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Anti-test Protest

Animal rights activists held a demonstration outside my office building this afternoon. About eight protestors, mostly choppy-haired young women, chanted along with an older man on a bullhorn (“Vivisection is a lie… How many more animals have to die?”). They stood by one of the building entrances alongside Atlantic Avenue, a major road that bisects the glitzy Boston Harbor real estate and the Financial District. (Our building security guards looked unusually alive.)

The only other protests I’ve seen in downtown Boston are blue-collar workers, upset with a conglomerate’s anti-Union business practices. So I was startled to see signs with vivid vivisection pictures that protested the notorious animal testing company Huntingdon Life Sciences. I’m fairly certain that HLS isn’t a tenant in our building, but perhaps they were targeting a customer or business partner. For sure it wasn’t my company.

I mean, we’re pretty evil, but we’re not, like, vivisection evil.

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By Meredith – October 4, 2007

Comment tu t’appelles?

“We can stand here like the French, or we can do something about it.” – Marge Simpson

After a year-long hiatus from French language classes, my body of French knowledge deteriorated down to various ways to politely demand cheese and wine. So, this fall I decided to take an intensive, twice-a-week French class for total beginners.

Re-learning basic French does feel futile. But French is not like arithmetic, where the knowledge that 2+2=4 doesn’t need to be continuously renewed. This is French, where “Comment tu t’appelles?” could be “Comen to tapple” or “Como tu tappel” or “Come to tapels,” depending on how well I’m guessing.

My pronunication is steadily improving, to the point where I can hear how viciously the French language is being murdered by my fellow students, 3 out of 5 of whom are native Spanish speakers. French is a challenge to anyone who speaks Spanish, because many of the articles deceptively look the same. A native Spanish speaker in my class giggles every time he says “elle” in reference to a female, because “el” in Spanish is a man.

Since all the other students are French-speaking novices, I’m totally the smartest person in the class. Plus, all the homework in my workbook is already completed. It’s like I flunked a grade in school. I’m cruising.

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By Meredith – October 3, 2007

Movie Review: Eastern Promises

Once you get past all the rape, throat-slitting, and the Yakov Smirnoff-quality accents, Eastern Promises is undoubtedly the feel-good Russian Mafia movie of the year. I won’t spoil the ending, but I left the theatre irradiating sublime optimism, however conflicted.

Oh, I jest. I like David Cronenberg. Despite his preoccupation with horrific violence, I feel safe watching his movies, because he may be graphic, but never gratuitous. Every gush of gore, every discharge of blood, every dismemberment happens for a very good reason.

Eastern Promises is a thoroughly delightful tale about a London midwife (Naomi Watts) who delivers the baby of a drug-addicted 14-year old Russian prostitute who dies in childbirth. In a quest to learn more about the baby’s mother, Naomi steals her diary and sets out to have it translated by a kindly Russian grandfather who turns out to be the depraved head of the organized crime family. Along the way, she makes eyes at the irresistable Viggo Mortenson, a driver for the mafia head’s berserk son.

Yeah, it sounds unbelievable, and one would imagine the audience in the movie theatre staring incredulously at the screen, but such is David Cronenberg’s skill that the story is intelligent, plausible, and efficient. Looking back on it now, it feels like entertaining sophistry.

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By Meredith – October 2, 2007

A Darfur Deferred

On a packed subway platform in Harvard Square, Katie grimaces at her Razr, which is utterly without bars. Then she looks around at the other passengers. One frumpy woman’s visible frustration with the train delay stirs reflexive apathy in Katie, even though she herself is 25 minutes late for drinks with Lana and Jacqui on Newbury Street. If anyone should be spazzing over a late train, it’s her.

But instead, Katie stoically scans the front page of an abandoned New York Times. A small headline at the bottom catches her eye: “Darfur Rebels Kill 10 in Raid of Peace Force.” Darfur! Katie knows all about Darfur, having attended the “Rip the Runway for Darfur” gala in New York last month (sponsored by Level Vodka – here for pictures). Like, she knows it’s pronounced “Dur-four,” not “Da-fer.”

Katie reads the first paragraph: “Hundreds of Darfurian rebels overran an African Union peacekeeping base in the central Darfur region of Sudan in a surprise raid over the weekend, killing at least 10 soldiers, possibly kidnapping dozens more and seizing supplies that included heavy weapons, African Union officials said Sunday.”

Kate reads the paragraph again. And then a third time, parsing its meaning within the context of her knowledge about Darfur. She’s confused. Wasn’t the Sudan government the bad guys? So, shouldn’t the rebels be the good guys? But why would the good guys kill the peacekeepers? Then Katie realizes: The peacekeepers are the ones who are supposed to ‘save Durfur’ from all the rape and genocide, and they’re getting killed! If the peacekeepers are killed, then who will ‘save darfur’?

Just then the train came, and Katie squeezes on the car, gripped by sadness. She aches to tell the strangers around her, to raise conscience, about the chaos and hopelessness in Darfur. She wants to – omigod, that girl is carrying the latest Jean Paul Gaultier bag that was featured in Vogue! Katie discreetly assesses the purse’s buttons, belt and buckle on the woven tartan pattern, and is thrilled to be appalled by its gaudiness. What a colossal waste of $1500. She can’t wait to tell Lana and Jacqui.

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By Meredith – October 1, 2007

Chore Day

Sundays are my favorite chore day. In the bathroom, I waged chemical warfare against mildew for a solid 30 minutes, spraying and scrubbing until I felt whoozy. There’s a good chance that my future offspring will suffer severe chromosomal damage because my bathroom’s exhaust fan couldn’t ventilate a coliseum.

I also vacuumed, which is my favorite chore ever since my father gave me a Dirt Devil for my birthday. I love the name – “Dirt Devil.” There’s something really motivating about imagining myself as dirt’s holy enemy.

Another satisfying chore is sweeping the dead leaves off the balcony. Having been an apartment dweller for all of my adult life, I love having a bit of outdoors to tend to, even if it’s just a second floor, wood-plank balcony. The thought of someday having a leaf-filled yard that requires raking makes me giddy.

I also tackled some digital chores, like cleaning up my hard drive, importing some CDs, and tagging pictures in iPhoto. I played around with the automatic photo enhancement, which, when applied to an over-exposed picture of Mount Washington from last weekend, turned out a garish but appealing alien landscape (shown below).

mtwash05

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By Meredith – September 30, 2007

Mount Washington Cog Railway September 30, 2007








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By Meredith – September 30, 2007

The Native Are Restless

Nike has released the Air Native N7, a running shoe exclusively available for Native Americans. Nike is quite proud of itself for offering this “true Native fitting, performance product” that meets the “specific fit and width requirements for the Native American foot”.

The USA Today article mentions the shoe’s “culturally specific look.” Other than a strip of color that runs along the laces, these are the biggest, whitest, most oblong sneakers I have ever seen. In USA Today’s picture, the sneaker makes the guy’s head look like a peanut. That’s a helluva toe box.

I’m no orthopedist, but I am a cynic. I wonder if ‘regular’ sneakers that suit the feet of every other race were really that inadequate for Native Americans, themselves a diverse population that span a continent. Or is Nike’s market so saturated that they are shamelessly going after a market share of 1% of the population (and the non-profit health foundations that cater to it)?

But ultimately, I suspect that this is a feel-good initiative for the employees of Nike, a company that has $15 billion in revenue a year and is still scrubbing at the tarnish from the controversy in the mid-1990s over its exploitative sweatshop labor in third-world countries. What a bizarre sequence of events in White European/Native American relations. In 500 years, we’ve gone from wiping them out with smallpox and stealing their land to niche-marketing them sneakers.

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By Meredith – September 29, 2007

Friday Night Frights

I attended exactly one football game during high school. It was the Homecoming game my Freshman year, back when I gamely “participated” in a doomed effort to sneak into a clique of sub-popular academic kids who never willingly talked to me at school events.

Maybe our team won, maybe we didn’t. My only memory is the Homecoming Court. The boys wore suits and ties, and the girls all wore dowdy skirt suits. They coupled off and perched on the back of convertibles that circled the football field, carrying flowers and waving. After a lifetime of seeing Homecoming Queens and Kings in popular culture, the lackluster crowning ceremony disappointed me.

The football coach was a Russian immigrant named Coach Marinkov, loved for being the easiest and most fun history teacher in school. But I’m glad that I never had him, because he ridiculed weirdos and was a blatant misogynist. The football team’s consistently dismal performance gave me deep satisfaction, because Coach Marinkov as well as every single football player was a jerk. Seriously.

The other day, I was web surfing and happened to come across a recent article about my alma mater’s football program: “Methacton savoring first win since 2004”, about how they snapped a 25-game losing streak under the tutelage of a new coach named McNally, who taunted them over the off-season by wearing a t-shirt with the No. 25 on it.

I emailed the story to my best friend from high school, snidely noting how “the Warriors ripped McNally’s oft-worn and sometimes smelly T-shirt to shreds.” Apparently, the sentence struck her and me the exact same way, as she replied: “I can see it all. And it makes me feel anxious.”

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By Meredith – September 28, 2007

Breakdown

I don’t have time to write a real post today, because I just spent 20 minutes composing a poisoned missive to MBTA Commuter Rail Chief Bob Stoetzel (via the MBTA ‘Write to the Top’ feedback) about how the hour-long delays that have plagued the Worcester line for the past few months due to ongoing track maintenance are bringing me to the brink of a nervous breakdown. I would re-post my compliant on this site for your entertainment, but I’m not too proud of the hysterical whining (“YOU ARE RUINING MY LIFE”), goaded by tonight’s commuting disaster that ended 2 hours later with Mr. Pinault picking me up in Boston. WAH.

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By Meredith – September 27, 2007

Today’s Pet Peeve: Engineers who think “anyone can write”

Obviously, engineers are literate, and usually intelligent enough to form a lucid linguistic construct. But even if their words are grammatically flawless, the resulting expanse of abstruse syntax is often the diametric opposite of what can be considered “communication.” The prose of an engineer treats the reader as if they have the cognitive powers of a robot.

Through natural ability and years of practice, I have honed my ability to communicate complex concepts through clear, concise writing. That is how I get to be a technical writer. Where do engineers get off thinking that “anyone can write?” Sure, anyone can cook too, but few have the culinary prowess to be considered a chef. I make a mean grilled cheese, but I’m not going to attempt ricotta gnocchi with tomato passatina, pecorino romano, and frizzled leek relish for $30 a plate.

If engineers want to express themselves, they can build a bridge, develop an artificial body organ, create a food additive, design a portable music player, or construct an aircraft carrier… Engineers are experts in engineering, a discipline that a group of engineers once defined as the creative application of scientific principles to design or develop structures, machines, apparatus, or manufacturing processes, or works utilizing them singly or in combination; or to construct or operate the same with full cognizance of their design; or to forecast their behavior under specific operating conditions; all as respects an intended function, economics of operation and safety to life and property.

Undeniably, an engineer crafted that explanation. My point exactly.

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By Meredith – September 26, 2007