jeremy freese's weblog

Today, I went for a 70-minute bike ride. Later, I went to Whole Foods and bought all kinds of healthy things for me to eat. In between: Michael's Frozen Custard, chocolate-malt-with-extra-malt.

(see quiz here)

Dorotha was responsible for the important new addition to Wisconsin Sociology karaoke: fieldnotes! Which has allowed for the most detailed karaoke recap ever, over at carey-oke's blog (who wrote the recap on her birthday, no less).

Regarding #s 2 ("Sister Christian"): Carey is underselling the quality of her own performance here. "Sister Christian" was also an especially inspired choice--as it was a previously unrecognized great karaoke song--and it cleared up for me that the key phrase in the chorus is "Motorin'" and not "Motor Inn", as I've always wondered what the rest of the song had to do with a motel.

Regarding #4 ("Wild, Wild Life") on her list, here is the accompanying photograph:



Regarding #15 ("Goodbye Earl"): My attempts to get the crowd to chant "Die, Earl! Die!" were not successful.

Regarding #17 ("I've Been to Paradise"): The department has its Great Karaoke Generalists (e.g., of course, Carey-oke herself) and its Great Karaoke Specialists. This song one of the department's greatest Great Karaoke Specialist at work. The combination of performer + song + video never ceases to amaze me.

Regarding #29 ("Total Eclipse of the Heart"): Carey describes the psychological torment I was put through with this song. I should be fine with a year of therapy, however.

Apparently I have sown some confusion with my post about the Nebraska State Quarter Poll. A reader from Alliance, NE (home of Carhenge) states the problem: "jeremy, design number 9 is different from the picture you have posted on the blog. do you want votes for sower 1 or sower 9? i think 9 is definitely stranger and creepier than 1 so i will vote for that anyway. it looks like he has his [body part name deleted] in a knapsack and he's peeking at it..." Um, while I hadn't thought of that, I did think #9 was the more striking image, and it was an accident that I posted the picture for #1 instead. Design 9, decked out in Nebraska Cornhusker red, is above and is the designed officially endorsed by JFW.

Some readers have asked if they can get jobs working on the The Sower comic book. My associates say they are willing to accept auditions for the lettering job, but they specify that they want the lettering to be done in a hypermanly style, to go with the general Sower theme. As another example of this, for whatever reason, my associates think it would be cool if The Sower traveled to and fro his various adventures via the back of some giant magic flying creature, and so now the debate is which of the three finalists is the most manly: a giant flying manatee, a giant flying cricket with huge mandibles, or a giant flying elk with huge mantlers.

BTW, Ann links to my earlier post and brings Millet into the mix.

1. Why does the woman on the left have money stuck to her face?

2. Why does the woman on the right want to fight about it?

3. What's that pink thing on that one woman's wrist?

Oh, wait, other photographic evidence allows us to answer #3:



Also:



4. What exactly would Jerry and Nina do if they ever did get that hammer they keep singing about?



5. Has doing "The Robot" spread from people onstage to members of the audience?

6. More importantly, who invited Barbie?

7. And who talked her into doing "The Robot" too?



8. How does Jerry manage to be Ike and Tina at the same time?

(I say "public sociology quiz" because presumably a broad training in sociology would provide one with an eye for picking out precisely what kinds of things-in-the-world are capable of yielding such vast discursive consequences.)

Answer in awhile.

(eventual boy band leader/Justin-figure crooning his best for a mob of adoring fans)

"We're trying to put together a boy band. Do you want to join us?"
"What song?"
"'It's Gonna Be Me'"
"Never heard it. Never heard of it."
"It's by N'Sync"
"Can I be Lance?"
"I don't know any of them besides Justin."
"Lance is the weird-looking one who wanted to be shot into space by the Russians." (link)
"Okay, you're Lance."
"Will I be expected to gyrate?"
"Of course."
"No way. I'm too prim and untrim to gyrate."
"Fine, no gyrating. You can stand in back. But you still have to look hot."
"Sign me up."

Note: An e-mail received this morning from one attendee of last night's karaoke proclaimed that the ensuing performance was, in her opinion, the biggest highlight of the many-highlight-filled evening. Due, in no part, to Mr. Purpletext above.

As you surely know, the swiftest way to fame and oodles of cash these days is to come up with a winning comic book/graphic novel series. Unfortunately, among some artistically-inclined associates of mine, enthusiasm has wanted for my own idea, Invisible Untenured Detective, about an assistant professor at Harvard who solves mysteries, aided by the fact that he is considered so irrelevant and unworthy by senior colleagues and students as to be rendered, for many crime-fighting intents and purposes, invisible. Instead, they have been working on their own concept, The Sower, about an especially virile hero who is dispatched on various world-saving and woman-wooing adventures.

Now, by miraculous happenstance, the State of Nebraska has opened an advisory poll for what should be put on the back of their state quarter, and one of the images that of a mysterious state icon coincidentally known as "The Sower." Can you imagine the free advertising of having tens of millions of Americans carrying around pictures of your comic-book-character in their back pockets? My associates are already working feverishly on changing the proto-drawings of their hero to look more like a hypertestosteronized version of the guy on the coin and on changing the backstory to have the hero hail from somewhere in Nebraska (Bellevue? Kearney? Wahoo?). Anyway, especially considering that some of their billions in profits could somehow trickle down to me: please go immediately to the Nebraska state quarter polling website, ignore the stuff about being a Nebraska resident, resist the temptation to vote for the truly wacky and disturbed Design #11, resist also the temptation to vote for the various drawings centered on their State Capitol (hmm, I wonder how many states have one of those), and cast your vote for Design #9.

Fellow blogger, I've dined with Ann Althouse. I know Ann Althouse. Ann Althouse is a friend of mine. Fellow blogger, Ann Althouse does not look anything like Amber Frey. Or like John Kennedy. Or Ann Coulter. For that matter, Amber Frey and Ann Coulter do not look anything alike. And none of them look anything like Laurie Dhue. Unless you really do hold to some Interchangeability of All Persons With Blond Hair theory. In logical notation:

AA ~= AF ~= AC ~= JFK(1) ~= LD unless all(B) = all(B)

And did you deliberately choose the worst picture of Amber Frey available anywhere on the Internet?

I have all this Taiwanese money still laying around from my trip there last October. Can I just cash this in at a bank? Will any bank exchange money from anywhere? Like can I walk in an presume they will do it, so I can act all assured and say "I have some Taiwanese dollars I need to exchange," or do I need to tentatively ask "Do you exchange Taiwanese dollars?" I'm desperately underfamiliar with all matters of money and traveling and its aftermath. More cosmopolitan readers, help!

BTW, to give you an idea of how much $NT I have laying around the RV, in case you want to break in and take it off my hands, $NT100 = $US3.

...about whether Wisconsin Sociology takes seriously its position as the #1 karaoke department in the country, consider the set of announcements for tonight's last-karaoke-of-the-summer excursion provided here--to our knowledge, the only sociologist-weblog that is all karaoke, all the time.

I have had inquiries to whether "The Robot," "The Breadmaker," "The Gecko," and "The Manversation" are all really audience-requested and performer-performed dances at the Karaoke Kid. They are.* If you have QuickTime, you can see one of the countless versions of "The Robot" being performed by an unnamed sociology graduate student at the end of this dark, grainy, and jumpy clip. This clip, incidentally, is presently the only known motion-picture footage of Wisconsin Sociology karaoke, which does not provide a particularly flattering portrait of our collective endeavor since whoever the guy is doing most of the "singing"--was he even with our group? did he just wander up there on stage and we were too polite to stop him?--seems not just to have enthusiasm running well beyond his musical talents but looks also like he may well be quite seriously unhinged.

* Rumors that they are also the titles of forthcoming John Grisham novels are, to the best of my knowledge, unfounded.

Back in high school, before my general estrangement from all things spiritual, I was president of my hometown church's Luther League, the youth organization for Lutheran kids. I don't remember anything I did as president--perhaps a roller-skating party!--although at least my term wasn't sullied by some kind of Luther-Lewinsky scandal. Anyway, late 80's youth Christianity was all about Satan and his many ways of ensnaring the unwary. There were of course the subliminal Satanic seductions provided on various heavy metal and dance-music albums. Then, there was the fear of actually being abducted by Satanists and used either as part of some ritual sacrifice or sold into demonic-profiteering-sex-slavery into some occultish opium den somewhere in--where else?--Southern California.

All this came back to mind this evening as I was reading this story in the New Yorker about a rising Christian comedian. The story is a great read in its own right, but it got me wondering about Mike Warnke, a Christian comedian whose album(s) were loved by a couple my more devout Luther Leaguer friends. His schtick was that of the ex-hippie-who-had-converted-to-Christ-but-kept-the-long-hair, except he took this even further by being not just an ex-hippie but an ex-hippie-and-Satanic-cult-high-priest. I don't know if I have given the guy another thought since high school, but the article had me wondering: Whatever happened to that guy? Is he still out there performing?

Turns out that a Christian magazine ran an long expose back in 1992 that revealed much of his story to be, like that of every single other person who has ever claimed to have been a high priest in a Satanic cult with fifteen hundred followers, lies. It's one of those This Guy Is A Complete Fraud exposes where the scope and audacity of all the lies, when years of falsehoods are put on page after page of a magazine article, makes a surprisingly compelling read. Especially when accompanied by discussion of freewheeling debauchery on the Christian comedy circuit.

Forgiveness being what it is, however, especially when someone is good for a laugh, he is still out there performing, with a website*, and from his itinerary looks quite busy. (His website does have a long discussion of the review of a Tribunal of Church Elders about the accusations in the article, which, at least in my eyes, didn't go very far in cutting through the thick film of sleazegrime covering this guy's biographical-morality-kitchen-counter.)

* Note the animated flag-eagle-cross combo on the website.

Confession: For a couple months now, I have contracted the services of a personal chef.

How it works: On Mondays, she comes over to the RV and cooks me four different entrees, in portions large enough that they eat make more than one meal unless I eat pathologically. The reason: I don't really cook, and I wanted to have some combination of food that was simultaneously convenient, healthy, and delicious enough to avert me from some of the less healthy culinary abysms I can readily fall into. The cost: about $100 each week I do it (this is labor + food; the latter is less expensive than it might otherwise be because everything she makes for me is vegetarian). Note: This is the kind of indulgence one can do when one has a professional job, only one mouth to feed and not an otherwise particularly costly or interesting life.

The results: scrumptious, so far. Sometimes a dish doesn't really work for me, but then I tell her and it's off the list of possible repeats. The woman does wonders with tofu, and makes some mean veggie quesadillas and sweet potato ravioli, among other things.

I have talked about this with a couple of single female friends who have said that they have a different problem, which is that they very much love to cook, but hate to cook for only one person and so do not do it nearly as much as they would like. Thus, an unmet market need for: the personal eater. One would contract to go around and eat at the abodes of various professionals-with-mad-kitchen-skillz who love to cook but have trouble securing an audience for it. I'd go into this line of work myself, except I'm too finicky an eater and way too shy/awkward/boring to provide adequate dinner conversation with strangers. But if you are a charming omnivore, this could be your calling.

Angela has opened the polls for at least one of her selections for singing at karaoke Wednesday. Among the options are "Little Red Corvette." Unfortunately, the Karaoke Kid does not have the Prince song that I think would make the best karaoke song: "I Could Never Take The Place Of Your Man." Not only would it be a sure-karaoke-winner, but I think it's also the sweetest song that Prince ever composed. The song is about a conversation that Prince has with a woman in a bar that begins something like:

"Hi! My name is Prince. Do you want to dance?"
"All I want is a good man. Do you think you are qualified?"

One need not be a committmentphobe to see this statement as ranking somewhere down near "Will we get married afterwards?" as an inappropriately premature response to a friendly dance request from a stranger. However, rather than doing what 90% of men would do in this situation, i.e., RUN, Prince instead provides a detailed explanation for how she seems to have been too psychologically damaged by her previous relationship to be, now or ever, in the emotional position to provide Prince with the intense hypermonogamous relationship he so ardently wants. He stands there kindly and listens while she cries and tells her entire story, including the whole part about being left with one baby and another one on the way. He even takes the time to gently explain why it would not work for them to just be friends. What a guy! Who says you can't be a Rock Star and a Sensitive Man at the same time?

One of the many things that I learned a few years ago when my sister died was that you really should let it be known to others what you would like to be done should the unfortunate happen to you. Even if you are the sort of person who doesn't care that much what happens, you should do it for your family's sake. Because: if you don't, then your family members can end up spending all kinds of time trying desperately to remember anything you ever may have said, however obliquely, regarding death, and they can also get into disputes about what you would have wanted--disagreements made more likely not just because different family members may know radically different renditions of you, but also because in thinking about what another person would have wanted, it's very hard to avoid projecting what oneself would want.

I was talking to someone last night about the process of tombstone shopping with my family. A problem we had is that, although my sister was 31 when she died, she had not married and was still spending a lot of nights staying over at my parents house, and so she hadn't necessarily made the transition to adulthood in my family's mind. As a result, it took considerable ever-so-delicate rhetorical exertion on my part to steer my family away from the seventeen-year-old-girl-dies-in-a-car-crash tombstones and toward the adult-woman-killed-in-prime-of-life-by-a-brain-tumor tombstones. (I could say that I'm sure that this is what she would have wanted, and I do genuinely think this is so, but, that said, it is certainly what I wanted for her.)

Anyway, in the course of this conversation, I realized I may need to update my postmortem wish. What I have made clear to my family is that, unless someone has an inspired idea for how my corpse could be used for a really hilarious practical joke, I want to be cremated.* But what to do with my ashes? My previous line has been that I want my ashes to be surreptitiously scattered into the ventilation system of a large university library, where they could circulate among and settle on the books for decades following my demise. However, even though I love books as much as ever,** I'm not sure I'm really justified in having this wish for my remains anymore, as all the various online services--either having documents available online or able to be ordered online for delivery--mean that I hardly ever set foot in the library here anymore. It would be great if I could somehow have my ashes scattered over the Internet, but barring some ability to make a matter -> energy conversion, I can't imagine how that would be done. Any ideas?

* After donating whatever organs can be donated, of course.

** Indeed, if my recent pathological reading benders are any indication, perhaps more than ever.

There are plans to get in one more karaoke event before the end of summer, as well as perhaps a later, special despair-e-oke event where we do nothing but sing sad songs and lament Jerry's return to New York and other karaoke departures.

The latest call to karaoke arms has included a call for accompanying dancers. While my normal karaoke is that of enthusiastic audience participant, I have sometimes appeared onstage to "sing," or whatever it is one would call that thing I do with my voice. I do not, however, dance. I do not do "The Robot." I do not do "The Breadmaker." I do not do "The Gecko." I do not do the latest dance craze that has swept through sociology-karaoke circles, "The Manversation."*

I could cite faculty dignity by way of explanation here, or my narwhalish figure, or my complete lack of coordination. But today I was reading Created in Darkness by Troubled Americans, a collection of "humor" from McSweeney's, and I see that a certain friend of mine--you know who you are--has sold them the transcripts from a particularly ill-fated attempt to provide me with dance instruction. This gives you a sense of the psychological trauma that dance dredges up for me.





Thanks, pal, I hope you got thirty pieces of silver for selling that interaction to McSweeney's as "fiction." No, what I'm doing now is not some new creative dance move of mine, but rather struggling to pull the stilletto out of my spine.

* How it's done: clench your fists, hold them up in right angles to your body, raise your shoulders slightly, furrow your brow, and then move your fists in a horizontal-figure-8 motion and cock your head from side to side while you sing in a faux deep voice. Even better if you are holding a glass of scotch while you perform.

With all these other things to do this weekend, what better use of my time than to read yet another murder mystery that takes place in academia? This one, The Edith Wharton Murders, takes place at an Edith Wharton conference at "State University of Michigan". Here's are a few paragraphs that seem an odd digression from the narrative flow of the book:

Most of the remodeling and repairs at the Campus Center were done except for one wing near our meeting rooms... The lower half of the walls were almost all redone with gorgeous polished granite tiles that were midnight blue, heavily flecked with orange. This was the kind of granite you see decorating the exterioors of office buildings, or used for floors, and these tiles were twelve by twelve inches and half an inch thick. I know because they were stacked in some unfinished hallways and I picked up one to take a better look. It was surprisingly light.

A Campus Center workman, youngish, with a goatee, came up right next to
me. "Nice stuff," he said. "Solid granite. Indestructible. Expensive."

Hmm, I wonder what the murder weapon is going to be.

From the latest letter I have received from my psychic benefactor, Maria Duval:



Further proof of Ms. Duval's psychic influence is that, when I opened this letter, what was playing on iTunes here in the RV was U2's "Stuck in a Moment You Can't Get Out Of" (really! I'm not making this up!). Anyway, while one might ask what you have done for me lately, what kind of risks was Ms. Duval taking on my behalf:



Which would have been just what I needed, to have some crazy psychic trapped somewhere deep in my past life, mucking things up as she uses the various vast mindforces at her disposal to try to free herself. Anyway, slogging through the last few centuries of my lives appears to have paid off, as Ms. Duval discovered something vital during her journey through my psychic past:



But, then, she gets more precise than this, revealing that the key plot twist took place only twelve years previously:



What happened in November 1992 that could have had such a dramatic and negative effect on my life? The two main things I remember from November 1992 are that: (1) I started applying to graduate programs in sociology and (2) Bill Clinton, the hottie-from-Hope-himself was elected president. Which of these things are responsible for my lost and tormented state? For thirty dollars, not only can I find out, but I can also have her perform a PEP&MA, which from my understanding is kind of like a karmic enema. And I get a special pouch. And it's guaranteed:



And, somehow, in the process, I also get to become wealthy enough to solve all my problems. I know people always say money can't buy happiness, but I would certainly welcome the oppotunity to try. I-Ching? Ca-ching! What's more, not only will Maria make me rich, she's even powerful and generous enough to allow me to specify how it is I would like to become rich:

The biggest surprise for me at ASA was how many acquaintances of mine knew about this blog and had even looked at it at one time or another. One such person had read my remarks on public sociology and had interpreted them as indicating that I was somehow in the process of partnering with Mathieu Deflem as part of some "anti-public-sociology" faction. Deflem, for those who do not know, has started a Save Sociology website which, for a time, featured printable posters calling for the impeachment of ASA-president-and-public-sociology-patriarch Michael Burawoy (see posts on Deflem by others here and here and [earlier] here). While my own contrarian impulses dispose me to react respectfully to anyone who has enough intellectual passion and chutzpah to risk a ride on the express train to disciplinary pariah status, I do not want to be associated with the views of Deflem, for the simple reason that I do not share them.

Since a clarification is apparently in order, let me be clear: I am not anti-public-sociology.

If you look back at my post on the topic, my opposition was to a particular statement, in Footnotes, that presented public sociology as having been invented "to criticize and counter the mounting professionalization" of sociology. Among other things, I objected to this empirically, making what I think is the hard-to-deny point that whatever the "professionalization" of sociology might mean, it is assuredly not at present "mounting." I also objected to the idea that "professional" sociology was something that our discipline should be using our main meeting to "criticize and counter," in large part because I think "professional" sociology is already weak and widely disrespected enough.

So, again: I am not anti-public-sociology. I am, certainly and adamantly, anti-anti-professional-sociology. If one insists (a) on making a binary distinction between the professional and public, and then (b) on seeing that binary locked in a zero-sum competition, then you could insist that being anti-anti-professional-sociology makes one anti-public-sociology. You're-either-with-us-or-against-us logic has enjoyed a recent renascence, after all. However, unlike apparently whoever wrote the "mounting" sentence I reacted to, I reject both (a) and (b).

I do disagree with various particulars, large and small, of the content and form Burawoy's statements about public sociology, so I do not want to be read as being On, or even Near, That Bandwagon. (Part of what I resist, incidentally, is even that has turned into A Bandwagon.) The largest points of disagreement would be along that predictable dimension of the relationship between politics and sociological research. There is a huge expanse of middle ground between Deflemville and Burawoyburgh here. This could be a short-monograph-length post in its own right, and I'm not going to get into it now.

Or, well, to get into it a little bit: I would personally be less leery of those who wax enthusiastic about a intensely-intimate-intertwining of social research and political praxis if the position was more often expressed in a way so that one could have political views outside a highly circumscribed ideological sandbox and still be welcome to play in our discipline. It bothers me that 90% of sociologists hold political beliefs representative of 10% or less of the available political spectrum.* I do not see what it gains us professionally or publicly--even if it does personally provide for an steady-surfeit of sanctimonious-self-satisfaction and also saves us from the inconvenience of dissensus--and I can think upwards of a dozen reasons why massive ideological homogeneity is bad for an academic discipline.**

But, anyway, whatever else might be said, "Public Sociologies" was a truly excellent and inspired conference theme.*** It got people thinking, talking, debating, disagreeing. Keep in mind, two years ago the ASA theme was "Allocation Processes and Ascription," which, no offense to anyone, is not exactly a sexy-pooch of a theme for generating excitement among the sociologist-masses. I also greatly appreciated the seriousness and enthusiasm that Burawoy brought to being given the mantle of serving as ASA president. This extended to his address. If I had to choose between an ASA president using the forum of their address for delivering a vision-for-the-discipline versus delivering a cute-summary-of-a-current-research-project (not to name any recent-past-president names), I would choose the former every time, even if I dramatically disagreed with the vision.

* Granted, I'm not willing to take some rightward dive myself for the sake of promoting ideological heterogeneity in sociology.

** Non-academics often have this impression that academics spend all their time engaging in friendly disagreements with one another. At least in sociology, sorting into like-minded groups is sufficiently strong that we typically spend most of our time sitting around agreeing with one another and disagreeing with other people who are not actually included in our discussions and so not able to provide counterarguments (economists! evolutionary psychologists!). And then people wonder why sociologists often do not perform all that well when they do participate in public debates.

*** BTW, if future meetings are also going to continue the innovation of us being given fetching souvenir bags to hold our programs and such, do you think someone could suggest that maybe we look into getting union-made bags instead of bags made under who-knows-what labor conditions in China? (Props to whoever it was at the blogger-get-together who looked at the tag to investigate the provenance of the public sociology bags).

While I was off in San Francisco, another blogger was examining Ann's voting record and announcing that, despite her professed undecidedness, she was likely to be voting for Kerry. This person is wrong; their error is paying too much attention to the party of the candidate Ann supports. If you look at Ann's electoral-biography, it would seem more reasonable to predict that--and quite apart from whatever eventual rationale she might provide for doing so--she's likely to vote for Bush. Consider her lifetime history of support in incumbent elections:

Supports incumbent: Ford, Carter, Clinton
Against incumbent: Johnson, Nixon, Reagan, Bush I

Plain as day: Ann is more likely to support an incumbent the more unpopular the incumbent has been upon the time of their re-election campaign. She's a contrarian independent. The only instance that doesn't really fit the pattern well is her vote for Clinton over Bush in 1992. One explanation for this would be, if one looks back to Ann's various posts about Clinton, it's clear she thinks he's a hottie. Apart from the "hottie" theory, however, one might suggest that Ann is more likely to support an incumbent the more she feels like the political discourse is unfairly maligning the incumbent (a discourse-contrarian independent, then). I don't think it's that hard to make the case that, even though Bush lost his incumbent race and Clinton won his, Clinton was the more unfairly maligned incumbent during this first term (Clinton being the one, for example, accused of having an aide murdered and of secretly being a puppet of his wife).

The Freese-Harried general theory of karaoke audience participation was recently subjected to a wholly independent test and reportedly its major predictions were once again confirmed. Ah, science!

(See a previous installment in this series here.)

Monday, I wrote a post saying that I had just started putting together my talk for the next morning, and that I was going to spend an hour doing so before I left to join the group going to see the San Francisco Giants play. This turned out to be untrue, as I actually spent only a half-hour on the talk, and spent the other half reading a mystery novel.* I didn't get back from the baseball game until after 11AM, and so I spent a little while more than night working on my talk and then set a wake-up call for 5:30 AM to finish my PowerPoint slides then.

A much-repeated wisdom about public presentations is that you should be Be Prepared for failures of AV technology. You are, for example, frequently told that you should make transparencies of your PowerPoint slides so that you can use the transparencies should there be a problem with the projector. The conscientious graduate student scheduled to also speak in my session had done precisely this. Myself, on the other hand, had only finished the slides themselves a half-hour before the session, and so I certainly didn't have the time to go to the Business Center and figure out how to get the slides from my computer to their computer so transparencies could be made. Consequently, it is perhaps not surprising that the graduate student was less panicky than I was when it turned out that there was no AV projector in our room.

So, fifteen minutes before our session was to begin, the graduate student and I went off in search for a projector. It took us close to ten minutes to find the office that ASA had set up to coordinate equipment. They asserted that neither of us requested a projector. I can imagine myself forgetting--although it's a little hard to believe, given that I always use PowerPoint these days--but two of us forgetting seems highly unlikely. In any case, they didn't have any spare projectors available for us to commandeer.

The graduate student said, "It's too bad [advisor's name] was leaving this morning because I know had brought his own projector."

Which inspired my own Plan B, as I remembered that Bob and Tess Hauser had also brought a projector for an exhibit promoting the Wisconsin Longitudinal Study. This would not, it should be noted, be the first time the Hausers had bailed me out by lending me something at the last minute.** I told the graduate student to go back to our room and explain why I would be late, and then I called the Hausers' room. Tess was there, and said I could borrow it.

"I was going to take a bath. Are you going to be coming to get it soon?"
"My sesssion starts in two minutes, so I'll be there in 90 seconds. What room?"
"Tower 1, room 3217"

Moving remarkably swiftly for a professionally attired person of my weight, I did make it to the 32nd floor of the hotel in 90 seconds, but was thrown off when I discovered that there was no room 3217 in Tower 1. A maid was in the hall, and I asked her where room 3217 was, and she gave me this baffled look and affirmed that there was no room 3217.

Just then a door down the hall opened, and Tess stuck her head out, saying she heard my voice. Room 3271. I'm sure that's what she said, and I just mixed up the digits in my general addledness.

So I get their projector and rush back down to the room where my session was supposed to be taking place. They were waiting for me in order to begin. I hadn't really held anything up; one of the speakers had cancelled, and so our session had plenty of time. Besides that, other than the speakers and their co-authors, only three people were in attendance: a guy who made several astute comments at the end, a friend who had come to hear me present, and a seemingly insane person (it's comforting to have another verification of the rule that there's at least one at every session, no matter how small one's session is).

Still, I hurriedly set up the projector and then took my seat, as I was scheduled to be the last speaker. The graduate student had opted not to use the projector, instead going with his backup transparencies. The other speaker just passed out a handout, noting that he had learned never to rely on other people for AV equipment.***

When it was my turn to talk, I hit the combination of keys that would launch the PowerPoint presentation and send the output from the screen to the projector. The title slide did come up, but everything on the screen was backwards--exactly as if you were looking at the slide in a mirror. There was a impressed murmur from the audience at this, as some of those who were aware of the perils of computerized visual aids had still not realized that the AV Gods could screw a person over this badly. "How is that even possible?" one person asked.

The WLS, I remembered, had set up its booth so that it was rear-projecting its slide presentation; that is, the projector set up behind a translucent screen rather than in front of a white one. The projector must be set to some menu option for rear-projection. I tried to figure out how to change it back, but it's actually hard to navigate on-screen menus when the different options are printed backwards and when pressing right on the selection pad causes the cursor to go left. To my credit, I realized the futility quickly and so only spent a few seconds fiddling with this.

And so, then, I just started my talk. As far as I could tell, it actually went over nicely. I held my laptop flat in front of me like a book, looking down and flipping the slides ahead to remind me of what I had wanted to say. When it came time to show a graph, I turned the laptop around and held it out to the audience, pointing to what the different colored bars on the graph meant. Given that there were only nine people there, this seemed reasonably effective, perhaps reminiscent of those flip charts that Ross Perot used to use.

* An Instance of the Fingerpost, by Iain Pears. It takes place in 17th century England. It's an excellent and engrossing book in the same vein as (but, so far at least, better than) Umberto Eco's The Name of the Rose. I basically spent last night reading it and catching up on my sleep rather than going out to enjoy San Francisco, which can be interpreted as saying something certainly flattering about the book and less flattering about myself.

** The most generous of which, perhaps, happened when the clutch went out on my car about twenty miles outside of Madison as I was driving home for my parents' 50th wedding anniversary. The Hausers not only came and picked me up, but they loaned me their car for the weekend, which was certainly the first appearance of any kind of Volvo on the Freese Family Farm.

*** The problem with this being, unfortunately, that handouts are not, excepting certain instances, anywhere near as effective as overheads or PowerPoint, if for no other reason than overheads and PowerPoint encourage the audience to keep look in the general direction of the speaker instead of down at their laps.

I'm packing up my stuff for the return home from San Francisco. No one, and I mean no one, lays more waste to a hotel room for a more boring end than I do. You would think, perhaps, that The Who had stayed here or something. Instead, just me, hanging out between my ever-dutiful attendance* at various sessions of my discipline's professional meetings. Perhaps at some point I will learn that the best organization of one's belongings over a multi-day hotel room is not simply to throw each item to some new, as-yet-uncovered-by-something-else location.

Currently, I am trying to find the piece of paper that has time of my return flight. This seems important.

* If not obvious: a joke. I don't attend many sessions that I'm not directly involved in.

I'm having fun. So much so that, as you can tell, I'm not blogging. Actually, right now, I've just commenced working on the talk that I will be giving at 8AM tomorrow. (I've learned from past conference experience that spending too much time on a 15-20 minute quantitative-research-conference-presentation is not just a waste of time, but actually leads one to give a worse talk--from the standpoint of both speaker or audience--than one would otherwise.) I'm leaving for a baseball game with friends in an hour, and then presumably late tonight I'll have to finish up getting my PowerPoint slides ready.

Regarding my weblog, there were three things that I wondered if they would happen to me sometime during the five-and-a-half days that I am in San Francisco for the American Sociological Association meetings. As it turned out, all three happened within my first four hours of being here.

1. A mutual friend introducing a stranger to me and the stranger saying "Yes, I know you, I've looked at your weblog." Literally, this was the first person I was introduced to here at this year's ASA.

2. During a professionalish conversation with a peer in the discipline, someone else joining the conversation and then saying, "Hey, have you seen this guy's weblog?"

3. Someone coming up to me, without my wearing my nametag, and asking me if I was Jeremy Freese, and saying that they recognize me because of the drawing of me on my weblog.

BTW, on the list of eleven plausible-forgettables in the last post, I forgot the add a twelfth--my digital camera--which means, of course, that I've forgotten my digital camera.

(Given that I won't forget my wallet, and only so much bad can happen to you nowadays as long as you have your credit card and driver's license) Presented in order of the disaster it would be to forget them:

1. This award plaque that I promised I would take on behalf of one of my senior colleagues and deliver to the head of one of the ASA sections so she can bestow it an an award ceremony. [update: packed!]
2. Ticket to baseball game [update: packed!]
3. The Medications [update: packed!]
4. Power cord for laptop [update: packed!]
[update: packed!]
5. Cel phone [update: packed!]
5 1/2. Cel phone charger (almost forgot to put on list because I almost forgot it) [update: packed!]
6. Micro-screen razor [update: packed!]
7. Portable hard drive [update: packed!]
8. Materials actually needed for presentation [update: packed!]
9. Lucky marmot socks [update: where the @%#* are my lucky marmot socks? how am I supposed to give a presentation without them? you can't just find socks with marmots on them anywhere, and, anyway, they might not have the lucky marmot mojo!]
10. Adequate reading material if, as is almost always the case, I cannot sleep on the plane ride there/back, despite how tired I am [update: packed!]
11. Wireless card (only #11 because presumably it wouldn't be that tough to just buy another, especially since that's what I did when I forgot my card on my recent trip to Santa Monica) [update: packed!]

My flight is at 6:15 AM. I connect through Memphis, which is not the most obvious intermediate location between Madison and San Francisco.

(two of sociology's karaoke stars doing Bon Jovi's "Living on a Prayer." I am the person to the right, conveniently cropped out of view)

A key strategy of Wisconsin Sociology Karaoke is to Get There Early--as in, right when it opens--so we can establish ourselves as the evenings alpha patrons before the place is beseiged by undergraduates and unsavory types. The Karaoke Kid, despite its posted opening sign of 8pm, does not feel obliged to open its doors promptly. Accordingly, we adjusted our planned meeting time to 8:15. However, last Monday, the Kid did not open until 8:30, by which time a rowdy crowd of sociologists had gathered outside and were, as the Dixie Chicks might sing, "ready-ready-ready, ready-to-riot."

And so, sociology stormed the karaoke barracades, putting so many songs into the queue right away as to shatter the all-time Karaoke Kid record for the quickest the guy has ever had to come around and take the books away, meaning that there were already well over hour's worth of songs in the queue. A consequence of this is that there were very few non-sociology-patrons who took a part on stage in the early part of the evening. The first such performer was this sixty-something gentleman who had signed up to do Cyndi Lauper's "She Bop." I took the opportunity to go to the bar to get something to drink, and, as I stood up there, a couple of sociologists began to chastise me shouting "Rule Two! Rule Two!" This was a reference to the second imperative of Freese-Harried general theory of karaoke audience participation, which is that you need to cheer more loudly for the people you don't know than the people you don't know.

"I read your blog sometimes," confessed one of the chastisers as I sat down, whom I wasn't actually aware knew about my weblog. "Well, pretty much just the karaoke posts. Sometimes I think you are talking about me." [She's right!]

Having the queue fill so quickly does make things more karaoke-kutthroat and so more daunting for the newbie-with-aspirations-to-sing. The general self-presentation strategy of this type of newbie--which I've witnessed upwards of a zillion times by now--is to first appear shy and unsure of whether they want to go onstage, and then later, after several rounds of cajoling from others, finally sigh and, as a magnanimous demonstration of their affability, pronounce that they might at long last allow themselves to be put in for a teensy little song. Monday night, one much-anticipated-newcomer came in late and sat at my table and began to do exactly this. I think the person was surprised by my drill-sargeant-like response: "No! You cannot play that game! You cannot act like you don't want to sing! You cannot pretend to be shy! When the books come back out, you have to put something in right away or else you're not going to get to sing at all!" My approach did work--what would have been a hour's worth of hemming-and-hawing was abridged to ninety seconds--and the person got their rightful chance to shine on stage.

There are other ways of dealing with the karaoke queue than rushing your slip of paper up to the bar. Even though none of us are willing to organize rallies to secure a significant hourly wage for The Karaoke DJs, some do feel it is wrong that the DJs generally respond to the implicit-bribery-via-the-tip-jar by putting one's song somewhere other than at the very end of the queue. As the Monday night extravaganza went on, suddenly the pressing need for a more explicit bribe arose, as it was realized that no sociologist had yet put in to do the best karaoke song ever--"Total Eclipse of the Heart"--and the queue was so full that the books had been taken away a second time and the DJ was adamantly accepting no new songs. A particularly concerned benefactor pulled out $5 (the price of a song is normally $1) and dispatched someone to the bar with instructions to get the DJ to put us in for TEotH. The DJ flatly refused. So, we added another $5 and asked a different person if she would go plead our case to the DJ for us.

Whatever the content of that interaction, all I know is we went from being nowhere in a two-hour queue to being the third in line. In karaoke math: money + marketing = the microphone. The uninitiated might, I suppose, balk at paying 10 times the going rate for "Total Eclipse of the Heart." Considering that it never-ever fails to provide a priceless karaoke moment, mathematically-hip JFW readers will note that this is still asymptotically close to being an infinitely good bargain.