Uncle Jazzbeau’s Gallimaufrey

back to bloggin'

OK. I've decided to fire up the blog again under a new name: epea pteroenta. I've switched over to Blogger software, too.

the story so far

Well, it has been a long strange trip, but back around last December, I lost the will to blog. No, ’struth! Then in the beginning of the year I disabled comments, trackbacks, in fact the whole MT shmir, by chmoding the CGI scripts. Then at the end of February I left for a fortnight in Europe. Fun. K&uoml;lner Karneval and vins françaises Around about the first of March the power supply on the server for this domain pooped out. And there wasn’t much I could do on the other side of the Atlantic. It took me until April Fools Day to swap in a spare one from the junk/server room, and get bisso dot com back on line. Watching the bots skim and the spicy ham producers starting up their old ways again, I rewrote a couple of scripts to simple send back a simple HTML message that comments and trackbacks were disabled. Until further notice. Sigh, why do folks have to wreck a good thing? Anyway, I've decided to put UJG into mothballs, but I plan to put another new blog soon in its place. I’ve said this before, and folks smirked, but soon, I will. Anyway, if you drop by and are looking for something to read, try any of the good blogs in the roll over on the left side of this page. Bis später.

there is no yogh in unicode

1. Ian sent me an email this morning with a URL pointing at the Merchandising of Vincent Gallo website. Artwork by Charles Manson and sperm donation from Gallo. This is the man who put a hex on Roger Ebert’s colon. [via the Onion A/V Club’s holiday shopping guide] 2. Visited with Krishnan and his wife Santhya last night. She cooked up some great pakoras, and he gave me a sandalwood Ganesh keychain. 3. — 4. I was looking for a yogh in Unicode the other day, but all I could find was ezh. Googling led me to this set of pages: one and two. I have linked to Michael Everson before. He wrote a great article on the problematic spellings of Euro in languages other than English.

turkey daze

I knew it was going to be a good Thanksgiving, when I heard Firesign Theatre’s Temporarily Humboldt County on the Internet radio this morning. Then I went upstairs and washed the dishes, prior to making coffee, and listened to the drunken couple in a shabby van out on the street arguing incoherently with one another. This was around 10 AM, my second wind. I, having seemingly grown older recently, was up and down all last night, and I remained up for a couple of hours at around 5, before going back to bed around 7. I did some work, closing some bugs while logged in remotely to the company’s network. I read a little on the open source Smalltalk implementation known as Squeak, and I wondered what other folks were doing. Sleeping, Jim, sleeping. Many of my foreign-born colleagues asked me this truncated week past what I (or we) would be doing, and I had fun tellling them about my friend Stephen’s Chinese restaurant where he roasted turkey like he roasted duck or pork in huge vertical ovens. He experimented one year with mashed potatoes and gravy, but he’s regressed to Chinese tender veggies and tofu. The older I get and the smaller my family gets, the more I find myself wondering during these interminably American holidays—at least the Fourth of July is easy to identify—what’s the, uh, big deal? You’re not a kid anymore, and there’s really no hope of gifts great or bad. I mean I didn’t have a traditional American Thanskgiving until I was well into my 30s. What? You mean not everybody is having ravioli and roast chicken today? But, for some reason, Xmas is the worst of these phony patriot act holidays. The effort expended by every media to get me to go out and spend my hard-earned buck on the latest whim du jour. Well, at least I got a nice book in the mail yesterday: A. Saenz-Badillos. 1993. History of the Hebrew Language. No TV station ever tried to force historical-comparative linguistics down my throat like sliced and dried out turkey breast.

hollow heart

My friend, Philip Gelb, (shakuhachi player and teacher and vegetarian chef) sent me an email saying how he is looking for some stinky tofu (臭豆腐 chòu dòufǔ). This fired off some memories. I’ve had stinky tofu a couple of times, once as a condiment with a since forgotten dish and another time as an ingredient. I requested the latter at my friend Stephen Hung’s restaurant, Super Wok, asking for garlic sauteed water spinach (空心菜 kōngxīncài Ipomoea aquatica) with stinky tofu. He was incredulous, but picked up the ingredients and had Jack the chef whip up a batch for me. Then everybody watched to see me try to eat it. I enjoyed it and finished off the dish. The smell reminds me of a good strong cheese, the texture is creamy, and the taste strong and delicious. I know that Phil also likes nattō (納豆 fermented bean curd), which is Japanese and also an acquired taste. If I ever get to Taiwan, I must go to Dai’s House of Stinky Tofu (獨臭之家) for dinner.

aux murs gris

Il était une fois un prince beau comme le jour. Il vivait entre son chien et son cheval, à l’orée d’un bois, dans un château aux murs gris et au toit mauve... [Boris Vian]

the function of trivia

I finally got around to finishing reading Ronald Wardhaugh’s Proper English: Myths and Misunderstandings about Language. Blackwell, 1999, p.163. [Mentioned here earlier.]

Whatever a grammar of a language is, it is largely impervious to human intervention. That is, the really interesting rules and principles are so basic that we cannot do anything at all about them. What we can do is to try to influence some of the minor outcomes, for example, try to insist that people say I drank instead of I drunk or It’s I instead of It’s me. Essentially that is tinkering with matters of no linguistic importance. To elevate the study of grammar to the task of trying to bring about “correction” in such matters is to try to trivialize that study. These matters may be of social consequence and often are, but that is a social observation not a linguistic one, because I drunk and It’s me are linguistically on par with I drank and It’s I. Furthermore, it is an observation that tells us much about social organization and the function of trivia in such organization and nothing about the structure of language.

Whereas everyone who speaks a language draws on a grammar of that language, there are often local variations in some of its details. Many such differences are related to regional and social groupings of speakers of the language, giving us regional and social dialects. Linguistically, these differences are interesting because they enable us to see how different groups handle certain details of the grammar. No group can be said to handle such details “better” or “worse” than any other group. What we do observe, however, is that the solutions of one group may be more highly valued than those of other groups and deemed superior. Once again this is a social judgment not a linguistic one.

bubblin’ crude

Seems that Max Baer, Jr., aka Jethro Bodine, has bought an out-of-business Wal-Mart in Carson City, NV, and is turning it into “Jethro’s Beverly Hillbillies Mansion & Casino”.

un retour à le raisin

Ray Davis over at Pseudopodium has posted an entry of great and perfect bloggitude. It’s about a book I’d never heard of being touted on a blog I’d never read.

Laughing at nonsense, mourning dullness, protesting insularity, mocking arrogant sycophants, and resisting a bullying mob all remain worthwhile exercises. But the extent to which such pleasures are initiated by the Franco-American brand—as opposed to pseudo-free-market one-party-system-backed economics, religious orthodoxies, identity allegiances which reinforce the injustices that shaped them, the Great Books gated community, pop evolutionary psychology, or tin Stalins, for example—seems strictly a local matter. As proven by some publications of our beloved ALSC, “Theory” is not a necessary condition for worthless blather. And, as proven by some “Theorists”, humans sometimes find it possible to take ethical action even against group pressure. [...]

For that matter closest to my heart, some of my favorite books of the 1970s and 1980s came from writers later to be classified as canonical Theorists. And if their books’ quality declined inversely to number of disciples and citations, well, couldn’t as little be said of Goethe? And if the ones who didn’t decline simply disappeared (Alice Jardine, where art thou?), hasn’t that happened to other dedicated academics?

Please, gentle reader, go and read it. If, for anything, Mr Davis should be remembered for his delightful encomium of orange bitters. La!

evacuation assembly area

There’s some signage in my workplace parking lot which always catches my eye:

The other day, a colleague brought along a used analog camera he’d just got, and as it was loaded with film, I snapped this. A month or so later, he scanned the developed photo and sent me a JPEG.

ua 1453 outta there

Well, no time no blog entry ... Last Friday Ms Viki and I flew down to Phoenix to see some old friends and celebrate their daughter’s graduation. First, I literally ran into Sean Penn on the sidewalk outside terminal 3 at SFO. He was without entourage, which seemed strange. Second, our flight was late and without an explanation or a how-d’you-do. (We flew Ted, which is a part of United, and is like its parent corporation without the friendly service. In fact, the flight attendants were indifferent or downright rude. South-Western next time.) Sigh. But anyway, Phoenix and Scotsdale are strange sprawling proto-LAs. The last time I was there in 2002 I took to referring to the constaint construction as terraforming. Lots of oversized, over-air-conditioned American suburban homes. Give it a decade or two and it’ll be sporting all the problems these folks thought they were escaping. (It didn’t help that I was reading Gibson’s Pattern Recognition at the time, I suppose.) I didn’t touch a computer while I was there, which was rather nice. I was watching CNN on cable at the hotel when I noticed that Arianna Huffington has a site that’s doing celebrity blogging.

karajans zirkus

This morning while I was reading the RFC on URI generic syntax (RFC 3986), I received a couple of emails from Richard Friedman pointing me at a collection of photographs at the George Eastman House and a couple of blog enties (one and two) giving details on the photographer, Siegfried Lauterwasser, and the round-about path the photos took from Germany to the US. Lauterwasser’s photo studio, which he took over from his father in 1933, is still in business in Überlingen.

vij viæ

You gotta love the Web! There always something for somebody. An aside in my last entry immediately drew a response from reader, Greg Kendall, who is the proprietor of the Seven Roads Gallery of Bookseller’s Plates, Binder’s Tickets, etc., etc. I almost didn’t mention the Munksgaard bookseller’s plate, but I did, and then spent some pleasant time looking at Greg’s collection. Immediately thereafter, I went into the Bibliotheca Byssina and started rummaging around taking down older books at random from the shelves, opening them and looking for any plates which weren’t in his collection. Finding some, it also forced me to finally get the scanner out of storage, download new drivers, and scan the plates. (I’ve been meaning to scan and post pictures on this blog.)

careful with that axe

Listening, bleary-eyed early this morning, to the Internet radio station run by Dr Yo, I heard out of the corner of my ear:

And if you survive till two thousand and five
I hope you’re exceedingly thin
For if you are stout you will have to breathe out
While the people around you breathe in
[Pink Floyd, Division Bell, “Point Me At the Sky”]

Leave it to Pink Floyd to warn me about my slowing metabolism.

pebbles

Just got off the phone with the international department at National / Citer in Paris regarding the Citroën we rented in Europe last month. On the second day of driving, a passing truck flung a pebble at us which dinged the windshield. Not much we could do, but try to forget it until we returned the car. Fast forward to two weeks later, when we drop off the car early on Sunday morning, tell the only National representative at the airport about the damage. She waves us off with a Gallic shrug and a “That’s OK.” On Friday, I get a registered letter from France threatening the entire minimum deductable of nearly 500 euros because we didn’t turn in an accident report. Also included is a blank accident report to fill in and instructions to return it ASAP. Of course, when I phone, their office is closed. Nothing to do but wait out the weekend, during which time I notice a charge on my credit card bill from the rental company for 280 euros. WTF? I filled the gas tank. Anyway, this morning I get up extra early to call Paris again. The friendly woman explains that the credit card charge is for fixing the windshield. I can turn in the accident report, but it won’t help, and she’ll fax me the paperwork from the people who fixed the damage. All in all, not as bad as I imagined it when the pebble was first flung.

roger, ram jet

Mr Bali Hai was back in the Bay Area teaching a class, and we got together after work at a Korean BBQ place on El Camino Real in Santa Clara. We didn’t much talk about blogging, though he had just found a great cold war doomsday device described online that he wrote an entry on. Ah, the ’50s and ’60s, and all that disposable income tied up in atomic ram jets full of H bombs.

1,898,190

UJG listed in Amazon. Exceeding strange, but I guess blogs have arrived. [via Chutry Experiment] Looks like Amazon is using their frontend to track websites in general. Powered by Alexa and A9.

desistfilm

1. Saw Stravinsky’s Rake’s Progress (libretto by W. H Auden and Chester Kallman) on Friday at the Metro Theater in Oakland. The light board failed that evening, so the lighting was reduced to an ancient follow spot. The show must go on. The production had some rough edges but was enjoyable. The opera is based on a set of 8 prints by William Hogarth [1697–1764]. 2. Saw Sideways on Saturday and enjoyed it. Two lovelorn losers traipsing through the California Central Coast wine country. From the director who brought us Citizen Ruth and Election. 3. Received an early birthday present from V.: the Criterion Collection edition of By Brakhage: An Anthology with 26 representative films. So far, so good.

blog lite

I’ll be blogging lightly over the next couple of weeks, because I’m starting a new job tomorrow. Good news is that I get to have a work blog. So, I’ll link to it, when it’s up and running.

let it blet

Haven’t been blogging recently. Meant to note a word I hadn’t come across before blet ‘to rot’ < Old French blet ‘decayed, rotten’ (> bletier) < Frankish blet ‘pale, sallow, pallid’. [via Laura’s persimmon entry at limon] I never did care for persimmons, but I had an earlier facination with quinces. Next letter over in the fruitish alphabet. Came across an interesting blog (Hanzi Smatters) that chronicles the misusage of hanzi (Chinese characters) in Western culture. [via Language Log] I really cannot imagine getting a tattoo, but getting a tattoo of incorrectly formed hanzi is just too bizarre.

[Addendum 12/06/04: Thanks to MM and misteraitch for pointing me at their respective entries on the medlar and its bletting. I also noticed today (in Meyer-Lübke) that French blesser ‘to wound’ derives from the Frankish verb blettian ‘to rot, decay; to wound’, and which unintentionally ties back to my tongue-in-cheek subject heading. The German Mispel, Basque mesmeru, mizpila, and Italian nespola come from Latin mespilus (variant *nespilus).]

psycho little dogs

Black Friday, the day after Thanksgiving, the best day of the year to shop. We didn’t venture out until half past four. But we were going into the belly of the beast: Trader Joe’s. When the powers that be redid the El Cerrito Plaza shopping center, they ensured more stores than parking places. In the TJ quadrant this works out like gangbusters. Creeping along looking for a space, dodging abandoned yet moving shopping carts and pissed off grandmas, I listened to the lead singer of Cake being interviewed on NPR. The band had finally released an album, Pressure Chief, after a couple or three years. I’ve liked their psychedelie nouvelle ever since hearing Italian Leather Sofa sometime in the last millennium. That and the pleasant moment at the end of a Sopranos episode with Frank Sinatra as credit music. [Aside about the scene ending, the music kicking, and the credits rolling chez Filmbrain] Yesterday, while making the cranberry sauce for Erling and Lynne’s Thanskgiving, I listened to a Blondie CD that V. had picked up recently. Parallel Lines, copyright 1978, a quarter of a century ago. More time had elapsed since the New Wave-Punk era and now than between my mom’s Broadway show tune 45s and my listening to them as a kid on a windup Victrola. “Strange how potent cheap music is,” says Amanda in Noel Coward’s Private Lives. Meanwhile, Alan is preparing his psychedelic breakfast, and Crass is asking How Does It Feel to Be the Mother of a Thousand Dead.

It’s like a car crash happening on my street
Broken bodies at my feet
And sirens on the way
They’re too late
’Cause nobody’s going to save us
We’re a rubbernecker’s dream
We’re burning gasoline
Go take your economy car and your suitcase
Take your psycho little dogs
Take it all away
And go

[Cake. 2004. Take It All Away (on Pressure Chief)]

wassail & cheer

There I was, at work on Wednesday mid-afternoon. All the native-born and long-time green card holders had decamped earlier that day or had never made it in, but there I was sitting with a Canadian, a Slovak, and an East German—programmers all—trying to describe the typical American Thanksgiving. Well, there’s too much food, it’s too bland, sports and parades on the TV, and people travel from afar to rekindle animosities dormant since last year. (At least that’s how most of my friends have described it to me.) Oh, yes, and the next day is the official first day of Xmas shopping. Watch out! But what about the story of the first Thanksgiving with the Native Americans and the Puritans? Too bad my office mate had elected not to come in today. As a Cayuga he might have shared his non-European POV with us. I never got to go to a traditional Thanksgiving meal like you see in the Norman Rockwell paintings until I was around thirty-something. You mean not everybody has roast chicken and pasta with pesto for Turkey Day? But surely, home-made ravioli with tocco sauce are consumed. No? Strange, maybe even weird. That leads up to what I’m doing today: going to a soi disant Orphans’ Thanksgiving. Though, V. & I are legally orphans, I think our hosts, Erling & Lynne still have a couple of DNA-donors kicking it around some place. I’ll make the cranberry sauce, and V.’ll make the wild rice stuffing.

vielleicht

There’s been a bunch of miscellanea building up on the blogging back boiler, but it’s getting harder and harder to blog these days. Recently, we rented In the Mood for Love by Wong Kar-Wai. Every since seeing Wong’s Chungking Express, I’ve been a fan. The sixties decor seemed especially alien in the Hong Kong apartments and offices, and Maggie Cheung and Tony Leung are happy together. It’s one of the western pop songs that Wong uses that’s stuck with me: Nat King Cole singing Perhaps, Perhaps, Perhaps in Spanish (Quizas, Quizas, Quizas). This song came back to haunt me late on Saturday night. I’d just joined a couple of friend in the Mission district of San Francisco, first to hear Richard Friedman’s sound design for Threads at the ODC Theater. It was a fantastic show. Before it, we’d eaten at a Vietnamese restaurant, Thanh Tam II, and afterwards we had ice cream at Mitchell’s. Hmm. But the song: turns out that the local PBS channel is showing a British sitcom on late on Saturday nights. And the theme music for Coupling is Perhaps, Perhaps, Perhaps. The show is a mix of Seinfeld, Friends, and Frasier. I watched two episodes from the first season. I had not heard of it, and I had missed (thankfully) the American remake which lasted (mercifully) four episodes. On Friday, at work, Erling and Lynne called me up from Sammy’s Roumanian Steakhouse in NYC. They and everybody else in the place were having a bunch of fun. The Simpsons has just entered its 16th season, and Thomas Pynchon dropped by again to make some bad puns with two of his book titles.

rhabdomeric receptors

What is it about kidney stones? [via the eyes have it] First Laura had them, and then the blogroll at Eye of the Goof pointed me at them.

This also in, regarding eyes:

Joachim Wittbrodt of the European Molecular Biology Laboratory in Heidelberg, Germany, and his colleagues have found that Platynereis has rhabdomeric receptors in its tiny eyes, and ciliary cells in its equally tiny brain. The ciliary cells perhaps regulate its daily activity cycle by sensing light, Wittbrodt guesses. “We think they are related to circadian rhythms. We have found that there is a direct connection to the area used for locomotion.”

From Nature [via As It Happens]

Some great election statistics maps out there. [thanks to Kerim at Keywords]

dishoom

I was on a roll. Ticking off the entries day by day, and then it happened: life, work, what-have-you interposed itself. But I recently got three URLs sent to me amongst the spicy ham product. They’re both funny, but in a nervous kind of way: partially due to cultural dissonance, no doubt.

1. From cartoonist Ben Boyd: You forgot Poland.
2. From Abe, nipponophile extraordinaire, somewhere here in the States: On getting better grades.
3. And from Ferhiz, all the way over in the UK: a South Asian take on the US presidential contest.

duomo obrigado

Well, I finished my first full week of teaching at USF, and I made a couple of fun discoveries yesterday in between classes: the Ricci Institute and the Fromm Institute. I was searching online for books on Japanese etymology, because I was trying to determine if Japanese arigatou was a loanword from Portuguese obrigado as somebody had suggested in a forum. (For the record and off the cuff, I didn’t think so.) Anyway, the library catalog showed a result that said the book was in the Chinese Library. I asked my TA, who’s from Shanghai, if there was a Chinese library on campus, but she didn’t think so. Hmm, looked around on the USF website, and bingo!, came up with the Ricci Institute. Haven’t had a chance to walk up to the Lonely Mountain Campus to see it yet, but am looking forward to it. Matteo Ricci was an interesting fellow who tried to teach the Chinese to use the European ars memorativa to help in learning their characters. The Fromm Institute discovery came about more slowly: I had noticed since day one last week, that mixed in with the usual undergraduates was a whole passel of retired folks roaming around the campus in hoardes. They all seemed to know one another and were just as happy and rambunctious as the younger students. But why? Finally, in the cafeteria, I sat at a table and heard three older guys talking about Nabokov’s Lolita (as well as Azar Nafisi’s Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books) in a way that said to me that they’d just come from a lecture they’d rather enjoyed. Talked to one of them and discovered that their was a whole ’nother college on campus for and by retired folks. Nice.

5 som per glass

Found this interesting blog [via pf] written by an American who’s working in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan.

loyal ignatz

Well, I starting teaching three classes yesterday at a local Jesuit university. Though I’m lecturing for the CS department, the classes are lower division and for non-majors, and we’ll see if any other teaching gigs ensue. I had fun wandering around the campus and into St Ignatius: the huge campus chapel that’s now been converted into a parish church. Crazy neo-baroque architecture, but there was a noon mass going on so I didn’t get to see much. Later, I ate some tasty pakoras and samosas that a Indian student organization was selling in the quad. The library was nice, once I got my picture ID and could get past the turnstyles. Checked out a Scolar reprint of Bishop Lowth’s A Short Introduction to English Grammar from 1762 which is the book in which split infinitives were first deprecated. Should provide some fun later on in the blogging.

advertising the war

Well, I got hit by an advertisement this morning in the wee hours that was purportedly left in the commentary on an old entry by a US Army battalion commander in Northern Iraq. Interestingly, the gist of the comment was familiar and the email address and name left behind are real ones. The entry itself is over year old and was basically a pointer at a pro-war op-ed piece in the New York Times by Dennis Miller. OK, so far. But then the URL left behind was an Amazon link to a book, which was also written by the proported comment author. Not one of those pay-back Amazon Associates links, but just a straight one to a book about the Gulf War. Inspection of the web logs showed that the search from Google came in from a Guangdong ISP, with one IP address for the search and another for the posting of the entry. Typical spicy ham product. Turns out that not only are the name on the entry and on the book’s cover the same, but that this name is one that was in the news last year for sending out form letters to hometown newspapers from soldiers in his unit. (In fact, this colonel gets a lot of PR here in the States.) But, why does the Pentagon need Chinese help to advertise its war and books written by its mouth-piece? Who knows, but it was fun to delete it. I wonder if I should send the bill for my time to the Secretary of Defense?

smelling bats

Been reading Twisty Little Passages: An Approach to Interactive Fiction by Nick Montfort. About two-thirds of the way through and enjoying it. One of the first things I did back in the early ’70s when I first got access to a computer (an HP 3000 at Lawrence Hall of Science during a high school science class field trip) was to write little BASIC programs that spewed out sarcastic Star Trek scripts. It was a lot of fun and writing anything in BASIC made me appreciate LISP when I started to learn it a decade later at SSU. It was not until I got to Island Graphics in ’88 that I go a Sun workstation (a 3/50) and discovered Advent. But earlier than that, I had been exposed to Hammurabi (kind of an Ur-SimCity) and Hunt the Wumpus on the PDP-8 at the local JC. (That was during the summer of 1973.) Ah, that computer lab was air-conditioned, but, oh, those noisy old ASR33s.

4. juli

Fourth of July and V. and I will be going up to Sonoma to see friends. Not sure if I’ll see the parade. It’s rather cool here in the East Bay, but I’m sure it’ll be hot in Sonoma. Probably won’t stay for fireworks. Home and an early evening of it.

koba un dzhugashvili

Unordered, unearthed meanderings:

• V. & I finally signed up for Netflix and we’re busy trying to outdo one another adding DVDs to the queue. Last night, we watched The Singing Detective both the American movie and the British TV mini-series. Verdict, as if it were in doubt, is the original is much better. From the Forest of Dean to the American Southwest, from tunes of the ’40s to the ’50s, and finally from Michael Gambon to Robert Downey, Jr.
• And now for something completely different. While looking for footage of Stalin to use elsewhere, I ran across this great collection of little seen Python footage. John Cleese at Graham Chapman’s funeral is funny, and Eric Idle as Joe Stalin, ultimate iron chef, is what got me there in the first place.
• The US Library of Congress has some 77 unpublished playscripts in Yiddish, some typed and others handwritten, with titles like Fun glik tsum shtrik: an operete in 4 akten (From Happiness to the Gallows) or Hello Nyuyork: muzikalishe komedye in 4 akten (Hello, New York). Most are written in pre-YIVO-standardized orthographies.

[Addendum 06/29/04: Sorry, the links to the plays have timed out. You can see them, if you go to the main page for Yiddish Playscripts and browse from there.]

naughty doughy bits

Just some miscellaneous links:

1. Davida and Tony sent me a link to their humorous erotic baked goods site, Carnal cookies. Cute photos of the finished product. (Now where did I put my link to penis pasta?)
2. President Bush seems to be stressing under all the news lately. A nice article I saw a while back, but just haven’t had the chance to blog yet. [via Ben Boyd]
3. The Genoese Republic had many forts and trading posts between Genova and the Crimea. The Sudak was just such one in Istanbul.
4. Finally, a picture of my workspace! Artist Phoebe Washburn has somehow managed to mirror my working anima. [via un regard oblique]

squamous

I have been meaning to blog about this for a while but keep procrastinating. I have a friend Paul who I haven’t been much in touch with since he and his wife moved from the Bay Area up to the Pacific Northwest. A while back, John, a mutual friend of ours and an ex-business partner of mine, and I were trading gratuitous emails, when John told me that Paul was recovering from surgery he had to remove a cancerous tumor in his mouth. (Paul had had non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma back in his college days and had survived that.) So, Paul and Kimberly decided to start a blog to keep everybody updated on his condition. A couple of weeks ago, I sat down and read the whole thing from back at the beginning of the year until the then present. A breathtaking use of blogging. Damn fine! The Paul saga continues.

ignorance in bliss

Urban folklore being what it is, I must say I was a little skeptical of this story of a German married couple who didn’t know what sex was. Seems that damnum absque injuria thinks so, too. It reminded me of a East Frisian joke about birth control that I heard when I lived in Bonn. [via Reflections in d minor]

whew

I spent the past five days in the Pittsburgh and Youngstown areas back East and Midwest respectively, and at the last moment I decided not to take a laptop. On our return, I’ve been weeding out the comment salty chopped pork product from this blog, and today I’ll be trying to read and respond to the accumlated email. I ought to have the next installment of der volf up today or tomorrow.

quiver

Maybe it had something to do with the documentary on the Vikings in Greenland and the mystery of where they went. Or, perhaps, it was discovering some blogs and sites which’d linked to me, but were not discoverable via Technorati. (Yes, I was looking at my web server’s log files for referrers.) Like: the intriguing and Icelandic Örvamælir and a Dutch page of links. But nothing much prepared me for the geeky weirdness of the intertangled webworld of Kukkurovaca, especially his Unlikely Glossary Project. And finally, clicking on all of this and some more, I came across James Tauber’s blog filled with techy nuggets. As a blogging buddy, Roger, wrote yesterday, it’s nice to get out and about on the less well known paths of the web again.

World Lit 101

Oh, we have memes, lots of memes. The current one to catch my fancy is the following list of books and which ones I’ve read.

Anonymous—Beowulf
Achebe, Chinua—Things Fall Apart
Agee, James—A Death in the Family
Austen, Jane—Pride and Prejudice
Baldwin, James—Go Tell It on the Mountain
Beckett, Samuel—Waiting for Godot
Bellow, Saul—The Adventures of Augie March
Brontë, Charlotte—Jane Eyre
Brontë, Emily—Wuthering Heights
Camus, Albert—The Stranger
Cather, Willa—Death Comes for the Archbishop
Chaucer, Geoffrey—The Canterbury Tales
Chekhov, Anton—The Cherry Orchard
Chopin, Kate—The Awakening
Conrad, Joseph—Heart of Darkness
Cooper, James Fenimore—The Last of the Mohicans
Crane, Stephen—The Red Badge of Courage
Dante—Inferno
de Cervantes, Miguel—Don Quixote
Defoe, Daniel—Robinson Crusoe
Dickens, Charles—A Tale of Two Cities
Dostoyevsky, Fyodor—Crime and Punishment
Douglass, Frederick—Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass
Dreiser, Theodore—An American Tragedy
Dumas, Alexandre—The Three Musketeers
Eliot, George—The Mill on the Floss
Ellison, Ralph—Invisible Man
Emerson, Ralph Waldo—Selected Essays
Faulkner, William—As I Lay Dying
Faulkner, William—The Sound and the Fury
Fielding, Henry—Tom Jones
Fitzgerald, F. Scott—The Great Gatsby
Flaubert, Gustave—Madame Bovary
Ford, Ford Madox—The Good Soldier
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von—Faust
Golding, William—Lord of the Flies
Hardy, Thomas—Tess of the d’Urbervilles
Hawthorne, Nathaniel—The Scarlet Letter
Heller, Joseph—Catch 22
Hemingway, Ernest—A Farewell to Arms
Homer—The Iliad
Homer—The Odyssey
Hugo, Victor—The Hunchback of Notre Dame
Hurston, Zora Neale—Their Eyes Were Watching God
Huxley, Aldous—Brave New World
Ibsen, Henrik—A Doll’s House
James, Henry—The Portrait of a Lady
James, Henry—The Turn of the Screw
Joyce, James—A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Kafka, Franz—The Metamorphosis
Kingston, Maxine Hong—The Woman Warrior
Lee, Harper—To Kill a Mockingbird
Lewis, Sinclair—Babbitt
London, Jack—The Call of the Wild
Mann, Thomas—The Magic Mountain
Marquez, Gabriel García—One Hundred Years of Solitude
Melville, Herman—Bartleby the Scrivener
Melville, Herman—Moby Dick
Miller, Arthur—The Crucible
Morrison, Toni—Beloved
O’Connor, Flannery—A Good Man is Hard to Find
O’Neill, Eugene—Long Day’s Journey into Night
Orwell, George—Animal Farm
Pasternak, Boris—Doctor Zhivago
Plath, Sylvia—The Bell Jar
Poe, Edgar Allan—Selected Tales
Proust, Marcel—Swann’s Way
Pynchon, Thomas—The Crying of Lot 49
Remarque, Erich Maria—All Quiet on the Western Front
Rostand, Edmond—Cyrano de Bergerac
Roth, Henry—Call It Sleep
Salinger, J.D.—The Catcher in the Rye
Shakespeare, William—Hamlet
Shakespeare, William—Macbeth
Shakespeare, William—A Midsummer Night’s Dream
Shakespeare, William—Romeo and Juliet
Shaw, George Bernard—Pygmalion
Shelley, Mary—Frankenstein
Silko, Leslie Marmon—Ceremony
Solzhenitsyn, Alexander—One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich
Sophocles—Antigone
Sophocles—Oedipus Rex
Steinbeck, John—The Grapes of Wrath
Stevenson, Robert Louis—Treasure Island
Stowe, Harriet Beecher—Uncle Tom’s Cabin
Swift, Jonathan—Gulliver’s Travels
Thackeray, William—Vanity Fair
Thoreau, Henry David—Walden
Tolstoy, Leo—War and Peace
Turgenev, Ivan—Fathers and Sons
Twain, Mark—The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
Voltaire—Candide
Vonnegut, Kurt Jr.—Slaughterhouse-Five
Walker, Alice—The Color Purple
Wharton, Edith—The House of Mirth
Welty, Eudora—Collected Stories
Whitman, Walt—Leaves of Grass
Wilde, Oscar—The Picture of Dorian Gray
Williams, Tennessee—The Glass Menagerie
Woolf, Virginia—To the Lighthouse
Wright, Richard—Native Son

iacta alea est

You’ve probably seen it blogged about by now: the page twenty-three sentence five meme. The LaughingMeme has a post-mortem on the epidemiology of the critter. He refers to it as the p23s5 meme and tracks it back through an earlier and lengthier p18s4 variant. Here it is in all its simplicity.

1. Grab the nearest book.
2. Open the book to page 23.
3. Find the fifth sentence.
4. Post the text of the sentence in your journal along with these instructions.

I tried it and here’s what I got:

1. OK. Der große Duden, Band 4: Duden Grammatik der deutschen Gegenwartssprache, 1966.
2. Drat! It’s the table of contents.
3. No real sentences, but here’s the fifth line from the first column: “Der überschwere folgende Leichten, Voll- oder Kaumschwere ... 662.”
4. Done.

[via the sum of my parts via Klastrup’s Cataclysms via thinking with my fingers via Jerz’s Literacy Weblog]

tag blogging

[from the friday five via Redwood Dragon] If you ...

1. ... owned a restaurant, what kind of food would you serve?

   Ligurian, but I’d rather not be a restaurateur.

2. ... owned a small store, what kind of merchandise would you sell?

   Since my mother’s brothers and father are / were haberdashers and because I've worked in the IT industry so long, I’d be likely to open a wearable computer store, but I’d rather not work retail.

3. ...wrote a book, what genre would it be?

   Postmodern, utopianist, fabulist encyclopedia of imaginary languages. I’m working on it right now. Well, not right now, because I’m procrastinating by writing in my blog. Maybe it’d be a bit bloggish, too. I also would like to write a Zeneise-Kölsch dictionary of invective.

4. ... ran a school, what would you teach?

   Linguistics, especially comparative-historical linguistics and its application to the grammar of artificial languages.

5. ... recorded an album, what kind of music would be on it?

   I’ve written a libretto for an opera. It has been performed in Austria and the USA, and it was both times recorded. For more information or MP3 files to download, see the composer’s website. I’m working on a couple of other libretti, when I’m not procrastinating on the great American novel.

blog it

I need to blog more often. Aha! What does it mean? I have noticed that I tend to link words that are short and anonymous with URLs. Tip of the tam o’ shanter to Erling for the pointer. Except, of course, back one sentence. Oh, well.

blankity blank

While cleaning blog, I managed to delete the number one entry. I’ve been able to reconstruct it partially, having preserved the comments but lost the trackbacks.

dominus anulorum

Couple of quick updates:

1. Ted Gellar at North Carolina State University pointed me at a Latin translation (work in progress) of Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings. See his comment to my Henry Potter in Latin entry for a couple more book titles that have been translated.
2. I found out a little more about epichairekakia the Greek word for schadenfreude. It’s buried in the comments to my original entry right now, but as soon as I get some more information, I’ll write it up proper.

happy blogday

It was two years ago today that Uncle Jazzbeau tested MovableType.

primed bear

1. A little applied number theory. [via Vlorbik] 2. Epenthesis, anaptyxis, or polyptoton?

sesquipedalian

The soothing buzz of vernal insects.

the wyrm

1. Nematodes in the sky. 2. The fat innkeeper, or Urechis caupo. 3. The shipworm is not a worm, but a clam: Teredo navalis.

els pessebres de catalunya

Thanks go out to Mr Bali Hai of the Eye of the Goof blog for a comment he left on my xiuxiueig entry below. He brought up two of Catalunya’s scatological Xmas customs: el caganer (best translation I’ve found, ‘the pooping shepherd’), a traditional Nativity figurine, and caga tió (the shitting log). A quick trip to Google revealed a wealth of information online, but my favorite has to be the joco-serious Amics del Caganer (in Catalan, English, and Castillian). A caganer is most commonly a man in a red cap, smoking a cigarette or a pipe, who is squatting, pantsed, and relieving himself. A coiled turd finishes off the scene. Because the figurine must be placed out of direct line of sight of the Infant, there’s a “Where’s Waldo?” quality to the positioning of the caganer in the manger. Children often ask their parents: On és el caganer? (Where’s the shitter?). Well, Bruxelles has its manneken-pis and my adopted city of Bonn has its Bröckemännche. The caga tió, on the other hand, involves a log filled with gifts, covered with a blanket, and the children of the house whacking it with sticks until it relieves itself of its contents. Singing accompanies this activity. Finally, there’re the tifas special Xmas cakes in the shape of a little pile complete with sugar flies. Tifa is derived from pastifa which is glossed: “persona que no fa polidament la seva feina.” I have always wanted to visit Catalunya, and this just cinches it that it must be during December.

[Addendum 01/21/04: Trevor, over at Follow the Baldie dot com, has an over the top entry in response to this one, complete with vomiting eagle monographs and defecating devils woodcuts. And thanks to Margaret at Transblawg for pointing us at one another.]

xiuxiueig

1. My good friend, Erling, just got back from a short winter vacation in Paris and Barcelona. Before he left, he asked me, tongue firmly in cheek, if there was something I’d like from Catalunya like a Catalan-Latin dictionary. OK, smirk, sure. Anyway, last week I got a phone call from Erling; it seems there was more than one Catalan-Latin dictionary in the medium sized bookshop he happened upon. Which one did I want? I changed my mind and told him I’d rather have a Catalan etymological dictionary, if that were possible. Last night, I got my dictionary. It is a grand book. 2. This evening, after returning home from work, there was a belated Xmas-birthday present from Ralf & Angelika. A long, red scarf for Karneval, with the following text in Kölsch: Laach doch ens. Et weed widder wäde. Well, I’m ready; bring on the Jecke, I’ll be warm and ready. Alaaf and all that that entails. 4. There’s a new linguistics blog on the blogoblock, and its name is Semantic Compositions. Click, read, and enjoy. [via Languagehat and Language Log]

swollen & pompous

1. “White socks are neat.” Or, are they evil? 2. Saw a fun documentary over the weekend: Fellini: Je suis un grand menteur by Damian Pettigrew. It was a Scottish-French co-production that was in Italian mostly, but with some French and English. Lots of behind the scenes scenes with Fellini directing and actors counting. 3. genus dicendi quod immodico tumore turgescit, [Quintillianus XII.x.73] A new motto for UJG?

happy new year

I wish a happy new year to all my friends, colleagues, and acquaintances in Blogovia. May your blogging and comments be bountiful.

marlene dietrich & johannes kepler

Well, another birthday has rolled on by over me. As a kid it was something less than desirable to have a birthday two days after Xmas. How do you get anybody to come to a birthday party? Your friends’ parents can barely find the door, so they can drive the ten or so miles from Sonoma to Schellville. Oh, well, it’s not as bad as my cousin Doris, whose birthday fell two days earlier. All those combined Xmas-birthday cards, half as many presents, etc. Many suggested that I just celebrate my birthday in July. Where’s the fun in that? So, one year, while I was living behind Charles “Sparky” Schultz’ place in Santa Rosa, I threw a Xmas in July party. Lots more people came to that than I ever remember coming to one of my pre-adult birthday parties. We had a cheesy little aluminum tree, presents, and home-made eggnog. I figured it was no hotter than Xmas down under. Anyway, enough whining. This year I got some great Yiddish books from V., mainly Sholem Asch (with some translations) but also a ten volume set called di geshikhte fun literatur bay yidn by Israel Zinberg. Monika sent us a mysterious present that consisted of a pair of gloves and what looked like the world’s smallest film changing bag. Turned out to be for keeping warm while you’re holding hands in frozen Old Europe. She also sent a small pocket sundial. I got V. a necklace and a Victorian brooch with some human hair under crystal. Tonight, Cliff will be coming by for dinner, and we can have great fun reading aloud from Asch’s ist river or motke ganef. I also have to figure out exactly when this blog goes into its third year.

mister mark

Languagehat has an entry about Messrs Pullum and Liberman’s ruminations over the number of new words that enter the language each year: placed at 20K by Don Watson in an article in the Australian newspaper The Age. “As rebarbative as ‘GDP-L-fucose synthase’ may be, I don't see any principled way to distinguish it from the long line of terms that have preceded it, from atmosphere through phlogiston and quark.” Quark, how I love it. The German dairy product, thicker than yoghurt, thinner than cream cheese and not to be confused with the desktop publishing software or the character from Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. Here’s how physicist Murray Gell-Mann says he coined the word, pronounced kwork, for those funny little particles that physics today is so full of. And, I guess that answers the question that Paul Pfalzner asked and which I quoted in an entry earlier this year.
[Addendum 12/26/03: Mark Liberman has an update.]

cthulhu r’lyeh

1. I’m glad that Congress is busy doing something: like keeping us safe from language. [via Cinema Minima.] 2. What would be the product of an unholy union between Chick Comics and H. P. Lovecraft? Unspeakable horror! 3. Could Tom Waits have existed without Dwight Frye? [Both via Eye of the Goof.]

doppelt gemoppelt

1. Chicken or Beef has taught us about the Disinfopedia. (And, I wonder if his first favorite Wiki is the Portland Pattern Repository’s Wiki; I know it’s mine.) 2. Laputin Logic has quoted a 163-year-old article on daguerreotypes written by E. A. Poe. (That reminds me, I haven’t finished that Borges Poe book I bought a couple of months ago. Nice photo—taken in the Poe museum—of Jorge and a stuffed raven on the cover.) Meanwhile, it’s a slow blogging month this one.

on turkey bey

There are some things that slowly slip from your mind's grasp, like dial telephones, non-automated tellers, and cranky computer columnists. It's not like you miss them, until maybe somebody points them out: all racoon-eyed and Norma Desmond like in the headlights of the future. Jerry Pournelle has remained lodged in my brain because because his column usually contained some kind of information that was pertinent to computers; John Dvorak hadn't because his blather was basically unimportant to my day to day existence. Mark Liberman, at the end of an entry, had a link [via Instapundit] in which the grand poobah of poo-pooing comes down hard, like a ton of cold pizza and a splash of stale Jolt cola on blogs and blogging.

Back before the dot-com upside and all that, I was basically a Mac user, and as such read Mac magazines pretty avidly. Dvorak had an end-column in MacWorld called the Devil's Advocate. In it he dispensed his sour-grapes dicta and sub-sub-Nietzschean aphorisms, and I always looked forward to how he'd misread some slightly less than au courant trend or factoid. Then I moved on, abandoning Macs, not because I found Wintel machines better, but because I had money to make and that usually involved non-Macs. Slowly I forgot about Dvorak. And suddenly, after reading his latest screed, it all came back home to me; it's like I'd never stopped. Sort of like missing a year or so of some soap opera. Here's John still kvetching about something popular and neat. He says that more than half of the blogs have been abandoned; doom; less than a quarter of the blogs get past the first couple of entries. And, what will remain in the near future will be co-opted, big media-run blogs without a hint of anything that made blogs popular. Well, it's good that I stumbled across this dear old nincompoop, because I've been planning on getting a new Mac laptop. I've been checking them out for the last year or so, surreptitiously, and I must say I like what I see. Interestingly enough at my current contract gig, many of the developers are using Macs and the others Linux machines (all laptops by the way), and few are using Wintel beasts.

the end of blogging

Blogging comment spam is about to destroy blogging as we know it. Jay Allen has started an open source, vendor-neutral anti-BCS project called Blam, and Mark Pilgrim warns him that it is all in vain. [via Padawan] Is the open commentary of the blogging community going the way of Usenet? (I remember the day that green card amnesty spam showed up on Usenet.) Blacklists don't work or are merely a stop-gap measure. Turn off comments: that'll work, but it's too impersonal and blogging folks need their feedback. Turn the blog into a gated community or an by-invitation only kind of country club: not immediate enough. How do you let a growing community interact with itself?

frigid links

Well, the folks behind pornographic blog comment spamming have figured out a new one. This morning during my vanity check at Technorati I noticed that top of the list was a strangely named blog with zero links. Clicking on through, as is the way of the web surely, I found a pseudo blog hanging off the URL of some porn site. About half the front page was consumed by a odd listing of blogs, some familiar, some not. All I can figure is that the proprietors are hoping for some automatic blog rolling and link back (which is why their URL remains anonymous here) to raise their ranking in Google and the like.

[Addendum 10/28/03: I see the offending link has disappeared. I guess Technorati took care of it.]

lama misellissima