The Week in Entertainment

Live: Turandot at the Met - a glorious performance - wonderful, opulent, gorgeous sets; so complex that the first intermission was actually longer than the first act. Lovely singing, too.

TV: Doctor Who's mid-season finale, while not perhaps brilliantly plotted, was still wonderful. Goodbye to Rory and Amy. Doctor: "It would take almost unimaginable power. What have we got? C'mon, tell me. What?" Amy (takes Rory's hand): "I won't let them take him. That's what we've got." And oh my god the two of them on the roof. And what an ending. Wow. Also The Middle and Modern Family new season premieres. Loved Sue's attempt to get  lost. Gave The Neighbors a shot - it was amusing and I'll try it again. Also tried Elementary, but I'm not sure I'll go back to it.I like Lucy Liu, but I'm not crazy about her costar, and the whole premise seems unmotivated to me.

Read: Calling Bernadette's Bluff, an intriguing book about an atheist philosophy professor at a Catholic women's university. Began The History of the Siege of Lisbon by Saramago - it's not about the siege of Lisbon, actually, it's about a proofreader. And it's marvellous.

Happy Birthday, Moveable Type

Yes - today is the anniversary of the first volume of the most influential Bible ever published: the one printed with Johan Gutenberg's moveable type - in 1542.

It was the beginning of a new age - an age of widespread information and literacy, and an end to the Church's monopoly on knowledge. The new printing process fueled the Renaissance and was a major catalyst for the scientific revolution. It may even have midwifed the Reformation. In short, it facilitated, if not outright produced, the end of the Middle Ages.

It is estimated that more books were produced in the 50 years after Gutenberg's invention than scribes had been able to produce in the 1,000 years before that.

A Bold Move

People in Apartment 3G call each by name a lot - mostly because except for the three stars and possibly the bearded Greek professor it's very hard to tell them apart (also, they often don't look the same from day to day, or even panel to panel, but that's a different problem). This is particularly true of the men, all of whom are bland, white-bread types who are very easily mistaken for each other. But here, one of them makes a bold move to stand out: Evan, whose aunt Cathy is as mean to him as Margo is to ... well, everybody, has changed his hair color. I give him props for a subdued, natural auburn shade rather than carrots. But it won't matter. He may not die in the Himalayas like Margo's last boyfriend, but he will lose everything.

Gosh, who could it be?

Phrase Origins: On Feb. 22, 1918 Warren Harding said it is good to drink "at the fountains of wisdom inherited from" this alliterative group.

Ummmm, errrr, I dunno, could it be .... The Founding Fathers?


This is so totally a Jeopardy! question. Ask me who came up with the phrase, and I'd have no idea. I also thought it was older than that. But ask it like this, and what else is it going to be?

And ..... And yet, one didn't get it at all, and the other - yep. She got it - and so did I.

Some things are given

One of them is Yosemite + photography = Ansel Adams.

For No Especially Good Reason

Scalzi did this over at Whatever: For No Especially Good Reason I Put Each Letter of the Alphabet Into My Web Browser and Posted the Link it Autocompleted To, so why not me, too, I thought?

A was The Abominable Charles Christopher, a wonderful web comic.

B was Barnes & Noble - I buy books. (I'm surprised, sort of, that Amazon wasn't my A.)

C was Birds of North America at Cornell, hence the C.

D was Darths & Droids - webcomic with an amusing D&D version of Star Wars

E was Wikipedia - English-language Wikipedia.

F was Facebook - well, sure.

G was Google - it would have been a shock otherwise.

H was Headsup: the blog - "the deskly arts" and a straight look at what's going on in FoxLand, too.

I was Izvestiya - not my first site for Russian news, but I isn't a go-to letter.

J was The Comics Curmudgeon: the url is joshreads, for historical purposes. A great site for comics snark.

K was Kotomatritsa, cats and others captioned - in Russian. Usually good Russian, not Internet slang though that's there, often poetic.

L was Language Log, the linguistic blog.

M was Multitran - a Russian translation database, a wonderful resource.

N was The Conscience of a Liberal, Paul Krugman's blog at the New York Times's website.  I was a little surprised it wasn't the main NYT website, but then again, he posts a lot.

O was Orbitz - I travel.

P was Peapod - I have my groceries delivered. I love it.

Q was Dinosaur Comics at qwantz- a great web comic.

R was Robert Reich's blog - this surprised me. I like him, but I don't go there a lot. Must not use "R" that much.

S was Slactivist, a progressive evangelical who also does a mean take-down of Left Behind.

T was Talking Points Memo; it's a source I enjoy.

U was Webster's Unabridged. I look up words.

V was The New Adventures of Queen Victoria, another good web comic.

W was WMATA - the Washington Metro system. 

X was xkcd - I mean, what else?

Y was You Tube - duh.

Z was Arnold Zwicky's Blog , another language (mostly) blog.

Happy Birthday, William

Today in 1906 Sir William Empson was born. He was a critic - one of the greatest English critics ever - and he also wrote poetry - complex and obscure but compelling.

Homage to the British Museum

There is a supreme God in the ethnological section;
A hollow toad shape, faced with a blank shield.
He needs his belly to include the Pantheon,
Which is inserted through a hole behind.
At the navel, at the points formally stressed, at the organs of sense,
Lice glue themselves, dolls, local deities,
His smooth wood creeps with all the creeds of the world.

Attending there let us absorb the cultures of nations
And dissolve into our judgement all their codes.
Then, being clogged with a natural hesitation
(People are continually asking one the way out),
Let us stand here and admit that we have no road.
Being everything, let us admit that is to be something,
Or give ourselves the benefit of the doubt;
Let us offer our pinch of dust all to this God,
And grant his reign over the entire building.


more poems here)

Atomic City

 Hey! My home town was just a Jeopardy! answer. I remember the American Museum of Science and Energy back when it was the Museum of Atomic Energy, and you could get a radioactive dime after having your hair stood on end by the Van De Graffe generator!









(and ps: doing multiple images in the new interface is as hard as I remember. grrrrr)

Ring tones

I forgot to mention that one of the things I like about Wallander is that everybody has a different ring tone on their phone. I hate shows where they all have the same, generic ring tone - very few phones I hear ringing could be mistaken for someone else's, even though that's a staple of "hahahaha" moments in tv and movies....

Happy Birthday, TS

Today in St Louis in 1888 TS Eliot was born. He wrote many poems, most famous perhaps "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" and "The Waste Land" - and of course "The Hollow Men", which begins "We are the hollow men" and ends

This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.

He also wrote the source poems for "Cats". And many others, including these:

The Boston Evening Transcript

The readers of the Boston Evening Transcript
Sway in the wind like a field of ripe corn.
When evening quickens faintly in the street,
Wakening the appetites of life in some
And to others bringing the Boston Evening Transcript,
I mount the steps and ring the bell, turning
Wearily, as one would turn to nod good-bye to Rochefoucauld,
If the street were time and he at the end of the street,
And I say, "Cousin Harriet, here is the Boston Evening         Transcript."


Cousin Nancy

Miss Nancy Ellicott Strode across the hills and broke them,
Rode across the hills and broke them--
The barren New England hills--
Riding to hounds
Over the cow-pasture.

Miss Nancy Ellicott smoked
And danced all the modern dances;
And her aunts were not quite sure how they felt about it,
But they knew that it was modern.

Upon the glazen shelves kept watch
Matthew and Waldo, guardians of the faith,
The army of unalterable law.

More of his poems here

Oh, my word

Seriously, this piece of word-substitution spam is the cyclopean of sublimity:

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Thesaurus users, beware! This is the end result - replacement gone wild!

There will be BLOOD

Okay, for some reason Margo is suddenly a busy public relations person, and this guy, Greg, is "ridiculously good-looking" but also annoys Margo a lot, especially since he horned in on her and Tommie's lunch with the Prof. Now he's out with Lu Anne - and he's trying to convince her that Margo is bad for her!

This will not end well. For Greg.

Agatha Christie won't turn to vinegar in the vault

So Sunday I watched a mystery movie that seems to be in a series called Mystery Woman - I don't remember what this entry was called. But it opened when the bookstore owner came in gloating over a first-edition Agatha Christie, for whom she had a buyer already lined up. Her ... partner? employee? token black character who (of course) had magical tech skills and also was (of course) much older than our heroine ... started bitching about people who buy first editions and wrap them in plastic and never read them. When you buy a bottle from a great vintage, he ranted, you don't let it turn to vinegar in your cellar; you drink it.

Well, yes. But two things occur to me. First, that first edition isn't going to go bad. As long as somebody's willing to pay for it, it will hold its value. Nobody's going to look at it and exclaim "Oh, you waited too long to read it! All the print has melted away!"

And second - how the hell does he know the owner of that book didn't buy a second copy to read?

Whoa

Okay, yes, I am perfectly aware that there are still roughly six weeks to go. But look at this.

Source: http://core.talkingpointsmemo.com/election/scoreboard

Happy Birthday, William

Today in 1897, William Faulkner was born. After around 15 years of being published and remaining fairly unknown, he was awarded the Noble Prize in Literature. This brought him to the attention of the public and the wider world, and he's now regarded as one of the most important writers in American literature.

The Week in Entertainment

DVD: Two more of the William Hartnell Dr Who episodes - the underrated The Sensorites and The Keys of Marinus.

TV: A made for tv movie called Mystery Woman ... something; frankly, I've already forgotten the name of this one - they were running them all day long. It had one black character - the older guy (older so therec ould be no hint of romance between him and the white heroine) who worked for the heroine and did all kinds of techno-magic to help her solve the case (you know, hacking into computers, using his 'contacts' to get copies of corporate documents, finding car registrations... all the stuff that amateur sleuths can't do, really), so he was the standard Magic Negro. It was otherwise quite forgettable. Leverage summer finale, which was an interesting idea: two shows, one with Eliot, Hardison and Parker, and one with Nate and Sophie. The first was quite tense, with a lot of good character moments, mostly revolving around Eliot - Eliot and Parker, Eliot and Hardison, Eliot Now and Eliot Then - but a really nice ending for Hardison and Parker. And Adam Baldwin! But, unfortunately, I got jolted out of the story since the subway where they had the final showdown did not even begin to look like the DC Metro. (It's funny: there's also no "Greer Park" and no "Washington Union", but the visuals are what grab you.) Also unfortunately, not only was the second one all Nate and Sophie but it had Sterling. More, it had one of those 'oh they're being shot at now let's go back and show you how that happened' openings that I really don't like. Plus I guessed what the painting was from the first time Sophie got all coy about it. Still, the first episode was very entertaining. Final episode of Perception, not bad though with a hell of a coincidence. Also, kudos to them for promoting 'talk therapy' instead of just meds for schizophrenics, but I have to say that Daniel doesn't seem the type of patient who would really benefit: he's plenty motivated and integrated already. Ah well; it's tv. Wallander: the Dogs of Riga, which was bleak and tense and well-done. And the next-to-last of the first half of Doctor Who's season, The Power of Three. It was a lovely episode - so nice to see Kate Stewart! - with nice character moments for the Ponds (Williamses). Next week the Doctor says good-bye to Amy and Rory, and I'm going to miss them a lot. They've been building up to this (and I really like the notion that it's been ten years for them, underlined by their being gone from the party for weeks in their time but only minutes in Brian's), and I hope very much that Moffat doesn't kill either one of them.

Read: Telegraph Avenue by Michael Chabon. Lord, that man can write - the book pivots around a short section that is one long Saramago-ish sentence ... actually, not really, Saramago is fond of commas and Chabon's sentence was held together by more elaborate conjunction. The plot is complicated, the characters real, and if nothing brilliantly new is said, the book is still, if a little slow, ultimately captivating and enthralling.

Happy Birthday to the Music Men

Today was a good day for music! John Coltrane (1926), Ray Charles (1930), and Bruce Springsteen (1946), all!

Happy Birthday, Euripides

This is the day we celebrate the birth of one of ancient Greece's greatest dramatists, Euripides. He reshaped Attic drama by featuring petty and uncaring gods, flawed but human heroes, strong women, and smart slaves.

Of his more than 90 plays, only 19 survive (or is "only" the right word? That's more than from Aeschylus and Sophocles together), among them Alcestis, The Bacchae, Elektra, Iphigenia At Aulis, Iphegenia in Tauris, Medea, and The Trojan Women.

Fat cat is my

A student was joking about how learning Spanish was taking away from "time spent crafting my Russian translations". She added that she had had to create a sentence with "ay caramba" and, "as I only know about six words", was finding it difficult. She came up with ¡Ay caramba! ¡Mi gato es mas gordo! and added "this either means my cat is too fat or my cat is very fat, I'm not sure which. But it got me high fives from the other students. I was totally floating on cloud nueve."

Another of the Russian class suggested it meant "my cat is more fat". (This, by the way, is correct.)

According to Google translate, it just means "my cat is fat", which is what "mi gato es gordo" also means.

But why I'm posting this is that GT suggested I translate "mi gato es gordo" from Portuguese. Why not?, I figured, and clicked.

According to Google Translate, "mi gato es gordo" is Portuguese for "fat cat es mi."

Okay, I get that Portuguese isn't Spanish. ("My cat is fat" is "meu gato é gordo", in case you're wondering.) But I don't know why GT suggested I translate from a language that 50% of the words didn't belong to. And I don't get why the word order was so drastically changed.

I don't get how machine translation purports to work at all, in fact...

Back on form

David Brooks is back in his comfort zone. He had to address the Boca Moment, of course, and he managed to admit there was a lot wrong with what Romney said - though even then he had to add that

Sure, there are some government programs that cultivate patterns of dependency in some people. I’d put federal disability payments and unemployment insurance in this category.

(Those people who get disabled just to get that awesome federal payout!)

But today he's back on form, penning an admiring column about "risk-takers" "at the top", telling us that

Prosperity is often driven by small enclaves of extraordinary individuals that build new industries and amass large fortunes. These driven, manic individuals are frequently unpleasant to be around. But, if your country is not attracting and nurturing them, you’re cooked.

He also tells us that today, things are bad bad bad in the US:

Today, grandiosity is out of style. We’ve just been through a financial crisis fueled by people who got too big for their britches. We’ve got an online and media culture that specializes in ridiculing grand people.

Caution rules. The number of jobs created by business start-ups under President Obama is much lower than under the three previous presidents. The World Economic Forum ranks the competitiveness of nations, and the U.S. has lost ground in each of the last four years.

He cheers for tax breaks and government giving money to these "grand" people, these "few ridiculously ambitious people"... and manages not to mention that in that WEF report ranking (I'll link to it; he didn't - ranking is on page 15-16), the countries beating us are Switzerland, Singapore, Sweden, and Finland, and other countries moving up in the rankings are Denmark, the Netherlands and the UK. Rounding out the top ten are yes, the US, and also Germany and Japan. I see a lot of countries there that are dedicated to Eurosocialism and taking care of the bottom of their societies. He also manages not to mention that one factor depressing the US at the moment is our penchant for fighting this Endless War, which is sucking money out of the economy faster than we can comprehend.

In other words, he's back to telling us the Republicans are right in celebrating the rich, because they're the drivers of capitalism, which is perfect, and without them getting anything they want, they'll pick up their jobs and go home.

Though his poster boy in this article? Came here from Canada, and to Canada from South Africa. So I guess we do attract them, somehow...

New Interface Is Still Not Good

So, when I posted the last post, I discovered that Blogger/Google has finally forced me into the new interface.

I don't like it one bit.

It's far too full of white space, and you have to do way too much clicking on fiddly side-menus to do things. Plus, it doesn't look like it has changed a bit since they announced it, including the so-called Preview.

Way not to be evil, there.

Maybe, but so what?

Today I was at a little conference talking about, among other things, how to get language learners to high levels - 3 or above - on the ILR scale. At a session about what those learners who get to 4+ or above (comparable to WEHANS, the Well-Educated Highly Articulate Native Speaker) have in common, someone asked a question about getting people to higher levels in their second (third, fourth...) language who don't function at high levels in their native language. (Answer: you can do it but it's hard and almost always involves getting them more proficient in the native language first.)

Anyway, this brought out a lot of the computer-game-disparaging, lazy-kids-these-days comments. I said something then, and I'd like to say it here, too.

First, yes, I have those students. They don't know what's going on in the articles they're translating - don't know the culture, don't know the events - and mostly they don't care. They can't even be bothered to research (you know, a quick Google of "Yashin bribery scandal" or "Stalin Russian metro" or "Bandera Hero Ukraine"). They will, with a straight face, write "US Finance Minister Timothy Gaytner".  More than that, they don't read (interestingly, there are three things these high-achieving learners share: most (not all) come from multilingual neighborhoods - note, not multilingual families; they're almost all tenacious, detail-oriented (ectenic) learners; and they all - all - read voraciously.) These students don't read non-fiction (some don't read fiction, but most do - genre, though, not 'literature'). They don't read analysis in English - Will or Friedman, Sowell or Kristoff, anybody. They don't read anything more complex than the front page and sports section of USA Today. And that means they have a hard time of it.

But.

That is neither new nor uniquely American. When we talk about the competency of the high-level learner, we don't just say "native speaker". We aren't just talking about the man in the street, the field, the coal mine, or the factory. We have to specify his attributes and qualify them with adverbs that describe superlativeness: not just educated but well educated; not just articulate but highly articulate. In any country at any time the percentage of people living in it that are both of those things is quite small.

So yes, it's true: many of our students don't read, and don't know a lot about the larger world around them. But that doesn't make them different from most people around the world. When we talk to them about what they need to do to get better, we need to remember that it's not their generation or even their country that's to blame.

Happy Birthday, Stevie

Today in Hull, in Yorkshire, England, in 1902 Stevie Smith was born.



My Heart Was Full

My heart was full of softening showers,
I used to swing like this for hours,
I did not care for war or death,
I was glad to draw my breath.



In the Night

I longed for companionship rather,
But my companions I always wished farther.
And now in the desolate night
I think only of the people i should like to bite.

more Stevie Smith poems here

How big it was

xkcd today. Wow. How long did that take to draw?



In case you're lost, or just want to see what you might have missed, here's a full-screen version that you can zoom in and out on.

But?

A TPM story about Romney's donors hoping he will make himself likeable had this odd sentence in it:

Romney rebuffed suggestions that he should help voters get to know him by appearing on television shows, but Romney insisted that “The View” was too “high risk” and said accepting an invite from “Saturday Night Live” would have made him appear un-presidential.

But? Why on earth "but"?

But is a contrastive or adversative conjunction; what follows it should contradict in some way what comes before it. Here, what comes after it amplifies what came before it, giving examples of his rebuttal.

This sentence cries out for a nice semicolon. Or perhaps a non-finite "insisting" and "saying".

Happy Birthday, David

Born today in 1933 - David McCallum (my first tv crush, as Illya Kuryakin of course!) It's good to see he's still working.

Happy Birthday, Sam

Born this day in 1709 in Lichfield, England, that great lexicographer and writer, Dr Samuel Johnson, who was also the subject of the first great biography in English.

During a conversation with his biographer, Johnson became infuriated at the suggestion that Berkeley's idealism - the theory that individuals can only directly know sensations and ideas of objects, not abstractions such as "matter" - could not be refuted. In his anger, Johnson powerfully kicked a nearby stone and proclaimed "I refute it thus!"

A much quoted man, he also said:

It is better to suffer wrong than to do it, and happier to be sometimes cheated than not to trust.

The true measure of a man is how he treats someone who can do him absolutely no good.

Knowledge is of two kinds. We know a subject ourselves, or we know where we can find information on it.

And his Boswell (Boswell) reported this:

Patriotism having become one of our topicks, Johnson suddenly uttered, in a strong determined tone, an apophthegm, at which many will start: "Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel." But let it be considered that he did not mean a real and generous love of our country, but that pretended patriotism which so many, in all ages and countries, have made a cloak of self- interest.

And I can't resist... lolexicographer Johnson (from Jeff Prucher):

Happy Birthday, William

William Carlos Williams, great American poet, born today in 1883. Like a superhero with a secret identity, he was a doctor by day and poet by night, writing lines of deceptive simplicity.

Winter Trees

All the complicated details
of the attiring and
the disattiring are completed!
A liquid moon
moves gently among
the long branches.
Thus having prepared their buds
against a sure winter
the wise trees
stand sleeping in the cold.

Blizzard

Snow:
years of anger following
hours that float idly down --
the blizzard
drifts its weight
deeper and deeper for three days
or sixty years, eh? Then
the sun! a clutter of
yellow and blue flakes --
Hairy looking trees stand out
in long alleys
over a wild solitude.
The man turns and there --
his solitary track stretched out
upon the world.

(More poems here and poems and short bio here)

The Week in Entertainment

Film: The Beloved (Les Bien-aimés), a wonderful French meditation on love, affection, desire, and obsession, spanning forty years and two generations - mother and daughter in a possible stunt casting of Catherine Deneuve and her actual daughter Chiara Mastroianni, both of whom provide compelling performances - of women who have, and inspire, life-long passions (alas, these don't meet in the same men) that they can't, somehow, resolve into relationships that work.

DVD: The Space Museum and The Chase, early Doctor Whos with William Hartnell. I always did love Barbara and Ian, and these were their last episodes. Museum is a fascinating failure, ep 1 raising lots of questions the rest of it resolutely refuses to address, but Chase is cracking good fun.

TV: Leverage - very nice look at Parker. I love how she fixed everybody. "Nice job," indeed. But waaaaah that it's the summer finale next week already. Frogs - how strange; I could have sworn that the frogs stomped Ray Milland to death on the lawn, but it's in the living room. The Belle of New York, an utterly light-weight Astaire-Vera-Ellen vehicle. Perception - first half of the season finale, which is rather confusing so far. Apparently absolutely nothing they showed us after the murder happened. That's ... kind of a cheat. Part two better redeem itself. Doctor Who: "Why would he want to kill you? Unless he's met you?" The Doctor is getting darker again - last week's killing of Solomon (much as he deserved it), this week's willingness to condemn Jex. Amy called it - and we've seen it in the past, particularly with Ten: the Doctor doesn't have companions because he gets lonely, but because he becomes mad and dangerous when he "travel[s] alone for too long." (Plus, how lovely to see Ben Browder again.)

Read: Finished Dear Blue Sky, which was very good. The Pigeon Pie Mystery, quite an entertaining novel. Began Michael Chabon's Telegraph Avenue, which is pretty good so far.

A few more flutterbys

Almost the last week I'll be at the College Park office. Here are a few butterflies and skippers, including one I've never seen (or at least not to know) before: an American snout - the source of the name is obvious!





Next, a Pearl crescent


And two Tiger swallowtails, one much the worse for wear



A slightly tattered Painted Lady

A Common buckeye

And three skippers, one largish (for skippers) Silverspotted



A sachem



And a Peck's skipper

Happy Birthday, Lauren

Born today in 1924, in New York City, Betty Joan Perske, much better known as Lauren Bacall.

That smoldering look, that husky voice...

You know what? There are people who do!

Brian Switek, a paleontologist who blogs (engagingly) at Laelaps, was called out by Answers in Genesis for his critique of the dinosaurs in last week's Doctor Who. I don't read AiG - who has the time? - but I did follow his link. Here's the final blow:

The Bible records God’s eyewitness account that he created flying creatures—which includes of course birds—the day before He created land animals—which includes dinosaurs—and man. Thus only the grossest of biblical compromise can suppose that birds evolved from anything, including dinosaurs.

Well. Sophisticated theologians like to argue that many of the New Atheists fight a strawman, that no one really believes the Bible is literally true. All I can say is, they need to talk to the fine folks at AiG and their co-religionists around the world. Plenty of people do, indeed, believe just that.

Why aren't they grateful?

Another sobering read from Glenn Greenwald, at his new digs at the Guardian, on why it's baffling that Americans can't understand why Mid-Eastern Muslims in Egypt and Libya and other places aren't "grateful" to us:

But to act as though Muslim anger toward the US and Israel is primarily the by-product of crazy conspiracy theories is itself a crazy conspiracy theory. It's in the world of reality, not conspiracy, where the US and Israel have continuously brought extreme amounts of violence to the Muslim world, routinely killing their innocent men, women and children. Listening to Engel, one would never know about tiny little matters like the bombing of Gaza and Lebanon, the almost five-decade long oppression of Palestinians, the widely hated, child-killing drone campaign, or the attack on Iraq.

And it's in the world of reality, not conspiracy, where the US really has continuously interfered in their countries' governance by propping up and supporting their dictators. Intense Muslim animosity toward the US, including in Egypt, long pre-dates this film, and the reasons aren't hard to discern. That's precisely why the US supported tyranny in these countries for so long: to ensure that the citizens' views, so contrary to US policy, would be suppressed and rendered irrelevant.

It doesn't take a propagandized populace to be angry at the US for such actions. It takes a propagandized populace to be shocked at that anger and to view it with bafflement and resentment on the ground that they should, instead, be grateful because we "freed" them.

Indeed.

Murderous rioting is never right - it is in fact a horrible wrong - but pretending it comes out of the blue, or that a horrible movie is more than a spark to long- and well-laid tinder, just invites another one in another while.

Happy Birthday, Bobby

Bobby Short, an extraordinary interpreter of the great American songbook, was born today in 1924. Thanks for the music, Bobby, you were always a delight to listen to...

A power greater

Here's a nice quote a friend sent me:

"What is it that gives ordinary businessmen a power greater than that of the government? It is the capacity for giving or withholding money—nothing else in the world. This is the weapon that Satan chose from the beginning to place him and his plans beyond politics, and it has worked with deadly effect. There is only one thing in man's world that can offer any check on the unlimited power of money—and that is government. That is why money always accuses government of trying to destroy free agency, when the great enslaver has always been money itself."

-- Hugh Nibley, "Beyond Politics"

С днем рождения, Дмитрий Анатольевич!

Today is Dmitry Medvedev's birthday. He was born in 1965, which makes him much younger than me, or even my baby brother... which is depressing, since he's prime minister and second man in a team running a whole country. Ah well...

A well-intentioned man in a hard job, in hard times. I wish him the best. Всего хорошего: успехов, радости, здоровья, и счастья!

Painted Lady

Vanessa cardui, the lovely Painted Lady butterfly, one of the world's most common. It's a brushfoot, or four-footed butterfly - see how the first pair of legs is so reduced as to be unnoticeable.

Biggest Arms Dealer

Via , Tom Dispatch, this report on the US's arms trade (my emphasis):

Overseas weapons sales by the United States totaled $66.3 billion last year, or more than three-quarters of the global arms market, valued at $85.3 billion in 2011. Russia was a distant second, with $4.8 billion in deals.

So at least our trade balance is good in the war-and-death sector.

But it's more troubling than that. We, as a nation, are promoting war as the first choice to solve any problem, while simultaneously disengaging from anything beyond a rote, yellow-ribbon style of "supporting the troops". As Tom says:

It would, by the way, be a snap to construct a little quiz like this every couple of weeks from U.S. military news that’s reported but not attended to here, and each quiz would make the same essential point: from Washington’s perspective, the world is primarily a landscape for arming for, garrisoning for, training for, planning for, and making war. War is what we invest our time, energy, and treasure in on a scale that is, in its own way, remarkable, even if it seldom registers in this country.

In a sense (leaving aside the obvious inability of the U.S. military to actually win wars), it may, at this point, be what we do best. After all, whatever the results, it’s an accomplishment to send 200 Marines to Guatemala for a month of drug interdiction work, to get those Global Hawks secretly to Australia to monitor the Pacific, and to corner the market on things that go boom in the night.

Think of it this way: the United States is alone on the planet, not just in its ability, but in its willingness to use military force in drug wars, religious wars, political wars, conflicts of almost any sort, constantly and on a global scale. No other group of powers collectively even comes close. It also stands alone as a purveyor of major weapons systems and so as a generator of war. It is, in a sense, a massive machine for the promotion of war on a global scale.

We have, in other words, what increasingly looks like a monopoly on war. There have, of course, been warrior societies in the past that committed themselves to a mobilized life of war-making above all else. What’s unique about the United States is that it isn’t a warrior society. Quite the opposite.

Washington may be mobilized for permanent war. Special operations forces may be operating in up to 120 countries. Drone bases may be proliferating across the planet. We may be building up forces in the Persian Gulf and “pivoting” to Asia. Warrior corporations and rent-a-gun mercenary outfits have mobilized on the country’s disparate battlefronts to profit from the increasingly privatized twenty-first-century American version of war. The American people, however, are demobilized and detached from the wars, interventions, operations, and other military activities done in their name. As a result, 200 Marines in Guatemala, almost 78% of global weapons sales, drones flying surveillance from Australia -- no one here notices; no one here cares.

Happy Birthday, Roald

Born today in 1916, one of the great children's authors ever

(More of his poetry here)





The Rowing Song

Round the world and home again
That's the sailor's way
Faster faster, faster faster

There's no earthly way of knowing
Which direction we are going
There's no knowing where we're rowing
Or which way the river's flowing

Is it raining, is it snowing
Is a hurricane a–blowing

Not a speck of light is showing
So the danger must be growing
Are the fires of Hell a–glowing
Is the grisly reaper mowing

Yes, the danger must be growing
For the rowers keep on rowing
And they're certainly not showing
Any signs that they are slowing.

Happy Birthday, Bill

One hundred years ago today, on a farm near Rosine, Kentucky the Father of Bluegrass, Bill Monroe, was born.

Here are three videos featuring his distinctive mandolin and high, lonesome sound.

Do enjoy.






Uncle Pen:


Blue Moon of Kentucky:


Wayfaring Stranger:

Happy Birthday, Stanislaw

Today in Lviv - then in Poland though now in Ukraine - in 1921, Stanislaw Lem was born. After WWII he basically invented the genre of far-future science fiction, using it to explore philosophical themes in an often satirical fashion. In the west, his best known novel is probably Solaris, but His Master's Voice and Fiasco, along with the Cyberiad, are also well known.

A couple of years ago, the (I think excellent) Russian film version of Solaris was cited as the definitive example of кино арт-хаус (kino art-khaus, art house film) by one of my students - we were discussing the translation of an article about Fyodor Bondarchuk, not an art-house director.

American values

So, Mitt Romney believes that condemning an attack on religion is against American values?

Or is it against American values to call Islam a religion?

Or is what's against American values the admission that sometimes an American will do something repugnant?

Is he saying that if he were president, his State Department would have issuing a statement saying "Now that's what I'm talking about!" as a two-thumbs-up review of the movie?

Gah. I always did think he was a sociopath.

Happy Birthday, HL

Born today in 1880, the irascible and splendid Sage of Baltimore, HL Mencken.

"I believe that it is better to tell the truth than a lie. I believe it is better to be free than to be a slave. And I believe it is better to know than to be ignorant."

"It is impossible to imagine the universe run by a wise, just and omnipotent God, but it is quite easy to imagine it run by a board of gods. If such a board actually exists it operates precisely like the board of a corporation that is losing money."

"The worst government is the most moral. One composed of cynics is often very tolerant and humane. But when fanatics are on top there is no limit to oppression."

"The only way to reconcile science and religion is to create something which isn't science or something which isn't religion."

Up into the building

I was at work that day, and spent much of it in a parking lot as they tried to evacuate our building in nothing flat. But, really, who am I, that anybody cares where I was or what I was doing?

Still, here's what I think about:

A man describing making his way down the stairs from the 67th floor of the North Tower:

"And then when we got to around the 35th floor we had to move over for the firefighters. I mean, we were all trying to get out, and here they came, up into the building."

Children chased by bison - duh

So I caught this video on CBS news tonight. Children walking up to pet a bison and getting chased.

Man. I was just in Yellowstone a month and a half ago. You cannot get out of your car without seeing a half a dozen signs telling you to keep your damned distance from all animals, especially bison. Like this one, though it's from Theodore Roosevelt National Park:



They aren't kidding. Do not send your children up to pet a bison. Just .... don't.

The Week in Entertainment

Film: The Words, which I think, after seeing it, got some bum reviews. Not the best movie I've seen, certainly, but I didn't think it was as flawed as most reviewers did (though I could have done without the peculiarly aggressive student character played by Olivia Wilde). Jeremy Irons was great, as usual.

DVD: City of Death, a nice Doctor Who written by Douglas Adams. Tried to watch The Tree of Life, but found it too confusing and pretentious and gave up on it after about half an hour. May try again...

TV: Doctor Who is back! Yay!. I was quite upset that it started with Rory and Amy getting a divorce, but it's believable and I loved the ending - all the Daleks shouting "Doctor who? Doctor who?" Wonderful! And the second episode - "Dinosaurs on a Spaceship!" - was great, too. Loved Rory's dad, and it had such great lines ("Are you suggesting dinosaurs are flying a spaceship?" "No, that would be ridiculous. They're probably just passengers.") Leverage, caught up on last week's - cute, I enjoy the ones where they do historical dress-up, and I liked how they subverted the "Eliot will be the bad guy" expectation. This week's was good, too. Back to their real strength: taking down an arrogant crook. Please Believe Me, a funny mistaken-identity romcom from 1950 with Deborah Kerr as a presumed heiress crossing the Atlantic on a liner, and Robert Walker, Peter Lawford, and Mark Stevens as the men chasing her. I can never get used to Robert Walker as a romantic lead... And the classic The Awful Truth with Irene Dunn and Cary Grant getting a divorce and sabotaging each other's new relationships. The Fairy King of Ar, an more than acceptable children's fantasy about some American kids on vaction saving some imprisoned fairies - Corbin Bernsen and Malcolm McDowell, believe it or not (also Glynis Barber). Spinning Boris, which is a "fact-based" look at American election advisers helping Yeltsin win reelection in 1996. It was intriguing if the basing was perhaps a bit light. Hop, which was not entirely predictable, but I think will be quite forgettable.

Read: The Lives of Things, short stories by José Saramago. Also his The Tale of the Unknown Island. The Second Life of Abigail Walker, a very nice story about a girl turning her life around by walking away from the mean girls she wanted for her friends and finding friends who want her. The American Way of War, a depressing book by Tom Engelhardt. And began Dear Blue Sky, a YA about a girl who begins corresponding with an Iraqi blogger after her brother enlists in the Marines in 2006. I'm not very far into it, but it's quite good.

Happy Birthday, Leo (С днем рождения, Лев Николаевич)

Лев Николаевич Толстой, or Leo Tolstoy as he's known in English, was born today (or August 28 Old Style) in 1828 on his family's estate in Yasnaya Polyana. His family was aristocratic (he was a count, or graf) and he lived wildly as a youth, running through a great deal of money. He also served in the army, participating in the defense of Sevastopol during the Crimean War. After his marriage he settled down in an austere lifestyle and wrote... War and Peace and Anna Karenina, and the lesser-known works such as Resurrection, The Death of Ivan Ilych, and After the Ball. Ivan Bunin called his unfinished novel The Cossacks one of the finest pieces of Russian prose ever written. In his later life he became a Christian anarchist (though he disliked the term), a pacifist, and (in Gandhi's words) "the greatest apostle of non-violence that the present age has produced", and the founding president of the International Union of Vegetarian Esperantists.

Read him in Russian here, and in English here.

The line and the Flash Pass

Via Slacktivist, a wonderful metaphor of America - and I'm not joking. Read it.

Tricky words

Alexander Golts wrote a wrap-up for the first week in May called "A Soviet Man in the Postmodern Era". It was first published in Yezhednevnyj Zhurnal, but I can't find it on their website, so here's a link to a reprint at Dvizhenie vmeste (Moving together)'s site. It's a pretty biting look at the tandem's takeover of Russia's holidays (including a jab at how the country's honor, so important on Victory Day, doesn't suffer from having so many WWII vets homeless, or as good as), and it has some nice cultural bits for translation students to wrestle with, as well as some syntactic puzzles. Here are two very different things my students struggled with.

First, this description of Putin and Medvedev having a drink with some "ordinary people":

И как апофеоз — тандем возглавляет демонстрацию, типа сливается с народом. Казалось бы, чистое возвращение в СССР, полный ренессанс советской эстетики. Однако все это носило привкус постмодернизма. Слияние с народом продолжилось с пивбаре «Жигули», где компанию тандему составил знатный рабочий со своими знаменитыми варежками.

And as the apofeoz - the tandem led the demonstration, as if 'mingling with the people'. It would seem a perfect return to the USSR, a total rebirth of the Soviet esthetic. However, it all had a little tinge of postmodernism. The mingling with the people continued at the Zhiguli beer bar, where the tandem was joined by (the/a) distinguished worker with his celebrated gloves.

There's a word problem - or a couple. First, апофеоз. Given older Russian F-for-TH, and the loss of the end of Greek words (Pegasus is Pegas, for instance), apofeoz sure looks like "apotheosis", and that is its first meaning. But that doesn't fit the context. If you look in a Russian defining dictionary, you'll find out it also means a "grand finale". The second was cultural - tandem. That term (a masculine, singular noun) always refers to the team of Putin & Medvedev. (There's even a word - tandemokratija, rule by the tandem.) Key to its meaning is that a tandem is a team in which one member is in front of the other - like a tandem bicycle.

There was a troubsome phrase - компанию тандему составил (kompaniju tandemu sostavil) - which is one of those things you just have to learn as a unit: составить кому-л. компанию, to join someone, to go along with someone, to keep someone company. Word order was tricky, because the Russian was company to-tandem kept worker, and that sort of thing always throws students (especially when they aren't sure who the tandem is!).

The third problem was purely cultural. Who was it that joined them at the bar?

"The distinguished worker with his famous gloves" - most of them got that far (one lost track of who свой was referring to (it's a possessive that goes to the subject and is obligatory in third person - preventing confusion in sentences of the Tom gave John his book variety - his is a different word depending on whose book it is), and one was led astray by a slang meaning for варежка - mouth. The problem was they didn't realize that this had to mean a specific person.

But if you read that someone was joined by (a/the) "famous singer with his celebrated single glove" or (a/the) "famous gangster with his trademark white fedora", you'd realize you were meant to know who that was. And Russians know who this guy is: Valery Trapeznikov, a "simple working man, like YOU" from Perm, a lathe operator who is also a Duma deputy (equivalent of a congressman), whose machinist's gloves are indeed his trademark.


Then there was this tricky bit, simpler at first glance - but not at second:

Главным же событием праздника стал белый медведевский плащик.

The highlight of the holiday was white medvedevsky raincoat.

The first problem here is the word медведевский medvedevskij. It doesn't really mean "bear" - that's медвежий medvezhij. But it's from the same word - Медведев is a surname that's identical to the genitive plural of bear, and the collocation белый медвед belyj medved means "polar bear" - hence (adding Russia's lack of articles) the caption of that picture at the top: "Mooom, who's giving this speech?" "President [Medvedev / of the bears]." "And which bears - polar or brown?"

But this doesn't mean a polar bear coat, or a polar bear's coat - it means Medvedev's white raincoat. It doesn't help that Russian doesn't capitalize proper adjectives (American, Moscow, Jeffersonian -in Russian, all are with small first letters). The hardest thing to deal with is the word order: in English, a possessive is a determiner and comes first; in Russian, it's just another adjective, and it comes after adjectives of color or quality... We don't say "white Medvedev's raincoat".

All in all, a nice article for intermediate level translators from Russian to work on. A lot of different things in it.

Happy Birthday, Siegfried

Today in Manfield, Kent, England, in 1886 Siegfried Loraine Sassoon was born. One of the great WWI poets, Sassoon eventually rejected the war and refused to return to the front after a convalescent leave, sending a manifesto to Parliament. Refusing to court-martial such a decorated hero and symbol, the Army declared him "unfit for duty" and sent him to a war hospital, to be treated for shell shock. After the war he led a restless life, during which he continued to write, poems and prose both.



Bombardment

Four days the earth was rent and torn
By bursting steel,
The houses fell about us;
Three nights we dared not sleep,
Sweating, and listening for the imminent crash
Which meant our death.

The fourth night every man,
Nerve-tortured, racked to exhaustion,
Slept, muttering and twitching,
While the shells crashed overhead.

The fifth day there came a hush;
We left our holes
And looked above the wreckage of the earth
To where the white clouds moved in silent lines
Across the untroubled blue.

Ancient History

Adam, a brown old vulture in the rain,
Shivered below his wind-whipped olive-trees;
Huddling sharp chin on scarred and scraggy knees,
He moaned and mumbled to his darkening brain;
‘He was the grandest of them all was Cain!
‘A lion laired in the hills, that none could tire:
‘Swift as a stag: a stallion of the plain,
‘Hungry and fierce with deeds of huge desire.’

Grimly he thought of Abel, soft and fair
A lover with disaster in his face,
And scarlet blossom twisted in bright hair.
‘Afraid to fight; was murder more disgrace?’
‘God always hated Cain’ He bowed his head
The gaunt wild man whose lovely sons were dead.


(more of his poems here)