2002-08-09 13:46 (UTC+1)

The state of affairs of affairs of state

There are interesting differences between the English and Norwegian versions of the Aftenposten coverage of Royalty.

In particular the current fuss about the newly-wed M�rtha-Louise's excision from the front page photo on the official Kongehusets nettsider is conspicuous in the absence of its translation. (To give the paper credit, they have taken to including suitable hyperlinks where available - which is unusually clued by Old Meeja standards.)

Harrumph. And double harrumph in that, while checking out the biographies I discover that the Norwegian implementation of primogeniture appears to suffer from the Infamous Gender Bug - Kronprins Haakon is M�rtha-Louise's little brother. I probably should have already known this, but really! That's just not the sort of moral leadership we expect from Scandinavia. (I note with relief that Sweden appears to have fixed that bug, but you would think they'd have offered to share the patch.)

2002-08-09 12:23 (UTC+1)

Two haikus

This in honour of Chomsky:

Furiously sleeping
greenness devoid of colour -
Bloomfield's refuted!

(Greenness seems to have - and require - a geminated n in my ideolect - how about you?)

Of course proper haikus should have not just a hiatus but an explicit reference to a season. Like this:

Cherry blossom time -
yadda yadda yadda, it
happens every year.

(I pronounce "every" as two syllables - how about you?)

The same sleepless night that caused these seems to have drained my willingness to explain the trains of thought in which they were originally embedded. Having been ambushed by an Social Engagement on Wednesday I spent most of yesterday with a dreadful case of beer-induced oomehead and I still don't feel fully recovered.

Mostly I don't mind turning middle-aged - I was never very good at Being Young, and it's as much a relief as a disappointment to be forced to surrender my wilder ambitions - but the increasing reluctance of my body to put up with the excesses I once considered normal is an unwelcome surprise. In revenge, I'm going to join a gymn...

2002-08-09 10:51

Competition results

I should have set a harder question - I'll know better next time. The winner has been notified - if you haven't been notified then it wasn't you. Sorry.

2002-08-09 09:42

Triumphant returns

We've done Mette-Marit's health and now Madeleine's boyfriend's behaviour is in the news again. Certainly one cannot fault the thoroughness with which he has set out to probe the boundary between youthful high spirits and simple thuggery.

Although this is all very comfortingly familiar, rumours that God is in his heaven and all's well with the world could not be confirmed at the time of going to press.

2002-08-08 10:09 (UTC+1)

No Glot, C'lom Fliday

Its been a long strange squawk the last week or so, and I'm shagged-out. I'm going to Interzone to look for fnords.

And then I'm going to threaten Shub Niggurath with a railway share and a blurgle-cruncheon - see if I don't.

I'll be back tomorrow, but I'll leave you with a competition - a freak e-shopping accident has left me with a spare copy of Les Langues Scandinaves and it could be yours! With such an intensley desirable prize at stake I've racked my brains to come up with a suitably fiendish question to ensure that it goes to a good home, and the question is:

Where would you like me to send it?

This competition is only open to inhabitants of the planet Earth; Desbladet employees and their relatives are not eligible and there is no cash alternative.

Answers on the back of an envelope to Desbladet Towers - in order to allow for timezones the competition will be open for ett full dygn or until someone actually enters, whichever comes last.

2002-08-07 13:34

She walks like Bo Diddley and she don't need no crutch

It's been a while since we featured any irresponsible and ill-informed speculation on the health of the impossibly fragile darling of the European Royal gossip industry, Mette-Marit of Norway. (Does Norway actually use the Hans Christian Andersen pea test to screen potential Princesses? It would explain a lot.)

We note, then, with relief that the Swedish press is reporting that the Norwegian press is reporting that Mette-Marit is pregnant again, again.

The Norwegian press is reporting that the Swedish press is reporting that the Norwegian press is reporting it.

And now I'm reporting that. Hoorah! Disturbingly, the first I knew about all this was when I got a suspicious cluster of Google hits on the subject, courtesy of a previous rebuttal.

The evidence amounts, by the way, to the observations that the Priceless Porcelain Princess is looking sleeker than she was (she likes cake, the court has responded, tartly) and that she has given up smoking.

I gave up smoking myself back in January - and my figure hasn't been quite the same since, either - and I can assure you that I am very much not pregnant - the radiant glow I exude is just smugness. So there.

2002-08-07 09:24 (UTC+1)

Per Ardua Ad Astrud

Se voc� disser que eu desafino, amor
Saiba que isso em mim provoca imensa dor

(If you say that I sing out of tune, love
I want you to know that this causes me great pain)

Desafinado (Jobim/De Moraes/Gimbel)

As it turns out Astrud doesn't sing Desafinado on this album - it has the classic Getz version with Charlie Byrd on guitar instead - or on any other of the compilations I've looked at. If you know better, Varied Reader, I yearn to hear of it and, indeed, to hear it.

She does sing It Might As Well Be Spring, and a very lovely thing it is to hear, as Meester Dave pointed out in the comment that started all this. (He also requested more analysis of singers, so you know who to blame.)

Astrud's voice is baffling but nice, kind of like being nuzzled by an ice-cream puppy on a sultry summer's day. (Mint choc chip, since you ask.) She puts absolutely no emotion into her readings but it's never clear whether to read this as burnt-out world-weariness (like Nick Cave, or Nico with the Velvet Underground), genuine ingenuousness, or whether she's just too busy getting the words out in the right order and hitting the right notes to worry about anything else.

In the bridge sequence

"I keep wishing I was somewhere else / Walking down a strange new street / Hearing words that I've never heard / from a man I've yet to meet"

where the melody on the last line heads up to a big harmonic resolution and a singer in a real music would have to crescendo triumphantly and use a whole family-sized pack of vibrato in one go, and a jazz singer would have to ironically deflate the sheet music's line, Astrud does neither; she just keeps on going straight through it, as enigmatically unperturbed as ever. It's a genuinely unsettling effect.

Of course, her is accent is really cute, too. I was in Portugal (the heart of the authentically inauthentic Costa del Concrete, I'm happy to say) over Christmas with my Mum and Big Sister and although none of the staff were actually Portuguese - including the relentlessly cheerful perma-tanned Scouser running the Portuguese classes - I did actually go to one of said classes and look over the Lonely Planet phrasebook, which makes me the most knowledgeable member of the Desbladet staff on the subject, even though (thanks Lonely Planet) European and Brazilian flavours are actually very different.

(Meanwhile my Big Sister, who speaks fluent Russian and German and good French and is thus part of the reason I picked Scandiwegian as a flavour of languages to specialise in - another part being my Little Sister, who speaks fluent Spanish and Japanese and good French - went to three such classes, and was in serious danger of being competent by the end.

It's not so much sibling rivalry as a desire to emulate their exemplary defiance of the stereotype of the monoglot English person, encouraged by the proof by example that such a thing is possible, that motivates me. Honest.)

Where was I? Oh, Brazilian Portuguese accents, right.

There's a hint of [S] about her [s]es, which is very Portugese, and more than a hint of [i:] about her [I]s - "Willow", "giddy", "spring", "FEVer" all have pretty much the same vowel, and the length is dictated purely by the music - which is no great surprise in a Romance language, at least in my (limited) experience. (Surprisingly, European Portuguese has more vowels and even a healthy sprinkling of diphthongs.)

But a lot of the strangeness of her phrasing - as is typically also the case with French and Spanish speakers, even when their accent has diminished to the point of being charming - comes from a use of syllable-timed rather than stress-timed prosody. Gory details are available (it's a 30 page .pdf, but you got off lightly - the others were .docs) but basically syllable timed languages tend to consist of a stream of more-or-less evenly stressed syllables. (Again, this depends on your continent - European Portuguese is stress-timed!) This is very strange to English ears, which consider stressing the right syllable in a word or phrase to be an essential of civilised life.

(English mouths, also - when I attempt to speak French I get a strange sort of itch in my diaphragm and I start longing to just pick a syllable and give it a damned good thump. I don't think I'm really suited to Romance languages, to be honest.)

It works for Astrud, though - it's this I think that's the engine of her apparent detachment. That doesn't help establish whether she meant it like that, but who really cares? I suspect that her angle is that she has no angle, but you're welcome to your own reading.

2002-08-06 10:36 (UTC+1)

The necessity of socks

Simon and yami are debating the necessity of socks, but they've both overlooked the Real Reason why socks are important.

In sober, mathematical fact, the real value of socks is as a pedagogical tool. Suppose I wish to select one shoe from each of an infinite set of pairs of shoes. Easy - I just choose the left one of each pair. Suppose, instead, that I want to do this with socks. Since there's no such thing as a left sock, I have to use the Axiom of Choice.

And thus with a leap and a bound of our now happily stockinged feet we can get the Banach-Tarski theorem. The original authors had intended this "paradox" to discourage mathematicians from using the Axiom of Choice, which shows that they were better mathematicians than judges of character, bless their little cotton socks.

Also socks are very important in puzzles of the following form:

If I have 25 red socks and 25 blue socks in a drawer what's the smallest number I need to take out to be sure of getting a pair?

(Answer: It's a trick question. There are no pairs - all the left socks have long since been sacrificed to the Dark Gods of the Laundry.)

2002-08-06 08:00 (UTC+1)

The Princess and the Pea, Approximately

When the enigmatically unlinkable Birgitte mentioned this collection site of Hans Christian Andersen's fairy tales I promised I would have a go at Prindsessen paa �rten last night with my Advanced Philological Tools.

Unfortunately the tools in question amount to an ancient Teach Yourself Danish, a far-from-modern Hugo's Danish In Three Months and an ageing little Bertlitz Engelsk-Norsk (ja, Norsk) ordbook. Still, everyone knows the story of the Princess and the pea anyway, and the quest for en virkelig Prindsesse is one that could hardly be denied the Desbladet seal of approval, and I am most of the way through a book on the Scandinavian languages from a linguist's point of view, so it would have been undignified to retreat. Besides, I've plodded through a word-by-word glossed version of the parable of the sower and the seed in Gothic before now - this was kids' stuff by comparison.

There's nothing quite like reading archaic Danish as basically misspelled Swedish and finding that the most useful resource for the difficult words is a Norwegian dictionary to emphasise how much the languages have in common. I appreciate that this is hardly a drastic conclusion but this is the first chunk of $OTHER_SCANLANG I've actually read and it really really works!

2002-08-05 15:25

Proper Linkage

Here's a Guardian article in which Julian Evans discusses Danish and Swedish literature.

I have read none of the authors discussed and I probably ought to do something about that at some point. Did Kierkegaard or Strindberg write anything about Princesses or is it all interminable sub-Arctic angst?

There's always Hans Christian Andersen, I suppose - he must have done Princesses, surely?

2002-08-05 10:20 (UTC+1)

A New Outlook

At my mother's place there were boxes to shift, gardens to dig and bags of shit (oh, exsqueeze me, manure) to deploy thereupon, and Stuff to be taken down the tip. By the sweat of my brow do I thus earn my keep.

But the real reason I had been summoned was that my mother had (it's best not to ask how) managed to replace Outlook Express on her computer with a larger and less pixilised version of this photo of me:

While I'm sure we can all agree that I radiate the Inner Joy only available to a man wearing a burgundy and cyan robe while clutching a plastic degree scroll, my mother had come to think that this was not an entirely satisfactory alternative to the use of email.

(I, on the other hand, think of it as Karma - I had only agreed to the photos of my first graduation on the condition that I wouldn't have to see them. Needless to say, photos of all three of my graduations are prominently displayed on the dining room wall. I rejoice, however, that I have never seen the videos, and I am not joking.)

I'm not very good at Windows technical support - I loathe the system and refuse to use it at work - but I did get it sorted. Had there been a fatted calf in the vicinity it would have promptly found itself grazing in the Great Meadow in the Sky, but as there wasn't we settled for roast chicken and rather too much ouzo. What is it people have against ouzo, by the way? It's pretty much interchangeable with Pernod, and that is clearly a good thing. Aniseed is universally loved and cherished by right-thinking people, isn't it?