Nerd Camp '08 Update
Alright, alright. So I know I've been a Very Bad Blogger lately, and an even worse Nerd Camp correspondent. So sue me. The thing is, I spent all day, every day, this summer in front of a computer screen. By the time the work day was through, the last thing in the world I wanted to do was to get online again. Truthfully, I never even took my personal laptop out of its case the whole time I was in L.A. I just got right back on the plane with it at the end of the summer. :)
But there were a few memorable moments this summer at CTY that I felt might need to be immortalized in blog form, so I will attempt to do so here, although I'm sure by now I will have forgotten at least one or two of the stories I had wanted to share. What can I say? I'm old. Well, at least compared to the majority of the Nerd Camp staff, not to even mention the students.
So let's see... I'm sure most of you are gonna want to know about the earthquake first off. The couple of emails I got from people back home about the topic even capitalized Earthquake when inquiring about it, like the whole thing was a global headliner event. Well, I am sorry to have to report to you that we were 40 miles away from the epicenter of the quake and were therefore subject only to a wee bit of ground tremor and not much else. Frankly, we were engrossed in our daily administrators' meeting (or, as I like to think of it, "D.A.M.") at the time, and it took us several moments to figure out what was going on, depsite the fact that the lights were swaying over our heads. We none of us felt the first bump that was described on CNN later that day, but we did feel the second one, as well as the general tremble, although our first response was to merely look at each other and say, "Earthquake? Is that an earthquake? Gee, maybe we should get up and do something about it," then to meander outside the building and look at each other for a bit.
Once it was over, however, we all kicked it into high gear, and while most of the admin went out to check on all of our students and staff (who were all fine, needless to say), I was faced with the tremendous fun of answering the billion and a half parent phone calls we began receiving right away and continued to receive until 10:30 that night(!). Overall, the parents were fairly easy to calm down, although I did wonder at one point why on earth they wouldn't expect US to call THEM if there was a problem with their student. I mean, presuming we weren't trapped under a building or something (is it too soon to make that joke??). Our residential dean and I decided we should let all calls that day go to a voice mail of me saying in an upbeat voice over a background of screaming, explosions, and general chaos, "No need to panic, everything here is fine after the earthquake! Thanks for checking in!", to which he said we should add, "Now, if you're calling about the zombie attacks...". Anyway, all in all it was a pretty mild event, depsite what the national media made it look like.
No, much more exciting to us were the celebrity sightings on campus. My first day in L.A. they were filming a Wal-Mart commercial (which at least one staff member claims to have already seen on tv, so I guess it's out there somewhere). But the real thrills took place two weeks later when a group was on campus all day filming an episode of the Showtime program Dexter (and if you haven't seen this series yet, allow me to recommend it). There happen to be a lot of Dexter fans amongst the CTY staff (Dexter viewing marathons in the main office began almost the instant we became aware of the on-campus shoot). So there was a fairly decent-sized crowd present throughout most of the filming. Even when it became hugely repetitive (and believe me, it did. Become repetitive). The photos below are courtesy of one of our health assistants (I ran out of my apartment without my camera that day, like a jackass). There's not too much to see, I guess (although if you look really hard you can see the star of the series, Michael C. Hall, sitting at one of the tables with his back to the camera and facing the guy who plays his dad on the show), but for me the most interesting bit about the entire event was how cliche the whole thing is. The directors and producers all walked around with beards and sunglasses and big floppy hats. They really did have that little chalkboard thingie that they put in front of the camera and slap at the start of every take. And they really did have people who would shout things into a megaphone like, "Quiet on the set!" and "Roll 'em!", which were echoed by other folks around the area so that it sounded like: "QUIET ON THE SET!" "Quiet on the set!" "Quiet on the set!". Highly amusing, IMHO.
In fact, that last bit about the need for silence led to one of the more amusing anecdotes of the summer. When the kids were at their activities between class time and dinner, they were still filming Dexter on the main quad. Well, one of the activities that was supposed to take place in that same area was dodgeball. Which is, needless to say, generally not a very quiet game, particularly when the number in attendance is over 30 or 40 kids, as it was that day. And even though the film crew had been told that they were not to disturb our program (nice to have the largest presence on campus sometimes), I guess some of the director folks came over and asked the students if they wouldn't mind holding down the noise so that they could keep shooting. And our kids, who are not always known for obeying our commands to the fullest letter of the law, then proceeded to play a completely SILENT game of dodgeball for the next hour and fifteen minutes. If we hadn't seen it ourselves, we would never have believed it. Guess we need to bring those film crews around campus more often...
Anyway, here are the pictures:
So there were two new obsessions amongst the CTY crowd this year: Pinkberry and Bananagrams. Pinkberry, for those of you outside the SoCal area, is this frozen yogurt that is not that crappy TCBY soft-serve but REAL yogurt. It's served with all kinds of fresh fruit and other healthy-but-only-popular-in-California items such as carob chips and mochi. And it apparently carries some rather addictive properties, as well. Rather like heroin. We had a one staff member, in particular, who was making runs to Pinkberry once and sometimes even twice a day. I mean, it doesn't help that our cafeteria offerings at LMU are notoriously godawful (and seemingly worse every year). But even so. I imagine there were quite a lot of painful recovery/detox periods for some staffers when they returned to their East Coast homes.
Bananagrams, on the other hand, is an addiction that can be fed in all parts of the country (I myself had not even been home a week when I acquired my very own set of Banangrams thanks to the glorious-ness of Haslam's Books). Bananagrams was a game that was introduced to the site by one of my office assistants, and it quickly became the reason for living for a lot of us on site. There were many days when Banangrams was played for five hours or more by various people in the main office, with a "Banana Winner" board attesting to the skill of some of the players. Bananagrams is a game that is sort of like Speed Scrabble, but is actually way more exciting than that sounds.
Now, I don't know why, but "banana" just happens to be one of those universally funny words. And the rules of the game did call for many banana and banana-related words to be used while playing. But it was pretty amazing how many new banana terms were invented during the high point of the Bananagrams craze. Things like "banana-time-out!", which was how office staffers would pause the game anytime they needed to do some actual work like answer the phone or whatnot. Or "banana-cheater!", which was how we called out someone that we thought was using a word incorrectly. I can't explain it, but putting "banana" in front of any other word ultimately made that word much funnier. Try it yourself sometime!
Well, I'm getting tuckered here, so I guess that's about it for now. Still more to come, however, in a future installment. Look for the hilarious tale of our chicken pox outbreak, along with other Nerd Camp goodness. TTFN!
But there were a few memorable moments this summer at CTY that I felt might need to be immortalized in blog form, so I will attempt to do so here, although I'm sure by now I will have forgotten at least one or two of the stories I had wanted to share. What can I say? I'm old. Well, at least compared to the majority of the Nerd Camp staff, not to even mention the students.
So let's see... I'm sure most of you are gonna want to know about the earthquake first off. The couple of emails I got from people back home about the topic even capitalized Earthquake when inquiring about it, like the whole thing was a global headliner event. Well, I am sorry to have to report to you that we were 40 miles away from the epicenter of the quake and were therefore subject only to a wee bit of ground tremor and not much else. Frankly, we were engrossed in our daily administrators' meeting (or, as I like to think of it, "D.A.M.") at the time, and it took us several moments to figure out what was going on, depsite the fact that the lights were swaying over our heads. We none of us felt the first bump that was described on CNN later that day, but we did feel the second one, as well as the general tremble, although our first response was to merely look at each other and say, "Earthquake? Is that an earthquake? Gee, maybe we should get up and do something about it," then to meander outside the building and look at each other for a bit.
Once it was over, however, we all kicked it into high gear, and while most of the admin went out to check on all of our students and staff (who were all fine, needless to say), I was faced with the tremendous fun of answering the billion and a half parent phone calls we began receiving right away and continued to receive until 10:30 that night(!). Overall, the parents were fairly easy to calm down, although I did wonder at one point why on earth they wouldn't expect US to call THEM if there was a problem with their student. I mean, presuming we weren't trapped under a building or something (is it too soon to make that joke??). Our residential dean and I decided we should let all calls that day go to a voice mail of me saying in an upbeat voice over a background of screaming, explosions, and general chaos, "No need to panic, everything here is fine after the earthquake! Thanks for checking in!", to which he said we should add, "Now, if you're calling about the zombie attacks...". Anyway, all in all it was a pretty mild event, depsite what the national media made it look like.
No, much more exciting to us were the celebrity sightings on campus. My first day in L.A. they were filming a Wal-Mart commercial (which at least one staff member claims to have already seen on tv, so I guess it's out there somewhere). But the real thrills took place two weeks later when a group was on campus all day filming an episode of the Showtime program Dexter (and if you haven't seen this series yet, allow me to recommend it). There happen to be a lot of Dexter fans amongst the CTY staff (Dexter viewing marathons in the main office began almost the instant we became aware of the on-campus shoot). So there was a fairly decent-sized crowd present throughout most of the filming. Even when it became hugely repetitive (and believe me, it did. Become repetitive). The photos below are courtesy of one of our health assistants (I ran out of my apartment without my camera that day, like a jackass). There's not too much to see, I guess (although if you look really hard you can see the star of the series, Michael C. Hall, sitting at one of the tables with his back to the camera and facing the guy who plays his dad on the show), but for me the most interesting bit about the entire event was how cliche the whole thing is. The directors and producers all walked around with beards and sunglasses and big floppy hats. They really did have that little chalkboard thingie that they put in front of the camera and slap at the start of every take. And they really did have people who would shout things into a megaphone like, "Quiet on the set!" and "Roll 'em!", which were echoed by other folks around the area so that it sounded like: "QUIET ON THE SET!" "Quiet on the set!" "Quiet on the set!". Highly amusing, IMHO.
In fact, that last bit about the need for silence led to one of the more amusing anecdotes of the summer. When the kids were at their activities between class time and dinner, they were still filming Dexter on the main quad. Well, one of the activities that was supposed to take place in that same area was dodgeball. Which is, needless to say, generally not a very quiet game, particularly when the number in attendance is over 30 or 40 kids, as it was that day. And even though the film crew had been told that they were not to disturb our program (nice to have the largest presence on campus sometimes), I guess some of the director folks came over and asked the students if they wouldn't mind holding down the noise so that they could keep shooting. And our kids, who are not always known for obeying our commands to the fullest letter of the law, then proceeded to play a completely SILENT game of dodgeball for the next hour and fifteen minutes. If we hadn't seen it ourselves, we would never have believed it. Guess we need to bring those film crews around campus more often...
Anyway, here are the pictures:
So there were two new obsessions amongst the CTY crowd this year: Pinkberry and Bananagrams. Pinkberry, for those of you outside the SoCal area, is this frozen yogurt that is not that crappy TCBY soft-serve but REAL yogurt. It's served with all kinds of fresh fruit and other healthy-but-only-popular-in-California items such as carob chips and mochi. And it apparently carries some rather addictive properties, as well. Rather like heroin. We had a one staff member, in particular, who was making runs to Pinkberry once and sometimes even twice a day. I mean, it doesn't help that our cafeteria offerings at LMU are notoriously godawful (and seemingly worse every year). But even so. I imagine there were quite a lot of painful recovery/detox periods for some staffers when they returned to their East Coast homes.
Bananagrams, on the other hand, is an addiction that can be fed in all parts of the country (I myself had not even been home a week when I acquired my very own set of Banangrams thanks to the glorious-ness of Haslam's Books). Bananagrams was a game that was introduced to the site by one of my office assistants, and it quickly became the reason for living for a lot of us on site. There were many days when Banangrams was played for five hours or more by various people in the main office, with a "Banana Winner" board attesting to the skill of some of the players. Bananagrams is a game that is sort of like Speed Scrabble, but is actually way more exciting than that sounds.
Now, I don't know why, but "banana" just happens to be one of those universally funny words. And the rules of the game did call for many banana and banana-related words to be used while playing. But it was pretty amazing how many new banana terms were invented during the high point of the Bananagrams craze. Things like "banana-time-out!", which was how office staffers would pause the game anytime they needed to do some actual work like answer the phone or whatnot. Or "banana-cheater!", which was how we called out someone that we thought was using a word incorrectly. I can't explain it, but putting "banana" in front of any other word ultimately made that word much funnier. Try it yourself sometime!
Well, I'm getting tuckered here, so I guess that's about it for now. Still more to come, however, in a future installment. Look for the hilarious tale of our chicken pox outbreak, along with other Nerd Camp goodness. TTFN!