Chaos Gene

Susanne sometimes worries that the boys have some sort of chaos gene. Although where they might have inherited that from is a mystery. The other day she tidied their room, which made a big space in the middle. Just big enough that they could take the mattress off their bed, and put it on the floor. But then they didn't sleep on it.
Alex slept in Daniel's bed, and Daniel slept on the floor, underneath Alex's bed. Which can't have been comfy. We pulled him out when he was asleep and put him on the mattress. He woke up and said "Don't". Then he went back to sleep.

Ethnicities

There's an awful lot of racial/ethnic diversity around here. Three different stories about that.

At work, we do a lot of surveys, which involve asking people what ethnic/racial group they are. First, we ask if they are Hispanic or not. Then we ask them if they are: white, African-American, Asian, Pacific Islander, Native American, or Other.

All the Hispanics tick other. Because they don't know that they are supposed to tick white. Someone, somewhere decided that being Hispanic is an ethnic group, not a racial group (or maybe that's the other way around) and so Hispanic people are white. Which is all very politically correct, if only the Hispanic people knew that they were white. But they don't. None of them. They never tick white, they always tick other. I asked if we could add Hispanic as a category, but we can't.



A friend of Susanne lives a couple of miles from us, and was applying to get her offspring into a school, but not the nearby school. The LA Unified School District has a complicated system of points for deciding what school you get into, if you don't want to get into the default school. One of the things you can get points for is for being an ethnic (or racial?) minority. He gets extra points for this, because he's white.


The boys school is quite a different mixture of ethnicities (and a reasonable number of children have parents of different ethnicities). But in that stereotyped way, the boys are not very good at telling black people apart. So whenever we are out, they are constantly seeing their friends. They don't think it's strange that the only friends they see are the black ones.

Computing Help

I've been doing a bit of teaching at Corporation of Current Employment. As is traditional when teaching I had trouble with the video projector and computer link up. Like they didn't work.

At University of Previous Employment, this would happen, so I'd phone up, and eventually a bored looking technician would fiddle with stuff, and sometimes, after about an hour, it would work.

One of the the nice things about Corporation of Current Employment is that the Computing people are very good, and very fast. So I phoned up, and within about three minutes, not one, but three people had arrived. They had obviously planned, because they came into the room, one went straight to the computer, one went to the projector, and one when to the box of network connections, pressed a button on the box (that I hadn't seen before) and it all came to life.

Too old for concerts

I went to a concert on Wednesday, for the first time in, ooh ages and ages. The doors opened at 8, so I was in line at 7:30 (I valet parked, to save a few precious minutes, plus it was $10, and non-valet was $6).

For some odd reason, Susanne didn't want to come (she compares Eels music to "whining as if they lived in Siberia"). So I stood on my own in the line. The person behind me was also standing in the line on their own. (Eels music attracts the kind of person who has no friends, it seems. Or maybe the kind of person who has no friends and likes Eels music). I asked them what the time was, and they replied in an English accent, their name turned out to be Hugh, and Hugh had come from New York, just to go to this concert.

Anyway, we sat down together (3rd row, thanks to our early arrival) and someone else with no friends (who liked the Eels) sat next to him. She was a librarian (I think) from Pasadena, and was more attractive than me. So he mostly chatted with her (inasmuch as one can chat in the 3rd row).

It turned out not be especially similar to other concerts. I asked someone working their what time it started (I needed to get food, before it started. He told me that the movie started at 8:40, and the band would come on at 10. Ten! That's past my bedtime! I'm going to be woken up at 6:30 tomorrow morning (if I'm lucky)!

And a movie? First I'd heard about a movie.

Well, to step back a bit. Eels (the band) consists of E, and a selection of other people who seem to change fairly regularly. (E is called E not for pretentious reasons, but because he is called Mark Everett, and he had a lot of friends when he was young called Mark. So they called him Mark E, or just E for short.

Now E's father was something of a famous physicist - which you might not have known. And that's not surprising, 'cos E didn't know that either until his father had died, and someone told him. The BBC made a documentary called Parallel Worlds, Parallel Lives about Hugh Everett, but it's only ever been shown on BBC4, it's never been on in the US, and never been available to buy (as far as I can tell, and I've looked). Anyway, that was the the movie.

In the documentary, they tracked down people who had worked with Hugh Everett, and people who had been influenced by him. They told the story of Hugh's meeting with Niels Bohr, which didn't go so well, and put Hugh off academia for life. Everett tried to explain to Bohr why he was wrong about quantum mechanics. Bohr didn't like that. (The famous Schrodinger's cat was also an attempt to explain why Bohr was wrong. Although most people don't understand that.) E learned that there were physicists who called themselves Everettian physicists, and was genuinely surprised.

Anyway, back to the concert. After the movie, E came on a played a couple of songs solo, and then he introduced The Band, which consisted of Chet (or The Chet), who seemed to be able to play every instrument known to humanity. And several that weren't. Including the saw (which he played with a violin bow).



During the song Flyswatter, E played the piano, and Chet played the drums. Then E stopped playing the piano, and (without missing a beat) took over playing the drums, while Chet went to the piano. Then they swapped again (and again, without missing a drumbeat). That's what the first video shows on this page. (Changeovers are just after 3 minutes, and just after 5 minutes).

The biggest hit by Eels was Novocaine for the Soul, and E once said that no one told you that if you had a hit record, you were going to have to play it every day for the rest of your life. Try doing that without going completely fucking insane. So the question on everyone's lips (well, mine) was whether they'd play it. They did, but a rather unusual version. E played drums furiously, and sang, while Chet played lead slide guitar. Thanks to the power of the internet, there's a video here. (That was from the night before, and somewhere else, but you get the gist).

Another unusual feature of the night was that E has recently written a book, about his life. He said that if he read any of it, that would be pompous and pretentious. So he made Chet read two passages from it. One where he first arrived in LA, saw someone famous, gave them a tape that he'd made, and thought he'd made it. The second where he had returned from his sister's funeral, and his neighbour (who thought he's been on holiday) said she'd seen a female apparition walking into his house. Which I would have thought a cue for the song Friendly Ghost, but was actually a cue for Last Stop This Town which was also about his sister's death. (She committed suicide after a number of attempts, and the second album of Eels, Electro Shock Blues, is mostly about this. It's not the cheeriest record you've ever heard. But it is very good.)

Eels played a session on KCRW the day before, and the whole thing (40 minutes) was recorded (sound AND video).

I challenge anyone to listen to it all and say that Eels are not the world's finest band.

You can listen to it here:




You can watch the video here:


(Chet plays the saw during Bus Stop Boxer, which is at about 29 minutes.)

Teaching

Before I started working at Corporation of Current Employment, I agreed to do some teaching. They call it a half module (or something similar) which means that I have to do one 1.5 hour session per week for 10 weeks.

The students, on paper at least, are horribly high calibre. Several have written books on various subjects, one was a professor of economics in Brazil, several have degrees and graduate degrees in real sciences - like physics.

So I was slightly concerned about what I might know, and be able to tell them, that they didn't know. Well, except for jokes - obviously I'd know a lot of jokes that they didn't.

Anyway, it went surprisingly OK. I've always taught psychology students, or subjects reasonably closely related to psychology. Some things that psychology students seem to just know, these students struggled with. Other things they found very straightforward.

Their task, in the second week, was to construct a questionnaire to measure something that they were interested in, pilot it on each other, and then give it to as many people as they could. My favorite was a questionnaire that one group designed on relationship satisfaction. They decided that there should be three kinds of questions, one group should be 'satisfaction with sex life'. They came up with three items:

1. Are you satisfied with the frequency of your sex?
2. Are you satisfied with the quality of your sex?
3. Are you satisfied with the kinkiness of your sex?

Lots of Stuff

I have a weird contradiction with this blog. When I'm busy doing lots of exciting stuff, I've got lots of stuff to write about. But I don't have much time. But when I haven't got lots of stuff to do, I have more time to write it. But little to say.

So, here's a brief summary. We sold our house. I went back to York to sort it out, with a bunch of help from Robin. It all went remarkably smoothly (in the end, once we'd thrown enough money at various problems).

We've now got a fat wad of cash sitting in a bank in the UK, and every day I stare at the exchange rate graph and wonder when the best time to move it will be. I took lots of photos, and then left my camera at Jennifer's house, so I'll have to retrieve it when I go back in July.

Meanwhile, we've been vaguely looking at houses. But only vaguely, for two reasons. First, because prices seem to be dropping, and second because we can't get much of a mortgage before we've been here for 2 years (which will be in 5 months).

Flickr has just started allowing you to put videos on there, as well as photos. So here's my first video on Flickr. It's not very interesting. Sometimes I point the video at the boys in the hope that they might do something interesting or cute or unusual. But they didn't. What is slightly interesting is that I don't think they've stood still for that long before, for any reason at all. There must have been something very interesting in the water.