Function Words

My glory days in art occurred when I was in second grade. I was one of the first place winners (there were 3) in a contest to design a safety poster about looking both ways before crossing the street.
Since then the decline in my artistic activity has been precipitous.
I decided to change that so I enrolled in a 2-night community college art class where we get to find out about basic materials and try to discover our inner artist.
I loved it.
The first class was Monday. She went over basic fine art drawing equipment (as opposed to graphic art).
This includes types of charcoal, pencils, pastels, oil crayons and conte crayons. She also explained the types of drawing papers and erasers and she gave us specific advice about how to store and carry our supplies.
Then we got to do our first drawing. She brought lots of paper, and drawing materials. She had us create a still life using stuff we had with us. I used a water bottle, sunglasses, box of altoids, a hairbrush and my cell phone.
It was so much fun! My drawing is pretty terrible but I had so much fun doing it.
I can't wait for the next class when we learn about acrylic paint and oil paint on canvas. We get to paint a self-portrait in oil on canvas. What a kick!

Judy Dench is amazing in Notes on a Scandal.
She plays an old maid teacher who is obsessed with a younger female teacher.

One interesting thing about this movie and Venus is that in both of them the main character is an old actor, Peter O'Toole/Judy Dench, performing masterfully. It is unusual to have major roles for old people. I think it may be targeting the aging baby boom audience.
What both Dench and O'Toole can do with just a look, pursed lips, a walk is really remarkable.

The way I saw Notes on a Scandal there was not a missed note. You could see the train wreck coming almost from the first scene. The Barbara character in this movie had similarities to the Maurice character in Venus. I see the main difference as being that Maurice was old but accepted his decline. He was determined to get what he could out of the time he had left. He wasn't crazy. For the most part his expectations were realistic.
Barbara was crazy. She was very lonely and she had serial obsessions. The moment when that becomes completely clear is when her cat is going to be euthanized and she demands that Sheba be with her even though Sheba is on her way to her Down syndrome son's perform in his first play. She could not understand how a mother's love of her child could take priority over a cat. She was very scary. An amazing performance!

We saw the movie Venus last night.
This is one of the cases where I really appreciate skillful acting. Peter O'Toole was amazing as a doddering old rapidly declining actor who had spent his life chasing women. He plays the character Maurice (pronounced Morris)
He is marvellous as an appreciator of women even as he is completely aware that no woman is interested in him anymore.
He is determined to enjoy them to the very end of his life. This puts him in sharp contrast with his friend Ian who is also an actor and equally declining. The difference is that Ian is determined not to enjoy the end of his life.
He views his young niece, Venus, as a dangerous nuisance rather than as a gift to be courted.
One thing that I loved about this movie was that it didn't sentimentalize old age. The actors were so real. We could love them exactly because they were so real.

...for breakfast.
It looks like time to go to the grocery store.
We need fruit!

Question:
Why are -gged words like 'jagged' 'ragged' 2 syllables but 'wagged' 'sagged ' 1 syllable?
Answer:
If they are adjectives, they are 2 syllables; verbs are 1.
-ed is derivational for the adjectives, -ed is inflectional for verbs.

While looking for information about Jeannette Rankin I found other stuff that was also interesting.
First, Jeannette Rankin is a feminist pacifist who was the first woman to be elected to the House of Representatives in 1916(?) (Not completely sure of the date) from Montana (also surprising-for some reason I would have expected some eastern state). I do know she was the first woman. She was also one of a few who voted against the US entering WWI.
This position was not viewed kindly and so she was not re-elected.
But then a few decades later she once again ran and won in 1939(?) (not sure of this date either). But this time she was the ONLY representative to vote against the US going to war against the Japanese in 1941. She stayed completely true to her pacifist position. A very courageous woman.
I learned that a play has been written about her in 2004. "A Single Woman"
The play has been performed in numerous places in the West including Blue Lake California.
Blue Lake is a tiny town near Arcata.
Arcata is a small town in Humboldt county.
The nearby county seat of Humboldt county is Eureka.
Eureka is almost twice as big as Arcata (26,000 vs 14,000).
Neither of them are very big.
An interesting fact about Arcata is that it is a university town with the northernmost Cal State university.
The student body of CalState Humboldt is 7500 so 1/2 the population of Arcata is made up of university students.
This means that the town of Arcata is politically rather liberal in complete opposition to the very conservative Eureka.

Oh what crazy thoughts we think when first we follow every link!

Sidney Sheldon died recently. I certainly recognized his name as a successful writer of television scripts like I Dream of Jeannie and The Patty Duke show and also of bodice-ripper novels. Upon reading his obituary I learned that he was a very interesting guy. He used research on his books as an excuse to globetrot.
He would spend months in the cities where he set his glamourous stories. It sounds like he had a very interesting life.

Now to the point of this post. I wanted to get a sense of who he was so I found a used copy of his first best-seller, The Other Side of Midnight. I am reading it now and I agree with the cover blurbs--it is definitely a page-turner.
It was first published in 1973 when he was 55. It is a very funny sort of fiction to read not so much because it was pre-feminist but because of his writer's perspective.
On the one hand it is very exciting. The plot devices are clearly thought out and well-executed so the story tracks beautifully. I guess I would expect that from a screenwriter. The strange thing is that the main characters are women and all of these women seem like men, no matter how beautiful, feminine and sexy they are. My impression is that even though Sheldon likes women a great deal, he is unable to convincingly portray the mind of a woman. Everything in the story seems like it is a man imagining being a woman. He is not attacking them. They are presented in a very favorable light, for the most part but the emotions don't ring true. Everything is about sex. Even this wouldn't be odd except that somehow it is from a man's point of view. Sheldon seems to have been very accurate in his portrayal of the places and history he describes. He must have done a great job researching them. But he failed to research the women who are at the center of everything. There is a peculiar emotional detachment that I can't ignore. The women's bodies are objects to the women themselves. As I have been reading I find myself wondering if I am the one who is out of sync. I keep having to remind myself that this is a guy voicing his thoughts through these female characters.

It seems very possible that my intense reaction to frustrations with inanimate objects in my life may be displaced anger that I feel but don't express.

TurboTax sucks!
I wasted most of the day yesterday attempting to download the updates. They promised that with my 56k modem it might take up to an hour. It took over 5 and then when my computer attempted to expand the files it froze completely and I had to reboot, losing the whole thing.
They also promised that if the modem closed the connection due to "inactivity" I should be able to dial up again and TurboTax would resume downloading where it left off. THERE IS NO "RESUME" BUTTON. The only thing that I can do after redialing is "CANCEL" which means starting over.

You would think that a product that has been on the market for at least 10 years now would get better with time.

Somehow it appears that they are making it my fault that they have produced a product which is impossible to use.
What happened to "the customer is always right"?

I have just spent an hour responding to a request from one of my students.
She is a woman who was enrolled in my course last semester. She managed to attend only 10/32 hours of class.
When she did show up it would often be in the last 5 minutes of a 4-hour class. She had her infant daughter with her on 2 occasions. On the one hand, she is clearly a very bright woman but on the other hand her life is entirely unmanageable.
In part, due to missing so much class time she turned in a project for the course that was very inferior.
I gave her an F for the course.
When I looked at the people registered for the same course this semester, I discovered that she was on my roster again.
The day before the semester began I received an e-mail from her saying that she was re-taking the course to get a better grade but that she would be missing the first 2 classes because she was out of town on "family business". As it turned out, she has already missed the first 4 classes of the new semester.

Yesterday I received another e-mail from her asking if "since I have already attended your class, can I take the course on-line and aim or at least a C?". This is NOT an online course and furthermore, she barely attended the class the last time. I will have to prepare special materials for her and accept e-mail assignments. Also, if she misses class, it's unlikely that she will have adequate notes to study for the final. It is possible to obtain the lecture information by reading the textbooks but I've noticed that students seldom do as well on exams if they rely strictly on their own reading.

She is asking me to compromise my academic standards so she can pass the course. She is also asking me to do a substantial amount of extra work just for her. I've already spent an extra hour of my time just responding to her e-mail. I don't get paid for this!

Oh the wonderful things I learn on the Language Log. There is a technical term for words which only occur in the plural. It is "plurale tantum". It seems that the pants/trousers family of words is very productive. Other pant-like (pants-like?) garments that also have this twoness property include: slacks, breeches, bloomers, jeans, dungarees, bellbottoms, tights, shorts, Levis, 501s, underpants, skivvies, drawers, panties, boxers, briefs, etc. You get the idea. It seems that all of these garments share the same property. They have 2 leg holes and thus are candidates for being included in the list of pluralia tantum.

Other pluralia tantum objects in the world include: suspenders, scissors, shears, pliers, binoculars, tongs.

Diaper is an interesting case. It appears that we can say: "She wore a diaper." or "She wore diapers."
Even though you can't say: *She wore a pantie. or *She wore a short.
Also interesting is that the brand names for diapers, Pampers and Huggies are also pluralia tantum but they they can be singular too: Hand me the Pamper so I can change the baby.

Hmmm. What's going on here?
The Language Log says that diaper/diapers and by analogy Huggie/Huggies is plurale tantum and singular.

I had been wondering when Rhonda would need her first oil change.
It seemed like too much time had gone by.
Yesterday as I drove home a little icon of a wrench suddenly lit up and the display said: Oil life 15%

This morning, I located the nearest Honda dealer, Honda of Santa Monica, and called to ask whether I needed an appointment for my oil change. He said I could just drive in. He said the amount of time it would take depends on when I come in. Then I asked how much it would cost. Talk about sticker shock! He said $55 for an oil change.
Oh well, I decided it was the price I had to pay for a hightech car.

I brought Rhonda in this morning. They were very nice. I asked why the oil change was so expensive. He said it is because they use a special oil in the hybirds. Just as I expected.
But then when I got the bill it was "only" $40. I felt very pleased that they charged so "little" when in fact the oil changes on the Neon used to be under $20.

It is amazing how my expectations about the $55 price changed my attitude toward the actual price.

These evil nexi are not orignal but they are worth repeating.
I found this in the Language Log:
The sad thing about Goropism is that within it lie the seeds of the evil nexus of nationalism, racism, and linguistic chauvinism." You could turn that comment into a terrific book on the Dark Side of the enlightenment.
This nexus refers to a "scholar" who explains all human language in terms of Dutch.

The other was a conversation about the evil triangle in New Mexico of Los Alamos, Espanola, and Santa Fe.
The nexus of plutonium, poverty, and privelege.

A definition I liked:
"An adventure is a tragedy that does not occur."

Upon hearing about the new Intel highspeed chip that supposedly can process teraflops, a trillion operations per second, I had to look up what a teraflop is. Then things got a little strange. There is more than one definition of billion and trillion. The number of zeros after the 1 for both "billion" and "trillion" is different in the US than it is in the UK.
It seems as though this could lead to some major confusions.

Here is how it breaks down:

US: million = 1,000,000 billion = 1,000,000,000 trillion = 1,000,000,000,000
UK: million = 1,000,000 milliard = 1,000,000,000 (called “a thousand million”)
billion = 1,000,000,000,000 trillion = 1,000,000,000,000,000,000

I assume that the teraflop refers to the US trillion, since Intel is a US-based company. But I wonder about how this discrepancy in the names for numbers might cause significant troubles.

I really liked Pan's Labyrinth. I wouldn't say I "enjoyed" it but I thought it was great.
By that I mean that it portrayed such misery and brutality that calling it enjoyment would not be right.
The story takes place shortly after Franco's fascists have taken over in Spain in 1944. At the time there were still pockets of resistance to the regime.
I've known for a long time about the dreadful brutality that was done by Franco. In the movie all of the evil is personified in the character of the Capitan. He does not hesitate to murder or torture anyone who he thinks might be a threat. A hungry father and son are captured while they are out rabbit hunting. The capitan beats the son to death in front of the father and then he shoots the father. After both are dead he looks in the sack they were carrying and finds the rabbits. He tells the cook to prepare them for dinner.
The main character is a little girl whose widowed mother is pregnant with the child of this evil capitan. The mother and daughter are brought to the military encampment so that the capitan can obtain his heir when the child is born. At one point in the movie he says to the doctor "If you have to choose, save the baby."
The little girl retreats into a fantasy world that she creates from the fairytales that she has been reading. The characters in her fantasy world are not beautiful--the fairies look like insects, the faun is a spooky goatlike creature--the land of the fantasy is a grey and ominous ruined well and an ancient tree stump populated by an enormous toad and hundreds of huge beetles. Even though the fantasy world looks scary it is not nearly as terrible as the real world she is escaping from.
The story does not have a conventional happy ending but it is a perfect portrayal of Spanish fatalism.
From the very beginning we know that things will turn out badly. For example, Franco remained in power until the 1970s. Nevertheless, it was a pleasure to watch the tragic story unfold.

It seems like they can be used interchangeably.
I can't walk any farther.
I can't walk any further.

What is the furthest distance you can throw?
What is the farthest distance you can throw?

The one thing that is odd is that the root of both of them is "far" and never "fur".

The American Heritage DIctionary says that they come from Old English: furthor

On their latest CD The Barenaked Ladies have employed a clever turn of phrase by invoking alternate meanings of a verb.

When I was a baby I learned how to suck,
You have raised it to an art form.

I like the way they force us to interpret what the antecedent of the pronoun "it" must be.

More thoughts on New Zealand. This is a country where sheep outnumber people by 10 to one. I started thinking about the relationship between sheep and humans. It occurred me that wild sheep would probably be impossible because they depend on being shorn every year. What would happen if their wool was not clipped? Would it keep growing? Well it appears that it would! Here is a picture of Shrek the sheep. Somehow he managed to outwit the musterers (yep, that is what people who gather sheep are called) for 6 years. By the time they found him he was enormous. He could barely walk. His wool covered his eyes. I would imagine that if the wool got wet he would have weighed so much that he might not be able to support himself. Also, even though you can't really see it too much in the picture, there was moss or algae growing on the wool so he was green, hence the "Shrek" name. He was finally found and sheared in 2004. There is no word on his current condition. Presumably he now gets his annual haircut.

Those zany Kiwis really have this official street sign. I found it in Te Anau.



I also found big fruit and a BIG dog. The dog was next to an equally large sheep. The fruit were next to some much smaller Japanese tourists.

Why is it that so many brilliant ideas occur to me when I am asleep, in the shower, driving, etc.?
They always seem to come at a time when I can't write them down. Of course I seldom remember them later when I have a means to record them.
Could it be that they are not so "brilliant" as I think?
hmm...It's likely that many of them are really so dumb that it's lucky I haven't written them anywhere.

"To return" directed by Pedro Almadovar
This is a wonderful movie about the world of women. Penelope Cruz is luminous. Brilliant and resourceful. Her character deals with the problems she is presented with in the most sympathetic ways.
All of the women in the movie have problems of various kinds. All of them have been hurt.
They band together to help each other.
At first I thought it was going to be a magical realism movie. It isn't. It's about coping with death and violence. It opens with a scene of all the widows at the cemetary cleaning the graves of loved ones.
The other dominating image is the powerful winds of La Mancha.
We understand the effect of winds by seeing a car driving down a road through a wind farm.
The story takes place in a working class neighborhood in Madrid and in an unspecified village some distance away.
I found myself so absorbed in the story that I would forget to read the subtitles. I loved the Castillian Spanish.
The imagery of the widows (we called them 'tanks' when I lived in Spain) was exactly like I remembered.
The other thing I noticed was that even though a number of crimes were committed there was a complete absence of the police. When I was there during the Franco regime the police were omnipresent and oppressive. I think the unwillingness of the characters in the movie to contact the police is a residue of police oppression from 40 years ago. It is also possible that in the masculine world of Spanish tradition, there would have been little sympathy for the crimes of women or of crimes perpetrated upon women so the women handled the situation among themselves without bringing in the authorities.
I don't want to spoil the story by relating any of the plot.
I definitely recommend this movie.

"They felt like that this was their own community."
I've noticed that the use of the two conjunctions in a row "like that" seems to be an element of some dialects of spoken English. It seems to be a 'chunking' issue where the speaker says "they/I/we + feel/felt like" as a chunk where feel+like is a unit.

Either one of the conjunctions could have been omitted:

They felt like this was their own community.
They felt that this was this own community.

I suspect this doublling of conjunctions is rare in written texts but is a common part of the syntax of spoken English.

I've just been looking into e.e. cummings' biography.
He was well-known for his pacifism.
I have realized that many of his poems would be relevant to the current Iraq war.

Here is the beginning of one titled "Why must itself up every of a park" that I liked:

Why must itself up every of a park
anus stick some quote statue unquote to
prove that a hero equals any jerk
who was afraid to answer "no"?

-------------
Wonderful images!!

The historical background information about the post-roman facts in Cornwall appear to be fairly accurate.
I liked the fact that they identified the Britons, Angles, Saxons, Jutes, Picts. I also liked the fact that they didn't bother to recreate some kind of fake accent for everyone. They spoke in conventional modern English.

The story is another reenactment of a famous medieval Celtic legend.
Other versions of the story tell of the doomed love and elopement of the central figures. The story also involves the taking of a magic potion that permanently seals their love. In some versions Tristan become one of the knights of the round table.
The movie version changes most of these things. The characters' names are kept the same but their activities are somewhat different. For example, in an early battle scene Tristan leads the fight against Irish raiders who are stealing women from Cornwall. He is wounded by a blade covered with a paralyzing poison. His compatriots think he is dead and send him out to sea on a funeral boat. When the boat grounds itself in Ireland he is found and revived by Isolde who knows about herbal remedies. In the end of the movie-version Tristan dies.

I don't mind the changing of a legendary story. After all, legends may contain a grain of truth but they are not a historical record. The thing that I did mind was the focus on brutality and the modern sensibilities that were included in the story.
The feminism of Isolde comes across as false. I think nearly half of the story was battle scenes. I can imagine that Hollywood believes that they can't tell a story to the modern audience without all the gore. But for me it seemed to be way over the top.

adj. Having or susceptible to having a greater than average number of accidents or mishaps.

I am NOT, repeat NOT accident-prone. Granted, I have had a few accidents but I know that this is a case where I am not above average.

I spent a large part of my dreamtime last night arguing with various people about this point. Sure, I did dislocate my arm while snorkeling, sure I did knock myself out when I slipped and cracked my head on a rock at the end of a bridge. (It could have been a lot worse. I could have fallen in the river!) Anyway, these were only two incidents. In neither case did the mishap prevent me from continuing my trip.

But then my horoscope today said: facts turn into stories, which turn into theories, which turn into ideologies. Choose carefully.

Maybe I should just resign myself to this "fact". Tell some stories and get use to an accident-prone ideology?