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.