Field and Garden Dream

Notes for Novel #1

2011-12-06T20:29:00.001-08:00

They say that in order to write a great novel, you have to write a bit at a time, many times. So here's the first installment of my notes for that Great American/magical-realist novel I'll write someday.

Plot device: Making a living as a time-traveling spy/conman in Disneyland. Cover is blown when I try to pay my bill with a 25 cent note at the cafe under the Swiss Family Robinson tree.

She is here!

2009-06-30T05:32:00.000-07:00

Guess what! She's here, in real life! Natu and his auntie have had an ongoing discussion about how things are supposed to be called.

Natu: Uma montanha!
Angie: What?
Natu: Uma montanha!
Angie: yeah, a mountain!
Natu: Uma casa na montanha!
Angie: What?
Natu: Otra casa!
Angie: What?

...

Angie: How many leaves?
Natu: Um, dois, três, cuatro, cinco. cinco leaves.
Angie: Six, seven,
Natu: seven, oito,
Angie: nine
Natu: ten!

...

Natu: Up! Down! Up! Down!
Angie: Shàng! Xià! Shàng! Xià!
Natu: No! It's: Up! Down! Up! Down!

There will be dancing

2009-05-25T21:17:00.000-07:00

The US re-release of that acclaimed independently-produced thriller from China The Day of Angie and Lucien's Wedding is scheduled for its Stateside opening on August 1, 2009. The main event will take place approximately 7PM to 10PM, including good food, dancing, ceremonial cake cutting, and a fireworks grand finale courtesy of Sea World.

Who: Angie and Lucien and All of You
What: The Return of Angie and Lucien's Wedding
When: ca. 7PM ~ 10PM, August 1, 2009
Where: South Cove Beach on Vacation Isle, Mission Bay Park
Why: Angie is not a threat to national security
How: With your dancing shoes on, or barefoot

You will get a chance to RSVP by mail in a month or so, but RSVP by email or in the comments is just as good or better!

This post will be updated as plans develop.

Update:
Days Hotel on Hotel Circle has granted us a reduced rate, lower than the AAA rate.

The Standard room is one king bed or two queens (with a mini-fridge and microwave). The Kitchenette room is like the two-queen room, but with also a little two-burner stove, sink, and dishes. The parking is free for one car per room, but $10 for additional cars.

If you'd like something cheaper or nicer but still want to be nearby, there are lots of other hotels on Hotel Circle. But I hope you'll like this one -- it's highly rated, and a pretty good deal for the area.

Update 2:
The ceremony and reception will run 7-10 PM, but we will be hanging out at the park all day. You're welcome to come join us early if you can!

Driving directions: Coming from the north, get off the 5 at Garnet/Balboa. Right on Garnet or Grand 1.5 miles, left on Ingraham, then 1.5 miles to the entrance. Coming from the hotel, get off the 8 at W Mission Bay/Sports Arena, and turn right. Stay in the left lanes to end up on Ingraham, then 1 mile to the entrance. The parking lot at South Cove Vacation Isle (by the model boat pond) closes right at 10 PM, so it might be better to park on the south end of Ski Beach (on the other side of Ingraham), and follow the walkway under Ingraham. (See map)

It will be warm during the day, but there's lots of shade and a steady ocean breeze. Bring a sweatshirt or windbreaker for after the sun goes down.

We are privileged to have great friends and family who have already provided us with most everything we need. If you would still like to bring a gift, we welcome gift cards and such, but your participation with us at our celebration is itself gift enough. Thank you for coming!

YCQ #16: Get yer own durn theme song

2009-03-31T23:35:00.000-07:00

YCQ #15: The most unwanted blog post

2009-02-28T11:20:00.000-08:00

Welcome, welcome, to today's episode of the Yellow Card Question Show! We have a show today of such amazing and grotesque character that it will surely haunt your nightmares for months to come! I guarantee it, and stand by my guarantee. And I won't even pretend that it's just coincidence that I'm standing by my guarantee, and have never even actually met the weirdo. If you are not struck speechless by this awful show, then you can go ahead and say something, and you can have a full refund! Be brave, and step right up folks!

Let's start things off with today's theme song: The most unwanted song! (Here's some background explanation.) Pinker, this one's for you.

And now let's have a yellow card!
!!!!!!

Well, I would want to say "No thank you," but I suspect an invitation to tea with the Queen is sort of invitation you can't refuse. And as everyone knows, when having tea with the Queen, you must not speak until spoken to, so I think I would simply be answering her questions. And I have no idea what she would want to ask me. Perhaps you should go talk to her about that first.

YCQ #14: Going to the Moon

2009-01-31T17:40:00.000-08:00

Well folks, we've come around again to that best of times, time for the wonderful widely acclaimed program, back by popular demand -- The Yellow Card Question Show!

The theme song of the day is 十月 (October) by that underground sensation 阿楼 (A Lou). Hit the button to start that going, and you can read my translation of the lyrics here.

Are you ready for this?! Can I hear you say "yeah"?! No? Is that not how this medium works? Oh. There are some really cool people who have a plugin to do voice comments. But I think that's just for Wordpress. Livejournal has voice posts, but I don't think they have voice comments. So yeah, I guess I'm not going to hear you say "yeah". I'll have settle for hallucinating it then.

Are you ready for this?! Can I hallucinate hearing you say "yeah"?! Maybe with a little more coffee and candy canes?!! Or maybe not. Okay I'll settle for a comment after the fact. Go ahead and type "yeah".

Um. So where were we? Yeah! The moment you've been waiting all month for, the all new Yellow Card Question! Here you go folks, the one and only Yellow Card that can cure all your ills and give you new ones, write your tests, take them, and grade them for you!

Well, if I could go on vacation to the moon for free, I think I might like that, but otherwise there are other things I would rather spend my time and money on, and other places I would rather be. You can go, and send me a postcard.

YCQ #13 / New Years' Resolution

2008-12-31T08:55:00.000-08:00

Since my time has expired this month, and my life has clearly been too boring to have anything to comment about, we now have what I know you all have actually been most hoping for: an all new episode of the Yellow Card Question Show!

Tuturuturu!

To make your life a little easier, I am also choosing your New Year's resolution for you. And today's theme song is also your New Year's resolution: Wear Sunscreen.

And now, the moment you've all been waiting for. With great gravity and ceremony, magnetism and antimony, I spin the stack and flip the wheel:

There were lots of good places to play when I was a kid. Wild grassy fields, big branchy trees, a lake for swimming and canoeing, clay hillsides and dirt drainage ditches. When I was living in this house:

there was a valley just off to the left there that had lots of entertainment. There was a small patch of jungle (including bird-of-paradise flowers, termites and cowkillers, porcupines, ...) and grassy little hill that we frequently had campouts on. I remember one summer (I think it must have been 1988) my friends and I must have camped out there several times in just a few weeks, and we got mad at our sisters when they did too, because they were copy-catting us. (A clear violation of childhood etiquette.) We also played a lot of tag and hide-and-seek games in that yard, and the bushes around the edge of the yard (gone now) were just the right height for jumping over. And when the wind was blowing good, you could stand at the edge of the hill and lean really far into it, especially if you tied a sheet to your ankles and grabbed the other two corners with your hands.

When we lived in this house:

we were a lot closer to the lake, and the neighbors had a canoe we could borrow. I spent a lot of time out in that canoe during the summertime. For some reason I can't articulate, it was particularly fun to be out when it was windy or rainy. That ditch in the foreground was also great for building a dirt city. Me and the neighbor kids made quite a town carved into the side of that ditch, with roads for matchbox cars, little lawns made of moss, and a couple high-rise buildings made of fresh mud. The brush and palm trees along the lake had parrots and cranes, boas and iguanas, and an occasional fox. In the lake we caught cool fish (mostly for the fish tank, since the largest ones were dogfish and piranhas, which generally had worms) and sometimes turtles. In the old days, there was a giant mango tree right in front of the house that was pretty good for climbing, and there was an even better one up the hill on the left.

There were so many different good places to play in those days, I think the best I can do is say that the whole area was my favorite.

A wedding like no other

2008-11-03T04:28:00.000-08:00

On April Fools' Day 2007, I wrote a post about suddenly falling in love and getting hitched with a woman I met in a bar. I thought it was a pretty preposterous story considering I was the protagonist, but ultimately the joke was on me. Sometime in the prior month I had in fact met a woman at a bar, we did suddenly fall in love, and we are now married.

Our first impressions of each other were admittedly not great. I was cultivating my nerdy, girl-repellent look at that time, and when we were first introduced, her first words were "Do you wanna teach some English classes?", a line every native English speaker in China grows tired of hearing. But we ended up spending a couple days of our May holiday together, and I quickly realized I rather liked her. Besides her frankness and ease with strangers, she was pretty cute, clearly intelligent, culturally experienced, and unlike any woman I've known. It turned out all my friends already knew her, and everyone who knew her liked her. It took a little bit longer for her to figure out that I was a likeable guy, but before long we were spending all our free time together.

I delayed my planned return to the States as long as possible, but trying hard to not follow in the footsteps of my Fool's Day alter ego who quit school, and not quite able to believe she really liked me that much, I went back to school in California, with a visit scheduled for my winter break. It turned out she actually was as stuck on me as I was on her, and by the time winter break came, we were making marriage plans.

Marriage plans are a little complicated when the partners have lives on separate continents. It's taking a while, and still isn't done. It won't be official until after her visa process finishes, which looks now like it will be a few months more. But last month my parents came to visit, and we celebrated with her friends and family here, in a wedding sui generis, including scenic mountain views, fireworks, dancing, a bonfire, and lots of super people all having fun together.

Joining the tea trade

2008-09-30T00:38:00.000-07:00

My career as an English tutor isn't quite lucrative enough to support my extravagant lifestyle, so I sold out last week and joined the tea trade. The early 20th century tea trade, that is. In my career as assistant to a conniving British tea merchant, my main duty is telling the enemy that my boss is not available, but I also act as his intelligence officer, tea taster (haha), and muscle (haha). And I have to remember not to blink too much. Here I am with our driver.

That is the car in the background. We are not sure if it was made from scraps or if it fell through a warp hole.

This is me with one of the enemy bosses. Before he joined the tea business, he was Stephen Chow's "Uncle Tat".

BTW, this post is not late or pre-dated. I wrote it in 1913, and post-dated it for your sakes.

Wandering around China

2008-08-30T23:27:00.000-07:00

I'm here on a tourist visa that says I can only be in the country for 60 days at a time, so we planned a trip to the northeast, thinking we would hop over the border into Russia or bib over to South Korea. (North Korea is a whole lot closer, but a little harder to get a border stamp.) But after we had bought plane tickets and told people we were coming, we realized that Russian visas can only be obtained in your home country, and the plane/boat to Korea is more expensive than the plane/train to Hong Kong, so we took a few days in Hong Kong first. One country, two systems, but it still counts as exiting the country.
We got there on the last day of a typhoon, so it rained a lot the first day, but was really clear after. We spent one night in Kowloon, one night at a hostel an hour's walk from the road along the sea, and after going back to the main island to get a clear view from the top, we went back across the border just before midnight, during the opening ceremony of the olympics.
Our plane back from Shenzhen was delayed, so we only had 5 hours back in Jinhua before starting off again. We visited Angie's friends and family in Dalian, Dandong, Changchun and Yanji, before returning home.

The photo albums are in picasa instead of the usual flickr. Let me know how well that works.

YCQ #12

2008-07-31T09:23:00.000-07:00

Welcome, welcome! The month of July (or was it June?) has sped past, and it is indeed time for a new episode of The Yellow Card Question! The theme song of the day is from 二十分可乐 (something like "20-minute humor"), a TV show produced by the local TV station, all in Jinhua dialect, with a lot of references to local culture and places. If you use Windows with IE and ActiveX, you can watch all 117 episodes online.

So! On with the show! For your entertainment today, we will have a bit of a twist -- I will pull the yellow card with my left hand! That's right, I am ambidextrous (or ambi-sinister?), capable of equally clumsy movements with my right and left hands. So, here we go -- wait for it -- the yellow card question!

How about that folks?!

Well, my main purpose in life is to keep my audience entertained. Or at least that's what a couple friends have told me recently. How am I doing?

YCQ #11 / January: Linguistics in Song

2008-06-30T02:36:00.000-07:00

Today I have a special treat for you listeners. It's time for a yellow card question, but instead of our usual theme song, we have a podcast in production since January 2007. That's right, like finely aged wine, very moldy cheese, or those dirty socks that got lost behind the dresser, this podcast is of the finest caliber producible by dusty musty forgotten dark corners.

Launch it in a separate player, or just open the mp3
Billy Joel - If I only had the words
Leonor Dely - Para todo hay un signo
Tito Gomez - Aunque no lo digas
Los Amigos Invisibles - Gerundio
Los Aterciopelados - Complemento
Rouge Rouge - Attention
Pablo Mayor - Dobladillo a la lengua
Miriam Makeba - The Click Song
Blackalicious - Alphabet Aerobics
Gilberto Gil - Lingua do Pê
K-G, Sideshow, Musah and Neno - Analyze
John Benjamin Band - More Science

And now, while that plays in the background, let's get on with the show! The one and only yellow card question of the hour, pulled from this perfectly normal deck of electronic cards -- there's no computer special effects here, folks -- well, not very special anyway -- I mean, it's just like a really short python script that picks a random element from an xml file full of questions, and formats it in a yellow-background div element floating in the center of the page, pretty kludgey, really. The text is generally formatted badly, because there's an extra space for some reason in places where there is a line break in the original printed cards, but the actual line breaks in the electronic version is just dependent on html formatting. For example, take a look at this one:

In the printed card, there was a line break between "make" and "the", and so you can see here a little extra space between those words. And then we end up with "place" on a line all by itself. It really loses the poetry of the question. So I would like to make the world a better place by fixing the yellow card script to make the formatting a bit prettier. If I could do that, my life would be complete. I've heard it said that there are other issues in the world, riots, flooding, earthquakes, drought, fires, more flooding, violence of diverse kinds, and even diseased kittens dying slowly. But I can't change the world or rescue every kitten, so I gotta take small steps with what I've got.

Angie's Meme Response

2008-05-25T00:23:00.001-07:00

In response to Carroll

The closest bookish thing was actually a magazine with an ad on page 123.

奢白，炫放无暇钻光
"Dior, luxury white, shiny as diamonds."

The second thing was a Japanese comic book.

Third:

The book w/ at least 123 pages on it is: American Legal English. (I'm reading it now). Topic: Manslaughter -_-
next 3 sentences are:
1. A homicide that would otherwise be second-degree murder may be reduced to voluntary manslaughter if it was committed in response to adequate provocation, sometimes referred to as killing in the 'heat of passion'.
2. In general, four requirements must be met:
3. (1). The provocation must be reasonable(judged by the standard of the reaction of an objective, reasonable person, not a subjective standard that relates to the actor).
Period.

And she tags jeorgesmith.

YCQ #10: Om

2008-04-30T22:58:00.000-07:00

Good evening, my children. The time has come once again, that special time when we stop to meditate on the omissions of the past and the looming shadow of deadlines to come. Today we celebrate this time of the month by the ritual of the yellow card question, when I reach into that fabled stack of digital question cards, and enlighten you with random bits of wisdom.

The theme song of the hour is 轮回 (Reincarnation) by 盛噶仁波切 (Singa Rinpoche), a Tibetan lama and living Buddha.¹ Calm your mind by listening to him chant.

I don't understand the lyrics, but I think there was more to that song than a mantra. How am I ever going to reach enlightenment when they make such complicated poems for meditation?

Okay, so now that our minds are at one with the universe, it's time for the yellow card!

And the teacher replied to the student, "Tweet tweet!"

1. Did you know Steven Seagal is a living Buddha too?

YCQ #9

2008-03-31T21:35:00.000-07:00

It's the end of another month, and I haven't had anything to say. So guess what that means! It's that time again folks: It's the Yellow Card Question Show!

For today's theme song, we are going to borrow one from another show: Chibi Maruko Chan, aka 櫻桃小丸子, aka ماروكو الصغيرة, aka 마루코는 아홉살, etc. Choose your language and start the music playing: Japanese, German, Mandarin, Cantonese, Arabic, Korean. I'm sure there are Bahasa and Tagalog versions out there and perhaps some others, but I can't be bothered to find them at the moment. You'll just have to cope with these options.

So what now? What we've all been waiting for -- let's have a question! Do your happy dances for a moment while I spin the wheel, roll the die, shuffle the deck, and blow on the tea leaves.

Hmm. This question was meant for Chinese students who have three to five roommates in their dorm rooms. It doesn't quite make sense to ask it of myself, but then who said these questions had to make sense.

Well, the simple answer is that I would go crazy. I don't have much furniture in my room, but I don't have much floor space either. I have just my one bedroll on the floor, various items of furniture and boxes along the walls, and a section of bare floor that I like to be able to walk on. I don't like walking on strangers, or friends for that matter. I suppose that if my "roommates" included those sleeping in my living room, than I would perhaps go a little less crazy, but there's not much out there to sleep on either. This silly building doesn't even have places to put hammock hooks! With no bunk beds, no hammocks, and shortage of couches, I just don't think there is any way 6 more people could live here, unless they slept in shifts. That might work. Both my current roommate and I do tend to alternate hours awake. For example, I sometimes sleep 7 PM to 9 PM and 2 AM to 8 AM, and my roomie might sleep 9 PM to 1 AM and 6 AM to noon. But still, a general increase in the average level of insanity would be unavoidable.

Humpty Lives Again

2008-02-16T16:24:00.000-08:00

My compy is well beyond the warranty period, and even beyond the age of the recall on the defective video processor soldering of that era. So a couple weeks ago when Humpty's video wigged out for the second time in his distinguished career, I figured that was the end. I was being forced by fate to buy a new computer. Oh well.

But then I found a company online that was reportedly able to repair such problems for $50 plus shipping. They only want the logic board though, so I disassembled Humpty (using instructions printed off the internet) and sent it in. And this week it came back to me!

Then I had to reassemble it. From this:

To this:

It worked! (Yay!) And I even had a dozen screws left over!

It's almost February

2008-01-30T09:04:00.000-08:00

of 2008. And I haven't said anything for far too long. But I have been having a fairly uneventful life, with little worth commenting on. I mean besides finishing my first quarter in the new program, seeing my sister for the first time in two years, meeting her fiance, going to their wedding, doing Christmas with the whole family, flying across the ocean to see my sweetie, getting engaged, coming back to school late, getting a bad stomach flu, then having my compy die on me, and having an impromptu whole family reunion last weekend, there hasn't been much happening with me. And most of my readers already know about those things anyway.

P.S. You may have noticed that I've moved this blog to my own domain. I'm also now running a proxified version (echo.discurs.us/fieldandgarden) so friends in China can see it without a proxy setup. (Yay!)

I am apparently an alien

2007-12-14T00:58:00.000-08:00

Human or Alien? via Mixing Memory

YCQ #8

2007-11-23T11:57:00.001-08:00

I am clearly not doing a very good job of keeping up with my posting quota, so I am resurrecting the yellow card questions. Yay!

And we need a new theme song! I nominate "我愿意" ("I am willing") originally sung by Wang Fei (王菲, aka Faye Wong), but lots of others have done covers. I recommend you start the video playing, but don't look at it for a minute, just listen. Then listen and watch for a very different experience.

I have a translation posted on my other blog, if you're curious.

And now, the moment you've all been waiting for, eagerly anticipating for the past umpteen months, willing to read, wanting to read, waiting to read: the all new 8th yellow card question! (Okay so it's not all new, since it's been there in the virtual deck this whole time, but it's the all new time it is appearing here, on this blog, in special blockquoted yellow on green background, as opposed to the black on yellow background, see. Believe me, it really is kinda all new, so be excited.)

And here it is!

If the whole world were listening, what would you say?

I honestly haven't a clue what I should say, but from the perspective of behavioral observation, I think a highly relevant data set is the corpus of blog posts I have written. Now, we must qualify this by noting that in practice, the whole world is not listening, or even reading, but in principle, any member of the world population on this side of the digital divide could wander through, and in fact a non-negligible portion of site hits come from foreign lands like Tennessee and Canada. They come looking for pictures of chickens or donkey riders, and seeking information about "umlatt" and holey jeans, and we do our best to meet their critical needs. It is for this reason (the benefit of lost internet travellers) that we have devoted so much of our time to wandering, the internet, and the world, alongside the essentials like food and underwear. Always be prepared, as they say. And I do all I can time and weather permitting, to help the whole world out.

10000 tracks scrobbled

2007-10-20T23:36:00.001-07:00

10000 tracks scrobbled
Originally uploaded by serapio

A year and a half ago, I joined the social music revolution. World peace and harmony through sympathetic vibrations, you know? Oh wait. That's not quite right. It promised to connect me with people who like the same kind of music as me. The best part is it didn't require marching in the streets or hiding in muddy fortifications.

Well, today I "scrobbled" my 10000th track, Fujo Nyumbani, by the Western Jazz Band, found on Steve Ntwiga's blog via el oso. I have found some good music on last.fm, but it's also clear i'm a freak. There just aren't many people out there listening to Leonor Dely, Forrest Carroll, and Mandingo y su Familia.

Photos in Dandong

2007-09-19T12:14:00.001-07:00

With Angie in Dandong
Originally uploaded by serapio

Swimming to North Korea
Originally uploaded by serapio

Guard house on the Korean side
Originally uploaded by serapio

I've posted some more photos, of our time in Dandong. It's a really nice city, with a river (the Yalu River) that's clean enough to swim in. Angie's dad swims across the river a few times a week, and I went with him a couple times. You're apparently allowed to wade in the shallows on the North Korean side, but not get all the way out of the water.

There are lots of monuments to anti-American efforts and Sino-Korean relations in the city. There's two bridges next to each other, one complete and the other half-destroyed by American forces during the Korean war, kept up as a war memorial. There's also a big "Counter-America Assist-Korea Memorial Museum", that still has a lot of anti-American propaganda. But actual anti-American sentiment seems to have waned greatly.

Also, if your Pirate Talk is a little rusty, be sure to brush up on it today. (If you are older than 45, younger than 21, a feminist or an impressionable male, you should only watch the first half, but that first half is pretty good.)

Pet picture month

2007-08-16T09:33:00.001-07:00

Petting the cute little camel
Originally uploaded by serapio

Cute little goats
Originally uploaded by serapio

Here are a couple nice pet pictures. They aren't exactly my pets, but I am petting some domesticated animals. Here is a camel, and then a couple little goats. Aren't they so cute?

I'm not dead yet

2007-06-30T08:59:00.000-07:00

My deepest apologies for not keeping up with yellow card questions, or posting in general. I'll not hold it against you if decide to banish me to Hainan. I had a kinda busy end of semester, but that by itself can't excuse or explain my negligence and and general absence from net space. The rumors are true. Or some of them are anyway. I have joined the stereotyped ranks of those foreign white men with Chinese girlfriends. In accordance with the declared Honey Picture Month, I am posting this picture at the 11th hour.

In case you were wondering, my 'do' in this picture only lasted a few days. I may be a child of the 70s, but I don't belong there.

Shaking the calabashes

2007-05-05T19:49:00.000-07:00

This is a public service advertisement.

Calabash Music is a supercool website that distributes fair trade DRM-free world music. It has become my main source of good music. Every week they designate one or two new songs as free for download. Well, this week, for some reason, they have 11 free songs!

Go check them out!

YCQ #7

2007-04-30T07:02:00.000-07:00

Clean cup, clean cup! Move Down! The theme song of the day is 中国话[mp3], by S.H.E, a Taiwanese girl band. It's one of the most popular hits these days, occupying place number 7 in Baidu's list of most popular songs. Play it the video below, or open the mp3 link above.

So what is it about, you ask? Here is a complete translation, but the chorus says

全世界都在学中国话
孔夫子的话越来越国际化
全世界都在讲中国话
我们说的话让世界都认真听话

The whole world is learning Chinese
Confucius's words are gradually globalizing
The whole world is speaking Chinese
The language we speak makes the world all listen carefully

It's celebrating the rise of Chinese as the next global lingua franca! (In case you missed the CCTV news, it's just a matter of time. China is doing a lot to promote Chinese language and culture worldwide, most notably the Confucius Institutes. Many of my students major in Teaching Chinese as a Foreign Language, a field that is growing, but not as quickly as the government and these students hoped.) The more off-the-wall lines in the song are references to tongue twisters, classical tone scansion, and philosophy parables.

So what were we doing here again? Oh yeah, the question!

If you could live perfectly well without sleeping at all, what would you do at night?

Well, I have often wished I didn't have to sleep so much. I've never managed on less than about 8 hours of sleep average, unlike some older brothers we know. This means that they have dozens more hours each week to make bank working long hours, read lots of books, shop online, and still have time for a family/social life. All I seem to have time for is reading the internet and watching youtube movies. If I didn't have to sleep at all, I might find the time to grade papers, write a thesis, or even take a shower occasionally.

[Edit: 中国话 is actually the top song in the list of popular new songs.]

I'm coming to the party, and I'm coming as

2007-04-23T17:50:00.000-07:00

a Computational Linguist, or a Corpus Linguist, or a Cognitive Scientist of Language, or a Luxury Car Salesman. And I'm moving to La Jolla, California. I am such an egotist.

My 15 seconds of fame

2007-04-17T05:13:00.000-07:00

I've said elsewhere that being a foreigner in China is a bit like being a minor celebrity. Well, now I really am famous. I'm mentioned a couple times in this news story, republished in the provincial education department news and Chinese university online news. Okay, so they decided to use a photo of a cute Korean girl instead of my lovely visage, and they didn't quite get what I said right, but this is clearly the most newsworthy thing I have done since the Golden West Pathfinder did the story about me that covered the whole back page.

The title, "我校留学生走进社区体验中国“邻居节”" means "Our school's foreign students enter community to experience 'neighborhood festival'". The university's "International Culture Club" coordinated a neighborhood festival with a nearby residential community organization last Saturday morning. There were a bunch of presentations by the community residents and by university students.

来自美国的外教卢西恩第一个上台表演，他还客串了把主持人，将留学生们一一介绍给了观众。卢西恩与对外汉语专业的大一的女生柴银赣一起合作唱了首中国的民歌《茉莉花》。演出前，两人一直在台下练习着这首歌。卢西恩告诉记者，10年前刚开始学中文的时候，他已经学过这首歌了。

This paragraph says,

Foreign lecturer Lucien, from America, was the first [of the foreigners] to go on stage to perform. He also acted as a host/announcer, introducing the exchange students one by one. [I actually introduced them as a group.] Lucien and first-year TCFL major Chai Yingan cooperated to sing Chinese folk song "Jasmine Flower". Before performing, they were off stage continuously practicing this song. [I think we sang it once.] Lucien told the reporter that 10 years ago, when he first started studying Chinese, he had already learned this song. [In fact, it's not been 10 years yet since I started studying Chinese, though I think I did say that at first, before correcting myself. And I learned the song the middle of my first year of Chinese.]

The story talks about the foreign students' performances, and then the last paragraph talks about me again.

留学生们都是第一次来到社区参加这样的活动。外教卢西恩说，在美国的时候，自己也只在小的时候参加过邻居节，到中国后更没有机会来到社区里了。

For all the exchange students, it was their first time to come to a community and participate in this kind of activity. Foreign lecturer Lucien said that in America, only when he was a child had he participated in community festivals [I was actually talking about the activities in Lomalinda], and since coming to China he had even fewer opportunities to come into the community. [I'm actually not sure what the reporter means here.]

So, clearly, there were some communication problems. I notice the reporter didn't include my wittiest comment of the interview. When she asked what other talents I had besides singing, I said that actually my only talent is twiddling my thumbs. We had a hard time translating that though. These sheltered Chinese students don't know about thumb-twiddling. I showed them how to do it, but I was unable to explain the deep cultural significance.

The Yellow Card Question, Episode 6

2007-04-15T07:56:00.000-07:00

Some of my fans didn't care so much for my theme song, so by popular request, we have adopted a new one! It's from goldenox, and you should just hit the play button now.

powered by ODEO

Yes, that is correct. It is Reggaeton. In Chinese. Chinese Reggaeton. What will they think of next: Turkish Reggaeton? Uzbek Salsa? Apparently a couple of the lines are kinda crude though, so I wouldn't recommend singing those catchy lyrics in polite company.

Oh, so yeah, time for the show! w00t!

Today, without any pomp or circumstance, I draw a yellow card. But just before beginning to read I remember the exciting news! You can play now too! That's right, the best yellow card questions in the world are now in their first public beta release! Check it out! Practice your spoken English, entertain your friends at boring parties, or add content to your abandoned blog! (Yes, I'm talking about you.)

All right, where were we. Oh yes.

"If you had to choose, would you rather give up your sight or your hearing?"

I would certainly miss listening to good music, spoken language and the sounds of nature, but I don't think I could handle not seeing. So much information in my world is presented visually rather than auditorially. I'm color blind and near sighted, but also lacking musical sense, so I think I understand visual art better than music.

And I've been wanting to learn sign language anyway.

The Truth

2007-04-06T23:45:00.001-07:00

Self-Portrait
Originally uploaded by serapio.

So I thought I should clear some things up. My previous post, dated April 1, did in fact have a number of true statements.

The first sentence about thinking about what I want to do with my life is true.
At the time I wrote that post, the sun had come out, and in fact it had been over 30° C Saturday. Oddly, winter returned Sunday, and by Monday night it had dropped to 2°. Today it is spring time again.
I do kinda like it here these days. Posts about why are forthcoming.
My camera is broken. Sometime between celebrating Carnaval, Chinese New Year, and President's day in L.A. and when I arrived in Ningbo March 2, my camera decided to construct it's own reality.

The rest of it is nonsense. I am returning to San Diego in the fall.

Decisions

2007-03-31T10:16:00.000-07:00

As you folks know, I've been doing a lot of thinking recently about where I'm going to school next year, what kind of academic I want to be, and what I'm doing with my life in general. I've become convinced that I don't actually want to be a linguist, and perhaps not an academic at all. Neither of my options is really right for me, in any case. I've signed up for another year here. I'll probably apply to grad schools again in the fall, looking at cog-sci and psych programs. But since the sun has come out again this place has really grown on me, or I'm realizing how much I have liked it here, and I'm considering staying on long term.

In not unrelated news, I should introduce you to my fiancée. I don't have any pictures yet though, and my camera's broken. I met Quan Feili (全非丽) at one of the two bars in town, back in January, and in the time since I returned here, we've spent a lot of time together. It's clear to me she is my soulmate, and last night we agreed we should get hitched sometime or another.

[Edit: In case it wasn't clear, this is an April Fool's joke. But see this update.]

The Yellow Card Question, Episode 5

2007-03-30T07:35:00.000-07:00

And now, it's time for the SHOW! (Scroll down the page and start the theme song playing now, okay? Go ahead, I'll wait.)

Today, for the first time in history, I will first demonstrate a new and amazing magic trick! As you can see, or as you will have to trust me on this anyway, I am holding in my hands this perfectly unremarkable hat! So unremarkable in fact, that it has the name "Visalia" across the front. And as you can see, or as I assure you, there is nothing in the hat! But watch (or imagine) closely now. My hands are empty and the hat is empty, but with a simple flick of my wrist and a reach into my backpack, !!!yellow cards!!! How was that folks? All without any mirrors or camera tricks!

Thank you, thank you.

And now, ... the question for today:

"If you woke up suddenly because your building was on fire, which three things would you save as you ran outside"

Well, I don't have much of value here, neither sentimental value nor monetary. My lippy-loppy, of course, has my entire life on it, so even though much of it is backed up elsewhere, that would be the first thing I would grab. After that, I think I should grab my various IDs (Does that count as one thing or as a dozen? Seriously, how did I end up with so many ID cards?). And for the third thing, ... I would grab a pair of shoes. I could manage in my sleeping clothes for a while (or there's a fair chance I would not have changed out of my normal clothes before falling asleep), and I could borrow or buy others easily enough, but shoes in my size are the stuff of legend in these parts.

It's on the tip of my tongue twister

2007-03-20T06:24:00.000-07:00

Suppose you can't remember the name of that art movement that was fascinated by speed and steel, or that word that starts with 'p' and means liking to fight. Or perhaps you are looking for words that would fit into a tongue twister you're writing.

I still can't find that word that sounds like bremsstrahlung though.

In other news, Blogspot is a hive of barbarians again. But it's in good company. Livejournal, Xanga, and Wordpress are also barbarian hordes, and of course everything Wikimedia.

The Yellow Card Question, Episode 4

2007-03-11T06:54:00.000-07:00

Three two one roll it!
♫It's Howdy Doody time, it's Howdy Doody time♫--
Cut! That's not right. Try that again.
♫Em Eye See! Kay Ee Why! Em Oh You Es Ee! Mick♫--
Cut cut cut! That's not right either! Where did our theme song go? Oh, we didn't have a theme song? How did that happen? How did we already get to our 4th episode without a theme song?! Well, we don't have time to put anything together now. How about we just adopt one. Okay, here it is:
Skullcrusher Mountain from the crazed mind of Jonathan Coulton.

Let the show begin! Doopity doo! Bring forth the cards of golden hue! Voila! Exclaim some more! Woohoo!

And the one and only card of the day!

"If you could speak any other language that you don't speak already, which language would you like to speak?"

Ooooh! This is a good one. Well, if Standard Chinese counts as a language I already speak, the next ones on my list would be:

- One or more Wu dialects. There are a bewildering number of mutually unintelligible Chinese languages spoken in this province and in the area just north of it. These Wu dialects maintain some interesting features of Classical Chinese, and of course do all kinds of interesting things different from each other and from the other Chinese languages, while the vocabulary is apparently mostly cognate with the other Chinese languages. I would at minimum like to understand better how the phonology of a couple dialects work, and it would be cool to actually be able to communicate in one.

- An Amerindian language. Mostly because they are morphologically and syntactically so different from the languages I know now, and I need some balance.

- Arabic. I took a semester of Arabic, but it wasn't really enough to get much beyond the phonology and spelling. Arabic has really cool morphology, and it offers an interesting language & power comparison with Chinese, in the coexistence of colloquial and standard languages.

- An African tone and/or click language. An African language to add to the typological balance, clicks because they are just awesome, and tones so I can understand comparisons with Chinese.

- All the other ones too.

Home Again Home Again, Jiggity Jog

2007-03-03T16:26:00.000-08:00

In the past four weeks, I have slept in eight cities, and ridden buses, metros, trains, a bullet train, a motorcycle, a rental car, a moto taxi, a few regular taxis, airplanes, and several cars of friends and family. And I walked a lot too. It was very good to see everyone, and it is good to be back.

I celebrated Chinese New Year, Carnaval, and President's Day in Los Angeles with my family. In my family, whenever these three important holidays fall on the same weekend, rather than trying to dance half-naked in the street, lighting firecrackers and waving American flags, we just sit around filling out income tax forms and taking turns holding the baby.

Now I have returned to Jinhua, where they are hanging red paper lanterns and shooting off fireworks to celebrate my birthday. It's very thoughtful of them.

The Yellow Card Question, Episode 3

2007-02-25T06:53:00.000-08:00

Well, seeing as how it has been two weeks since the last yellow card question, it must be time for a new one. But I'm kinda tired, so I'm not feeling up to putting on my clown suit and magician's hat. All right fine, I'll put on my yellow raincoat and rollerblade onto stage. Okay? Are you happy now?

Now, it's time for the yellow card. (Applause) Here, from my amazing stack of questions, special for today, exclusively for this audience, we have a question! (I try a bit too hard to look excited, and almost lose my balance. Audience applauds.) A special question that you've all been waiting for, chosen randomly and without the possibility of a rigged card draw! (Applause)

"If you were given one million dollars, what would you buy?"

Well, I think I would buy two things.

One is Liner's system of mail tubes, so we could climb into little capsules and be sucked to another continent in a few seconds. I think that wouldn't cost very much if I drove a hard bargain and had it made in China.

With the money left over, I would assemble a linguistics (or cogsci) department that pays attention to neuroscience and cognitive psychology and explores language in its cognitive and social context, that neither ignores linguistic theory nor takes any of it too seriously, that does take real languages and linguistic diversity seriously, that has plenty of quantitative experimental research (both corpus-based and psycholinguistic) but still has room for more exploratory (but still empirical) research, and that has people working on the whole spectrum of phenomena from phonetics to discourse structure and pragmatics. Oh, and they should let me study there.

Is that too much to ask?

The Yellow Card Question, Episode 2

2007-02-09T08:14:00.000-08:00

And now, what you've all been waiting for -- this week's episode of:

The Yellow Card Question!

Pretend now that I actually didn't leave my deck of yellow card questions in Jinhua and planned ahead by queuing up a few here, but rather am pulling the question now live, before your very eyes! Feel the suspense! Gaze in anticipation at the beautiful bright yellow rectangles! Read a few extra exclamation marks!!!

And a few more: !!!!

And now, the question:
"You have been captured by cannibals. How would you like to be cooked?"

Well, if I'm going to be eaten, I would like to be eaten good, slow cooked in a deep pit barbecue or roasted over an open fire with lots of tasty spices. I've heard cannibals often know how to make a mean barbecue sauce and are pretty good at cooking with open fires. So really, I trust them to cook me right. Just so long as they don't leave any as microwaved leftovers I'll be fine.

N views of West Lake, and other stuff

2007-02-03T09:34:00.001-08:00

Before I go gallivanting across the globe and visiting such exotic locales as Visalia and University City, I should say something about Hangzhou, since I previously said I wanted to say something about it, but was waiting until I uploaded some pictures. Well, I've uploaded some pictures, but can't think of much to say about it, although I did already say a few things on the photo pages. Anyway, go take a look. It's a nice place.

Today was a nice sunny day, and I rode my bike (a bright red folding bicycle) much of the way to Double Dragon Caves, which is a pretty famous tourist attraction, not far away, that I managed to not visit all this semester. I've just put up some of the pictures I took today.

Language Requirements

2007-02-03T08:47:00.000-08:00

My two most likely options for school next year have radically different language requirements. First, take a look at the one for UCSB linguistics:

The foreign language requirement. Students must demonstrate knowledge of one research language before receiving an M.A. and a second research language before advancement to candidacy for the Ph.D. A research language is a language with substantial relevant literature on linguistics. Knowledge can be demonstrated by one of the following methods of examination within the student's area of interest: (1) English translation of a 500-word passage, chosen by the examiner, to be produced within one and a half hours with the aid of a dictionary and with no more than 8 points of erroneous comprehension (2 points for each major error significantly affecting meaning; 1 point for each minor error). (2) A 1,000-1,500 word English summary, written over a single weekend, of a substantial linguistic article chosen by the examiner. The faculty member in charge of exams for a particular language will specify a sample of material comparable to what can be expected on the exam. Translation and summary exams may be taken in May or October on a date to be set by the examiner. (3) A research paper that not only independently fulfills a course or degree requirement but also contains copious references to linguistic literature in the foreign language of interest, with the understanding that the works referred to shall be lent to the examiner for verification.

In other words, you have to be able to understand academic articles written in two languages other than English. I don't meet that requirement yet. Now look at the one for UCSD cogsci:

Language Requirement. The main goal of the language requirement is to give all students firsthand experience with some of the differences in structure and usage of languages and the several issues involved in the learning of second languages. This requirement can be satisfied by demonstrating satisfactory proficiency, by prior study in a language (e.g., two years of high school study), or by satisfactory completion of one quarter of study in a language course approved by the department.

"Two years of high school study" or "one quarter of study"! All UC undergraduates have to have more language courses than that! The theoretical bent of the two departments is fairly similar, and they have a high emphasis on empirical work, but UCSB being a linguistics department and the UCSD program being a cogsci department makes a lot of difference.

Change of Plans

2007-02-02T04:41:00.000-08:00

I have decided to make an emergency run home during my one month winter break. I need to meet with the professors at next year's school options, get out of the country, and see my people. I need a hug and, most importantly, a burrito!

I hope the following isn't misunderstood, and doesn't offend. Much of it is generalizations that should perhaps be more carefully qualified. I have a corresponding list in progress of things I like about living in China, but I'm pretty sure I will have an easier time thinking of those things when I'm in California. (The grass is always greener.) You can expect to see that list in a month or so. What is more relevant at the moment is my list of things I don't like about living in China:

I have no peer group. I have only weak social groups. I have no roommates. I miss human contact.
I have had very little time to practice Chinese. Relatively little context to speak, and for much of the semester I was too busy to study.
I also managed to not do any other things I had hoped to explore here, like classical painting, martial arts, ancient Buddhism or Daoism.
There are very few natural areas to visit. The roads are paved, the fields are plowed under (though mostly by hand), the lakes are artificial, and the rivers are polluted.
The historical sites are reconstructions, with almost nothing remaining more than 20 years old.
The assumption that dating Chinese women is a high priority for me, even a major reason for coming here. I can understand why this stereotype exists, since there are a lot of single men who come here as teachers or on business, and many of them do have Chinese girlfriends. And some of them, even one I know, have dislikable attitudes towards Chinese women. The effect is that I, as a representative white male American, am assumed to have similar intentions. The combination of that and being an exotic species makes me the object of some somewhat annoying attention, and some dislike.
The media control is real, with pretty limited variety on TV. The news seems to be even less trustworthy than Fox or BBC Science. (And much less sensational/interesting).
The nationalism and patriotism turn up in surprising places. It's sometimes just quaint, but other times like fingernails on a chalkboard. As far as I can tell, there is no stigma against nationalism. (Contrast this to Mexico City, where the relevant question being discussed was "Is nationalism ever a good thing?" if I remember correctly.)
People assume that I like Bush and his policies, and that I'm nationalistic too.
The Great Firewall blocks a lot of content: wikipedia, many blog and website hosts, many news sources, and many random pages. And it dramatically slows down international traffic too. It makes it harder to connect with friends and family in the States, read different perspectives on the news, and read academic articles. The internet connection is pretty poor when school is in session, and really bad in the evening.

I'm hoping I will be able to make some changes on some of these points next semester, and getting out of the country will help refresh my memory of what I do like about being here.

A new tradition: yellow card questions

2007-01-28T23:51:00.000-08:00

So, today I'm missing my third estimate of when I would finish grading exams. If I lower my standards, I may still finish tomorrow. In celebration of that realization, I am blogging.

You may recall that I have recently started a couple traditions, which seem to be suffering some continuity problems. Well, in the spirit of lowering my standards, I am starting a new tradition, and this one is easy, so if I can't do this one, I will officially be a failure, and you can banish me to Hainan forever. (Pretty please? Seriously, that used to be a not uncommon punishment, back in the good old days.)

And now for the show! In this activity, I draw a random question from the stack of conversation question cards that I use for my oral English classes, and then I answer it! Isn't that exciting!

So, the "yellow card" question for today is:
"If you could have any car you wanted, which car would you choose?"

Well, that one's a lame question. Especially here, since a car would be pretty pointless. (Where would I drive it? Where would I park it?) Oh, and apparently I'm not allowed to get a driver's license, since I'm color blind, and according to the legal code here, color blind drivers are unsafe, perhaps because (it is said) they can't tell the difference between the red and green lights. (1) I can tell the difference between red and green lights. I've never had a problem with it in the US. (2) People here don't pay much attention to the lights anyway.

Um, so where was I. Oh, if I could have any car... I would want a car that is clean enough that I wouldn't feel wasteful driving long distances, and small enough that parking wouldn't be too hard. The main reasons I might prefer a car over a moto is for long drives, or in bad weather. Although the convenience of being able to carry around more than a backpack amount of stuff would be nice too.

In view of these factors, I think I choose a Smart Car. Plus it's super cute, isn't it. I would like to show you the picture of Slowlane and Jeorge with one we saw in Berlin, but that photo is not digital, and is sitting in a box in San Diego. Please imagine it. Thanks.

Tune in next week for the next episode of The Yellow Card Question!

CUTEST. MANGOS. EVAR!!!!11

2007-01-23T18:57:00.001-08:00

CUTEST. MANGOS. EVAR!!!!11
Originally uploaded by serapio.

My Movie Career Begins

2007-01-15T05:00:00.000-08:00

A Pakastani, an American, a Palestinian, and an Irani, as Evil Soldiers from Nebulous Foreign Country

About two hours east of here is a city with several "film industrial parks", consisting of permanent film sets, with neighborhoods of replica buildings in various styles. There is a small but steady market for foreign extras, and there are a few agents who specialize in recruiting foreigners for these roles in made-for-TV movies and commercials.

This weekend I began my acting career by appearing in a TV movie, playing the role of an evil soldier from a nebulous foreign country. I appeared in three scenes, mostly seen carrying a rifle, chasing after one of the protagonists. We also kill someone off camera and steal some treasure. It seems the part was made directly from the stereotype of the greedy, dull-witted foreign devil.

For most of the day, I was just having fun hanging out with the other foreigners, and suffering in the cold. But towards the end as it began to sink in what sort of character I was supposed to be, and afterwards as I tried to imagine how someone watching the movie would see it, I feel like I have acted wrongly. And it's a given that I acted badly. My career can only go up from here, right?

Switching to New Blogger

2007-01-14T07:54:00.000-08:00

So I suppose I am switching to the new Blogger system, which means all my fans that are subscribed to my feed should tell their subscription software to look in the new feed location.

Top 10 Reasons For Not Updating Your Blog

2007-01-06T01:58:00.000-08:00

10. An earthquake has shut down the internet, and it's painfully slow to access the blog authoring page. (News saying the internet is back to normal is an evil lie. It is better than a weak ago, but still very slow.)
9. Most of the things you might like to post about involve showing photos, which, due to said internet freeze, cannot be uploaded.
8. End-of-semester crunch time.
7. You're still looking for a license plate that ends "000".
6. You're still working on compiling your New Year's resolutions.
5. You need to wash your hair.
4. As a white heterosexual male native-English-speaking college graduate of US citizenship and Protestant upbringing, you're feeling self-conscious about drowning out less privileged voices and contributing to cultural hegemony.
3. Now that Time Magazine has made you, as an internet content producer, the 2006 Person of the Year, you feel you can rest on your laurels and seek self-fulfillment in some other arena, kind of like Yasser Arafat did after he was made 1993 Person of the Year as a peacemaker.
2. You are feeling disillusioned about your blog-posting abilities, comparing your 100 posts in three years to your sister's 200 posts in one year.
1. You've decided there's no better way to annoy your sister (short of flying back to visit her and tapping her on the shoulder unceasingly.)

October Podcast

2006-12-15T08:13:00.000-08:00

Inspired by my favorite podcasters Mano Lopez and the Homemade Show, and by the shortage of music here that I like, I decided I would start doing a podcast. I figured I could do one once a month or every other month, and I put together most of this playlist one week in October. After a short delay, I now present to you my first podcast. You can expect January's podcast in mid-March.

October: 故乡何处是?

The Chinese question in the title means "Where is my hometown?" and it's a quote from Li Qingzhao, a poet who moved from Shangdong province to Zhejiang in the 1100s when the north was engulfed in war.

Playlist:
Solo - Theo Torres
Happy Birthday - ZJNU Student Choir
水云间 (Water Cloud Space (?)) - 童孔 (Tong Kong)
呼吸 (Breathing) - 常静 (Chang Jing)
La Vida es un Carnaval - Issac Delgado
Y Soy Llanero - Grupo Cimarrón
Chicharra - Marta Gomez
Damaquiel - Hector Buitrago et al.
Amortiguador - Andrea Echeverri
Acochado Todo - Almir Rouche
Mindjer Dôce Mel - Eneida Marta
The Easy Way - That Mad Ahab
Stay in New England - Mimi LaValley
Leaves that are Green - Simon and Garfunkel

play

High-Fashion Underwear

2006-12-14T03:10:00.000-08:00

You know that cozy feeling of sitting by a campfire with a hot cup of chocolate in your hands, feeling the warmth on your face and the cold mountain air at your back? Well, take away the fire and the hot chocolate, and imagine instead that you're teaching a class.

It's gotten a little colder here recently. And the classrooms, like the student dorms, have no heating. Last weekend in Hangzhou (which I will have to post about later, but I understand now how it could claim to be the prettiest city in China), I bought a new coat, perhaps warmer than anything ever owned before, and I've sometimes been wearing it while teaching.

Tonight I went out and bought some long underwear. The attendant assured me that the ones I got are very fashionable, and a very nice color. They come in a fancy box, with schmancy tags.* The biggest size they had is one size too small (the same situation as for slippers), but they're larger than the set I left in California, which must have been bought for me when I was shorter, and then have shrunk. So hopefully I will feel more comfortable when I go out now, but the local paparazzi had better keep their cameras ready for me sporting my high-fashion underwear.

*This was a test: Is this usage of the schmefix ungrammatical? Did you go "Huh?" when you read this sentence?

Free Hugs

2006-11-25T01:24:00.000-08:00

This video makes me happy.
With the low resolution it looks a lot like Patiunky, and I can totally imagine him doing something like this, even if it is somewhat at odds with his current YouTube persona.

Apparently the Free Hugs Campaign has quickly spread all over the world, though it is having difficulty some places. In China, for example, hugging counts as inappropriate public display of affection, and it's considered a foreign custom, too. Oh well.

Yum

2006-11-22T16:02:00.000-08:00

A bit busy here, no time to write much. Which is where you come in. Your job is to: (1) identify what I am eating in this picture, and (2) provide a caption. A hint: it isn't turkey with cranberry sauce. Thanks.

In other news, the Great Firewall has migrated to include blogspot.com and beta.blogger.com among the civilized. It has accordingly been moved down on my enemies list.

Happy Thanksgiving!

万事随转烛

2006-11-03T07:34:00.000-08:00

Which is to say, "The myriad matters [of the world] are as the wavering of a candle flame."

I feel obligated to inform the world of the annoyingness of the Great Firewall. The firewall doesn't fully block anything, but it makes a lot of things troublesome. It's more like something out of a Monty Python sketch than a serious defense against toxic memes. Instead of building a wall, they have built an obstacle course, and instead of lying between civilization and the barbarians, it winds through the whole world, and changes course every weekend.

For example, to post a comment on MySpace (admittedly deep in barbarian territory), you first attempt to load some MySpace page, and MySpace will prompt you to log in. So you login, and are taken to your "Home" page. If you can remember which links you have to follow to get where you were headed, you can do such things as read new messages, read friends' bulletins, and view your long list of MySpaceFriends. If you try to look at any person's profile, however, (including your own), something is triggered in the firewall, and the connection is dropped. So, you try your favorite proxy service. That one might have MySpace's kind of web magic reserved for paying users, so you use another service. It can load the profile page fine. But then you click the 'post comment' link, and you get MySpace's "You must be logged in to do that!" page (which I have in the past gotten when I tried to log in: apparently at times you have to be logged in to log in.) So you have to log in again, which will take you back to your "Home" page, from which you again have to navigate back through the link maze to post a comment.

Or again, suppose you want read your sister's blog. She, like you, uses Blogspot to host her blog. She writes a pretty funny blog that you read pretty often, so you have her blog bookmarked, and you load that bookmark. ... After several seconds of waiting for your computer to contact the server you remember that this week Blogspot is officially a hive of barbarians. Nice barbarians, maybe, but barbarians none the less. So you might go to your favorite proxy service, or since you are subscribed via Bloglines, you can read her posts there. And what if you want to post a comment? Well, if you are using the gladder Firefox extension, when you click on the post link, you are automatically redirected to a proxified page. Then you can click on the "comment" link, and type in your comment. Then you scroll down and find... the word verification magic doesn't work with the proxification. (That is a real word. There are 452 Google hits as of this writing. 453 once Google finds this one.) Ah! But you know that the Great Firewall has no problem with Blogger.com. Blogspot is a hive of barbarians, but Blogger, from which the barbarians produce the Blogspot drivel, is safely within civilization. So you cut and paste the web location into a new tab, and edit out the proxifying part, load the page again, paste in your comment, and fill out the word verification. 哎呀，这么麻烦！ (which is to say, "Aiya! So irritating!")

The Internet Gods Read my Blog

2006-10-28T05:37:00.000-07:00

A week or two ago I discovered that I can now access the English Wikipedia (though not the Chinese version) without going through a proxy or using the secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia
service. This morning I discovered I can access the Stanford application page. Just now I discovered I cannot read my own blog without going through a proxy. The verdict is clear. The internet gods have read my blog and took some hints from it. Just not all the right ones. I checked Youtube just now. It's fully accessible, and I was sucked into watching the Llama Song. Beware.

故鄉何處是?

2006-10-28T04:52:00.000-07:00

有个学生在她的日志问为什么外国人那么常常那么遥远旅行。
我在乌兹别克看我哥哥的时候，哥哥的朋友表达了差不多一样的意思。现在他也去过别的国家，但是那时侯他也觉得常常遥远旅行很奇怪。我妈妈告诉他，你认识的外国人只是喜欢旅行的外国人。很多的外国人不常去远。
但是还有真的分别。中国也在改变呢，可是家乡概念在这儿还很重要。上个星期学生社会谈论外国文化。那儿有三个外国人：一个索马里的本科学生，一个也门的留学生，和我。对每个外国人问了家乡怎么样，我们差不多不能回答。索马里的人在沙特阿拉伯出生，没看过索马里。也门的人住在英国，不常去也门。我也告诉他们，我没有真的家乡。这样的事对中国人很难懂。人结婚了，常常跟丈夫的父母一起住，如果不跟他们一起住，他们应该在不远的地方。大学生不跟父母一起住，有的学生回家得座五六个小时的车，但是放了寒假,暑假都回家，放了中秋节的假，大部分也回家。大部分没从浙江省出去过。外国人来中国过一年多，不看他们的家，对中国学生的看法真奇怪。
墨西哥人真这样。在墨西哥，大学生回家每天或者每个星期，每天座一个多小时的车或者每个星期座五六个小时的车不奇怪。但是男人常常过半年不看他们家，因为需要去非常远的地方找工作。
国家文化都有自己的习惯，有一点不同，但是心里差不多。虽然我没有家乡，我认识的人都不在叁塔巴巴拉或者哥伦比亚，但是我想我认识的人，我还想我住过的地方。什么国家的大学生，留学生，外教，季节工人都想家。

There was a student who asked in her free-writing journal why foreigners so often travel so far.

When I was in Uzkekistan visiting my older brother, his friend expressed a similar thought. Now that friend has also traveled to other countries, but at that time he also thought frequent distant travels are pretty strange. My mother told him, "The foreigners you know are only those who do like to travel." There are many foreigners who rarely travel far.

But there is also a real difference. China is also changing, but the concept of hometown is still very important here. Last week a student club was discussing foreign cultures. There were three foreigners present: a Somali regularly enrolled student, a Yemeni exchange student, and me. They asked each of us foreigners what our hometown was like, and we were all pretty much unable to answer. The Somali was actually born in Saudi Arabia, and has never seen Somalia. The Yemeni lives in England and only rarely goes to Yemen. I also told them I don't have a hometown. This sort of thing is hard for a Chinese person to understand. When a couple marries, the often go to live together with the husbands parents, and if they don't live with them, they shouldn't live very far away. University students don't live with their parents, and some of them must take a bus for five or six hours to return home, but every summer and winter holiday they all return home, and during the autumn one-week holiday, the majority also return home. The majority have also never left Zhejiang province. For foreigners to come to China for a year or more and not see their families, to the Chinese way of thinking seems quite strange.

Mexicans are really like that too. In Mexico, university students return home every day or every week. Riding a bus for over an hour each way every day or five or six hours every weekend is not unusual. However men often pass half the year without seeing their families, because they must travel extremely far to look for work.

The cultures of different cultures each have their own customs, which are a little different, but their hearts are much alike. Although I don't have a hometown, and none of the people I know live in Santa Barbara or Colombia, I still the miss the places I have lived, in addition to the people I have known. The college students of every country, exchange students, foreign teachers, and migrant workers all get homesick.

Differences

2006-10-22T09:29:00.000-07:00

People keep asking me about the differences between China and the United States. Usually when people ask me about those differences, I say something similar to what I said on my other blog, i.e. essentially that there isn't a very big difference, and the differences are getting smaller. But for everything there is a season, and the time has come to get detailed about the differences I have observed.

People here speak Chinese, and people in the United States speak English. Okay, yes, I know that's kind of obvious, but we have to start somewhere. Of course, that statement is a terrible simplification. Chinese people typically speak two languages: their local dialect, and the standard dialect. For people in Zhejiang province, the difference between their local dialect and the official dialect is something like the difference between French and Spanish, or maybe even the difference between English and German. In addition, university students have typically been taking English classes since they started middle school, some of them since primary school. So even those who have difficulty speaking and writing English can still read English fairly well. So whereas in the USA, most of the multilingual people are immigrants or children of immigrants, multilingualism is fairly widespread in China, even though there are quite few foreign-born residents.
In the USA, toilet paper is in bathrooms; in China, toilet paper is on tables in restaurants. In the USA, fairly large paper napkins are widely available in eateries, cafeterias and fast food restaurants. In China, what is available to wipe your hands or face in such places is either a roll of toilet paper, or what westerners could easily mistake for kleenex tissues. In at least one dining hall here, you are given one such tissue/napkin when you buy your food. And yes, almost all public bathrooms are BYOTP (Bring your own toilet paper), and most are squatty potties.
In China, it's not very polite to touch food with your hands, and if you do touch food with your hands, you must not lick your hands. You must use your limited supply of tissues. However, it's quite all right to spit bones out onto the table, and to slurp soup from your spoon.
Chinese students typically choose their major only once, before they start college. The students of one major take all the same classes, live together with four or six per room, and typically eat and socialize together. American students typically change majors multiple times, and not uncommonly transfer from one college to another. They have many general education classes with students from other majors, and might or might not choose to live with and socialize with people they know from class. If three students have to share a bedroom, they think they have it bad.
They don't have Mexican or Italian food here. The closest Middle Eastern food is one hour away. On the other hand, you can get a dozen dumplings (any way you like) or a bowl of fresh noodle soup for 3 RMB (about 40¢), and you can eat like a king for 20 RMB ($2.50).

There may also be other differences, but those are the obvious ones.

Apparently, the post I wrote last week was my 100th post. Yay! I think that deserves some kind of celebratory/nostalgic review of these past two years (has it really only been two years?), but I see blogger has got some new features coming that will make such nostalgia easier. Perhaps once I check them out, we can have a proper party.

Critics among you may also note that the weekend is over without my posting the promised Chinese post. Well, I didn't say when each week I would write such a post, so there. I promise you I've already started. I've written five sentences. Be patient.

新的习惯

2006-10-15T02:14:00.000-07:00

我是英语老师，我的英文课之两门是写作课。我告诉了那个学生，常常用英文为交际写是很有用的习惯。还有，我让他们日志的作业，每个星期用英文写一页。

我的中文名字是“力行”，有“身体力行”的意思，是说，内容说的话努力实践。因为我应该练习写汉语，所以我每个星期用中文写一件文章。因为我的中文很差，我不能写那么长的文章，但是跟小的开始，越来越长，我希望能学会写不错的中文文章。

我家人都不会看中文看得懂，我要让他们看得懂我的话。所以我翻译到英文。因为我也想练习西班牙语，我也到西班牙语翻译我的文章。这样可以做平行的语言资料库。

Soy profesor de inglés, y dos de mis clases de inglés son clases de escritura. Les dije a aquellos estudiantes que escribir en inglés a menudo por communicación es hábito muy bueno. Además, les di tarea de escribir un diario en inglés, una página cada semana.

Mi nombre chino es "Lixing", que refiere a un modismo "cuerpo trabajar duro". Es decir, haga esfuerzos si mismo según lo que predique. Porque yo tambien debo practicar escribir chino, voy a escribir un ensayo en chino cada semana. Porque mi chino falta mucho, no puedo escribir un ensayo tan largo, pero con empezar pequeño y lentamente seguir mas largo, espero que pueda aprender a escribir ensayos buenos.

Mi familia no pueden entender chino, y quiero dejarles entender mis palabras. Entonces, voy a traducir a inglés. Porque también quiero practicar español, voy a traducir mis ensayos a español tambien. En esa manera puedo hacer un pequeño corpus lingüístico paralelo.

I'm an English teacher, and two of my English classes are writing classes. I told those students that frequent writing in English for communication is a very good habit. In addition, I gave them homework of writing a journal in English, one page a week.

My Chinese name is "Lixing", which refers to the maxim "body work hard", meaning diligently practice what you preach. Because I also need to practice Chinese, I'm going to write a post in Chinese each week. Because my Chinese is pretty limited, I can't write a very long essay, but by starting small and slowly writing longer, I hope I can learn to write decent Chinese posts.

My family can't read chinese, and I want to let them understand my words, so I will translate into English. Because I also want to practice Spanish, I will also translate into Spanish. This way I can make a small parallel linguistic corpus.

View from Jian Feng Shan

2006-09-25T16:19:00.000-07:00

Last weekend I again hiked up Jian Feng Shan, this time with several others from the university. It was a bit hazy/cloudy, but the view was still quite good. Afterwards we had a BBQ lunch. Yum!

9-11 retrospectives

2006-09-15T18:20:00.000-07:00

Global Voices has an excellent roundup of worldwide commentary on the 9-11 anniversary. [via el oso]

The people here, like many places around the world, are certainly interested in the U.S., generally more than other English-speaking nations. Many people respect or admire aspects of American culture, and the rest have a strong enough sense of hospitality to still be friendly, but we're not exactly liked. It's important to understand why.

尖峰山

2006-09-14T08:05:00.000-07:00

尖峰山
Originally uploaded by serapio.

I have posted a few more photos of the area, starring the local geographical landmark, Jian-Feng Shan. This mountain is about two miles north of the campus, and on most days it is clearly visible even through the fog. Its means Pointy-Peak Mountain, and that pretty accurately describes it. It rises about 1000ft in less than a mile of trail, and the top is just big enough for a couple small picnicking parties. I hiked up the trail the day after I took this picture, and it is necessary to take many rests on the way up. It has been raining or sprinkling 24hrs a day for much of the last week, so everything is fairly wet, but temperatures are pleasant.

The Great Firewall

2006-09-01T19:36:00.000-07:00

As you may have noticed, I have been able to access *.blogspot.com and blogger.com from beyond the firewall. I can also visit flickr, youtube, and bloglines, all of which I thought might be blocked. However, there are a few things I've noticed are being blocked, and I'm having trouble figuring out their rationale.

Wikipedia: This one is particularly annoying, because everyone links to it everywhere, and so at least once a day, I'll try to load a wikipedia page. My first hypothesis was that the powers that be want to protect people from polluting their brains with all the mundane trivia available there. However, everything available at wikipedia is also mirrored at many other sites across the web. I think the difference is that though people can go look up snakes on planes, Pirates versus Ninjas, Tencent QQ, Salars, or Jingjing and Chacha, they are protected from wasting their time arguing on the Wikipedia talk pages.
Many news sites: Some of the foreign news sites are blocked, but not all. Earlier, I'm pretty sure that CNN and BBC were blocked, but right now CNN seems fully accessible, and it looks like www.bbc.co.uk is accessible, but news.bbc.co.uk is not. VOA News is also blocked. (I wouldn't have noticed except their overly articulated broadcasts are nice for English learners.) Also, the dynamic part of the wall seems particularly sensitive to words that appear in the news. You can load news.google.com once, but reloading it is likely to be interrupted. (This dynamic part might have been what was affecting my efforts to load CNN and BBC pages earlier.)
HRIC: This one makes a lot of sense. This is just one of many blogs I occasionally read, but it's often critical of the government here. The curious thing from my perspective is that several other blogs, especially Global Voices >> China and the blogs that feed into it, are not blocked. GV has a much wider repertiore than HRIC, but also contains similar content.
*.wordpress.com: Again this is a question of why single this one out. Blogspot is accessible, Typepad is accessible, Livejournal and Xanga are accessible. But Wordpress is not. Dunno.
Google cache: Google is only occasionally unaccessible, likely when too many bad words appear in the results summaries. But Google cache, both from Google.com and from Google.cn, is always unavailable.
Stanford graduate application: And finally, the graduate application for Stanford University is blocked. Frankly I'm stumped on this one. I thought at first the host itself was down, but I can reach it fine if I go through SDSU computers. The application won't be available until the 15th, but it could be a slow process if I have to go through the SDSU computers or a proxy. Perhaps this is just the internet overlords' way of telling me I shouldn't go there.

I'm also surprised they aren't blocking youtube. There's some serious spiritual polution there, like Ask a Ninja, Angry German Kid vs. Numa Numa Boy, Bush covering U2, Hannes Coetzee playing spoon slide guitar, and the Snakes on a Plane music video.

(Okay, the Hannes Coetzee clip doesn't count.)

Zhejiang Normal University

2006-08-29T19:29:00.000-07:00

I have uploaded some pictures of the campus. The lake in this picture is right outside the front gate of my apartment.

The campus is preparing for a giant 50th anniversary celebration by adding lots of buildings and gardens on the east end of campus, and generally prettying up the older west side of campus.

Welcome to my humble abode

2006-08-24T17:35:00.000-07:00

Here is a tour of my new digs. Outside in the brightness is a nice little balcony.

I think I'm going to find out this morning how soon I start teaching and, more importantly, where to find food.

And I do indeed have good internet. So skype me! (user: lucien.carroll)

Carry-on baggage

2006-08-22T15:43:00.000-07:00

As you have probably heard, emergency new restrictions on air-travel carry-ons forbid carrying water bottles, toothpaste, gel deodorant, pudding, cattle prods, dynamite, or snakes. Now that I have moved my toothpaste, pudding and snakes into one of my checked bags, my normally small carry-on is New Carry-on Lite™!

almost internet famous

2006-08-09T15:51:00.000-07:00

Today, instead of writing my thesis or even writing a wikipedia article as thesis-writing warmup, I made shirts. Aren't they swell?

I've promised myself I'll write that wikipedia article after dinner.

Sanborn Clan Reunion Photos

2006-08-04T18:48:00.000-07:00

Conversation
Originally uploaded by serapio.

I've uploaded my some of my photos of the Tahoe reunion.

And here's some movies too.

Breath deep, open wide, and say 'ah'

2006-07-22T18:26:00.000-07:00

I would have thought that people who were asked to read stories about Jurgen mit Füchse und Hühner and Günter Müller der Hürdenlaüfer, rather than feeling sad, would have busted up laughing. I think I also would have a hard time keeping a straight face with my eyebrows taped together.

Donkey Rider

2006-07-21T02:28:00.000-07:00

Donkey Rider
Originally uploaded by serapio.

The donkey rider is a frequent element in Song dynasty monumental landscape painting, such as the works of Guo Xi, "Li Cheng, and Fan Kuan. According to Peter Sturman, the professor of my undergrad art history class, the donkey rider is an icon of a failed literati, modeled after Meng Haoran and Du Fu. Li Cheng is believed to have seen himself as the donkey rider. The donkey rider is a talented poet, artist and philosopher who is nevertheless unsuccessful in the civil service examinations or falls out of favor with the imperial court, and takes up a reclusive itinerant life in the countryside.

So that's the problem

2006-07-04T18:27:00.000-07:00

New research suggests there might be a special neural pathway for rewarding recognition and comprehension. Related research, searching for a neural pathway that rewards writing long essays that no one will want to read, has so far found nothing.

For some more cognitive science reading, relevant to the national holiday, check out this discussion of psych research on patriotism, and dope up those mu-opioid receptors.

Blucker by Sweetwater River

2006-06-24T23:00:00.000-07:00

Blucker by Sweetwater River
Originally uploaded by serapio.

I have been informed that I should point out to my faithful readers that I have posted pictures of the hike Biker and I took when she visited me.

For further entertainment, provide the syntactic tree for the sentence above. Then insert "on flickr" in the most natural place, and redraw the tree. If you figure that out please explain it to me.

Or perhaps we need a poll. Which would you feel more comfortable saying?
a) I have posted pictures on flickr of the hike we took
b) I have posted on flickr pictures of the hike we took
c) I have posted pictures of the hike we took on flickr

Is this covered in those formal-syntax type classes?

Come take a seat against the arms trade

2006-06-20T22:05:00.000-07:00

Hey peeps! Come hang out with me in the Million Faces Stadium, full of people sitting for arms control. I'm in section W7, seat W7R0C50.

Moseying

2006-06-09T09:35:00.000-07:00

Jinhua
Originally uploaded by serapio.

It's finally happening. Starting in September, I will be teaching English at Zhejiang Normal University in Jinhua. It's apparently a university of just 20000 students, and the city might have anywhere between 300,000 people and 4 million, depending on who you read. (I think it might be confusion about Jinhua being a city within an administrative division, within a prefecture.) Someone fought somebody else here in the 4th century, and some poet during the Song dynasty claimed it was pretty, but otherwise it seems like a fairly unremarkable place. But I'm hopeful. In this view from Google Earth (you can check it out for yourself), we see Jinhua with mountains in the background, and the measuring tool tells me it's just 9 miles from the river to the mountain top, with an elevation gain of 3500 feet. I can't find the university, but it is said to be in "the northern suburbs", which must put it within just a couple miles of the base of the mountain. The city is also just a couple hours drive from Hangzhou, which was once likely the largest city in the world, and is often described as the most beautiful.

Emergency Public Service Announcement

2006-05-23T23:34:00.000-07:00

It has belatedly come to my attention that Thursday is Intergalactic Towel Day! But Don't Panic!! Just remember to bring your towel.

[UPDATE: Considering that there will also be a massive tidal wave tomorrow, it is especially CRITICAL that you carry your towel with you at all times.]

Hike up San Miguel Mountain

2006-05-23T22:55:00.000-07:00

Me and Jerry went for a hike up San Miguel Mountain Monday. The flora and fauna were out in full force.

Site of the week

2006-05-18T09:40:00.000-07:00

In the category "What are they teaching kids these days!"
Duda Hart Stork Baby Toys & Clothes

My compy returned home today

2006-04-17T21:15:00.000-07:00

I know you have all been waiting in suspense for news of my computer.

(Except of course for those of you who hadn't heard. A week ago saturday, shortly after posting those fascinating slides about discourse segmentation, my screen went fuzzy and froze. Upon rebooting, the screen went black. In anguish I cried, "Is there a doctor in the house?" To no avail. Alas! Monday, after the time of mourning had passed, I took it down to the local Apple Store, and sent it away for repairs. At least they were free. I have been alternating between an old 300MHz celeron tower I had almost sent to the graveyard, and the computers down at school.)

So, today my compy was returned to me. They reformated my hard drive, as they said they might. I had backed up a lot of things a month or so ago, and I had the forsight to backup my main documents before taking it in, but I have still lost many applications, a few photos, a movie clip or two, my mail history, my music, and sundry other bits of my life. The moral of the story is: do frequent backups, even if you're not in the habit of killing computers.

Evaluating Hierarchical Segmentation

2006-04-08T18:44:00.000-07:00

For all of you intrigued by the methodological issues surrounding evaluating hierarchical discourse segmentation, I have posted my slides on this subject.

Quote of the Day

2006-04-07T23:17:00.000-07:00

This sentence appears without warning as if it there were no sarcasm involved:
"By eschewing obfuscatory verbosity of locutional rendering, the circumscriptional appelations are excised."

Mann, W. and Thompson, S. (1988). Rhetorical structure theory: Towards a functional theory of text organization. Text, 8(3):243–281.

This paper, unfortunately, seems to only dip into humor with this one line, and then continues on in language that one could mistake for obfuscatory verbosity.

Is humor allowed in academic papers?

2006-04-03T20:28:00.000-07:00

Eric Atwell and Andrew Roberts, 2006. Combinatory Hybrid Elementary Analysis of Text (CHEAT)

"Our guiding principle: get others to do the work"

Lomalinda

2006-04-02T14:08:00.000-07:00

Bienvenidos
Originally uploaded by wildmansmee.

Kurt Metzger posted on mklife a bunch of photos he and Jon Captain took on their recent trip to LML. I have pulled a few into my flickr photos.

Up-to-the-minute Encyclopedic Knowledge

2006-04-01T19:25:00.000-08:00

Thank you, Wikipedians

planted things

2006-03-23T22:25:00.000-08:00

humanity has subdued the earth --
plowed it under, paved it over,
permitted things to grow
only where they are planted.
trees, like fences and lane markers,
grow in straight lines.
cholla and yucca and poppies
grow only in forgotten plots
hidden in canyons, fenced off.
i ask you, who asked the palms
to grow where they do?
the eucalyptus trees and junipers?
no one.
each plant --
the eucalyptus and the poppie --
grows where it finds itself,
takes root in the dirt it's given.
there is a certain wisdom there.
but i think i'm glad
i'm not a plant.

Tempos Brasileiros

2006-03-23T00:13:00.000-08:00

I've been playing with iMovie.

Woohoo!

2006-03-13T21:54:00.000-08:00

I just submitted my first conference paper!

Kitten War

2006-03-08T23:04:00.000-08:00

I know many of you have seen this already, but I feel obligated to notify those that haven't. See kitten face off against kitten! You choose which one is cutest!

I have a new blog

2006-03-05T21:52:00.000-08:00

It seems the thing to do these days is to have multiply blogs. Pinkerton has at least two, kirinqueen and hober have a few a piece, and some people out there are mass producing them. So I have decided to get with the program, and I have a new blog. There, I will tell the world everything it needs to know about itself. Here, I will continue to wander among gardens and fields.

Physical humor

2006-03-05T16:42:00.000-08:00

Pocket Taser

Traveling

2006-02-22T23:25:00.000-08:00

create your own visited country map

(15 countries)
Note that in contrast to the travels of Mr. Carroll, Mataikhan, Caedmonstia, Slowlane, and Jeorge, I have barely traveled. My traveling within the US is similarly sad:

create your own personalized map of the USA

especially when you consider that in three of those states I never left the airport, and in Arizona I've never been beyond Yuma.

----
Addendum: Here you can make a map of the places you've been and the places you want to go to. What's not as fun is it's a flash dealy that you can't post on your blog.

Brazilian Graffiti

2006-02-19T17:56:00.000-08:00

PointingFingers
Originally uploaded by wildmansmee.

Brazil has lots of graffiti. Every elementary school, and many parks, government buildings, and businesses are decorated with graffiti, some of it commissioned, some of it not. This photo set has a selection of some I saw.

The benefits of technological progress

2006-02-13T23:18:00.000-08:00

Cognitive Science Sandwiches

2006-02-02T09:03:00.000-08:00

From the menu from the Cognitive Science Café:

The Aristotelian Concept
Cucumber, tomato, balsamic vinegar, feta, and pita are individually necessary and jointly sufficient for this Greek classic.

The California Connectionist
Munster, sprouts, and mustard on whole wheat with a hidden layer of avocado.

The Perceptron
Like the California Connectionist, but without the hidden layer.

The Quine Panini
This grilled fresh mozzarella, tomato, and basil panini eliminates the distinction between sandwich and pizza.

The Prototype
Peanut butter and jelly on white bread.

The Turing Tester
Half Brie with apricot jam on a French roll, half vegan alternative — we bet you won’t know which is which!

Chomsky’s Universal Sandwich
Sandwich --> Bread Filling Bread
Filling --> Filling Filling
Filling --> Vegetable
Filling --> Cheese
Filling --> Fruit
Filling --> Spread
Vegetable --> {sprouts, cucumber, eggplant, pepper, onion, carrots, lettuce}
Cheese --> {cheddar, swiss, munster, brie}
Fruit --> {tomato, avocado}
Spread --> {mustard, mayonnaise, hummus}
Bread --> {white, wheat, sourdough, focaccia, French roll}
Please provide a complete parse tree when ordering. Minimalists appreciated.

What kind of mall are you?

2006-01-25T22:22:00.000-08:00

GoianiaMall
Originally uploaded by wildmansmee.

One of my New Year's resolutions (resolved as described here by Blukford) was to write a quiz on quizilla. I have now done so.

Regreso

2006-01-17T18:39:00.001-08:00

Astute observers of things like calendars and schedules may already be aware that it is now the 17th of January. 2006. That is two weeks since the last time I said anything of substance, and over three weeks since the events of said post. During the past three weeks I have continued to wander among gardens and fields, as well as other assorted land zones, and the events of these wanderings shall be related as time and whim permit. Tomorrow I leave, returning to San Diego in a couple days, if airlines fly on schedule.

Playground

2006-01-07T12:16:00.000-08:00

NaGangorra
Originally uploaded by wildmansmee.

Here are pictures of this adventure.

Porto de Galinhas

2005-12-31T14:47:00.000-08:00

Galinhas Reef
Originally uploaded by wildmansmee.

Immediately upon arriving at my sister's house last week, I repacked for a holiday at the beach. That means I took a quick shower (in cold water), changed into my last remaining mostly clean clothes, and threw a portion of my dirty laundry into my day pack. The six of us and our luggage (some members of my family brought more than a day pack) hopped into a white VW bus (called a combi here) and drove off down the coast to Porto de Galinhas, a little tourist town on the beach.

My sister tells me the galinhas in the Porto de Galinhas used to refer to slaves, that Porto de Galinhas used to be a major port of entry for this kind of galinha. (I'm not sure why slaves would be called galinhas (chickens) though, since those were the days when chickens roamed free.) However, the local tourist industry apparently decided that this etymology wouldn't be good for PR, and so now the galinha references you find there are giant wooden carvings of chickens, all over the town, and bug-eyed chickens on t-shirts, yelling "NO stress!" and other endearing slogans.

We rented a little chalé in a pousada for three nights, a few blocks from the beach, with two bedrooms, two bathrooms, two floors, and two front doors. There was also a single winding staircase, a kitchen and a couch. Mum and Dad slept in one room, and the four of us kids slept in the other. With the four of us, the mosquitos, and the flying ants, it was very cozy. Pinker got kicked many times during the night when one of us others turned over.

There were several times in the chalé that I opened some musty cupboard or walked into a room and had a feeling of deja vu, taking me back to the Zander house, the last house we lived in in Colombia. Of course, the chalé was much smaller, and was in some ways nicer, with tile floors rather than cement, and smells of ocean rather than views of the lake. But somehow it was similar too.

The main attraction at Porto de Galinhas is the reefs. At a particularly low tide, the reefs just off shore stick up out of the water, creating tide pools with tropical fish trapped inside. We were there near the half moon, so the tide wasn't so low, but it was still low enough for us to walk around on and watch the fish.

We also spent a lot of time by the pool, on the couch, eating, or wandering the tourist shops.

On the way out, we made a wrong turn and ended up driving along a dirt road through this estuary. It was almost like a jeep ride to Port.

Goiania

2005-12-29T19:11:00.000-08:00

I only stayed in Goiania for about 48 hours. Matthew and Elsiene had come a week before, and then that Sunday the rest of us arrived, Biker before Pinker and me, and Liner and the parents in the evening.

I don't have a proper picture of the house or the neighborhood. The grandfather lives in a little house behind the one Elsiene's parents live in, and a third little house is behind that, all on a smallish lot. Beside the house is a little garden with assorted fruit, including bananas, papayas and a giant passion fruit. The neighborhood felt a lot like Puerto Lleras or Villavo, cities near where we lived in Colombia.

Her parents slept in the grandfather's house, and the eight of us slept in the front house. Pinkerton and I got one of the two entryways. The activities consisted principally of eating and conversations where we spoke slowly in English and Spanish, and Elsiene's parents and multitudinous cousins spoke slowly in Portuguese with bits of English. Aileen, Elsiene, and a couple of the cousins are all pretty fluent in both Portuguese and English, and Matthew is doing pretty well too, but the rest of us spent a lot of time rewording things and asking people to repeat something.

There was a wedding. Photography figured prominently. There were two official still cameras and one video camera, and it seemed like an average of one camera or camera phone per audience member. I believe Biker had four cameras. Right after the bride and groom are presented as man and wife, there was about a half hour interlude of pictures--with the parents of the bride, with the parents of the groom, with the official witnesses on one side and then the other, with the grandmother of the bride, with all the flower girls, ring bearers and such, etc. Afterwards, in the greet-the-new-couple line, there were more pictures.

Apparently the wedding was also fairly unusual in that it was more laid back than typical Christian weddings here, but not so laid back as to have dancing. I still find it a little hard to accept that my brother has had two weddings without any dancing. Biker, since as the recipient of the other bouquet, you're the next one getting married, I want you to promise to have some good Salsa and Forro at your wedding, okay?

That was over a week ago. I have gotten rather behind in relating my adventures. But I'm on freakin' vacation. That means I'm allowed to be a lagger, and have fun doing it. Which I am.

Traveling

2005-12-27T02:53:00.000-08:00

Despite the deafening silence on this blog in recent weeks, I have not fallen off the earth, as some may have supposed. In fact, as many of you know, I survived the end of the semester with only an incomplete to add to my collection. The number of students who hate me personally is probably countable on a single hand, and the number who hate linguistics is quite possibly less than the number who like it.

So I'm in Recife now, at my sister's house, com a meu papai, a mea mamai, as meas hirmãas e a meu hirmão menhor. My older brother and Elsiene will be joining us again in a couple days so we can have Christmas. We spent the beginning of last week at the house of Elsiene's parents, hanging out with them and her cousins. There was also a wedding. Then the end of last week we spent at Porto de Galinhas, a little beach resort just south of here. More about each of these will be forthcoming, but this post is about traveling.

I arrived at the house of Elsiene's parents about 40 hours after leaving SD. Splitting lanes from SD to Oceanside and from Irvine to Buena Park, I made the drive in 3 hrs in Friday evening traffic when without traffic it takes 2. After repacking and getting dinner, Pinker's friend drove us to LAX, arriving about 9:00. There were lines all over. Pinker asked the man tending one of the lines what his line was for.

"It's the same as inside."

Apparently all the lines were the same. So we got in the one outside. When we got to the front of the line, we gave the guy our passports. He checks them in his machine and asks, "Thomas?"

"Huh?"

"Are you Thomas?"

We both respond that no, we are not Thomas.

Holding up Timothy's passport, "You will have to go inside. This passport requires special handling." He pointed us to line number 19.

After getting to the front of the line we found a machine for automatic check-in. After poking around and asking around, we found that by scanning my credit card it would read my name and find my ticket info. After doing so, I was told that since my itinerary included international travel, I would have to see an agent. The agent that came by told us that for international checkin, we should have gotten in the blue line, the one marked "Domestic Checkin". So we got in that line. Standing in that line, I got out the info I had on my itinerary, and discovered that the flight was due to depart at 10:00 rather than 11:20 as it said on the printed ticket. What time was it now? 10:08. Oh. A man came by and told us to go over to a fourth line and we could get it straightened out.

By this time Pinker and I were both quite frustrated. Thus, Pinkerton was mad and I was discouraged. The next 3.5 hours passed in somewhat of a blur, but it involved a fair amount of standing in line, standing at the counter, Timothy demanding that Delta do something to straighten this out, and me sitting on the floor against a post. I think it also involved being told to go back to the long Domestic Checkin line, but we didn't. In the end, they were able to get my ticket fixed through to Sao Paulo, but Pinker would have to get his fixed in the morning since he had an e-ticket and the international flight was a different airline. I was convinced that the Delta people had been quite helpful, but Pinker thought they were still being less than forthright with their promises to help. We were told to come back in the morning and go to the line marked "Domestic Checkin". We spent the night in the Bradley Terminal, talking philosophy, sleeping uncomfortably, and splitting a Haagendasz ice cream and coffee for breakfast.

We returned to the Domestic Checkin at the Delta terminal, and the guy guarding the entrance to that line informed us that we should go down to the international checkin down the hall. Dubiously, we proceeded through that line, and he proved correct. Checking our bags we were redirected yet again, but we eventually made it onto an airplane, almost 12 hours after getting to the airport.

The flight to NYC, the NYC airport and the flight to Sao Paulo were fairly pleasant and uneventful. I read a lot. Pinker slept a lot. I must have slept a fair amount too.

The flight to Sao Paulo was an hour late, which meant we just missed the flight previously reserved for us. There proceeded another series of lines, a taxi ride across town for $45 to the other airport (which we paid for half in Euros, half in USD, since that's what we had), a rush through checkin, a run to the gate, and then another brief flight to Goiania. When we didn't show up on the earlier flight, Matthew guessed we were on this later flight, and met us at the little airport shortly after we arrived. This was Sunday afternoon, approximately 40 hours after I left San Diego.

Leaving Goiania was quite an ordeal as well. Everyone but Aileen and I left on a morning flight with one airline, while Aileen and I left in the evening with Varig. We were originally supposed to leave before them, but Varig canceled that flight. Five minutes after Elsiene's parents left Aileen and me at the airport, we found out that the flight was delayed. We camped out in the airport until it left later that night, putting us in Sao Paulo about midnight. Varig put us up in a nice hotel, since the connecting flight wasn't leaving until the morning. We packed into the hotel shuttle, ate dinner, slept several hours, ate breakfast, packed into the shuttle again, checked our luggage back in, and waited around while they delayed our flight again. By the time I arrived in Recife, I had spent more time in transit than I had hanging out in Goiania. But in transit, I got lots of time to read and to hangout with my brother and sister. Traveling is about the journey, not the destination, right?

Rustle the leaf

2005-12-05T11:00:00.000-08:00

Potty training

Packing

2005-12-01T22:14:00.000-08:00

Is it gross to wear the same pair of pants this weekend that I wore all last weekend (without washing them in between)? I'm not sure which of my dirty pants is the cleanest.

Spring break?

2005-11-05T19:16:00.000-08:00

How about a Spring break. Is it time yet?

That word again

2005-11-02T01:06:00.000-08:00

I'm sure there's a good word for it. It kind of feels like you're saying weltanshauung or bremsstrahlung, but not meaning either of those things. Something like foreboding, but scarier.

Teaching college kids is like giving class presentations three times a week. With grading. And when the class is boring, or the explanation unclear, or the assignments too difficult, they're frustrated or angry at you their instructor. And that's not very fun for anyone. And linguistics is supposed to be fun. At times like these I want to return my contract and 85 bucks a week, and return to my garden on the slope of South Mountain. The students deserve better than this, and I can't deliver.

What's the word for

2005-10-27T16:05:00.000-07:00

that vague premonition of impending utter calamity?

Today I cleaned my iVook

2005-10-15T23:31:00.000-07:00

My keyvoard was getting pretty gross, with hairs, dandruff, and dirt fallen in vetween the translucent white keys. So in the middle of cleaning my room (yeah, woah!) I took a few moments to take off the keys and clean it all out. I thought it looked pretty cool with eberything taken apart, so I took a picture. To sabe your stomachs I am only posting the photo of after I had cleaned the gunk out.

Putting it vack together was pretty fun too--much like doing a puzzle. You start with edge pieces, then work your way in. There were a couple parts I had to think pretty hard avout though. Now it's all vack together, vut I'be discobered I'm not as much of a touch typist as I had thought.

A linguistic puzzle

2005-09-15T12:31:00.000-07:00

I gave my students the assignment of find Google search strings with one asterisk (like '"the * ran"') that would catch results where all the words in the wild card slot were of the same part of speech. So for example, many students used something like '"the * ran"' for catching nouns. (There is a wrinkle that recently Google changed how they interpret the asterisk, so that now it can match more than one word. Please ignore those results.)

Well, one student came up with the pattern '"he talked *"' for catching adverbs. Now, of course that slot could be filled with an adverb, but always? or even most often? I had expected 'about' or 'with' to show up most, but if you look at the results, in nearly all the results, you do indeed get an adverb in the wildcard slot, and 'about' comes right after. What gives? Why do people so consistently slip an adverb between 'talked' and 'about'?

I'm baffled.