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2004-03-05 hometime (utc)
I've installed a new Emacs which has better unicode support, and so of
course I wanted to be able to use it on the 'bladet, so that we may
discuss Švyturis beer, yum yum, and use Wisława Szymborska's actual
name (is that it?) and generally use a crazy collection of ģrāphs as
we see fit.
So I wrote a utf-8->HTML escape code conversion script, as you can
plainly see. (See the HTML source and weep!)
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2004-03-05 apr�s-samwidge (utc)
Skihoppning is, of course, the second-finest sport in the world after
cricket. And the second-best just got second-better, 'cos now they're
letting wimmins play on the Big Slopes. Enjoy our sl�-motion replay...
Before (just):
Det internasjonale skiforbundet (FIS) har gitt klarsignal til
kvinnelig deltakelse i pr�vehoppingen foran helgens skiflyging i
Vikersund. Anette Sagen nekter � tro det.
The international skiing association (FIS) has given the go ahead for
wimminlig participants in the test hoppning before the weekends
skiflying in Vikersund. Anette Sagen can't believe it.
And just after (Ms
Sagen's jump of 171 metres):
- Dette var helt sinnsykt. Jeg hadde ikke trodd at suget i bakken
skulle v�re s� vilt, sa en jublende Sagen rett etterp�.
"That was completely mind-blowing. I wouldn't've thought the
acceleration(?) on the slope could be so wild", said an exultant Sagen
immediately afterwards.
170m is an awfully long way to hopp (although some of the mannligare
contestants later jumped over 200m) - the Four Hills distances were
more like 140�20m, so this really must be a giant hoppslope.
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2004-03-05 not beer, h�las (utc)
Zeige mir eine Frau, die wirklich Geschmack am Bier findet, und ich
erobere die Welt.
"Give me a woman who loves beer and I will conquer the world."
- Kaiser Wilhelm
II (1859-1941)
In this increasingly global world, though, the beer may just conquer
the world itself without the need for any smelly old Kaisers:
Le brasseur belge Interbrew, num�ro quatre mondial, et le br�silien
AmBev, num�ro cinq, ont annonc� hier leur rapprochement, par le biais
d'un �change d'actions et d'activit�s. Le nouveau groupe,
InterbrewAmBev, sera le num�ro un mondial de la bi�re en termes de
production, d�tr�nant l'am�ricain Anheuser-Busch, et d�tiendra 14 % du
march� global.
The Belgian brewer Interbrew, the world's fourth largest, and the
Brazilian AmBev, number five, announced yesterday their merger by
menas of an exchange of shares and activities. The new group
InterbrewAmBev, will be the world's number one in beer in terms of
production, dethroning the American Anheuser-Busch, and will control
14% of the global market.
Pff. America is, like, so C20, isn't it?
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2004-03-05 morning (utc)
In the Ukraine
even:
An international congress on the future of the Russian language in the
CIS opens in the Kyrgyz capital today, the Russian broadsheet
Nezavisimaya Gazeta reports.
"Russia is finally beginning to spend more money on supporting
teaching Russian in the CIS," the paper says, adding that over 23m
roubles has been earmarked by the government for a programme teaching
Russian in the CIS. The paper notes that the number of
Russian-language schools in Ukraine has decreased sevenfold, according
to the Russian Education Ministry, and by three times in Kazakhstan
and Georgia.
"It is more prestigious to know English and it is thought to be very
old-fashioned to speak Russian," the paper adds.
Russian-language schools, one would have thought, were not the only
way to acquire some competence in Russian, especially if you start
from Ukrainian (which is approximately Russian in the first place,
unless you happen to be a booster of Ukraine's Glorious History and
Cultual). But it's sweet that they're still calling it the
"Commonwealth of Independent States (Sit Down Chechnya, Not Quite
That Independent)", rather than the Commonwealth of Vassal
Kleptocracies or something.
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2004-03-04 paus (utc)
How about "Bogoslavia"? I think they're making it up and there's not
really any such place, anyway. I mean, it was (allegedly) part of
Yugoslavia, but it hasn't had a war with anyone since the early
1990's. A likely story! So far as I can see the only way a
former Yugoslav territory can be at peace for that long is if it
doesn't really exist.
Anyway, Birgitte supplies a list alleged to be of Slovenian
literatures in
translation.
and Lea Flis chips in her two bogo-zlotys:
As literary translations go it is not unexpected that poetry prevails;
for centuries it has been the most direct and authentic expression of
the Slovene national character. [...]
For those with no background in Slovene prose, I recommend Jancar's
novel Mocking
Desire (Northwestern University Press, 1998) as a first read. No
doubt the most frequently translated fiction writer in Slovenia,
Jancar uses a deceptively simple language to deliver a critical
outlook on Slovenia's current social situation, as well as our
political and cultural heritage.
So, if the story of the European novel is of the way in which
Europe became conversant with its identity, Slovenia hasn't really
started yet. Jancar is "no doubt the most translated fiction writer
in Slovenia" in the sense that precisely one book of his has made it
into the Engleesh - and he's presumably an alter-ego of some American
academic having a laugh. (Which is also a decidedly better
explanation for the "poetry" - it must be pretty straightforward to
cobble together a collection of verse you can plausibly claim was
translated from the "Slovenian", don't you think?)
And perhaps the real reason everyone mistakes "Slovenia" for
Slovakia is that that's exactly what it is. It would be easy enough:
whenever one of the big international aid agency is reviewing your
gravy train application, you ship them to a disused corner of Slovakia
(it's not as if touristes ever go there, so they won't recognise it)
and slip the locals a few zlotys to put on a fake "Slovenian" accent
and say "Welcome to our beloved Slovenian homeland! I will now recite
some of our glorious poetry in honour of your visit!" The hardest
part would be keeping a straight face, I should think.
Come on, "Slovenia", 'fess up!
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2004-03-04 stll mrnng (utc)
�1. Head me some lines, and make 'em snappy!
French
anti-crime law criticised. (Not for being tautologous, sadly).
Swiss
who saved Jews pardoned. (For, as you will guess on the
double-take, something else.)
I was going to put a snide remark about Austria there, but it's
probably safer to borrow
one:
If the story of the European novel is of the way in which Europe
became conversant with its identity, Austria has some way to go. This
is the country that busied itself with the concept of Heimat in the
1920s, printing postcards with factory chimneys brushed out; the
country of J�rg Haider and of silence about its part in the Nazi
enterprise. How many Austrians does it take to change a lightbulb, the
Jewish novelist Doron Rabinovici asked me in Vienna. The Austrian's
answer: "I don't know, I wasn't there, I can't remember."
�2. Cheer up, Bulgaria, it might never happen!
And if the Danes would
stop smirking for a minute, please?
Danskene er det folkeslag i Europa som er mest forn�yd med sin
tilv�relse, if�lge en ny unders�kelse som ble offentliggjort i Brussel
onsdag. [...]
Danmark topper listen tett fulgt av svenskene og nederlenderne, og med
bulgarerne p� sisteplass. Over 90 prosent av danskene er forn�yd med
sine liv.
The Danes are the European people most pleased with their lives,
according to a new survey officially published in Brussels on
Wednesday. [...]
Denmark narrowly tops the list ahead of the Swedes and Dutch, with
Bulgaria in last place. Over 90% of Danes are pleased with their
lives.
�3. Bollocks, Your Majesty!
Oh
yes, it's the ship's parrot whose language is, shall we say,
saltier than is considered fitting in the company of our Beloved
Monarch, so he's been granted shore leave for her visit.
En alltf�r frispr�kig bes�ttningsmedlem p� brittiska "HMS Lancaster"
kommer inf�r drottning Elizabeths bes�k p� fartyget nu p� fredag att
tystas ned. Den sv�rande papegojan Sunny har f�tt landpermis.
Den gr� jakon har de senaste �ren tj�nstgjort som maskot i fregattens
officersm�ss, ber�ttar Daily Telegraph.
Med tiden har gojan bland dessa herrar till allm�n f�rtjusning skaffat
sig ett alltmer explicit ordf�rr�d. Prov p� hennes mildare
kraftuttryck �r "arse" och "bollocks".
Funnily enough, among my mildare kraftuttryck �r "arse" och
"bollocks". The Daily Telegraph is also to be commended for not
claiming the parrot is telepathic.
�4. Trieste and Slovenia
Slovenia, as seen from Trieste:
10km away lies Slovenia - one of the first countries to opt out of
Yugoslavia in 1991 but is so constantly confused with Slovakia it has
even considered renaming itself.
Trieste is now in Italy, having previously been Trst in Slovenia
(where they don't much hold with vowels). I'm sure I don't need to
tell you that there's a left-over Slovenian population in Trieste, nor
that it considers itself beleaguered.
The Slovenian language,
incidentally,
is ancient and noble, and not at all like the decadent jibber-jabber
that passes for the rest of South Slavic, good Lord, no:
One of the Slavic family of languages, Slovenian is most closely
related to Croatian and Serbian. It is usually grouped together with
the South Slavic languages. It is however distinguished from them, in
that it has retained archaic proto-Slavic features and lexical
characteristics, which indicate a greater age and a strong lexical
relationship with the north Slavic type (Bezlaj). For instance, the
linguistically rare dual number still in use today links Slovenian to
the Lusatian Slavic, the supine to Czech, the genitive case in the
negative form to Balto-Slavic group. Unlike Serbian and Croatian,
Slovenian is characterized by a great number of dialects - about 50
dialects and subdialects - which indicates its greater age.
Where do they get these people, and why on earth don't they take them
back for a refund?
Explains the vowel thing though - vowels wear out much quicker than consonants and so older languages usually
don't have as many - some really ancient languages, like Hebrew,
don't have them at all.
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2004-03-04 morning (utc)
Malta is famous as being the only island ever to have been
awarded
the George cross.
Maltese
is famous for being a Semitic language (closely related to Arabic)
written with the roman alphabet.
The closest I've got to in-print Maltese literature in ze Engleesh is
set in Cardiff:
Trezza Azzopardi's mesmerising debut novel, the Booker-shortlisted
The Hiding Place, chronicles the life of a Maltese immigrant
family in 1960s Cardiff, Wales, and is a beautifully evocative tale
that ignites memories of family, childhood, violence and poverty for
one young woman.
Oh, and the beginning of Anthony Burgess's Earthly Powers is
set there, if I remember right.
This is a lot more than I currently know about Slovenia, though.
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2004-03-03 darkening (utc)
It's official:
You are descended from Napoleon. You see no national boundaries and
sweep freely across the continent. You are so European, if you had a
pond, you would give your neighbours generous quotas to fish in
it. You are probably whistling the Ode to Joy right now.
One of the questions is �Where are you going for your holidays this
year?�, and one of the answers is �Riga, it's the new Tallinn, [...]�,
which I did (I demand that Twinkletree stands Janus-like between
years) and it is.
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2004-03-03 regn (utc)
Hoorah! But now I must work work work to make up for time of lostness.
2004-03-03 Engelsk sn� (utc)
Taoisme, slightly twitchy
Thus spake the master programmer: "After three days without programming, life becomes meaningless."
Tomorrow, as a precautionary measure, I'll be bringing in my trusty HP-48 GX...
("FORTH IF HONK THEN", eh, Varied Reader?)
2004-03-03 tum-ti-tum (utc)
Of poets and posthumousness
When I die,
bury me with my guitar
beneath the sand.
[from "Memento", Frederic Garcia Lorca]
It's funny how the queue of persons wishing to congratulate themselves on bringing about the fall of communism from a safe distance is so much longer than the equivalent one to claim credit for the fall of Franco's very nasty regime in Spain. Except that it isn't, partly because there is no such credit to claim, and partly because the Ideologistes of the Flaming Right - who are most vigorously in charge of claiming that destiny knitted their bed-socks, these days - would be the last persons in any position to claim it if there were. Franco may have been horrid, but he was both a scumbag of the right and geopolitically of no particular consequence.
More than a quarter of a century after democracy came to Spain, more than 30,000 victims of the civil war and the repression that followed still lie in mass graves, scattered across the country.
Spaniards call them the graves of forgetting.
Efforts by families to reclaim their loved-ones' remains have been hindered by a lack of official interest and funding.
But pressure to open the grave shared by Lorca means the issue is coming under renewed - and for many unwelcome public scrutiny.
Some would prefer not to reopen old graves, and wounds, this having been the deal post-Franco Spain made with itself.
Even Lorca's relatives are against disturbing their uncle's grave - though they are being shouted down by the families of the men who share the grave and by the poet's fans.
Which is to say, the Lorca industry has recruited some genuine griefs as a fig-leaf for its machinations.
For future reference, then:
Unwilling Testament
If I should die,
cut off my ears,
And keep them in a jar,
Undusted
On a shelf
Behind my local's public bar
When I'm deceased,
Cut off my toes
And thread them on a string
And always wear them round your neck
When you go wandering
When I should croak
By all means flay
The skin from off my back
And use it as a tarpaulin,
In case your roof should crack
When I'm a stiff
Please petrify
My liver and my spleen,
And plant them in your flow'r bed,
Upside down, and painted green.
But if you'd rather not do that,
Do something else instead:
It's not as if I'll give a toss
If I am really dead.
(Please check!)
- Frederic Garcia von Bladet.
2004-03-03 sigh (utc)
The EU enlargement considered as a reading list
The RAID (="redundant array of inexpensive disks") array [sic, just like PIN number and ISBN number] on the server has died horribly, shortly after both RAID arrays on the Big Computer died horribly. The point of RAID arrays is, of course, precisely that they don't just die horribly, but there you go.
The upshot is that I can't log in to my account (I'm logged in as root on my personal box, faut de mieux) and I don't have access to my bookmarks or my sacred blog-file. (Also I can't do any work, of course.)
But while I'm kicking my heels, why don't we all play a nice game? With ten (10) new countries set to join the EU in May, it has occurred to me that it would be good to read at least one book from each of them this year. And you can help choose! Contemporaryish (post-war 20th or 21st centuries only, for sure) literature only; novels rather than verse, where possible, please, and plays only if there isn't even any verse; translations into languages I know, for preference, which in practice means English or French, since Swedish bookshops do not especially consider that their role in life involves selling books. So far, the pickings are of thinness, sadly:
Any offers? There's plenty of slack there, up for the taking of - be the first on your block to recommend an unreadable Maltese epic prose poem thinly disguised as a novel!
2004-03-02 post-samwidge (utc)
Signals, slightly unheeded
For two quid, if you'd got there before me, you could have rescued one of the copies of Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities from the increasingly untemptingly priced Oxfam bookshop's travel section. (The other one there was 2.50, and may still be if you hurry.)
I would like to take this opportunity to recommend the book to those who haven't read it, but I am somewhat undermined by the fact that that group still includes me.
2004-03-02 sulk (utc)
But if there is one thing we von Bladet's are not, it is lesser
men.
Europas kongelige, Finlands statsoverhovede, det japanske
kronprinsepar og mange flere, har nu som de fornemste og fineste
g�ster alle f�et invitationerne til Marys og Frederiks bryllup
14. maj. Resten m� vente til ca. halvanden m�ned f�r �rets
begivenhed.
Yoorp's royalties, Finlands President, the Japanese royal couple and
many others have now, as the foremost and finest guests, all
received invitations to Knudella and Kronprinsfred's wedding on the
14th of May. The rest must wait until the half-duck month for the
event of the year.
When is the half-duck month, anyway?
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2004-03-02 morning (utc)
Leonard Bloomfield's Language (1935 in the Britished edition)
is a work of enduring value, and well worth reading even now. The
psychological framework leans towards behaviourism (boo!) and the
morphology and especially syntax sections show their age, but there's
nothing wrong with the good old-fashioned American structuralist
phonology, which I hope is still taught before any of the fancy-pants
post-generative malarkey.
Where the book really comes into its own is the historical and
dialectal linguistics in the second half. Bloomfield vigourously
defends (he does everything vigourously) a neo-grammarian account of
phonetic change, and sketches a very plausible account of how this
combines with analogic change and local borrowings to construct the
kind of distribution of linguistic forms found in practice, but most
importantly he draws on a rich variety of fascinating examples from a
range of languages to make his case. He was professor of Germanic
languages at Chicago at the time of writing, so there's a pleasant
amount of Scandiwegian, but also plenty of Romance, and in earlier
chapters quite a lot of examples from Native American languages (which
was what Bloomfield mostly worked on).
Sapir's Language still rocks as a first introduction to
linguistics, and is the most inspiring book on the subject I've read;
Bloomfield's bigger and more comprehensive book would be an excellent
choice to read next.
(I have Hjelmslev's Le Langage in the Frenchy-French, and I'm
still looking for Jespersen's Language, which doesn't seem to
have come out in Danish first.)
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2004-03-01 dark (utc)
�1. Le cerveau �pic�, mais pas localis�
La d�marche neurophysiologique a donc pour but d'expliquer comment
certaines fonctions cognitives sont soutenues par des syst�mes
neuraux d�finis. La neuropsychologie n'a pas, ou ne devrait pas
avoir, pour but de d�couvrir la �localisation c�r�brale� d'un
�symt�me� ou d'un �sydrome�.
The neurophysiological approach thus has as its goal to explain how
certain cognitive functions are supported by definite neural systems.
Neuropsychology doesn't, or shouldn't, set out to discover the
"cerebral localisation" of a "symptom" or "syndrome".
L'Erreur de Descartes, A. Damasion, p. 84
I got the Frenched-up version because Amazon UK claims the Engleesh
is out of print, and you can't prove I didn't. The point of this
quote, though, is that while a region of the brain may be crucial for
some task, it doesn't follow that it's solely responsible for it.
�2.
L'intentionalit�, pris au sens psychologique, exprime precis�ment
l'insufficance fonci�re de la coupure entre l'int�riorit� et
l'ext�riorit�. Dire que la conscience est conscience de
quelque-chose, c'est dire qu'il n'y a pas de no�se sans no�me, de
cogito sans cogitatum, mais pas non plus d'amo
sans amatum, etc., bref que je suis entrelac� avec le
monde.
Intentionality, taken in the psychological sense, expresses precisely
the fundamental inadequacy of the division between interiority and
exteriority. To say that consciousness is consciousness of something
is to say that there's no noese without noeme, no cogito
without cogitatum, but also non amo without
amatum, etc.; in short that I am interlaced with the world.
La ph�nom�nologie, J-F Lyotard
Hoorah!
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2004-03-01 afternoon (utc)
Soon after the German gets here [="the USA"], we find him using in his
German speech, a host of English forms, such as coat,
bottle, kick, change. He will say, for instance,
ich hoffe, Sie werdens enjoyen, "I hope you will enjoy it", or
ich hab ein cold gecatched "I've caught a cold".
Language, Leonard Bloomfield (Ch. 26, "Intimate Borrowing")
Margaret Marks is covering
the English-language coverage of the Denglish, hoorah!
Advertising slogans in French magazines are often in ze Engleesh,
and on those occasions are always (presumably by law) complete with
asterisk directing the reader to a footnote in which a translation of
Frenchness is given. I kind of miss that in German and Swedish, where
it doesn't occur...
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2004-03-01 samwidge (utc)
For
sure:
A la veille de la sortie du film, les m�dias ont d�battu de �la v�rit�
historique� de la crucifixion. La Passion est-elle conforme � la
r�alit� ? se sont demand� pr�tres, pasteurs et rabbins � longueur de
talk-shows. Quel a �t� le r�le des juifs qui, dans le film,
apparaissent comme les m�chants ? Ont-ils voulu la mort de J�sus ?
Gibson s'est appuy� sur les Evangiles, mais aussi sur les visions de
la stigmatique allemande Anne Catherine Emmerich (1774-1824), qui
perp�tuait la rumeur accusant les juifs de voler le sang d'enfants
chr�tiens pour en faire leur pain azyme...
On the eve of the film's opening, the media debated the "historical
truth" of the crucifixion. Does The Passion conform to
reality? Priests, pastors and rabbis asked themselves during
talk-shows. Why was the role of the Jews who, in the film, appeared
to be the villains. Did they want Jesus's death? Gibson has drawn on
the Gospels, but also on the German stigmatic Anne Catherine Emmerich
(1774-1824), who perpetuated the rumour accusing the Jews of using the
blood of Christian childrens to make their unleavened bread...
Anne Catherine "The Gibbering German" Emmerich's involvement has been
noted in some of the saner media reviews (the Torygraph
comes up trumps here) and you should see
Naomi's
old post on the subject for a more scholarly take.
"Historical truth", though? World's gone mad, innit?
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2004-03-01 monday (utc)
Paul Virilio in the Vlobs, doing the Frenchy-French thing where
the ideas don't necessarily make any sense, but the view is vertiginous:
Le grand danger contemporain c'est que le sentiment d'angoisse est en
train de modifier de l'int�rieur la d�mocratie. La d�mocratie �tait
li�e � la standardisation de l'opinion. De ce point de vue, elle est
fille de la r�volution industrielle, c'est-�-dire la reproduction �
l'identique de produits mais aussi d'opinions. Aujourd'hui nous vivons
live la synchronisation des �motions. Et les �motions sont
ad�mocratiques, avec un a privatif. La synchronisation des
�motions c'est la porte ouverte � un mysticisme panique et hyst�rique
dont les guerres de religion actuelles sont les mauvais signes. Mon
esp�rance est pourtant intacte. Je choisis l'esp�rance contre toute
esp�rance.
The great contemporary danger is that the feeling of anxiety is in the
process of modifying the internals of democracy. Democracy was linked
to the standardisation of opinion. From that point of view it's the
child of the industrial revolution; that is, of the mass production of
products but also of opinions. Today we experience live the
synchronisation of emotions. And the emotions are undemocratic with a
deprivatory un. The synchronisation of emotions is an open
door for a paniced and hysterical mysticism of which the current
religious wars are the ill omens. My hope is intact however. I
choose to hope against all hope.
Top quality stuff, for sure.
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