tales from the black box

Posted on Thursday, 2005 June 16 by Anton

Wow. Shortly after Simon Ng posted this blog entry —

. . .
today has been weird, at 3 some guy ringed the bell. I went down and recognized it was my sister’s former boyfriend. He told me he wants to get his fishing poles back. I told him to wait downstair while I get them for him. While I was searching them, he is already in the house. He is still here right now, smoking, walking all around the house with his shoes on which btw I just washed the floor 2 days ago! Hopefully he will leave soon . . .

— the visitor stabbed him to death. (Cited by Nev Dull)

Posted in blogdom | Leave a comment

damned if you don’t

Posted on Wednesday, 2005 June 15 by Anton

I’m likely to want to refer to this later:

One of his friends was contemplating becoming involved in a drug-distribution scheme, and telephoned Nguyen for advice. After a lengthy conversation, Nguyen advised the friend to stay away from the scheme, that it would only lead to trouble. The conversation was taped, and Nguyen was charged as a co-conspirator in a scheme to distribute drugs. Did you notice that? He advised against becoming involved in the scheme, but was still charged.

(Cited by Mary Lou Seymour)

Posted in drugwar | Leave a comment

adventures in fruit

Posted on Sunday, 2005 June 12 by Anton

New experience of the day: I found a little white spider in a bunch of Mexican grapes.

Posted in general | 2 Comments

a gap in the library

Posted on Friday, 2005 June 10 by Anton

Latin ecce, Italian ecco, Russian vot, French voilà, Esperanto jen — the nearest English equivalent I can think of is lo!, which is not in most bilingual dictionaries, for the same reason English-speakers know the word voilà. So how do I look up such a word in my English-Spanish dictionary?

Comments are always open: can you add to (or correct) the list?

Posted in language | 2 Comments

font moan

Posted on Friday, 2005 June 10 by Anton

I moved from Mozilla to Firefox and found that the font menu has changed. I don’t know where each app looks for its fonts; they’re not neatly integrated in Linux as in MacOS. I don’t like any of them as well as Lucida, but they are apparently TrueType and render nice and smooth, with the interesting side effect that it’s much easier to read light-on-dark. But none of them have a complete Greek alphabet! Most Greek letters show up looking like Syriac, whatever font I choose. Argh. How am I to do math?

Any month now I’m going back to Apple’s warmer embrace. All I really wanted from Linux was the ability to write Unix-style filters, anyway.

Posted in neep-neep | 1 Comment

Why can’t the English learn to speak?

Posted on Thursday, 2005 June 09 by Anton

Got an idea just now that might sell a few copies: Monty Python Annotated for Americans, containing answers to such questions as “What dialect is Palin doing in this bit?”

This thought was prompted by watching My Fair Lady. In the first scene where Higgins shows his phonetic jottings to Eliza, I obviously had to pause, and found that I could read it no better than she could; most of the characters look like International Phonetic Alphabet, but if so they’re a nonsensical jumble – and what’s the alveolar click doing in Covent Garden? “Ha!” my housemate snorts. “They couldn’t find anyone who could put together the real thing?” They rarely do, of course, but this was a major production. . . Later I learn that it’s not IPA but an older scheme, the Visible Speech of A.M.Bell.

Posted in cinema, language | Leave a comment

our little medium is all grown up

Posted on Wednesday, 2005 June 08 by Anton

Got a junk call (from 214-279-0990) just now on my mobile telephone. I think it’s my first ever in seven years.

In unrelated news, the humidity that was just barely unpleasant earlier today is now coming down as a very fine drizzle, a pleasant change, and very unusual for June. Mom tells me California has been getting rain that normally goes to Cascadia.

Posted in California, spam | 9 Comments