Travel

I love these series of three videos. Makes me want to travel again.


MOVE from Rick Mereki on Vimeo.



LEARN from Rick Mereki on Vimeo.



EAT from Rick Mereki on Vimeo.

The last one is especially compelling. :)


Discovered via Gawker. More information here.

Guest post

Hi all,

I have a guest post up at Justine Larbalestier's blog here. It's all about my job as a children's book editor, and it links to some older posts either here or over at the Blue Rose Girls blog. I'm answering questions over there (and as always, here, too!), so check it out!

I also had a new post up over at the Blue Rose Girls on Monday.

This week I've been reading a ton, editing a ton, watching American Idol a ton, participating in Twitter Kidlitchat and YAlitchat, as well as watching the Olympics. Sometimes all at the same time!

Man, I feel like going skiing right now!

It's snowing! It's snowing random links, that is.

Re-posted from the Blue Rose Girls.

I'm on vacation, at my parents' home in Southern California for the holidays. I made it out of New York on the last non-canceled flight to Los Angeles Saturday afternoon during the snow storm! Speaking of the storm, I was actually a teeny tiny bit sad to have escaped, because I really love snow, and there's something so special about the first big snow of the season. But I was happy to live vicariously (whil in 70 degree weather) via lots of photos and videos online. Here's my favorite:



This year really flew by. I'll try to do a proper wrap-up in the next few weeks, but today I'll direct you to agent Nathan Bransford's great "Year in Publishing" post.

And here's a recent article about a business practice in publishing that nobody talks about. In fact, I know very little about how this works and found the article fascinating myself.

I was a guest blogger over at the Debutante Ball last week, and posted about research--how I researched to find my dream publishing job, that is! Read it here.

Also, related to Meghan's post about eBooks, this is an interesting article about an experiment regarding the issue of DRM, or digital rights management.

And finally, in honor of the sad news that actress Brittany Murphy died over the weekend, and also the recent news of Kirkus's demise, I was reminded of my post from this past May about Bad Reviews, which referenced both subjects (albeit somewhat indirectly). And will add that despite my negative feelings towards some of the reviews in Kirkus, I was saddened by the news. It really is a loss to publishing. You can read more thoughts about this over at the Horn Book blog.

And to conclude this random post, let's get back to snow. Anyone who knows me well knows that my favorite snow book, which is also my favorite picture book of all time, is The Snowy Day by Ezra Jack Keats. Other snow books I love are Robert's Snow by Grace Lin, and Uri Shulevitz's Snow.

What are some of your favorite snow books?

Happy Holidays, everyone!!

Hypocrisy

I thought this clip from last night's The Daily Show was particularly good:

The Daily Show With Jon StewartM - Th 11p / 10c

Bill O'Reilly's Right to Privacy

Daily Show Full Episodes
Important Things With Demetri Martin

Funny Political News
Joke of the Day

More SNL

Here are a few more videos I've especially enjoyed:

Jesse Jackson discussed the Bradley Effect:

Hall & Oates split on who they support:

How many people have your name?

Interestingly, there are more people in the U.S. named "Alvina" (9,122) than have the last name "Ling" (7,115).

And, as to be expected:

HowManyOfMe.com

There are 0 people with my name in the U.S.A. How many have your name?

For some reason, I thought there was a possibility that someone in Texas was named Alvina Ling--I think she came up in a White Pages search. But maybe not. For now, I only know for sure of one other Alvina Ling, in Singapore.

link courtesy of Fuse #8.

Happy Blogiversary fellow bloggers and blog readers!

I woke up this morning to an NPR story about blogs, which reminded me that it was my day to post. According to a Wall Street Journal article"Happy Blogiversary" that was reported back in July, one of, if not the first blog was Robot Wisdom.

On Dec. 23, 1997, on his site, Robot Wisdom, Mr. Barger wrote: "I decided to start my own webpage logging the best stuff I find as I surf, on a daily basis," and the Oxford English Dictionary regards this as the primordial root of the word "weblog."

Other early blogs were CamWorld and Scripting News. It's incredible that these blogs are celebrating their 10-year anniversaries this year--I wonder who among us will still be blogging 5 or 10 years from now. Will I?

The NPR.com page also has a little chart about who blogs and why people blog. I'd say the reasons why I blog are pretty much in line with the reasons why most people blog.

******

The above is partially re-posted from the Blue Rose Girls blog. I asked over there, and I'll ask here. In the spirit of the long life of blogs, is there anything more/less/different you'd like to see with my blog?

******

A few other Random things for this blog on this Christmas Eve morning. The first is a game my brother Felix introduced us to last night. It seems simple, almost stupid, yet it's oddly mesmerizing and addictive. The game is here. The goal is the trap the kitty, keeping him from escaping off the board.

******

And then two videos. These have been around a while, but I just saw them around Thanksgiving and meant to share them earlier. First, Daft Bodies:




And then Daft Hands (this one came first):




Enjoy!

Are you right brain or left brain?

You may have seen this before, but my friend Heather sent this along. Check out this link here and let me know if you see the girl rotating clockwise or counterclockwise.

At first all I could see was her turning clockwise, which I guess means I use more of my right brain. This was interesting for me to know, because I never thought of myself as particularly a right brain thinker. But I guess if some of the qualities of a right-brain thinker include "big picture oriented," "can 'get it' (i.e. meaning)," "presents possibilities," and "risk taking," then it makes sense. (Although of course I associate with many of the left-brain qualities, too! Like "words and language," "acknowledges," "forms strategies," and "practical.")

I wasn't able to get her to switch directions until Heather suggested looking unfocused at her feet, and then she switched. So weird! Some of my friends were convinced that it was some technical trick, but yet when we looked at the same screen at the same time, I would see her turning clockwise, while another person would see her continually switching. I'm baffled as to how it works.

So, which part of your brain do you use the most?

100 Words a Day

My roommate Rose has been contributing to the blog 100 Words a Day. Check it out here. It's a cool idea and an interesting exercise; I think 100 words can sometimes last forever, and sometimes seem way too short. At any rate, I decided to make this post exactly 100 words to see how it feels. A bit weird, to be honest. Each word feels at risk of being wasted, but also feels worth something more.

I've been thinking about trying something new every day. This is one of my new things for today. My very first 100 word post.

Poems for Grace and Robert

Elaine has recently posted two lovely poems on Wild Rose Reader for Grace and Robert that really touched me. Read them here and here.

I <3 Lily Allen

Lily Allen is awesome. Went to her concert last night at the Warsaw in Brooklyn. Even though she complained at the start about being sick and having the runs (I forget how she said it, but in her cockney accent, it was adorable), she put on a kick-ass show. I was pretty close to the stage, but also right next to the speakers. I'm a little deaf this morning.

Here's her Smile video.


(If this doesn't work, you can view it here.)

I've decided I want to see more live music. I love it.

How to get into publishing/editorial?

Check out my colleague T.S.'s new blogger blog, Must Love Books. He has a great post about getting into publishing, so check it out. Welcome to blogger, T.S.!

Editor Cheryl Klein also had a great post a while back about how to be an editor here.

Don't try this. But watch it.

Another video I love. So soothing, somehow, although ridiculously dangerous and inconsiderate. I rode on the back of my friend's Vespa last night from Chelsea to Williamsburg, and it reminded me of this video, and also of riding my little scooter in Taiwan, weaving in and out of traffic, the fierce wind blowing, feeling like I'm flying. I need to get on my bike again soon!

Amateur - Lasse Gjertsen

Saw this over at Earl Picken's blog. Really cool.

Cool blog

I found this blog on Gothamist. Very creative. I think Linda would get a kick out of it. Heck, I think she's a RISD grad, so maybe they already know each other. I love the video of the subway swing, because it's so carefree, and also classic New York--most of the bystanders don't even flinch/react to such a strange occurence, and others immediately jump in and want to try. That's one of the things I love about New York.

I found the setting her hair free a little gross, though, although the spirit of it is nice, I guess. But ugg, imagine finding a braid of human hair attached to a deflated balloon on the ground?! Or what if you were swimming and your arm caught on it. Yuck! It reminds me of the story my friend once told me about a college boyfriend who gave her his chopped-off ponytail in a paper lunch bag for Christmas one year. What was sad is that he really thought it was a romantic gift, because he knew she never liked his ponytail. Again, nice sentiment, but *shudder*.

Mentos and Diet Coke

Okay, I know I'm probably the last one to discover this--I was listening to an old podcast from June (NPR: Most emailed stories) and heard the story of these guys who were recreating the Bellagio fountain show using Diet coke and Mentos! It's so cool:



And for comparison, here's a shot I took of the Bellagio fountain when I was in Vegas this past July:



Which do you like better?

CLOUDS!

My friend Heather just emailed these pictures out. I LOOOOOVE clouds. And sky. These are beautiful, thought I'd share.

Jorn Olsen works for the Dutton-Lainson Co. in Hastings, Nebraska, and lives by Heartwell Park next to Hastings College. The other nighthe took these photos. The stadium lights are at the Hastings Collegestadium just east of his home.The clouds are called Mammatus clouds. They do not precede a tornado, or foretell a storm, but are formed when the air is already saturatedwith rain droplets and/or ice crystals and begins to sink. The worst of the storm is usually over when these kinds of clouds are seen.They are quite rare, but really beautiful.

Do you know your own mind?

In a previous post, I talked about racism, and mentioned the book Blink by Malcolm Gladwell. This book explores how we think without thinking--in the blink of an eye. How our instinct oftentimes take into account our lifetime of experience. He talks about a psychologist who can predict with 95% accuracy if a couple is going to end up together 15 years from now after watching a tape of them interacting for an hour, and 90% accuracy after just 15 minutes. He describes the tennis coach who knows when a player will double fault before the racket hits the ball. And part of the reason why they can do this (they weren't born with this skill) is that they have become experts, with experience and training, their minds have been honed to do this. Although I'm not sure if I can really call myself a children's book expert, I think if I'm an expert in anything, that's it. And in my job, I often know if I'm going to turn down a manuscript after reading one sentence, (Of course I read more than that just in case!), and it comes from reading so many books and manuscripts and knowing what I like and what I don't.

Well, Gladwell also explores when perhaps we shouldn't trust our instincts, and one situation is when racism or preconceptions come into play. He talks about this test, which I had coincidentally taken before reading the book, because a friend had forwarded it to me. It's completely fascinating, so I highly recommend checking this website out and taking a few tests: https://implicit.harvard.edu/implicit/

This is how the tests are described on the site:
It is well known that people don't always 'speak their minds', and it is suspected that people don't always 'know their minds'. Understanding such divergences is important to scientific psychology.

This web site presents a method that demonstrates the conscious-unconscious divergences much more convincingly than has been possible with previous methods. This new method is called the Implicit Association Test, or IAT for short.

According to Gladwell, over 80% of people taking the Race IAT end up having pro-white associations. Even Gladwell himself showed a "moderate automatic preference for whites"--and he himself is half black! I showed a preference for whites as well after taking the test, and considering I'm a minority myself, I don't consider myself racist (although since I've taken these tests before, I know that everyone is, a little bit...).

Gladwell says, "The disturbing thing about the test is that it shows that our unconscious attitudes may be utterly incompatible with our stated conscious values...of the fifty thousand African Americans who have taken the Race IAT so far, about half of them, like me, have stronger associations with whites than with blacks. How could we not? We live in North America, where we are surrounded every day by cultural messages linking white with good." (p. 85)

But what I found MOST amazing (and please bear with me, I know this is long, but thanks for reading this far!), what I found most affirming and hopeful was this section of one paragraph:

"...believe it or not, if, before you take the IAT, I were to ask you to look over a series of pictures of articles about people like Martin Luther King or Nelson Mandela or Colin Powell, your reaction time would change. Suddenly it won't seem so hard to associate positive things with black people. 'I had a student who used to take the IAT every day' Banaji says, 'It was the first thing he did, and his idea was just to let the data gather as he went. Then this one day, he got a positive association with blacks. And he said, 'That's odd. I've never gotten that before,' because we've all tried to change our IAT score and couldn't. But he's a track-and-field guy, and what he realized is that he'd spent the morning watching the Olympics.'"

I found this hopeful and affirming because one of my goals of being in publishing is to make sure that minorities and other unrepresented groups are featured more in children's books, because I know from personal experience that it really troubled me as a child to not see characters that looked like me in the books I was reading (let alone magazines, television, and movies). I was so thirsty for characters that were like me that whenever a character had black hair, I would think hopefully, "Maybe she's Asian!"--I even wanted Snow White to be Asian. And I think this is also partially why I loved the Emily books by L.M. Montgomery more than the Anne books (although of course I loved those, too!)--because Emily had black hair. This is normal--we all know that kids want to see themselves in the books their reading. That's why we buy books like Eloise for little girls named Eloise, and Fancy Nancy for girls named Nancy (alas, not Alvinas in any of the books I was reading, either! Although as an adult I did find a D.H. Lawrence book The Lost Girl with an Alvina in it and of course read it even though it was not very good).

And especially for minority kids growing up in mostly white communities, the positive "examples" of people who look like them are even less. And when white children aren't seeing any kinds of depictions of kids of other ethnicities either, that's problematic as well. I often realized that I was oftentimes the only example of an Asian person that some people ever met, and I certainly don't think I'm a great representative of my ethnicity!

So, to have this confirmation that seeing positive, diverse images in children's books can make a psychological difference, a subconscious difference, to lessen the bias against people of color, well, this was so affirming for me. It is important. It does make a difference.

Take the tests here, see how you do.

After a long email campaign...

Jarrett has finally been named a Hot Man of Children's Literature by the esteemed Fuse #8.

I know this is vague...

I don't know where this came from, but I just found this on the Earl Pickens blog. So fricken cool. Check it out!