Angela Brett
Mathematician and linguist by training, programmer by trade, physicist by association, writer by neglecting everything else.
Homepage: http://angelastic.com
May the Fourth be with you (even if you haven’t seen Star Wars)
Posted in News on May 4, 2013
I’ve mentioned this before, but it’s Star Wars day, so it seems like a good time to repost. Remember last Star Wars Day, when I snubbed the CERN CinéClub’s showing of the original three Star Wars movies in order to write a poem about Star Wars, from my perspective as someone who has only seen The Phantom Menace, several hours of The Star Wars Holiday Special (with Rifftrax), the start of the original trilogy, under duress, while tired, from 2a.m. until I fell asleep, and a lot of Star-Wars-related songs and Internet memes? Well, I still haven’t seen the movies, and it doesn’t look like the CERN CinéClub is showing them today. But I did recite the poem in front of a crowd of nerds and geeks at the open mic night on JoCo Cruise Crazy 3, and they didn’t lynch me as an infidel, or throw me in the hot tub and force me to drink mudslides and watch Star Wars on the on-deck movie screen. Some of them even said they liked the poem! Even several people who I know write great things themselves! Here is my video of it. Having a decent microphone and no need to use up all my breath to speak loudly eliminated most causes and symptoms of nervousness, but oh boy, is my high-rising terminal showing at the beginning.
If you’re wondering, my first comment referred to Mike Phirman saying earlier that when you go on stage your body shuts down its vital functions and ‘you can really, really, really have to pee before you go on, and then you walk on stage and your body goes into like war mode, where it’s like, ‘There’s no time for that! We are at war!” I don’t think anyone laughed at the reference to the story Wil Wheaton read on the first cruise, so there goes my best chance at any audience noticing that. I missed out the following lines, at the start of the second stanza:
There were Chewie, and Yoda (the OSV talker)
Han Solo, and Leia, of course, Luke Skywalker.
I excused that in advance by saying I’d spent more time memorising Chicken Monkey Duck than this poem. That was not a joke, although I also made one mistake in Chicken Monkey Duck, so I guess I’m just imperfect. That means I’m not a replicant; hooray! (For what it’s worth, I saw all of Blade Runner for the first time this year, while outside in the rain, no less, so I finally know what that means. And I’m still using it wrong, because it seems like replicants aren’t perfect either. But passing the Voight-Kampff test just seems like it would give a higher-level qualification than passing the Turing test.)
To anyone else out there who still hasn’t seen Star Wars and feels like they should have: remember it’s entertainment. It should not be on your to-do list. Put it on your ‘things that might be fun to do when I need a break from the to-do list’ list if it seems interesting to you. Or, like me, use it to quickly dispatch anyone’s insistence that you see, read or listen to every other piece of culture that they deem important. Once you tell them you haven’t even seen Star Wars yet, they dismiss you as a lost cause and stop trying to add things to your to-do list. And if you’re a geek and they tell you this makes you a fake one, just tell them that, as Marian Call says, you have been a nerd since your first five syllable word, and no TV series or movie changes that:
In other news, I’ve signed up to read something at the Leman Poetry Workshop open mic night (warning: gratuitously-Flash-only website; don’t bother clicking if you have special needs that this won’t cater for) on May 31. I haven’t decided what to read yet, but it’s on my birthday, so probably something about birth, or death, or cake.
Also, I’m working on several different things at the moment, including the long-planned but little-implemented six of hearts, so hopefully I’ll finish those and post them here soon.
Haiku Detector Update
Posted in Haiku Detector on April 27, 2013
On Monday I posted a quick-and-dirty Haiku Detector Mac application I’d written which finds haiku (in terms of syllable counts and line breaks, not aesthetics) in any given text. Since then I’ve made it less dirty and maybe more quick. It now shows progress when it’s busy looking for haiku in a long text, and gives you a count of the sentences it looked at and the haiku it found. You can also copy all the haiku (Copy All Haiku in the Edit menu) or save them to a file (Save in the File menu.) Here’s where you can download the new version, which should still work on Mac OS X 10.6 and later. And here are a few more haiku I’ve found with it.
There’s only one (not counting a by-line) in the feature articles of the April 27 edition of New Scientist:
Inside a cosy
new gut the eggs hatch and the
cycle continues.
From Flatland: a romance of many dimensions, by Edwin Abbott Abbott:
On the reply to
this question I am ready
to stake everything.“I come,” said he, “to
proclaim that there is a land
of Three Dimensions.”Man, woman, child, thing—
each as a Point to the eye
of a Linelander.This was the Climax,
the Paradise, of my strange
eventful History.
Here are a few more from Flatland which I’m editing this post to add, since I liked them more on the second reading:
Let us begin by
casting back a glance at the
region whence you came.Therefore, pray have done
with this trifling, and let us
return to business.Even if I were
a baby, I could not be
so absurd as that.
From Last Chance to See, by Douglas Adams and Mark Carwardine, which I somehow ended up with a text file of many years ago and eventually got a book of:
I’ve been here for five
days and I’m still waiting for
something to go right.We each went off to
our respective rooms and sat
in our separate heaps.They’re nocturnal birds
and therefore very hard to
find during the day.It looked like a great
horn-plated tin opener
welded to its face.We keep searching for
more females, but we doubt if
there are any more.The very laws of
physics are telling you how
far you are from home.Foreigners are not
allowed to drive in China,
and you can see why.`Just the one left,’ she
said, putting it down on the
ground in front of her.Yet it was hunted
to extinction in little
more than fifty years.And conservation
is very much in tune with
our own survival.
And here’s my own haiku about a particularly amusing passage in that book:
Here Douglas Adams
trudges through his anagram:
Sago mud salad.
Charles Darwin’s most popular work, The Formation of Vegetable Mould Through the Action of Worms with Observations on their Habits, only contained 12 mostly-lacklustre haiku, but I like to think this one is a metaphor:
Worms do not always
eject their castings on the
surface of the ground.
Something about lack of worm castings being only skin-deep.
But most of these don’t mention nature or seasons, as haiku should. So here are some from Sylva, or A Discourse of Forest Trees:
Dieu, and thence rode to
Blois and on to Tours, where he
stayed till the autumn.How graphic, and how
refreshing, is the pithy
point thus neatly scored—
Meteorology, or Weather Explained, by J.G. M’Pherson contains some very poetic-sounding unintentional haiku:
“It’ll pe aither
ferry wat, or mohr rain”—a
poor consolation!“Beware of rain” when
the sheep are restive, rubbing
themselves on tree stumps.The brilliant flame, as
well as the smoky flame, is
a fog-producer.Till ten o’clock the
sun was not seen, and there was
no blue in the sky.But, strange to say, there
is a healing virtue in
breathing different air.There is much pleasure
in verifying such an
interesting problem.
Unfortunately, there are no haiku in Dijkstra’s ‘Go To Statement Considered Harmful‘.
The app still uses a lot of memory if you process a novel or two, and may have trouble saving files in that case; It looks like it’s a bug in the speech synthesis library (or my use of it) or simply a caching strategy that doesn’t work well when the library is used in this rather unusual and intensive way. Anyway, if you ever try to save a file and the Save dialog doesn’t appear, try copying instead, and relaunch the program.
Next I think I’ll experiment with finding the best haiku based on the parts of speech at the ends of lines. But first, I’d better start working on the thing I’ve plan to do for the six of hearts.
If you’ve found any nice unintentional haiku, or if you can’t run Haiku Detector yourself but have ideas for freely-available texts it could be run on, let me know in the comments.
Five of Hearts: Haiku Detector
Posted in CERN, Haiku Detector, Writing Cards and Letters on April 23, 2013
A few weeks ago, a friend linked to Times Haiku, a website listing unintentional haiku found in The New York Times, saying ‘I’d actually pay for a script that could check for Haiku in my writings. That would make prose-production a lot more exciting! Who’s up to the script-writing-challenge?’
I knew I could do it, having written syllable-counting code for my robot choir (which I really need to create an explanation page about.) I told her I’d make it that weekend. That was last weekend, when I decided at the last moment to write an article about neutron stars and ISOLTRAP, and then chickened out of that and wrote a poem about it. So I put off the haiku program until yesterday. It was fairly quick to write, so here it is: Haiku Detector. It should work on Mac OS X 10.6 and above. Just paste or type text into the top part of the window, and any detected haiku will appear in the bottom part.
Haiku Detector looks for sentences with seventeen syllables, and then goes through the individual words and checks whether the sentence can be split after the fifth and twelfth syllables without breaking a word in half. Then it double-checks the last line still has five syllables, because sometimes the punctuation between words is pronounced. The Times Haiku-finding program has a database of syllable counts per word, but I didn’t need that since I can use the Mac OS X speech synthesis API to count the syllables. Haiku Detector makes no attempt to check for kigo (season words.)
The first place I looked for haiku was the Wikipedia page for Haiku in English. Due to the punctuation, it didn’t actually find any of the example haiku on the page, but it did find this:
Robert Spiess (Red Moon
Anthology, Red Moon Press,
1996)
How profound. Next, having declared myself contributing troubadour for New Scientist magazine, I fed this week’s feature articles through it, and found:
A pill that lowers
arousal doesn’t teach shy
people what to doMeanwhile, there are signs
that the tide is turning in
favour of shyness.So by 4000
years ago, the stage was set
for the next big step.This heat makes the air
spin faster, so pulling the
storm towards the city.Some will be cooler
and less humid — suitable
for outdoor sports, say.
The last ones seem almost seasonal.
I needed to stress-test the app with a large body of text, so I grabbed the first novel of which I had the full text handy: John Scalzi‘s Old Man’s War, which I had on my iPad on my lap to read while my code was compiling. This book has at least one intentional haiku in it, which Haiku Detector detected. Apart from that, some of my favourites are:
I hate that her last
words were “Where the hell did I
put the vanilla.”As I said, this is
the place where she’s never been
anything but dead.“I barely know him,
but I know enough to know
he’s an idiot.”She’d find me again
and drag me to the altar
like she had before.A gaper was not
long in coming; one swallow
and Susan was in.They were nowhere to
be found, an absence subtle
and yet substantial.And it stares at me
like it knows something truly
strange has just happened.
I haven’t got up to that fifth one in the novel yet, but it mentions a swallow, which I understand is (when accompanied by more swallows) a harbinger of Spring or Summer depending on which language you get your idioms from, so there’s the kigo.
Next I figured I should try some scientific papers — the kinds of things with words that the Times haiku finder would not have in its syllable database. You probably can’t check this unless your workplace also provides access to Physics Letters B, but I can assure you that the full text of the ISOLTRAP paper about neutron stars does not contain any detectable haiku. However, the CMS paper announcing the discovery of the boson consistent with the Higgs does:
In the endcaps, each
muon station consists of
six detection planes.
As is usual for CMS papers, the author and institute lists are about as long as the paper itself, and that’s where most of the haiku were too. Here are a few:
[102]
LHC Higgs Cross Section
Working Group, in: S.University
of California, Davis,
Davis, USA
That’s ‘one hundred and two’ in case anyone who doesn’t say it that way was wondering.
And here are some from my own blog. I used the text from a pdf I made of it before the last JoCo Cruise Crazy, so the last few months aren’t represented:
Beds of ground cover
spread so far in front of him
they made him tired.Apologies to
those who only understand
half of this poem.I don’t remember
what colour he said it was,
but it was not green.His eyes do not see
the gruesome manuscript scrawled
over the white wall.• Lines 1 to 3 have
four syllables each, with stress
on the first and last.
(That’s not how you write a haiku!)
I don’t wear armour
and spikes to threaten you, but
to protect myself.A single female
to perpetuate the genes
of a thousand men.Kerblayvit is a
made-up placeholder name, and
a kerblatent cheat.He wasn’t the first,
but he stepped on the moon soon
after Neil Armstrong.He just imagined
that in front of him there was
a giant dunnock.
(there are plenty more where that one came from, at the bottom of the page)
She was frustrated
just trying to remember
what the thing was called.Please don’t consider
this a failing; it is part
of your programming.
While writing this program, I discovered that that the speech API now has an easier way to count syllables, which wasn’t available when I wrote the robot choir. The methods I used to separate the text into sentences and the view I used to display the haiku are also new. Even packaging the app for distribution was different. I don’t get to write Mac software often enough these days.
Yet again, I didn’t even bother to deal out the cards because I already had something to inspire me. In my halfhearted attempt to find a matching card, I came across one about electronics in the service of ALICE, so I ran the latest instalment of Probably Never, by Alice, into it, and got this:
Or well, I have to
put up with getting called a
fake girl all the time.The jackhole who called
me a “he/she” recognized
that he crossed the line.
If that sounds interesting, subscribe to Probably Never, and I could probably forward you the rest of that episode if you want.
And finally, two unintentional haiku from this very post:
Haiku Detector
makes no attempt to check for
kigo (season words.)(there are plenty more
where that one came from, at the
bottom of the page)
Wait; make that three!
And finally, two
unintentional haiku
from this very post:
Have fun playing with Haiku Detector, and post any interesting haiku you find in the comments. Also, let me know of any bugs or other foibles it has; I wrote it pretty quickly, so it’s bound to have some.
I know what I’m doing for the six of hearts; I’ve planned it for a long time but still haven’t actually started it. It’s musical, so it will probably be terrible; brace yourselves. By the way, I keep forgetting to mention, but They Might Not Be Giants will be published in Offshoots 12. Yay!
Four of Hearts: Nucleosynthesis (rapidly processed)
Posted in Periodic Table, Writing Cards and Letters on April 14, 2013
Oft upon a spacetime,
a red star gets the blues
and puffs up like a superstar
with nothing left to fuse.
Pushing hot and heavy,
it finds its stellar rise
affords a new and rapid way
to nucleosynthesise.
Squirts new heavy ions
to interstellar dust
then collapses in and pulls some back
and into stellar crust.
Newly Lilliputian,
compressed by weight of all
our star invites its nearest friends
to join the neutron ball.
Millimetre mountains
on kilometres-round
neutron star where mass of more
than one Earth Sun is bound.
Heart a seething chaos,
skin so smooth and hard,
beneath the skin, too densely packed
to tell each piece apart.
Love-crossed star starts dancing
with friend who heard the call:
another star-crossed lover,
another neutron ball.
They pull each other closer,
spin fast, and by and by,
they kiss in bursts of gamma rays
and heavy nuclei.
Once upon a planet
of star-fused chemistry
some humans sought to learn of how
their atoms came to be:
Made their own large nuclides
used traps to measure mass,
then calculated where they’d fit
in star’s electron gas.
Nuclides so unstable
they fall apart on Earth,
at pressure, they survive in dead
star hotbed’s upper berth:
Isotopes of nickel,
and lots of iron too,
zinc-80 (deeper than we thought)
But no zinc-82.
Once upon a line graph,
those data points could show,
a hint of where and when and how
big elements may grow.
Is it supernovas,
or casanovas’ kiss?
Is it neither? Some of both?
And what else did we miss?
Probed big atoms’ origins,
but all their parents knew:
My daughter works in science labs;
don’t ask me what they do!
Tried to tell the physicists
but all that students knew:
zinc-80 (deeper than they thought)
and no zinc-82.
This is my understanding (as a mere mathematician/code monkey) of the cover story of this month’s CERN Courier. I picked up a copy on Friday evening on the way out of work, and decided I could interview people I know in ISOLDE and write an article about it in 400 words or fewer in order to apply for an editorial trainee scheme at New Scientist magazine, since applications weren’t due until Monday and I needed a writing project for the weekend anyway. Once I’d read the article and enough supporting material to understand it, I realised I probably wouldn’t end up writing the article. I wasn’t sure I really understood the significance of it, I didn’t have access to the original paper from home, and what’s more, the result was a month and a half old, which is far too old, according to New Scientist’s freelancing guidelines. It might work for getting an internship at Old Scientist, but I probably wouldn’t like that because I’m the editor-in-chief at Old Scientist and I’d probably treat my interns poorly.
Anyhow, I decided I’d just appoint myself New Scientist’s, or maybe the CERN Courier’s, unofficial contributing troubadour, and write poems about their feature articles. If Popular Science can have a contributing troubadour, so can New Scientist. So, certain I couldn’t adequately explain ISOLTRAP’s result in 400 words or fewer, I set about writing a poem about it, which came out at 302 words. I tackled it rather longitudinally though; it doesn’t go much into the specifics (or even mention the r-process or ISOLTRAP by name) and occasionally I may sacrifice clarity for rhythm or puns, but I tried to give all the context needed to have some kind of understanding of the final result. This article is probably easier to understand than the CERN Courier one. One of the many interesting things I learnt while researching this is that stars actually get the blues before going supernova.
Three of Hearts: Phirmanator: The Sara Chicazul Chronicles
Posted in CERN, Writing Cards and Letters on April 8, 2013
Back in late February, my friend Alice sent an email asking people to cover The Doubleclicks’ Nerdy Birthday Song for Sara Chicazul, who had a birthday on JoCo Cruise Crazy 2 but not on JoCo Cruise Crazy 3. The idea was to put up one per day, so that she could experience the thrill and horror (previously reserved for Mike Phirman) of having a birthday every day. A lot of people did. I don’t usually sing anything more melodic than Chicken Monkey Duck when people can hear me, so I figured I’d dust off my robot choir (a little program I wrote to take text and a tune played on my MIDI keyboard, and turn it into TUNE commands to make the built-in Mac speech synthesis sing) and record a cover that way. It took a fair bit of dusting off, what with a new version of XCode and of the MIDI framework I used, and I think the metaphorical dust mites gave me cold-like symptoms, which is why I haven’t posted anything for a while. Anyway, today I finally recorded a cover, and here it is. Given that the third thing I ever recorded using my robot choir was my Macs singing Happy Birthday to the London Science Museum, I think I may as well rename my robot choir to ‘The Phirmanator’.
This recording starts off with just the Victoria voice singing, then at the first ‘you’re getting older’, Vicki joins in. I have a cameo saying ‘everybody!’ and then Agnes joins in and all three voices get a gospel choir effect. I added Zarvox (an intentionally robotic voice) at the end, partly because I thought it would be funny, and partly because Vicki sounds awful holding that ‘all’ note and I wanted to make up for her being so much quieter in that part. I noticed part of the way through that I’d used the wrong notes in a few places, so I fixed those, but there are probably others. I don’t know how to make music; I just know how to turn MIDI notes into frequencies. Also, I can barely even play my rainstick, let alone a stringed instrument, so it’s a robocoppella. I timed everything to synch up with the original song, and it sounds kind of nice if you play both together. By itself, well… it sounds like autotune became sentient and killed all the human singers.
Two of Hearts: Spazzing Out
Posted in Lingo Pix, Writing Cards and Letters on March 23, 2013
I shiver with excitement at the coolness of the snow,
while flailing in delight at how the flakes float to and fro.
They say I shake for heating but my body seems to know
the fervor brought by white-on-white of sky and fractal tree,
and tenses itself tight on sight of all that’s cool to me.
My muscles are excited all the time, and so am I,
for music and for science and for humor and for pi[e].
They say my motor cortex might be part the reason why,
that these days they can thwart excitement through rhizotomy,
but when’s the spazzing fangirl vim and when’s it not o’ me?
In summary, my muscles have a tendency to spasm;
it seems to me those muscles can’t contain enthusiasm.
While technically I’m spastic I can say without sarcasm:
it feels like life’s fantastic and my body’s full of squee
so let your hair down (don’t relax) and come spaz out with me!
I am a raging fangirl (of improbably many people and things) with cerebral palsy spastic diplegia, and this is what it feels like. My other superhero secret identity is Hyper Spaz.
I came up with the idea for this several months ago, upon realising that my body was just as full of squee as my mind, though it was going to be a song, with an entirely different structure. I came up with the line ‘My muscles are excited all the time, and so am I’ about three weeks ago and decided to actually write it, with that as the first line, but I’ve just been too busy doing other things (including uploading videos of Jonathan Coulton, Paul and Storm, Mike Phirman, John Roderick, Zoë Keating, John Hodgman and some quitters from JoCo Cruise Crazy 3) and I didn’t spend very much time on it. So here it is, finally. It has an interesting rhyme scheme which I feel like drawing a diagram and investigating the topology of, but I think I’ll save that for later. During those three weeks I happened to find out about selective dorsal rhizotomy, which seems like a pretty neat procedure, though I wonder whether it would have an effect on the young patients’ eventual personalities.
This is the easy part of Thing-A-Week-or-so where the writer’s unblocked and the ideas flow faster than the cards that are supposed to inspire them and the time I have to implement them. I still haven’t put away all the aces of hearts and kings of clubs I got out before the cruise yet, let alone looked through all the twos of hearts, so I just used the first two of hearts I found with a tenuous connection to the topic. I’m glad I’m not a vegetable; I’ve heard their screams.
It turns out I can read fake plqaD.
Posted in News on March 5, 2013
21 hours and already two posts ago, I linked to my post about the program I wrote for exploring grapheme colour synaesthesia. So I happened to look at that post again, and realised that despite the fact I learnt the words to Chicken Monkey Duck without any reference to the personally-coloured lyrics (Mac users: download the file and open it in TextEdit to see the text with coloured outlines matching the initial letters, which the box.net preview doesn’t show. Windows users: sorry, I’ve noticed Windows rtf viewers don’t show outlines) I made, I could still start to answer some of the questions. I asked, among other things:
- Could grapheme-colour synaesthetes learn to look at a sequence of colours that correspond to letters in their synaesthesia, and read a word?
- Could colours be used to help grapheme-colour synaesthetes learn to read a new alphabet, either one constructed for the purposes of secret communication, or a real script they will be able to use for something?
And I included this picture of some text in a supposedly-Klingon font (though it does not seem to be quite the same as plqaD; I am not sure why I didn’t find this font at the time) with the letters coloured according to my own grapheme-colour synaesthesia for the corresponding letters in the latin alphabet:
Looking at it today, I realised I couldn’t remember what the text was; I wrote that post ten months ago. It definitely wasn’t ‘How razorback-jumping frogs can level six piqued gymnasts!’ So I decided to see if I could figure it out based on the colours.
The first and second words I figured out in seconds: Swimming is. S, W and I are pretty distinctive colours, and the Ms even look like Ms. Then… teemncgc? No, that’s not a g. I can imagine a capital G in that sort of colour, but I’m using small-g colour for the ‘g’s, and anyway the letter is a different shape. It’s an H! And that’s not an n but a u; they’re fairly similar. Actually I’d say u is closer to a c-yellow than to n-yellow, so maybe I put that one in wrong. So Swimming is tee? much like (‘like’ is easy to read once I figure out it’s an l rather than a c; I love the colour of the letter K) mathing? No, bathing! M and B are pretty similar colours. So that’s not tee… it’s slightly grayer… logically it must be too. I guess I don’t think too much about the colour of the letter O, but that’s about right. Swimming is too much like… bathing. Okay, I’m googling that; I assume I took a Klingon quote from the internet. Yep, it’s Worf.
So yes, at least one grapheme-colour synaesthete can look at a sequence of colours that correspond to letters in their synaesthesia, and read a word. As for the second question, I haven’t really learnt much of the Klingon ‘alphabet’ from this, because I’ve been reading the colours and only paying attention to the shapes of the letters when two letters are of similar colour. The colours mean I can cheat and not even look at the shapes, so they might actually make it harder for me to learn the shapes in the short term. On the other hand, I can read more, more quickly, since I’ll never have to refer to a chart to look up which letters the shapes correspond to. I suspect that practice reading the colours (perhaps gradually fading to black) would help me learn the shapes in the long run.
I haven’t touched the Synaesthetist app since I wrote it; maybe I should go back and implement some of the features I was thinking about.
Ace of Hearts: She Went to Pick Flowers (Mara Levi music video)
Posted in Flowers and Animals, Kräuter, Wildblumen, Wildflowers of Canada, Writing Cards and Letters on March 5, 2013
For the Ace of Spades I posted a music video incorporating some footage shot on JoCo Cruise Crazy 2, so for the Ace of Hearts, here is a music video I made with the help of a lot of sea monkeys for Mara Levi‘s song ‘She Went to Pick Flowers‘ during JoCo Cruise Crazy 3.
It was filmed on Coco Cay, St. Maarten, and the conference center (game room, for us) on board the Freedom of the Seas. While it’s a little ironic to film a video for this song during a luxury cruise, we had all the appropriate scenery available and I really wanted to share the song and hopefully get Mara some more fans. If you like the song and think Mara should have a few flowers, please buy it or other Mara Levi music, and maybe also support Mara’s band The Pushovers in making their first album together. And if you really like her, I certainly wouldn’t complain if you requested her for JoCo Cruise Crazy 4.
I got a lot of help from other Sea Monkeys (JoCo Cruise Crazy attendees) to make this, some of whom showed up and rescued the project right when I thought I’d never find the time or people or locations to pull it off. I didn’t even get everyone’s full names, so if you’re in it and would like a proper credit, let me know. I hope my amateur video editing does you justice.
My star Cass (‘she’) for example, showed up out of nowhere right when I thought there’d be no time to do it, with a rental car to get us to the beach, and agreed to be in the video with no prior knowledge of the song or of me. And when I was held up on Coco Cay because (having been Half Moon Cay where everything is paid using the ship’s room card) I didn’t realise I’d need cash to get my hair braided, another Mara Levi fan let me into the cabana area to film there instead of on the beach where I’d have made ‘old houses’ out of sand. The drawing and origami are by cartoonist Lar DeSouza, and I bought the flowers from flauxers, which is run by another sea monkey who also happened to end up in the video as a tenant. I had been confident from the beginning that some sea monkey would have a top hat they could lend me (there’s a whole ‘monocled monkeys’ group) but it would have actually been difficult to locate one had Robert not been wearing one from the beginning. A few more names are listed in the video description. I’m also grateful to the people who wanted to help but didn’t manage to meet me at the right places or times because I’m not very good at organising things and I didn’t get to the beach for long on Coco Cay.
Mara Levi says she loves it, in capital letters with three exclamation marks, so I’m calling it a success.
Flowers for everyone!
King of Clubs: Some People I Met on the Cruise
Posted in Pirates, Writing Cards and Letters on March 5, 2013
Here is yet another parody of My Favourite Things from The Sound of Music, this time about some of the interesting people I met on JoCo Cruise Crazy 3 — not even including the official entertainers. I could fill several more verses and link to more examples of some of the descriptors; Sea Monkeys really are diverse, yet we have so much in common. I’ll add more links to explanations of the various people as video goes online. Some of these links relate to previous cruises, but the same kinds of people were on the third.
Whovians, früvians, knitters and quitters
Charming teen boys who don’t need babysitters
Folk most surprising and folk just like me
These are the people on JCCC.
Beardos and weirdos, who cares what the norm is?
Queer folk, craft beer folk and chiptunes performers [substitute ‘standup’ or ‘improv’ or ‘nerd rock’ here if you like; they were all there]
Coders and yodas and soda geeks too
All folks I’ll miss now that crazy week’s through
Linseed boilers
Fans of Euler’s
Scary horse head dudes
With 80s cartoon fans and two singing snorks,
There’s no-one this con excludes!
Dancers and -mancers and cancer survivors
Makers and bakers and pantses-McGuyvers
Writers, fist-fighters, devisers of clues
These are some people I met on the cruise
Those who keep horses, cats, dogs, dare I say ‘bees?‘
Artists, Kickstartists, mustachioed babies
Snake breeders, cake eaters, ‘fake’ geek girls too
Now that they’re gone I don’t know what to do
Famous vloggers
Weekly bloggers
Details I’ll forget
Please tweet, post in forums, put faces in books
I’ll see you all on the net!
Now if I may blow my own horn (which is probably out of tune) a bit more, here are a few other things I did on the cruise which I’m quite proud of. After using Mike Phirman‘s song Chicken Monkey Duck as mere word fodder to illustrate grapheme-colour synaesthesia and binary trees, as the cruise approached, while I was procrastinating from practising the poem I planned to recite for the open mic night, I finally got around to actually memorising it. Then on the cruise, I had the honour of singing it with Mike Phirman himself, and made one mistake (a monkey instead of a chicken; I am not counting singing the album version instead of the video version he does live, which has an extra pause in it, as a mistake), which I’m going to say was for the purpose of wabi-sabi.
Mike said nobody other than him had memorised that much of it before. I’m sure I’ve seen people doing it on YouTube, but perhaps they were reading the lyrics.
Later in the cruise, I recited my poem about Star Wars during the open mic, feeling justified in using Chicken Monkey Duck as an excuse for the inevitable mistakes (this is how it should have gone.) Still, it’s better than choosing a poem on the night and then reading it, as I did last year.
Mike Phirman (who, in case you were wondering, had said earlier that when you go on stage your body shuts down its vital functions and ‘you can really, really, really have to pee before you go on, and then you walk on stage and your body goes into like war mode, where it’s like, ‘There’s no time for that! We are at war!”) said it was awesome and Paul Sabourin commended my nerd pandering, so I’ll consider that a success! Sure, they’re pretty much paid to say that, but they’re paid to say it partly out of my pocket, so I’ll take it.
There’s one other creative thing I did on the ship, but that’s worthy of being the Ace. I will post it very soon.
Queen of Clubs: A Few Things You’ll Need for the Cruise
Posted in Pirates, Writing Cards and Letters on February 3, 2013
Here is some advice on preparing for JoCo Cruise Crazy, to be sung to the tune of My Favourite Things from The Sound of Music, because the cruise is one of my favourite things:
Plan out your formalwear; book some excursions;
catch up on memes from the previous versions;
make your own fancy pants, moustache and fez;
read every word every Sea Monkey says.
Sign up for Cruise Monkey, hug tags and Twitt-arrr;
learn to play Artemis, drums, uke or guitar;
buy things for nerd cred and smuggling in booze,
then you’ll be halfway-prepared for the cruise.
What the sluice-muck? It’s a cruise, schmuck!
There’s no need to stress.
Just book, grab your passport and get to the port
and please don’t forget to dress.
Memorise bios and work of performers;
make sure your stateroom and friend group’s enormous;
map out free WiFi at each port of call;
learn not to sleep so you won’t miss it all.
Practise for open mic and karaoke,
and to meet idols without sounding croaky.
Pack things for signing and panties to throw,
then you’ll be three-quarters ready to go.
I repeat: it’s all unneeded;
do what piques your geek,
then bring any meds that you need to survive
and you’ll have an awesome week!
One of the things on my pre-cruise to-do list is ‘write something for the Queen of Clubs’, but I couldn’t think of anything but my pre-cruise to-do list, so this is what I wrote. You can do all sorts of planning and preparation for the cruise, and it’s fun to do it, but even if you do nothing more than get to the port on time with clothes on and the relevant documents, you’ll have a shipload of fun. More advice, especially for first-time JoCo cruisers, can be found on Alice’s blog.
This is my third parody of My Favourite Things, after My Favourite Strings and The Bad Coder’s Favourite Things. It’s an easy song to parody.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License.
Please tell me if you do something cool with it.
Creative Output 
