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2003-04-11 9:04 (UTC)
(Jag l�ser aldrig p� t�get.)
Well, I took lakrits to class and the teacher was delighted - Swedish persons apparently freely concede the superiority of Dutch salt liquorice (and possibly tulips, but I didn't check).
I still haven't read Point de Vue, and now I've got the engagingly sullen Nouvel Obs to keep it company - they have noted (as presumably CNN hasn't) that the New Free and Democratic Republic of Mesopotamia is a post-colonial construct cutting across ethnic groups not noted for their displays of mutual affection (Turkey noticed this, too, of course) as well as a guide to the archeological highlights (which are pretty spectacular).
Just as well I'm scheduled to spend 5 hours on the train tomorrow, then, really.
2003-04-10 15:28 (UTC+1)
"Vi tar det s� lugnt i sn�n," s�ger Stockholmboarna
Kaos? Certainly not! It may be sn�ing in Stockholm, but the hardy Nordic inhabitants are well prepared for that. (Good heavens, imagine the embarassment if a Swedish town were inconvenienced by a little sn�; they'd never live it down!)
Oh and I fed one of the Merkins some yummy salt lakrits yesterday. Watching the expression on his face change from perplexity to disbelief to outright horror was very entertaining indeed. I don't think this will be catching on in Philadelphia any time soon. I'm taking it to Swedish class tonight as an end of term treat, but most of that lot already know they don't like it.
2003-04-10 13:17 (UTC+1)
Impending Absences
Well, the clocks are now finally fixed, but trying to run software from Sun (Zoom!) Sparcs in the FDRUSA over X-windows is not going well at all.
Computers are rubbish, aren't they? I think we should just go and have a picnic or something, and I could read this week's Point de Vue (either Harry or the other one - I can't tell the difference, sorry - on the cover, igen, sigh. Between the wretched British royals and the laughable Monacovians there's been slim pickings of late, and they're certainly not covering any of the alleged controversies about the Hice of Orange, and quite right too.) or something.
And I've finally got hold of a copy of the presentation I may be giving (depending on how much of it I feel like changing, which isn't very much at the moment, frankly) and it looks like as of this weekend I'm doing Oop North to London (Gatwick) to Venice to London to Bristol (for one day only) to Cheltenham to Wales (for the long weekend). I ran into my landlord on the way home last night, and he said he wanted to do some dampproofing and was worried about it disturbing me. Not much chance of that, really.
2003-04-10 11:31
Perhaps it was the chicken jalfrezi, perhaps it was the Kingfisher
beer (on draught, hoorah!) but last night I realised that the universe
is actually composed exclusively of the elements sloth, lethargy,
petulance and goo in various combinations and proportions. (Yes, it probably is mostly goo.)
With that in mind, and the fact that the hay fever season is
redirecting my goo deployment, I'll have to post this April
fool's joke (via Agent "Birgitte") now before it goes
off. ("Dansk og svenk bliver �t sprog", "Danish and Swedish becoming
a single language"; I haven't had a chance to read it myself yet, sorry.)
(Operation Clockwatch: a man with a ladder came to set my clock to
9:00 at about quarter past. Once they're all thus set, he can step
them in synch from the master, and the time will once more be now in
the Maths building. That's the theory, anyways...)
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2003-04-09 16:47 (UTC+1)
Intercontinental!
The gang's all here, and the meetings are apparently in my office (which is the down side of having a big office all to yourself).
Expect intermittence. (Operation Clockwatch Update: The clocks had a brief intense whir of activity and are now all stopped at 10 to 7.)
2003-04-09 11:34 (UTC+1)
to have a room of my own, even if it is just temporary. It is
especially nice to have a blackboard all to myself, and several
colours of chalk. (The department had turned it into a white board by
sticking an adhesive sheet on it, but that lasted about a week.
Chalk has magical mathematical properties, and if the computers don't
like the dust, so much the worse for them.)
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2003-04-08 16:20 (UTC+1)
THE HITCHHIKER'S GUIDE TO THE GALAXY, in a moment of reasoned lucidity
which is almost unique among its current tally of five million, nine
hundred and seventy-three thousand, five hundred and nine pages, says
of the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation products that 'it is very easy
to be blinded to the essential uselessness of them by the sense of
achievement you get from getting them to work at all.
'In other words -- and this is the rock-solid principle on which the
whole of the Corporation's Galaxywide success is founded -- their
fundamental design flaws are completely hidden by their superficial
design flaws.'
[So long and thanks for all the fish, Douglas Adams]
The effort to make things clear can certainly help discover whether
they actually made any sense in the first place, is it not? This is
one of the things I like about computer programming. Writing text in
this spirit is a lot less fun, at least for me, but that's what I'm
doing today.
Tomorrow our visitors from the Very Free and Democratic Indeed
Republic of the United States of America will arrive and I will be
very busy, and on Saturday I'm going to a wedding Up North and on
Sunday I'm off to Venice.
I'm planning not to hiatus if I can help it, but still, events will
happen, and you have been duly warned.
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2003-04-08 15:50
Firstly, my liquorice is here, and I am happy to be able to endorse
"Briketten double salted" unequivocally - it's a truly bracing taste
experience. Yum, and indeed also yum.
Second, Ingen-Sv�rd
was all mentioning City Book Reading Projects where everybody in
a city is supposed to read the same book and then we'll all see each
other with it on buses and park benches and spontaneous conversations
between strangers will break out and friendship and love blossom and
that. So I have finally been shamed into starting the such book for
my very own city of Bristol, which is
Treasure
Island. My father read this to me when I was a small child,
but it also holds up to adult scrutiny. It's really quite a strange
experience to encounter a story half-remembered from so long ago. I
will just note, though, that I'm now half-way through and nobody has
said "Arr, Jim-lad!", yet.
It's a really neat touch that a bunch of the opening scenes are set in
Bristol itself which was a major port at one time, before losing out
to Liverpool. (This the town that put the "Bristol" in "ship shape
and Bristol fashion", you know.) This has added a whole new dimension
on the obligatory silly voices game, as you may imagine. (But only
really if you know the idiosyncrasies of Bristle speech - "Arr,
Jim-lad, where's the treasural?")
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Happy Birthday, Astro Boy! tentofour
I awoke not long after 5 this morning, with the tweetosaurs giving it
up in a mad party stylee somewhere out there in the barely sodding
crepuscular. I am fond of the sea-faring driftosaurs (one of the
weirdest things about $OLD_COMPANY was that it was far enough
inland to be out of their range, which freaked me right out, I can
tell you) but their twittery little friendosaurs I could most
certainly do without.
But as Monsieur Sans-�p�e has
brought to my attention, like a shiny copper coin to a bedraggled and
footsore indigent, this is an usually exceptional day:
In Japan, Mighty Atom/Atom Boy is so famous that most people
know the construct behind the story. For new readers, however, some
elements may need reinforcing. Briefly, Astro was created on April 7,
2003 by Dr Tenma of the Ministry of Science as a replacement for his
beloved son, Tobio, who was killed in an accident.
[From the introduction to the ongoing Dark Horse run of the complete
series in English]
And that's today!
As it happens, I've come to think of Astro Boy as the Japanese
Tin-Tin: it's universally hailed as a classic series, its star is a
squeaky-clean boy hero, but the adventures are unthrilling and the
comic relief provided by the supporting characters and their
exaggerated mannerisms is mostly not funny. Since it's the lad's
birthday, though, let's put that down to the translation and shut up
and enjoy our nice cake (flavoured with real engine oil, yum yum).
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2003-04-07 ten to bloody four, still.
["Either follow the customs or leave the country" - Danish Proverb]
First, a recommendation: if you want to learn to read Danish quickly,
and you don't need a lot of hand-holding, then Elias Bredsdorff's
Danish: An elementary grammar and reader (pastries not included)
is the book for you. The pronuncitation section is sane, the
reference grammar is short but thorough, and the readings are
interesting, if not entirely convincingly elementary; they start with
folk-tales and before you know it you're into Andersen, Jespersen and
Kierkegaard.
One of the customs peculiar to the Danes is that of speaking Danish,
which is widely held to be gratuitously difficult for persons
of non-Danish origin
I det hele taget er forskellen p� det skrevne og det talte sprog en
grundl�ggende kilde til problemer for udl�ndinge, der skal l�re dansk.
�Svensk og norsk udtales langt oftere end dansk, som det skrives, og
de afslutter ogs� ordene i stedet for at k�re dem sammen i en
sm�re. S� alt andet lige er det klart nemmere for en spanier at l�re
et af disse to sprog frem for dansk,� siger Erik Hansen.
[Taken as a whole, the differences between the written and the spoken
language are a fundamental source of problems for Outlanders who are
learning Danish.
Swedish and Norwegish are pronounced as they are written by far more
often than Danish, and they also finish off words cleanly instead of slurring
their endings(?). So, all else being equal it's clearly easier for a
Spaniard to learn one of those two languages than Danish.]
If you read Danish - and who doesn't? - there are interesting
sociolinguistic things said in this article, and in its companion
piece, where we sit in on a Danish for Outlanders class:
[E]leverne er jo som Grethe Maribo afslutter timen med at gentage ret
dygtige.
�Undskyld,� bryder Olga ind, mens Maribo er i f�rd med at rose dem til
skyerne.
The pupils are indeed, as Grethe Maribo [the teacher - des] finishes
the lesson by repeating, very accomplished.
"Sorry," Olga says, when Maribo has finished praising them to the
skies. [She doesn't know that "dygtige" is a good thing, see?]
Aw.
Meanwhile back in Blightly, where David "Barking" Blunkett, the
Minister for Intolerance Home Secretary recently caused a fuss
by proposing that immigrants should be required to pass an English
competency test to qualify for citizenship, it is in fact tuition
that's in short supply, rather than willingness to learn:
In one London area there is a waiting list of more than 1,000 for
language classes.
Furthermore, new immigrants may have to wait up to three years to
qualify to join free adult literacy schemes.
[BBC news]
Being "tough" on immigrants pays political dividends right across
Europe at the moment, sigh, and language is a convenient stick to
wield for the purpose. With declining populations and mounting
pension bills Europe desperately needs immigrants just to balance the
books, and yet when they come we go out of our way to ostracise and
exclude them, and then reproach them for not "integrating". Sigh.
[Danish linkage via Birgitte, International Woman of Mystery, tak]
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