Read this following the story about 3 A's no longer being enough for uni. There's definitely something weird about uni entrance for some courses now. It almost seems now that seventeen year olds need to have already completed a career in medicine to convince medical schools they can start training.
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This is footage of the Cramps' legendary (amongst a few earthlings, at least) gig in a mental hospital in Napa. It was funny to follow Fodor's discussion of the relationship between the internal and the external by reading about the death of Lux Interior.
I enjoyed this post about the 'Twisted Elvis from hell' which begins:
It's hard to think of Lux Interior as dead, despite what reports say. Then again, it was always hard to think of him as alive
and suggests that:
Lux actually wore his interior on the outside
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About a year ago, Erica gave me a free subscription to the London Review of Books so now I regularly feel guilty about hardly ever reading it. Every now and then, though, it has some must-reads. The new one has a piece by Jerry Fodor advertised on the cover as 'does my iPhone think?' It's a review of Andy Clark's book Supersizing the Mind and it turns out it's really about whether his iPhone is part of his mind (is there a principled difference between consulting your iPhone for information and consulting your memory?)
It's a great article and I think it shows quite clearly that Clark is wrong and there is a difference between my mind and my iPhone (or there would be if I had one).
Linguistically, its got classic Fodor style with jokes about how much philosophers get paid, two uses of 'begging the question' in the old-fashioned 'proper' sense (presupposing the answer to a question rather than just raising it), a nice explanation of the problem with slippery slope arguments, applied in passing to the question of whether abortion is homicide.
Apoa came and sat beside me while I was reading it so I started to explain it to her. Her brain quickly exploded but she also realised right away that she was on Fodor's side.
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Sorting some downloadables for you:
'Blazing a Trail' - festschrift paper on intonation and relevance theory
PALA 2008 presentation - talk on inference and stylistics, looking at a Chekhov story
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Kiloh doesn't understand why I think this is so funny B-))))))
Dug was having a go at me yesterday for wearing fancy skintight clothes on my bike (I could swear I wear baggy jeans and a jumper but anyway). I'm guessing he'd enjoy this piece by Baxter on Rapha's 'not hardcore' attitude to cycling.
I also got interested in the procedural disjunction in the middle (how's that for posing? ;-)
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Kiloh was really looking forward to the Pigeon Detectives gig on Saturday and had paid 25 of her pounds for the ticket. She was ill on Friday so stayed in bed most of Saturday and cancelled her cinema outing in the afternoon. She was perky on her way to the gig but then felt worse again. After the support band she was so ill she had to go home. She walked the whole way (around 45 minutes' walk) as busses kept not coming, pausing to puke every now and then and putting her head down and walking on when accosted near the park. She borrowed a phone to tell me she was leaving the gig and called when she got home to let me know she was safely back and off to bed. She's off school today. I hope she gets to see them soon and doesn't have the beginnings of a 'jinx band' as seemed to be happening with Daniel and the Kings of Leon for a while.
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