Archive for: March, 2009

On Swimming to the Library at the Heart of the World

Mar 31 2009 Published by Sarah, etc. under Recovering English Major

I’ve been reading Gentlemen of the Road by Michael Chabon. For about a month now, even though it is only 204 pages long and is illustrated! It is dense. Incredibly so. Possibly developing a gravitational pull. Behold:

Across a river frozen to the depth of a planted spear, along an avenue of blazing torches, drawn by reindeer in a royal sledge with fittings of mica and electrum, accompanied by ram’s-horn blasts and harness bells and the scrape of iron runners against the ice; tender contraband, hidden at her father’s side in the grandiose reek of a bearskin, with the heat and the weight of him against her and the full moon hanging minted against the sky like a bright dirham: that was the way she had last crossed over to the island of the kagan and the palace where he dwelt in friendless splendor.

That’s a single sentence. And I don’t know how the first part, that series of prepositions and two verbs gets that first semicolon. And I still need to look up both electrum and dirham. I love it; it’s wearing me out.

At the southern tip of the island that was shaped like a letter qof they splashed up a stone embankment and clambered stiff and stumbling like unarticulated iron beings. Unslinging their sacks, they rolled in the grass and shadows of a laurel grove in which, so her father had told her, a kagan new-crowned was forced to his knees and informed, with his neck in the loop of a silken garrote, of the precise day and hour on which he would be returned to the spot and dispatched, by a slipknot, to the afterlife of kings.

It’s about mercenaries (sorta) on the Silk Road (I think) during the Dark Ages (maybe). That’s the best I can do telling you what it’s about and I’m 50 pages from the end.

3 responses so far

It Is He! The Half-Blood Prince!

Mar 30 2009 Published by Sarah, etc. under Fandom

Okay, y’all, below the jump is a big, beautiful picture of Severus Snape. That is how we’re starting the week off around here. With all kinds of gorgeous Snape. Mmm, Severus. And a list of all the wonderful things about him and the picture (some number of which I hijacked offa LJ). You feel free to add your own.
Continue Reading »

10 responses so far

Free for All Friday 16

Mar 27 2009 Published by Sarah, etc. under Free for all Friday

There was almost no bacon last week. So this week we’re having a bacongasm! That’s at the end. As gasms should be. But to get you there, suck on these:

  • The Primal Diet. Let’s come up with a slogan. And I’m not even saying this in a diets-are-bad-way-mkay, way. I’m saying it in a These People Are Clearly Morons way. The Primal Diet: Mmm, Salmonella; The Primal Diet: It’s Like Bulimia, Only…No, It’s Just Like Bulimia; The Primal Diet: When You Want to Be Both Obviously Skinny and Idiotic. Keep ‘em comin’!
  • Jeff Fortenberry (R-Nebraska) is introducing legislation to ammend the Clusterfuck CPSIA bill (I think it should be called that all the time) to at least not make libraries have to gut their shelves of children’s books. You should write to your representative to encourage them to cosponsor or at least vote for the ammendment. And then, if you have any politicking left in you, maybe write Jeff Fortenberry and, after thanking him for the whole Clusterfuck CPSIA thing, ask him to knock it off with the “obesity is a public health crisis” bullshit.
  • Some killjoy wrote a computer program to solve Soduku puzzles. I hope he doesn’t get invited to many parties.
  • Remember the obnoxious How Progressive Are You quiz from a couple weeks ago? Found one equally obnoxious (and possibly offensive!) from the other side: The People’s Cube Progressive Guilt Quiz. Your results are totalled as you go, so by the time you get to the end you’ve got a number waiting for you. Scroll back up the page to see how to interpret your results. I scored +610 making me a “Non-person”:

    You and your life’s work are barred from being mentioned in media publications. Ineligible for re-education. After the Revolution subject to Revolutionary Tribunal Che Guevara style (shot in the head without trial). Everyone you ever came in contact with has been contaminated and is therefore also guilty. We will find them, too. You are all incorrigible corporate war-mongering Zionist terrorists; the people will continue to resist your capitalist attacks by any and all means.

    I don’t know if this qualifies as contact, so maybe you might want to repudiate me. I’m fixin to be first against the wall. Also, Apollo, you won’t be able to score negative eleventy billion, but you might could score negative 900, which is like eleventy billion kind of.

  • From IC, Bletchley Park reunion! With a recreation of one of Turing’s original Bombes!
  • Whoopie Pies are the new Cupcake! Whoopee! I think Omnomicon is just about the best food blog there is. I only wish she updated more frequently.
  • Administrators make actual public statement that there are no vampires at a fancy prep school in Boston.

    The headmaster of the prestigious exam school took the unusual step today of sending a notice to faculty, students, and parents saying that “rumors involving ‘vampires’” had begun spreading through the building Wednesday, causing disruption and anxiety for a number of students. …. The prestigious Boston Latin public school was founded in 1635, and its students have included Ben Franklin, Sam Adams, John Hancock, Louis Farrakhan, Sumner Redstone, and Nat Hentoff.

    And the Headmaster. Had to make a statement. That there were no vampires at the school. Because the students were really worked up. I guess that there might be vampires. Vampires are the least of their problems.

  • We talk about gin some around here, right? Here’s a recipe for a San Martin cocktail. Sounds different and tasty and I think I might like to try it. I’ve never looked for Chartreuse in a package store, though. I wonder if it’s hard to find.

  • Speaking of cocktails, Bacon Bloody Mary Bottle of Vodka #2 (Smirnoff Red) is half-done-drunk-up. BUT! I did buy a jar of pickle spears. So until I finish those or bum a canning jar off someone, the experiment remains in a tingly state of anticipation.

  • And now, your bacongasm:

15 responses so far

Two Words Diverged According to a Computer Model

Mar 26 2009 Published by Sarah, etc. under Lexpionage

BBC News published an article not too long ago headlined, “‘Oldest English words’ identified.”* It doesn’t go into much detail, but it tantalizes by suggesting that a computer model found a secret, wonderful tipping point where we could recognize, indubitably, the change from one language to another– from, for instance, Middle German to Old English. It makes me imagine a huge balance scale, the pans full of morphemes. The morphemes move and flit around, eventually from one side to the other and when the balance falls below a certain point, et voila: English! Also, the morphemes leave sparkly little contrails.

The article goes on to talk about language evolution, and how words change across distance and time. Logically, the oldest words are those used most consistently. And the oldest forms of English would be almost completely confusing to us, but for a very few:

That is, the model provides a list of words that are unlikely to have changed from their common ancestral root by the time of William the Conqueror.

Words that have not diverged since then would comprise similar sounds to their modern descendants, whose meanings would therefore probably be recognisable on sound alone.

We could say words like I, who, two, or three and probably be understood as well as understand if they were said to us. Ruminate on the “sound alone” choice, tho. Can you think of four words it would be easier to communicate without sound? I or me is about as easy as it gets.

The article winds up by teasing us with the idea that the researchers are on the trail of some mother sounds over 40,000 years old. Can you imagine? Going to any place across Europe or Asia to the Indian subcontinent at any time for the last 40 millenia and finding at least one or two common sounds? I’d start with [mah] and [dah] and see if I got family and food, or something close to it.

I think I’ll spend some time daydreaming about writing a series of books called the Sparkly Morpheme Historical Phrasebooks for Erudite Time Travelers. We’ll start with, like the article says, things you could shout in the middle of the Battle of Hastings (“Arrowed!”) and still have understood.

Did you send this to me? I feel like I received it from someone, but I can’t remember who, and I’d like to acknowledge you, please. Thank you!

7 responses so far

You Had a Part People Loved

Mar 25 2009 Published by Sarah, etc. under Geekery

I mean, my TV Guide interview was six paragraphs about my BOOBS and how they fit into my suit. No one bothered to ask me what I do on the show.

7 responses so far

Rand Round-Up

Mar 25 2009 Published by Sarah, etc. under Speechifying

The Man getting you down? With all the demands for government to just take over control of banks, and unconstitutional Bills of Attainder and whatnot, I’m getting a little anxious, just a little bit queasy.

So I take a bit of solace in reading people writing about Ayn Rand, and her ideas, and how, if worse comes to worst, maybe it wouldn’t be a bad idea to totally “Go Galt.” Check these out:

Caroline Baum at Bloomberg says Obama Needs AIG’s Liddy, Not the Other Way Around:

I’m not alone in noting the parallels in the government’s evolving response to the financial crisis. For a year I’ve been waiting for Paulson or Geithner to announce “the John Galt Plan to save the economy,” which is right out of Rand’s novel.

It wasn’t until the AIG bonus brouhaha broke last weekend and I watched government officials flailing to contain the fallout that I realized the government is losing its leverage. Or maybe it never had any leverage to begin with.

Let me explain. The government has been propping up teetering financial institutions, including AIG, Citigroup and Bank of America, creating the illusion that the banks need the government.

The government doesn’t care about these institutions. It cares about the stability of the financial system: the totality, not the parts.

Stuart Schneiderman writes about Going Galt from a psychological perspective:

Borrowed from Ayn Rand’s “Atlas Shrugged” the concept means that when taxes become confiscatory, they will become a powerful disincentive and people will choose not to work. If that is the only way they can exercise their freedom, then that is what they will do.

Edward Cline at Capitalism Magazine writes On The Left-Wing Reaction to John Galt, Ayn Rand, and Tea Parties:

This is because they thought she and her philosophy had been buried by that arch-conservative, Whittaker Chambers, wielding a shovel on one side of the grave, while that fellow-traveler and critic Granville Hicks wielded another on the other side, in a true demonstration of bipartisanship half a century ago. And hadn’t all the academics and pundits and book writers since then refuted her and her philosophy over time and ensured that she would not return to haunt them?

The cultural and political elite are upset that she has not been forgotten. That philosophy has returned to haunt them and aggravate their guilt. And they are in high dudgeon because they are being cast in the role, not as saviors, but as her black-hearted villains. They are discovering that ideas cannot be interred as permanently as their authors. Atlas Shrugged is on their minds.

And Yaron Brook at the Wall Street Journal keeps breaking it down into bite sized chunks, for savoring (and hopefully easy digestion) with Is Rand Relevant:

Rand also noted that only an ethic of rational selfishness can justify the pursuit of profit that is the basis of capitalism — and that so long as self-interest is tainted by moral suspicion, the profit motive will continue to take the rap for every imaginable (or imagined) social ill and economic disaster. Just look how our present crisis has been attributed to the free market instead of government intervention — and how proposed solutions inevitably involve yet more government intervention to rein in the pursuit of self-interest.

Rand offered us a way out — to fight for a morality of rational self-interest, and for capitalism, the system which is its expression. And that is the source of her relevance today.

There. That’s better. If you’d like, stand on one foot and say it with me:

Metaphysics: Objective Reality; Epistemology: Reason; Ethics: Self-interest; Politics: Capitalism

4 responses so far

Titular

Mar 24 2009 Published by Sarah, etc. under Rhetorical and Literary Devices

Filing under language change, gender, and unintentionally hilarious headlines, please dig: Euro chiefs ban ‘Miss’ and ‘Mrs.’ They’re not actually banning women, just words that women use as titles. In all European languages:

The politically correct rules also mean a ban on Continental titles, such as Madame and Mademoiselle, Frau and Fraulein and Senora and Senorita.

Guidance issued in a new ‘Gender-Neutral Language’ pamphlet instead orders politicians to address female members by their full name only.

It makes me think of Star Trek, where everybody is universally, “Sir.” You?

The article goes on to discuss how the pamphlet aims to render everything not merely gender-neutral, but gender-free, as if there were no distinction between men and women. Unfortunately, it runs up against problems with words like “midwife.” There is no gender-neutral version, although I don’t see how, as long as you’re going this far out of your way, you can’t just invent a word or phrase, like “birth facilitator.” I don’t know, maybe the women actually giving birth would beg to differ on who’s facilitating what.

It gets loopier than that, too:

The booklet also admits that “no gender-neutral term has been successfully proposed” to replace ‘waiter’ and ‘waitress’, allowing parliamentarians to use these words in a restaurant or café.

I know that Europe isn’t supposed to do anything, at all, ever, like Americans do, but we’ve had great luck with “server” for this particular situation. Or is that the punchline to an elaborately obtuse Pulp Fiction joke? “Garcon means boy.” It sure does.

There is some resistance to the idea, from a Scots MEP in particular, and another man whose region they don’t list. Philip Bradbourn is quoted as saying:

“I will have no part of it. I will continue to use my own language and expressions, which I have used all my life, and will not be instructed by this institution or anyone else in these matters.”

What do you make of this? Thought police or busybodies run amok? Or is that the same thing?

11 responses so far

Don’t Try to Fight the Feeling

Mar 23 2009 Published by Sarah, etc. under Speechifying

Start your week off right with The Supersuckers singing “Hey Ya.”

One response so far

Free for all Friday 15

Mar 20 2009 Published by Sarah, etc. under Free for all Friday

Hi y’all! It’s Friday. I collected a bunch of stuff for us to talk about:

  • Like Science Fiction? Then you’ll love Christianity! There’s not much new here if you’ve been into speculative fiction for long, but it’s interesting to see the straights, as it were, dig it:
    Now that science fiction again has politics to draw on, will it abandon its religious impulses? Predicting the future is a task best left to sci-fi writers themselves, but I’d bet not. In a genre less committed than most to the this-worldly, there will always be messiahs to save the world from evil robots or invading aliens. And at movie theaters and on TV screens nationwide, there will always be legions of worshipful fans.

  • Fun Facts About Socialists, like
    In a fight between Aquaman and socialists, Aquaman will end up penniless and on the streets since all his money will have been taken away to pay for the mortgage Black Manta took out knowing full well he couldn’t afford it.

  • Great Sex, God’s Way, in Cullman, Alabama.
    The Associated Press quotes local evangelist Roland Belew, a former trucker who now preaches at a truck stop, as saying the whole idea goes against the teaching of New Testament apostles.

    “Paul said preach the Gospel,” the AP quotes Belew as saying. “Talking about sex ain’t gonna get nobody to heaven.”

    Nonsense. There’s a whole book of Bible that tells you how to have good sex. I’ve been to a lot of churches, and a lot of truck stops, but never a truck stop church, and now I’m glad of it.

    I’m hoping this takes off. Maybe if we get enough people to believe that Jesus likes it when you have an orgasm, we’ll be able to buy vibrators without risking arrest or driving to Tennessee.

  • Have you read about the clusterfuck that is the Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act? It comes across like it’s good for you, but what it basically says is, if it was made before 1985, it’s illegal. It’s illegal because of lead, phthalates, and government run grossly amok. Thrift stores can’t sell kids clothes. Parents are technically violating the law if they keep their own books from childhood around, to say nothing of the extreme danger of using one of Grandma’s books from the 1950s (which we can only remember in black and white because of, I think, all the phthalates). Here’s a PDF Catalog of CPSIA approved toys and activities.
  • Speaking of kids books: Spike Jonze is making Where the Wild Things Are.
  • Why the GOP Can’t Win with Minorities. This is a fantastic editorial, and well worth reading no matter where you identify on the political spectrum. It’s uncomfortable, at times, as it flies in the face of political correctness. But it makes great points that must be made:
    And here is conservatism’s great problem with minorities. In an era when even failed moral activism is redemptive — and thus a source of moral authority and power — conservatism stands flat-footed with only discipline to offer. It has only an invisible hand to compete with the activism of the left. So conservatism has no way to show itself redeemed of America’s bigoted past, no way like the Great Society to engineer a grand display of its innocence, and no way to show deference to minorities for the oppression they endured. Thus it seems to be in league with that oppression.

  • I discovered Unremitting Failure last week and it’s entertaining as all get out. Like his paid advertisement for a course in semicolon wrestling:
    Now he makes four figures on the professional semicolon wrestling circuit and is happier than Strunk & White, the tag-team semicolon wrestling team that introduced the reverse turn-buckle ampersand slam.

  • From Chris Hansen: From beneath you, it devours. Or the sleeper awakens. It has no name but “Barry” and is really freaking gross and creepy.

  • HAPPY BIRTHDAY APOLLO!

  • And just so this FfAF isn’t entirely bacon free, I’ve had a set back in the Prize Bacon Bloody Mary area. I had the bacon and I had the vodka. But I did not have a glass vessel in which to steep the vodka. And I think steeping it in plastic (remember, it takes three weeks) might also steep in some plastic taste? I just don’t think it’s a good idea. Then the vodka got drunk. And half the bacon got eaten. But the weekend is upon us, so I am confident I can load up on bacon and vodka (enough for steeping, and for eating and drinking) and get a mason jar of some sort while I’m at it. I’m not punking out on you, Philosaur, is all I’m saying.

Hey, what else is there to talk about?

15 responses so far

Some Things I Have Wished Lately

Mar 19 2009 Published by Sarah, etc. under Confession

  • That I had self-cleaning floors.
  • That I could pick my house up and turn it 90 degrees clockwise.
  • That I could care about March madness.
  • That I had an encyclopedic knowledge of plant names and herb lore.
  • That as a price for the knowledge I wouldn’t have to dress up like Stevie Nicks or anything, as is so often the case.
  • To be one to two inches taller, but no more than that.
  • That I could be funny when I wanted to be, not just when I was at home or drunk or if you were in love with me.
  • That maybe a few more people could fall in love with me so I could do about my sense of humor.
  • To have a machine that would transcribe my stream of consciousness while I ran, much like that one lady in The Tommyknockers by Stephen King, even though I’m pretty sure I remember correctly her meeting a bad end involving tentacles and Max Factor Pan-Stik makeup.
  • That I could take pictures of myself that didn’t make me look like a drag queen or ragamuffin or dragamuffeen.
  • For some rhubarb cream pie.

7 responses so far

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