Useless info

The top most played songs from iTunes on my desktop as of this moment:
1. Fokofpolisiekar, Tevrede
2. Fokofpolisiekar, Hemel op die platteland
3. Krauka, Sigurd
4. Michel Fugain, Une belle histoire
5. Ramses Shaffy, Shaffycantate
6. Fokofpolisiekar, Fokofpolisiekar
7. Fomins & Kleins, Dziesma par laimi
8. NOX, Forogj világ
9. Boudewijn de Groot, De reiziger
10. Enekk, Rakiya

And on my laptop:
1. Luca Dirisio, Calma e sangue freddo
2. Sinsemilia, Tout le bonheur du monde
3. Laïs, Klaas
4. Lùnapop, Zapping
Multi-way tie for 5, so it ends here :)

Oops...

And thus went two weeks without an update. Summarizing the past weeks in a couple of lines is a hard task, but I will try anyway: ‘Work, dancing, Freshers’ Weekend, more work, more dancing, sore feet, more dancing, more work, not enough sleep, more work and more dancing.’ See, it wasn’t that difficult.

Language ecology
Have been focusing on language ecology at work the past week. Coincidentally the Linguistics Circle last week was by Mark Garner, who was talking about exactly that. It seems a good idea to study language in its context and to study the interactions between language, speaker and speech community. Whether we need to call language an organism, a species or an ecosystem, I am quite indifferent.

Also found out that ecolinguistics can mean ‘ecology of language’ but also ‘language of ecology’. Which I find extremely boring but MG thinks it’s interesting. Our language classifies oil, water, air, energy etc. as mass nouns, thereby giving the signal that they are unlimited resources. So what does Greenpeace want us to do? Make them quantifiable nouns? Tsk.

Sorbian
I finally got around to sending an e-mail to the Sorbian Institute in Cottbus. It’s been eleven years since I dropped German in high school and I was surprised how well I managed to still write in German. With a bit of help from Google to decide on the gender of nouns and the appropriateness of constructions. Now here’s hoping that Herr Professor Doktor Dietrich Scholze-Šołta and Frau Doktor Sonja Wölkowa write back.

Fire!
MG had made bean soup and haloumi for dinner. Haloumi is some weird kind of squeaky cheese that you fry. Frying occasionally sets of the fire alarm here, which really annoys us but at least we know that it works.

So here we were sitting enjoying our soup and haloumi, when suddenly two fire engines come racing into the estate. Oh shit, would they have been alarmed by our fire alarm and are we going to have to pay for a false alarm? They didn’t come last time the bloody thing went off... But no, apparently there was a real fire in Block 2. Fortunately MG is very curious so I don’t have to give into my curiosity...

Wet

I do not particularly like this weather. There comes a point where water from the air stops being refreshing. I am cold and wet. I shall take a shower. Then I’ll still be wet, but at least I’ll be warmer.

Cèilidh

T.O. is back in town and to celebrate, a group from New Scotland went to a cèilidh in Teviot yesterday evening, organized by the Hillwalking Club. As M.G. and I arrived at Teviot, G.M. and C.L. were standing outside arguing with the security people. Teviot seems to have introduced a whole set of new rules that is to make the place ‘safer’, but in effect they only make the security people more annoying. They wouldn’t let G.M. in because he didn’t have photo ID on him. G.M. managed to talk his way in in the end, though.

When finally upstairs, the cèilidh had already started. Our first dance was an interesting rendition of the Flying Scotsman, or as the band seemed to call it, Flying Scotsmince. Some nedette managed to spill N.W.’s beer over N.W.’s jacket, and the floor, and I slipped on the wet floor but amazingly got up straight away and danced on. N.W. was well pissed-off with the poor girl. Another nice experience with Teviot, as they had also tried to confiscate our stuff on Thursday because the pile was in the wrong place. Apparently.

The band was, well, interesting. They seemed to have two tempos: excruciatingly slow and ridiculously fast. Some of their reels were well suitable to do strathspeys to (quite slow strathspeys too), but their Orcadian Strip the Willow was painfully fast. J.W. and I managed to do skip-change and turn people to the music until about 4/5 through the line and were dead afterwards.

The Cumberland Square Eight was nice, although I nearly lost hold of J.W. (because T.T. had his arm right in the middle rather than at the top of her back, so there was no room for my arm anymore). The Eightsome Reel was also very good. A pity that T.T. didn’t realize that his two goals of a) doing fancy things in the Eightsome Reel and b) dancing with female numpties from the audience don’t quite mix. Fortunately M.G. jumped in at times to help the poor girl through the dance.

New Scotland people asked the band throughout to play a bit faster, but they never did. After the cèilidh, T.T. and M.G. went to talk to the band. ‘You need to realize that actual human beings are dancing to your music. You couldn’t dance to this music, this was crap,’ is a rather factual quote. The band didn’t seem to care: we were the first ones ever to complain.

I guess they only play for the RSCDS then.

Confusing

The paperbank on Gladstone Terrace has two stickers on it. The one in the top left hand corner says what you can and cannot chuck in. It says «No Yellow Pages». The one in the top right hand corner says «Recycle your Yellow Pages here!».

Right.

Save Piglet!

The British eh... ‘newspaper’ (for lack of a better word), The Sun, reports that Piglet has been banned from a council office in the Midlands, because a muslim employee complained that pig-related items were offensive to his religion. So the Winnie-the-Pooh calendar with a Piglet picture had to go. Aren’t we taking things a bit too far here, people?!

On a related note, my cousin R.B. sent me an embroidered birthday gift (couple of months late, but hey...) of Eeyore, Pooh, Piglet and Tigger. They’re all blue, so either it’s in Eeyore-vision, or it was very cold on the flight here. Thanks R.!

En deze week in deze week de week die is geweest

A ridiculously busy week in which updates have hardly been possible. So today will feature one big mega-update in which I will attempt to remember what actually happened. In retrospect, it seems like I’ve been spending quite a bit of time doing dancing stuff. In fact, I’ve been doing dancing stuff seven evenings in a row, with today the first night off!

Tuesday evening: dancing
Country basics turned out not to be as massively busy as step. I think we had about 15 new people, and maybe some 20 existing members who were there to help the newbies out. So in total that makes 35, which is more than step but not as many as we expected. N.W. did a good job standing in for B.W. Afterwards he said he thought he was rambling on a bit too much but I didn’t see any problems and I think the class went well.

Towards the end of country basics I spotted L.G., the new dem teacher, standing outside the room, so I welcomed her in and introduced her to R.K., L.F. and J.F. Her class was good, although it was clear she was sussing us out and adjusting to us. Her class wasn’t as techniquey as R.K. had liked, but she did do some technique implicitly, and for a getting-to-know-us class you can’t really plan to do much technique anyway.

Wednesday morning: D.W.
Wednesday morning I had a meeting with D.W., who was my unofficial third supervisor last year. She has arranged for me to speak at a conference in Shetland in May, so we had planned to discuss a bit about what I was going to say there. But D.W. had another surprise for me: the journal Northern Studies, which my first supervisor from last year A.K. is chief editor for, is having an essay writing competition, and D.W. had thought it was a good idea if I would enter. The deadline was 30 September (Friday) but I could get a couple of weeks’ extension because writing a prize-winning essay in two days is, well, slightly unfeasible.

Wednesday afternoon: Research group
Wednesday at three was the first meeting of the Language in Context research group. The only research group that is remotely relevant to what I’m doing, so it seems. W.B. and M.W. went as well, so our office was very well represented. It was just an introductory meeting trying to find out who could do a presentation when, and about what. I got myself appointed co-convenor, or whatever the job title is, which means that I can do mailing list maintenance and get to update the website. I’ll be doing a dry-run of the Shetland paper somewhere in the second semester.

Random observation: V.P. is pretty cute.

Wednesday evening: Dunedin
The research group and a wee chat with W.B. and M.W. afterwards took a bit longer than anticipated, and there was no time for dinner to be able to make it to J.H.’s technique class at Dunedin. I wasn’t particularly interested in the class anyway: New Scotland is for classes, Dunedin is for social dancing. That seems like a good division. So the social dancing was pretty good. I don’t remember all the dances or all the partners. I know we did Midnight oil (with the girl I think is M.G., but I thought M.G. was in Cork so that doesn’t really add up...) and Irish rover. I thought I did Irish rover with C.B. and it was a good dance that I wanted to have put on the Beginners’ Dance program – but checking the Green Book it wasn’t the Irish rover I did with C.B.

Pub with the Dunedin crowd was nice. Some interesting gossip from D. & I.L., but mainly I was doing New Scotland gossip with the other NS’ers. Got a lift home from J.S., which was nice.

Thursday day: work
I started writing my potentially prize-winning essay on Thursday, alternating with preparing for an EL1 lecture on English phonology. How am I going to teach English phonology if I have no idea what I’m doing? The lecture was rather comprehensible though, which was a good thing for my confidence.

Thursday evening: ISC and dancing
The weekly tea and coffee afternoons at the ISC still need a bit of getting used to. I just don’t know many people there yet. Some of them seem to know me though, which is kind of weird. I felt a bit lost anyway, but I had to stay to the end cause I was going to beginners’ highland which is in the Chaplaincy so there would be no point in going back home from George Square campus and back again.

Highland was good. I felt a bit lost there as well. It was a beginners class but I kind of knew the stuff already from having done it in country dances and at Bob dems and the like, so I was drifting somewhere in the middle. I’m sure S.A. is going to make it more difficult soon and I will feel like a true beginner.

Beginners’ country was rather packed. I did help a bit where needed but I also took a rest after the highland cause especially my toes did not really want to co-operate anymore. I called the Dunedin Festival Dance at Social, which was semi-disastrous but everyone seemed to get through it in the end. Wild geese is actually quite fun if you do it socially instead of for a dem.

Friday day: lecture and tutorial
The Friday lecture was even easier than the Thursday one. We (or: they?) slowly seem to be going on from the ‘how your speech organs work’ to ‘how language works’ which I find infinitely more interesting. I saw M.O. just before the class. She is now a fresher doing EL1, with a matric number starting with 93... She’s in L.C.’s tutorial who finds her an interesting person...

My tutorial got off to a slow start but there were a couple of keenies so we got the discussion going and we only just managed to get everything done in time. Now I know what a tutorial is like I can go to next week’s a bit better prepared. Observations from the tutorial: people seem to find it normal that someone called Monica goes by the name of Siobhan; and April needs to make more work of the concept of the language having primacy over nonsensical English spelling rules.

Friday evening: committee meeting
Read the minutes which will appear here at some point... R.K. and A.I.’s way of dealing with last week events shows that they really did not understand what the problem was. T.T. seemed very pissed off at this, but I think we’re just letting the matter rest. The anticipated call from H.S., enquiring whether we still needed her, came earlier than expected. And we did say we needed her.

We will be clearing out the McEwan Hall cupboard on Wednesday afternoon. Then we will discover whether New Scotland still has that half mile of clingfilm.