rats!

Happy New Year, and welcome to the Year of the Rat! In celebration of this holiday, how could I not offer up to you a platter of rats? No, not to eat, silly. That would be gross. This is a generous helping of rat-themed¹ things for a festive ThThTh list.²

  • Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH, by Robert C. O’Brien. The Newbery Award winning children’s novel about a mother mouse and a colony of highly intelligent rats.
  • Templeton, the rat from E. B. White’s beloved book, Charlotte’s Web. Was voiced by Steve Buscemi in the 2006 movie based on the book.
  • I don’t give a rat’s ass. An idiom meaning “I don’t care,” akin to “I don’t give a flying fig.” One of those expressions that is always used with the negative. For example, one would not likely hear “I give a rat’s ass.” Or maybe one should. I could design a line of greeting cards, perhaps for Valentine’s Day: “I give a rat’s ass about you.”
  • ratty: An adjective to mean dirty, messy and/or worn out. Also a nickname for a cafeteria at my undergrad University. The Sharpe Refectory was long ago nicknamed the Sharpe Rat Factory, later shortened to The Ratty. The nickname was used so frequently that it was easy to forget that it wasn’t the cafeteria’s official name.
  • Ratatouille (2007) Pixar’s latest animated movie is about a young rat who loves to cook.

    • willard_movie.jpg

  • Willard (1971), and its sequel, Ben (1972). There was also a 2003 remake of Willard, starring the appropriately creepy Crispin Glover. These were movies about the friendship between a man (or boy) and some rats. (Oh, and the rats are vicious killers. Note that you can find these movies on imdb via the plot keywords “eaten alive by rats.”)
  • “You dirty rat!” a phrase popularly attributed to James Cagney, though apparently a misquote:

    It should be noted, however, that he never actually said, “You dirty rat!”, a popular phrase associated with him….The phrase actually originated in the 1932 film Taxi!, in which Cagney said, “Come out and take it, you dirty, yellow-bellied rat, or I’ll give it to you through the door!” often misquoted as “Come out, you dirty rat, or I’ll give it to you through the door!”

  • Rodents of Unusual Size (ROUS): Oversized rats (well, it’s not specified that they’re rats, but they look pretty rat-like in the movie) from the Princess Bride.

    • rats_of_hamelin.jpg

  • The Pied Piper of Hamelin. A legend, sometimes written as a fairy tale, about a man who freed a town of its rat infestation by playing his pipe to lure the rats to drown themselves in the river. When the town refused to pay the agreed upon fees, the Piper then lured away the town’s children.
  • The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents, by Terry Pratchett. A Discworld book for young adults about some rats (and a cat) who work a Pied Piper scam.
  • I Was a Rat, a children’s book by Philip Pullman (of The Golden Compass fame). About a boy who was once a rat. A bit of a fairy tale retelling from an unusual perspective.
  • “Adventures of the Rat Family,” a fairy tale by Jules Verne
  • Amy from Buffy the Vampire Slayer. A character who turned herself into a rat to escape being burned as a witch, but didn’t manage to turn herself back into a human afterwards. Was then kept in a cage as pet by Willow for several years. When she eventually returns to human state, says “I felt like I was in that cage for weeks.”
  • “I think I smell a rat,” a song by the White Stripes. For Amy (see above item) clips set to the song check out this YouTube video.)
  • A few more rat-related items include: mazes, the rat race, The Rat Pack, and pack rats. There was also the rat who ate the malt in “This is the house that Jack built”

    This is the rat,
    That ate the malt
    That lay in the house that Jack built.

rat_frenzy1.jpg

¹ YTSL mentions, though, that this can also be considered to be year of the mouse. All the more reason to get around to a mouse list some time soon.

² Last year, I gave a list of pigs for Year of the Pig.

family outing

As those of you who have not recently been in a coma, had memories erased during an alien abduction, or who have other reasons for not being aware of it know, the political primaries are in full swing here in the US. (I realize that quite a few of you who tend to read this are not from the US, but I’m assuming that you have not managed to escape some of the US-centered news.) Today is Super Tuesday, a day when 24 states are holding primary elections. My state is one of them. And I’m happy to say that I voted.

John and I went together, and we brought Phoebe along. (She didn’t get to vote.) I’m not sure I’ve ever voted in a primary before. It seems not in this town, at least. I was a bit startled that they shout out your party affiliation as they cross off your name and give you your ballot. It was a bit disconcerting to hear the shouts of “name name, number blah street, Republican” for the 3 people in line ahead of us. I was afraid they were going to turn on us when they heard that we were (gasp) Democrats. I was heartened by hearing a couple of other shouts of “Democrat” while we were there, though. I suspect that we are not in the majority in this town.

It’s been a difficult process for me to choose a candidate. There were a number of candidates I could get behind. Just over a year ago, I mentioned that I was excited that Hillary Clinton had announced her candidacy. I was practically giddy from the thought that there were people who truly believed that she had a chance at the presidency, that people believed a woman could be US president not only in my lifetime, but now. But even though I wanted to support her for a number of reasons, I’ve continued to be unhappy with her position on the war in Iraq.

We can’t really know how Obama would have voted on the war had he been in the Senate in 2003. But we do know that at that time, he spoke out against what he considered to be an unneccessary war. (Thanks to TIV for posting his speech from that time.)

So I’ve been leaning more and more towards Obama. I was considering Edwards. Various quizzes I took told me that my views most closely matched Kucinich. (But of course those quizzes didn’t take into account views on UFOs. I think mine differ somewhat.) A couple of quizzes showed my views as overlapping roughly the same amount for Obama and Clinton. A quiz I found more recently, via pgoodness (and possibly some other places that I’m not recalling now) was the electoral compass. I like this one in that it showed how it placed the candidates on a map of social and economic issues, and gave links about how it calculated those positions. I was able to see how my views overlapped and diverged from theirs on particular issues. Looking at these questions really helped me to consider the candidates more objectively. (And holy crap, I’m frightened by what I saw in the Republican camp.)

If you haven’t voted already, vote when your time comes. (BipolarLawyerCook wrote a great call-to-polls post you should check out, too.)

brrrr

We just got back from a whirlwind trip down to visit John’s parents. John’s sister was visiting them, and John’s mother just had a birthday. Plus, coincidentally, my sister (from California) was in New York city for a couple of days for a trade show. So, a trip down to New York seemed in order.

We left Thursday night, after I got home from a really long day of teaching and meeting and commuting. We didn’t get on the road till about 8:30, which isn’t bad considering I got home at almost 7, and still had to pack and eat dinner. But it did mean an arrival time after midnight.

I then took the train into New York City to meet my sister Friday morning, and join her in checking out some retailers. (Actually, I don’t mean shopping, believe it or not. Though I did buy a bathtub drain stopper and some licorice. I lead a glamorous life like that.) I had a really fun time. This was the first time in years my sister and I just got to hang out together. With no babies or anything. It was rainy and windy and cold, and not really a great day for walking around outside. But walk around outside we did. I also took the opportunity to spend the time on the train reading a book for fun since I wasn’t lugging my laptop. I re-read Sara Caudwell’s The Shortest Way to Hades, one of my favoritistest books in the world.

John is going through a crazy-busy time for work now, and so we decided to come back home Saturday night. (It’s impossible for either of us to get stuff done when visiting John’s mother.) But first, we had the day with John’s sister, visited John’s Dad, then made a trip to my favorite restaurant in the universe. We then went back to John’s parents’ house, packed up, and were on the road by about 9:30 or 10:00.

Phoebe and I got to sleep most of the way home, which was great. Especially since, upon our arrival at home at 1:30 a.m., we found that the house was a nippy 50 degrees (that’s 10 degrees celsius). Our furnace had shut off at some point in the past couple days. We spent the next couple hours doing various things to speed up the warming process: turning on the oven, running space heaters in the bedrooms, and burning cardboard and whatever scrap wood we could find in the fireplace.

It was actually almost festive, with the roaring fire and the scavenging for amazon boxes and clementine crates. Phoebe had fun playing with her crayons while bundled up in a blanket nearish the fire. By 3:30, a space heater had brought Phoebe’s room up to a tolerable 60 degrees or so, and I managed to get her into her crib by 4. (We didn’t want to leave the space heater running in her room, so wanted to get the room warm before we left her in there.)

And I did sleep past 7:00 this morning, and seeing as I have no deadlines this weekend and have even read a book for fun and watched some TV, I now can lump myself in with those categories of people of which I was previously jealous. Hurray!

grrrr

Bear with me. Or, bears with me. Well, not really with me. But on the list. Yes, Themed Things Thursday¹ is coming out of hibernation, as I come crawling out of my work-induced cave of fatigue and grumpitude. And what better way to come out of a cave than being pursued by a whole lot of bears?

Some Bears ²

  • Winnie-the-Pooh: Pooh has to top any list of bears in my book. The bear from the books by A. A. Milne. (I prefer not to think about the Disneyfied version.)
  • Grizzly Adams: A TVshow about a man and bear.
  • Gentle Ben: A lesser-known show about a boy and a bear.
  • Grizzly Man A movie about a man who decided to go and live with bears. Eventually, the bears tired of him. From what I understand, he met a…um…grizzly…end.
  • Yogi Bear: A cartoon about a bear, smarter than the average bear, so he says. Stole pic-a-nic baskets. Yogi Bear was always allegedly “in the ranger’s hair.” But I don’t believe he ever actually ate the ranger. (I watched this show as a kid, but I’m not sure I liked it. I feel like I felt some empathy for Boo-boo Bear, the side-kick.)

    • snowwhiterosered.png

  • Goldilocks and the 3 bears:
    The classic fairy tale of breaking and entering. While a family of bears is out for a walk while their porridge cools, a little girl heads into their house where she steals their food and breaks some furniture.
  • Bears are also prominent in several other fairy tales, like Snow White and Rose Red.
  • Bear Snores On: A kids’ book (by Karma Wilson and Jane Chapman) about a bear who snoozes through a party in his cave, when various other animals sneak in to get out of the winter storm.
  • There are a whole bunch of other bear books for kids, several of which are berry-oriented, like Blueberries for Sal, Jamberry, The Little Mouse, the Red Ripe Strawberry and the Big Hungry Bear.
  • bear hug: A hug characterized by a real squeezing of the arms, rather than just a symbolic arm-wrapping. As one might imagine it would be like if hugged by a bear. Though without the mauling.
  • “B is for Basil, assaulted by bears:” A page from The Gashleycrumb Tinies, Edward Gorey’s alphabetic masterpiece.
  • Fozzie Bear: a muppet who likes to tell bad jokes. (Wocka, wocka, wocka.)
  • fuzzy wuzzy, a children’s rhyme:

    Fuzzy Wuzzy was a bear
    Fuzzy Wuzzy had no hair
    Fuzzy Wuzzy wasn’t very Fuzzy, was he.

  • “Bears Discover Fire:” A Hugo Award-winning short story by Terry Bisson in which bears…discover fire.
  • Bears are fairly popular mascots for sporting teams, especially brown bears, or Bruins (cf. the Brown University Bruins, UCLA Bruins, the Boston Bruins, or the Chicago Bears. And cf. also “da Bears” sketch from SNL)
  • teddy bear: A popular type of stuffed animal, named for Theodore “Teddy” Roosevelt
  • Gummy Bears: fruit-flavored, brightly-colored, gelatin-based candies shaped like little bears.

    • brown_bear_3.png

    ¹ Yes, I realize it is now no longer Thursday. But I ran out of time, and I’ve had this draft going for over a week.

    ² This list is about bears, not bears…

    no damn cat, no damn hat

    So I sat on my ass
    All this cold dreary day
    And I said “How I wish
    I had more time to play.”

    No time to write posts
    That are well thought-out rants,
    No time to write lists
    about movies with pants.

    So I all I can do is to
    Bitch,
            whine
                    and moan
    And each time the phone rings
    Shout “leave me alone!”

    No damn cat came in wanting
    To show me his “things”
    But the living room’s trashed
    And the bathtub’s got rings

    Glued to the keyboard
    With deadlines a-loomy
    The house is a mess
    And my mood is all gloomy.

    I should do my work now
    While the clocks say it’s lating
    But this is a fun way
    Of procrastinating.

    ——
    I couldn’t resist this week’s Monday Mission, which asked for a post in the style of a children’s book or poem.

    give up the funk

    I’ve been feeling a bit funky lately. No, not that kind of funk. I seem to have been in a bit of a funk. And I want to give up the funk.

    You may or may not have noticed that I haven’t been writing so often. I’ve been really tired, and pulled in lots of directions. The result is that I’ve felt a bit like hiding away in a cave.

    The good news is that several of the big deadlines are now behind me, and that most of them involved getting the planned tasks done. Data was collected, annotated, and analyzed. Abstracts were submitted for one conference. An accepted paper was revised and re-submitted for another conference. The class I’m teaching is rolling along, for better or worse. (Some days are better, some days are worse.) There are some more big work deadlines approaching, but they are not as oppressively immediately pressing, so I feel like I can relax a bit for a few days.

    I ended up largely (or perhaps completely) flaking on the computational linguistics chapter presentation I had said I’d do. I don’t like flaking, and I felt pretty crappy about it. But by the time the abstracts were done Friday night, I had very little left in me. I still had hopes of throwing together a handout Saturday morning, but Phoebe would have none of it. She made herself quite needy that morning, and didn’t allow me to take my attention from her. So we (John, Phoebe and I) went to the group without a presentation. People had read the chapter anyhow, and of the other 6 people there, 5 of them knew more about the topic than I did. So as John points out, any sort of formal presentation would have been largely wasted. We all worked on the exercises from the chapter, which I think worked out better. But I still feel unhappy about the whole thing. I’m usually someone who somehow manages to do everything I commit to, even if I wear myself out in the process. I just have to realize that I’m not always in control of my time anymore, and I can’t go volunteering to do extra things. Or at least so many extra things.

    I did end up getting some time to be a vegetable. By the time Phoebe was in bed Saturday night, I was too tired to focus on the paper revisions. So, I got to watch the two first episodes of the new Terminator TV show (“The Sarah Connor Chronicles”), which John had downloaded. I enjoyed the episodes, and now have another show to add to my kick-ass women list. (Last night we watched the third episode, too.)

    Anyhow, I’m hoping to come crawling out of my cave now.

    ——-

    (Oh, and by the way. I did update the Phoebe blog a bit. I decided to just publish the whole thing, even though it included unfinished drafts.)

    a few categories of people

    Tonight I am feeling envious and/or jealous of the following categories of people:

    1. Those people who ever get to sleep past 7 a.m.
    2. Those who have time to watch TV, watch movies, or read books, especially on weekends.
    3. Those who haven’t committed to revising and submitting conference abstracts due on a Friday night.
    4. Those who don’t have another conference paper revision due the following Monday.
    5. Any individuals who have not insanely committed to presenting a computational linguistics textbook chapter to a group on the Saturday morning of the same weekend as those other deadlines.

    Really, it’s all good. But I find myself with strong cravings for mindless entertainment and near-vegetative activites. I thought a little bit of whine might help. Ooo, and maybe some cheese.

    big hands I know you’re the one

    A couple of nights ago, during part of Phoebe’s pre-bath stalling tactics, Phoebe started to pull coins out of John’s pockets and put them in one of John’s hands. As John will often have pretty substantial loads of change in his pockets, I asked, “Are you going to be able to hold all the coins in one hand?” To which John replied that he had big hands. Followed shortly thereafter by “Big hands I know you’re the one.”

    So John and I started singing “Blister in the Sun.” Phoebe dug it. We’d get to the end of the verse, and she’d say “more!” Then we played the various album versions, and we all danced. Rockin’ out in the upstairs bathroom.

    (That’s a live 1984 version. If you want to hear the studio version, you can check out one called the Violent Sims, with an animated video. I also came across a video of a guy signing along the with the lyrics in ASL. Ah, the wonders of YouTube.)

    gifts and thanks

    Dear Jen and Mad,

    I want to thank you for starting the Just Posts, and keeping them going. Ever since I read a gift post by one of your original wedding attendees/co-brides, I have been drawn in. What’s more, I have taken it upon myself to draw others in. You see, I think that when a person makes an effort to use their voice for social change or for generally making the world a better place, that person deserves an audience. And I see the Just Posts as a means to that audience.

    I think the voices do really matter. Mad, I know you have expressed some doubts about the possible emptiness of online activism. Are the Just Posts really Just Words? For me, at least, they are more than that. I have actually made efforts based on what I have read. I joined a CSA, to support a local farmer and sustainable agriculture. I have donated money. I have given gifts that benefitted a school library. I have considered ways to take action, and have at least in some cases, taken those actions. And, what I feel is most important, I have started to speak out more. I have shared my thoughts and my hopes, and found others who have listened. And I think that this in itself matters.

    I must admit that I was taken aback when you started your gift registry list for the baby that the two of you are growing. When you asked for time for volunteering, for actual getting-out-of-the-house actions, I thought that this was too expensive a gift to request. You see, my life has gotten quite busy in the last few months. Pressures are building for school and work, and I’m at a point where I really need to buckle down and work towards my degree. At the same time, I have other demands from family and friends, which I cannot ignore to an even greater degree that I do now.

    Here’s something kinda funny. Just a few weeks before you announced this new growth in your marriage, I had started to consider more ways that I could act. I have spent time in the past in volunteering activities, and these have been very important to me. Only few days before the big announcement, likely particulary inspired by this post of Jen’s, I started looking at online databases with volunteer opportunities, scoping out places that might be close to home. But I didn’t get too far. My scoping activities were likely cut short by some other demands on my time and attention. And I thought that this was perhaps not the right time for me to start wearing my volunteer pants again, but that I’d keep looking to see if there was something I could fit in down the road.

    So when you made your request, I was thrown into a bit of an existential crisis. I may even have had a wee bit of a temper tantrum. I felt a little like I was being asked to clean my room, after I’d already decided to clean my room later. “I will not clean my room! I don’t want to!” I shouted to the universe. “I don’t need to clean my room!”

    But the truth is, you are right. My room is a mess. I need to pick up the piles of stuff off the floor and take some action. Here’s the thing. I can’t promise a thorough job right now. It will have to be a gradual one. For a start, I will share my stories of volunteerism, in the hopes that these may motivate me more, and maybe someone else who sees them. I will look into volunteer opportunities, and share what I’ve learned. I will make some calls. And I will find more actions I can take.

    I know it’s not the gift you were hoping for, but consider it more of a gift card. Or a promise of a gift card, scribbled on a greeting card. A re-used greeting card.

    So, here’s to say thank you for all you do, and all the ways that you inspire me.

    Much love,

    alejna

    ——

    As the ultimate in tacky gift-giving, this post is being offered not only as a shower gift to Mad and Jen for their Just Post baby, but as an entry to the Monday Missions. This week’s mission was to write a post in the form of a thank you note.