Slovenia has very good graffiti

this photo (plus others at flickr) by Michael

I'll be back in DC tomorrow. See you around!

it's a pretty fun game.

So, I'm in Trieste with some various members of my family. Yesterday was very calm and unAmerican; we had dinner (lunch) at a restaurant and then played bridge in the apartment. I drank way too much wine and did not win at the card game. A good time was had by all.

During dinner my sister introduced to us another game which we played for a really really long time. In this game, somebody thinks of something, and then everybody else thinks of something, and then everybody else says what their thing is, and then the first person says what their thing is, and then the first person decides which of the other things is most similar to their (the first person's) thing and says why.

Then it the person who thought of that's turn to go next.

I could probably explain that more clearly, but instead I will give you an example:

Cecily: okay I have one.
Michael: window
Nancy: air
Regan: Dresden
Ben: vessels
Jocelyn: the Little Mermaid
Cecily: okay, it's Alcatraz.

This was a hard one and it came down to being a battle between Dresden and the Little Mermaid, Dresden because it is a place and a town and the locus for much heartbreak and strife, and the mermaid because she sits on a rock in the ocean. But then I suddenly realized that my sister and my dad had totally been monopolizing the game, and on reflection I realized too that vessels can hold stuff, and so can Alcatraz. So the round went to Ben.

It's a pretty fun game.

Ciao

Hey! I'm in Italy. I didn't miss any of my connecting flights and none of my bags were lost or delayed. Woo Christmas!

democracy, whiskey, sexy!

We had a 4th of July party here on Saturday. It was very fun. Pictures on flickr; I have to write a paper now.

The south is so weird.

It's been snowing like crazy all day. I like it! But here's the thing: there are all these people running around outside, in the snow, with UMBRELLAS.

My disdain, as usual, is almost boundless.

In other news: School is almost over, and I am going to Italy for Christmas. Hooray for me!

update: visual aid!

things I want to do, soon

National Gallery's snapshot exhibit

Spy Museum again (I have comp tickets! That expire in December!)

kite flying. On the mall? I have a kite!

People who are interested in these activities, please tell me; I like company.

baby brothers

my advice to you

this is how I recommend everyone spend their Thanksgiving:

This is the holiday of Thanksgiving. It is a day of eating food that is baked, and food that is lightly cooked in a sauté or a hot pot of liquid. If you can bear it then announce why you are thankful on this day. Remember that your opinions may seem boorish or those of an ass to every person who is here

Try not to get too clopsy on the Scotch, out there.

it's nice to be home

Montana has:
-snow
-brothers
-coffee
-wine
-dogs

Montana does not have:
-traffic
-Presidents
-taxis
-chicken bones on the sidewalk

doing math with words

As mostly everyone who has ever met me knows, I like mixing up my domains. A lot. It can get a little out of control. Anyway, hence my love of ridiculous cartoons and puns in which arcane linguistics terms are used as, for example, the names of imaginary fighting techniques.

At some point last year I was overcome by an uncontrollable fit of giggles and snorts* during a class discussion about morphology, during which it was asserted that a certain English grammatical item has the effect on a verb of "suspending its temporal profile and rendering it imperfective."

I found this hilarious and immediately began to draw diagrams and avoid the eyes of my classmates, in an attempt to not collapse in a puddle of hilarity. But it was too late, and too many vaguely threatening conversations were happening in my head. As in,

"you just watch out or I'll render you imperfective"

and

"don't make me suspend your temporal profile, young lady"



I am not at all disruptive to have in a classroom setting.

So, lately all of my energy of this sort has been focused on spoken-language phonology, because I am taking a class at Georgetown about spoken-language phonology and there are all kinds of new and enticing words for me to make up stories about. And not only words! But phrases and constructions and metaphors, etc. For some reason this happens especially much when we are talking about Rs. Vowels are R-colored (my new favorite color? R!). Last week the professor told us (kind of indignantly) that "Zero plus R equals R" so therefore we do not need a special symbol for an R-colored schwa. Math and letters and colors, all mixed up into one delicious idea. (see! Now we have cooking too!)

The main idea of this post: I am working on a new cartoon. Titled "Phonolohotonthologos". Everyone, bone up on your 18th-century British satire and your laryngeal anatomy, or you probably won't think I'm very funny.



*This did not only happen one time.

other brother

costume number 1

Venus Flytrap.

kids these days

My little brother.

d

A hero for the ages.

I'm only in it for the sample sentences

Dear Internet,

It's damp and gloomy around Constitution City these days. Plus I am vaguely ill, as per usual. I'm spending the afternoon at my favorite friendly neighborhood coffee shop, "doing homework" and "being productive".

One of the things that I especially like, in a linguistics article, is when there is a whole list of sentences that is supposed to illustrate some important linguistic point. And I almost always think the lists of sentences are extremely entertaining, especially taken as a group.

For instance, from the article I am ostensibly reading right this second:

3.19
a. Your attitude upsets/is upsetting me.
a'. Your boorish behavior upsets/is upsetting me.
b. Your clothes nauseate/are nauseating me.
b'. The smell of your clothes nauseates/is nauseating me.

Whoever wrote these examples needs to get some new friends I think.

Then, after I am done reading this article and doing my homework, I have many, many things to do this weekend.

First is a fancy reception for the NSF project I'm working with. For the occasion, I am wearing brand new, very attractive, red shoes. I should update my profile; now I have THREE pairs. The new ones look like this:



The problem with me buying fancy new shoes and wearing them to grownup events is that I inevitably just show everyone my new shoes and force them to have long conversations with me about how great my new shoes are. Rather than discussing collaborative research efforts and visual language processing and other important things that I am supposed to be talking about. Oh well.

Second is a birthday party for Julie. Happy birthday Julie! This party is the social event of the season, it seems- Julie is so popular that everyone and their brother in law is flying in from out of town for the occasion. So that should be very fun and socially rewarding. I'll probably talk about my shoes a lot there too, unless I change into less fancy garb for the night.

Third (I'm not counting things I always do like sleep and drink coffee) is, my favorite friend Keith is in town from New Orleans where he is a Professor Of Economics, so he and his lovely lady friend and I are going to eat breakfast together. Breakfast! at 10 in the morning! On Saturday! I am so industrious these days, getting out of bed before noon and everything!

Fourth is more homework. A lot of it. And a lot of laundry. My bedroom had been looking substantially improved since the last time we talked about it, but this past week was a killer and we're back to not being able to see any square inches of floor, these days.

Fifth! Sixth! and Seventh! I'm supposed to go to THREE parties tomorrow night. I'm going to have to do some social-life triage, I think, because I usually start falling asleep on my way from the first thing I try to do to the second. If I try to do more than one thing. On an evening.

You know.

Then more things, but I am bored of thinking about it all right now. It sounds so exhausting. I'll have to coax myself gently from one event to the next by telling myself lots of encouraging remarks about the availability of various beverages and how much I like talking about my new shoes to people.

Meanwhile, here's what's been going on in my article: Leon is a fool, the window is shattered, the children cried, John ate fish, the balloon popped, the sky reddened, and Mary learned French.

ink; light sabers; old age

My printer is out of black ink (or it is just angry with me; it's hard to say) and I had to turn in some homework yesterday. I tried printing it anyway, in the hope that it would just look sort of faded and old-school, but instead only the top half of each line printed so it was no good. No good at all.

So I printed it again all in blue. That was very pretty, and I a little bit want to just never replace my black ink ever again. All my homework will be printed in a variety of colors and everyone's (or at least, the TA's) day will be a little brighter.

I did try to buy a new ink cartridge on Monday, but I failed. For some reason I had decided that this one store at Union Station would sell me one. But, I was wrong. It had been a long and hot day by the time I got there, anyway, so I didn't want to give up: I looked and looked and looked and then finally went up to the counter in case they were just hiding printer accessories from all the thieving, ink-loving tourists.

They weren't. That store only sells musicky things, not computery things. No ink cartridges were to be had.

It was okay though because my day was made so much better by the small suburban-grandmother-looking woman in front of me, who spent $750 on a lot of 6-foot electric light sabers. Three red, three green. Or maybe four. She sort of stacked all the gigantic boxes around each other and staggered out into the world, lacking visibility but heavily armed. I spent the rest of the afternoon imagining her busting out the light sabers (one in each hand) in order to settle a duel, or hail a cab, or scold teenagers for coarse language.

Because everyone knows that's what suburban grandmothers spend their days doing: settling duels, hailing cabs, and scolding teenagers.