November 29, 2009
September 21, 2009
Cuzco?
(Photo taken in Montmarte)Hey there, sports fans. I know I'm a terrible blogger, terrible friend, terrible human being. I'm not sure I'm quite in the head space to regale you with all my Europe antics right now, but you know how I love music, and love copping out by posting youtube videos. So I've embedded some "videos" of some songs I've been listening to lately. Some are not new in general terms, some are, but they're all upbeat and I would say fun. I make no claims about the actual associated videos posted, as far as I care you can push play and go to another tab to get back to your email or... work. Some of them are just picture videos anyway, and one just an mp3.
Anyway, let me know if you have any music you want to share with me, b/c I really love music and its not particularly easy to find new good music out of the wild blue yonder.
I owe posts on Europe, and the continuation of my "what the heck is linguistics?" If I could stop napping in the afternoon I'm sure I could find the time.
Gorillaz: DARE
Metric: Help, I'm Alive
MIA: 20 Dollar
Peter Bjorn & John: I Want You!
Download bài hát I Want You
Yeah Yeah Yeahs: Dull Life
August 26, 2009
Scandinavia
Hi, its been an unforgivably long time since I've posted something decent. And I'm guessing it will be longer. I have to do the 2nd part of my trilogy in 5 parts about Linguistics and grad school for humanities students. My first part was a big hit, it seems, so no promises on the next ones.
I'm in Sweden right now, got to Uppsala this morning, spent about a day and a half in Stockholm, but will go back there later. I was in Paris, Copenhagen and the south of Sweden before that.
June 25, 2009
In the News
So it was a big day for celebrity news. Farrah Fawecett lost to cancer, Michael Jackson’s heart gave out. Very sad indeed, and the latter is quite shocking – and despite what your opinion is of the character of the man, he was a pop music genius. But some other news concerns me much more closely and deeply, and that’s the update on the Pickton trial appeal.
A very brief summary of the matter, Pickton is a pig farmer in BC who murdered women from the streets of Vancouver and hid their dismantled bodies on his farm, and also fed the pieces to his pigs. He’s charged with 26 murders, but there were more that couldn’t be conclusively pinned on him.
He lost an appeal today (by a split ruling) that claimed the judge responsible for the trial mis-instructed the jury. But what this also means is that he gets another appeal at the Supreme Court of Canada.
When I lived in BC in 2002-03, every week I went with a group of students from my school to the downtown eastside of Vancouver, which is notorious for the drugs and sextrade. We walked around with big things of hot chocolate in oversized blue jackets giving away hot drinks, as well as candy and various other useful items (gave away the mittens I was wearing once, who could say no to that request?). I was part of the group (comprised only of women) who spoke to the women on the street. We gave hot chocolate to those who wanted it, left alone those who had no interest in us, and talked to those who would. Despite what you think about this kind of outreach, it has made a huge difference in my life, mainly because it allowed me to simply interact with these people. They are me, they are exactly the same – what is different is that I was born into a stable, loving middle class family and they were exposed to situations either of poverty, abuse, or other unfortunate circumstances. Talking to these women I learned of their hopes and dreams, which are like yours and mine. One woman wanted to be a marine biologist, others just wanted to care for their children and make sure they were ok. It seems to me that the drugs and prostitution are effects of the crap they’ve been given in their lives, but the hope and the smiles show the wonder of their human hearts and triggered compassion in me. They are the same.
Many of the women we interacted with knew other women who had gone missing from East Hastings. They knew those women who were brutally murdered by Pickton. Some were afraid, because it could have easily been them.
So I read the story about the appeal on CBC news and it really brought me to frustrated tears. Leaving Pickton himself aside, I’m astonished that there are people who are willing to be his lawyers and defend him so vehemently. I know that everyone deserves defense, and all that stuff, but the scale of evil we’re dealing with makes me forget what the logic behind these laws is. He is an unbelievably evil man, and should be in prison for the rest of his earthly days. Those women deserve whatever tiny shred of justice we can muster up for them. They deserve infinitely more. Remember that they are you and me, they did not deserve to die, they deserved to be loved. Remember that when you think about people on the streets, when you think about prostitutes. Please don’t condemn them in your mind, because we don’t know what they’ve had to deal with in their lives. Remember that they have children, they have friends, and they have dreams. Think of the dream to be a marine biologist.
A very brief summary of the matter, Pickton is a pig farmer in BC who murdered women from the streets of Vancouver and hid their dismantled bodies on his farm, and also fed the pieces to his pigs. He’s charged with 26 murders, but there were more that couldn’t be conclusively pinned on him.
He lost an appeal today (by a split ruling) that claimed the judge responsible for the trial mis-instructed the jury. But what this also means is that he gets another appeal at the Supreme Court of Canada.
When I lived in BC in 2002-03, every week I went with a group of students from my school to the downtown eastside of Vancouver, which is notorious for the drugs and sextrade. We walked around with big things of hot chocolate in oversized blue jackets giving away hot drinks, as well as candy and various other useful items (gave away the mittens I was wearing once, who could say no to that request?). I was part of the group (comprised only of women) who spoke to the women on the street. We gave hot chocolate to those who wanted it, left alone those who had no interest in us, and talked to those who would. Despite what you think about this kind of outreach, it has made a huge difference in my life, mainly because it allowed me to simply interact with these people. They are me, they are exactly the same – what is different is that I was born into a stable, loving middle class family and they were exposed to situations either of poverty, abuse, or other unfortunate circumstances. Talking to these women I learned of their hopes and dreams, which are like yours and mine. One woman wanted to be a marine biologist, others just wanted to care for their children and make sure they were ok. It seems to me that the drugs and prostitution are effects of the crap they’ve been given in their lives, but the hope and the smiles show the wonder of their human hearts and triggered compassion in me. They are the same.
Many of the women we interacted with knew other women who had gone missing from East Hastings. They knew those women who were brutally murdered by Pickton. Some were afraid, because it could have easily been them.
So I read the story about the appeal on CBC news and it really brought me to frustrated tears. Leaving Pickton himself aside, I’m astonished that there are people who are willing to be his lawyers and defend him so vehemently. I know that everyone deserves defense, and all that stuff, but the scale of evil we’re dealing with makes me forget what the logic behind these laws is. He is an unbelievably evil man, and should be in prison for the rest of his earthly days. Those women deserve whatever tiny shred of justice we can muster up for them. They deserve infinitely more. Remember that they are you and me, they did not deserve to die, they deserved to be loved. Remember that when you think about people on the streets, when you think about prostitutes. Please don’t condemn them in your mind, because we don’t know what they’ve had to deal with in their lives. Remember that they have children, they have friends, and they have dreams. Think of the dream to be a marine biologist.
June 10, 2009
Linguistics: I'm gonna tell you what it is
(1) What linguists actually do/care about
Random linguistics thing to start out, I usually type in “inphil” to get to my own blog, which I always correlate with Infl, you know, like InflP? Ok, so we’re not there yet.
To start, if you haven’t studied linguistics, you do not know what linguistics is. I don’t care if you think you do, because you really don’t. And if you’re one of those people who meets a linguist and then starts talking non-stop about everything linguistic you know, we hate that, b/c what you’re talking about is 99.9% of the time NOT what we do. If you think the Cyrillic alphabet is interesting, and that every modern English word can be traced back to Greek, or that technology will quickly lead to the abysmal end of all civilized communication, that’s nice for you, but that’s not linguistics.
There are several subfields, and major divisions can take labels like “theoretical”, “applied” and “experimental” – really we’re not that different from other more traditionally scientific fields, we just don’t get credit for our scientific inquiry (and if psychology can pass as a science, linguistics is 5 times the science). What I do is theoretical, but applied and experimental are much more salient to the non-completely abstract minded.
Sociolinguistics interests many a layperson, and involves the interaction between language and
society (its like some sort of genius fit it all into one word or something!). Socio (for short) addresses things like how dialects of a language differentiate from one another, which can involve geographic and political factors (fun fact: Hindi and Urdu are the same language but b/c of political/religious reasons have different names and use two different writing systems Devanāgarī/Arabic). The usage of “like” in English (And he was all like, I’m like totally like going crazy… like), the frequency of thinking vs. thinkin’, and various words, phrases, intonations and sounds all fall under socio, correlating them to socio-economic class, age, gender, etc.
Some experimental linguistics includes language acquisition, like watching babies and seeing how they start to talk – what sounds they can say first, what sentences they form and how old they are when the put it together. A classic example is the U-curve (I think that’s what it’s called…. I’m not an acquisitionist). This is where kids acquiring English, for example, will say something like “The rabbit went,” which sounds like a perfect sentence, but will a little later say “The rabbit goed”, and then again later return to “The rabbit went.” What this pattern is meant to indicate is that early on a child has rote memorization of verb forms including irregular ones (e.g. be/are, hold/held, teach/taught), but that in the second step the child has learned that if you add –ed to the end of verb you can make past tense (e.g. walk/walked, jump/jumped). This is actually a step forward in their development b/c the kid understands the base form of the verb and that it’s a separate piece of stuff, –ed, that makes it past tense. Then the final stage is where the child has sifted through the regular and irregular verbs to talk like a normal adult crazy English speaker.
Having TA-ed an intro class is coming in handy here.
Ok, but I don’t do those kinds of linguistics. Theoretical breaks down into syntax, semantics,
morphology, phonetics and phonology. Phonetics is the sounds that we make with language, and phonology is the sound patterns or systems of a language (for accessibility, pretty much all my examples will be from English here). For example, ever notice how you say “an iron” rather than “*a iron”? I’m sure you’re aware that you have to say ‘an’ before a word that begins in a vowel (if you’re the kind of person who says “an historic”, please leave my blog immediately), which is part of phonology – we don’t like to say too many vowel sounds in a row so the ‘n’ at the end of ‘an’ breaks it up. This subfield also includes things like stress patterns. Assuming you do trisyllabic laxing, say “divine”, then say “divinity” (serene/serenity, school/scholarly, profound/profundity). Same word, different sound (pay attention to the vowels – try saying “divine” normally, then add –ity the end, it’ll be weird). This is phonology, and you can predict how the sounds will change based on the number of syllables in the word and the nature of if suffix (e.g. –ity) that is added to a word.
Semantics is the meaning of language, slash the meaning of sentences. It tries to address how to get the meaning of a sentence by compositionally putting together all the words to get a truth value – closely related to philosophy. Again for examples, consider “Georgio bought an expensive BMW.” At first glance the sentence seems straightforward enough, but it really has two meanings. Meaning(1): Georgio bought theee most expensive BMW on the market (760il?). Meaning (2): BMW’s are expensive in terms of the average car, but Georgio actually bought the cheapest BMW money can buy. And semanticists care about how we get the two meanings, blah blah blah.
Taking a breather at this point, understand that if you thought, for example, that sociolinguistics is the most or only important area of study in terms of language, you’re wrong. You need the theory behind it to even investigate such things. If all you’re interested in for language is how people use it, and what is meant by different usages, you and I are different people. You’re allowed to be interested in that but you are NOT allowed to think that the aspects you’re not interested in are unimportant, or even less important. Unless you want to be a huge jerk times a million forever. I personally don’t really care about how people use language in society, meaning I don’t spend any time researching it. Other people have got it covered as far as I’m concerned.
What I work on is syntax and morphology. Morphology is the structure of words, like in antidisestablishmentarianism. This is multimorphemic
word, meaning it’s made up of small pieces/affixes that all attach to the root, which is establish:
anti-dis-establish-ment-arian-ism
One question in this subfield is how do we restrict what affixes attach to which root. –ity, for example changes an adjective into a noun: stable/stability. But it can’t attach to just any adjective root: tall/*tallity. (It turns out –ity only likes the Latinate roots).
Syntax is looking at sentence structure and word order (to the exclusion of meaning), which gives the following as a grammatical sentence even though it doesn’t have any clear pragmatic meaning:
Colourless green ideas sleep furiously. (props to Chomsky)
To understand a little syntax, and why I study it, I have an example with the contraction “wanna” for “want to”. One can say things like “I wanna go to the store.” Or “Do you wanna leave now?” It would seem that wherever you have “want to” you can replace it with “wanna”. Not so! One can form the question “Who do you want to go home?” from something like “I want Tim to go home.” But you CAN’T say “*Who do you wanna go home?” That’s b/c where Tim used to be (after ‘want’ and before ‘to’) before we turned him into ‘who’ and put him at the front, there is a gap, and you can’t make a contraction over a gap. Neat, eh? So syntacticians look at the underlying sentence structure, b/c if we just looked at the surface structure there’s no reason ‘wanna’ should be bad anywhere ‘want to’ occurs. Does this make sense?
To finish off, a few things that many people think pertain to linguistics but don’t:
-We do not necessarily speak 12+ languages (although some do, but don’t ask me)
-We do not correct peoples’ grammar dependent on what your grade 10 English text book said you should say. We are interested in how people actually talk, not how some stuffy librarian tells them to speak.
-Pretty much anything to do with spelling doesn’t apply to the average linguist – its not language, its orthography, i.e. a conventional representation of language.
-Most of us are not judging how you talk when you’re in conversation with us, if we’re paying attention at all we’ll probably just find you fascinating.
-We don’t discuss which languages or dialects are better than others, b/c we believe that all languages and dialects are equally complex and good – they all form natural languages.
-NO, I do NOT speak Tolkien’s elven language, or Klingon, or Esperanto – linguists are not about FAKE languages, we study REAL languages, and the fake ones never come close to cutting it in comparison with the real ones.
-We’re not translators.
-I’m sure there’s more, but I’m drawing a blank.
We are concerned with how all languages are similar to each other at some level, and how language is represented in the brain. Language is specific to humans, and b/c of how children learn it so quickly and perfectly suggests that our brains are prewired to acquire any natural language. Me, I’m into patterns (getting back to my pure math roots), and systems and all such manner of thing.
Questions?
http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/
Random linguistics thing to start out, I usually type in “inphil” to get to my own blog, which I always correlate with Infl, you know, like InflP? Ok, so we’re not there yet.
To start, if you haven’t studied linguistics, you do not know what linguistics is. I don’t care if you think you do, because you really don’t. And if you’re one of those people who meets a linguist and then starts talking non-stop about everything linguistic you know, we hate that, b/c what you’re talking about is 99.9% of the time NOT what we do. If you think the Cyrillic alphabet is interesting, and that every modern English word can be traced back to Greek, or that technology will quickly lead to the abysmal end of all civilized communication, that’s nice for you, but that’s not linguistics.
There are several subfields, and major divisions can take labels like “theoretical”, “applied” and “experimental” – really we’re not that different from other more traditionally scientific fields, we just don’t get credit for our scientific inquiry (and if psychology can pass as a science, linguistics is 5 times the science). What I do is theoretical, but applied and experimental are much more salient to the non-completely abstract minded.
Sociolinguistics interests many a layperson, and involves the interaction between language and
society (its like some sort of genius fit it all into one word or something!). Socio (for short) addresses things like how dialects of a language differentiate from one another, which can involve geographic and political factors (fun fact: Hindi and Urdu are the same language but b/c of political/religious reasons have different names and use two different writing systems Devanāgarī/Arabic). The usage of “like” in English (And he was all like, I’m like totally like going crazy… like), the frequency of thinking vs. thinkin’, and various words, phrases, intonations and sounds all fall under socio, correlating them to socio-economic class, age, gender, etc.Some experimental linguistics includes language acquisition, like watching babies and seeing how they start to talk – what sounds they can say first, what sentences they form and how old they are when the put it together. A classic example is the U-curve (I think that’s what it’s called…. I’m not an acquisitionist). This is where kids acquiring English, for example, will say something like “The rabbit went,” which sounds like a perfect sentence, but will a little later say “The rabbit goed”, and then again later return to “The rabbit went.” What this pattern is meant to indicate is that early on a child has rote memorization of verb forms including irregular ones (e.g. be/are, hold/held, teach/taught), but that in the second step the child has learned that if you add –ed to the end of verb you can make past tense (e.g. walk/walked, jump/jumped). This is actually a step forward in their development b/c the kid understands the base form of the verb and that it’s a separate piece of stuff, –ed, that makes it past tense. Then the final stage is where the child has sifted through the regular and irregular verbs to talk like a normal adult crazy English speaker.
Having TA-ed an intro class is coming in handy here.
Ok, but I don’t do those kinds of linguistics. Theoretical breaks down into syntax, semantics,
morphology, phonetics and phonology. Phonetics is the sounds that we make with language, and phonology is the sound patterns or systems of a language (for accessibility, pretty much all my examples will be from English here). For example, ever notice how you say “an iron” rather than “*a iron”? I’m sure you’re aware that you have to say ‘an’ before a word that begins in a vowel (if you’re the kind of person who says “an historic”, please leave my blog immediately), which is part of phonology – we don’t like to say too many vowel sounds in a row so the ‘n’ at the end of ‘an’ breaks it up. This subfield also includes things like stress patterns. Assuming you do trisyllabic laxing, say “divine”, then say “divinity” (serene/serenity, school/scholarly, profound/profundity). Same word, different sound (pay attention to the vowels – try saying “divine” normally, then add –ity the end, it’ll be weird). This is phonology, and you can predict how the sounds will change based on the number of syllables in the word and the nature of if suffix (e.g. –ity) that is added to a word.
Semantics is the meaning of language, slash the meaning of sentences. It tries to address how to get the meaning of a sentence by compositionally putting together all the words to get a truth value – closely related to philosophy. Again for examples, consider “Georgio bought an expensive BMW.” At first glance the sentence seems straightforward enough, but it really has two meanings. Meaning(1): Georgio bought theee most expensive BMW on the market (760il?). Meaning (2): BMW’s are expensive in terms of the average car, but Georgio actually bought the cheapest BMW money can buy. And semanticists care about how we get the two meanings, blah blah blah.Taking a breather at this point, understand that if you thought, for example, that sociolinguistics is the most or only important area of study in terms of language, you’re wrong. You need the theory behind it to even investigate such things. If all you’re interested in for language is how people use it, and what is meant by different usages, you and I are different people. You’re allowed to be interested in that but you are NOT allowed to think that the aspects you’re not interested in are unimportant, or even less important. Unless you want to be a huge jerk times a million forever. I personally don’t really care about how people use language in society, meaning I don’t spend any time researching it. Other people have got it covered as far as I’m concerned.
What I work on is syntax and morphology. Morphology is the structure of words, like in antidisestablishmentarianism. This is multimorphemic
word, meaning it’s made up of small pieces/affixes that all attach to the root, which is establish:anti-dis-establish-ment-arian-ism
One question in this subfield is how do we restrict what affixes attach to which root. –ity, for example changes an adjective into a noun: stable/stability. But it can’t attach to just any adjective root: tall/*tallity. (It turns out –ity only likes the Latinate roots).
Syntax is looking at sentence structure and word order (to the exclusion of meaning), which gives the following as a grammatical sentence even though it doesn’t have any clear pragmatic meaning:
Colourless green ideas sleep furiously. (props to Chomsky)
To understand a little syntax, and why I study it, I have an example with the contraction “wanna” for “want to”. One can say things like “I wanna go to the store.” Or “Do you wanna leave now?” It would seem that wherever you have “want to” you can replace it with “wanna”. Not so! One can form the question “Who do you want to go home?” from something like “I want Tim to go home.” But you CAN’T say “*Who do you wanna go home?” That’s b/c where Tim used to be (after ‘want’ and before ‘to’) before we turned him into ‘who’ and put him at the front, there is a gap, and you can’t make a contraction over a gap. Neat, eh? So syntacticians look at the underlying sentence structure, b/c if we just looked at the surface structure there’s no reason ‘wanna’ should be bad anywhere ‘want to’ occurs. Does this make sense?
To finish off, a few things that many people think pertain to linguistics but don’t:
-We do not necessarily speak 12+ languages (although some do, but don’t ask me)
-We do not correct peoples’ grammar dependent on what your grade 10 English text book said you should say. We are interested in how people actually talk, not how some stuffy librarian tells them to speak.
-Pretty much anything to do with spelling doesn’t apply to the average linguist – its not language, its orthography, i.e. a conventional representation of language.-Most of us are not judging how you talk when you’re in conversation with us, if we’re paying attention at all we’ll probably just find you fascinating.
-We don’t discuss which languages or dialects are better than others, b/c we believe that all languages and dialects are equally complex and good – they all form natural languages.
-NO, I do NOT speak Tolkien’s elven language, or Klingon, or Esperanto – linguists are not about FAKE languages, we study REAL languages, and the fake ones never come close to cutting it in comparison with the real ones.
-We’re not translators.
-I’m sure there’s more, but I’m drawing a blank.
We are concerned with how all languages are similar to each other at some level, and how language is represented in the brain. Language is specific to humans, and b/c of how children learn it so quickly and perfectly suggests that our brains are prewired to acquire any natural language. Me, I’m into patterns (getting back to my pure math roots), and systems and all such manner of thing.
Questions?
http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/
May 26, 2009
May 20, 2009
Mostly Harmless
Whew! Its been a whirlwind ladies and gentlemen. When was the last time I talked to you? Meh, I’m not going to check right now. Many things have been happening in the world of linguistics. Some that made me feel pretty certain that I wanted to quit; others that at least partially re-motivated me to hang on. I was thinking this weekend (as I’m wont to do) about how pretty much everyone doesn’t really know what I do, to the exception of my colleagues/peers who do the exact same stuff. And this is not your fault, no, it is my fault for neglecting to take the time to attempt an explanation of the abstract and nuanced world that I submerge myself in daily. So, in full on geek-copycat blogger style, I will present to you a trilogy in five parts:
(1) What linguists actually do/care about (i.e. don’t treat us like English majors, we promote splitting infinitives and ending a sentence with a preposition)
(2) How our grad program works/is different (and why it’s useless to compare it to grad programs within your general scope of knowledge).
(3) The deal with linguistic conferences (they’re basically parties that we get universities to send us to at various coordinates on the surface of the globe)
(4) Intra-linguist relations (because you know how warm and fuzzy we can all be)
(5) How linguistics relates to/affects you (or more clearly, that it doesn’t)
Hopefully the trilogy will set you up for an appreciation, or at least a clarification, for we linguists, and get you to stop asking how many languages we speak.
But back to breaking news. I went Harvard & MIT for a conference this weekend. Two very different schools, for being 25 minutes walking distance from each other. Apparently MIT only has 10,000 students, and 7,000 of those are grad students, which I think means it’s a bigger achievement to be an undergrad there. Also, Cambridge/Boston has a sickening number of Starbucks (but I was reminded several times that the west coast/Washington-Oregon has waaay more), which sucks b/c Starbucks is really not my favourite (their coffee I got in the airport on Thursday was bitter and required an unnaturally high ratio of cream and sugar) and they seem to have eked out the smaller franchises and independents there. But Harvard is super fancy, as expected, but the campus has much less of a collegial feel than I expected. It was, however, painfully clear that pretty much everyone walking around Harvard Square was soaked in super saturated money water. I laughed out loud with a student who was helping at the conference expressed concern about the “cutbacks” that Harvard had to make because of the economic crisis. So don’t care! The Harvard kids will be fine – maybe they won’t have central air in their on-campus lockers or free foot massages or that new super high tech multi-media classroom, but I waste no tears for them.
And MIT is less about the class and more about “what’s the craziest building we can create barely within the confines of physical laws?” I have pictures, I’ll have to upload them to my computer and share them (but if you’re impatient, google-image search the Stata Center).
Today I had a defense for a major paper (first out of two) that I had to write for my program, and I passed! Yay! Now on to all the other work that needs to be done. So much fun.
But keep an eye out for my super exciting series coming up. I’ll try to be faithful in writing it in good time.
(1) What linguists actually do/care about (i.e. don’t treat us like English majors, we promote splitting infinitives and ending a sentence with a preposition)
(2) How our grad program works/is different (and why it’s useless to compare it to grad programs within your general scope of knowledge).
(3) The deal with linguistic conferences (they’re basically parties that we get universities to send us to at various coordinates on the surface of the globe)
(4) Intra-linguist relations (because you know how warm and fuzzy we can all be)
(5) How linguistics relates to/affects you (or more clearly, that it doesn’t)
Hopefully the trilogy will set you up for an appreciation, or at least a clarification, for we linguists, and get you to stop asking how many languages we speak.
But back to breaking news. I went Harvard & MIT for a conference this weekend. Two very different schools, for being 25 minutes walking distance from each other. Apparently MIT only has 10,000 students, and 7,000 of those are grad students, which I think means it’s a bigger achievement to be an undergrad there. Also, Cambridge/Boston has a sickening number of Starbucks (but I was reminded several times that the west coast/Washington-Oregon has waaay more), which sucks b/c Starbucks is really not my favourite (their coffee I got in the airport on Thursday was bitter and required an unnaturally high ratio of cream and sugar) and they seem to have eked out the smaller franchises and independents there. But Harvard is super fancy, as expected, but the campus has much less of a collegial feel than I expected. It was, however, painfully clear that pretty much everyone walking around Harvard Square was soaked in super saturated money water. I laughed out loud with a student who was helping at the conference expressed concern about the “cutbacks” that Harvard had to make because of the economic crisis. So don’t care! The Harvard kids will be fine – maybe they won’t have central air in their on-campus lockers or free foot massages or that new super high tech multi-media classroom, but I waste no tears for them.
And MIT is less about the class and more about “what’s the craziest building we can create barely within the confines of physical laws?” I have pictures, I’ll have to upload them to my computer and share them (but if you’re impatient, google-image search the Stata Center).
Today I had a defense for a major paper (first out of two) that I had to write for my program, and I passed! Yay! Now on to all the other work that needs to be done. So much fun.
But keep an eye out for my super exciting series coming up. I’ll try to be faithful in writing it in good time.
May 05, 2009
you make me touch your hands for stupid reasons
Thanks, Lisa. Screw the hipsters. Emo is what I says it is.
April 22, 2009
Emo playlist
Recently emo has been coming back to me. I may have encountered much of the genre in high school, but it has that undeniable junior high quality to it. Its the kind of music that gives you free license to feel sorry for yourself for whatever real or ridiculous problems you're having, and it makes me feel better to feed that completely self-involved part of myself. If you're not in the mood for it, it can come off at totally pretentious and juvenille, but like I said, jr. high. There's even new stuff these days that maintians the late 90's/early 2000's emo tinge (yes yes, I know it started in the 80's, but then we just called it Punk), and it takes me back. I feel like a lot of music is reminding me of my younger years, before I could drive, when I was even worse at dealing with my hair, when I was too shy to talk to a clerk to find something in a store.
I remember being in my friend's basement at her 15th birthday party and someone had a mix tape that had 'What's my Age Again?' that we kept rewinding and replaying... that's such an awesome song. One line is "nobody likes you when you're 23", and last year I took special note to that sentiment being in the midst of 23-ness. But I'm not sure I acted in the same manner as the blink boys at that age.
Anyway, a small sampling... I'm sure many potential readers will wince and say "I know craploads more about emo and punk than this lame chick", and honestly I'm completely ok with that. I don't claim to be an expert or connoisseur. Its the sound and the corresponding response of the music that I'm referring to. Disagree with comments at will.
But what all this reminiscing really tells me is that I'm getting ooold. Some of the music I've been remembering is from 10 years ago or more. I make random 90's pop culture references to some of the students I TA, and I can't tell if they're laughing b/c they get it or b/c they feel sorry for me and the reference goes over their heads. Most people around me tell me that 24 is not very old, but when I was 17 I would have been like, dude! That is like so old! Its all relative.
Anyway...
I remember being in my friend's basement at her 15th birthday party and someone had a mix tape that had 'What's my Age Again?' that we kept rewinding and replaying... that's such an awesome song. One line is "nobody likes you when you're 23", and last year I took special note to that sentiment being in the midst of 23-ness. But I'm not sure I acted in the same manner as the blink boys at that age.
Anyway, a small sampling... I'm sure many potential readers will wince and say "I know craploads more about emo and punk than this lame chick", and honestly I'm completely ok with that. I don't claim to be an expert or connoisseur. Its the sound and the corresponding response of the music that I'm referring to. Disagree with comments at will.
But what all this reminiscing really tells me is that I'm getting ooold. Some of the music I've been remembering is from 10 years ago or more. I make random 90's pop culture references to some of the students I TA, and I can't tell if they're laughing b/c they get it or b/c they feel sorry for me and the reference goes over their heads. Most people around me tell me that 24 is not very old, but when I was 17 I would have been like, dude! That is like so old! Its all relative.
Anyway...
April 13, 2009
204 extravaganza!
I didn't do anything particularly fun for the 200th post, and so I'm going to do a little bit o' that now for the big 204! What a momentous number. I wonder if there's anyone out there who has read them all... I can only think of one possible candidate other than myself, but perhaps I flatter myself.
If you're happy and you know it say a swear:
The theme will be... media! Including media I like, and random internet media (which are not actually non-intersecting subsets of media, but whatever). I know that I'm not a media guru compared to many, but I do have a pretty extensive music collection. If my iPod is any indication I currently have 3283 tracks, and I haven't added about 12 albums of music I got from a friend yet. Beginning with planet Beth's iPod (yes, that's what pops up in the iTunes sidebar... I already used up "Magnum" on my cell phone...) here are the top played songs, with associated play counts:
boobs!
1. Casimir Pulaski Day - Sufjan Stevens (PC 145)
2. The District Sleeps Alone Tonight - The Postal Service (PC 128)
3. The Predatory Wasp of the Palisades - Sufjan Stevens (PC 112)
4. Optimistic - Radiohead (PC 109)
5. The Avalanche - Sufjan Stevens (PC 108)
6. ...Off By Heart - City and Colour (PC 105)
7. Mr Brightside - The Killers (PC 103)
8. Like Knives - City and Colour (PC 102)
9. Concerning the UFO Sighting - Sufjan Stevens (PC 97)
10. A Message - Coldplay (PC 96)
11. Kid A - Radiohead (PC 92)
12. Everything I Am - Kanye West (PC 90)
13. Warning Sign - Coldplay (PC 88)
14. Brand New Colony - The Postal Service (PC 87)
15. Got to Sleep (Little Man Being Erased) - Radiohead (PC 87)
hiney!
Mittens!
Ok, so clearly I'm a creature of habit. But let me explain. First off, I do love The Postal Service 'Give Up', but another reason for the multiple high play count is that this was the first album I put onto my iPod. And for a while I only had like 5 albums, and that was the one most befitting of my mood during such a time period. Clearly the overwhelming winner is Sufjan Stevens, and only from two different (yet closely related) albums. I make no apologies for Casimir Pulaski Day, and if you knew it you'd know. But again I think this has something do with the fact that 'The Avalance' and 'Illinois' are also some of the oldest albums on my iPod (relative to the iPod, of course). I assure you my whole music collection is much more diverse than these top 15. Which I will now prove with 5 songs chosen faithfully from shuffle:
"Cheese eating surrender monkey's" is a derogatory term for the French.
1. Dum Diddly - Black Eyed Peas
2. Last Flowers to the Hospital - Radiohead
3. Smile - Weezer
4. Objects of my Affection - Peter Bjorn and John
5. Minus - Beck
And it took me a second to get the fishsticks/gay fish joke... it helps if you say it outloud
I do love my alt rock... or whatever it is that I've been calling "alt rock". I remember when 'Jagged Little Pill' and alternative was all the rage. But I was in grade school, so I just pretended to know what the cool kids who were in touch with current music were talking about. Music I actually knew when I was a kid was stuff like the Beach Boys and Patsy Cline that my parent's had. Also there were some Boney M and Puff the Magic Dragon records in there somewhere. But collecting (good) music is awesome. But never ask me what a song is "about", b/c its almost guaranteed that I have no freaking idea. At best I'll have some vague notion: "Love? No wait, a breakup... political commentary?"This is because the value I place on music is the actual sound of the music rather than the lyric portion of this medium. Some people look down on others for projecting some deep interpretation onto the lyrical value of a song, only to later find out that the artist who created those lyrics had something rather shallow in mind. But when I projects, its as a true observer reappropriating the artform to my own purposes. Its how the sound makes me feel, and how I relate to the sound rather than the direct message a lyric might be trying to send. At least a lot of the time, not all of it.
You know who I've always loved? Phil Collins.
Recently I'm on a total 80's kick. And by total I mean Joy Division and The Smiths, both of which turn out to be awesome. A friend of mine, who's 80's experience is much more salient than mine said "The 80's are simply the best". Which makes me chuckle. I don't know anyone else who would utter that statement, given the general perception of that decade of music. I'm a little more up on the 90's music (does anyone remember how good Third Eye Blind was? b/c its really good) and I can actually tie those singles to my life experience. Like hearing "Hey Leonardo (she likes me for me)" and "She's so High" at Canada's Wonderland on a sweaty hot teenaged day.
I'm effectively procrastinating. Huge due date in 3 days. Going to die.
A small collection of things I've come across, such as webcomics and yoube-tube videos. The day I started writing this post seemed to be a good day for some of comics I frequent, at least at the time:
I secretly feel like an idiot when I don't get the math jokes, like I don't remember anything from my math degree anymore.
For the previously unconnected Rollover: Police reported three dozen cheerful bystanders, yet no one claims to have seen who did it.
On the PhD front, this is an issue almost every student I talk to has.
My strategy used to be to avoid the use of a name or title altogether, until I got embarassingly called out by my supervisor who said his name is not 'Hi,' or 'Hello,'...
Right, so you know how I'm irrationally obsessed with Stephen Colbert (possibly on par with my irrational fear of a certain limbless animal), so I found this mega old clip from his Chicago days. I think Paul Dinello is trying to play some kind of teenager, but the squeak in his voice makes me believe.
Kinda hott, no?
Makes me laugh. C'mon, don't be so uptight.
Watch Strangers With Candy if you want to see Colbert and Dinello get their lovin' ooon.
Another kind of media (*brilliant and seamless segue*) is like newspapers! We get the Montreal Gazette for free at the gym (oddly, no one ever has been able to find it free anywhere else on campus... its only for those who, um, pay the gym membership? maybe there was a newspaper subscription somewhere in the fine print of the not-contract we didn't have to not sign). I used to
get the Toronto Star for free at U of T, which is where I started doing SuDoKu. It took me a couple times to actually figure out how it works, but don't worry, I've caught up to basic human functioning by now. And U of T's weekly the newspaper had normal SuDoKu as well as a squiggly/kid one and a monster one (like 12x12 or 16x16, which takes way long, but the time is directly proportional to the feeling of satisfaction obtained).
I posted a completed hard monster sudoku on the ling lounge fridge.
Anyway, I've been planning for a long time now to write an angry letter to the Gazette editor because the SuDoKus are way to easy. Even the ones that are 'very hard' would only be so if the challenge was to do it in under 4 minutes, but I think I could still swing that. I don't even have to write little number in the corner for theirs. It makes me very angry. You can ask my office mates, they've heard the repeated rants. dailysudoku
Hugh Jackman is a beautiful man.
And my brother exposed me to The Show, which I wish I knew of at the time, but I'm a loser and am not up on the current type things. Here's one I like. theshowwithzefrank
I think I'm still missing "books". Honestly I haven't read any books recently, because linguistics articles are all the reading I get to do during the school year, but summer I usually catch up. Hmmm, what book should I tell you to read today? If you've never read Dickens, here's your chance, and if you want someone to mess with your head do up some Crime and Punishment, and if you want to feel completely desolate and hopeless read A Fine Balance by Rohinton Mistry, and if you want a crazy book with some humour but an underlying message that is serious and penetrating read Slaughterhouse V, and if you want to feel like shooting yourself read the 200 page account of the battle of Waterloo buried in Les Miserables, and if you want to the same plot cycling around itself, each time only undergoing minor detail alternations, read Pillars of the Earth, and if you want to suffer the terrible writing of an evil "philosopher" who can justify murder by industrial ideology read Atlas Shrugged.
I don't like "The curious incident of the dog in the nighttime"... I don't understand the kid's problem with synonyms...
But if you just want to read a really good book read Lord of the Rings. That's right, I said it.
You know Samwise is the real hero. And that Pippin's accent is way sexy.
Happy 204. If you take out the "0" that's how old I be.
If you're happy and you know it say a swear:
The theme will be... media! Including media I like, and random internet media (which are not actually non-intersecting subsets of media, but whatever). I know that I'm not a media guru compared to many, but I do have a pretty extensive music collection. If my iPod is any indication I currently have 3283 tracks, and I haven't added about 12 albums of music I got from a friend yet. Beginning with planet Beth's iPod (yes, that's what pops up in the iTunes sidebar... I already used up "Magnum" on my cell phone...) here are the top played songs, with associated play counts:
boobs!
1. Casimir Pulaski Day - Sufjan Stevens (PC 145)
2. The District Sleeps Alone Tonight - The Postal Service (PC 128)
3. The Predatory Wasp of the Palisades - Sufjan Stevens (PC 112)
4. Optimistic - Radiohead (PC 109)
5. The Avalanche - Sufjan Stevens (PC 108)
6. ...Off By Heart - City and Colour (PC 105)
7. Mr Brightside - The Killers (PC 103)
8. Like Knives - City and Colour (PC 102)
9. Concerning the UFO Sighting - Sufjan Stevens (PC 97)
10. A Message - Coldplay (PC 96)
11. Kid A - Radiohead (PC 92)
12. Everything I Am - Kanye West (PC 90)
13. Warning Sign - Coldplay (PC 88)
14. Brand New Colony - The Postal Service (PC 87)
15. Got to Sleep (Little Man Being Erased) - Radiohead (PC 87)
hiney!
Mittens!Ok, so clearly I'm a creature of habit. But let me explain. First off, I do love The Postal Service 'Give Up', but another reason for the multiple high play count is that this was the first album I put onto my iPod. And for a while I only had like 5 albums, and that was the one most befitting of my mood during such a time period. Clearly the overwhelming winner is Sufjan Stevens, and only from two different (yet closely related) albums. I make no apologies for Casimir Pulaski Day, and if you knew it you'd know. But again I think this has something do with the fact that 'The Avalance' and 'Illinois' are also some of the oldest albums on my iPod (relative to the iPod, of course). I assure you my whole music collection is much more diverse than these top 15. Which I will now prove with 5 songs chosen faithfully from shuffle:
"Cheese eating surrender monkey's" is a derogatory term for the French.
1. Dum Diddly - Black Eyed Peas
2. Last Flowers to the Hospital - Radiohead
3. Smile - Weezer
4. Objects of my Affection - Peter Bjorn and John
5. Minus - Beck
And it took me a second to get the fishsticks/gay fish joke... it helps if you say it outloud
I do love my alt rock... or whatever it is that I've been calling "alt rock". I remember when 'Jagged Little Pill' and alternative was all the rage. But I was in grade school, so I just pretended to know what the cool kids who were in touch with current music were talking about. Music I actually knew when I was a kid was stuff like the Beach Boys and Patsy Cline that my parent's had. Also there were some Boney M and Puff the Magic Dragon records in there somewhere. But collecting (good) music is awesome. But never ask me what a song is "about", b/c its almost guaranteed that I have no freaking idea. At best I'll have some vague notion: "Love? No wait, a breakup... political commentary?"This is because the value I place on music is the actual sound of the music rather than the lyric portion of this medium. Some people look down on others for projecting some deep interpretation onto the lyrical value of a song, only to later find out that the artist who created those lyrics had something rather shallow in mind. But when I projects, its as a true observer reappropriating the artform to my own purposes. Its how the sound makes me feel, and how I relate to the sound rather than the direct message a lyric might be trying to send. At least a lot of the time, not all of it.
You know who I've always loved? Phil Collins.
Recently I'm on a total 80's kick. And by total I mean Joy Division and The Smiths, both of which turn out to be awesome. A friend of mine, who's 80's experience is much more salient than mine said "The 80's are simply the best". Which makes me chuckle. I don't know anyone else who would utter that statement, given the general perception of that decade of music. I'm a little more up on the 90's music (does anyone remember how good Third Eye Blind was? b/c its really good) and I can actually tie those singles to my life experience. Like hearing "Hey Leonardo (she likes me for me)" and "She's so High" at Canada's Wonderland on a sweaty hot teenaged day.
I'm effectively procrastinating. Huge due date in 3 days. Going to die.
A small collection of things I've come across, such as webcomics and yoube-tube videos. The day I started writing this post seemed to be a good day for some of comics I frequent, at least at the time:
I secretly feel like an idiot when I don't get the math jokes, like I don't remember anything from my math degree anymore.
For the previously unconnected Rollover: Police reported three dozen cheerful bystanders, yet no one claims to have seen who did it.On the PhD front, this is an issue almost every student I talk to has.
My strategy used to be to avoid the use of a name or title altogether, until I got embarassingly called out by my supervisor who said his name is not 'Hi,' or 'Hello,'...Right, so you know how I'm irrationally obsessed with Stephen Colbert (possibly on par with my irrational fear of a certain limbless animal), so I found this mega old clip from his Chicago days. I think Paul Dinello is trying to play some kind of teenager, but the squeak in his voice makes me believe.
Kinda hott, no?
Makes me laugh. C'mon, don't be so uptight.
Watch Strangers With Candy if you want to see Colbert and Dinello get their lovin' ooon.
Another kind of media (*brilliant and seamless segue*) is like newspapers! We get the Montreal Gazette for free at the gym (oddly, no one ever has been able to find it free anywhere else on campus... its only for those who, um, pay the gym membership? maybe there was a newspaper subscription somewhere in the fine print of the not-contract we didn't have to not sign). I used to
get the Toronto Star for free at U of T, which is where I started doing SuDoKu. It took me a couple times to actually figure out how it works, but don't worry, I've caught up to basic human functioning by now. And U of T's weekly the newspaper had normal SuDoKu as well as a squiggly/kid one and a monster one (like 12x12 or 16x16, which takes way long, but the time is directly proportional to the feeling of satisfaction obtained).I posted a completed hard monster sudoku on the ling lounge fridge.
Anyway, I've been planning for a long time now to write an angry letter to the Gazette editor because the SuDoKus are way to easy. Even the ones that are 'very hard' would only be so if the challenge was to do it in under 4 minutes, but I think I could still swing that. I don't even have to write little number in the corner for theirs. It makes me very angry. You can ask my office mates, they've heard the repeated rants. dailysudoku
Hugh Jackman is a beautiful man.And my brother exposed me to The Show, which I wish I knew of at the time, but I'm a loser and am not up on the current type things. Here's one I like. theshowwithzefrank
I think I'm still missing "books". Honestly I haven't read any books recently, because linguistics articles are all the reading I get to do during the school year, but summer I usually catch up. Hmmm, what book should I tell you to read today? If you've never read Dickens, here's your chance, and if you want someone to mess with your head do up some Crime and Punishment, and if you want to feel completely desolate and hopeless read A Fine Balance by Rohinton Mistry, and if you want a crazy book with some humour but an underlying message that is serious and penetrating read Slaughterhouse V, and if you want to feel like shooting yourself read the 200 page account of the battle of Waterloo buried in Les Miserables, and if you want to the same plot cycling around itself, each time only undergoing minor detail alternations, read Pillars of the Earth, and if you want to suffer the terrible writing of an evil "philosopher" who can justify murder by industrial ideology read Atlas Shrugged.
I don't like "The curious incident of the dog in the nighttime"... I don't understand the kid's problem with synonyms...
But if you just want to read a really good book read Lord of the Rings. That's right, I said it.
You know Samwise is the real hero. And that Pippin's accent is way sexy.
Happy 204. If you take out the "0" that's how old I be.
March 17, 2009
"Talk about your gigantic time-wasters"
Anyone wanna play frisbee? Lets run around in the park and not do work. Yay!
Also, I could really go for a mango based smoothie. And another 6 week backpacking trip. I'm totally in touch with reality.
I wore my green hoodie today. SC is irish so this counts as fake holiday particip-action.
Hal Johnson and Joanne Macleod. Oh wait, that's Bodybreak.
March 03, 2009
Today I am not a Linguist
It goes up and it goes down. I find that at least once a semester (since probably 2nd year) I have to console myself with the most comforting thought of dropping out. Now those of you who are caring and kindhearted people, fret not! Such thoughts never materialize, and in fact I stay in school until the end of all time. Its weird b/c yesterday and Sunday I actually thought “I’m in a really good mood.” Granted I was hella tired, but I spent Sunday walking around in the sunshine on the dry streets of Toronto. I honestly had to remind myself that it was not some kind of summer/spring hybrid day, although I felt like it was (between snow drifts piled into alleys) and that made me happy. Part of what brought on this contentment was reading week, where I got one of my rare releases from my life of academia to roam where the normal people roam, and to eat the normal people food. And to watch TV on a TV. The not doing work every day thing is sticking to me right now, so being back in the haze and craziness is not sitting well. Also I’ve had a few rejections come my way recently, which is part of the fully disclosed raw deal I agreed to, but still sucks. So today I feel more sad, but you know “sad is happy for deep people.” Aligning with this mood I’ve decided to watch Gattaca, which I love so much. It’s brilliant, and the last scene is just beautiful. LOVE. I’m just sorry Ethan Hawke is a jerk in real life. But pretend its 1997 and all we really care about is Gattaca and the geeky roommate from Dead Poets Society. We’ll let him off this time.
I also came across Warning Sign by Coldplay on my iPod. It’s probably still my favourite song of theirs, and it makes me sad too. And when you’re in that kind of still, quiet, sad-like state, you want things that will feed the swirl of the paradoxical stillness to let it sink deeper so that you are in fact even happier in eddying sad. Ya know? Radiohead is good for that too. If it weren’t cold outside I might have gone for a slow walk under the winter trees by the damped sounds from the nearby ice rink. But it is cold, and I am tired. I could have fallen asleep in class today, which could have something to do with the lights being off for the power point, but also because I haven’t been giving the effort to care about classes recently. But don’t tell my prof, he’s a good guy who’s passionate about what he does.
Now why would I tell you all of this… to satiate myself, to feed my own self-evaluation as someone who is insightful and entertaining. Usually my amusement factor comes from me being a dork and watching to see if you laugh while attempting to maintain a straight face. It’s funny when you make fun of yourself, but not in a depressing “I clearly have low self-esteem way”, more of a “I don’t give a crap what you think of me” delivery.
I never understood those people who, in their mid 20’s, say moron things like “this is the way I will be, I’m not going to change now.” That’s total bull and you all know it. I’m a different person every year, perhaps even every month. In some ways I’m more clam, able to speak to store clerks in a non-frighteningly awkward manner, but in other ways I’m more of a freak out (although I’ve come to terms with the bus) and get hyper before I TA and have to resist the urge to do cartwheels down the aisle. But I change everyday, you change everyday. That means we never have an excuse saying we can’t change, because we do. Don’t be a wuss.
If you haven’t seen Gattaca, you should. And if you think you’re too cool to admit to liking Coldplay, you’re not, you’re too lame. And if you take yourself too seriously, trust me, no one else does. Go find and eat some Easter candy, get a roll-up the rim coffee from Timmy Ho Ho’s and try to remember the last time you gave Ethan Hawke a thought. I bet it involved “Reality Bites”.
I also came across Warning Sign by Coldplay on my iPod. It’s probably still my favourite song of theirs, and it makes me sad too. And when you’re in that kind of still, quiet, sad-like state, you want things that will feed the swirl of the paradoxical stillness to let it sink deeper so that you are in fact even happier in eddying sad. Ya know? Radiohead is good for that too. If it weren’t cold outside I might have gone for a slow walk under the winter trees by the damped sounds from the nearby ice rink. But it is cold, and I am tired. I could have fallen asleep in class today, which could have something to do with the lights being off for the power point, but also because I haven’t been giving the effort to care about classes recently. But don’t tell my prof, he’s a good guy who’s passionate about what he does.
Now why would I tell you all of this… to satiate myself, to feed my own self-evaluation as someone who is insightful and entertaining. Usually my amusement factor comes from me being a dork and watching to see if you laugh while attempting to maintain a straight face. It’s funny when you make fun of yourself, but not in a depressing “I clearly have low self-esteem way”, more of a “I don’t give a crap what you think of me” delivery.
I never understood those people who, in their mid 20’s, say moron things like “this is the way I will be, I’m not going to change now.” That’s total bull and you all know it. I’m a different person every year, perhaps even every month. In some ways I’m more clam, able to speak to store clerks in a non-frighteningly awkward manner, but in other ways I’m more of a freak out (although I’ve come to terms with the bus) and get hyper before I TA and have to resist the urge to do cartwheels down the aisle. But I change everyday, you change everyday. That means we never have an excuse saying we can’t change, because we do. Don’t be a wuss.
If you haven’t seen Gattaca, you should. And if you think you’re too cool to admit to liking Coldplay, you’re not, you’re too lame. And if you take yourself too seriously, trust me, no one else does. Go find and eat some Easter candy, get a roll-up the rim coffee from Timmy Ho Ho’s and try to remember the last time you gave Ethan Hawke a thought. I bet it involved “Reality Bites”.
January 31, 2009
Superman: Senior Year!
Hey folks. It’s been a long long time. Many reasons for that, but I’m sure you won’t be convinced by any of them.
The biggest news is that I now have a niece where I had no niece before. Her name is Anna, and all test results say that she’s perfect in every way.
Ain’t they sweet? Finnan is clearly the protective and supportive big brother so far. I can’t wait till the sibling torture begins. So that is very good news.
Yes, as for the title, I used to watch Smallville (which may appear in old posts, I don’t remember). Tom Welling is really hot, and a little bit o’ sci fi/superhero is good for you. Makes you believe and in magic. (“Hey Oprah, wanna see a maaagic trick?”) Anyway, I bring this up because Smallville is still going. They’re in season 8, so with my useful science degree I did a little math. Season one involved freshman superboy (as many hopeful teen shows do – wanna get the most high school out of their main character). 8 years later I deduce that Clark should be rearing up for college graduation from good old Kansas A&M, or some other believable fake school name. I don’t watch the show anymore, as I age my enjoyment in/tolerance for cheese-corn decreases. But I still love the theme-song:
Maybe a recap on Christmas. I was in the Sound for about 3 weeks, but the first week was all work. I did field work at the Cape, which is always awesome to do, it’s so neat to talk to the native elders at the reserve, they have such great stories and the more I talk to them, the more I understand. They’re really nice people, constantly working for the good of their community. And then I had a paper due so that was some more work after that. But then it was Christmas.
My mom gave me a rice cooker, which is absolutely and totally magic (maybe magic is the theme of my post!). I will tell you why it’s magic. For one you just dump rice and water in it and it makes you rice (who knew!). For another, it knows when the rice is done! Ok, so this is amazing because you can have different amounts, different kinds of rice, and it just knows! The brown rice takes longer than the white rice, but the all knowing power of the rice cooker takes care of that. I seriously do not know how it works. There are no sensors inside where the rice is, and it can’t be a change in weight measurement. But I may have figured it out. There’s a little green man that no one but the rice cooker can see (like in the Flinstones) that flies into the pot and checks the rice and tells the cooker to shut off when its done. I told you, magic.
Christmas weather kinda sucked. We had a bunch of snow storms in a row, and then it rained and everything melted. The park was completely flooded and there was a bridge from the path into a lake of water.
Since I’ve been back at school it has been crazy busy, and I’m not exaggerating. I’m taking a couple classes, TAing one, applying to 6 conferences, doing a proceedings paper, and I’m supposed to be working on my big research paper due in April. I think things will calm down slightly now, but that will only be for a short time.
Another fun fact is that I got a really bad cold right before Christmas, and then I was sick a gain a week ago. But that gave me a good excuse to buy Ben & Jerry’s, ya’know, to soothe the throat and all. Although I think they should have a Cookie-dough/screw-the-chocolate-chip ice cream flavour. Mmmmmm, cookie dough.
Right on. Well, that’s it for today.
The biggest news is that I now have a niece where I had no niece before. Her name is Anna, and all test results say that she’s perfect in every way.
Ain’t they sweet? Finnan is clearly the protective and supportive big brother so far. I can’t wait till the sibling torture begins. So that is very good news.
Yes, as for the title, I used to watch Smallville (which may appear in old posts, I don’t remember). Tom Welling is really hot, and a little bit o’ sci fi/superhero is good for you. Makes you believe and in magic. (“Hey Oprah, wanna see a maaagic trick?”) Anyway, I bring this up because Smallville is still going. They’re in season 8, so with my useful science degree I did a little math. Season one involved freshman superboy (as many hopeful teen shows do – wanna get the most high school out of their main character). 8 years later I deduce that Clark should be rearing up for college graduation from good old Kansas A&M, or some other believable fake school name. I don’t watch the show anymore, as I age my enjoyment in/tolerance for cheese-corn decreases. But I still love the theme-song:
Maybe a recap on Christmas. I was in the Sound for about 3 weeks, but the first week was all work. I did field work at the Cape, which is always awesome to do, it’s so neat to talk to the native elders at the reserve, they have such great stories and the more I talk to them, the more I understand. They’re really nice people, constantly working for the good of their community. And then I had a paper due so that was some more work after that. But then it was Christmas.
My mom gave me a rice cooker, which is absolutely and totally magic (maybe magic is the theme of my post!). I will tell you why it’s magic. For one you just dump rice and water in it and it makes you rice (who knew!). For another, it knows when the rice is done! Ok, so this is amazing because you can have different amounts, different kinds of rice, and it just knows! The brown rice takes longer than the white rice, but the all knowing power of the rice cooker takes care of that. I seriously do not know how it works. There are no sensors inside where the rice is, and it can’t be a change in weight measurement. But I may have figured it out. There’s a little green man that no one but the rice cooker can see (like in the Flinstones) that flies into the pot and checks the rice and tells the cooker to shut off when its done. I told you, magic.
Christmas weather kinda sucked. We had a bunch of snow storms in a row, and then it rained and everything melted. The park was completely flooded and there was a bridge from the path into a lake of water.
Since I’ve been back at school it has been crazy busy, and I’m not exaggerating. I’m taking a couple classes, TAing one, applying to 6 conferences, doing a proceedings paper, and I’m supposed to be working on my big research paper due in April. I think things will calm down slightly now, but that will only be for a short time.
Another fun fact is that I got a really bad cold right before Christmas, and then I was sick a gain a week ago. But that gave me a good excuse to buy Ben & Jerry’s, ya’know, to soothe the throat and all. Although I think they should have a Cookie-dough/screw-the-chocolate-chip ice cream flavour. Mmmmmm, cookie dough.
Right on. Well, that’s it for today.
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