boxofdelights

I got into a stupid fight on James Nicoll's LJ, which inspired me to post:

How many syllables does "Julia" have?
How about "Danya"?
And "Darya"?

Given that the correct answer is "However many the person whose name you're pronouncing wants it to have," do you find it difficult to pronounce any of those names with two syllables?

How many syllables does "jewel" have? "Poem"? I don't want to start a stupid fight on my journal, but so far everyone who comments here has reasonably good sense and reasonably good manners. If you feel safe answering this question in this context: Do you have prejudices about people whose answers to the last two questions are different from yours? What are they?

And what is it about being female on the internet that makes people think I couldn't really understand what I just said, so they ought to explain it to me?

I don't watch Law and Order, so I didn't catch those references in this week's Community, but there was a joke in there for me: when Annie called the unblooming yam "A big orange splotch on your perfect record!" I don't know why this tickles me so much, but Community + Pinkwater! Of course!

The older I get the more everything seems to refer to everything else. Possibly because there are more stories in my brain for each new story to refer to. Possibly I am just going crazy. Referentiality tickles the pattern-making part of my brain even when I know it is meaningless. (The Big Orange Splot reference is not meaningless. It tells you something important about Annie's character and, I hope, her character arc.)

I've been intensely fannish about The Good Wife lately, wolfing down the backlog, waiting for the next episode like a dog waits for dinner, and reading all the commentary I can find. I've been running into the notion that Alicia couldn't tolerate being deceived over the Peter/Kalinda affair because Alicia doesn't lie.

Alicia does lie. She lies less than any other main character, maybe less than any recurring character except Pastor Isaiah, but she does routinely lie: to her children. She lies to them in that very episode. Zach asks why his parents are separating, and Alicia says, "Because we decided it was time." No, actually, Alicia decided. Unilaterally. Peter did not even get the chance to discuss the decision after the fact.

And a minute after telling her kids this lie, which will not fool them for long even if Peter backs her up on it, Alicia tells them, "We don't lie here. We don't lie to each other." This is exactly the double bind that creates liars like Peter. On the verbal level you learn that you must not lie to the people you love. On a deeper level, you learn that you must lie to the people you love, and you must do anything (including lying) to prevent them from finding out that you lied. And both those messages come from your parent, your moral teacher, the person without whose care you would have died.

I'm sure that Alicia can rationalize why she had to say that then, to protect Zach and Grace, because she loves them, because the truth would only hurt them and what difference could it possibly make? And I am sure that Peter's rationalizations for his lies to Alicia sound remarkably similar. And I am intensely interested in whether the show is going to bring that similarity to light.

I should have thought about this earlier, and asked you guys for feedback, or maybe I should have waited until next year. But here's what I just sent to this year's Wiscon access committee:

Problem: Panelists sometimes forget to use the mike or to move their hands away from their mouths when they talk.

The only method I, as an audience member who cannot understand what is being said, have to address this problem is to put my hand up and wait for the moderator to call on me. This solution is not available when the panel is not taking questions[*], takes some wait time even when it is available, and is an interruption to the actual discussion.

Suggestion: Print HANDS or MIKE (depending on whether the panel has mikes) on cardstock in large friendly letters. Leave them on the blue-stripe seats or at the entrance to the room. Somehow inform everyone that these are intended to be used to remind the panelists to move their HANDS or use the MIKE.

ETA: The access team thinks this is a great idea. They're going to see what they can do for this year.

[*]ETA: I know that some people can call out "mike!" even when the panelists are talking. I appreciate it when they do. But. I wish everyone could understand how painful it is for a shy person to push herself forward, when it is not her turn, to ask.