Top Ten ____ [TV shows]

I don’t watch that much TV, but I have watched more than 10 different TV shows. Notable shows I haven’t seen include Parks and Recreation, Breaking Bad, and Game of Thrones, so that’s why none of them are on the list. As a rule of thumb, if I don’t mention your favorite, undeniably great show, just assume I haven’t seen it.

10) Fresh off the Boat – The first Asian American-led TV show since All-American Girl (1 season, 1994-1995) gets the last spot on the list. It’s not always the strongest show in terms of plot, but I’m a fan of the cast. The show follows the Huang family after their move to Orlando, Florida in the 1990s. While Louis establishes his steakhouse and Jessica works on her mystery crime novel, they both parent Eddie, Emery, and Evan as they navigate elementary/middle/high school, enter into relationships, learn to drive, and make college plans. The jokes don’t always land, but there are a lot of good moments.

9) Sherlock – BBC’s take on Arthur Conan Doyle’s famous detective has Holmes and Watson sharing a flat in modern-day London where Sherlock runs his consulting detective agency and Watson blogs about their adventures. The first two seasons, which primarily adapt Doyle’s stories, are really, really good – the plot is engaging, the dialog is tight, and the camera work is excellent. Season three has a couple of my favorite scenes, but starts moving away from being strictly a detective show. Then came season four. It’s too clever for its own good. It starts reaching conspiracy theory levels of what-the-heck. Just for that season, Sherlock ends up this far down the list.

8) The Magic School Bus – In this show that teaches children science, the elementary-aged characters regularly climb onto a magical transforming bus that shrinks, grows, and turns kids into reptiles, bats, water, and more. Sounds safe and realistic to me. I actually appreciate that there’s absolutely no attempt to explain how the bus works. Everyone just accepts it. The science, while often simplified (it’s a 25-minute children’s TV show; give it a break), is generally theoretically sound. I’m now in engineering, so a show that relates math and science to everyday life gets a thumbs up from me. [Other educational/semi-educational TV shows from my childhood: Cyberchase, Reading Rainbow, Between the Lions, Zoboomafu, Fetch!, Zoom, and Liberty’s Kids. Thanks, PBS.]

7) Community – Seven students find their way to Greendale Community College and form a study group that becomes more than a study group. Episodes are centered around the classes they take, but tie into other events that happen throughout the year. One of the show’s big strengths lies in its ability to spoof other genres/styles in the context of Greendale. The season 1 and 2 paintball episodes (imitating action, western, and sci-fi movies) are some of the best TV I’ve seen. There’s also a funny bottle episode and a Claymation Christmas. That said, I see the problems with season 4 that are a result of the showrunner (Dan Harmon) being fired after season 3. The show goes off the rails a bit. Although Harmon was brought back for seasons 5 and 6, they don’t quite capture what they had in the first half of the show’s run, but Community’s worth a watch even just for the first three seasons.

6) Star Trek: The Original Series – Due to budget and technology constraints, TOS is not great television, especially season 3, but this was the Star Trek that started it all. Even if the plots are formulaic, they address pertinent questions about moral and social issues ranging from the use of technology to discrimination.

5) Star Trek: The Next Generation – TNG has some of the same problems as TOS in terms of plot, and it takes some time for the characters to settle into their roles, but once they do, it’s classic Star Trek. The casting overall is strong, but Patrick Stewart as Captain Picard is brilliant.

4) The Great British Bake Off – A baking competition in which the contestants are pleasant to each other. What more could I ask for? I prefer the original hosts, because the current hosts are downright bizarre sometimes, but I’m not really complaining.

3) Jeopardy! – Last year during the MLS season, I discovered that I have TV service through the internet, which I used to watch the Revolution’s one nationally televised game in Spanish. For some reason, I didn’t think about also using my newfound TV access to watch Jeopardy! until after I went home for Christmas and came back to Ann Arbor. Since then, I tune in for my week-nightly viewing of Jeopardy!, where I can put my stores of semi-useless knowledge to use.

2) The Office – Everyday life at the Scranton branch of the Dunder Mifflin paper company. The characters are all flawed, but ultimately likeable, and yes, the office dynamics and shenanigans are exaggerated, but I’ve worked with some interesting people and done some pretty ridiculous things in my office, so they’re not that far out of left field. I can see why the show’s not for everyone, but I think it’s hilarious. The first season is a little rough, it really hits its groove in the middle seasons, then the last two seasons have a few questionable episodes before the final three episodes, which have some incredibly funny, strange, poignant moments.

1) Avatar: The Last Airbender – Like Star Trek, it considers important issues regarding gender roles, racism, propaganda, and animal abuse, among many others. It also has amazing characters, plot, and animation, so it earns the top spot on this list.

Other noteworthy shows (not necessarily vying for a spot in the top ten, but interesting for one reason or another) – lesser known, but Person of Interest is relevant to current questions about technology and surveillance. A computer program, “The Machine,” can predict crime before it happens and can output the social security number of a “person of interest” – a perpetrator, victim, or bystander. The first couple seasons have mostly self-contained episodes with variations on a standard plot, then an overarching plot is woven in. The last season was regrettably cut short, so the finale is a little rushed, but still done well. And not lesser known, but The Walking Dead. Only the first ~3 seasons, maybe the first ~5, and only more if you want to see what a train wreck it becomes. Starts out great, turns into a zombie soap opera. That’s all I’ll say about that.

One Hundred Days of Solitude

Well, we’ve reached over a hundred days since I intentionally went to a public place to interact with real live people. Besides a five-minute visit to my office to pick up my books before labs were shut down, I’ve been to exactly two indoor locations – the grocery store and my apartment. I haven’t ridden the bus, been driven in a car, or flown anywhere for the better part of four months. We’re technically allowed to go places now, but I’ve stuck to my apartment and outdoor locations while waiting to see how reopening goes. Approaching the end of the month, the numbers in Michigan looked pretty good, both in terms of cases and deaths. Michigan Medicine posts the number of COVID-19 positive inpatients they have every day, and they hit a low on June 17/18 since this all started in March. However, that number then rose 50% in 4 days. Time to lock everyone back in their closets? Not quite yet. They went from 6 to 9 patients, and only time will tell if this is statistically insignificant or the start of another wave.

At the beginning of the month, Governor Whitmer lifted the stay-at-home order, effective immediately on Monday, June 1. Indoor gatherings with less than 10 people and outdoor gatherings with less than 100 people and social distancing were permitted. As this was only a week after Memorial Day and its unknown numbers of barbeques with unknown quantities of people practicing unknown degrees of social distancing/facial covering, I declined to do anything other than stay at home and do research and watch Netflix. On Sunday, June 7, my church restarted in-person services outdoors. I didn’t attend because 1) I didn’t want to bike there and 2) unknown quantities of people practicing unknown degrees of social distancing/facial covering. I did, however, bake a pineapple upside down cake. It was a midcentury-esque masterpiece.

Pineapple upside down cake

By Monday, June 8, retail, restaurants, pools, libraries, museums, offices, etc. were all allowed to be open with varying social distancing and capacity restrictions. The places that were left closed at this point were things like gyms, bowling alleys, movie theaters, and nail salons, where groups of people congregate and/or are in close contact for not strictly essential activities. I did my roughly biannual intensive floor washing on Tuesday, June 9, because turns out dust is a thing. On Wednesday, June 10, I finished watching all of the Great British Baking Show episodes available on Netflix. Friday, June 12, the Ann Arbor library started the coronavirus/socially distanced/virtual summer 2020 Summer Game and I started rewatching Avatar: The Last Airbender, which is even better than I remembered.

The weather was too nice on Saturday, June 13 to not go out, so even though I knew it would be “crowded,” I set out on my bike for the Bird Hills/Barton Nature Areas area. After the world’s most unnecessary detour, I made it and added a couple more parks to my list. It was indeed busier than my usual mosquito-infested, swampy haunts, but not too bad away from a couple spots. On Sunday, June 14, I again watched church on Facebook live, then did a load of laundry, and ate my last two freezer pancakes for dinner. I did my semi-annual file backup/SD card reformatting on Monday, June 15 and otherwise got research done over the rest of the week. Plus baked a batch of popovers for the heck of it on Wednesday, June 17 (I got flour at the grocery store and it wasn’t 900 degrees in my apartment).

Looks very refreshing.
(Fuller Park pool, closed, at the beginning of June.)

On Saturday, June 20 I went grocery shopping in the morning (still basically 100% of people wearing face coverings¹) and in the afternoon headed out to visit another group of parks. Why the city of Ann Arbor thought right next to the M-14 was a good place for a nature area is beyond me. Nothing like the sounds of the birds and 75 mph traffic as you walk through the woods. Anyway, joke’s on me because I took the time to visit this park. I still wasn’t attending church as of Sunday, June 21, so it was another Facebook sermon with questionable audio for me. The rest of the week was research as usual; I also visited parks, ate sandwiches, baked apple cobbler, watched Netflix, reread books. The university committed to a partially in-person fall semester with a modified schedule, but we’ll see how well that works out once students return en masse.

On Saturday, June 27, I took my bike out to the northern half of Ann Arbor to visit my remaining parks north of the Huron River. With that done, I’ll have to start ranging farther afield into lesser known territories. On the plus side, biking in high heat, humidity, and sun makes my 85-degree apartment feel cool . . . for about ten minutes when I first get back. Another Sunday, another Facebook sermon on Sunday, June 28. Then I finished out the month with a couple days of work. On to July. I’m still not making plans to go anywhere/do anything while I wait and see how things go. Like I said, the numbers in Michigan still seem pretty good but other states are not looking great.

¹A side note on masks/face coverings from my science-ish perspective: Even if they aren’t super effective, and are hot and uncomfortable, I’d rather be careful. And no, you are not suffocating yourself, with carbon dioxide or otherwise. 1) Air is already mostly not oxygen (78% nitrogen, 21% oxygen by volume). 2) You don’t extract all the oxygen from air you inhale. Exhaled air is still ~16% oxygen; in other words ~80% of the oxygen that’s inhaled is exhaled. 3) Masks are porous. The pore size of cloth is on the order of microns. Air molecules are hundreds of picometers, or 5-6 orders of magnitude smaller. Your exhalations are not hitting your mask and rebounding back into your respiratory system. (Virus sizes are on the order of nanometers, so would not be filtered out by a cloth mask, but respiratory droplets are again in the micron range and could be stopped by a mask, which is the point.) 4) Doctors, nurses, dentists, construction workers, etc. are not all passing out at work from hypoxia every time they put on a mask. So even if you don’t really think masks do anything, you’re not killing your brain cells by wearing one, and you might even be helping other people. Isn’t that nice?

Some Creatures Great and Small

We’ve seen the flora of Ann Arbor, so how about the fauna? Besides the usual suspects of fat campus squirrels, deer, and evil geese, since I’ve been exploring the surrounding area, I’ve encountered a few more denizens of our fair city. I (still) only have the kit lens for my camera, so my zoom is sorely lacking, and we’re going to blame that for my less than stellar wildlife photography. My lack of a telephoto lens also means that I have to get pretty close to anything I photograph, so don’t expect any pictures of bears any time soon.

We’ll start off with our campus stalwarts, deer and squirrels, paired with geese and swans. I was on my way to check on the creek/river levels after a rainy few days when I started seeing hoofprints along the path. The deer was nowhere to be found, but it sure left tracks, especially along a particularly muddy stretch. The squirrel could have been found in any of seven thousand different locations, but this was in a nature area where the stars aligned to give me a squirrel close and still enough, a zoomed in lens, the correct focal point, and a reasonable ISO/shutter speed for a living subject. The most common squirrels in the northeast are the Eastern grey squirrel and the red squirrel. Both are present in Michigan along with fox squirrels. My specimen was too big and not red enough to be a red squirrel, and after consultation of the internet, I think it’s a fox squirrel, based on its yellow-ish, not white, belly.

Similarly to the squirrels, the geese are everywhere there’s water between spring and fall. As bad as the hissing, flapping, and charging is in fall, it’s worse in spring because they have goslings. This particular family unit was blocking a path, because of course. I waited for them to get along to a spot where I could give them a nice, wide berth, pausing for a couple photos on the way. The swans are rarer, but I’ve seen them on the Huron River before. These are, unfortunately, invasive mute swans. They’re problematic because they chase away native birds. I found a site that describes them as “one of the world’s most aggressive waterfowl species.” In Michigan you can apply for a permit from the DNR to remove mute swans, nests, and/or eggs from your property.

Clockwise from top left: Evidence of deer, non-campus squirrel, evil geese with baby evil geese, and invasive mute swans with baby invasive mute swans.

My next bird was identified with the help of Cornell’s All About Birds site, run by the Lab of Ornithology. I couldn’t tell if it was a crane or heron, but from their site, I think it might be a great blue heron. It’s got the bluish/greyish coloring, orange bill, black crown, and head plumes. I stumbled across this guy going between nature areas. Bonus bird in flight and goose family in the background.

Great blue heron (probably)

Lastly I ran into whatever these little guys are by North Campus undergraduate housing. I want to say groundhog babies but I’m not positive they aren’t some other rodent-ish animal.

Baby groundhogs (maybe?)

I have a couple more photos that didn’t make this post – a rabbit and a couple raccoons. Most of the animals I don’t usually see because I’m mostly around campus/downtown, but I think the raccoon sightings might be because there have been less people/cars out. One was behind my apartment by the dumpsters and the other was just strolling around campus.

Other, unphotographed creatures I’ve seen include chipmunks (too fast), a couple [nonvenomous] snakes (also fast, hard to spot in the grass, and usually met right before almost stepping on them), and a variety of birds. Because I don’t have a telephoto lens, the smaller birds will mostly have to remain uncaptured, though I do have a picture of a red-winged blackbird in which the bird is actually visible. Sightings include robins, cardinals, blue jays, a pileated woodpecker, and any number of unidentified flying objects.

Hay un Conejo en La Luna

Thanks to five and a half years of Spanish classes in middle and high school, I know more Spanish than Mandarin. By a lot. I know how to count in Chinese, plus maybe 2-3 dozen additional assorted words and phrases. In Spanish, I can guess my way through non-technical written work and understand soccer on Univision Deportes. Which wasn’t my goal in learning Spanish, but it’s an appreciated side benefit.

My middle school made every student take half a year of Spanish and half a year of French before choosing a language to continue. I think the idea was to expose everyone to the less-popular French language, but at the end of the year I mainly picked Spanish because I didn’t want to learn any more French. What’s the point of having a whole alphabet if you ever only pronounce six of the letters? Over the next two years, I completed the equivalent of Spanish I. We learned our numbers, foods, school supplies, and family members and were introduced to “Vamos a La Playa,” Casi se muere (in English, Almost Died), and telenovelas.

In high school, we continued our language journey with Realidades (Prentice Hall’s Spanish textbook series, which I actually think taught Spanish pretty well). We learned more tenses, more vocabulary, and started having to write full paragraphs in Spanish. I stuck with it through Spanish IV, where my class regularly didn’t do our homework, failed our comprehension pop quizzes, failed our vocabulary quizzes, and spent a lot of time arguing with our teacher. After that lovely experience, I quit Spanish my senior year of high school so I could take AP Chemistry, AP Physics, and AP Calculus all at the same time.

At Cornell, engineers do not have a language requirement. You can take a language to fulfill part of your liberal studies requirement, but it’s not mandatory. I did not end up taking any language classes while at Cornell, Spanish or otherwise, at least in part because it’s hard to fit them into an engineering schedule. Plus my brain had plenty of other things to keep track of. During senior year, one of my friends told me about the Duolingo app. It’s free and has dozens of languages to learn, though Spanish and French are the most well-developed. The way Duolingo works is it has various topics (present tense verbs, travel, family, participles, etc.) with lessons. After a certain number of lessons, you move on to the next level for that topic and unlock other topics. As you progress to more advanced topics and higher levels, the exercises get more complicated, both in terms of sentence structure and the type of questions you’re asked. At lower levels, there’s more multiple choice and fill in the blank questions, while at higher levels you’re asked to do more translations.

The app was okay, but a decent amount of the material was either too easy or too annoying to input on a phone, so I didn’t get very far in the Spanish course before stopping. Some time later, I found out there’s a desktop version, which I like a lot better, and I worked on it on and off so I wouldn’t completely forget my Spanish. Recently, I completed the course (every topic, every lesson). My opinion is that it was good for review, but I wouldn’t recommend using it to learn Spanish from scratch, though they have started adding notes that help. The vocabulary is okay; where it lacks is in teaching verb conjugations, especially the irregular verbs. You also get some really weird sentences, like “They have a good feather selection” and “My horse sent a message to all my contacts.” I can’t complain too much, though, because it’s free.

I still have some content to go through – they have stories with comprehension questions and a podcast that I’m pretty close to understanding without the transcript because they talk slowly. But to conclude, I still know a reasonable amount of Spanish; for a free course, Duolingo is good, though not the best for learning without other resources; and the title of this post comes to you courtesy of Realidades 2 or 3. It’s a chapter about myths/legends, and “hay un conejo en la luna” means “there is a rabbit in the moon.” Have I ever, once, needed to know how to say that conversationally? No, no I have not.

All the Small Things

I’m back from crawling around in the underbrush and possibly getting poison ivy, Lyme disease, and/or malaria to bring you another round of pictures of plants. You may have noticed recently that besides my end-of-month coronacation reports, I’m not posting about activities that happen on any particular day. The reason is twofold. 1) I’m not taking any trips/travelling, and basically all events have been cancelled – band/orchestra concerts, in-person library programming, seminar speakers, even the Arboretum people asked people not to go see the peonies in person this year. And 2) There are only so many ways you can say you went wandering in the woods, startled a lot of squirrels and chipmunks, and waded through weeds and mud (plus new for June – got eaten alive by bugs). Not every walk warrants its own post, so be glad you’re just getting the highlights.

I will say that a good thing to come out of the coronavirus quarantine is that I’ve finally explored parts of Ann Arbor well within walking distance of where I’ve been living for the past four years. Also it turns out work gets done when you sit down and work instead of distracting your coworkers. But back to the plants. I practiced my plant identification skills to give you my best guesses as to what the wildflowers I’ve encountered are. I actually managed to find the ones I had little to no idea about by scrolling through this page, which is pleasantly very 2000s in terms of web design.

First up, trillium, likely Trillium grandiflorum, or great white trillium or large-flowered trillium. I spent my very last BRBs (Big Red Bucks) at Cornell at Trillium, a cash/BRB dining option by the ag quad. After our blisteringly warm and humid convocation, my family and I went for a special graduation-weekend lunch at Trillium before hiking at Watkins Glen.

Trillium grandiflorum (Great White Trillium)

Next we have another dandelion picture, because I’m pretty happy with the focus on this one.

Our friend Taraxacum officinale (Common Dandelion)

That’s followed by one that took a lot of scrolling, but I’m pretty sure it’s dame’s rocket (Hesperis matronalis). It’s described as prolific and as having plentiful flowers, which definitely fits what I’ve seen of it. It was everywhere along some of the trails I walked this spring. Its name comes from the ancient Greek for evening, possibly because its scent becomes more prominent in the evening.

Hesperis matronalis (Dame's Rocket)

While I was looking for the dame’s rocket, I found wild geranium (Geranium maculatum). This is another flower that I’ve seen in quite a few places around Ann Arbor but never bothered to identify until now. Confusingly enough, geraniums that you might buy to plant in your garden are in a separate genus – Pelargonium. They were originally classified in the same genus by Linneaus, but split up in 1789.

Geranium maculatum (Wild Geranium)

And finally we have a flower that I had narrowed down to some sort of daisy, probably Erigeron annus, or eastern daisy fleabane. That’s it for this time. Back next time with different types of grasses.¹

Erigeron annus (Eastern Daisy Fleabane)

¹Probably not really.