crying fowl

The other night we were watching a Werner Herzog documentary called Encounters At the End of the World, which is about Antarctica and which Herzog narrates in English, and we were trying to guess what part of Germany he was from by scrutinizing his accent. I guessed Bavaria, not so much based on my presumed expertise as someone with graduate degrees in both Germanic literature and Linguistics, but rather as someone whose German relatives are not from Bavaria and also sound nothing like Werner Herzog when they speak English. I called up the Wikipedia entry for Herzog on the laptop that just happened to be in front of me, and confirmed that he is indeed from Munich. We went back to watching the movie, but every so often I would glance down and scan the information on the computer screen.

Suddenly I had to hit pause. "Listen to this!" I said, and started to read aloud to poor James, who presumably was along for this particular ride primarily in the hopes of getting to see some weird scientific crap about Antarctica. "One recurring symbol running through Herzog's films is chickens, which Herzog fears." We paused for a moment to let this sink in. Herzog had stated near the start of the documentary that it was definitely not going to be yet another film about penguins, so naturally that statement suddenly resonated with us. "Penguins are kind of like chickens," said James. "Yeah," I said. "This is all starting to make sense." We hit play and continued watching.

A few minutes later I glanced at the computer screen once again and lunged for the pause button. "WAIT OH MY GOD LISTEN TO THIS!" Reading aloud, I continued, "Even Dwarfs Started Small features cannibalistic chickens, and several sequences of dwarfs throwing chickens."

"Several sequences, " I repeated. "SEVERAL."

"Uh huh, I got that part."

"Sevvvveral. More than one."

"Got it."

I had barely started the movie up before the proceedings were halted once more. Again I quoted directly from the computer screen: "Signs of Life and The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser feature chicken hypnosis."

Me: "Herzog has so much to say about chicken hypnosis that he can't fit it all into one movie?"

James: "Wait, so the chickens are being hypnotized, or are they hypnotizing someone else?"

Me: "It doesn't specify. Maybe both, if we're lucky."

Then we got back to watching the rest of the documentary, only now occasionally inserting phrases into the narrative, suchlike:

Herzog: "Zee wattur iss negative 2 dekrees Celzius. Zee divers must be carefull not to go too far..."

Us: "...becauss of there mayght be chickenss."

Also, we are now planning a Werner Herzog film festival/drinking game.

everything except people

Tonight my friend Claudia reminded me of one of the funniest-because-it's-true things that James my robot boyfriend from outer space has ever said, which was "I anthropomorphize everything except people."

Speaking of Claudia, and people, on Friday we went to a champagne party with some of her friends/coworkers who do a monthly wine tasting dinner. I present to you the aftermath:


That might not seem particularly impressive until I tell you that there were only 12 people there, and two of them left early.

vic the kitten

So I was just on the phone with my mom in San Diego, and in the middle of telling me the usual trivial neighborhood goings-on she mentions that my cat (who lives two doors down from her, with my brother) is sick and tomorrow they are going to take her to the vet to be put down. Then she segued calmly into the next topic, something about where my dad had taken the car that day or whatever.

Thanks mom, always great talking to you.

(Disclaimer: the above photo is over 18 years old. They're not planning to kill an actual kitten, in other words.)

wishful thinking

I have been watching the events in Mumbai unfold with keen interest and concern, since I spent much of the last fiscal year living and working there, and made a lot of friends along the way. (They are all safe and sound, I know in the meantime.)

I've talked before about a phenomenon I call "Indian truth," where often you are told what the other person thinks you want to hear, no matter what the truth actually is. Your new kurta will be ready on Wednesday, the electrician will be arriving within 15 minutes, the meal does not contain ingredient X, the scarf is 100% pashmina, etc. This truth-they-think-you-wish-were-true is harmless enough, if incredibly frustrating, when it comes to quotidian examples like the ones I just mentioned, but it has been showing itself in matters of far greater import this week. Something like 48 hours ago the Indian authorities were asserting that the situation at the Taj hotel was completely resolved, yet as late as a couple of hours ago there were multiple eyewitness reports coming in that suggested anything but. So, apparently the officials meant that other than the continuing gunfire and explosions, terrified people holed up in their rooms, numerous dead bodies still scattered inside, at least one terrorist alive, armed, and roaming the building, and...oh yeah, the building being on fire again, the situation has been resolved? Way to go with that!

I'm not surprised either that many are questioning why the fire brigade is so inadequate and why it is taking so long for the situation in general to get under control. In India it seems everything is either not organized at all, or organized to the point of being choked with pointless, circular bureaucracy. Now throw in a soupçon barrel of corruption and a shocking lack of infrastructure and mix it up with a city of about 15 million people, most of whom live in slums. Of course they can't pull their shit together.

mumbai

On fire:


Not on fire:


Gotta say I definitely prefer it not on fire.

travelogue

James and I decided that instead of driving down the I-5 to Los Angeles for Thanksgiving week, we'd take two days for a leisurely drive down California Route 1. We spent the night in San Simeon, which is right next door to Cambria.




Cambria has some nice beaches, where you can view lovely sunsets and all that crap, but the town itself is what we now lovingly refer to as "White Trash Ashland." The shops in Ashland (Oregon), while clearly aimed primarily at tourists, at least have things you might want to purchase--for someone you like, even. In Cambria you are confronted with tacky shoppes [sic] with holiday-themed baby clothes, amateurish seascape paintings, Australian dry goods (apparently to make something Australian you just have to glue some shearling on it somewhere), and cutesy tee shirts. One store prides itself on being rubber ducky headquarters for the entire USA. Do they carry Hanukkah rubber ducks, complete with yarmulkes, you ask? Zikher, I say:



I couldn't even bear to look at, much less photograph, the rubber "celebriducks." These were kind of like centaurs, except with a rubber duck's ass where the horse part should be and an elaborately detailed famous person's head and torso up front (Queen Elizabeth, George Washington, etc.). I am all for animals disguised as other animals, and while technically a historical figure in the form of a duck would fall into that category, I think we can all agree that that is just stupid and disturbing.

Speaking of disturbing animals, this morning we got in the car to go to Whole Foods and James noticed a dog that was off leash and became concerned. "My neighborhood isn't very safe for loose dogs these days," he said, in a way that made me realize he regretted saying it as it was still coming out of his mouth. "Um, what do you mean?" I asked suspiciously. "Does this have something to do with mountain lions?" And indeed it turns out that several dogs recently have been killed by a mountain lion in his neighborhood, in areas further away from the foothills than his own house.

James hadn't mentioned this sooner because he knows I am already a little concerned about the occasional bear that wanders down the street or parks itself in a hot tub, so naturally I had to make fun of him for thinking I was too delicate to handle this latest bit of news. "I CAN'T BELIEVE you didn't tell me that a mountain lion had been eating babies in your neighborhood," I said. (Pause.) "I can't believe you didn't tell me that a mountain lion had killed your next door neighbor Mike...and his wife."

Anyway, the police have killed the mountain lion in the meantime, which kind of sucks in theory but probably seems like a great idea as you watch a giant feline dragging away your Labrador. Personally, though, I am more of a cat person.

see the movie, skip the book

The other day I went to see the new movie Slumdog Millionaire, primarily because the still photo in the New York Times review (and above) clearly indicated that at least part of the movie was shot in the apartment complex where I used to live in Mumbai. The movie was so good (save for a couple of lapses into tired romance/destiny themes and scenes) that I immediately bought the novel it was based on. It was originally entitled Q&A, but has been renamed to match the movie.

I'm about 75 pages into it and I can't put it down...because I have to keep asking myself, "How in the world did someone read this sophomoric, one-dimensional, sloppy, homophobic piece of crap and turn it into the movie I just saw??" It's like they aren't even related. Normally I have no problem with giving up on miserable writing and moving on to the next book in my queue, but I feel obligated to keep giving this one a chance. Seriously, though--it's almost unbelievably awful.

Updated to add--
Here is the larger version of the movie still:



vs. a photo I took from my bedroom window:

totoro!

Since Rick (and by proxy, Cathy) originally introduced me to Hayao Miyazaki and the film My Neighbor Totoro...



...when I saw the pattern for this baby hat I naturally had to make one for Baby Rick-and-Cathy, who is due in about a month. Yay!!



Speaking of critters, James and I pulled into the driveway at his house in Monrovia today and this guy was hanging out in the yard:



Let's just hope he doesn't come bounding into the living room later.

a.w.a.p.

As a result of James's tireless quest to keep me as wired as humanly possible, I am now the owner of an iPhone 3G. I had an inkling that one would be my Christmas present this year, but in fact James was simply waiting for it to be 30 seconds after my Verizon contract expired, which in his mind should count as a major holiday anyway.

This gesture has forever erased the negative points he amassed a few years ago when I (a) pointed him directly to an Orla Kiely purse I really wanted for my birthday and (b) said "Under no circumstances do I want a new cell phone" and then guess who got a new cell phone for her birthday? The iPhone is pure gadgetry GOLD. I want to marry it. There's most likely nothing I can say that hasn't already been said about its vast superiority to any other handset out there, so I won't belabor the point.

Instead I will leave you with a photo of some baby knitwear that was completed a couple of weeks ago but had to be kept secret until after a certain baby shower.

for the birds

caffeine


+ time change



= just way way too much knitting





(Kate Gilbert's Bird In Hand mittens.)

immemorial

I've been noticing for a couple of years now that I am a lot more forgetful than I used to be. Mind you, I can still recall verbatim every turn of phrase James may have used in a discussion from six years ago when I was convinced he was actually telling me I was unattractive, or what my 10th grade English teacher said about my writing (that it would always be "fluffy"; two Master's Degrees from Yale later, I almost am ready to beg to fucking differ), or what the soap in my German grandmother's bathroom smelled like in 1984. No, I am talking about shit that happened five minutes ago.

Like Friday I got on the bus to go to work and there was a guy in a giant piñata costume (including elaborate horse head) sitting calmly and hilariously among the normally-dressed commuters. I ended up standing right in front of him and was able to spend the next ten minutes admiring the craftsmanship and ingenuity of his work, and then he got off at Van Ness. He was clearly on his way to winning every costume contest in town, provided no one took a bat to him first.

In other words, I was perfectly aware it was Halloween. Three or four minutes later I looked up from my magazine, saw some new passengers standing near the front of the bus, and thought, "I can't believe no one is offering their seats to those nice nuns." And then, "I don't think I recall ever seeing a nun on the bus before." It was only when one of them turned fully around and I noticed they were zombie nuns that I was jerked back to my senses. Oh, riggghht. Halloween. Plus, I don't think real nuns wear Puma sneakers. So many clues.

At work I'll do things such as concentrate all morning on a set of tasks and then report to my group lead something like "OK, I've re-fracked the dirbills and the freenats, and also built for the ungrapped norbars, and I entered the stuff for the padmerizer and made sure it's working properly, so unless you can think of something else, category 1 is ready for a corpus test. Should I go ahead and file the bugzilla?" And then a look of confusion will cloud her face and she'll say, "We ran a corpus test for 1 last night. [pause] Wait, do you mean category 6?" And yes, I will have meant category 6, the very same category I had been focused on with a mad-professor-like intensity for the previous four hours. But a two-cubicle stroll is enough to knock that information right out of my short-term memory's tenuous grip.

And then there's more mundane stuff, like how I often find myself in a room wondering why I am there. I was just in the living room, and now I am in the office. Why? Oh, look at that shiny thing...I need to fix that. And then a few minutes later I will be back in the living room fixing the shiny thing, and remember that I still haven't fetched the book I wanted from the office. Or whatever.

I blank out on people's names on a regular basis, both personal acquaintances and celebrities. The one upside is that I get to experience my own brain doing that cool linguistic thing where, say, I will know that the name I am searching for has five letters, or starts with a G and is two syllables, but then can't get beyond that. Or I'll be trying to remember the name of an actress, and I can imagine the character she played on The Shield, and remember that she is married to David Mamet, but the best I can come up with is "Is it Something Partridge? No, that's not it." Five hours later (and/or after checking IMDb), I'll figure out that the name I was searching for was Rebecca Pidgeon. My brain teases me with the semantic web surrounding my target--nuptial status, some kind of bird involved somehow, employment details--but won't hand over the goddamn name.

Um, what was I talking about? Oh, look, shiny mittens I made this weekend!

there is no 'karen' in 'team'

Today my company is having a work outing involving a scavenger hunt that winds up at whatever mystery restaurant it is where they will then provide lunch. Now, I enjoy a scavenger hunt as much as the next person...wait a minute, NO I DON'T. At least not unless the next person hates them with the heat of a thousand flaming effigies of whoever came up with the idea of sending a hundred or so full-grown professional e-discovery specialists on a scavenger hunt. There were going to be teams, people...TEAMS. Sweet peanut butter jesus, I would rather spend the day participating in role-playing skits and trust exercises with a herd of evangelical Christians. Luckily that wasn't the company-sanctioned alternative option; the alternative option was to take a mandatory PTO day, which is what I did. So I've been spending a relaxing morning knitting Latvian-style mittens,


baking vegan banana-cranberry-pecan bread,


watching old episodes of The L-Word on Netflix, and talking on the phone with my mother.

OK, that last part was not so relaxing, particularly once I discovered that she (and presumably my father also) is planning to vote yes on California Proposition 8, because she is "old-fashioned." I mean, OK...I guess homophobia is old-fashioned. Mom also thinks Sarah Palin is "spunky," expressed with an enthusiasm that indicates she believes spunkiness is a necessary and sufficient condition for running the third-largest country in the world. I can't believe I am related to these people. And they wonder why I rarely call or visit.

Moving right along so I don't start screaming again, last week I finally checked out the first two seasons of 30 Rock, and oh. my. freaking. god. it is so excellent. I was laughing out loud alone in my apartment at numerous points. Then on one episode there was a scene where I thought to myself, wow, that looks exactly like the street where my friend/fellow MEOWkitty Lori lives. I dismissed it as a hillbilly perception that all residential streets in Manhattan look the same, but then I remembered that about 18 months ago I was visiting Lori and there were signs on her street restricting parking the next day...because of filming for some show I'd never heard of called 30 Rock. Then in a later scene I figured out that the Tina Fey character "lives" around the corner from Lori.

Since I'm talking about the MEOWkitty knitters...the other day I realized that among the 14 people in the group, we have five people with published designs in books, magazines, or both; the host of an HGTV knitting show; two people (besides the host) who've appeared on the show; and the assistant pattern editor of a major knitting magazine. Seriously, the MEOWkitty knitting mojo is off the charts. Even the people who prefer not to design or to work in the industry have insane skills, and plus they're all crazy smart and funny. I [HEART] YOU, MEOWERS!

out of the closet

It's been a while since I've bored you with photos of my apartment decor. Today my personal engineer installed a curtain line so that I could transform one wall of the craft room/office into a knitted item display area:



I spent most of today unraveling two sweaters I made this year that I never wore because they made me look extremely not attractiver than usual. Which means that my yarn stash reduction efforts just backtracked by two sweaters' worth. Plus today I bought yarn online to finally make James a Dylan Goes Electric sweater, so that's three.

Oh, well. Screw it. I like yarn, OK? Some days I think I might even like it better than heroin...but then I come to my senses.

wool-gathering

Yesterday Casey said he wasn't going to run my corpus test for me until I posted to the blog, so you may hold him responsible for the following installment.

I mentioned that last weekend I was in upstate New York for a big sheep and wool festival, but mainly it was just an excuse to gather together as many of my MEOW kitties as possible (we managed to get seven, including me, which is exactly half) and sit around and drink wine, gossip, knit, and also drink wine.

Two of those MEOWers currently have infants, so they came along too. (Disclaimer: No children were harmed by drunken knitters during this event.) Henry and Alex are quite the little charmers.




I am a bit afraid of the terror they will start to wreak once they become mobile, however. Alex is already the size of a mini-fridge and clearly on his way to a successful career with the New England Patriots (much to his father's delight). Not that I know anything about baseball.

The thing about fun, hard-drinkin', hard-knittin' chicks after they have babies is...well, see for yourself:


(Update for certain mentally challenged readers anonymous trolls who need to be slapped: the kids were asleep. This thingamajig happened to serve well as a temporary side table. No one was leaving any kids with glasses of wine in front of them. No one was drunk. There's this thing, called hyperbole for comic effect? Look into it.)

The wool festival was beautiful in that it was crisp, cold, clear, and surrounded by fall-colored foliage, as you can see in the previous post's photos. What wasn't so beautiful was the sheer volume of knitters (and spinners and crocheters and felters and weavers and their spouses and their children) who descended on the Dutchess County Fairgrounds in search of lanolin-infused fiber crack. We were clever enough to arrive a little before it officially opened, and to head directly to the booth where they were selling Blue Moon Fiber Arts yarns, in particular their immensely popular hand painted "Socks That Rock" line.

By the time we arrived at their booth you already had to wait your turn a little to access the Wall of Yarn, and by the time we'd chosen our skeins there was not only a long line to shell out a week's hard-earned salary purchase, but also an even longer line just to get to the merchandise.

My friend Tiffany regarded this spectacle with an expression of mild disbelief and said, "It's like the Beatles, but with yarn."

The truth is, you can easily buy Socks That Rock online, but what you can't get online is their special edition "rare gems" colors and their discounted mill ends, of which the MEOW kitties picked up quite a few examples (mixed in with some standard colors):


By noon we were well ready to escape and head back to our lodgings, roll around in our new yarn, and declare that it was 5:00 p.m. somewhere. And so we did.

rhinebeck!

I'm in Rhinebeck/Rhinecliff NY for the weekend to hang out with half a dozen of my knitting posse and to go to the New York State Sheep and Wool Festival. We're having a blast.

i do not think that word means what you think it means

The other day I got an offer from one of my forgotten frequent flier programs that allowed me to subscribe to various magazines in order to use up my otherwise essentially worthless mileage balance, and so I did so.

Does anyone else think it's odd that Out magazine comes in an opaque mylar wrapper?

oh deer

This weekend James and I had dinner at the Saturn Cafe in Santa Cruz, where the tables are sort of like shadow boxes--they've got all kinds of little scraps of paper and photos and trinkets and other stuff underneath the glass, and the space is ample enough to fit some interesting larger items. We sat at a table that had an old credit card verification machine in it, opened up so that you could see the guts of the printed circuit board assembly. James went into full-on Asperger mode and started naming all the different components complete with their technical designations. Since I personally fall way outside the autism spectrum I can't recall exactly what any of these were, but the (one-way) conversation sounded something like "That's the JFET-623, wow I haven't seen one of those in a long time, and that one is a MOSFET 2279R...interesting...and over there is the blah blah blah letters numbers blah blah blah" and so on. This continued for a couple of minutes and I finally said, "Oh my god, you're an attention whore! You're trying to get on the blog again, aren't you?" And as you can see, he succeeded.

Meanwhile, somewhere in the midwest, a friend of mine spent much of her weekend listening to her 3-year-old daughter's angst-ridden proclamations about deer: she did not like them, they were scary, they jumped through windows, etc. Naturally my friend and her husband tried to console their daughter by telling her that deer were in fact gentle and nice and kept their activities confined to the great outdoors, having no inclination whatsoever toward the comforts of, say, a foyer or sun room. "A deer jumped through the window at my SCHOOL!" the tyke insisted, only to be gently but just as insistently rebuffed with the assertion that surely that was just pretend. And then my friend arrived at the school Monday morning to find:

Dear Parents,

In case you are not aware on Friday afternoon about 4:15 a female deer
decided to jump through a window in room 117 and after a very short
visit turned around and jumped back out through another window in the
same room. The deer never left room 117 and there were no children in
the classroom at the time. I would like to say that we had a plan of
action, but realistically we never thought about writing one for a
deer jumping through the window.

(etc.)

And now my friend feels like the worst mother on the planet. However, another friend wisely pointed out that being the worst mother on the planet would probably involve something like noisily bursting into the child's room in the middle of the night wearing a deer costume.

dylan goes electric

Since I don't actually have time to design anything these days (and by "these days" I mean "for the past two years"), it's always nice when one of my older designs gets a fresh shout-out:

Dylan Goes Electric on the Lime & Violet blog

::go me:: ::go me:: (cabbage patching)

turns out I *was* dreaming

I was clicking around the New York Times site just now and came across a short piece discussing Sarah Palin's accent and speaking style, and it pointed out that pronouncing 'nuclear' as 'nucular' is an instance of a phenomenon (called metathesis) common among the world's languages and that it's no different than when someone pronounces 'iron' as 'eye-ern' rather than 'eye-ren.' And I got all excited because OMG! A layperson in the mainstream media who actually did some linguistics homework instead of spouting untenable prescriptivist crap!

And then I scrolled up to see who the writer was, and it was Steven Pinker. As in, the MIT linguist Steven Pinker.

Doh.

unhappy

One of my favorite teachers has died:

New York Times obituary for Ed Klima

I still talk about his Linguistics and Poetics class that I took over 15 years ago. I definitely learned some new ways of thinking from him.

sux et veritas

Back in early July I wrote a little about the naming of Lynx, the project we're wrapping up right now. Our engagement director Dan and his wife conveniently scheduled the arrival of their baby (and Dan's consequent paternity leave) to coincide with only the last couple days of the project, but Baby Diego had other plans and decided to show up about 10 days early. I wanted to get a lynx-themed baby card to send to them from the team, but Hallmark inexplicably has not yet taken advantage of this potentially lucrative niche market, and so I had to make a card myself, third-grader style, with felt tipped pens and card stock. Please note that it is a baby lynx peeking out of the bundle:



Speaking of little bobcats, James and I hiked at Tomales Point on Saturday and get a load of what we saw there:





We also saw lots of Tule Elk, but those are totally par for the course in the Point Reyes area so those weren't as exciting somehow. Plus they don't have fangs or claws, and Dan and I don't have a running joke about them.

The excitement continued on Saturday night when I realized about $1500 had evaporated from my checking account via fraudulent PayPal transfers. As is typical, James came to the rescue and applied his mad Internet forensics skillz to ascertain that the breach had occurred not via my home machine (which is a Mac behind two firewalls, so that was unlikely anyway), and not via PayPal per se, but via the "junior high school level" (no, James, tell us how you really feel) security protocols in place at my grad school alumni association--whose forwarding email alias I have long used and which unfortunately was also my PayPal login ID. The details are not terribly interesting and I should be getting all my money back within a few days, but this all just goes to show that if you are such a pretentious tool that you want to have a fancypants Ivy League school in your email address, you should probably just go for YaleTool at gmail dot com or some such--because while the Elis are great at winning squash tournaments and coming up with clever Latin slogans to shout at football games, apparently they know fuckall about web security.

Before all that went down, however, we stopped at Pizzeria Picco in Larkspur and had a fabulous meal after our long hike among the elk. Picco had recently been written up in the New York Times for its soft serve ice cream, and their pizza is nothing to complain about either. My favorite was the Marin, which is a white pie with paper-thin baby red potato slices and rosemary. Picco is only about 10 miles north of the city, so if you're a San Franciscan and have a car you should totally get your ass up there ASAP. I have five words for you: Scharffen Berger chocolate soft serve.

beer me

James drove up to San Francisco for another extended visit on Thursday, so I met him at Toronado after work. We arrived around 5:30 and settled in at the bar for our usual beers (Russian River Pliny the Elder for me, Russian River Damnation for him), not realizing that we were a mere 30 minutes away from the official unleashing of Oktoberfest. Toronado gets pretty busy on a normal Thursday, so once you toss in gallon-sized beer specials, free bratwurst, and an oompah band you are definitely asking for mayhem.

Looking back, I did find it odd that the woman tending the grill next door at Rosamunde had been wearing Lederhosen when we'd stopped in for a quick vegan sausage to go with our beers. She was talking to two other customers and one of them informed her that she'd recently discovered that Lederhosen actually means "song pants" and not, as she'd previously believed, "leather pants," because (she averred) it turns out Leder actually means "song." Now, usually I am the last person who would butt in on a stranger's conversation, but this piece of linguistic misinformation was so egregious that I found it in myself to set aside my introversion and general contempt for humanity in order to explain that Leder did indeed mean "leather," and that this word had evidently become confused in some poor person's mind with Lieder, which means "songs." To German ears, by the way, these two words sound as different as, say, later and leader do to a native English speaker.

Drinking Russian River beer at Toronado is always a little nostalgic for me, because it reminds me of possibly the most debauched wedding I have ever attended, as well as the ensuing possibly worst hangover I have ever endured. The connection is a little more convoluted than you might think. For one thing, there was no Russian River beer consumed at that wedding; rather, the wedding took place something like 18 years ago at the Cilurzo Winery in Temecula, and the groom was friends with Vinnie Cilurzo, the son of the winemakers (hence the location of the nuptials). Vinnie later got into brewing, and as I understand it he has since evolved into some kind of microbrewing GOD and in 2002 acquired Russian River Brewing Company and the rest is history or whatever. I have always loved Pliny the Elder, although I have to admit it pains me to order it because everyone, including Vinnie himself I believe, pronounces it where Pliny rhymes with "tiny," when actually Pliny should rhyme with "tinny" (and "Vinnie," come to think of it). The beer is so fucking delicious, however, that I am willing to defile the memory of my two years of Latin study under one of my favorite professors of all time in the whole universe just to get my hands on it. (Sorry, Eliot, if you are reading this. If it makes you feel any better I am still a huge fan of the ablative absolute.)

Updated to add--In honor of Oktoberfest I am going to subject you to a picture of me in Bochum, Germany in 1974 wearing a traditional Dirndl dress. That's my dad's dad with me.

eskimo kitteh = famus

One of my linguistic LOLcats is featured on Language Log today.

LingLOL

At Gina's invitation, I joined the LOLphonology group on Facebook today. It's a lot of fun, but I have found myself unable to constrain my LOL creation to strictly phonological topics, so I will just post some of the non-phonological linguistics LOLs here:

six (million) degrees of separation

I was just listening to an audio commentary on season 5 of The Wire, and the commentators said something about how Lance Reddick (who plays Cedric Daniels) was a classically trained musician, and that he'd studied piano at Oberlin. I got all excited because (a) Lance Reddick as Daniels is possibly the sexiest man on television, and (b) I'm pretty sure we are about the same age, and (c) *I* studied piano at Oberlin. So I ran to consult the internets to find out whether we'd been at Oberlin at the same time. I am not sure how I thought that would help me in any way now, except maybe to make me more likely to attend a class reunion, but still, I wanted to know.

Since season 5 centers in large part around getting one's facts right, it was kind of funny to discover that (according to his own web site) Reddick studied at Eastman, not Oberlin, and he studied composition, not piano. So, there went that theory. But then I read a little further and discovered he'd gone to the Yale School of Drama and graduated in 1994, which means we were in New Haven at the same time (I arrived for non-drama grad school in '93). Do you see what this means? LANCE REDDICK AND I ARE PRACTICALLY BEST FRIENDS!! I'm pretty excited about it.

transubstantiation without representation

Last Sunday I was out walking and ran into my delightful colleague Becca. She asked what I was up to and I explained I was out for a long slow distance walk in preparation for a marathon, upon which she exclaimed, "Wow, you look great! Not like you're tired at all!" I glanced at my watch and said, "Well, that might be because I left my house 8 minutes and 42 seconds ago."

It seemed odd that Becca would be nowhere near her own home, sitting by herself on a bench outside a closed minor branch of the San Francisco public library on a Sunday morning. It turns out she was killing time waiting to go sing in the choir at St. Dominic's Catholic church. That in itself doesn't seem too surprising, I suppose, until you remember that Becca is (a) Jewish and (b) an atheist. She walked a few blocks with me and explained that when you love to sing, a choir spot is a nice gig: you get a large crowd every week, and while perhaps they aren't there to see you in particular, they are certainly a captive audience. She went on to explain that she had set up some rules for herself about what she would and wouldn't say during services: she sings whatever needs to be sung, of course, and there is a chanted prayer that she considers close enough to singing that it passes muster, but she doesn't recite the normal prayers or take part in the other spoken portions of Mass. Except, she noted, for the part where someone says to you "The Lord be with you," at which point she is happy to respond with the expected, "And also with you." Because, yes! Definitely! For sure he can be with you...no, really, I insist.

This seemed like a reasonable system to me, and called to mind my own days as a Mass-attending atheist. For reasons that had something to do with the local public school sucking ass and the closest private school being a Catholic school, in 1974 I found myself suddenly thrust into a first-grade classroom governed by a woman in what seemed to me a rather strange, penguin-like dress and hat ensemble. My parents apparently did not feel it necessary to explain to me prior to my matriculation exactly who this God person was, or mention the existence of the Bible, but they had conveyed the message that whatever one's teacher said should be assumed to be true. Imagine my confusion when Sister Rosario told us the story of Adam and Eve with a level of conviction and enthusiasm that suggested she believed these nudist garden-dwellers had actually existed or something. I am proud to say that even at the tender age of six, my bullshit-o-meter immediately skyrocketed to eleven. Whatever a six-year-old's equivalent is of WTF?, I was thinking it.

This educational institution where I spent a further four or so perplexed years was called The School of the Madeleine, which makes it sound like there might at least be pastries or something, but no. The closest things to a cookie were the communion wafers, which I never got to experience because I knew (although I have no idea how--I don't recall being told this explicitly) that I hadn't been baptized and that this meant I was not allowed to get up with everyone else while the guy in the elaborate bathrobe shoved tiny edible discs into people's mouths. Thank goodness I never put together that the wafers were supposed to be Jesus's actual flesh, because C'MON, PEOPLE, that's disturbing, and I'm trying to sit quietly alone in my pew and think about ponies, here.

One day in third grade, the principal, Sister Bernadetta, came by and was asking us what was our favorite part of Mass. I had somehow picked up on the idea that Mass was not something one was supposed to enjoy, and so I worried I would be reprimanded for admitting that the singing was my absolute (and, come to think of it, only) favorite part. I was shocked when her face lit up and she said, "Oh, wonderful! You know, singing is twice praying!" And I thought, great, now you've ruined that part for me too.

Speaking of singing, I went to observe karaoke night at a dive bar last Monday after work with some co-workers. Sweet imaginary Jesus, what a day it would be if I ever had the nerve to get up in front of people and sing. I love love love singing, but the thought of doing it within earshot of anything human turns me cold and clammy. Now I can't decide whether I want to turn this into some kind of Life Challenge or whatnot, because lord knows I already carry around a lifetime's worth of real and imagined humiliation at the tip of my brain twenty-four hours a day. Most likely I will continue to sit quietly on my barstool pew, nursing a margarita and wondering what communion tastes like.

spur of the moment

I have been doing this interesting thing lately where I have no life outside work. Did I say interesting? I meant retarded.

I have a lot to accomplish on a very short timeline, and then there's the small matter of how sometimes our tools are, shall we say, difficult ornery inimical satanic, and also I actually love the linguistic-y part of my job and so why wouldn't I arrive by 7:00 a.m. every day and not leave until 13 hours later? It all makes a lot of good sense, especially if you've just arrived from the planet What The Fuck Are You Thinking in the galaxy of Dipshit.

One benefit of going in early is that there is always enough room on the bus that it will actually stop to let you in. One morning when I departed home at a more reasonable hour, and I am not making this up people, I had to watch SIX buses go by my stop, each one so full of passengers that the driver would not allow anyone else to get on. At that time of the morning, even on those occasions when the bus has to stop to let someone off and you sneakily wedge yourself in via the rear doors, you are only asking for trouble. By the time you reach Market Street you will have someone's BlackBerry or vintage brooch embedded in your cheek and your body will resemble something designed by Frank Gehry, only with slightly less deconstructivist élan and a lot more throbbing spinal pain.

All this is leading up to why I ended up at work today wearing these:


Having settled into the sleep-deprived, adrenaline-fueled, hummingbird-like whir of Project Where Everything Is Due Yesterday mode, I can sometimes forget to maintain the understated and professional demeanor for which I am ever so famous. And so it happened that I had declared a certain event that was to take place this afternoon as the [Project-Related-Thing] Rodeo. And then I decided to dress for the occasion and also threaten my colleagues with spurring, should they be foolish enough to question my authority or fail to freshen my beverage in a timely manner.

You heard right, I said spurring and I meant it. I brought these in, too:


Come to think of it, those could come in kind of handy on a crowded bus. "Howdy! Oh, was that your shin? I was so distracted by your cell phone conversation that I forgot I was wearing these. Is there...oh, my...is there a doctor on this bus?"