2003-04-04 Yup, still ten to four.

Snökaos - it's not just for Christmas!

While the short walk to Starbucks has inspired rivulets of sweat down my pallid carcass, yum yum, those crazy Swedish persons just can't accept that winter is over:

Det hastiga snöovädret drabbade först norra och mellersta delarna av landet. Enligt SMHI drog det fort sydöster ut och efter hand la det sig kring Stockholmsområdet.

The rapid snöstorm first hit the northern and central parts of the country. According to SMHI [the Swedish met office] it moved quickly south-east and gradually settled around the Stockholm area.

Guys! It's spring now, OK? I know how much the snö means to you, but the equinox has been and gone. You can have snö again in the autumn, but right now we're on Daylight Saving Time, and it's time to let it go. Be strong!

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2003-04-04 13:25 (UTC)

Notes from the big room.

(The really big room with the blue ceiling, that is.)

The students have mostly cleared off to honour the rabbit which distributes chocolate eggs, and there are accordingly basking spaces free on the big scratchy green rug they have in the big room.

It's too bright to read in there, but the duckosaurs (one greenhead and one speckled earth tones; I'm given to understand that they're colour coded for reproductive purposes, bizarre though it sounds) are an entertainment in themselves. They're waddling around between the various knots of persons on the rug, blatantly begging for foodstuffs, the idle things. They wander fear- and shamelessly right up to persons' feets and give them the Poor Li'l Orphan Duckosaur eyeball until nibbles forthcome. And they're not stupid, neither; there was barely a mid-waddle pause as they ascertained that I was bereft of foodstuff and snooted past with their bills in the air, insofar as one can snoot with a gait like that.

Lazy, scrounging, arrogant bastards - à 'orangeing's too good fer 'em, I say.

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2003-04-04 Still ten to four, oh yes.

Welcome to Britainistan

Not only are the clocks still set to ten to four, as they were yesterday, but we've just heard that the air-conditioning specially fitted in the room dedicated to the Very Big Computer failed over night, but nobody did anything about it, so the Very Big Computer has tried its very best to melt.

(Needless to say, air-conditioning is not available for puny humans, but I don't really mind that - this isn't Texas, hoorah!)

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2003-04-04 09:34 (BST) or ten to four Unive

Sometimes I wish I could draw

"Do you take prisoners?"
"No, only cash."

The other thing that everybody already knew about the New Yorker is that the cartoons are funny.

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2003-04-03 How would I know? (Universit

Va' ä' klocken, Herr Ulf?

("What's the time, Mr Wolf?" was a popular playground game when I was a young child. But we didn't play it in Swedish, for some reason.)

The curse of British Summer Time is upon us. Personally, given a choice, I much prefer for noon to occur when the sun is roughly at its zenith but the experiment I tried one year of sticking defiantly to Greenwich Mean Time ("UTC", now, sigh) was not entirely successful, and these days I jump off the cliff when everybody else jumps off the cliff. (In fact, even when I'm briefed and ready on the Friday, I've always forgetten again by Sunday, but this takes a great deal of specialist training - don't try it at home!)

The University is well-equipped for these change-overs, though - all the clocks in the department are slaves of one master clock in another building, so that when the master changes over, all the slaves follow it without missing so much as a tick.

This, needless to say, never happens. This year, until today, the clocks had stayed on GMT UTC despite the Brussels directive - possibly out of patriotic contempt for meddling Eurocrats, although rumour has it that the Master Clock Resetter-in-Chief (at present I am not able either to affirm or deny that this is a hereditary post, dating to the days of Henry VIII) was absent and undeputised. Today, though, Action Has Been Taken, and the clocks have been moved to a variety of times between the old and new values, apparently at random.

It's not just the trains that don't run on time in Britain, you know; right now even the time isn't running on time.

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2003-04-03 13:32 (UTC+1)

One of the most brilliant of the language books in the famous Teach Yourself series

is Teach Yourself Dutch, according to the blurb, at any rate. I'm half-cured of buying self-instruction manuals for languages I have no pressing need to study, but it would have taken a heart of stone to leave the ninth edition of K. Koolhoven (for it is he or she!)'s masterpiece on the Oxfam bookshop's shelves, and I have many things (most of them books, admittedly) but I do not have a heart of stone. Plus the chapter on pronunciation is a tour de force of succint, IPA-driven clarity and grace, hoorah!

And in any case, if you interpolate between English and Scandewegian you seem to be well on the way to a reading knowledge of Dutch, and what reading there is to do! In the inimitable yellow-and-blue style, everything reads like a bizarre coded dialogue, espionage for the usage in:

"Ik heb eens in Egypte op een kameel gereden."
"Hij reed op zijn fiets naar kantoor."

(Please note that I have never really gereden een kameel, in Egypt or otherwise, and besides, they made me do it.)

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2003-04-02 16:34 (UTC+1)

Languages, globally "important" and otherwise

Conserver: c'est ce qu'on fait avec les confitures de fruits ou avec le saumon en boîte (...). Les livres, les enregistrements peuvent conserver une langue mais seuls les gens et les communautés, peuvent la garder vivante.

[Preserving: that's what you do with fruits in jam or tinned salmon (...). Books and teaching can preserve a language, but only people and communities can keep them alive.]

Nora Marks-Dauenhauer et Richard Dauenhauer, historiens de langue maternelle tlingit (Alaska)

While Courrier International's languages of the world special edition is being whisked to von Bladet's UK base from our secret hideaway in the Swiss Alps, let's make do with Unesco's April 2000 dossier on the same subject.

Starting with 6000 langues: un patrimoine en danger, it later invites our old chum R J-L Breton (star of, and primary informant for, this bladet's own geolinguistics week last summer) to muse on on the question "La suprématie de l'anglais est-elle inéluctable?" (and also spells his name wrong).

But it's not all doom and gloom! Well, yes, it is, actually, but there's interesting articles about le dernier chaman zapara and all sorts of other stuff.

There is also a megabytes' worth of colour PDF of all this, although all their links to it are FUBAR. (But I am old and cunning, hoorah!)

[link via fr.sci.linguistique]

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2003-04-02 15:21 (Proper Time +1)

[Book Review] Harry Potter 3 in French.

It's over 450 pages long but reads quickly. Hermione says, "Oh, là, là!", at least twice. Good triumphs over evil, but not definitively. The annoying orphan kid with the glasses goes on about his late parents a fair bit.

Seven books in seven different languages is starting to look unlikely, epecially given the pricings of the various flavours of Scandiwegian.

Suggestions for more localised Appalling Mental Junkfood would be very welcome: I've heard (encouragingly) bad things about the Swedish Röde Orm, for example.

Works of Grown Up Literature need not apply...

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2003-04-02 09:52 (Proper Time+1)

Awfully Shocking

I still don't have a TV license, and now the Enforcers are angry:

Our Enforcement Officers are planning to visit your area soon, and they may call on you at any time during the day, including evenings and weekends.

I take this to be a tacit acknowledgement that in the past evenings and weekends have been excluded from consideration. This would certainly help to explain why I haven't seen any Enforcement Officers for the five fricking years that I haven't had a license.

I bet the UN weapons inspectors wish they had thought of this. (Evenings and weekends, just imagine!)

I hope, despite recent precedents, that not having a TV is still considered a valid defence...

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2003-04-01 17:16 (BST)

The crawling horror from the deep.

Ph'nglui mglw'nafh FORTRAN R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn.

AÏÏÏÏEEEEEEE!!!!!

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2003-04-01 09:22 (BST)

Today

I shall mostly be learning how to program parallels. I've got my New Testament, and I shall be mercilessly fire-and-brimstoning any FORTRAN lusers.

For their own good, of course; I'm very compassionate.

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2003-03-31 12:09 (Bloody Silly Time)

(Print) media roundup

1. I knew that the French word for shorts is "(un) short", but I didn't know how to say "short shorts". Now I do - it's "minishort ultracourt". This crucial information brought to you via the Nouvel Obs fashion pages.

2. Still with th' Obs[1], Jonathan Coe works Blair over, while catching The Mood Of The Nation, or at least me. (Was this originally in English newspapers?) His recent London Bookfair-inspired meeting (chez the French Institute) with his Norwegian, Danish, Dutch, French and Spanish publishers deviated from established custom.

En temps normale, ils m'aurient abordé par un question on ne peut plus prévisable: «A quand le prochain livre?» Mais, cette fois, ils avant tout autre chose a me demander: «Pourquoi Tony Blair agit-il ansi?»

Cette perplexité que suscite l'attitude de Blair en Europe continentale est partagée par les Britanniques, qui dans leur majorité sont fermement opposés à la guerre menée contre l'Irak sous l'égide des Etats-Unis depuis jeudi dernier.

[In normal times, they would have begun with the most predictable question possible: "When's the next book?" But, this time, they had something quite different to ask me: "Why is Tony Blair acting like this?"

The perplexity Blair's attitude has inspired in Continental Europe is shared by the British, the majority of whom are firmly against the war conducted against Iraq under the aegis of the US since last Tuesday.]

3. There is a profile of A. Noam Chomsky in the current New Yorker, which is sufficiently well-written that supporters and opponents of his opinions and influence in either politics or linguistics will be able to read it with profit. It seems to be very well-written in general, this Yorker of Newness, although I have the feeling that everyone else on the planet already knew that.

4. A Scientific American cover article on feathered dinosaurs, hoorah! I've been treating birds as dinosaurs for a while, ever since I heard rumours of fossil evidence to that effect. (Who could resist fixing a passing robin with a baleful glare and berating it for the way its ancestors treated that nice Raquel Welch?) But now it's officially official:

Now we must acknowlwdge that birds are a group of feathered therapod dinosaurs that evolved the capacity of powered flight. [...] Conversely, many of the most charasmatic and culturally iconic dinosaurs, such as the Tyrannosaurus and Velociraptor are very likely to have had feathers, but were not birds.

It thus becomes all the more urgent to reconstruct dinosaurs from their DNA. Forget Jurassic Park, think of the market for the Turduckenosaur - the Thanksgiving treat for the All-American Appetite, yum yum.

[1] Front cover headline "IRAK: les pièges d'une guerre folle" ("IRAQ: the booby-traps of a mad war") so you know there's going to be no mucking about with "balance" or anything.

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