I had one of those moments this morning when the music perfectly matches the moment. The moment was sitting doing some work in a cafe while the kids were in circus school. The music, provided by the cafe, was Trust by Low which I notice amazon listeners have given 4 stars on CD but 5 stars on vinyl.

Based on one comment on the CD, it looks like I enjoy:

a collection of acoustic ramblings, unfinished ideas, and a poorly recorded 'jam' session made in someone's bedroom on the most rudimentary recording equipment

Sound good to you?

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In Germany in the 1920's and 1930's some people's idea of fun was riding rocket propelled bicycles

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Woke up early this morning to make sure Apoa finished the homework that was due today (getting more and more tempted every day to 'throw it on the fire and take the car downtown') and really didn't feel in the mood to go in and teach all day. Wednesdays involve two three hour sessions with an hour for lunch in the middle. But I had such a good time in the classroom that I hereby take it all back.

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I'm becoming strangely interested in spam. Not just because some of them are a bit like avant garde poetry but also because of the interesting subject lines. I just got one with the subject 'who do u want to win Wilfred?' which is spookily similar to an example we've been looking at in class. I deleted it and then recovered it cos I suddenly thought it might be from a student.

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Just been reading about Linguistic Human Rights at Peter Patrick's homepage. There's a link to a pdf file with guidelines for using language analysis in asylum cases as a way of trying to determine someone's national origin. I think one aim of the guidelines is to try to avoid too much weight being put on this kind of evidence.

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Peter sent me this interesting election data

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Went to pick up the kids from their sleepover this morning. When I arrived, Anne said they'd just given birth to a baby on The Sims, '9 seconds from conception to birth!' By the time I got upstairs, social workers had arrived and taken the baby away cos the grownups had all gone to work and left the baby home alone.

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How I live Now is a really good book but I'm a bit unsure about it being an 'adult crossover' book and winning the Guardian Children's Fiction Prize. Apoa got bored when Daisy started talking about being sexually obsessed with her cousin. Maybe she's just too young? Meanwhile, Mean Girls is really hitting the spot for Apoa and Kiloh.

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Language Log - always accompanied by the qualifier

Enjoyed Geoff Pullum's post about sloppy use of linguistic evidence. He writes:

The bottom line: people who want to be taken seriously should exercise as much care with their linguistic evidence when making a point about the use of language as they do (or should) with their claims about financial evidence when talking about economics, or psephological evidence when talking about electoral politics, or seismological evidence when talking about earthquakes.

At the same time he agrees with Mark Bauerlein's general argument that there are practically no academics in the states whose politics isn't to the left of John Kerry's and that this is a bad thing.

I wonder how this country compares with the states on this. I know that academia here is broadly made up of 'lefties' (I'm not sure I'm happy with that term but you kind of know what I mean) but I do come across academics who noone would call lefties every now and then. Pullum and Bauerlein make it sound like that would be very unlikely over there.

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Kiloh was telling us that her tutor says she has a lot of physical energy and that it will be great if she can convert some of it into mental energy to help her with maths and stuff. As she told us, she was waving her arms around like crazy and jumping up and down.

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I never explicitly listened to them at the time but got curious now, partly under the influence of the white stripes. I'm surprised by two things:

1. they're very folky while I'd only really known that they were bluesy (and 'rawk'-y of course)
2. I was listening to them at the time! As I listen, I'm transported back not just to school corridors where spotty youths in cowboy boots wouldn't be seen without a zeppelin album under their arm, but also to various venues which they must have been soundtracking unbeknownst to me. Parties, discos and, most strongly, a certain psychedelic 'quiet room' (this was pre-chill-outs) where you could leave off the dancing and do some serious sitting, drinking and smoking. I can smell the candles and lava lamps right now. (Who needs madeleines?)

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Came into work yesterday morning to find the burglar alarm flashing and beeping a warning. I investigated and found there was a river flowing through the bottom of the building which meant the power had to be turned off (which upset the burglar alarm)

You never want to be in a building full of academics who have been severed from their emails.

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Just pressed 'send' and so finished one of the many tasks that have been sitting on the desk for a while now making me feel guilty. I started the day by passing guilt on to somebody else and received a few gentle nudges from others during the day. If our guilt modules atrophied, I don't think academia could continue to function.

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I heard a student today saying:

'you hand it in and then they rip it apart, and that's how you learn'

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Not what you expect to hear when you finally get through to a person on a ticket booking line.

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We had a lot of kids round on Halloween for some mass trick-or-treating. Even when we split them up, the groups were too big. As we were strolling between houses, JessieL asked me 'what's this linguisty jobbie Apoa's been telling me about?'

She was referring to the utterance 'Everybody doesn't like chocolate'. My students find it hard to believe that for some speakers it can mean 'not everybody likes chocolate' as well as 'nobody likes chocolate' (I've got a feeling I agreed with them once - maybe I've been contaminated by linguists). I promised I'd ask a few more folk.

At breakfast, we found 3 out of 4 people accepted both senses. Apoa was the odd one out and just found it weird. JessieL was incredibly articulate as she explained her opinion to Apoa:

'Technically, like if you're talking proper and everything, it just means that every single person doesn't like chocolate. But I can see that some people might say it sometimes and mean that not everybody likes it.'

It's a good illustration of the problems of investigating competence when all of your evidence has to be based on performance data (at least that's what I tell the students).

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I'm really pleased that Robbie has got a new job. It's in Oxford and is part-time, 3 days a week. Another artist told me that she does 2 days a week and that you should never take on more than that if you want to do your own work, but Robbie thinks it will work so we'll see. I think it's really important that Robbie gets a chance to work seriously on his art, like when the main concern of the literary establishment was to 'get Mr. Eliot out of the bank'. (Where did I read about that?)

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Well, there's been plenty to blog about recently but no time to do it. When lots of 'real' people and things are waiting for you to do stuff it's hard to justify sitting here typing for virtual entities.

But I've just been woken up on the point of bedtime by the sound of someone being beaten up outside and have been standing in the cold talking to the victim, the cops and a few other witnesses. The police radio was talking about a 'crack address' here but it sounded from what the others said more like he had got pissed and been beaten up by somebody he knew on his way home. Anyway, since I'm not sleepy any more, I'll add a message or two before I get dozy again.

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