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John(P) just reminded me of this post from November 2002 and the 'portentous political comment' in an email I sent him a year ago:

Yes, IDS is just one big open goal gaping in front of the satirists, isn't he? I've been making reference to this story quite a bit in my pragmatics class. Great examples of someone saying something and being taken to mean something quite different, e.g. Portillo says he's not interested in being leader and being taken to mean 'make me leader'

I'd feel clever if it wasn't for the fact that every single person in the country who isn't in the Tory party took the same view.

Can't believe they're going for someone as obviously dislikeable as Howard but I agree with Michael Portillo who said that at least he'll give them some definition. But is that really how they want to be defined?

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This event was actually last week but the British Stammering Association's website is here if you're interested.

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Every football fan knows that the first real game they ever go to is always an amazing and unforgettable game. For me, it was a glorious sunny day when Aberdeen beat St. Johnstone 5-0 in the Scottish League Cup, including a hat-trick by Jimmy 'Jinky' Smith who went on to be sold to Newcastle for a then Scotland-to-England record sum of ?100,000 (I've just been checking and it might have been 3-0 in 1966, but anyway).

Last night, I finally got to take the kid (Apoa, Kiloh and Aidan) to their first game, thanks to drastically reduced ticket prices caused by the decision not to play most of the first team in the League Cup. I was worried that I'd let them down by taking them to a League Cup game against lower division opposition with not too many star players on the pitch (although who knows whether there was a future Beckham on the pitch?)

With five minutes to go, Arsenal were up 1-0 and things were petering out when Apoa needed the loo. While she was there, Rotherham equalised and we ended up with extra-time and a penalty shootout (at our end) in which everybody from each team, including the keepers, took a penalty and they had to start again before we finally won 9-8. It was half past eleven and the kids were passing out on their doorsteps when we finally got home. Pretty good value at 5 quid a ticket!

Does anyone else think it's a bad sign that he himself wants to be known as 'IDS'?

And is there a difference between a vote of confidence and a vote of no confidence?

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Apoa's chance to use my ipod came on the way home from her first selective school exam. This is a school where 1800 kids apply every year and 180 get in. There was a lot of nervousness around, most of it being felt by grownups. Most of the grownups I overheard were talking about how cool their kids had been about it all. One of them said:

I couldn't sleep last night, but she's been completely fine

Apoa too was very cool about it. We had to wait around in a crowded hall for half an hour before the exam. She just sat there calmly making a friendship bracelet while I read a bit more of my current book, which is Sidetracked by Henning Mankell. It's a really good crime novel, although there were a few moments in it where I've been wondering a bit about the translation (you know that feeling where you don't know whether the original author or the translator decided to put it like that).

Apoa did show one sign of nervousness, though. She went to the loo just before she went in and then thought she needed to go again straight away. By the time she came out of the exam, she didn't need to go any more.

The pencil she used for the exam was 3 centimetres long. I did persuade her to bring in one full-length spare but she insists that these little stubs are easier to use.

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Thanks to Ohna, I've now got one of these and am enjoying it very much. The kids are enjoying borrowing it and I enjoy checking out their listening preferences. On Sunday, Kiloh went straight for the Super Furry Animals (Rings Around The World) and yesterday Apoa went first for Brain Damage by Pink Floyd before moving on to the White Stripes. The White Stripes are really big in the primary schools of North London and Seven Nation Army will be featuring in Apoa and Kiloh's next school orchestra performance.

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Another message to LINGUIST gives some more links to stories in the Omaha World Herald about the judge who told a father not to 'speak hispanic' to his daughter (he's stepped down now). The links are here, here, here and here. The original article is here

The person who sent the post comments:

...I'm also impressed that Judge Reagan's office is returning calls about his ruling forbidding a father to speak Spanish to his child...It sounds like Judge Reagan has been getting quite a lot of flak on the ruling. Some community groups have requested to meet with the judge, and others are taking the opportunity to do a little public education on bilingualism. So maybe some good will come of this in the end

LINGUIST List: Vol-14-2859

He writes:

Wow! We just won one! That's so unusual I thought I'd tell you about it:

When you are lucky enough to live in a good place, you would like to keep it that way. Developers, however, make their money by building new things - not by protecting the old. And they make a lot of money doing it, so they tend to be much more persistent than your average resident/protester. In this part of the world, if the building project doesn't 'fit in' (and most don't) The Town Council gets first vote - and in this case they refuse it. So it moves up the planning ladder to The District Council - who also refuse it. The Developer (who wasn't expecting anything else) now takes the last and most expensive step - he appeals to The Department of The Environment. Now that's a wonderful title ('Environment and all..') but what it really means is - John Prescott! - who, in his office of Deputy Prime Minister is in total control of all local government (stop and think about that for a moment). Now, continuing the amazing magic trick of our Labour Government being more Conservative than ever the old Conservatives would have dared, John Prescott has decided that if it is a building application, it should not only be approved, it should be encouraged. So, appeals, though costly to the applicant, mostly lead him to the approval he was seeking. I have very few arms to fight this. But in this case, I was able to get the hearing moved to our local Town Hall rather than the Inspectors Offices miles away. Some judiciously planted local Press stories generated a large public turnout (40+ ain't much to you, but for a planning meeting here, that's a crowd!) The Building plans (large block of flats on coast) had been discussed to death but by forcing them to look at the plot and not just the building I was able to show that they intended to tarmac the garden completely and provide parking for twelve cars - which would change completely the street scene from the small town treescape it is into an urban parking lot. I thought we had lost it. But just this week I got the notification - the appeal (against our refusal to allow building) was dismissed! Jubilation in Budleigh Salterton!! But to paraphrase The Governor of California: 'The builder will be back'. Yes he will, but his next bid will be more in keeping with this funny town.

Cheers! Jed

I enjoyed receiving an email just now from James R. Fitzgerald, Supervisory Special Agent, Federal Bureau of Investigation. to let me know that the FBI internship programme has now been expanded to include linguistics graduates as potential interns. The message was sent to the Forensic Linguistics mailing list and forwarded on to a different list which I'm on. The first sentence of the email was 'Some of the List members are familiar with me'. I enjoyed both the ambiguity and the echoes of Blur's 'We've Got A File On You' which I'd just been listening to and which had been reminding me of Gilbert and Sullivan's song in the Mikado, 'I've Got A Little List', as well as that joke about ex-Stasi employees getting jobs as taxi-drivers after the Berlin Wall came down (the one about them being great taxi drivers because they 'know where you live')

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The judge was right: 587

The judge was wrong: 697

Undecided: 45

No opinion: 31

LINGUIST readers were shocked the other day to hear about a judge in Nebraska who had apparently told a father not to 'speak Hispanic' to his daughter or risk losing his visitation rights. Apparently, he had said 'it's hard enough to learn English, you know'.

Anyway, here's what happened when another linguist phoned the judge to protest:

I was so alarmed after reading the article mentioned yesterday on linguist list (Linguist 14.2777) that I googled the judge's name to get his address/phone number and then I called and left a long message saying that the ruling was harmful and ill-informed and went on to say why this was so, and who I was etc.

To my surprise, I got a call from Judge Reagan's secretary this morning, responding to my message of last night. She said she has been getting a lot of responses like mine and she wanted me to know that both sides are not coming out in the press and that in the courtroom the judge had said that he is for bilingualism and wishes he were bilingual himself. She said that the issue is that the father was in jail for the first 5 years of his daughter's life and the girl doesn't know him and he wants to speak only Spanish with her and she doesn't understand any Spanish. I told her that linguistically there is nothing wrong with being immersed in a language at age 5 and in fact that would be a better way for her to become bilingual than the 'this is a carro, that is a mochila' method, but that it sounds like the real issue is that she didn't know her father until now and that her current discomfort with her father seems magnified (to her, her mother, the judge) with the additional linguistic difference. So, I still don't think that was the right ruling, and I don't know about the whole 'speaking Hispanic' thing, but I sure was impressed that someone actually called me back.

The Omaha World Herald is now running an online vote asking whether the judge was right. You can find a link to the story near the voting buttons at the bottom of the page.

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The guy on the bike wasn't injured at all, by the way. It looked like his brakes weren't working but he managed to slow down enough to get onto the pavement, despite the fact that another cyclist who'd just taken refuge there was in his way.

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Being a Hayward Explorer got me an invite to a breakfast reception plus a tour of Saved this morning, which was coolissimo. A cup of calm, a mini-muffin, a danish, a short guided tour, a free audioguide, a rokeby venus poster, and getting to see the exhibition before anyone else with only around 40 people in the gallery. Highlights included a letter Mary Queen of Scots wrote the night before she was executed, the burghers of calais on the terrace, some golden treasure from a spanish armada boat, the only spherical astrolabe still in existence, and loads of things.

On the way there, I saw a man nearly die by driving into the side of a lorry who was turning left (the most common cause of death for cyclists in London) just before reading a stencil telling me I was travelling over the spot where a bicycle messenger was recently killed and then being terrified by a car who was passing me as I was about to pass a stationary bus. On the way back another driver shouted at me as he passed me, I think because I wasn't close enough to the kerb for his liking. It's still better than the tube, though.

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Thanks to UNISON being on strike in Haringey yesterday, I finally managed to take the kids to see Spirited Away.

It really is a fantastic movie. When it ends and you come back to the beginning, it seems like the beginning was a long time ago and that an awful lot has happened since then.

I didn't think the kids would enjoy subtitles so we went to the Coronet in Notting Hill, which was nicely nostalgic (even though it's changed a bit since our day, including no longer allowing people to smoke) only to discover that Time Out had made a mistake and it was subtitled after all. I'm glad because I now know that subtitles are no problem for them and also because the word is that the dubbed version is a bit dodgy, for example translating what should be 'sorceress' as 'witch' and what should be 'gods' as 'spirits'. I have no way of knowing whether that's right but I prefer the subtitled words anyway.

It was also interesting introducing the kids to the concept 'rush hour' when we took the tube home.

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Holes is a fantastic book that we all read recently and so we were excited to hear it was being made into a movie

Yesterday, we went to a special preview screening at the Phoenix, which was a charity event to raise money for new seats. It was great fun as loads of people squeezed in for free food and lucky dips and stuff before the film. Probably the most exciting thing for the kids was that Dick N Dom were there with a little bit of bogies.

The film was good but there were a couple of creaky bits in the conversion from book to film. We wondered what it would be like for people who hadn't read the book.

We had a problem on the way home when Ohna's tyre broke (yes, it could be described as a hole), so we had to ask Justin to help out with his Hiace. We're still resisting buying a new car, though.

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Went to see Kill Bill last night and it was lots of fun, partly because there was such a huge crowd (largely male and twenty-to-thirty-something) crammed together on the way in but mainly because it's an incredibly impressive movie. There's been a lot of talk about all the other movies it alludes to but for some reason nobody has mentioned Itchy and Scratchy which is by far the most obvious influence.

The plot is simple and 'a roaring rampage of revenge' covers it pretty well (Lawrence confirmed that this will be mentioned in at least one Hamlet seminar in the near future) but I don't agree with David Thomson who suggests that in this film Tarantino decided to 'ignore character and conversation'. There's not much conversation but there are real characters, even though they're the kind you get in action movies, and it's very skilful in helping you to get to know them quickly. But it is the 'other stuff' that's the most obvious, including another great soundtrack and some amazing editing.

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This could be good. I really enjoyed the book, even though it was kind of incoherent, with a lot of repetitions and things. It seemed like he'd been interviewed and then the bits had been put together quite quickly. But I did think his story was interesting. I guess it all depends on what they do with it...

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Went to see David Blaine with Kim while she was here. She said she had promised Jonathan she'd have a look. I don't think it's as stupid as most people do. I mean, everyone's talking about him, aren't they? I'm sure that's his main aim. And it was slightly interesting to stand there looking up from beneath the above the below.

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Well, I really could have done without having to spend two hours (and a load of dosh) replacing my bike saddle today after some tea leaves half inched it. Funnily enough, this happened outside the Barbican where I met someone last week who'd just had his bike nicked. I guess everywhere is equally dodgy in London but maybe that bit of pavement is made more dodgy because there aren't many pedestrians there.

Enjoyed Mike's show on Wednesday and had a nice time with Kim and Mike and Gerry then and yesterday, exploring family and other pasts and presents. Being a kid in Kintore feels like a really long time ago now. Meanwhile Bessie and Ted are in Blackpool having a romantic holiday to celebrate the anniversary of their first wedding, which was 60 years ago next week. I can't imagine what it feels like to look back that far over all the things that have happened in between.

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If you're interested, the full text of Blair's speech is here

I enjoyed The Deal. I think my favourite bit was when Blair told Brown to say hello to Patsy Palmer (well, I think that's who they meant) on his way out of Granita and when they showed us the real Blair and Brown together right at the end.

I do think Blair's performance yesterday was brilliant as a performance and I do think there was some substance there, but not about actual policies or decisions or anything. What gets my goat, though, is when you hear him talking about the Iraq thing and constantly focusing on whether it would have been OK if they had done nothing at all about Iraq (he says 'we', of course but that word sticks in my throat). Surely everyone can see that there were more than two options available? There are surely a lot of people who think something should have been done but not the things that they have done. Nearly all of the members of the UN, for example?

The thing I always remember is that Blair stated quite clearly that he wouldn't support Bush if there wasn't a new UN resolution and then changed his mind when it became clear there wouldn't be one. And nearly everybody must see that there was a huge amount of deceit and dishonesty when he was trying to persuade people to support the war. I think he might survive, though. I'm not sure that people care too much about honesty when it comes to politics. I bet Dirty Den would have a fair chance of getting elected if he stood. (Arnie and Dirty Den - now that would be a special relationship.)

Apparently, when some Hollywood producer was told that Reagan was standing for president, he replied:

No, no. Jimmy Stewart for president. Reagan for the best friend.

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Well, I had to take the bus again to go and collect my bike and it was even worse. 40 minutes to get from one end of Upper Street to the other. How many million people are being made miserable like this everyday? I'm glad I've got my bike back.

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