Hawks Again

The pair of red-shouldered hawks have been about the park again the past week. Today I saw them at dawn, and again at noon when I was leaving for a dental appointment. In the morning on Thursday last week, when I went in late, I saw them, too, and got a couple of good shots of the female after they split up.

Here they are against the dawn sky:


And here at noon, having just flown in from opposite ends of the park - this shot shows both front and back plumages nicely. (I love their brocaded backs!):



I'm pretty sure this was the male - he joined his mate a couple of minutes later.






This is the female, I'm pretty sure - she's the larger of the two:



Here she is from the back, displaying that striking pattern:



And here she is preening, her head buried in her breast feathers (that brown spot below her head is her brooding patch, I think):

Happy Birthday, Jackie

Today in 1919 Jackie Robinson was born.

A stunning second baseman over ten seasons, he played in six World Series and contributed to the Dodgers' 1955 World Championship. He was selected for six consecutive All-Star Games from 1949 to 1954, was the recipient of the inaugural MLB Rookie of the Year Award in 1947, and won the National League Most Valuable Player Award in 1949 – the first black player so honored. He was inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame in 1962 on the first ballot. In 1997, Major League Baseball retired his uniform number, 42, across all major league teams.

And of course, he was the first black major leaguer since 1880, breaking baseball's color barrier... and contributing massively to the advancement of civil rights.

The Week in Entertainment

TV: House - I don't get it. She stole $2500 from Chase. She stole $2500. Why is this being treated as if it's funny?? He's not allowed to walk away from someone he just met because she won't sleep with him? I'm not saying he's a prince (though currently he is my favorite character - which says more about the rest of them, I think), but - five minutes of conversation means she's allowed to steal from him and harass him and make his life miserable - and it's funny? He has to date people he doesn't want to? The people who write this show are crazy. A couple of indie films I hadn't even heard of before, somehow. TiMER, which had lot of interesting ideas inside the rom-com packages - things like destiny and whether you actually want to know your fate. Emma Caulfield was very good. Also, Penelope, a very cute, well-acted, appealing little fairy tale. My only quibble is, that nose was hardly enough to make grown men run screaming down a hallway to jump through a window on the second floor. Also, an animated film called Dragon Hunters which combined stunningly gorgeous visuals (of places and things) which very cartoony people and a very predictable plot. It certainly wasn't a bad movie, but don't go out of your way to see it.

Read: Your Hate Mail Will Be Graded by John Scalzi, a collection from The Whatever. Executive Lunch, not a bad first mystery, and Take The Monkeys And Run, a funny first mystery. And another JS Fletcher, In the Mayor's Parlor, which was nicely done. I like this guy's writing.

Happy Birthday, Gelett

Today in Boston in 1866 (Frank) Gelett Burgess was born.

He wrote more than 35 books of fiction and nonfiction, including Lady Méchante or Life As It Should Be (which is funny), as well as several plays, and he coined the word "blurb". But he is best known for this (which has a title I never knew till today):

Purple Cow: Reflections on a Mythic Beast Who's Quite Remarkable, at Least

I never Saw a Purple Cow;
I never Hope to See One;
But I can Tell you, Anyhow,
I'd rather See than Be One.

This poem haunted his life , eventually causing him to write this little sequel:

Confession: and a Portrait Too, Upon a Background that I Rue

Ah, yes, I wrote the Purple Cow;
I'm sorry now I wrote it;
But I can tell you, Anyhow,
I'll Kill you if you Quote it.

(But he's dead, so I'm not afraid.)

Spread of an unbelievable meme

You know, when Susan Collins tried to spin the repeal of DADT as a bipartisan victory over Democratic bigotry, I scoffed. For crying out loud, when Clinton passed DADT it was not a step backward from some time of equality and Gay Pride in uniform. Before DADT it was HDKO - Hunt Down and Kick Out. With, by the way, a Dishonorable Discharge that pretty much ruined your life as far as employment prospects went.

And now I'm seeing that show up elsewhere - in the comments at Digital Cuttlefish's place for instance, where a commenter said

"Oh yes. Me too! I'm glad that most Republicans support the GOProud... Further, the terribly stupid half-measure of Don't Ask, Don't Tell enacted by (Democrat) Pres. Clinton has GOT TO GO."

Look, I'm glad that some, maybe even many, Republicans are coming around. But let's not lie to ourselves and pretend that before Clinton gays were happily accepted in the armed forces. DADT was a sad compromise forced on us by Republicans. Fact.

Happy Birthday, Anton

Today in 1860 Антон Павлович Чехов (Anton Pavlovich Chekhov) was born. He was a doctor throughout his life, and probably contracted the tuberculosis that killed him while practicing medicine in the labor camps of Siberia - not as a prisoner, but as a volunteer medic, a logical conclusion to a career that began with free clinics and sliding-scale fees for Russia's working poor and included building schools and a fire station.

But if medicine was his lawful wife, literature, as he said once to Alexei Suvorin, was his mistress (Медицина — моя законная жена, а литература — любовница), and he wrote four classic plays (Three Sisters, Uncle Vanya, The Seagull, and The Cherry Orchard) and many short stories - his masterpiece "The Lady with the Dog" was written in Yalta, where he'd gone to battle his tuberculosis. (The picture is Chekhov with a dog, in Yalta...) Many consider him the father of the modern short story, many of whose forms he pioneered. He also formulated what's often called "Chekhov's Law" of "economy in narrative": "Don't tell me the moon is shining; show me the glint of light on broken glass." Or, in a more famous formulation, often called Chekhov's Gun: Если в первом акте на стене висит ружье, то в последнем оно обязательно выстрелит - "If there's a gun on the wall in the first act, it has to be fired by the end of the third act."

In May 1904 he became so ill that he went to a German health spa, where he died two months later.

All 201 of his stories, in the Constance Garnett translations and in chronological order, can be found here, with notes. And here they are in Russian.


«Если ты кричишь "Вперед!", ты должен принять безошибочное решение, в каком направлении нужно идти. Разве ты не понимаешь, что, не сделав этого, ты взываешь как к монаху, так и к революционеру, и они будут двигаться в противоположных направлениях?»

"If you cry 'Forward!' you must make it absolutely plain which direction to go. Don't you see that if, without doing so, you call out the word to both a monk and a revolutionary, they will go in precisely opposite directions?"

Snicker. But then, of course

At headsup: the blog Fred looks at some Foxy fearmongering.

The project, three years in the making, also presents a portrait of the Muslim world that might surprise some. For instance, Germany has more Muslims than Lebanon, China has more Muslims than Syria, Russia has more Muslims than Jordan and Libya combined, and Ethiopia has nearly as many Muslims as Afghanistan. It might surprise people who missed the part of third grade where you figure out that a small part of a really, really big thing can be bigger than a really, really small thing. Syria had about 21 million people in 2009, about an eighth of whom were distinctly non-Muslim. How shocked do you figure we ought to be at the news that there are more than 18 million Muslims in China?

The point, though, of course is that most of the people reading this story will not be thinking rationally. And this stuff just fans the flames.

For Challenger

I thought of various poems... but in the end this, though not strictly a poem, seemed fitting. Kalpana Chawla, my favorite astronaut, looked out on January 28, 2003, and saw the sunset overtaking the day, and the light and dark sides of Earth together. This is what she said later about that moment, which occurred on the anniversary of the Challenger disaster and only a few days before Columbia went to join her sister ship...

More than Stars in their Eyes
	In the retina of my eye, the whole Earth and the sky could be seen reflected. So I called all the crew members one by one, and they saw it, and everybody said, "Oh, wow!"

Y not?

Category: "Stan" in the place where you live.

Clue: If you don't count the two Ys, the A is the only vowel in this country's name.

I'm not sure why, but the way this is worded reminds me of Jeopardy's sister show's fiat that Y is never a vowel (meaning words like "why" or "spy" or "spryly" have no vowels in them), something that really annoys me. Why wouldn't you count them?

What's wrong asking "Y is the only other vowel than A in this country's name"?

Or am I just over thinking and over reacting? (Do not answer that!)

ps - I have the tee-shirt with this diagram on it. For fun at lunch one day, a bunch of us tried to figure out how it would differ for other languages (e.g., for Welsh move Y into the vowel side, but move I and W into the center, or for Croatian, move R and L ...)

........ I do need a life, don't I?

Sky Watch: Sun Lance

A day between snow storms - the sun lances upward towards red and grey clouds in a glorious burst of gold.




more Sky Watchers here

Yes he is

In today's Washington Post, Tom Campbell says "DeLay is not a bad man."

I beg to differ. You can tell a lot about a man by the positions he espouses. And Tom DeLay espoused bad, bad positions.

Take just one example: the Northern Mariana Islands. Until fairly recently (2000) in that US territory,

91 percent of the workforce who were immigrants -- from China, the Philippines, Sri Lanka and Bangladesh -- were being paid barely half the U.S. minimum hourly wage and were forced to live behind barbed wire in squalid shacks minus plumbing, work 12 hours a day, often seven days a week.

One man - Tom DeLay - worked very very hard to keep it that way.

"Made in the USA" went on everything produced in those islands. Most Americans would be appalled to know the conditions that "in the USA" meant. Tom DeLay was ecstatic.

In 1997, on a golfing visit to the Islands, he told the islands' employers: "You are a shining light for what is happening to the Republican Party, and you represent everything that is good about what we are trying to do in America and leading the world in the free-market system."

Later, DeLay would tell The Washington Post's Juliet Eilperin that the low-wage, anti-union conditions of the Marianas constituted "a perfect petri dish of capitalism. It's like my Galapagos Island."

Tom DeLay thought the whole country should be run like that. Yeah.

Tom DeLay is not just "someone who lost his way in pursuit of what he thought was right".

Tod DeLay is a bad man. And three years in jail might not be long enough.

They really can't

Presented without comment, from yesterday's STRATFOR newsletter this sentence (yes, one sentence) - exhibit three in my contention that they can't write:

There is already a succession process in play, so with these protests that are taking place and the big one that’s supposed to come tomorrow, they may exacerbate that pre-existing condition and really force the ruling National Democratic Party into a corner because it’s already struggling with the military in terms of how to proceed with the transition and now it’s seeing pressure from the streets and the fear is that in an extreme case scenario the military could actually align with the public to boot out the NDP and create a new system.

Happy Birthday, José

José Martí was born today in Havana, Cuba, in 1853. He was exiled to Spain at 17, later moving to Mexico, Guatemala, and back to Cuba, from which he was again deported to Spain; he fled to France and then the US, living in New York and working for Cuban independence. He joined the war in 1895 and died shortly after the invasion.

Por Tus Ojos Encendidos... (Verso XIX)

Por tus ojos encendidos
Y lo mal puesto de un broche,
Pensé que estuviste anoche
Jugando a juegos prohibidos.

Te odié por vil y alevosa:
Te odié con odio de muerte:
Náusea me daba de verte
Tan villana y tan hermosa.

Y por la esquela que vi
Sin saber cómo ni cuándo,
Sé que estuviste llorando
Toda la noche por mí.


translation by Manuel A. Tellechea:

Because your eyes were two flames
And your brooch wasn't pinned right,
I thought you had spent the night
In playing forbidden games.

Because you were vile and devious
Such deadly hatred I bore you:
To see you was to abhor you
So lovely and yet so villainous.

Because a note came to light,
I know now where you had been,
And what you had done unseen —
Cried for me all the long night.


(More of his poems in Spanish and in English here)

Are or do

Just heard a commercial that featured one of those odd uncoordinated coordinations that happens because English treats 'to be' as though it were an auxiliary verb:

Are you between 55 and 80 or know someone who is?

They're trying to coordinate two questions, and generally we omit the second auxiliary - but only when it's the same one as the first. But "know" takes "do" to make questions (and negatives) - as do all lexical verbs. "Be", however, doesn't* - in fact, "be" itself is its own auxiliary. "You know someone - do you know someone?" but "you are between 55 and 80 - are you between 55 and 80?"

So the perfectly coordinated construction - compare "do you watch television or know someone who does?" - falls apart.

* There are in fact plenty of Englishes that treat "be" as a lexical verb, with do-support constructions such as "Do you be between..." and "I do not be...", but Modern Standard English isn't one of them.

Happy Birthday, Charles

Charles Dodgson, better known as Lewis Carroll, was born today in 1832, near Daresbury, Cheshire, England.

Three years ago you got The Mad Gardener's Song; two years ago Bessie's Song to Her Doll, last year Tema Con Varizioni, and this year A Sea Dirge:

There are certain things - as, a spider, a ghost,
The income-tax, gout, an umbrella for three -
That I hate, but the thing that I hate the most
Is a thing they call the Sea.

Pour some salt water over the floor -
Ugly I'm sure you'll allow it to be:
Suppose it extended a mile or more,
THAT'S very like the Sea.

Beat a dog till it howls outright -
Cruel, but all very well for a spree:
Suppose that he did so day and night,
THAT would be like the Sea.

I had a vision of nursery-maids;
Tens of thousands passed by me -
All leading children with wooden spades,
And this was by the Sea.

Who invented those spades of wood?
Who was it cut them out of the tree?
None, I think, but an idiot could -
Or one that loved the Sea.

It is pleasant and dreamy, no doubt, to float
With 'thoughts as boundless, and souls as free':
But, suppose you are very unwell in the boat,
How do you like the Sea?

There is an insect that people avoid
(Whence is derived the verb 'to flee').
Where have you been by it most annoyed?
In lodgings by the Sea.

If you like your coffee with sand for dregs,
A decided hint of salt in your tea,
And a fishy taste in the very eggs -
By all means choose the Sea.

And if, with these dainties to drink and eat,
You prefer not a vestige of grass or tree,
And a chronic state of wet in your feet,
Then - I recommend the Sea.

For I have friends who dwell by the coast -
Pleasant friends they are to me!
It is when I am with them I wonder most
That anyone likes the Sea.

They take me a walk: though tired and stiff,
To climb the heights I madly agree;
And, after a tumble or so from the cliff,
They kindly suggest the Sea.

I try the rocks, and I think it cool
That they laugh with such an excess of glee,
As I heavily slip into every pool
That skirts the cold cold Sea.

Happy Birthday, Thomas

Today in 1621 Thomas Willis was born - the father of modern neurology. He discovered much about the way the brain is put together - nerves and cranial anatomy, including the Circle of Willis, and the circulation of the blood into and through the brain.

Carl Zimmer has written a (typically) brilliant book, Soul Made Flesh, that tells his story - and others (did you know Christopher Wren was more famous in his lifetime for his anatomical drawings than his architecture?) - highly recommended. I happened to read it shortly before visiting London, and it made me hunt out Willis's tomb in St Paul's.

Happy Birthday, Wolfgang

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart was born today in 1756 in Salzburg.

Happy Birthday, Jules

Today in the Bronx in 1929 Jules Feiffer was born.


Here's my annual offering of a classic... still (unfortunately) relevant.

"And"?

STRATFOR can't write. This is my conclusion after reading their newsletter for several months now. I once accused them of using conjunctions to subtly editorialize, but now I think that, well, they just can't write.

This isn't to say that they can't analyze world politics. Maybe they can. I'm not so sure now that what they say is what they mean. Conjunctions and complex sentences give them fits.

Am I being too hard on them? As they say, you be the judge of this paragraph from today's newsletter:

Hezbollah with a backing of Syria engineered a collapse of the Lebanese government. Once the Lebanese government fell apart, premonitions of a return to civil war started making their appearance in the Lebanese media. In this whole scenario though, Syria and Hezbollah knew that they held the upper hand. If anyone wanted to avoid a bigger conflict, and that includes the Americans, the Saudis, and many of Lebanon’s own factions, then they would have to come to Syria to negotiate on Syrian terms. Those terms meant getting rid of Prime Minister Saad al-Hariri and also neutralizing the Special Tribunal for Lebanon investigating his father’s murder, and that investigation was putting at risk a number of Hezbollah and Syrian officials.

That last sentence? Why isn't that a relative clause? "And that"?? Or try this sentence from the same newsletter:

Now a compromise candidate of sorts, Najib Mikati, has been nominated as Lebanon’s next prime minister. According to Lebanese law, the prime minister has to be Sunni. This is causing a lot of anger among Lebanon’s Sunnis who are outraged that Lebanon’s next prime minister is someone who’s been nominated by their archrivals in Hezbollah. Now we have a situation where Lebanon’s Sunnis are the ones leading violent protests in the country and everyone is appealing for calm. And again this works in Hezbollah’s favor, for once they are not seen as the propagators of violence, the Sunnis are, and Hezbollah is using this to sow more divisions within the Sunni camp.

"This is causing anger"? What's "this"? The way it's written, it's the law requiring the prime minister to be Sunni, and that, frankly, makes no sense. Here we need a "even though according" or "despite the fact that according". Or does it? Once we know that Mikati is a Sunni (though we won't find that out from this report), we see that the whole "According to Lebanese law" sentence ought to be a parenthetical, if it actually needs to be there at all. The paragraph is a mess.

Of course, it may seem like I'm beating up on someone whose doing quite a good job in a second language; after all, the analysis was written by someone who - judging by their name - is not a native speaker of English. But I'm not. I'm talking about STRATFOR, who claim to use "powerful analysis based on geopolitics to produce penetrating explanations of world events. This independent, non-ideological content enables users not only to better understand international events, but also to reduce risks and identify opportunities in every region of the globe," and who are an American-founded, -based, and -led organization. If they can't produce reports in clear English, they've got a problem - or rather, we do, given who reads and relies on those reports.

It's the little things

Sometimes, when you're reading a book set in another country, it's the little things that you notice the most. For instance, I'm reading "Brittle Shadows", a novel set in Australia by an Australian. This sentence really struck me:

[She was] wondering what it would take to convince her dour-faced taxi driver to adjust the air conditioning to something less than Antarctic.

Antarctic?

Well, sure. That's what they're next to, after all.

But I doubt it would ever have occurred to me to put that word in if I were writing an Australian character...

Complementizing Comma?

I just finished a book called Deed to Death. To be fair, the plot was tight, but I don't really care for the school of mystery writing that relies on "the driver of the green sedan was worried" and "Toni pulled onto the freeway. Four cars behind the green sedan followed" gimmick. Refusing to identify this menacing figure, and then actually writing sections from his point of view without ever telling us he's the killer - well, let's just say that in order to pull it off you have to be a much better writer than this one is. It feels like a cheat when you discover what's clearly meant to be a dazzling surprise.

But that's not what I want to talk about. The author has an idiosyncratic style, full of sentence fragments instead of complex sentences - like this:

A heavy spring rain had fallen during the night. A cleansing deluge that hammered the grey dust from the surface of the gravel and forged deep puddles across the road leading to the construction site.

I'm not crazy about the simple past, which I think should have been the past perfect - and really? "forged puddles"? But metaphors are tricky - sometimes they work and sometimes they don't. If this one hadn't been on the first page, when I was still easing into the book, I probably wouldn't have paid it so much attention.

But that's not what I want to talk about, either. The main thin she does that jars me is use commas where she's dropped a complementizing that.

Okay, what do I mean by "complementizing that"? The word "that" can be used to introduce a complement clause - a clause filling the slot in a sentence usually filled by some sort of noun phrase. For instance, I knew John and I knew that John was a good man have the same top-level structure. The verb "knew" has a direct object in the first sentence and what you might call a direct object clause in the second - a complement clause, to be precise - and it's introduced by "that". This use of "that" - to introduce a complement clause - is called "complementizing".

Now, in English we can omit the complementizing "that" in the vast majority of cases (not when it's a subject, as "that John was a good man was something we all agreed on", because we have to have it there to signal the approach of a complex subject). And in fact we very often do.

I know you think you're doing the right thing

is far more likely to occur than

I know that you think that you're doing the right thing.

But when you omit it, you don't fill that gap with a comma.

I know, you think that you're doing the right thing

is a very different sentence, and so is

I know, you think, you're doing the right thing.

That latter one is close to incoherent without some context, but could easily make perfect sense - it just can't mean what the version with "that"s does. That needs to be written without the commas.

This author has a tendency to use commas in place of complementizing "that" - not all the time, no, but sometimes. For example:

In that moment she knew, Brian counted her as family.

And then Toni realized, Mark's treachery hadn't ended with Scott's murder.

And then she realized, she was going to pass out.

The first one of these is particularly bad. When she doesn't know, Brian doesn't count her as family? But the other two, while hard to misinterpret, are awkward and jarring, because you're expecting more to the sentence. You're expecting a complement to follow what the comma tells you is a parenthetical. And you don't get it. So you have to go back and start over.

Commas don't separate verbs from their direct objects. And that's true whether the direct object is a simple noun phrase or a complement clause.

I think I know what she's doing. But she's picked the wrong punctuation mark. Far more often than the rest of them, the comma actually serves a grammatical function. It's not just "when there's a pause". In fact, using the "that" in all three of these sentences would have marked that pause more than adequately.

Happy Birthday, Vasily

Born today in 1848 in Krasnoyarsk, Vasily Ivanovich Surikov (Василий Иванович Суриков).

He is probably the foremost Russian painter of large-scale historical subjects, which often focused on events that resonated with the ordinary person, though he also painted smaller events and portraits. His major pieces are among the best-known paintings in Russia.

Three years ago I showed you his portrait of the Bronze Horseman - Peter I (the Great) in St Petersburg - and depiction of the arrest of the Boyarina Feodosia Morozova, Two years ago it was a light-hearted game, Taking of the Snow Fort, and one of his more intimate works, a portrait of Menshikov and his daughters in exile. Last year, a moody picture of Stenka Razin in his boat, and a portrait of an old man in his vegetable garden. This year, two of his landscapes, a herd of horses on the Barabin steppe and a seasonally-apt watercolor of the Kremlin.





You can find more of his pictures at this Russian-language site if you're interested.)

The Week in Entertainment

TV: Still catching up on DVR'd stuff: The season finale of Psych. Mr Yin! And I loved Gus's wanting to know what the stuff was, and was Yin going to sterilize the needle. The first episode of Shameless, which was rough, raw, and really very funny. Also serious as hell. Wow. The first two parts of Downton Abbey, which is entertaining. Finally got around to Great Migrations, which was stunning (and had rockhoppers! my very favorite penguins!). An episode of The Mentalist, which I enjoyed as usual. Modern Family was extremely funny. And then some movies - the 2006 The Quiet American, which was damned good - and didn't twist the book around like the Audie Murphy version (though in fairness I must say that I have always hated Audie Murphy since I was in the 3ID, where all the enlisted knew him as the guy who bought his Medal of Honor with the blood of his troops). Despicable Me, which was amusing enough but not as good as the reviews made it sound. The Young Victoria, well-acted and beautiful and interestingly written. The Third Man - I'm not quite sure how I managed to get this old without having seen it. And because I couldn't resist any longer, The Lightning Thief, which may have been okay as an independent entity, but which butchered the book so badly I cannot like it.

Read: The Lightning Thief, to confirm the above and get the taste of the movie out of my mind. Several more novels by Joseph Fletcher.

Happy Birthday, Sergei

Born today in Riga, Latvia, in the then Russian Empire, Sergei Eisenstein (Сергей Михайлович Эйзенштейн), one of the great pioneers of film directing, often called the "Father of Montage." He directed some of the early great movies - the silent films Strike [Стачка](1924), Battleship Potemkin [Броненосец Потёмкин] (1925) and October - Ten Days That Shook the World [Октябрь «Десять дней, которые потрясли мир»](1927), and the historical epic Alexander Nevsky [Александр Невский] (1938). Potemkin has some of the most famous sequences in film - particularly the one on the Odessa Gates steps.

Red-Shouldered Hawks

Almost a year ago (February, in fact) I saw two hawks on the dead tree in the park, but didn't have my camera. However, this week... this week I did.

First, on Tuesday last week when we came in late because of the ice and snow, I spotted a hawk flying across River Road into the trees between the creek and the Metro parking lot. I got a couple of nice pictures - including one really lucky shot.






And then Friday morning as I walked into the park I spotted them - once again, the pair of them and sitting in the same dead tree. They stayed there long enough for me to not only get the distance shot, but some fairly close-up ones. Then they moved off again, and once again one of them (I think the female) moved into a tree close enough for me to get a couple more shots.

What a reward for not getting the day off for snow!











(for I and the Birders who are interested, more - and better - shots of this pair are here and here, all from recent days.)

Happy Birthday, George

Mad, bad, and dangerous to know... George Gordon, Lord Byron, was born today in Aberdeen, Scotland, in 1788. Lame and bisexual, he had a miserable childhood, and left Britain as a young man to travel the eastern Mediterranean. He wrote a long poem about that trip, Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, and it made him an overnight success... success which he handled badly. Eventually his scandalous life made it dangerous for him to remain in Britain, and he fled to Italy, where he died at 36, deeply involved in the cause of Greek independence from the Ottoman Empire and still working on his final poem, Don Juan (which, in true English fashion, is pronounced Don Joo-an - as we see from the very first stanza, where it rhymes with "true one" and "new one".)


On this Day I Complete my Thirty-Sixth Year

'Tis time the heart should be unmoved,
   Since others it hath ceased to move:
Yet, though I cannot be beloved,
      Still let me love!

My days are in the yellow leaf;
   The flowers and fruits of love are gone;
The worm, the canker, and the grief
      Are mine alone!

The fire that on my bosom preys
   Is lone as some volcanic isle;
No torch is kindled at its blaze--
      A funeral pile.

The hope, the fear, the jealous care,
   The exalted portion of the pain
And power of love, I cannot share,
      But wear the chain.

But 'tis not thus--and 'tis not here--
   Such thoughts should shake my soul nor now,
Where glory decks the hero's bier,
      Or binds his brow.

The sword, the banner, and the field,
   Glory and Greece, around me see!
The Spartan, borne upon his shield,
      Was not more free.

Awake! (not Greece--she is awake!)
   Awake, my spirit! Think through whom
Thy life-blood tracks its parent lake,
      And then strike home!

Tread those reviving passions down,
   Unworthy manhood!--unto thee
Indifferent should the smile or frown
      Of beauty be.

If thou regrett'st thy youth, why live?
   The land of honourable death
Is here:--up to the field, and give
      Away thy breath!

Seek out--less often sought than found--
   A soldier's grave, for thee the best;
Then look around, and choose thy ground,
      And take thy rest.

Sky Watch: Frigid Dawn

Purple high in the cold sky fading to pink in the east - and then before the yellow of the rising sun there's a dark gray cloud lit with crimson... a bare tree... and three crows, calling in the dawn.





more Sky Watchers here

Ah, you know...

Myortvye dushi ... Мёртвые души, Gogol's great novel, is not pronounced Mee-ohrt-vee-ay doo-shee. It's not.

Why doesn't somebody look up how to pronounce words for Alex? I'm starting to think the only ones he does properly are the French ones.

Jeepers. They just dethroned a champion because he wrote "Angel & Demon" for the movie, instead of "Angels and Demons". Consider how badly some of them have spelled the "correct" answer, that's cold.

Anyway, back to my original point. It's Mjortvyje, /'mʲortvɨɪ/ - three syllables, not four, stressed on the first syllable, and no eees or ays.

"Consider"?

Okay, you know I'm not much of a prescriptivist when it comes to English style. But the nuts and bolts of grammar? Yes, it is possible to get those wrong.

But please don't really on a grammar checker for your pointers.

Take this sentence:

Mr X. proved himself able to handle a variety of topics at ILR Level 3.

The grammar checker would like me to get rid of himself and replace it with ... he. WTF? Oh, okay. If I do that, it immediately tells me that I should use him instead. Why can't it just say that in the first place? But I digress...

In its "explanation" it says

Use pronouns ending in "self" in conjunction with a noun, as in "Andrew himself" or when the pronoun refers back to the subject, as in "I hit myself." Use "own" in conjunction with a pronoun only when referring back to the subject.

Okay. Fine. (Well, except for the missing comma after "Andrew himself".) All well and good. (Of course, in my sentence "himself" does refer back to the subject.) But then it gives these two examples.

Instead of: They heard herself on the radio.
Consider: They heard her on the radio.


Instead of: John watched her own meal get cold.
Consider: John watched her meal get cold.

Neither of those seems anything that anyone would write (well, possibly in some dialects with a capital H for that first one). And neither is anything like mine. Why doesn't it try and show the difference between

They heard themselves on the radio.
They heard them on the radio.

John watched his own meal get cold.
John watched his meal get cold.

Sure, it'd need a few more words, but that's the kind of advice people need. Though, come to think of it, it didn't ask me if "Mr X. proved him able to handle a variety of topics" was perhaps incorrect. Maybe it doesn't know.

Maybe it just has a simple prompt triggered by the appearance of the -self morpheme?

Pfft. Of course that's all it has. That's why you shouldn't pay it much (if indeed) any mind.

Happy Birthday, Louis

Today in 1952, Louis Menand was born in Syracuse, New York.

I confess that my favorite thing by him was his book review of Eats, Shoots & Leaves, which begins:

The first punctuation mistake in “Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation” (Gotham; $17.50), by Lynne Truss, a British writer, appears in the dedication, where a nonrestrictive clause is not preceded by a comma. It is a wild ride downhill from there. “Eats, Shoots & Leaves” presents itself as a call to arms, in a world spinning rapidly into subliteracy, by a hip yet unapologetic curmudgeon, a stickler for the rules of writing. But it’s hard to fend off the suspicion that the whole thing might be a hoax.

The foreword, by Frank McCourt, contains another comma-free nonrestrictive clause (“I feel no such sympathy for the manager of my local supermarket who must have a cellarful of apostrophes he doesn’t know what to do with”) and a superfluous ellipsis. The preface, by Truss, includes a misplaced apostrophe (“printers’ marks”) and two misused semicolons: one that separates unpunctuated items in a list and one that sets off a dependent clause. About half the semicolons in the rest of the book are either unnecessary or ungrammatical, and the comma is deployed as the mood strikes. Sometimes, phrases such as “of course” are set off by commas; sometimes, they are not. Doubtful, distracting, and unwarranted commas turn up in front of restrictive phrases (“Naturally we become timid about making our insights known, in such inhospitable conditions”), before correlative conjunctions (“Either this will ring bells for you, or it won’t”), and in prepositional phrases (“including biblical names, and any foreign name with an unpronounced final ‘s’ ”). Where you most expect punctuation, it may not show up at all: “You have to give initial capitals to the words Biro and Hoover otherwise you automatically get tedious letters from solicitors.”

Parentheses are used, wrongly, to add independent clauses to the ends of sentences: “I bought a copy of Eric Partridge’s Usage and Abusage and covered it in sticky-backed plastic so that it would last a lifetime (it has).” Citation form varies: one passage from the Bible is identified as “Luke, xxiii, 43” and another, a page later, as “Isaiah xl, 3.” The word “abuzz” is printed with a hyphen, which it does not have. We are informed that when a sentence ends with a quotation American usage always places the terminal punctuation inside the quotation marks, which is not so. (An American would not write “Who said ‘I cannot tell a lie?’ ”) A line from “My Fair Lady” is misquoted (“The Arabs learn Arabian with the speed of summer lightning”). And it is stated that The New Yorker, “that famously punctilious periodical,” renders “the nineteen-eighties” as the “1980’s,” which it does not. The New Yorker renders “the nineteen-eighties” as “the nineteen-eighties.”

...Some of Truss’s departures from punctuation norms are just British laxness. In a book that pretends to be all about firmness, though, this is not a good excuse. The main rule in grammatical form is to stick to whatever rules you start out with, and the most objectionable thing about Truss’s writing is its inconsistency. Either Truss needed a copy editor or her copy editor needed a copy editor.

You can read the whole review here, and you should, as his discussion of writing, which begins after he stops beating up on Truss - starting with this paragraph

Though she has persuaded herself otherwise, Truss doesn’t want people to care about correctness. She wants them to care about writing and about using the full resources of the language. “Eats, Shoots & Leaves” is really a “decline of print culture” book disguised as a style manual (poorly disguised). Truss has got things mixed up because she has confused two aspects of writing: the technological and the aesthetic.

is well worth your time .

Hmmmmm

I'm watching the Weather Channel, and they've shown us several clips of accidents and people stuck in snow. Interestingly, it's SUVs getting stuck and a Jeep sliding and rolling over ... This jibes with what I see on the roads: people in these big old utility vehicles seem to feel that snow and particularly ice have no power over them.

It still does, people.

Happy Birthday, Buzz

Today in 1930 in Glen Ridge, New Jersey, Buzz Aldrin was born (as "Edwin", but he legally changed it to Buzz, his childhood nickname, later). One of the first men to land on the moon, he was the second to set foot on it. He made many crucial contributions to the space program, including the use of water for neutral-buoyancy training, and coordinate rendezvous.

And when moon hoaxer, conspiracy nut, and stalker Bart Sibrel ambushed him, poking him in the chest with a Bible and calling him "a coward, a liar, and a thief", Buzz Aldrin, 72 at the time, punched him in the face. Sometimes, that's what it takes.

Who's Gallant Now?

I have a friend who sent me this email, which made me laugh immoderately:

I don't know whether you have read the Anne of Green Gables books, but I have them all and something made me pick up the last in the series, Rilla of Ingleside, which takes place during WWI. It's ages since I read it, but I nearly fell out of my chair laughing at the beginning of Chapter Ten, where "Antwerp fell -- Turkey fell -- gallant little Serbia gathered herself together and struck a deadly blow at her oppressor..."

Now to Google whose name Bent & Hampton would have given their dog one war earlier.

If you read Angela Thirkell, you too were giggling when you read the words "gallant little". If you don't, well... the joke is that two ladies constantly changed their dog's name to represent oppressed nations and their leaders during WWII. He was successively Zog (for Gallant Little Albania), Schuschnigg (for Gallant Little Austria), Smidgly-Rydz (for Gallant Little Poland), Mannerheim (for Gallant Little Finland), etc. After the war he was simply called Gallant because "nobody's being gallant now." Probably not funny - but extremely so to those who've read the books.

Happy Birthday, Edgar

Today in 1809, in Boston, Edgar Allan Poe was born. Wikipedia notes

Best known for his tales of mystery and the macabre, Poe was one of the earliest American practitioners of the short story and is considered the inventor of the detective-fiction genre. He is further credited with contributing to the emerging genre of science fiction. He was the first well-known American writer to try to earn a living through writing alone, resulting in a financially difficult life and career.

Oh, that Wikipedia and its wacky understatements!

He died in Baltimore, probably as a result of drug- and alcohol-poisoning due to cooping (the practice of kidnapping someone and forcing them to vote often in many precincts), though there have been many theories of his death, all records being lost. Until last year, three roses and a bottle of cognac, half empty, were left on his grave every year for more than 60 years. Last year was the first time the anonymous visitor didn't come. This year, he didn't come again, meaning it's likely that he died and left no-one to carry on the tradition.

Here's one of his shorter, less macabre works:


Eldorado

Gaily bedight,
A gallant knight,
In sunshine and in shadow,
Had journeyed long,
Singing a song,
In search of Eldorado.

But he grew old-
This knight so bold-
And o'er his heart a shadow
Fell as he found
No spot of ground
That looked like Eldorado.

And, as his strength
Failed him at length,
He met a pilgrim shadow-
"Shadow," said he,
"Where can it be-
This land of Eldorado?"

"Over the Mountains
Of the Moon,
Down the Valley of the Shadow,
Ride, boldly ride,"
The shade replied-
"If you seek for Eldorado!"

A boatload of oddness

That old distinction between first-person shall/will and second/third-person use apparently also applies to should/would - though I don't know if it applied in the "moral obligation" sense of should. But that's not the odd thing about this quote, from a 1922 novel by Joseph S. Fletcher called The Middle of Things:

"Robbery wasn't the motive. Murder was the thing in view! And why? It may have been revenge. It may have been that Ashton had to be gotten out of the way. And I shouldn't wonder a bit if that wasn't at the bottom of it, which is at the top and bottom of pretty nearly everything!"

"And that, ma'am?" asked Mr. Pawle, who evidently admired Miss Penkridge's shrewd observations, "that is what, now?"

"Money!"

And it's not the multiple negations (shouldn't be surprised if that wasn't to mean "wouldn't be surprised if it was" or "would be surprised if it wasn't") - that's expletive negation and it's very common in speech (if deprecated in formal writing) (see this Language Log post for more on the construction). After all, this is dialog in fiction; it's perfectly acceptable.

No - it's the use of that. The first time I read the clause "if that wasn't at the bottom of it" I thought "that" was referring to "getting Ashton out of the way", and I couldn't figure out how getting him out of the way was "at the top and bottom of pretty nearly everything."

But Miss Penkridge is using that cataphorically - that is, to refer to something that hasn't been said yet - and then the referent is another pronoun (which). This sort of splitting of the "that which" reads very oddly to me. It's as if she's dropping out a noun phrase and just keeping the two relatives ("the thing that was at the bottom which is the thing at the top and bottom...").

The sentence isn't by any means impossible to parse, though I couldn't without the clue provided by Mr. Pawle's follow-up question (that is what?) - but I don't think I've encountered it before, certainly not very often. (It's not helped by the misplaced comma before which, either; surely that's a restrictive relative clause, defining which "that" she means.)

Nowadays, I think you'd be more likely to see a pseudo-cleft structure instead, something like this:

And I shouldn't wonder a bit if what was at the bottom of it is what is at the top and bottom of pretty nearly everything!

And if nothing else, we'd understand what she meant as easily as Mr. Pawle did the original.

An awkward blend

The recorded message says we're to report "between ten o'clock hours and eleven o'clock hours" due to the snow/freezing rain last night and this morning.

Either "between ten o'clock and eleven o'clock" or "between 1000 and 1100 (pronounced ten hundred hours and eleven hundred hours)". Not "o'clock hours". That just sounds silly.

Happy Birthday, Peter Mark

Peter Mark Roget was born today in 1779, in London.

His Thesaurus has been an invaluable tool for many writers - a work of genius. More people need lessons in how to use it, but that's not his fault. For one thing, he didn't intend it to be a dictionary of synonyms, but rather a classification of English's lexicon - "of the words it contains and of the idiomatic combinations peculiar to it, arranged, not in alphabetical order as they are in a dictionary, but according to the ideas which they express."

And then there's this shirt I got for my birthday last year!


(lol image from loltheorists)

His first name is an English word

Okay. Say you couldn't think of Maxim Gorky (which, almost, I couldn't, since I think of him as Maksim) (this writer, whose first name is also an English word meaning proverb or motto, was the first president of the Soviet writers' union), still the answers they came up with today really didn't work - even if they didn't know their first names.

Tolstoy? C'mon. He died before the Soviets took over.

Pasternak? A bit of a dissident, though tolerated by Stalin, they hated his novel Dr Zhivago so much it had to be smuggled out of the country. There's no way he would have been chosen to head the writers' union.

And Solzhenitsyn? A total dissident, imprisoned in the camps and eventually exiled from the country.

Plus their names - Leo (or Lev), Boris, and Aleksandr - aren't exactly English words.

Of course, this is a tough question. Lots of people don't know foreign writers' first names...

Happy Birthday, Genndy

Today in Moscow, Russia (then USSR), in 1970 Genndy Tartakovsky was born.

Happy Birthday, Ben

Born today 301 years ago in Boston - yes, Boston - Benjamin Franklin, "inventor of the stove" — which he never patented because he created it for the good of society. Also, inventor of the fire company, fire insurance, bifocals, a flexible urinary catheter, swim fins, the glass harmonica, the odometer, the lightning rod, and - boon to all us vertically challenged readers - the "long arm" — a long wooden pole with a grasping claw at the end — to reach the books we want to read. Also, a very quotable man, one way or another. Here's Adams on Franklin:

“Franklin did this, Franklin did that, Franklin did some other damned thing. . . . Franklin smote the ground and out sprang George Washington, full grown and on his horse. . . . Franklin then electrified him with his miraculous lightning rod and the three of them--Franklin, Washington, and the horse--conducted the entire Revolution by themselves.”

And here's Franklin himself:

If you would not be forgotten as soon as you are dead and rotten, either write something worth reading or do things worth the writing.

They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.

The Week in Entertainment

Actually, a couple of weeks, as I seem to have missed last week...

DVD: Sherlock - the making of and pilot extras. (I'm really pleased to hear they're scheduled to make three more eps this year!) The Sarah Jane Adventures, series 3. Nigel Havers? She could have done a lot worse! and David Tennant's last-filmed Doctor scenes... sweet. And speaking of the Doctor, the Series 5 set, though so far all I've watched are the Confidentials and the commentary on Big Bang, the last episode. That was a genuinely excellent season, I love Matt Smith, and I can't wait for the new season.

TV: The Middle, funny enough to keep watching. Modern Family - I laughed so hard at the end of it it almost hurt. On DVR, an episode of The Mentalist - nice development for Cho & Rigsby. Leverage's season finale - zomg Eliot is so cool (not that I think that warehouse fight is remotely possible, but still - so cool) and I enjoyed the way Christian Kane played him trying to keep his (we already could guess) bloody past from the rest of the team. The actual final ep was excellent, too - and some more nice Eliot stuff. He had the longest way to come... and the journey wasn't easy. Kane does a great job with him. Doctor Who: A Christmas Carol - I enjoyed the heck out of that, particularly when they went to the logical conclusion and had changing the old man mean he now couldn't do what they changed him for. Also? Rory as a centurion: niiiiiice. (And see above) There's more DVR, still...

Read: The new Lord Peter novels A Presumption of Death and The Attenbury Emeralds, both enjoyable. Really good - sharp and funny - novels about an 11-year-old sleuth in 1950s England, The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie and The Weed That Strings the Hangman's Noose. Four books about a sleuth-cum-politician in 1860s England by Charles Finch, all excellent entertainment. And two by JS Fletcher, Ravensdene Court and The Orange-Yellow Diamond. Both were intriguing, though full of a certain casual racism (they were written in 1912) - still, they manage to rise above it. The former has a good "Chinaman", and the latter actually has a Jewish hero, and the slightly dimwitted Scot who you first think is the hero falls for a Jewish girl!

Crossword Puzzlement

The Baltimore Sun's crossword today was titled "Put Me In, Coach", and featured answers with the word "me" inserted into otherwise valid phrases to make the new ones. Examples are

King of workouts? = Henry the Firmest
Footballers who draw flags? = Dirty linemen
Belittle Short? = Demean Martin
State for Shrek and Fiona? = Homely matrimony
Zoo area for dromedaries? = Camel zone (slightly strained, as calzone is one word)
Rogaine-induced reverie? = Dreamed locks

and this one

Purloined sirloin? = Meat heist

...

Okay. Literally, as I was typing it out I saw it - and even with "calzone" as a hint - one word! Different pronunciation! Argh. Not 'at heist'. 'Atheist'.

I'm ashamed of myself......

Happy Birthday, Robert

Robert W. Service was born today in Preston, England, in 1874. At the age of 23 he moved to Canada, which become his home (though he died in France at the age of 84). And, no; I'm not going to give you a bunch of the boys whooping it up in the Malemute Saloon - you can find that anywhere. Instead, here are two of his Ballads of a Bohemian, written in the lead-up and early days of WWI, in which Service was an ambulance driver:

Moon Song

A child saw in the morning skies
The dissipated-looking moon,
And opened wide her big blue eyes,
And cried: "Look, look, my lost balloon!"
And clapped her rosy hands with glee:
"Quick, mother! Bring it back to me."

A poet in a lilied pond
Espied the moon's reflected charms,
And ravished by that beauty blonde,
Leapt out to clasp her in his arms.
And as he'd never learnt to swim,
Poor fool! that was the end of him.

A rustic glimpsed amid the trees
The bluff moon caught as in a snare.
"They say it do be made of cheese,"
Said Giles, "and that a chap bides there. . . .
That Blue Boar ale be strong, I vow --
The lad's a-winkin' at me now."

Two lovers watched the new moon hold
The old moon in her bright embrace.
Said she: "There's mother, pale and old,
And drawing near her resting place."
Said he: "Be mine, and with me wed,"
Moon-high she stared . . . she shook her head.

A soldier saw with dying eyes
The bleared moon like a ball of blood,
And thought of how in other skies,
So pearly bright on leaf and bud
Like peace its soft white beams had lain;
~Like Peace!~ . . . He closed his eyes again.

Child, lover, poet, soldier, clown,
Ah yes, old Moon, what things you've seen!
I marvel now, as you look down,
How can your face be so serene?
And tranquil still you'll make your round,
Old Moon, when we are underground.


A Casualty

That boy I took in the car last night,
With the body that awfully sagged away,
And the lips blood-crisped, and the eyes flame-bright,
And the poor hands folded and cold as clay --
Oh, I've thought and I've thought of him all the day.

For the weary old doctor says to me:
"He'll only last for an hour or so.
Both of his legs below the knee
Blown off by a bomb. ... So, lad, go slow,
And please remember, he doesn't know."

So I tried to drive with never a jar;
And there was I cursing the road like mad,
When I hears a ghost of a voice from the car:
"Tell me, old chap, have I `copped it' bad?"
So I answers "No," and he says, "I'm glad."

"Glad," says he, "for at twenty-two
Life's so splendid, I hate to go.
There's so much good that a chap might do,
And I've fought from the start and I've suffered so.
'Twould be hard to get knocked out now, you know."

"Forget it," says I; then I drove awhile,
And I passed him a cheery word or two;
But he didn't answer for many a mile,
So just as the hospital hove in view,
Says I: "Is there nothing that I can do?"

Then he opens his eyes and he smiles at me;
And he takes my hand in his trembling hold;
"Thank you -- you're far too kind," says he:
"I'm awfully comfy -- stay . . . let's see:
I fancy my blanket's come unrolled --
My ~feet~, please wrap 'em -- they're cold ... they're cold."




all his works

Focus on the majority

Fred Clarke has a brilliant look at the recent Tennessee Tea Party demand:

The Tennessee Tea Party has some demands for changing the education curriculum in their state:

No portrayal of minority experience in the history which actually occurred shall obscure the experience or contributions of the ... majority.

So, OK, then. No more looking at history through the lens of "minority experience." Time to focus on "the majority."

No more of this obsession with kings and nobles -- put the focus where it belongs, on the serfs and the peasants who made up the vast and overwhelming majority of the population.

Set aside the generals and conquerors and put the focus on their victims -- the foot soldiers and the civilians who make up the majority in any war.

Forget this preoccupation with the minority experience of the wealthy plantation owners. History should be taught with an emphasis on the much larger number of people who were treated as non-people and -- thanks to minority-rule in the Involuntary Volunteer State -- were raped, beaten, kidnapped and tortured with impunity.

Who knew the tea partiers were such big fans of Howard Zinn?

They aren't, of course; they're just too gutless to say what they really mean by "minority" and "majority".

Happy Birthday, Martin

January 15, 1929-April 4, 1968

I submit that an individual who breaks a law that conscience tells him is unjust, and who willingly accepts the penalty of imprisonment in order to arouse the conscience of the community over its injustice, is in reality expressing the highest respect for the law.

Happy Birthday, Noel

Today in 1899 Noel Coward was born, in Teddington, Middlesex, England.

He chose his own epitaph: A Talent to Amuse.

And how perfectly fitting it is.

Happy Birthday, Berthe

Berthe Morisot was born today in Bourges, Cher, France, in 1841. One of the Impressionists, she exhibited in the Salon and then, along with the other "rejected Impressionists" (Paul Cézanne, Edgar Degas, Claude Monet, Camille Pissarro, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, and Alfred Sisley), in their own exhibitions.

The Dining Room

Summer Day

On the Balcony


(More here)