Error for the error

Presented to me as I tried to log in to my gmail today:



Thanks, Google.

I wonder if this will work

Today, I need to research and write at least seven of the required twelve pages of my phonology paper. The proper process is to do your research first and then write, but I have managed to mismanage my time and now I am unable to do that, so the researching must happen simultaneously with the writing. I post my progress here not because anybody else cares, but in the hopes that it will actually shame me into writing at a regular pace.

10:19 AM: 0 pages
11:35 AM: 1 page After trolling the internet for examples, I finally found one that would work. Too bad most of my page so far only includes tables of data, which conveniently take up lots of space. Oh well. Onward!
12:22 PM: 2 pages
1:54 PM: 3 pages I had to take a break for food. Now I need to finish this.
3:18 PM: 4 pages While I only got a page written, I'm feeling a little better about how this analysis is going. Also, I'm over halfway to my required page count before I can quit for the day. I'm optimistic.
4:15 PM: 4 pages A "brief break" turned into an hour. Argh.
4:58 PM: 5 pages
6:23 PM: 6 pages (almost) I need to take another break, ugh.

Regularly-scheduled programing

Apparently when I am sick, instead of using the down-time for productive ends, I find stupid articles on the New York Times and write ranty blog posts about them. Never fear; I am feeling better and was actually quite productive for the past two hours, so we now return to your regularly-scheduled "write three pithy sentences and a poem and call it a day" post.

I couldn't not post this poem after misappropriating a line for yesterday's post's title. It's one of my favorites of Eliot's, and it packs such a huge punch for being one of his shorter poems; the ending always, always kills me. Have at it.

(Apologies for the crappy formatting; I can't be bothered to make it look right. If you care, buy a book.)

The Hollow Men

Mistah Kurtz—he dead.

A penny for the Old Guy

I

We are the hollow men
We are the stuffed men
Leaning together
Headpiece filled with straw. Alas!
Our dried voices, when
We whisper together
Are quiet and meaningless
As wind in dry grass
Or rats’ feet over broken glass
In our dry cellar

Shape without form, shade without colour,
Paralysed force, gesture without motion;

Those who have crossed
With direct eyes, to death’s other Kingdom
Remember us—if at all—not as lost
Violent souls, but only
As the hollow men
The stuffed men.

II

Eyes I dare not meet in dreams
In death’s dream kingdom
These do not appear:
There, the eyes are
Sunlight on a broken column
There, is a tree swinging
And voices are
In the wind’s singing
More distant and more solemn
Than a fading star.

Let me be no nearer
In death’s dream kingdom
Let me also wear
Such deliberate disguises
Rat’s coat, crowskin, crossed staves
In a field
Behaving as the wind behaves
No nearer—

Not that final meeting
In the twilight kingdom

III

This is the dead land
This is cactus land
Here the stone images
Are raised, here they receive
The supplication of a dead man’s hand
Under the twinkle of a fading star.

Is it like this
In death’s other kingdom
Waking alone
At the hour when we are
Trembling with tenderness
Lips that would kiss
Form prayers to broken stone.

IV

The eyes are not here
There are no eyes here
In this valley of dying stars
In this hollow valley
This broken jaw of our lost kingdoms

In this last of meeting places
We grope together
And avoid speech
Gathered on this beach of the tumid river

Sightless, unless
The eyes reappear
As the perpetual star
Multifoliate rose
Of death’s twilight kingdom
The hope only
Of empty men.

V

Here we go round the prickly pear
Prickly pear prickly pear
Here we go round the prickly pear
At five o’clock in the morning.

Between the idea
And the reality
Between the motion
And the act
Falls the Shadow

For Thine is the Kingdom

Between the conception
And the creation
Between the emotion
And the response
Falls the Shadow

Life is very long

Between the desire
And the spasm
Between the potency
And the existence
Between the essence
And the descent
Falls the Shadow

For Thine is the Kingdom

For Thine is
Life is
For Thine is the

This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.

T.S. Eliot

Between the idea and the reality falls the Shadow

Stories like this, more than anything else, are why I think America needs a reality check of really epic proportions. "$200 million a day" is right up there with the death camps, the communism, the Kenyan birth certificates, the Hitler-frenzy, and all the other drivel that politicians, newscasters and ordinary people are agonizing over; looking back at that list (and it goes on and on and on), I am astonished and saddened by just how easy it is to manipulate and mislead the American public these days.

In general, I find the hatred, venom and oh-so-thinly-veiled racism that's spewed out into the airwaves to be offensive, hurtful and counterproductive. But what's worse is that so many people this country - everyone from the "ordinary Americans" to members of Congress - just sit there with their mouths open like baby birds and blindly swallow it all whole. I mean, honestly. If you bother to think logically even for five minutes (yes, I know it's hard), over half the shit you read on the internet and hear on television (often touted as the word of God Himself) seems patently ridiculous. Just because Sarah Palin tweeted it or Glenn Beck yelled about it or Jon Stewart mocked it or Arianna Huffington posted it (yes, it goes both ways, look at that) doesn't mean it's true. (I suspect that Stewart and Huffington have more reliable/competent handlers and fact checkers, and not because I agree with their politics but because of their track records.) The point is that these people are still as fallible as the rest of the human race - and they have an agenda on top of it.

I realize that shit like this goes hand in hand with freedom of speech. But you know what also should go hand in hand with freedom of speech? Freedom of thought. The realization that just because it's been "reported" on television doesn't make it true. Pull your heads out of the sand and spare two minutes for some critical thinking, please. There's no one policing the airwaves or the internet, so it's our job to police our minds and opinions, to make conscious decisions about which sources we trust and believe. All I'm left with is the question of how some people manage to live their entire lives without learning this simple lesson, and why these self-titled "government watchdogs" don't spend a little more time watching their facts and a little less time reciting incorrect ones. (The answer, by the way, is that no one calls them out on it - and when someone does, they're painted as the "liberal media" (which as far as I can tell means any news source not preceded by the word "Fox") and ignored.)

So watch Fox News, watch the Daily Show, read Drudge and the HuffPo and whatever else you want to read. But when their opinions start to become facts accepted on blind faith - when it transitions from "sometimes it's nice to hear other people who share your views" to "it's so much easier to let Sean Hannity think for me" - that's when we're in real trouble. As a country, we need to re-learn how to think for ourselves; we used to be good at it, but oh how the mighty have fallen.



"When widely followed public figures feel free to say anything, without any fact-checking, we have a problem. It becomes impossible for a democracy to think intelligently about big issues — deficit reduction, health care, taxes, energy/climate — let alone act on them. Facts, opinions and fabrications just blend together. But the carnival barkers that so dominate our public debate today are not going away — and neither is the Internet. All you can hope is that more people will do what Cooper did — so when the next crazy lie races around the world, people’s first instinct will be to doubt it, not repeat it."
Thomas Friedman, November 16, 2010

Vodka Redbull, anyone?

It may be that I just don't care enough to actually decipher the science behind this whole debacle, but whenever I hear someone talking about the horrible, dangerous, must-be-dealt-with effects of combining alcohol and caffeine and how this poison should be banned, I always want to ask someone how, again, drinking a can of Four Loko is different than drinking an Irish coffee? Jack and Coke? Vodka Redbull? Hell, a double espresso after a couple of glasses of wine with dinner? Chemically, these combinations all put alcohol and caffeine together in your body. Now, if some scientists tell me that drinking alcohol and caffeine together is going to kill me, I'll probably believe them - but only after I get them to explain how the entire Irish civilization hasn't died out, and why nobody's sued Bailey's Irish Cream out of existence yet (come on, that stuff's designed to jack up coffee). Or if they tell me that some chemical combination found specifically in Four Loko is dangerous, that's another can of worms entirely. Ban the hell out of it, in that case.

But the argument that usually surfaces is just that mass over-consumption of caffeinated alcoholic beverages is dangerous and wrong. And there's no denying that binge drinking is stupid and unhealthy. Yes, people get hospitalized after abusing Four Loko - but they also get hospitalized after abusing any kind of alcohol, caffeinated or not. Shutting down drink companies like Four Loko because they happen to be popular among irresponsible high school and college kids seems useless and unproductive in the face of the larger problem: the prevalence of binge drinking in young people. So it's true that some dumbass frat boy isn't going to sit in a quiet bar with his Irish coffee and take his time with his drink - he's going to chug a can or three of Four Loko and be on his way. The context and culture of a caffeinated cocktail and a can of Four Loko are entirely different, and they influence both the consumer base and how it's consumed. But if you take away Four Loko, what's our dumb frat boy going to do? He's going to go back to his old stand-by, vodka Redbull - or he'll just do a few shots of whatever's in the freezer and pop a few caffeine pills, or something stronger. You've banned alcoholic caffeine (caffeinated alcohol?) but you can't ban caffeine, and people have been combining the two for centuries.

If an Irish coffee is to Four Loko what an expensive microbrew is to Coors Light, then the problem comes back around to the party, binge-drinking culture. Drink twelve servings of any of those drinks and you're in trouble.

I have no solution for the binge drinking problem. I have no solution for the horrifying statistics they throw at us (by "us" I mean the targeted "irresponsible dumbass" audience of people ages 15-25) about the consequences of binge drinking. I do have insights into the party culture, but that's another post. My point is that if caffeine and alcohol are safe to combine in measured, responsible amounts - just like alcohol and caffeine can be safely consumed separately, up to a point - we seem to be vilifying the wrong player here. Four Loko is involved in the problem, no doubt about that - but are they the cause? No, because people always have and always will combine alcohol and caffeine. They've made it easier and more convenient to get, but to me that just seems like good business. Is banning the drink the solution? No, see previous response. They're undoubtedly involved, because Four Loko is apparently the party version of an Irish coffee - but in general, this whole fiasco seems so short-sighted and silly to me. Fix the greater problem and the smaller one goes away too, and companies like Four Loko get to stay in business.

Now, who wants a drink?

Disclaimer: I have never drunk or purchased Four Loko, nor even been in an establishment where it was sold or served. To be honest I'm a little mystified by the whole thing - why buy caffeinated alcohol when you can make it yourself, to your own tastes? And as I said, the science escapes me. Maybe the combination specifically in Four Loko is bad. So at the end of the day, caffeine is a drug. Alcohol is a drug. Use them responsibly or don't use them at all.

More invented words

I am up late completing my phonology problem set, as usual on a Monday night. It's my last one, however - amazing how I managed to make it this far in the semester without figuring out how to properly manage my time so I could work on them without stressing out. Oh well, I guess it's one lesson I won't learn.

I will, however, miss writing sentences like these:

"For a few lexically marked words, Ident(length)-BR dominates NoGeminate, and instead of vowel lengthening a geminate coda consonant is inserted to create a heavy (bimoraic) syllable."

"Ikolano requires syllables to have onsets. However, when redpulicated, the epenthetic onset consonant is not copied, even to serve as the reduplicated coda consonant."

"Ilokano will occasionally resyllabify words to ensure that the reduplicant is a closed syllable. This behavior is only possible in words with initial C-glide clusters where the glide is underlyingly a vowel, as in (4)."

"RED=σ(μμ) can be satisfied either by lengthening the first underlying vowel in the reduplicant or by copying the surface glides. Which option a speaker chooses will depend on the ranking of Ident(F) and Ident(length)-BR."


There's a lot about linguistics writing that appeals to me - no mess, no fuss, the value placed on coherency and conciseness above all else, the organization, not to mention the awesome topics (my paper is called "Heavy Syllable Reduplication in Ilokano") - but sometimes I read back over what I write and wonder what the hell I'm even talking about. I find it fitting that linguists have invented their own language and alphabet to talk about language, but sometimes the levels of jargon are ridiculous.

We say it just 'cause we can

Made-up linguistics term: mora.
Its made-up plurals: moras or morae. (A hotly debated subject, of course - we're linguists, after all.)
The made-up adjective: moraic.
The made-up adverb: moraically.

Spellcheck has now underlined every other word in my document in red, because I am currently writing a paper fundamentally based on the idea of the mora. (I swear I'm not entirely making this up.)

This phenomenon is also related to the words: binarity, bimoraic, bimoraically, monomoraic, monomoracity.

There's a term for what has happened here but, ironically, I can't think of it.

Fall back

Every year, I am both extremely entertained and utterly mystified by the entire country's rather arbitrary decision to just add or subtract an hour. Especially when other countries may or may not also observe daylight savings... but even if they do, you can bet that they don't change their clocks on the same day. So there's that awkward window of time when, even though Paris is six hours ahead of New York, sometimes it's seven hours... and sometimes it's five. Baffling. I feel like this is how giant international misunderstandings escalate into global crises.

It also provides context for hilarious incidents like this blurb from the West Wing.

In conclusion: happy end of daylight savings, everyone. If you still have a timepiece that isn't plugged into the internet, set it back, because it now officially gets dark really early. Wonderful.

Unrelated: I'm now just 6/7 for my daily blog posts. Shame on me.

Eden

The Poems of Our Climate

I
Clear water in a brilliant bowl,
Pink and white carnations. The light
In the room more like a snowy air,
Reflecting snow. A newly-fallen snow
At the end of winter when afternoons return.
Pink and white carnations - one desires
So much more than that. The day itself
Is simplified: a bowl of white,
Cold, a cold porcelain, low and round,
With nothing more than the carnations there.

II
Say even that this complete simplicity
Stripped one of all one's torments, concealed
The evilly compounded, vital I
And made it fresh in a world of white,
A world of clear water, brilliant-edged,
Still one would want more, one would need more,
More than a world of white and snowy scents.

III
There would still remain the never-resting mind,
So that one would want to escape, come back
To what had been so long composed.
The imperfect is our paradise.
Note that, in this bitterness, delight,
Since the imperfect is so hot in us,
Lies in flawed words and stubborn sounds.

Wallace Stevens

Fall semester 2.0

My classes this semester, reinterpreted:

Elementary German I
Or, Non-Romance Languages for Dummies
Introductory course in which students learn that just because Germany and France share a border doesn't mean the languages have similar grammars.

Origins of Astronomy
Or, Comparative Bright Lights and Other Distractingly Shiny Things
Differs from other introductory physics classes because lectures are accompanied by pretty pictures.

Phonology I
Or, Introductory Graduate School: Everything You Know Is Wrong
A first-year graduate seminar in which students learn to disregard everything they thought they knew about phonology because it is Very Wrong, and instead learn to work with theories that are, on the surface, much less intuitive than what is traditionally presented in a typical undergraduate course. Specific to phonology, but in theory applies to all sub-disciplines. (See: X-bar Theory, Syntax.)

The Indo-European Family
Or, The New York Times Crossword In Theory and Practice
Historical linguistics, no prerequisite. Majors sit in the back and obtain high levels of proficiency in the daily crossword, sudoku and kenken, while non-majors sit in the front and ask fundamental questions.

Is it May yet?

Rrrrrrreçois les chants qu'il offre

Tonight, my Argentinian choir director tried to teach us how to pronounce the French words in "La Cantique de Jean Racine" with his very distinctive Argentinian accent.

He was unable to stop rolling the letter r. I don't even.

Headdesk.

Tuesday morning

Three things from my Tuesday morning:

1. The San Francisco Giants blew everyone away with their superb games in the World Series. I am happy to say that I can now look my Texan friends (yes I still have them) in the eye. Good job, guys. BAY AREA!

2. Today is election day! I miss voting in person, I must say. Almost makes me want to register in New York... but not really, because Albany is just as bad as Sacramento, and colder. The two-state comparison has basically devolved into an awesome contest for whose candidates are more ridiculous, though... for me at least.
2a. As a primer for today's ballot and watching the results come in, here's the recent Gail Collins op-ed: Name That Candidate.
2b. Also, presented without comment: Jon Stewart, Autotuned.

3. They are jackhammering into the street directly outside our window, and have been doing so since about 7am. Why, New York. Why must you destroy everything, and so loudly?

It begins here

It's November!

November means many things for me: Thanksgiving, scarves, cranberries, the transition from fall to winter, knitting, mulled wine, root vegetables, fireplaces, winter coats, incessant and obnoxious Christmas music in stores. On the west coast, it means Peet's Holiday Blend; on the east coast, it means apple cider (and apple cider donuts). Everywhere, November means that the holidays are officially only one month away. It's the beginning of the Gluttony Period, that wonderful food-focused time of year that starts November 1 with the leftover Halloween candy, ramps up to peak at Thanksgiving, follows with a small refractory period of righteousness before the holiday baking craze kicks in, and truly finds its stride right around the middle of December. Guilt and contrition follow, mostly in the form of New Year's resolutions to join a gym or eat more salad. But really, November reminds you that since you can now swaddle yourself in layers and layers of coats and scarves, who cares if you get a little pudgy? It's not like you'll be wearing a bathing suit any time soon.

November 1 marks the beginning of the Gluttony Period. It also marks the start of two important month-long challenges: No-Shave November and National Novel Writing Month.

No-Shave November is self-explanatory: men don't shave their faces. What began, I think, as laziness with an excuse has sort of morphed into a competition. Mostly I like No-Shave November because it gives me prime mocking material when I see my brother at Thanksgiving and he looks like a lumberjack. It's also great to reveal who can actually grow a beard, and who cannot. (Usually, however, if a man can't grow a beard he doesn't do No-Shave November.) For the truly lazy, the next step is Decem-beard.

National Novel Writing Month (affectionately known as NaNoWriMo) is more relevant to me. Traditionally, the challenge is simple: write a 50,000-word novel by the end of the month. I do not currently have the time, discipline or inspiration to write a novel, so I am re-interpreting the challenge (as most people are wont to do). My challenge to myself is to write one blog post every day. They won't necessarily be awesome posts, but they will be posts. I will do my best to not hide behind the "...Uh, here, have a poem" heading too often. I figure that even if I'm not writing a novel, at least I'll be exercising my brain somewhat.

So there you have it. One post a day for thirty days. When you compare it with an entire novel it's mostly a cop-out, but at least it's something, right?