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August 2002 Archives
Meanwhile, sounds like Jonathan's party was fun. One reveller writes:
The diet of G&Ts and champagne for 4 days is now telling on me.
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Some moments this week:
- family card games going on until way past bedtime. One night, Kiloh ended the game asleep on my leg under the table. Apoa and Kiloh both seem to have inherited Ohna's card sharp gene, btw.
- had my mobile ring on the beach with a message confirming some work. Always wanted to have that happen to me.
- found some interesting data about the English of seven year olds. I was reading Kiloh's copy of Girl Talk where a letter from a reader raved about how much she enjoyed it by saying 'Girl Talk is the bomb'
- found a 'snake' in the garden but it turned out to be a slow worm. Yes, it was slow.
- went round the neighbours to say 'can we have our ball back?' Haven't done that for a few decades. I think the last time I did it old mannie Peerie came chasing after us with a stick.
- the downside. Of course, we've had messages and phone calls about various kinds of building works (supposedly) going on at home.
- oh, and we graduated from crazy golf to 'proper putting'. Highlight of this was watching Apoa carefully, and balletically, lining up every shot.
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Read here about the Dictionary of the Older Scottish Tongue and find out about the etymology of 'haggis' among other things.
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I am in Budleigh Salterton, living without broadband, finding out what my pages look like on different systems and browsers, and missing Jonathan's 40th birthday party, where the guests included Jennifer's famous Cullen Skink. B-(
Still, there are compensations, which include: croquet, football, whist, dozing by the riverbank after a wade, and Otter Ale.
It's also the cat's first holiday and we are relieved to find that she enjoys travelling and thinks of her box as a cosy home rather than a prison. Now we'll have to see what she thinks of the local wildlife.
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We were discussing the Joy Division influence on Moby, especially in Extreme Ways when Ohna pointed out that the tune is mainly based on Sorry I'm A Lady by Baccara Remember?
Ooh here comes that man again
Something in the way he moves makes me sorry I'm a lady
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Point your eyes at it here
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This has a comment from Xan Brooks who says that:
If the figures are to be believed, we are currently luxuriating in middle of the best year for movies since 1971. Cinema attendance in Britain currently stands at its highest level for more than three decades, with some 174m tickets expected to be sold by December 31. All of which is surely cause for celebration. The economy may be slumping, consumer spending wobbling and the house price bubble about to pop, but at least we've all been to see Scooby Doo and Men in Black II.
The trouble with statistics, of course, is that they only tell half the story
I wonder how robust this statistic is? And does this one only tell half of its own story?
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ps This sentence is not true
Damn, once again I was too disorganised to get myself ready in time for National Slacker Day
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Here is an extract from Tim Connell's talk about this.
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Ohna just put me out of my misery. I've been listening to The Flaming Lips and trying to work out which song Fight Test, the first track on Yoshimi Battles The Pink Robots, sounds like. Ohna just walked in and joined in with them, but the words she sang were:
It's not time to make a change, just relax, take it easy, you're still young, that's your fault, there's so much you have to know
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I wonder what Terry Gilliam would make of this site about the role of the prostate?
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I wonder what the society for the advancement of formal structures would make of this siteabout natural language parsing?
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It's Hornsey Journal day, and Kiloh's on page 4. You can read all about it (and about her canny mum) here
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How did Lamb Chop produce her labial consonants? Find out here
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The 'language gene' research is obviously really interesting and exciting but it strikes me that the phrase 'language gene' causes a bit of a problem, since people discussing it have to spend a lot of time explaining that there isn't really one single gene that gives us language, etc. etc.
The gene we're talking about is called FOXP2. An error on FOXP2 causes a disorder which involves severe language problems. Researchers at the Max Planck Institute compared this gene in humans, chimps, gorillas, orang-utans, rhesus macaque monkeys and mice. They found slight changes in the gene which happened over time. So the assumption is that mutations in the human FOXP2 gene were important in the development of language.
Here are some links:
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You can read here about the plan to recognise Cornish as an official protected language. You can hear examples of Cornish, follow links to other sites and speculate about the mental state of the person who chose the pictures and captions.
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Do you believe this account of Portuguese sexual practices? The enigmatic mermaid (who is Brasileira) seems to buy it.
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This article has got people really interested in Verlan. Even Caterina is intrigued.
No-one so far seems to have mentioned the film with a Verlan title. Les Ripoux is the Verlan way of saying 'Les Pourris' which means something like 'the rotten ones'.
It's also a blooming good film.
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Last summer I went camping in Sherwood Forest with 4,000 kids. I wasn't responsible for all of them, but it was quite an experience.
At the camp, the kids organised Earth Summit meetings to discuss sustainability and other issues. At the end of the camp, they produced a declaration which is being presented at the World Summit in Johannesburg. If you fancy signing it, you can find it here
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Went to see Lantana last night, which was excellent. I can't post links to an official site as all the ones I visited were broken, but here's part of a reviewI found on imdb:
In Hollywood the man is a limited creature, and this tendency limits the potential for the movies of America. Let us give thanks that producers in other countries may still find funding for movies not crafted shallowly for the American main-stream!
Lantana is a brilliant movie. Lantana is not a Hollywood movie, nor an American movie.
I'd agree. My opinion is that it's a French movie (it's literally Australian, of course). It's got real people with real personalities who reveal themselves through a combination of what they say and what they do. It isn't just reality, though (e.g. we find the main characters linked by amazing coincidences) but the departures from reality are part of the game and so they don't ruin things in a 24 kind of way.
The non-broken bit of the Australian site describes it as a 'mystery for grown-ups' so I'm wondering whether it works for younger audiences, given part of the interest is about how marriages work (or don't work). I remember how bemused our 19-year-old au pair was by In The Mood For Love which Ohna and I had raved about. She reminded me of my bemusement when I was 14 and went to see Death In Venice knowing only that it had death in the title and a double A (a now extinct category, for people over 14) certificate (I thought that told me all I needed to know).
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Had a great day out with O yesterday.
They wouldn't let me in to Matisse-Picasso even though I'm a member. Well, not without joining the colossal queue for a ticket. So I bought the catalogue and decided to go to Paris and see it there. What are the odds that I actually do it?
We went to see Ansel Adams and William Egglestone at the Hayward instead. Two great shows and really good computer resources on Ansel Adams.
We followed that up with Lost in La Mancha, a tragic disaster and not really the thing for a producer to watch on her day off.
The highlight was that we followed this with a glass of wine and a deep conversation about scriptwriting, partly informed by William Goldman's ideas on 'Hollywood horseshit' and the difference between Hollywood films and independent films (Hollywood films reassure you, independent films challenge you).
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Robbie has been to Cyprus and done some amazing work there, which he's put on show for you here.
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Robbie wants to know which came first, the name of the colour or the name of the fruit. My guess is the colour came first, but does anyone know?
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Why do both of the spellings tying and tieing look weird?
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dug is still disappointed with 24. I agree with him. I also thought the last episode was ruined by the commentators who led me to expect some amazing revelation/really shocking final episode. I thought it was a fairly predictable ending. And not letting us see at first whether Nina had killed Teri seemed a bit childish to me. The tension it raised for us was at a meta level and mainly about how much cheek we thought the makers would have. ('There's no way she wouldn't just kill her. If she hasn't killed her, that's a really big cheat...') But even tying her up was weird. We'd just seen her charge around killing everyone she met as soon as she saw them, but Teri gets tied up and a bit of a reassuring chat?
I still might want to borrow Chris's dvd box set, though.
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Watched that 23rd episode again last night. Enjoyed it more the second time around. I think the irritating things don't have as much of a negative effect when you've seen them once. Also, I was surprised that I interpreted the reactions of our little mole differently now that I knew what was about to be revealed at the end of the episode. There's something satisfying about that, like when you solve a puzzle that seemed impossible and then you find the solution was staring you in the face.
Anyway, all the commentators who've seen the 24th episode seem to think it's the best thing since sliced loaf, so looking forward to tonight, and I can't stop speculating about what the big twist at the end will be. Maybe it's all been a dream in the shower...
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Kiloh didn't enjoy the Fun Run. She fell and hurt her knee and then finished the race with a stitch. Her friend Martha won the race, though, which was very exciting. If I wasn't still in the stone age (film age?) I'd have posted a photo of her coming home in despair by now.
Anyway, we've just found out that Kiloh came first in the fundraising part of the competition. She's off being photographed by the Hornsey Journal as I type. Not only that, there's a prize. A family ticket to Alton Towers plus three nights in a farm nearby. I hope this didn't cost more than Kiloh raised.
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From the Flaming Lips email list:
Beck recently did an interview with MTV news where he officially announced the badly kept secret that the backing band on his October tour would be none other than everyone's favorite Oklahomans.
Yes, the Flaming Lips will be going out with Beck in support of his acoustic-based record 'Sea Change.' The Lips will open up with their own set, before playing with the man himself on his set. No further details are available yet, but we'll let you know as they come. Meantime, check out the MTV interview:
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Prentiss thought Richard Dawkins's comment (see earlier post) sounded 'nastily apt' and went off to find out what 'spiv' meant. His comment in turn made me realise that Dawkins is wrong. The absolute stereotype of a 'spiv' is, of course, Private Walker from Dad's Army, closely followed by Arthur Daley. To paraphrase Lloyd Bentsen (anyone remember?) dubya 'is no Private Walker'
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....is good fun.
dug has been having a discussion with Chris about 24. Chris defends 24 as something that knows it's preposterous and 'knows what it is and sticks with it'. I can't agree. I think it's got some good points, notably that most people find it quite compulsive, but I think it's poorly (and unevenly) written and directed, and that it 'cheats' in that it wants to be taken as having something to say about the real world (e.g. with the Clinton-Monica-alike subplot) but lets itself down with the preposterousness. I also find that my attention flags after about 20 minutes so that I often miss the sledgehammer-cracking-a-nut that is the hook at the end.
The latest shocking twist reminded me of the scene that, I thought, ruined Gosford Park (can't believe that screenplay won an oscar) when Emily Watson's character gives the audience a jaws-hit- the-floor shock by doing something that character would absolutely never do. I think writers should try to amaze their audiences but if you have to resort to out-of-character behaviour or suchlike implausibilities, then you've bought the amazement at the expense of the movie. The shock at the end of the 23rd 'hour' was a double failure in that it was something that could not be the case given the rules of the show, and it was something a lot of members of the audience kind of expected, given that they knew this is a programme that cheats.
Anyway, returning to my point, if you want to see something that's knowingly preposterous and 'knows what it is and sticks with it', go and see Spy Kids 2
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ps. Sorry, of course I can believe that screenplay won, but the main thing that struck me about it was that it had some serious flaws. I'll be surprised if it ends up alongside 'Chinatown', 'Witness' and all in the 'how to write a screenplay' books.
Larry Trask is a top linguist and a great communicator, in books and in person. His book Language: The Basics has a really good section on prescriptivism.
Well, now he's followed his (Penguin) Guide To Punctuation with a book that gives some prescriptions and proscriptions about grammar: Mind The Gaffe. There's a review here
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You can't argue with this
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Here is a really good website about Gilbert and George.
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This discussion of Dirty Words interested me. Paul Morley's comments made me laugh.
btw, do you think the late reviewers have to sign a contract agreeing to interrupt each other all the time?
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This famous work is the first you see at the Gilbert and George exhibition we went to today. Apoa's response was:
'I'm not angry and I'm not boring. I'm just bored.'
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In this Guardian article, Richard Dawkins is quoted as saying:
Obnoxious as Saddam Hussein undoubtedly is, it is not obvious that he is more of a danger to the world than 'President' Bush and his reckless handlers.
It would be a tragedy if Tony Blair, a good man who has so much to offer this country, were to be brought down through playing poodle to this unelected and deeply stupid little oil spiv.
More from The Friday Thing:
Dietrich Bonhoeffer, priest and theologian (perhaps the most important theologian of the last century), was hanged by the SS in April of 1945. His last writings are collected in the extraordinary book 'Letters And Papers From Prison' - which is often to be found knocking around in secondhand bookshops, and is certainly worth the 75 pence. There is a section of the book, near the beginning, entitled 'Of Folly', and in it Pastor Bonhoeffer sheds some much needed light on the war with Iraq, and the character of a certain President Bush.
'There is no defence against folly. Neither protests nor force are of any avail against it, and it is never amenable to reason. If facts contradict personal prejudices, there is no need to believe them, and if they are undeniable, they can simply be pushed aside as exceptions. Thus the fool, as compared with the scoundrel, is invariably self-complacent. And he can easily become dangerous...'
'The fool can often be stubborn, but this must not mislead us into thinking that he is independent. One feels somehow, especially in conversation with him, that it is impossible to talk to the man himself, to talk to him personally. Instead, one is confronted with a series of slogans, watchwords, and the like, which have acquired power over him. He is under a curse, he is blinded, his very humanity is being prostituted and exploited. Once he has surrendered his will and become a mere tool, there are no lengths of evil to which the fool will not go, yet all the time he is unable to see that it is evil.'
From The Friday Thing today:
Not a million miles away is a war. An enormous, stinking, heads-blown-off, children with no legs, anthrax in your cornflakes, shitty mess of a war. And for some strange reason, everyone seems to have forgotten the most important thing in the world: that we try ever so hard not to have it.
Just listened to the Flaming Lips on KCRW, which was great. The Radiohead track was 'Knives Out'. The Minogue was Can't Get You Out Of My Head.
In discussing Radiohead they had a chat about progressive rock:
Wayne: Sounds like you've got to be smart and have glasses
DJ: Only in England
Not sure exactly what the DJ meant by that.
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this one is very short. It's a review of this book, which Amazon describes like this:
How can an infinite number of sentences be generated from one human mind? How did language evolve in apes? In this book Donald Loritz addresses these and other fundamental and vexing questions about language, cognition, and the human brain. He starts by tracing how evolution and natural adaptation selected certain features of the brain to perform communication functions, then shows how those features developed into designs for human language. The result -- what Loritz calls an adaptive grammar -- gives a unified explanation of language in the brain and contradicts directly (and controversially) the theory of innateness proposed by, among others, Chomsky and Pinker.
The reviewer is Katharine Beals who says maybe Loritz is on to something and then says but, for the most part, it's awfully hard to tell
It seems Loritz is going against the idea of linguistic modularity and arguing that language is learned by brain cells. The thing is, the modularity folk also think it's learned by brain cells. The question is whether, at the level of the mind, you need to postulate something language-specific. Looks like I'm going to have to read the book (although this review suggests that won't make it clear to me anyway). Still, these arguments sound like a must-hear to me:
Finally, he questions two key claims of generative grammarians: that children learn language effortlessly, and that parents don't teach it to them. In particular, he argues, when a child refers to a cow as a 'koo', the typical parental response-e.g. 'That's right! It's a cow'- is an expansion or recasting that yields implicit negative evidence of the sort that generative grammarians assume is completely absent, but which in fact, through the principles of Adaptive Resonance, causes automatic, subconscious corrections.
(I'll ignore the fact that where I grew up, the typical parental- response would have been 'that's right - it's a koo')
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BoingBoing pointed me to this (scroll down to 'a new kind of review'). Here's part of it:
I can only imagine how fortunate you must feel to be reading my review. This review is the product of my lifetime of experience in meeting important people and thinking deep thoughts. This is a new kind of review, and will no doubt influence the way you think about the world around you and the way you think of yourself.
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Doesn't that Ms Dy-Na-Mi-Tee leap out of the radio at you?
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Richard Sproat just sent LINGUIST what I think is a slightly over-negative comment on the NYT article on speech recognition I mentioned earlier.
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Just heard that The Flaming Lips will be performing LIVE on KCRW on 'Morning Becomes Eclectic' this Thursday, August 8th at 11am PT (I make that 7pm in London).
They'll be playing songs from Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots and also covering Radiohead and Kylie Minogue.
Any bets on which songs? I'm going for No Surprises and Better The Devil You Know
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Took the kids to the hairdressers yesterday. The nice lady cut Kiloh's hair and then came to tell me that she has nits. Incredibly, since it's clear that their intent is to take over this part of the planet, this is the first time any of us have had them. We are now a family of paranoid head-scratchers. I'll have to ask Aidan next door to show me how to play the famous Nit Olympics.
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He also describes the gig as 'Punkstock'. When they played Finsbury Park, there were some strange stage announcements which reminded me of Woodstock and that famous brown acid. My favourite was:
This is a message for a seven year old boy called Voidoid. Could you please go back to your mum and dad? They didn't mean it. You are a real punk.
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But don't worry. It was 'ironic'.
Enjoyed Steven Wells's review of Pistols at the Palace, which concludes by saying that they are:
the living heart and soul of a nation of drunken barbarian scum. We might as well be proud of them.
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bouillabaisse is currently listening to They might Be Giants. In the pre-internet days, TMBG used to offer a dial-a-song service. Now they're doing mp3s, but they're still offering a dial-a-song service.
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The word on the streets is that this is a bit of a disappointment (apart from a fight report on Alexander Trocchi vs Hugh McDiarmid, 1962)
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Jonathan says: I am indebted to this site for the news that 'Out of the 120,000 people that die everyday, most end up in hell'
Hope they've done a statistical significance test on that.
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I like the idea of google's happy birthday warhol thing, but it's not the most attractive of their logos, is it?
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Just got an ad for scirus, 'the award-winning scientific search engine' from Elsevier Science. I typed in one of those obscure words (explicature) and I was indeed impressed by the 189 results generated (although I was also impressed by the 296 results from google).
This worries me, though:
Did you know... You can now view abstracts and pay per article on the journal source ScienceDirect
Mmm, they don't pay us anything for writing the articles, but they want to make money out of us when we want to read them. Interesting.
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Every day, Channel 4 news sends me a 'Snowmail' giving me an idea of what's on the news that night. Today, Krishnan Guru-Murthy said:
Debating Iraq: I'm not normally a conspiracy theorist, but you know something's up when nobody wants to talk about it.
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I know, I know. Nobody's forcing me to go there. The thing that keeps bringing me back is the location. If you want to get to the cinema quickly with kids, it tends to be the simplest option around here.
Men In Black II was quite satisfying. Particularly enjoyed the Ed Wood-like opening, and I always find Danny Elfman's music does the job quite well.
I had trouble hearing what the actors were saying. Not sure if it was the mix or if I'm just getting old. Felt a bit like watching a movie in French without subtitles. Luckily, the details of the plot were not that vital.
But, of course, tragically, I was in an Odeon. At least this time the film was in focus and the sound was good (not for the adverts, though - if I'd paid to put my groovy Oakenfold-soundtracked ad on there, I'd want my money back).
This was the Muswell Hill Odeon, which could so easily be turned into a magnificent cinema. The place used to be stacked with old projectors. They've gone now, so if you're in the main screen there's only an upstairs and you can look down at the pitiful sight of the empty ground floor below. Because of this, the front rows (where we usually sit) are now the expensive seats. So 100 people sat dotted around the back of the cinema while the 'sofa seats' at the front sat empty. There are three cheap seats mingling on the edges of the sofas, so Apoa, Kiloh and I sat separately waving at each other. From where I was sitting, the bottom right of the screen had a 4-inch thick rail across it. It all felt very post-world war, evoking the great British spirit of 'mustn't grumble', and reminded me of one of my great cinema moments: getting up the day after the hurricane to walk past trees sitting on cars etc. to the Notting Hill Coronet. In those days it was London's coldest cinema (you had to remember to bring your coat) and the last cinema to allow smoking. We sat shivering watching Hope and Glory with reminiscing OAPs making up the rest of the audience. I'm sure John Boorman would have approved.
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Znet sent me this, even though it's actually from The Observer
Apparently, it's huge in the States. I'm not sure why, but I don't think it would do so well here.
It reminds me of this and, sadly, this
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Men In Black II has a PG certificate.
I hold high hopes after the 'OK I suppose'-ness of Stuart Little 2 and the 'pass the matchsticks' mediocrity of the scoobster (redeemed only by the continuing post-movie re-enactments of Daphne's 'oh yeah' dance).
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The last but one was inspired by the fact that everyone in blogland is linking to this site at the moment.
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Just been looking at some experimental data investigating arcane hypotheses in pragmatics. My main finding so far is that people are as strange and unpredictable as a box of Forrest Gump's chocolates.
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No-one who isn't in it has heard of it. (Crouch End is a part of London over the hill from us).
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Dead dictator lives (and Bouillabaise returns from his holidays).
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I hesitate to report this, but here goes.
Partly inspired by my desktop calendar of New Yorker cartoons (thanks Jim and Elsie), Apoa (9 years old) told me today about this joke she's just made up:
A woman has cancer and she's going to die. The doctor tells her husband. And he replies, Oh, don't worry. I've got her insured.
She's grasped quite a few features of the genre, but I think she needs to do a bit more work on that fine line between comedy and tragedy.
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(Inspired by discussion of syllables at Meg's blog):
imho, linguistic variation is one area where those blooming rampant globalisation processes just aren't as rampant as we tend to think.
Why not? Because humans are complicated mechanisms and their face-to-face interactions carry more weight for them than things like what comes out of the box in the corner.
And here's the pet theory: the stuff from the box only matters to us if we think it matters to the people we meet face to face.
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This message from LINGUIST announces that:
To help explore and record linguistic diversity across the globe, a British foundation has provided 20,000,000 pounds over ten years to create an international scholarly program to study endangered languages.
Blimey.
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The non-squeamish might also be intrigued by the forked uvula belonging to Simon aka minor 9th
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Meg has raised an important linguistic issue: what is the longest one-syllable word in English? That's longest in terms of number of letters, thus ruling out the joke answer, which is smiles.
Sadly, Meg is also guilty of pointing to these crimes against one of my favourite places of articulation (I don't want to spoil the surprise, but don't go if you feel squeamish when you see pierced uvulas).
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For a minute, I thought of suggesting we start assigning Chegwin numbers to people who've been on British tv, but then I realised nearly everyone would have a Chegwin number of 1.
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Simon Singh has just (well, just about) relaunched his website. Lots of good stuff there for scientists, cryptographers, mathematicians, people. Nice bit about Erdos-Bacon numbers - could Gwyneth Paltrow be about to break the record? Or how about an outside bet on Keith Chegwin?
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Did you notice that Paul Peachy's maths look a bit dodgy in the sparrow article? We've dropped from 12-15 million to 6 million sparrows in Britain in the last 30 years. So that makes 10 million fewer?
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If you've got time on your hands and money to spare, and you've got a taste for funk, join Jonathan at funk45
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Does anyone know if there's a term for words which sound a bit rude in other languages?
Our dry-cleaner uses a chemical called Dowper. Where I grew up dowp is a (not particularly rude) word for bum (British English anatomical sense).
Maybe we could introduce dowper as a technical term.
Another query: does anyone know what you call a negative form like disgruntled which doesn't have a corresponding positive form?
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other languages is impressed by my beautifully tidy linguistics desk
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Article about the investigation into the decline of sparrows and starlings in today's Independent.
It's an interesting report, and another good topic for teaching about research projects. I wonder, though, about the journalistic decisions which put a headline here (front page of print version) saying that Scientists blame cats for decline of sparrows while the headline here (on page 13 of the print version) says that Cats, cars, and cleaner streets lead to the fall of a once-common bird.
It seems that we're still not sure but think it could be a combination of factors, including cats.
Great photo of a sparrow with the inside story, btw.
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