Salivili hipput tupput täppyt äppyt tipput hilijalleen

An unexpected effect of listening to music through my computer’s speakers is a better stereo image than I’m used to. That’s how I noticed for the first time that Loituma’s joyously goofy song Ievan polkka has four vocal parts, not three: the female lead and the male accompaniment are in the center, with two female voices, singing almost but not quite the same part, in the wings. (Maybe it’s one woman singing the same part twice but adlibbing.)

If any of you understand Finnish, by the way, I’d love to have a transcription and a translation.

Posted in music+verse, neep-neep | 5 Comments

what’s so good about it

Orson Scott Card reviews Serenity

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a year passes like nothing

It’s a year since I moved this humble effort from Blogger to WordPress, plenty of time for some of you to update your linksnot that I’m not grateful for attention in whatever form.

A tip of the hat to those few who have already done so.

Posted in blogdom, me!me!me! | 1 Comment

mall.montreal.com, whoever you are

Why go to the bother of generating referral spam for a page with no content?

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Brent gets desperate

how to impress chicks?

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layers of language

In the chaos that is my mind at this hour —

Brain damage such as stroke can take away the symbolic processing ability known as language. I wonder: does the most obvious kind of sign-language, pointing and miming, go with it? And do Deaf signers so afflicted lose more or less of the naïve sign-language than the hearing do? In one sense these questions have no meaningful answer, because every stroke is different; but there must be interesting correlations.

Does stroke ever take away the ability to process conditional or relative clauses?

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with friends like these

Argh. I just tried to back up my home directory folder to a DVD. When the burn was nearing completion, it aborted because Finder “cannot find data fork of file <unable to locate file path>”. Got that? Four gigabytes of files can’t be archived because one of them — which may not really exist, for all I can tell — is corrupt. And why didn’t this error message show up during the “Preparing data” phase, to save me from wasting a blank?

Later: It occurred to me that this could have happened because a temporary file was deleted between the preparation and the burn. So I closed all applications and tried again; no luck. Then I noticed on the packaging that these Memorex 8X blanks apparently cannot be burned properly by my 2X drive. (sigh)

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