Nicked from Jen and brought to you by the power of boredom.
List the towns or cities where you spent at least a night away from home during 2007. Mark with a star if you had multiple non-consecutive stays.In alphabetical order:
Commas
A while ago I had a discussion with M. about the copy-editing skills of the Scotsman editors. They are quite happy to fiddle with her column, and they appear to have some interesting ideas about where commas go. For example, if M. would write a sentence
1. This is an interesting argument, but the conclusions are mistaken.this is likely to end up in print as
2. This is an interesting argument but, the conclusions are mistaken.We both agreed that they did it wrong, but it took a while to agree on why they were wrong and what would be right. Or rather, until we found out that we had the same ideas all along, just different ideas of how to express them.
I am sitting behind my desk (working).but
I am sitting behind my computer (typing).
I am sitting behind my piano (playing).
I am standing behind the cooker (cooking).
I am sitting in front of t' telly (watching a movie).Or at least in Dutch – ik zit achter mijn bureau, de computer, de piano; ik sta achter het fornuis, het aanrecht but ik zit voor de televisie.
I am sitting in front of the computer watching a DVD.Is it possible to say that?
Bas Haring, Voor een echt succesvol leven.
I thought Bas Haring was a philosopher, but it turns out he did Artificial Intelligence, and now he's a professor in Leiden, doing ‘public understanding of science’. I also thought Bas Haring was witty and not necessarily unpleasant to look at, and I'm fortunately still right about that.
This book For real successful living is about our ambitions, why they are what they are (and not something else), and why they are there in the first place. Why do we strive to be the best in something, the biggest, the strongest, the highest, the fastest? Well, if the winner of a race was the person who ran the 10K slowest, everyone would just stand still and there would be no winner. If you would get prestige by building a very small tower next to your house, no one would build a tower at all and everyone would have the same prestige.
Why would you need to compete in the first place, is another question, I suppose. But that's the question of natural selection and Darwinism and suchlike, which is obvious in the book when he talks about crabs and ducks and other animals. For those who subscribe to Intelligent Design, there may be no reason to compete in the first place? So stop annoying the rest of us?
The two main things to learn from this book:
Music:
I have the annoying tendency to pick up on strange things I say or hear, then make a note on it and try to figure out what's actually going on, or what's actually going wrong. I'm talking constructions here, not necessarily the content of the examples. The examples are taken from actual conversation, which does give a little insight in my life – which after all is what a blog is for...
One
From a discussion with M., when she was talking about the difficulties keeping food warm that she was going to make at a friend's house. I meant A, but I said B.
A. Put them in whatever the woman's name is's bed.I think this is just a production error, caused by a slightly too heavy NP (CP?) whatever the woman's name is. Maybe there is a limit to the size of the NP that can take a possessive 's; this NP was too big and things went wrong.
B. Put them in whatever the woman's name's bed is.
...maar daarna is NEC beter, gedurfder, meer risico gaan nemend gaan voetballenPossibly another production error, pre-empting the gaan from the main clause VP.
Q. Wat doet men als men een vallende ster ziet?Possibly a case of do support, but more likely a case of a mix up between lexical doen and dummy verb doen.
A1. Een wens.
A2. Een wens doen.
Dokter Phil moet dood.This reminded me of the Scots The dishes need done, but it's not X needs V'ed, but X needs A, meaning X needs ?(to be) made A.
In the cd shop today, upon purchasing (among other things) the cd Canto Ostinato – over an hour of very repetitive contemporary classical music, which is very entrancing – I had the following conversation with the person behind the sales counter:
Him: Ja, die is net onlangs opnieuw uitgebracht.Another one for the collection of English things I say in Dutch.
Me: O, is-tie?
After a previous post about fluid notions of nationality in professional cycling, here's another example from (inter)national top sport. The television commentary on Lornah Kiplagat's world championship cross-country running, earlier this year in Mombasa, Kenya:
Kiplagat heeft het waargemaakt in eigen land. Wereldkampioene op de lange cross. Wat een fantastische prestatie van deze Nederlandse.Kiplagat did not become (Dutch) sportswoman of the year 2007.
Because I am foreseeing lots of marking this week, I'm not really starting any big projects. This is the perfect time to tidy my desk, put stuff in the appropriate files (or the waste-paper bin) and generally get a bit more organized.
And then I find a piece of paper which I think – from the notes on it – dates from about September 2006. On the note is a mysterious sequence of abbreviations:
BSI have no idea what I meant by this. I'm chucking out the note because it's now useless. If I ever get a brainwave and think, ‘I wrote down ten abbreviations on a piece of paper that had to do with this’, this blog post will have saved them for posterity...
IS
CB
DC
DPlay
BH
IH
BC
IC
C.
There is more to tell, which I will do over the next week when I do not foresee a whole load of useful work to be done apart from marking EL1 exams, from which I will probably take a couple of breaks which I can then use for blogging. In the mean time, another gem from Computing Services, stressing once again that unavailability of systems is their primary goal:
Problem with access to WebCT - MALTSUsers being able to log on to WebCT. Well, we can't have that, surely...
We are experiencing problems with users being able to log into WebCT at present. We are investigating and will rectify the problem as soon as possible.
This morning I thought I'd check whether any of my first years had posted any panicky questions to the forum on WebCT. Unfortunately, the MyEd portal was down, with some services working, and others (among them WebCT) not. They provided a link to the homepage of the Information Services Applications Division, where I could find more information.
Not really.
But they did have a news article:
Infrastructure unplanned availability remains above 99.5% generally.Surely what they mean is that unplanned unavailability remains below 0.5% (or rather 0.1%) generally, but got themselves in a bit of a knot when they tried to give a positive twist to the story. Now it seems like the availability of IT services at the university is a complete fluke, and that Computing Services had nothing to do with it. At least they never planned for this to happen. Of course, with the Computing Services' track record, this is entirely possible.
All services other than eFinancials (which experienced a weekend outage in October) are showing greater than 99.9% availability so far this year.
The Bank of Scotland (one of three banks in Scotland that issue paper money) issued a new series of banknotes on 17 September, and it wasn't until last Thursday that I finally managed to get new money out of the cash machine.
I like them.
Most people find them very similar to the euro banknotes. This may well be because the previous series of Bank of Scotland banknotes (as well as the current series of Royal Bank of Scotland notes, Bank of England notes, and in particular Clydesdale Bank notes) looked like it was printed in Poland in 1934, and the design finally looks like it may have been done this century. Apart from British money, the only money people here know are US dollars (which look even shiter), and euros. So I think the main reason why people think the new notes look like euros is that they look modern.
The other euro-like feature is that the design is based on bridges. But whereas euro notes feature imaginary bridges that exist only in the brain of Robert Kalina, the bridges on the new Scottish notes are real. The £10 note I have features Glenfinnan Viaduct. The one major design flaw I could spot was that it does in fact say this, in what I estimate to be a 36-point font, whereas the text Ten Pounds is only in about a 14-point font. (The reverse/front has a picture of Sir Walter Scott. Here they do have Ten Pounds in 36 points, and Sir Walter Scott in approximately 6 points.)
The Glenfinnan Viaduct, by the way, is on the way to Fort William. It apparently appears in three Harry Potter movies, notably The Chamber of Secrets where there is a whole scene of the Hogwarts Express crossing the viaduct.
But comparing the £10 note to other countries' banknotes, I find them quite similar to the 8th series of Swiss banknotes, designed by Jörgen Zintzmeyer. I find these really clever, both because of the upright rather than oblong design, and because all banknotes are equally wide but incrementally taller as the denomination increases. This goes in steps of 11 mm, and exactly the top 11 mm of each banknote includes a specifically coloured bar, the denomination, and the Swiss cross. Genius.
The Swiss are planning on changing their banknotes again, but the current plans are not necessarily an improvement.
Also, with the new Bank of Scotland design, I am now preferring their banknotes over all the others, where I previously liked the Royal Bank designs best. Clydesdale designs still suck, and I can only hope they'll get their act together and introduce something new soon...
This Saturday was SUSCDF, conveniently in Edinburgh. I had been part looking forward to it – as I do to most dances on the university programme, because that means seeing all those nice people that you don't get too see very often – and part dreading it. The dread was because of the dem, which I have previously said shall not be mentioned. Much.
The dem went better than expected, and probably as well as could optimistically be expected given the choreography and the music we were supposed to do it to. Glasgow had a traditional-type dem like we normally do, Celtic did the same Variations on a Theme-type dem that they always do, and Aberdeen have now managed to get seven couples in a Schiehallion reel, with eight planned for SUSCDF 2008.
Dance-wise, I don't think I've done as many dances off a programme as I did this Saturday for a long time. I only missed the two on either side of our dem, and I sat out Purple Heather Jig, as I do not understand, comprehend, grasp nor get any colour of Heather Jig. I think we raised some eyebrows when Johann asked me to waltz with him. Apparently he's wanting to improve his waltzing as a lady. (Scary images of Little Britain happening now.) I also danced with Bobby until he managed to rip a scab off his hand and started bleeding like a pig,* so I replaced him with Andy.** And I danced with Zsofia, Anna, Jen, Heather, Liz, Jenni, Holly, Jessie, Kirsty F.,*** Fran, Kirsty F.,**** Cara, Sarah, Jenni, Erika (those five in Caddam Wood, so they don't really count), Rosie, Kirsty F. again,***** and Emma.
* In Dutch you bleed like an ox, which sounds less pejorative, if only marginally so.
** What are Celtic doing right that we aren't?
*** Originally Edinburgh, now St Andrews.
**** Originally Newcastle, now Aberdeen.
***** As ****.******
****** Not the best system, these asterisks. I may have to look into using superscript, or be all old-fashioned about it. From Robert Bringhurst's Elements of Typographic Style: "For footnotes, symbols can be used if the notes are few. (The traditional order is * † ‡ || ¶. But beyond the asterisk, dagger and double dagger, this order is not familiar to most readers, and never was.) Numbers are more transparent, and their order is much less easy to confuse." Good to know Bringhurst doesn't trust all readers not to confuse the order of numbers...
The after dance party was slightly hard work. As soon as I got there I decided that it had probably been a bad plan to go, but then inertia took over and I didn't leave until quite a while later, and I was home and in bed by 3am.
The Dunedin night that Jen and I ran together was a big success. The dances were quite manic but most people appeared to cope. Afterwards we got lots of thanks and compliments for a good programme, which was nice. The best was this old frail-looking woman who first asked me where my accent is from, and then said the programme was very nice, and that she'd also said this to 'the Jen girl'.
I don't know where my accent is from. I know where I am from, but my accent is a mutt. I have been playing with the idea of having Warren record me and put my realizations in the NeighborNet programme, to see what I come out closest to, but transcribing 110 words is a lot of work and it's not really benefiting anyone, so thus far I have been reluctant to ask.
I have now also been social convenor for New Scotland for about a month. It's quite good fun to puzzle the programmes together, and to make sure that it's not too repetitive, too difficult or too boring, to make sure that the most important dances from the most important upcoming dance programmes are covered, etc. Finding callers is maybe a bit more of a challenge, but I try to cover a couple of weeks at a time in an e-mail and I also wave the social programme around on Thursday nights and press people into calling.
This Saturday is SUSCDF. It's going to be in Edinburgh, which is conveniently close. I'm sure it's going to be a ball.
There is also a dem. We shall not talk about that. People might not survive.
The good news is that I don't have to teach discourse analysis and computer-mediated communication for at least another year. And that's assuming I'll still be here next year, and that I'll still be teaching English Language 1. If I'm not, I mightn't have to teach these things for even longer.
However, in general, Fridays are not very good days. They consist of a lot of running around. I'm teaching from 10 to 12, then there's the postgraduate lunch in Teviot (something that over a year into the project still doesn't want to take off, but we keep trying), and then there's usually a research group meeting of some description from 1 to 2. Which means that by the time I come to my office ready to actually do some work, I'm completely drained of energy, and like fuck am I going to start anything new.
Mondays, in comparison, are much better. Freshly re-energized from the weekend, I do not have teaching in the morning, and the fortnightly research group is at the sensible time of 3pm. Once you get back from that, there just is not really any time to start anything new anyway, so it's okay to just sit and answer some e-mails. So I actually quite like Mondays.
Not only Bob Geldof and his Boomtown Rats had the wrong end of the stick with their I don't like Mondays. It also appears that Fridays get a much more positive review in popular culture: I remember Friday on my mind by the Easybeats, and Friday I'm in love by the Cure. Of course this is not likely to be a representative sample of the weekday song population, but as it's a Friday afternoon, I'm really not going to research this in depth.
On average, though, this year's lot appears to be a bit more on the ball than last year's, although they may not necessarily speak a whole lot more. I'm also not sure of their ontheballness comes out of a general interest in the topic – I suspect this to be the case for some of them – or out of an obsession with high marks and wanting to know exactly what to say in an exam and how to say it, rather than wanting to understand what a phoneme actually is or what the point is of conversation analysis – I am quite sure a number of my kiddies fall into this category.
Do I know what the point is of conversation analysis? No. Do I care? Not really.
By this time last year, I had seven of my then first-years having befriended me on Facebook. One group even had a tutorial group reunion (well, the people that they could remember, anyway – and quite frankly, I had forgotten about a fair number of them as well) two weeks ago, for which I was invited as well. I had expected it to be slightly awkward, but it was actually quite good fun. This year, I have more students, but none of them have tried to befriend me on Facebook yet. There was a vague attempt in one group (the Thursday group) to have a tutorial outing, but that never got properly organized. There was mention of the Big Cheese though, so I'm not exactly sorry it came to nothing...
I'm looking forward to teaching starting again in the first week of next semester, with some interesting topics: social and geographical variation in English, and history of English. The days will be getting longer by then, so Fridays may no longer be as depressing.
Courtesy of Jen and myself tonight:
1. Minard Castle (R 8x40)
2. Campbeltown Loch (J 4x48)
3. Schiehallion (S 64 + R 64)
4. Gothenburg's Welcome (J 8x32)
5. Neidpath Castle (S 3x32)
6. Rest and Be Thankful (R 8x32)
7. The Bees of Maggieknockater (J 4x32)
8. Caddam Wood (R 5x32)
9. Bonnie Lass of Bon Accord (S 64)
10. Glens of Angus (R 4x32)
11. The Duke and Duchess of Edinburgh (R 8x40)
This bit from the Sportgeschiedenis Weblog made me smile:
In 1997 klopte de Oekraïner Andrej Tsjmil (de Moldavische Belg had op dat moment de Oekraïense nationaliteit) de Italiaanse Engelsman Maximillian Sciandri in Parijs - Tours in een sprint met twee. De Australische Nederlander Henk Vogels werd trouwens knap derde. De gemiddelde snelheid werd vastgesteld op 48,929 (!) km/u.A Ukrainian who is actually a Moldavian Belgian, an Italian Englishman and an Australian Dutchman (who at other points in his career was a Dutch Australian, to make things even more transparent). Fluent identities, or something.
Why, pray tell, did the International Olympic Committee decide to change their country code for Romania from ROM to ROU in January 2007? It doesn't make sense. The country is called România in its own language, and Romania in English, both of which would give ROM. Only French (Roumanie) would give ROU. So why change a code that makes perfect sense into something that makes less sense?
It looks ugly too.
The package of stir fry vegetables wasn't supposed to fall over and knock over the pot of yoghurt that then rolled off the worktop and made a big "thud", splashing yoghurt all over the kitchen floor and lower regions of the kitchen cupboard.
However, I don't think it was aware of that.
Myshele said it wasn't very cooperative yoghurt. This is true. It was Tesco's.
This is probably evidence of me being such a geek that I can't even help doing linguistics in my spare time. But oh well, here goes.
The ferry from Norway to the Faroes got into a spell of bad weather over the weekend. One of the propellor engines ended up above water, turned itself off in an emergency procedure, another engine gave up because it couldn't deal with the extra demand, the whole ship turned at a right angle to the direction of the waves and started tilting back and forth, oscillating between 45 degrees either side. Not nice, and I don't think I'll take a ferry across the North Atlantic any time soon.
Today, Faroese news carries a story about two Danish for whom this was their first ferry experience, and who thought the whole ordeal was unpleasant, but apparently a necessary part of the trip. (Subtext: silly Danes who've never been on a boat before!)
Tvey av ferðafólkunum við Norrönu hendan nú famøsa túrin vóru ikki serliga bangin. Tað var nevniliga fyrstu ferð tey sigldu, og tí vistu tey ikki, at tey upplivdu nakað út yvir tað vanliga.The bit in red took a while to parse. I wanted it to read "on Norröna's now famous trip", but couldn't figure out the possessive construction. Whether you use a defunct genitive or a way cooler accusative possessive construction, the possessor would typically follow the possessed NP, and that NP would not be definite (as the possessive construction itself makes it definite). The accusative one also doesn't work because it's restricted to familial relations – although it would be cool to see it spread to other relations as well...
Donsku hjúnini ætla sær at sigla niður aftur til Danmarkar."Down to Denmark" – now would that be because it's further South, or because Denmark (highest point 120 metres or so) is actually a lot lower than the Faroes (880 m)? Or actually, seeing as they still do directions with Norway as a point of reference (útnyrðingur 'north-west', landsynningur 'south-east'), might it have to do with Norway being even higher (2400 m, I think it was)?
Tey eru annars komin heim at vitja vinfólk í Føroyum.Interesting use of the word heim there. Obviously, the Faroes are not "home" to our friends, because if it were, they would most certainly have been on a boat before. They did not come home to visit friends in the Faroes, but they left home to do so. But apparently, the Faroes are "home" whichever way you look at it.
I went for a walk along the Water of Leith with Christina yesterday.
On the way to the point where we met (which was an hour's walk, and I later found out Christina had thought I would probably take a bus) I finally took a picture of the road sign that had grabbed my attention a couple of times before. I was never a real fan of rap music, but somehow this grafitti conveys a nice nostalgic feeling...
Slateford isn't the most inspiring area of Edinburgh, and it got worse the further south I walked, but sometimes there were nice views to be had. Somehow I like this railway going toward the Pentlands.
Nice autumnal colours.
Some local fauna in the Water of Leith. Spotting the heron would be a lot easier if I had had a proper camera on me, but as I only remembered that I should have taken it when I was already more than ten minutes from home, I decided the camera on my phone would do. 
Really, there was nowhere else to go.
Or was there? We just soldiered on anyway.
The Edinburgh Street Naming Committee does not discriminate.
Some more local fauna.
After that it was Apfelstrudel and vanilla ice cream at Christina's flat, and there was much tiredness.
