2013 Year in Review

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I've ever done one of these before, but it seems to be good practice. This was a hurry-up-and-wait sort of year, a lot of long-term things done cooking or still ongoing. Events that stand out to me 2 hrs until midnight: January: Tibial stress fracture puts me on crutches for six months. Arm and shoulder muscles develop enough to speed me through NYC rush hour even in pouring rain.

February: Commuting to Midtown NYC on crutches is simply unsustainable. Begin working from home.

April: Moving-to-San-Francisco-So-Eat-Everything-in-Our-Kitchen party. "Drink with Me" from Les Misérables is sung.

Menu: 10 lbs slow roasted and crisped pork shoulder w/ Chinese steamed rolls and Thai chili sauce w/ cucumber slices, 3 lbs braised brisket with au poivre sauce, arugula, chickpea, and beet salad with lemon-olive oil dressing, thyme polenta with roast chicken drippings, green beans, Japanese/Korean-style shredded kelp and sesame salad, Korean seaweed and cod soup with shiitake and kelp broth, strawberry tart, strawberry and ladyfingers cake with mousse and rosewater cream, madeleine cake, fruit tart, truffle salt caramels, 4 bottles of wine, and some whiskey. Still have 4 more bottles of wine alas. And cognac.

April: Very agitated about Boston. No friends hurt despite running marathon. "When I was a boy, and I would see scary things on the news, my mother would say to me, "Look for the helpers. You will always find people who are helping." -Fred Rogers

May: Celebrate our second year of marriage, almost tenth(!) year of relationship, with my ineffably remarkable husband.

May: Husband defends PhD thesis! (He passed.)

May: Fantastic cross-country road trip with my husband, stopping in Chicago, the Badlands, Yellowstone, and Elco (Nevada) overnight. Spent an extra day each in the Badlands and in Yellowstone. A+, 5 stars, would drive again.

June: Move into new apartment in San Francisco.

June: March in San Francisco Gay Pride parade as part of Dropbox streetcar.

July: Finally realize that when the blonde says to Neo, "let's go, coppertop," she is referring to him as a human battery, not as a secret ginger.

July: Start attending SF area meetups.

August: Housewarming party. Five desserts. Coin the word "bake-nado", e.g. "I was baking a lot. I was in a bake-nado." I accidentally made an extra cake and a Gâteau St. Honoré.

September: Feeling like an adult spending a weekend in Napa staying at a cottage with friends. Hit up Ad Hoc and Bouchon while I'm at it. Faintly underwhelmed.

September: Folsom Street Fair. Underwhelmed.

October: Celebrating ten years of a relationship with my husband.

November: Help organize and cook for Thanksgivukkah for about a dozen people. Also discover how to make dairy-free chocolate mousse and how to spatchcock a bird.

December: Start thinking about new year's resolutions; realize I've forgotten all the ones I made for this year.

The Parsons Code Eliminates Earworms

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For two weeks, I had a relentless earworm that randomly materialized and would not vanish. Musical friends could not identify it, Shazam and Soundhound were no help, and I could not even place the composer (Mozart? Beethoven?). The same few notes drove round and round my head and worst of all, I couldn't recall the rest of the piece! When my frustration had me systematically listening to my entire classical music library, my husband discovered something called the Parsons Code and then the Parsons Code Database for Melodic Contour. Musipedia explains the Parsons Code:

Each pair of consecutive notes is coded as "U" ("up") if the second note is higher than the first note, "R" ("repeat") if the pitches are equal, and "D" ("down") otherwise. Rhythm is completely ignored. Thus, the first theme from Beethoven's 8th symphony that is shown above would be coded DUUDDDURDRUUUU...

In his "Directory of Classical Themes" (Spencer Brown, 1975), D. Parsons showed that this simple encoding of tunes, which ignores most of the information in the musical signal, can still provide enough information for distinguishing between a large number of tunes.

(I feel like more people need to know about this remarkable system, though if I am late in the game, then I'm glad that I've finally come across it now.)

So what was the culprit?

 Harpsichord Concerto No. 7 in G Minor, BWV 1058. by Johann Sebastian Bach

I had the first six measures stuck in my head in a loop for two weeks. Once I found the sheet music and played the rest of it, the notes stopped looping in my head!

Thanks, Musipedia.org, for preserving my sanity.

Feminist Media Criticism, George R.R. Martin’s A Song Of Ice And Fire, And That Sady Doyle Piece

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Feminist Media Criticism, George R.R. Martin’s A Song Of Ice And Fire, And That Sady Doyle Piece by Alyssa Rosenberg A much more level-headed response to criticism of GRRM’s approach to women that asks us to take a more objective view of storytelling, and refuses to equate the story with the writer or the reader.

My friends and I have remarked how GRRM’s mothers (those without grown children: Cersei Lannister, Catelyn Stark, Tanda Stokeworth, Lysa Arryn, etc.) are characterized as having “mother’s madness”. Their attempts to protect their children seem ill-advised, and at times harm their other offspring (Rickon, Myrcella). We had a hard time naming sane mothers who behaved rationally, other than the Queen of Thorns (Olenna Redwyne). Daenerys, the ultimate Mother, also fears the madness of her house’s blood, and my friends and I have yet to decide what this exception might mean for the series’ future and GRRM’s stance on mothers. All the same, it would do our minds a disservice if we reacted to this question with nothing but all-caps outrage and exceptionalism. I’m not saying Sady Doyle doesn’t make some good points about orientalism, etc., but Alyssa Rosenberg points out some telling flaws in her arguments that, I feel, often characterize the more embarassing portions of New Wave Feminism.

New website

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For my birthday, the lovely Eric J. Suh gave me a domain name! I have a website now! I was so excited I went and built it in about four hours. I'm going to move this blog over there when I have the time this weekend, as well as add more content and tweak the code. For now, my website is at JenniferGong.com. (I'm debating whether I should use JenniferZGong.com or JenniferGong.com.)