I do not directly ask them, instead, I use a technique called magnitude estimation. This requires people to assign numbers to sentences, and the numbers reflect how good or how bad they think the sentences are.

Now there are a few assumptions that this paradigm makes. This assumes that grammaticality is not a binary function. It is not the case that the goodness or badness of a sentence can be a yes or no response. Instead, it takes the view that grammaticality is a graded variable. By using numbers (and therefore a scalar variable), one can say that one sentence is good, another sentence is slightly bad, and another one be very bad. It is not always the case that sentences are bad just because they violate some prescriptive assumption.

Anyway, the experimental design that I made involved four different types of filler items, and each of these fillers had a good version and a bad version. Each of these four filler types correspond to different syntactic constructions. The sentences were either good or bad because they would be violating some syntactic constraint, for example, subject-verb agreement or number agreement. These two agreement types are uncontroversial in the literature: if there is a disagreement, then the sentence becomes wrong.

Now, why do I have these fillers? Well, they serve a purpose. One purpose is that it hides as much as it can the real items in the experiment. The thing is, if the person realizes that there is a pattern in the items, then one can possibly strategize in one's responses and so the response isn't automatic anymore: the response isn't done on the fly. So there are fillers that are designed to distract the participant from finding out which items are the real test items.

Another purpose of the fillers that I had was to make sure that people are paying attention. The thing is, they are being paid a small amount of money in the experiment, and they might as well come in with a could-care-less attitude and then just plug in random numbers without even thinking about the directions. Thus, if they respond to the filler items the same way, regardless if they were good or bad fillers, then that means that they were not paying attention to the task.

So, I had to compare the means of the good and bad fillers. I had to conduct four different T-tests for every participant, since there are four filler types. If they come out as significant in at least 3 out of 4 filler types, then I will retain the participant. If they only come out as significant in just 2 types or less, then I will drop the participant and discard the data garnered from that participant. That is a way in checking whether the participant is actually doing what you want them to do or not.

So yeah, comparing the means involves executing T-tests, but last weekend, I was not able to make the software package to read my data. Weird. But now, I got help from someone, and I was able to make it work. Due to that, we're dropping a few people from the study, about 4, since they didn't show evidence that they were actually paying attention to the task.



(Warrior with Wooden Penis, from my Sackler and Freer Collection Series)

Evening in Beirut

Tonight will be one of the rare times in which I will exhibit my hopefully still-working cooking skills to others. The only other time I have done this so far is when the department has its annual welcome party, and everyone is encouraged to bring a dish to share. Every time for the past five years, someone has asked me for a recipe of the dish that I have made for the occasion.

Anyway, tonight, I am co-hosting a Middle-Eastern dinner party with a friend. She has the kasbah, I have the cooking skills. And we invited a few of our close friends for the occasion.

So, what's in store for the night? I am making hummus with spinach, which includes tahini, garlic, kosher salt, olive oil, and lemon juice. This will be served beforehand, with Middle-Eastern pita breads to accompany it. The main dish would be a tagine of chicken with chickpeas and mint. This involves simmering the chicken in a pot full of exotic spices such as cumin, turmeric, coriander, and cinnamon. Fresh mint would provide the contrast needed from the spices. This is served with couscous with dried apricots and coriander seeds.

Now the dessert, well, I am not too good when it comes to making desserts. So I will let my co-host plan that. After all, she's better in baking and in desserts in general than me.

What else? I have a few CDs of Middle Eastern electronica, featuring bands from underground clubs in Beirut, Paris, Montpellier, Marrakesh, and so on. This should be fun. The only thing missing are the belly dancers.



(African Shield, from my Sackler and Freer Collection Series)

Occupied

This week has been very hectic, and it seems that I have had stuff to do for every hour or minute of it.

Anyway, in the realm of my dissertation, I have been told by my adviser to think about the deep shit. What this meant was that I had to step back a little and think about the most basic of the basic principles when it comes to what I am working on. I have been working on discourse coherence, and so I had to think what exactly are the basic mechanisms that I need for this to happen. Until now, I have been thinking about the architecture of the models that I am proposing, and so I had to step back and see the bigger and more basic picture.

I also had meetings every day with people relevant to my dissertation. It's getting hectic than ever. I met with my adviser on Monday, and I met with another professor in the department on Tuesday. On Wednesday, I met with my adviser and this other professor jointly. Today was supposed to be a meeting with another member of my committee from the Psychology Department, but she canceled at the last minute due to student obligations, so we are moving it to Tuesday. And tomorrow, I meet with my adviser again, at 8:00 AM.

My blackboard in my office is full of my diagrams contrasting the opposing views that my dissertation is tackling. Now the critical point in my dissertation progress is actually coming up with a set of experiments that would contrast and test these two opposing views.

I have also been conducting tons of experimental sessions with human participants lately. I guess we just have had good fortune when it comes to recruitment this time around. This afternoon, I will be seeing five people, which brings us closer to our cap for this experiment. Then after this, I will have to do the statistics and perform some tests, and see whether our hypotheses are true or not. This means that I need to spend some time with my best friend, none other than SPSS. Once this current experiment comes to a close, there is another experiment that I will be running, but for a different project with different collaborators. Hopefully, I will get a few publications for this year and the next.

This coming Saturday, my good friend and I are hosting a few friends for an Arabian-inspired dinner. We figured that it would be a good way to unwind, by relaxing and spending a good time with some friends from school, and sharing dinner with them. My friend will be opening her kasbah for us, while I will be in charge of the kitchen. I am planning a tagine of chicken with spices and fresh mint, coupled with some couscous with dried apricot. Before that, we'll have two types of hummus accompanied by good Middle Eastern bread. Regarding the dessert, I don't really have a good expertise when it comes to dessert, so I will leave that to my sidekick. I also have some good Middle Eastern music to accompany the whole evening.

So yeah, I have been occupied lately and therefore aren't prolific with my blogging as I used to. Anyway, before I close this post, I would like to point out the new photo series I have. The pictures I have been showing here since last Friday were taken during my December 2007 visit to Washington DC, and two museums that I really enjoyed were the Sackler and Freer Museums, which are part of the Smithsonian Museums in the National Mall.



(Mask, from my Sackler and Freer Collection Series)

Theft in the Office

My office was the scene of a theft this past weekend. I lost some cash.

So, here's the back story to it. I have a small amount of cash, which is not mine. This is actually the department's money that I have in small amounts at a time so that I can pay participants whenever they come in for an experiment. It is usually kept in an envelope hidden from view, and most of the time, the amount doesn't go over 50 USD.

Anyway, last Thursday, I conducted my last experiment for the week, and I didn't have anybody scheduled for Friday. I remember having about 25 USD in the envelope, since I asked the principal investigator for more money because I knew that 25 USD would not suffice for the participants I have for this week. I did not touch the envelope at all last Friday since there weren't any participants, and it wasn't until Saturday that I found out the missing 25 USD.

Saturday afternoon, I wanted to listen to music without disturbing my office mate, so I opened the drawer where the envelope was hidden, in order to get my headphones. But alas, the envelope was still there, albeit moved, and the money was missing.

I have my suspicions. It must be one of the people who have key access to the office. There are three occupants in the office, and I have no reason to suspect my office mates, so there can only be one other suspicion, the cleaners. They have master keys to all offices since they need to get in in order to clean the place.

Now the bizarre thing is, I usually leave my laptop in the office, and yet that wasn't taken. I have a USB-attachable mouse and yet it was still there. Of course, they took the cash because cash is untraceable. But the thing is, I always put the garbage can outside of the office so the cleaners will have no reason to get inside, and yet someone got inside. And I find it interesting that they went through the drawers to find an envelope of money. If they found the money in the drawer, then it is safe to assume that they went through the other drawers too and checked what must be inside.

The thing I hate is that I am forced to suspect the cleaners. I know that it is in a certain level, wrong to just typify people of a certain class, such as the working class, and claim that they are good for nothing. I don't want that to happen. And yet, instances like these force me to make these stereotypes. I know that there are honest people out there, even in the working class, but being the pessimist that I am, what would I think?

Anyway, I have changed my modus operandi. I am making things more secure, so hopefully things like this petty theft doesn't happen again.



(African Collection, from my Sackler and Freer Collection Series)

Lepidoptera

What does one do when one's pituitary gland and hypothalamus produces opioid polypeptide compounds? Is this what one gets when one decides to have a paradigm shift? Lepidopterae in ventris?



(Interesting Statues, from my Sackler and Freer Collection Series)

Linguistic Factoid No. 15: Language Families

There are about 6,000 languages around the world. Some of these are spoken by a huge amount of people, while some of these are spoken by just a small handful of people that are predicted to die within the next century. These languages are in a way related to each other, and if one had the time and effort, then one can simply sit down and figure out how languages relate to each other and which languages are close to each other or not.

Once upon a time, a linguist realized that English and Sanskrit were very much related. There were similar words across the two languages, and upon further scrutiny, it was found that English and Sanskrit are related. Thus, the world realized that there is one such language family called Indo-European. This language family extends from the Celtic languages in Ireland and Great Britain to the languages found in the Indian sub-continent.

How does one establish a language family? Well, people can examine how similar or different each languages' vocabulary is. People can examine a core vocabulary and see how much they vary. The words in this core vocabulary should be words that are thought to be highly resistant to borrowing, such as kin terms and body parts. One can also examine the syntax or word order of the languages. The more similar things are, the easier it is for people to establish the existence of a common language family across the languages.

So, what is the largest language family? Well, there is this language family called Niger-Congo, found in sub-Saharan Africa. This language family contains about 1,400 languages, extending from Senegal to South Africa. The second-largest language family is the Austronesian language family, which is posited to have originated in the island of Taiwan, and is now found along a wide swath of area, from Madagascar in the Indian Ocean to Easter Island in the South Pacific. There are 1,200 languages in this family, but the area coverage is very large.

Of course, there are language families that are smaller than these two. And there are also languages that do not belong to any language family. Theorists have claimed that Japanese is one such language, but this is not firmly established yet. Other languages, such as Basque (found in Spain and France) and Burushaski (found in Pakistan) are clearer to be language isolates, since they are clearly very unrelated to the languages that surround them.



(Atrium, from my Sackler and Freer Collection Series)

1000 Posts

Wow. I never knew that I now have more than 1000 posts here. I looked at my Control Panel in this blog, and it told me that I already have 1016 posts that are published. Granted, some of these posts are placeholders that serve as links for other posts, such as the ones that you see on the side, but still, I didn't realize that I now have more than 1000 posts!

This blog has accompanied me through my journey in graduate school. I started this blog when I was about to depart Manila and move to Buffalo back in July of 2005. I remember being excited, blogging about trip-planning, about how I was preparing for the trip and the whole enchilada, about how I was packing, finalizing my paperwork, weighing which items I would be bringing and which I would leave in the Philippines. I remember blogging about my ride, and about how life as a graduate student turned out to be. I blogged about my classes, my papers, my projects, my ups and downs in graduate school.

I also blogged about vacations and travel, which is a passion that I somehow developed over time. I blogged about places that I have been to, places that I have visited, places that I have given talks in, places that I have taken pictures of.

I also blogged about roommates and their good and bad traits, how they never clean, how they act like a pig, how they have very long hair that it ruined my vacuum cleaner, how they never seemed to have a sense of responsibility, and how my current roommates seem to be the best ones so far that I seem to be the messiest in the house.

I also blogged about certain dilemmas that I faced, how I finally learned how to use my own head and think for myself, how I got so close to the edge of snapping and getting a nervous breakdown, how I abandoned belief in religion since it doesn't make sense, how the desire to be pragmatic and practical made me undergo a paradigm shift and change my outlook in life altogether, and due to this I lost friends and gained some.

So, 4 and a half years and 1000 posts later, where do I find myself? I am still here, near the end of the graduate career that I currently am treading, and a year and a half away from graduation. I am finished with my coursework, and mostly am busy with research on my own projects and with projects that I am collaborating with other people. I just came out of my adviser's office this afternoon, with a happy face, since it seems that I have convinced him that my story makes sense and that it is worth pursuing, and that I am not talking shit. That is always a good thing: one should be able to convince one's adviser that one is not insane.

Some people commented that I am melancholy at times. I suppose this is due to the fact that I still have no clear income source after this semester, at this point. I have been job-hunting here and there, and so far there are denials. I seem to be over-qualified at most spots that I apply for. Either I am over-qualified for a position because all they want is a person with simply a bachelor's degree, or I am under-qualified since the position requires a PhD and I don't have it yet. Too bad there aren't a lot of happy medium positions lying around. Life sucks, I realize that. But that is also reality, and there is nothing I can do about it. Hopefully, there is something good that comes my way.

Anyway, if I always dwell on these depressing thoughts, I will just be depressed. That's why I am celebrating with the passage of my 1000th post. For that, I am happy. There's always tomorrow, and with tomorrow are surprises. Who knows, that surprise might be a good one.



(Tall Pillars, from my Lafayette Square Series)

October Storm...

Three years ago, I had one of the weirdest weather-related surprises of my life. Back in 2006, the weather gave Buffalo and the rest of Western New York a surprise that hasn't been seen before, and that was the October Storm.

Upon looking at the blog posts that I did that time, I find that my reactions to the whole event turned from happy to disappointed. The storm began around the afternoon of Thursday, October 12. It was the first snow of the season. I even blogged about the event, and took pictures of it here, about how I was so excited that it was the first snow for the year. I took my camera out of my office cabinet and took some shots. I also had a Kuwaiti friend who was seeing snow for the first time.

But the snow didn't stop. And the snow was wet and heavy, and the trees still had leaves in it. Thus, this created a bad combination resulting in tree branches falling all over the place, and breaking power lines as a consequence. Two days later, I found myself camping in my office since my house had no power and heat, which I blogged here.

Finally, I got help from my Kuwaiti friend, by letting me crash in his place. I spent a total of five nights in different places: the first two nights without power and heat spent at a classmate's house in the same neighborhood, then one night camping in my office, and two nights in my Kuwaiti friend's place who was fortunate to not lose the power at all. Finally, after four days of no power, my house got power again, and I blogged about it here.

So yeah, good thing that today doesn't seem to be a repeat performance of what 2006 was. But that event was weird enough that we saw ourselves in CNN.



(Pennsylvania Avenue, from my Lafayette Square Series)

If the Length of a Dissertation Means Something...

...then it is worth mentioning that John Forbes Nash, Jr., the person who is known for game theory, wrote a dissertation that was 32 pages long.

Yes, thirty-two pages long. Thirty-two freaking pages long!

In fact, if you want to see a copy of the dissertation, you can go to this webpage and find a PDF copy of his dissertation. It was type-written, has plenty of hand-written mathematical formulae, has two (yes, TWO!) citations, one of them being himself, and a short acknowledgment.

So, who is John Forbes Nash? If one watched the movie A Beautiful Mind, then one would know who this person is. He won the Nobel Prize in Economics back in 1994. He also is diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia.

I never knew that a dissertation could be this short. At least in my field, psycholinguists typically write shorter dissertations than say, fieldwork-based linguists. So I expect my dissertation to be around the 150-250 page range. A fieldwork-based linguist would probably write around 600-700 pages.

If the length of one's dissertation signifies the amount of time that a person becomes insane, then indeed John Forbes Nash didn't have much time. That also means that I can be insane in the near future too. That also means that fieldworkers are the least insane linguists around. Hmmm, that hypothesis might be problematic.



(Treasury Department, from my Lafayette Square Series)

Animalia in New England

For our last day, we decided to visit the New England Aquarium. The last time I have been to an aquarium was back in 1997, when we visited the Kaiyuukan in Osaka. So this time, I am quite excited.

Oh, and what fun seeing penguins, anaconda, weird fish, sharks, turtles, and other swimming animalia is. I took plenty of pictures, and it's a good thing that my camera could handle the light situation. I was most impressed with the jellies, which were so surreal and bizarre.

After visiting the aquarium, we decided to walk the waterfront, where Boston's glitterati play. Then, we headed back to Quincy Market to get some souvenirs.

Then, the inevitable happened. We realized that most, if not all of the sites in Boston that we wanted to visit were already visited, and there wasn't anything else to visit. Yeah, it was about 3:30 PM, and we were in the city with nothing else to do. It's already too late to say for example, take a day trip to Salem or something similar, so we just decided to kick back and watch a movie. We ended up watching The Invention of Lying, which was a great satire movie.

After the movie, we headed to a Vietnamese joint, and got ourselves some pho. That was awesome. Good thing I had my fix of Vietnamese food here, since I don't have much chance of getting it in Buffalo. So yeah, I am ready to go back.

Tomorrow, all I need to do is pack. I have a flight in the afternoon, and then the day after, it's back to the regular routine again.



(The White House, from my Lafayette Square Series)

Back Bay and MIT

The third full day in Boston was spent wandering in Back Bay. This is a neighborhood of Boston that is rather ritzy and high-class. Upon getting there, I saw the brownstones and it reminded me of Georgetown in Washington DC. The buildings were narrow yet three-stories high, and the cars were definitely flashy. Only in Boston have I seen a Maserati.

We started by walking through Boston's Public Gardens, and finding the three famous statues in the park: the Ether Monument, the Duckling Statue, and the George Washington Statue. Then, we proceeded Commonwealth Avenue and strolled through it, taking photographs of various influential people.

Then we also strolled the southern side of that street, and visited the Reflecting Pool and gawked at the skyscrapers. Afterward, we crossed the Charles River and walked to Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and entered the heavyweight campus. I took photos of Frank Gehry's Stata Center. That was a weird yet cool building.

For dinner, we went to the waterfront, where we visited the Legal Seafoods restaurant. Mom ordered lobster, while I had my fix of raw oysters. I love this town, very close to the ocean, and seafood that is fresh and tasty is readily available. Too bad we don't get the same quality seafood in the third coast.

So we still have one full day here in Boston. That will be another adventure on its own.



(La Casa Blanca, from my Lafayette Square Series)

Fine Art and Harvard Yard

So, the second full day in Boston was rain. Rain, and lots of it. So, in order to avoid the torrents, we decided to head to the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston and get our fix of "culture" as they say it (note the scare quotes).

The place is huge, but there were plenty of interesting paintings and sculpture that one can see. I especially liked the Mediterranean sculpture, such as the ones from ancient Egypt, Greece, and Rome. I also liked the huge paintings of the ancient masters, unfortunately, they display it so high up the wall that I cannot photograph them properly.

After spending a few hours in the museum, I separated from my folks and went ahead to Massachusetts General Hospital to meet a friend. We then went to Harvard University and walked around the place. I loved the campus: it is very old, very brick, and very red. I took pictures of the whole campus, and went ahead daydreaming what it would be like to reside, study, or work inside one of those buildings.

Anyway, after that, my friend and I went out to eat, by strolling over to the North End. This is the Italian enclave of Boston, and we went to this pizza place where for just 20 bucks, we got a large pizza with two drinks. Those were fun times.

So yeah, the rain didn't hold us back. It was fun, and hopefully the fun goes on tomorrow.



(Off-Limits Building, from my Lafayette Square Series)

The Freedom Trail

So the first full day of my tour of Boston was spent walking the Freedom Trail. The Freedom Trail is a path that cuts through downtown Boston, showcasing 16 historical sites. We started from the Boston Common and ended at the USS Constitution (the Bunker Hill Monument was already closed by the time we were finished with the battleship).

We began in the Boston Common, where we saw several monuments. Then, we visited the Granary Burying Ground, the first of the three cemeteries that we visited today. We also entered the Massachusetts State House, and toured the inside. The inside was very ornate, and I took plenty of pictures.

King's Chapel and the Burying Ground was also visited, the second cemetery. Then come several small sites, like the Ben Franklin statue and the Old City Hall, Old Corner Bookstore and Old South Meeting House. Unfortunately, Faneuil Hall was closed for renovations.

We had lunch in Quincy Market, which is this amazing set of food from various locations. Of course, I had my fix of seafood with fried oysters on a roll. Boy I love oysters.

After that, we continued on to Paul Revere House, and saw the oldest house in Boston. Old North Church was next, and so was the Copp's Hill Burying Ground, the third and final cemetery in the trail. Finally, we crossed the bridge to Charlestown (a neighborhood of Boston) and visited the USS Constitution, the oldest battleship that is still afloat.

Dinner was in this very swanky Moroccan restaurant called Tangierino. Boy, this is one swanky place. I had a great tagine of eggplant and goat cheese as an appetizer, and my lamb shank was so awesome it melted in my teeth. I didn't get wine, but I got a cocktail instead, which made me tipsy somehow. It was a little on the high end (our bill for three people went a little over 200 USD, with each one having an appetizer and a main course, plus a bottle of wine and a cocktail, a dessert, and tea and coffee), but it is one great place to impress a boyfriend/girlfriend/partner/husband/wife. If you are in town and want to splurge a little, go for it. Just bring a flashlight if you are not good in the eyes.

After that, and the alcohol in my system, we headed back to the hotel. Day One is now over. The next day will have its own adventure.



(Interior with Plant, from my Lafayette Square Series)

Raw Fish and Sake

Ah, Boston. Boston is nice. Immediately after getting out of Boston's South Station and stepping out of the Amtrak train, I saw the city, the buildings, and fell in love with it. Compared to New York City, this is my type of town.

Why? Because there aren't a lot of people, because the streets are clean, because the ratio of people and buildings is optimal. The city is so clean, and I do not feel like an ant in the middle of an urban forest.

Anyway, after finding our hotel, and dropping off our stuff, we decided to go to a Japanese restaurant. I haven't been to a great Japanese restaurant in quite a while, mainly because I know what real and good Japanese food is, and I am afraid that I would just be discontent.

But, the thing is, Boston is right at the sea, right in front of the Atlantic Ocean. They must have good seafood here. So, my parents and I decided to give it a try. And sure enough, the sushi and the sashimi was great. The fish was raw, and fresh. It melted in my mouth. The eel was delicate that it just vaporized inside my mouth. The tuna was supple, and the other fish was superb. I am glad that I got my fix of raw fish. Now I can come back to Buffalo.

Aside from that, I got a sake sampler. I had four shots of four different types of sake. They were warming my body, and sure enough, I was a little tipsy at the end of the night. Oh well, yes, I am a lightweight.

So, starting tomorrow, I will be combing the streets and using my camera. There's new material for another photo series!



(Salon Interior, from my Lafayette Square Series)

Book Review: Blindness by José Saramago

Wow. Wow. For the third time, wow. I did not imagine that this novel would be a very powerful read. I discovered Saramago last year, when I read The Cave, and earlier this year, I read his newest translated novel, Death with Interruptions. And this time, I decided that I would pick up a third novel from this Nobel Prize winner, and I settled on Blindness.

Let me begin by describing the plot first. A country’s population suddenly becomes infected with an epidemic of white blindness. This is opposite to regular blindness, where the blind person sees instead of pitch black, an expanse of milky sea. Everything the blind person can see is white, and not only that, it is contagious.

Saramago begins by narrating how several people become blind: the first man to be blind became blind while driving a car, and while waiting for the light to turn green, he becomes blind in his car; a thief helps him to get home and steals his car, only to become blind later on; a hooker becomes blind while having sex with a man in a hotel; an opthalmologist becomes blind after diagnosing another person afflicted with white blindness; and so on. All in all, a group of people are interred in an abandoned mental asylum, initiated by the government who intended to prevent the infection of the whole population. Thus, within this confined space, human morality disappears. The saying homo homini lupus becomes true in every respect. Everyone becomes blind, so even basic human functions halts to a stop. Bodily actions such as eating and defecating become very hard, and soon enough, the whole compound becomes an institution full of excreement, dead and decomposing people, and so on. Groups of blind people turn against other groups of blind people, hoarding the food supplies in exchange for payment, such as jewelries and valuables, sex from the women, and so on.

In the midst of this, one person leads a small group of people, namely, the opthalmologist’s wife, who, miraculously, was not afflicted by the white blindness. She pretends that she is blind, so she was taken to the mental asylum together with her husband. She guides her husband and the rest of the people to live as human as possible, given the conditions. Their ordeal is detailed in the first half of the book, until a fire erupts in the asylum, and the soldiers disappear. They escape, and then find the whole city destroyed, with blind people trying to adapt to the current situations. All in all, this novel is a very dystopian one, painting a horrific picture of how human nature disappears when one of the senses deprives the human race.

Saramago intended this to be an allegory, a parable of what might happen when the morality of people disappears, and the consequences that might happen because of that. As usual, Saramago is a very powerful read, requiring my whole brain to process it. It is a novel that made me think, elaborating the whole scene, allowing me to do inferences as to the situation. Written in the typical style that Saramago employs, the prose is written like a stream-of-consciousness style, with no regard for punctuation and standard rules of writing dialogue. Paragraphs can be pages and pages long, forcing me, the reader, to be engaged fully in the reading experience.

I have always liked the fact that Saramago takes a simple what if scenario and then develops the story from that question. In Death with Interruptions, he wrote a story of what would have happened if Death decided to take a vacation and actually gave people what they wanted: immortality. In this novel, he asked the question of what would happen if everyone suddenly became blind, with the exception of one person. I suppose what Saramago painted here is a very harrowing one, making me wonder whether I would really like to see what would actually happen if humans’ higher cognitive abilities were subtracted from the equation. It made me appreciate my cognitive abilities, the things that make me human, the traits that I have which separate me from lower-rank animals.

Overall, as usual with the other books of Saramago that I have read, this is one that I whole-heartedly recommend. I never was a big fan of dystopian movies, but with respect to literature, I embrace this genre. I have read 1984 by George Orwell years ago, and ever since, asking the what if question with respect to human nature is something that will never fail to make me think and reflect as to how I am human.

See my other book reviews here.



(Leafy Artwork, from my Lafayette Square Series)

Lying and Parenting

I came across this very interesting article from Live Science, reporting a research conducted by the University of Toronto. It seems that parents lie to their children surprisingly often, more often than we think they do.

So, what is the motive behind this parental behavior? Why do parents lie to their children? It seems that parents lie to their children in order to shape their emotions and behavior. Parents sometimes lie to their children to get the desired behavior, such as lying so that the child will not cry during a night out dinner, or even for protection, such as lying so that the child will not learn about the horrendous murder in the news.

But is this really beneficial? Granted, I am not a developmental psychologist, so this is just my opinion out here. But I would think that lying actually disrupts the learning mechanisms of the kid. If the parent lies by saying that a magical creature will be happy if the child ate his broccoli, then the child will form the wrong assumption of a non-existent cause and effect. I think it would be way better to expose children to truths in the very beginning.

I do understand that there are cases in which experience trumps learning. There may be times in which it is way practical to tell the child to just obey, since the parents know better. But children are not stupid. Children have fascinating brains too, and they have the amazing capability to learn quick. Parents may just be under-estimating the capacity of the child's brain for learning, to the point that they will lie more often than needed. Children can recognize patterns and rules, and they are not stupid as parents might think.



(Native American Hall 2, from my Lafayette Square Series)

The Motorcycle Diaries: A Review

Somehow writing a review of a movie I have seen recently seems to be a growing trend here in this blog. If I write more, then I will probably have a page where it is all linked to. In the meantime, I will leave it as is.

Anyway, the previous time I reviewed a film was because I was disturbed by it. This time, I am reviewing this film because I was impressed by it.

So, this film is a biopic about the travel that Ernesto 'Che' Guevara has undertaken across South America, together with his friend Alberto Granado. They traveled from Argentina, then crossed over to Chile, went north to Peru and visited the San Pablo leper colony, and then on to Venezuela. As they travel, Guevara meets poor folk, indigenous Inca people, revolutionary miners, and Communists. These collection of experiences shaped his thinking to become one of the most admired revolutionaries of the world.

So, instead of narrating what the film depicted (one can simply go to Wikipedia and find that out), I would rather write about what I found interesting in the movie. As I said before, I normally would like a movie if the movie makes me think. This is one such case.

Case in point: the gradual change in Guevara, starting from an upper-middle class medical student, ending in a revolutionary. The movie does not explicitly tell us how he changed, but the viewer can infer the changes while Guevara interacts with the natives along his trip. His interactions with the poor farmers whose lands were taken away by the ruling class; his observations with the segregation in the leper colony, where the doctors live on the northern side and the lepers live on the southern side; his conversations with the miners that cannot get work because they are communist; and his admiration with the lost civilization of the Inca, as he visited Machu Picchu. In the way, the movie gave me entrance to Guevara's brain, and that was a highlight of this film.

I am not saying that I agree with Guevara's political stance and philosophy. But, I can totally see why Guevara would opt to choose Communism as his flavor of politics. Personally, I think that Communism won't work, that the ideal of every person getting equal benefits and treatment will definitely fail because of the human tendency to be selfish and curious. However, given the circumstances that Guevara was in, I can definitely see that Communism was the logical choice for him. The idealist mind in him believed that Communism was the solution to the problems of the people around him. The pragmatist in me disagrees, however.

Aside from the political angle of the film, I also liked the travel angle of it. After all, I once fell in love with South America, and wish to visit it again sometime. The vast expansive scenery was amazing, and to top it all, I recognized a few places that I have been to, such as the scenes in Cuzco and Machu Picchu, when they showed the cathedrals in Cuzco and the Inca ruins in the middle of the mountains.

Overall, this is a movie that has engaged my brain. I am glad I saw it. And I recommend seeing it.



(Game Fish, from my Lafayette Square Series)

Boston

Augustana - Boston

In the light of the sun, is there anyone? Oh it has begun...
Oh dear you look so lost, eyes are red and tears are shed,
This world you must've crossed... you said...

You don't know me, you don't even care, oh yeah,
She said
You don't know me, and you don't wear my chains... oh yeah,

Essential yet appealed, carry all your thoughts across
An open field,
When flowers gaze at you... they're not the only ones who cry
When they see you
You said...

You don't know me, you don't even care, oh yeah,
She said
You don't know me, and you don't wear my chains... oh yeah,

She said I think I'll go to Boston...
I think I'll start a new life,
I think I'll start it over, where no one knows my name,
I'll get out of California, I'm tired of the weather,
I think I'll get a lover and fly em out to Spain...
I think I'll go to Boston,
I think that I'm just tired
I think I need a new town, to leave this all behind...
I think I need a sunrise, I'm tired of the sunset,
I hear it's nice in the Summer, some snow would be nice... oh yeah,

Boston... where no one knows my name... yeah
Where no one knows my name...
Where no one knows my name...
Yeah Boston...
Where no one knows my name.


If you want to see the video for this song, go here.



(Mansion Lobby, from my Lafayette Square Series)