It's log, it's log, it's big, it's heavy, it's wood

I love Ren & Stimpy. Now if I can only get David to like it. Can you believe I married someone who doesn't think Ren and Stimpy is funny?!?

NKOTB 4EVA!

In the late 1980s I was completely obsessed with the New Kids on the Block. My entire room was plastered, wall-to-wall, with NKOTB posters. I had a life-sized cardboard cut-out of the group in the middle of my room, as well as a room divider covered with pictures and articles cut out of teeny bopper magazines. I even had posters on my ceiling so that the last thing I saw before I went to sleep was John, Jordan, Donnie, Danny, and Joey looking down on me. I finally removed all the New Kids paraphernalia in 1990 when my friend Erin and I were having two cute boys over to study for Geometry. Soon there after, the New Kids faded away into pop culture history.

So imagine my surprise when I hear that the New Kids might be reuniting. I guess with the recent "success" of the Spice Girls' tour, the fab five are thinking about jumping on the reunion bandwagon. While my musical taste have certainly progressed way beyond late 80s bubble-gum pop (even in 1989, I bought R.E.M.'s Green and The Cure's Kiss Me Kiss Me Kiss Me along side the New Kids), I would be tempted to go see them again. Would it make me completely lame to go see the same show I was screaming and crying at 20 years ago?

Oh, and in case you're wondering, I was a Donnie fan. He was the "bad boy" of the group.

My Fantasy Modernist Life

Everyone has a secret fantasy career that they daydream about while sitting in their cubicle pretending to do their real job. (Or in my case sitting at home in front of my computer pretending to write their dissertation.) In Kara-fantasy-world, I travel the globe discovering and buying hip modern furniture and design products for an upscale modernist design store and wealthy clients. And on the side I also write freelance travel articles about all the "so cool it won't be cool by the time you read this" places I go to on said travels, since up-and-coming designers only hang out in the coolest local cafes, bars, and restaurants. Basically I want a *Wallpaper magazine life. (I don't think anyone actually lives this kind of jetsetter, uber-hipster, design-junkie life. The magazine just creates the image of this lifestyle and sells issues based on the idea that you can feel like you live a small part of it just by consuming their product. Brilliant.)

So with that in mind, I've been drooling over pictures from the annual Cologne International Furnishings Show posted on Mocoloco (one of my favorite modern design blogs). The most unique so far is the Bratespiel, a pop-style small appliance that can roast marshmallows (as well as sausages since. Come on, this is Germany). I would have absolutely no use for this, but it looks so cool (thus defeating the tenant of much modern design of form AND function).

In my fantasy work life, right now I'd be in the middle of a couple weeks of down-time in DC before jetting off to Palm Springs for their annual Modernism Show and Modernism Week. Now if I can only find someone to hire me . . .

Fred Phelps is now protesting Heath Ledger

You just got to love Topeka-based anti-gay hate group Fred Phelps and his cult. Now he's promised to protest memorials for Heath Ledger in the U.S. I guess travel to Australia is not in god's plan. Maybe Fred could pull an Oral Roberts and claim god will kill him unless he raises travel money to protest the funeral of a "fornicator." How did I grow up in the same town with this man?!? (Thanks to my brother-in-law for passing this article on to me.)

Why I Hate Political Science

This link is for those of your non-academics who wonder why I hate a discipline that I've been attached to since I started undergrad. In a nutshell, it's because of the hegemony of mathematical and formal research methods in political science and the associated emphasis of universal theories of politics, devoid of reference to specific context, history or culture. Now this is a vast over-generalization and simplification, but you get the basic idea. Fortunately, there has been a backlash movement for over 5 years called Perestroika. You can read about Perestroika here, here, and here. Even with the pendulum swinging away from the stuff I hate about political science, though, I still don't know if I can stomach teaching and researching in this discipline. I'll make that final decision, though, when my dissertation is done!

Addicted to decaf

Almost every morning, I walk with the dog to Starbucks and order a decaf Americano. Sometimes I get strange looks from the people around me since I'm ordering decaf. "What kind of idiot drinks decaf in the MORNING?" I'm sure they're thinking. I gave caffeine up about 3-4 years ago and I don't regret it. However, I still crave decaf coffee in the morning. I always thought it was psychological. Some kind of attachment to a warm, bitter, creamy (clearly I put creamer in my coffee) drink after I wake up. That is, until I found out that Starbucks decaf still has caffeine in it. Now all decaf has a little caffeine in it; usually around 5 milligrams. In a Consumer Reports study, the decaf coffee at about about half of the places they tested had 5 or less mg of caffeine. However, decaf at Starbucks, Seattle's Best and Dunkin' Dounuts all had over 20 mg of caffeine per cup! That's about 20% the caffeine in a normal cup of coffee.

No wonder I crave decaf in the morning. I'm hooked on the caffeine!

They just met on the way . . .

With the ongoing writers' strike, David and I (like many others I am sure) have started digging into our TV on DVD collection. This week we started watching Season 1 of Moonlighting. During the late 80s this was one of my absolute favorite TV shows, along with others in the sexual tension, witty banter, mystery-solving, will-they-or-won't-they genre of the time such as Remington Steele and Scarecrow & Mrs. King.

Like other TV on DVDs I've made David watch with me (Buffy, Angel, Roswell, Alias) I'm hoping to convert him to fandom. I also hope I can figure out why these kind of shows appealed to me when I was a "tween". Maybe it was because these women were a kind of nascent form of the strong and complex female characters I would later love (such as Buffy and Sydney Bristow). What role did Maddie Hays and Laura Holt play in the development of my personal brand of feminism? Maybe adult me can find this out.

There's also the pure comedy of Moonlighting that I always loved. I can't wait to watch the Taming of the Shrew parody, and the one where everyone dresses up like the client with the black veil over her disfigured face. The end involved lots of cream pies. Classic. I didn't realize this, but Moonlighting is often cited as one of the first modern dramadies (fusing aspects of comedy and drama), now a staple of the contemporary TV diet. The show also routinely broke the fourth wall, a practice which points to the artistic complxity of the show. As Leah R. Vande Berg's entry on Moonlighting at the Museum of Broadcast Communications argues:

"Additionally, in many episodes, protagonists Maddie and David break the theatrical "fourth wall" convention with self-reflexive references to themselves as actors in a television program or to the commercial nature of the television medium. Such metatextual practices are techniques of defamiliarization which, according to certain formalist critical theories, epitomize the experience and purpose of art; they jar viewers out of the complacent, narcotizing pleasure of familiar forms and invite them to question and appreciate the artistic possibilities and limitations of generic forms. Moonlighting's use of these metatextual practices signifies its recognition of the traditions that have shaped it and its self-conscious comments on its departure from those traditions -- characteristics typically attributed to works regarded as highly artistic."

Moonlighting as highly artistic, eh? And I just thought it was fun to watch.

Our Super Coolio Modern House

As anyone reading this probably already knows, my husband, David and I recently purchased a house. We really weren't planning on starting to look for a house until the summer, but we stumbled upon the perfect place and had to act fast. We are both into modern architecture and design, and as you can imagine finding a modernist house in the DC area is very, very difficult, especially in the area we wanted to buy in - McLean, Virginia. If we were really into center-hall colonials or McMansions, we'd be set.

I thought I'd use this space to post some more information about the house, the architect, as well as the former residents. In the future, I'm sure I'll be blogging about the renovation process.

The house was designed by the architect Hugh Newell Jacobsen and built in 1970. Jacobsen is a pretty famous architect now, although I think in 1970 he was more "up and coming." I've actually spoken on the phone with him a couple of times (we're getting the original documents and drawings associated with the house from him) and he seems like a really cool guy. Definitely a character. The man has to be in his mid- to late-70s and he's still actively working on projects and in the office everyday. I asked him if he'd like to see the house when we're done with renovations, and his reply was "certainly, and especially if you offer me a drink" !

The picture is from the March 1972 issue of "House Beautiful" magazine, in which the home was featured. I've posted scans of the magazine article pages on my fokti account. There's some really cool furniture in the photos, especially a pair of chairs in the living room. I did some research and found out they are called Astrea chairs and designed by Joe Colombo in the early 60s. Joe Colombo designed a number of great pieces in the 1960s, including lots of stuff made in plastic. I especially love the trolley which is still in production today. Unfortunately, the Astrea chair is not. We even inquired as to whether the previous owners still had the chairs and would be willing to sell them to us. Guess what? House beautiful (like many design magazines) brought in their own furniture for the shoot, including the Astrea chairs. Doh!

Speaking of the original owners, W. Proctor and Irma Harvey were 89 and 90 years old when they moved out and put the house on the market in August. Unfortunately, Mr. Harvey died in September. An obituary David found of him paints him as a real interesting guy. He was a professor of cardiology of Georgetown for over 50 years and an expert in diagnosing heart conditions simply by listening to people's hearts. Crazy stuff.

The house sits on almost 4 acres, which is a very large lot for McLean. It's all wooded with a creek running through the back. Our yellow lab, Jenny, will love getting into that!

That's enough for now about the house. More to come about the renovation process, especially after our big meeting with our designers tomorrow. W00t!

Culture v. Biology

I already posted this on my facebook page but thought I would put it here as well.

I've always been a big believer in the separation between culture and biology, and the idea that culture and socialization shape our differences and not biological make-up. This article talks about some interesting research that may prove me wrong.

Researchers at MIT are looking into whether social and cultural norms can become hardwired into our brains. I'll have more to comment about this later. For now I just wanted to post the link.

Greek = Good

I just tried Greek yogurt for the first time today, and I am now a convert. (Okay, probably not REALLY for the first time. I'm sure I've eaten it in restaurants before. Just not in a little plastic yogurt cup I took out of my own fridge.) Specifically, I had Oikos Organic Greek Yogurt in vanilla flavor that I purchased at Whole Foods. It has a slight almost sour flavor to it which, contrary to what you would like, actually tasted quite good. It also was creamy, a nice change from the watery soy yogurts I normally eat.

I did a little research and found out that Greek yogurt not only has all the health benefits of regular yogurt, but can actually improve lactose intolerance. As someone who suffers from lactose issues (hence the previous reliance on soy yogurt), I am excited but also a little skeptical. I'll just have to eat a bunch of Greek yogurt one day and see what happens. (For those of you reading this who don't know me, I am inherently a skeptic and a believer in empirical evidence.)

I've taken the plunge and joined the blogosphere

I can't believe I'm actually starting a blog. What's even more unbelievable it that anyone will actually read this. To be honest, I'm doing this less as something for other people to read, and more as a place for me to post my thought on interesting things I come across online, as well as comments about my life in general. I guess you could call it a diary of the internet era. I was posting a link on facebook today and realized it would be much easier if I could do this in blog form. So here I am.

And if someone besides myself does happen to read anything on here, it probably means they are a friend or family member. At least you'll be able to keep up on where my mind in wandering to these days.