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2004-01-09 post prandial (utc)
Book:
Jacque Monod Le Hasard
et la N�cessit�. (Review)
Film: Pirates of the Carribean. A learned correspondent
informs me that those who become undead without previously having died
are not, technically, zombies. But even so, I seldom go to the cinema
and I liked this one, especially since it was subtitled in Latvia
and Russian.
Album: Essential
Purcell, Hyperion. Completely astonishing. It isn't classical
music, before you start, it's baroque: Baroque is the good
stuff; classical is when the clammy hand of harmony finally throttled
the polyphony out of the western art music tradition and made Mozart
seem (at least to his contemporaries) like a good idea, and should be
rigorously shunned.
Global TV channel: Deutsche Welle. Half of it is in Engleesh, and
even when it isn't it's still preferable to CNN, BBC World or TV5 (if
that's what the dreadful French one is called). The news gets on with
it, and finds space for vignettes and curiousities, and even some of
the features are tolerable.
TV Programme: A tie between the skihoppning and the cricket, both of
which I generally only get to see in pubs.
Country: Finland, Finland, Finland. My source of
Kalle Anke, Svensk Damtidning, Swedish-language
newspapers and, crucially, the home of the mighty Hesburger and
the best post-apocalyptic shopping tunnels I've seen outside Japan.
County Fair: Los Angeles.
Beer: Aldaris Zelta beats out S^vtyturys Extra, because I had a litre
glass of it, it came first chronologically, and it's easier to say
after a few of litres.
Food: A tie between peas and bacon, Lithuanian style, and macaroni
and cheese on a stick.
Zoo: San Diego.
City: Riga. There may be prettier old towns (Tallin is lovely), but
Riga stays pretty further out.
Commute: Venice. The bus from the mainland (where we stayed) worked,
and you can't beat a water-bus down the grand canale, even if that was
all I saw of the place. (Sigh.)
News story: Kronprinsfred's engagement, of course. (Runner up: Sn�kaos)
Prinsess: Mette-Marit. An heir in the oven, a well-received
co-regency, and her brave struggle against
carpetification. (Knudella isn't a prinsess yet, of course, and
thus ineligible.)
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2004-01-09 kaffedags (utc)
(I think I'll make this an occasional series.)
When I placed my order at amazon.de I inadvertently used the debit card
that was thieved a few months ago. (I never actually created an
account at 'zon.de, incidentally. 'Zon.(co.uk|fr) must have tipped
them off, excuse my regexps.)
So a day later I got an email from their Rechnungsservice (I'm
not going to translate any of the German terms, for reasons that
should be obvious) saying that "Ihnen ausgewaehlten Zahlungsart
nicht weiterbearbeiten" (I think that's the bit) and I had to dive
into the "Mein Konto" page to fix it all up again. Which I
duly did, although there were a few hairy moments, for sure.
And today I learn from them that "Ihre Amazon.de Bestellung wurde
versandt", hoorah! We call this technique for dealing with Forren
"pragmatics-oriented leverage of passive comprehension," although it
also answers to "Yeah, whatever". It does work, though: I also used
it on Lithuanian, where loanwords (usually from French) and
half-remembered scraps of the Latvian I had desultorarily worked at
added up to just slightly more than nothing.
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2004-01-07 hometime (utc)
I am up in th' Big Smoke tomorrow, at the celebrated and very Imperial
College of Science and Technology. (Which, being Imperial, could
certainly beat up any merely Kungliga Tekniska H�gskolan any day of
the week, and twice on Sundays.)
Back Friday.
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2004-01-07 13:12
�1: L'hoppning
Lib�ration ("Lib�") can fulfill
all your journalisme needs, you know. Even the skihoppning:
La 52e Tourn�e des quatre tremplins, le plus prestigieux troph�e de la
Coupe du monde de saut � skis, s'est termin�e hier sur le tremplin
autrichien de Bischofshofen par la victoire du Norv�gien Sigurd
Pettersen.
The 52nd Four Hills tournament, the most prestigious trophy of the
skihoppning world cup, finished last night on the Austrian slope at
Bischofshofen with the victory of the Norwegian Sigurd Pettersen.
It's no wonder the French never win it, though, if they go round
calling it "le saut � skis". It's a good article for the relative
hoppning novice, even if the French jumpers many shortcomings feature
prominently ("Nous ne sommes pas au niveau," ["We're not up to
scratch."] their coach acknowledges).
Odds on Norwegish kronprinsess
Mette-Marit's immanent sprog being called "Sigurd" if male are not,
however, discussed with any thoroughness.
�2: Sn�kaos! ("Sn�kaos")
It's all Norway Norway Norway at the moment, is it not? Stoking the
fires of national jubilation the fervent, if imported, patriot Anna K brings us glad, if
belated, tidings of sn�kaos (which is Norwegish for sn�kaos): "Nedb�rrekord
og sn�kaos i S�r-Norge" ("Precipitation record and sn�kaos in
Southern Norway").
This is especially magnificent since sn� had already taken every
other country in the region by surprise in the last couple of weeks,
but Norway had nonetheless heroically refused to take the hint, hoorah!
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2004-01-07 kaffedags (utc)
�1 Det sn�ar inte, tyv�rr
Historiological
notes alerts us to the parallel history of Winnie the Pooh in
Norwegish, where the songs acquired tunes which are known and loved by
generations of Norwegish. (It is of course no secret that
Scandiwegians have to be physically restrained from communal singing
at the slightest provocation.) Happily, the cited example concerns
sn�, and is in fact "The more it sn�s (tiddely-pom)", and it starts
like this:
Det sn�r, det sn�r,
tiddeli bom.
Det er det det gj�r,
tiddeli bom.
N� sn�r det mye mer enn f�r
tiddeli bom og huttemei tu.
We are then asked, "Does anyone know other books or characters that
has its own life after translation?" and as it happens, I do. The Magic Roundabout, a staple of
UKish childrens TV and beloved by young and old of its era (it was the
5 minute bridge between afterschoolchildrensprogrammes and the smelly
old evening news, so everybody saw it) was originally in French, but
the animations were completely rescripted in Engleesh:
Once Eric Thompson was chosen to do the voices and narration of the
programmes, he decided not work from the translations of the French
scripts but made up stories to fit the pictures as he went along.
Now that's the kind of translation this bladet is proud to
endorse!
�2 The same procedure as every year: a diachronic investigation of
Christmas traditions.
via Margaret
Marks, a discussion of
"Christmas" traditions by a sufficiently historian not to mistake any
set of customs as a "True Meaning":
[T]his is Christmas, and [...] in the Middle Ages Christmas was the
Feast of Fools. All over northern Europe the tradition was to turn the
world upside down at Christmas, to choose the most unlikely person and
put him in charge. All the great cathedrals elected a Boy Bishop who
was expected to preach on Christmas day, and who was even put in
charge of the administration from St Nicholas day, 6th December, until
the 28th (Holy Innocents). And all the great households, including the
royal courts, appointed one of the servants - preferably an idiot - to
be the Lord of Misrule as he was called in England, or the Abbot of
Unreason, as he was in Scotland. Their job was to preside over the
celebrations, which at the least went on for the traditional Twelve
Days - from the 26th of December until the 6 of January (the feast of
the Epiphany, of the Three Kings). The Lord of Misrule insulted the
guests, rather than flattered them; the humour and the songs were
vulgar and obscene; and there was more than a hint of sexual
misconduct.
Unfortunately (for posterity, if not the after-dinner listeners), all
the footnotes fell of during the soup course, and blaming the
Reformation for the decline of such practices leaves unexplained how
they stopped in Catholic Yoorp also, and the relation to the similar
traditions of value-inverting carnivals, which I am given to
understand are still alive and well in Germany.
�3 Liberate me harder!
The shrill and uselessly paranoid cabal that has hijacked a country
once world-renowned as a beacon of liberty has come up with a new and
pointless way to humiliate and insult Forreners: give them a de
facto criminal record on entry to the FDRUSA.
Read all about it at, for preference, chez
Lib�ration. (Frenchy-french required.)
�4 Prinsessor!
[via Birgitte, tack.] It is indeed marvellous what
years of careful training in the tact and discretion becoming in a
prinsess can accomplish:
Prinsessan Madeleine och kronprinsessan Victoria festade i natt in
det nya �ret tillsammans med sina pojkv�nner i S�len.
[...]
- Det �r mycket roligare att fira utan mamma och pappa,
s�ger Madeleine till Expressen.
Prinsess Madeleine and kronprinsess Victoria [in that order, note]
celebrated the new year last night with their boyfriends in S�len.
"It's much more fun to celebrate without mummy and daddy," said
Madeleine to Expressen.
And let's face it: the celebrated partyprinsess would know.
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2004-01-06 hometime (utc)
This Cepelinai (Centraleurop�isch <c> = Engleesh <ts> =
German <z>, so these are in fact "potato zeppelins", shaped like
the legendary airships, yum yum, whose hangers, incidentally, where
later imported to Riga (Latvia) for use as the covers of the covered market
near the train station where you can buy the single pair of gloves a
babushka outside is peddling or nip in and buy red caviar by the kilo,
or any number of things made of pigs, but I digress)
recipe
calls for you to "irate potatoes". I think it's an imperative rather
than an adjective, but that leaves me none the wiser on how.
This is from a Lithuanian page that wants you to understand why "every
time you sit down to a Lithuanian meal you are faced with a plate of
food full of meat and grease." As a lapsed vegetarian, however, I
tend to feel a plate full of meat and grease needs no further
explanation, and certainly no apology, and if I had a freezer I'd be
batching up zeppelins for several at the weekend. But sadly I do not,
and my local food emporiums do not offer a boil in the bag version,
which I think is an unfortunate omission.
And I have nothing to eat tonight, and no beer for my most excellent
beer mug. It is now, even more than getting up for work this morning
(where I had the +2 in UTC+2 to lie in anyway) that I understand that
the holiday is over.
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2004-01-06 hurrah! (utc)
Is there anything quite as
engrossing as following a sporting event by means of the
commentary-free text summary of the results on a web page? (You might
think a Grauniad cricket-style approach would be worth a go, but that
would probably go right over my head in Norwegish.)
And now Mr Pettersen of Norway has won the Fourth Hill of the
Hoppning, to add to victories in the First and Second, and thus won
also the whole tournament. And as Norwegish news sources struggle to
keep up with the enormity of these events, Aftenposton manages
a terse remark to more or less this effect.
Tomorrow, normal prinsessfixated bladet nonsense will of course
resume, since we do not care to follow the whole worldcuphoppningseason:
skihoppning is at heart a Twinkletreetelevisiontreat.
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2004-01-06 morning, all! (utc)
At Helsinggrad airport yesterday (Monday) they only had Sunday's
edition of VG which preceded the Third
Hill Skihoppning results, but had plenty of fluff about Pettersen.
The Hufvudsted[sic]bladet on the plane had the full results,
but they could only bring themselves to talk about about the Finnish
hoppars, the top two of which came second and third respectively so
why not?
The Evening Standard (a bit like a newspaper) headline on the way back
said "Welcome back to rail chaos" (t�gkaos), which was sweet of
them even if there was no more evidence of that than of sn�, which is
to say none. I'll miss it.
While I was away, there was indeed plenty of sn�kaos in Finland and
Sweden; the sn� blew into Helsinggrad just about the time we did, and
then into Vilnius more-or-less simultaneously with our train. I have
no idea whether Lithuania went down with kaos, since I never got the
hang of the language and hence the newspapers, but it didn't look like
it. An investigative committee has been established to look into the
relative paucity of sn� in Riga.
Although I did get, as I blogged earlier, a teach yourself Latvian
book, I had really been keeping my powder dry for Lithuanian, about
which many dubious claims of Indo-Yoorpean archaisms are often made,
but the nice lady in the bookshop out there recommended the Routledge
Colloquial pack as the best Engleesh source, h�las. (Routledge
are OK, but insufficiently exotic for my tastes and they tend towards
the dull.) The Rough Guide Baltic Phrasebook, admirable though
it is in ways I am too foolish to appreciate, does not provide the raw
materials from which "A beer, please" can be assembled and since this
is about half of what I typically want to say in Forren (weighted by
frequency), I simply gave up at that point.
Mr Kauder and Mr Welsch are now winging me materials to learn German
(the language of instruction being French), Russian (the other
Important Global Language of the sn�belt) and Lithuanian, because I am
still curious. The Open University has also sent me its language
prospectus, and my current goal is to render the beginners' German
course largely redundant by the time it starts in November, although
Scandiwegian will certainly remain the primary dialect of Forren on
this bladet.
Now, I really must try to remember how it is I live and what it is I do.
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