Why I missed my tutorial

Paraphrasing:

Sorry, but I had to do a week's military service in South Korea.

The disturbing thing is that it's true.

More bookblog

This one I forgot last time, mainly because I'd lend it to JF, so it wasn't on my bookshelf to remind me of its brilliant randomness:

• The Book of Dave by Will Self. I really only knew Self from his appearances on Shooting Stars (uvavu, uranu, ulrikakakakakakakaka!). His persona there was someone utterly devoid of human emotion, with a heavily sarcastic view of the world and an ego that would fill several continents. I think I was right; or at least, this book shows that Will Self is positively certifiable. The plot: London taxi driver Dave is going through a bit of a rough patch. His loveless marriage broken up, he doesn't get to see his son, and everyone seems to want something from him. Dave then goes completely insane and writes a massive misogynistic rant addressed to his son. This involves a complete separation of the sexes after puberty. Also, his arrogance as keeper of The Knowledge (e.g., where Woodburn Place is) shines through as well. In a fit of rage he buries the book, printed on metal for some odd reason, in his ex-wife's backyard. Centuries later, people find it and base a new religion on it. Suppressive new world order, that sort of thing. At times the book is a bit difficult to plough through, but it is a very challenging and mind-engaging read. (I still think Will Self should be locked up, for his own safety if not for ours. He can still appear on t'telly though.)

Then two of the recently-bought ones:

• Adrian Mole and the weapons of mass destruction by Sue Townsend. This reads as a diary, a year in the life of Adrian Mole. It is not a very interesting life as such, but it's woven together by a whole string of randomness. An insane relationship that is doomed to fail, a lifestyle that he can't afford, and his struggle to get a refund for a £57 deposit for a holiday in Cyprus (which he cancelled because Tony Blair had said that Iraq could develop weapons of mass destructions that could easily reach Cyprus in 45 minutes, which obviously makes it a Dangerous Place to Be).


• A spot of bother by Mark Haddon. Wow. Nothing at all like The curious incident with the dog in the night time, but possibly even better. For one, it's not written from the perspective of an autistic kid, so it's slightly easier to relate to. There are 144 chapters, divided between four perspectives. Plot summary from the back of the book (paraphrased as I've lent the book to EM now): daughter Katie is marrying Ray, whom the family don't like. Son Jamie is not willing to bring his boyfriend to the wedding, afraid that his parents will make a scene about it. Mother Jean is cheating on her husband with one of his former work colleagues. And father George gets squished in the middle of all this, while he also finds a rather bothersome spot on his skin and decides he has skin cancer. This is only the beginning, watch it evolve. Because the 144 chapters are so short, it's very easy to think, ‘oh, just one more chapter’, so it didn't take too long to finish.

The irony

A small avalanche-slash-episode of falling rocks in Tórshavn today, at undir Bryggjubakka in the harbour. A rather unfortunate event, especially for the two cars that got slightly damaged.


Photo credit: Jens Kr. Vang, www.portal.fo

Note the green sign in the background: this is supposed to be the safe point in case of an emergency.

Oops

I went to Cameron Toll. W H Smith's has 3 for 2 on everything (yes, everything!), and Waterstone's has 3 for 2 on selected items. Today's purchases are...

• A spot of bother by Mark Haddon;


• Love over Scotland by Alexander McCall Smith;


• Salmon fishing in the Yemen by Paul Torday;


• The English by Jeremy Paxman;


• Empire by Niall Ferguson; and


• Adrian Mole and the weapons of mass destruction by Sue Townsend.
  

Reviews in due course.

I also bought a DVD: Delicatessen, which is a French movie about a butcher in France just after the war, who is keeping up with demand by killing people. Could be interesting...

Meanwhile, I finished another book – Ik mis alleen de Hema by Manon Sikkel and Marion Witter. Stories about people who emigrated from the Netherlands. Some stayed abroad, some returned. For some of them it was exactly like they expected, other people's lives took a very unexpected turn. All in all rather quite enjoyable reading, but nothing world-shocking. Also, only two of the people actually said they missed the Hema. I don't, because we've got good shops here too and I was never addicted to Hema-rookworsten anyway.

New favourite word

From yesterday's Sosialurin...

Avdottin fólk og rúsdrekkakoyring

Hóast vikuskiftið hevur verið friðaligt, hava fleiri fólk verið og sovið rúsin av sær. Eisini eru 4 fólk tikin fyri rúsdrekkakoyring.

Bæði fríggja- og leygarkvøldið var mestsum fult á støðini í Jónas Broncksgøtu. Vakthavandi greiðir frá, at tey fáa nógvar áheitanir frá fólki, sum tíðliga um morgunin finna avdottin fólk í garðinum ella í túninum hjá sær. Eisini fólk, sum eru á veg heim úr býnum og síggja fólk liggja avdottin, ringja til løgregluna at boða frá.
Umframt avdottin fólk, vóru eisini fýra dømi um rúsdrekkakoyring um vikuskiftið. Tveir førarar vórðu tiknir í Suðuroynni, ein varð tikin í miðstaðarøkinum og ein varð tikin í Eysturoynni.
Vakthavandi sigur, at allir førarar høvdu eina promillu, ið var yvir tað loyvda, og onkur kann vænta at missa koyrikortið. Blóðroyndir vórðu tiknar, og einki er tó vist fyrr enn blóðroyndirnar eru afturkomnar.

It literally means ‘fallen off’, but it is used for people who are so drunk they just fall asleep. In this case, in other people's gardens – and not just the one person either. These Scandinavians and their alcohol...

Incidentally, the police station is in Jónas Bronck Street. According to the Faroese, Bronck was a famous Faroese sailor that the Bronx in New York City is named after. This is almost certainly untrue; a Swedish sailor of the same name is more likely to have given his name to the area. But hey, if you can't have an area of New York, I suppose a street in downtown Tórshavn is a decent alternative...

Culture

It's been a while since I updated with a list of books recently read. In no particular order...

Harry Potter and the deathly hallows (J K Rowling) – There's no need to say very much about this. The end was a bit anti-climactic and dragged on for a bit longer than it really should. Things were repeated again and again, which was a little bit annoying. Yes I know this by now, you've only explained it three times before! Then again, as I was later reminded of, it is a children's book.

De brug (Geert Mak) – This was this year's free book gift in the Dutch book promotion week. Mak takes us to İstanbul, to the bridge that links the European and the Asian bits of the city. The story is about the people living and working on the bridge: coffee sellers, shoeshiners, people that sell random bits of junk, and people that steal it away from you just as quickly. People that have come from the countryside to get a better life in the city, and failed. But really it's the story of the bridge itself, of İstanbul, and of Turkey.

De magie van de eilanden (Ben Hoekendijk) – A non-live travel journal of a man doing a solo crossing of the North Sea, from the Netherlands to Fair Isle, Shetland, the Faroes, Orkney, the Farne Islands, and back. Nice because I recognize a fair bit from my own travels to Shetland and the Faroes, but at times rather annoying for technical speak (slightly too detailed on how an automatic steering installation works) or his emphasis on 'spiritual' (read: quite seriously Christian) things.

Zoektocht in Katoren (Jan Terlouw) – The sequel to that great classic, Koning van Katoren. Again we see a cumbersome adventure through the country, visiting all sorts of cities, each with their own problem which is an exaggerated version of something from Real Society (people suing each other over nothing, Health and Safety rules gone berserk, animal rights in the meat industry, etc.). I always found Koning van Katoren really clever, but the issues in this book were so obvious! Or would it have been the fact that I've grown older since reading Koning van Katoren (about 20 years, in fact), and that great classic, too, is in fact political commentary very thinly disguised?

Rottumerplaat (Jan Wolkers) – The €1 edition (heavily cut) of the 1971 diary of Jan Wolkers' stay on this uninhabited island. Wolkers is basically a bit of dirty old man but at the same time very loving to animals. Oddness. But perfect for a short train ride. Also from the €1 promotional series, Heblust by Ronald Giphart. Which therefore is completely about sex, so slightly ambivalent feelings toward that one.

Think that's probably it for now.

Cleaning Services

At Support Services we are always trying to improve the service we provide to you. To improve communication and make it easier to contact the staff when you have a problem or need assistance we have now trained all our cleaning supervisors on Outlook. If you have any issues that you wish resolved regarding cleaning or suggestings for improvement then please feel free to contact the relevant supervisor.

Trained on Outlook. Suggestions for improvement? Ehm...

I hope you find the above useful.

Yes. My life is complete now. I can e-mail the cleaning guy.

This was distributed to all the desks in all the rooms. What a waste of paper. Of course, we will now all chuck these sheets and then have to deal with angry cleaners who get hernias because the waste paper bags are so heavy.

Discourse analysis

Your discourse analysis homework du jour:

Nous informons notre aimable clientèle que tout linge emporté lui sera facturé.

Nous vous remercions de votre compréhension.

La direction

What is strange about this? And what does it mean?

Marriage

Or, why I was in Duinkerken:



The joy of ancient marriage registers. I am very indebted to Johannes van de Cnocke for at least having a legible handwriting (see above). Most of the other ministers are a lot more difficult to read.

So, when I get back to Edinburgh, I can look forward to browsing through 800+ photographs of microfilm images of the marriage registers of Duinkerken, four to six photographs per spread, of the years ending in 7 between 1647 and 1697. Supposedly, and hopefully, this will give me the same kind of information* as I got from the Shetland marriage registers, and another decent chunk of PhD dissertation. From a very superficial browsing of the data, as I was taking pictures of it, it seems like there are some interesting things going on. Yay, another couple of days well spent.

* Possibly better, as for 1647 and 1657 they also list where the people were born, which gives an excellent picture of spatial mobility and social networks at the time. Unfortunately after the French came to power in 1662, this information was no longer recorded, or alternatively, everyone was just born in Duinkerken...

** iPhoto doesn't have an invert colours option, and Adobe Illustrator doesn't save as .JPG. Does anyone know of any decent picture editing software for the Mac?

Back

We left Armbouts-Kappele this morning at 9, had a short visit to Fort Mardijk (one of the most depressing places I have ever used linguistic data from), and left Duinkerken around 9.30, to arrive in The Hague about 12.45. We then had lunch, left The Hague at 14.45 to arrive at my parents' at 19.00. That last bit usually takes two and a half hours, but it was rather busy on the roads.

Now my back hurts. Stupid uncomfortable drivers' seat...

France

I am in France. This is evident from the font on the roadsigns rather than their content. Otherwise, it could just as well have been Belgium: Zuydcoote, Ghyvelde, Spycker, Armbouts-Cappel, Hondschoote, Pitgam, Teteghem, ...

Of course, it's only historical accident that this is in fact France, and not Belgium. (And another historical accident, quite related to the previous one, that it's not the Netherlands.) And that's why I'm here. Looking at population registers in the municipal archives of Duinkerken.* The marriage registers are quite interesting, and show some nice links to Flanders, at least before 1662 when Duinkerken became French. Afterwards, not very many Flemish origins are mentioned. If this means that there weren't any, that would be very interesting...

Very bored writing everything down by hand. It takes ages, because the documents (on microfilm) are handwritten in some 17th-century secretary hand. Time to bring in the camera, whoosh through decades of marriage registers and do the painstakingly boring work once I get back to Edinburgh.**

* The French sillily write Dunkerque on the road signs.
** They also insist that this should be Édimbourg.

Signage

Possibly the most opaque Canadian traffic sign. Not entirely sure what is not allowed here. No castagnettes? (We shuddered to think of the other very obvious option and possible ways to enforce it.)


Also in Montréal. Just so you know you really have to stop.


In Athens Airport. I'm always mildly amused when I drive to a place I've never been before, and they have signs up warning me that the traffic situation has changed. So what? But this is rather quite useless too: everything's the same! Honest!


Somewhere in Mitilini. Twenty years ago, this would have landed Greece on the Axis of Evil. Now it's just quaint. Bless 'em.


In the Olympic Airways plane with the deceptive registration SX-BIG. Note that this sign was stuck on the inside of the luggage bin, and that it therefore could only be read if the information it conveyed was false.


At Heathrow. "Data or files may be lost" is not something you want to hear when you're waiting for your luggage...

Some photos from Montréal and Μιτιλήνη

The flags


The flags in Montréal tended to come in fours, with the Québec flag flanked by those of Montréal, Canada, and the United States. Why the United States? I have no idea. Greece has a lot fewer flags than Canada, in my experience at least.

The skylines


Okay, so Mitilini doesn't really have a sky-line. But I didn't have a photo of the Montréal waterfront.

The local heroes


Bonus points for those who know why these people are famous. The one on the left is one Jean Drapeau, the one on the right is Vladimir Iljitsj Lenin Ελευθέριος Βενιζέλος (Elefthérios Venizélos), whom the airport in Athens is named after. (And whose statue looks in nothing like the guy on the photo on the information board next to it.)

It's all Greek to them

As everyone knows, Greek is written with the Greek alphabet. For the historical linguist geeks among you, since the time of Ancient Greek, the voiced stops β [b], γ [g] and δ [d] have become fricatives (so [v], [γ] and [ð] respectively). But sometimes they need to write the sounds [b], [d] and [g] still. Fortunately [p], [t] and [k] have voiced allophones in certain positions, so they just pretend that these phonological contexts are there in spelling.



My first encounter with this insane system was at 4am in a bookshop at Athens Airport, where we saw a book by one Γκρέγκορι Ντέιβιντ Ρόμπερτς (Gregory David Roberts). But you get used to it, and after a while it gets less of a challenge, but still quite good fun, to decipher what the bar price lists mean by Ρεντ Μπουλ, Γλενφίντιχ or Τζόνι Γουόκερ (interestingly, with l-vocalization, but incorrectly with [ʍ]).

Ils sont fous, ces Grecs.

Lesbos (Μιτιληνη)

Melt. Sigh.

Yet the semantics of that phrase are completely different to the description of Montréal.

More later.

Montréal

Melt.
Sigh.

At the zoo

Someone told me it's all happening at the zoo. I do believe it, I do believe it's true...

I joined the small expotition to Edinburgh Zoo last Sunday. We had LG, JW, JW's sister whose name I do not know, and their friend Gordon who also goes by Percy. As one does. JW is an important person who is in possession of The Membership, which gave me an additional discount on top of the student discount. I could theoretically have saved another 50p on the entrance fee by opting out of the voluntary donation that they don't really tell you is voluntary. But I was feeling charitable. Chimpanzees need a place to live as well.

There were many animals at the zoo, although there were at least equally many that should have been there according to the signs, but empirical evidence of their existence is lacking and the only possible scientific conclusions are that they are either imaginary or abducted by aliens and sold into slavery in the Andromeda nebula. (Poor sod who bought the sloth.)

The penguins went for a walk, but they did not do tap-dance nor did they burst out into polytonic renditions of classic Motown hits. Very disappointing. They must have been the wrong species.

The Avian antics were nice but also very scary. I wouldn't want to run into a turkey vulture in a dark alley on a cold November evening. (Or anywhere/anytime else.) We saw an otter having caught a little white mouse try to eat it but when he dove under for a second an evil seagull stole it. And the second one as well. I think some form of seagull deterrent near the otter enclosure is in order. Personally I was thinking about laser-guided nuclear missiles, but LG thought that was a bit harsh.

It was nice and sunny and I had a nice time and a hotdog (although not 'the greatest hotdog in the world' as they advertised on the carton).

Homer and the hippies

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/dorset/6901543.stm

The Simpsons movie comes out next month, and to get some extra publicity, a giant outline of Homer Simpson holding a doughnut has been painted next to the Cerne Abbas giant, an age-old chalk carving of a guy with certain attributes that make it quite clear why people nowadays think it was a fertility symbol.


(image stolen from the BBC website)

But the Wessex district manager of The Pagan Federation (there is such a person) isn't at all happy with this.

"I'm amazed they got permission to do something so ridiculous. It's an area of scientific interest."

Which is why Homer was painted in the field next to the giant. No longer an area of scientific interest.

"We were hoping for some dry weather but I think I have changed my mind. We'll be doing some rain magic to bring the rain and wash it away."

As we all know, the weather is made possible in cooperation with differences in athmospheric pressure, among other things. I doubt rain magic comes into the picture. I can see how a massive Homer could be offensive to people who regard the Cerne Abbas giant as a holy site, but threatening with rain magic just draws it right back into the realm of the ridiculous. Another point not scored by the neo-pagans.

Which doesn't mean I think it's an excellent idea to paint Homer on a hill, but that's beside the point.

Gezellig naar de Krim

I just saw the most horrendous television programme ever. Take a dozen couples of old age pensioners with caravans going on a mass holiday in the Crimea, and broadcast their adventures on national television. Why, pray tell, would this ever be a good idea? I only saw about ten minutes of the programme, but they were ten minutes of constant cringing.

At the fact they bought and pre-cooked-and-then-froze all their food in the Netherlands, so that they won't have to eat any of the Ukranian food. At the fact that they complain they can't get recent Dutch newspapers in the middle of nowhere in the Ukraine. At the fact they ridicule Ukranians for not speaking English. At the sorry state of their own English which makes me want to jump off the top floor of David Hume Tower in replacive shame. At the way they made custard by shaking the ingredients in a thermos - "because we don't have a mixer" - which of course wasn't closed properly so that the Ukranian campsite was covered in yellow mush.

At the fact that these are horrible examples of proletarians who should just have taken their sorry old excuses for a caravan to the fokking Veluwe - or the Sauerland or the Belgian Ardennes, if they were feeling adventurous. But most of all at the fact that all of this is on television and there are people who actually like to watch this.

Meanwhile... we had a couple of days of good weather. I did some cycling; I'm terribly out of shape (not as bad as some of the roads though) and now have severely sunburnt legs despite the suncream. I also bought two new CDs (Crowded House and Tori Amos) and two new DVDs (Flushed away and Wallace and Gromit and the Curse of the Wererabbit), some new clothes and a new book.

Bigotry

Danny Kennedy, deputy leader of the Ulster Unionist Party on the news that the British National Party may be recruiting in Northern Ireland:

"This isn't the kind of imported hate-mongering that we want or need in Northern Ireland."
(BBC News website, 3 July 2004)

Interpretation 1: We are perfectly capable of doing our own hate-mongering, and we have enough of it already, that we don't need extra hate-mongering brought in from England. (That last bit is a bit odd for the UUP, maybe?)

Interpretation 2: They're even bigoted when it comes to the origins of their bigotry.