I had a discussion with my wards today about Leap Days specifically and this phenomena of man made time dilation generally. I didn't go so far as to try to describe the section of Thomas Pynchon's Mason and Dixon where Mason gets trapped alone for 10 days in the English countryside when they chopped the calendar by ten days. September 1st went on to September 11th when they switched from the Julian to the Gregorian calendar, but Pynchon's Mason lived through those eleven days.
Different topic: visited San Diego last weekend (post coming), and it was surprisingly annoying. We weren't beer tasting, or bachelor partying, but the reality of the shabby, trashy beach town was revealed, and I really wanted to like it. More on this later...
Monday, February 29, 2016
Monday, February 15, 2016
Pronunciation Issues; Characters in Literature
This is a thing that's been in my head a little more often recently...
So, a few years back I was off at an elementary or middle school to get some work done for my then "current gig/adventure", and as I was leaving I noticed there was a book sale going on. It wasn't the school's library selling off the discontinues, rather UCLA had gathered the books from their own bowels and donation centers, and had donated them to be sold in one of these settings.
If you, fair reader, know me or read these blogs regularly enough, you know that I have a problem with books and can't pass up a book sale or indie bookstore or tiny rez-museum shop with at least checking on their offerings.
And, at the time of this specific gig/adventure, money was tight. I knew that the $1.25 in my pocket (left over from bodega coffee) would be all I had to throw down the collection-addiction well.
It didn't take long perusing the paperback shelves for me to find something worthy of fifty valuable cents:
Camus is one of my favorites, for many reasons. Always an outsider, he dabbled in philosophy, politics, wrote plays and novels....The Starnger I realized when rereading it in my mid-20s (as opposed to AP English in high school) is a masterpiece of absurdity and has been appropriated by (us) existentialists as a foundational text (even if Camus would (and did) disagree).
Anyway, The Plague is great: it follows an outbreak of bubonic plague in Oran, one of Algeria's Mediterranean port cities. The main character has a name that I had a hard time pronouncing in my head. I pride myself on pronouncing names from all walks of life with impeccable precision, and it's usually only when I'm with Ryan and we're talking Belgian beers when I'm regularly off.
Seeing the name many times on every page led me to ask my father, who is serviceably fluent in French for a few tips. The name, which is a surname, is "Rieux." I may have even written a post about back then.
As I mentioned, this happens rarely.
Even with my current gig/adventure.
Now I'm reading another great book by one of my short-list authors and again there was name that I had a difficult time reading, or pronouncing it in my head. This is the book:
David Mitchell wrote Cloud Atlas, which I hear was better than the movie, which I haven't seen. The book Cloud Atlas is freaking great, and it makes snse that in order to get a movie of that story done you'd have to force some romance onto pieces that don't have that...
Here, in The Bone Clocks, the name of our heroine's daughter is the one that tripped me up, send me to Google for help. The name: "Aoife."
It must be all those vowels, in both names. "Rieux" is pronounced like a perfectly French 1.5 syllable word, "REE-oonh." (I put the 'n' in the end there to mimic the natural nasalation of French.)
"Aoife" is Irish and means something like "strong beautiful girl" and is one of the woman warriors, or princesses, of old Irish lore. (The mom/protagonist's maternal family is from Cork.)
It's pronounced "EEE-fa."
So, a few years back I was off at an elementary or middle school to get some work done for my then "current gig/adventure", and as I was leaving I noticed there was a book sale going on. It wasn't the school's library selling off the discontinues, rather UCLA had gathered the books from their own bowels and donation centers, and had donated them to be sold in one of these settings.
If you, fair reader, know me or read these blogs regularly enough, you know that I have a problem with books and can't pass up a book sale or indie bookstore or tiny rez-museum shop with at least checking on their offerings.
And, at the time of this specific gig/adventure, money was tight. I knew that the $1.25 in my pocket (left over from bodega coffee) would be all I had to throw down the collection-addiction well.
It didn't take long perusing the paperback shelves for me to find something worthy of fifty valuable cents:
Camus is one of my favorites, for many reasons. Always an outsider, he dabbled in philosophy, politics, wrote plays and novels....The Starnger I realized when rereading it in my mid-20s (as opposed to AP English in high school) is a masterpiece of absurdity and has been appropriated by (us) existentialists as a foundational text (even if Camus would (and did) disagree).
Anyway, The Plague is great: it follows an outbreak of bubonic plague in Oran, one of Algeria's Mediterranean port cities. The main character has a name that I had a hard time pronouncing in my head. I pride myself on pronouncing names from all walks of life with impeccable precision, and it's usually only when I'm with Ryan and we're talking Belgian beers when I'm regularly off.
Seeing the name many times on every page led me to ask my father, who is serviceably fluent in French for a few tips. The name, which is a surname, is "Rieux." I may have even written a post about back then.
As I mentioned, this happens rarely.
Even with my current gig/adventure.
Now I'm reading another great book by one of my short-list authors and again there was name that I had a difficult time reading, or pronouncing it in my head. This is the book:
David Mitchell wrote Cloud Atlas, which I hear was better than the movie, which I haven't seen. The book Cloud Atlas is freaking great, and it makes snse that in order to get a movie of that story done you'd have to force some romance onto pieces that don't have that...
Here, in The Bone Clocks, the name of our heroine's daughter is the one that tripped me up, send me to Google for help. The name: "Aoife."
It must be all those vowels, in both names. "Rieux" is pronounced like a perfectly French 1.5 syllable word, "REE-oonh." (I put the 'n' in the end there to mimic the natural nasalation of French.)
"Aoife" is Irish and means something like "strong beautiful girl" and is one of the woman warriors, or princesses, of old Irish lore. (The mom/protagonist's maternal family is from Cork.)
It's pronounced "EEE-fa."
Tuesday, February 9, 2016
Psst...hey, LA, it's winter...?
I just talked to Marc the other day and we discussed many things, this winter's weather included.
He was saying that in Dobbs Ferry, and the City as well, it had been a very mild winter. "Just those few inches of snow that everyone saw on the news a few weeks back." He said the blanket came down on a Sunday and was gone by Friday at the latest.
I had thought it was a more dire season, but I don't too much of the news, and especially very little national weather news. I guess my sporadic visits to Facebook represent my "news" connection to the east coast.
I talked with Linda as well, and again the conversation came to weather. It had been in the sixties for an unusually high number of days this winter, she was saying. One? Is one an unusually high number of days in the sixties? How long has it been since we left...since we arrived...? (TEN YEARS!)
Anyway, it has been silly down here in the Southland during our strange current winter heat wave: the last two days have been over 90 degrees.
IT'S FEBRUARY! I know we live in what amounts to a movie, or a fever dream, or an romantic ideal to many Americans who will never visit the Los Angeles region (that's how most New Yorkers view all of California---as an idea more than a place), but am I really sitting and sweating in shorts and a tank-top in February?
Yes. Yes I am.
Lamentations usually reserved for May or June or August are coming from our gobs during this dark winter...
He was saying that in Dobbs Ferry, and the City as well, it had been a very mild winter. "Just those few inches of snow that everyone saw on the news a few weeks back." He said the blanket came down on a Sunday and was gone by Friday at the latest.
I had thought it was a more dire season, but I don't too much of the news, and especially very little national weather news. I guess my sporadic visits to Facebook represent my "news" connection to the east coast.
I talked with Linda as well, and again the conversation came to weather. It had been in the sixties for an unusually high number of days this winter, she was saying. One? Is one an unusually high number of days in the sixties? How long has it been since we left...since we arrived...? (TEN YEARS!)
Anyway, it has been silly down here in the Southland during our strange current winter heat wave: the last two days have been over 90 degrees.
IT'S FEBRUARY! I know we live in what amounts to a movie, or a fever dream, or an romantic ideal to many Americans who will never visit the Los Angeles region (that's how most New Yorkers view all of California---as an idea more than a place), but am I really sitting and sweating in shorts and a tank-top in February?
Yes. Yes I am.
Lamentations usually reserved for May or June or August are coming from our gobs during this dark winter...
Monday, February 8, 2016
Have You Seen "eXistenZ"?
Woe is the sci-fi action film, made with sheer originality, that happened to come out in April of 1999 and also happened to not be named "The Matrix." Mainly I'm looking at you "Thirteenth Floor" and you, too, "eXistenZ."
This past weekend Corrie and I saw the bizarrely yellow poster-avatar to David Cronenberg's "eXistenZ" on Netflix. Holding what looks like a handgun is a very young Jude Law; he seems to be protecting Jennifer Jason Leigh. The title sparked memories, but fleeting. After doing some research I realized that it was because of when it was released that I whatever memories I had, or motivations to see it, were so fleeting.
It was basically released a week after "The Matrix", the live-action anime movie that changed the action-film vocabulary from that point forward. There are camera angles seen during yesterday's Super Bowl that exist because of "The Matrix."
Anyway, reading the synopsis was also when I learned that David Cronenberg was the director. You know you're in for something whacky with him involved.
That tidbit pushed us over the edge. We settled in and hit play.
Holy cow! I was not prepared for the gore and overt sexuality brought to the table. There is no gratuitous sex in the movie, but a whole lot of sexuality.
Jennifer Jason Leigh plays a virtual reality game designer who is sharing her hotly awaited game with an eager group of gamers. Okay, I said to myself, as they all seemed to be connected with umbilical cords and fingering what looked like hairless vaginas with nipples.
Have you seen this movie? That's what the controllers look like: weird vaginal lap-animals with tits and nipples. To "play" the game, players tweak the nipples and rub the pink, twitchy, "pod."
They call them pods; after a mishap with one, Ian Holm repairs it but it looks like an autopsy.
The controllers connect to the players using so-called umbys; you learn this as the movie unfolds. These umbys connect the vaginal-nipple-pod to the player's bio-port. The bio-port is a butthole sized hole about four inches above the belt line.
Besides the sexually rubbing of the pods, there are these awesome bio-ports, with lots of lubing and fingering and even some tonguing. Seriously.
The gore is equally explicit. At one point Jude Law's character, chocking up the desire to eat the specimen to "game logic", chows the meat off of some random animal carcass. By the looks of the bystanders, it is fetid at best. He uses the greasy and sinewy carcass to make an organic firearm, which is, upon closer examination, the handgun from the poster-avatar. It shoots teeth; Jude loads with a tooth bridge that his character in "real life" didn't have.
That was how you knew it was part of the game. This movie is a set of nested realities that never lets the viewers get too comfortable. "Inception" is a spiritual offspring.
It made over $2.5 million at the box office, against a budget of $30 million.
Norm and I saw "The Matrix" at least three times in the theater, with Norm possibly closer to five times. The redefinition of the terms of action movies and the creation of a whole set of cliches that the Wachowski siblings augured swept movies like "eXistenZ" and "Thirteenth Floor" away from the collective consciousness.
The conversation had changed.
The "Thirteenth Floor" is up next...
This past weekend Corrie and I saw the bizarrely yellow poster-avatar to David Cronenberg's "eXistenZ" on Netflix. Holding what looks like a handgun is a very young Jude Law; he seems to be protecting Jennifer Jason Leigh. The title sparked memories, but fleeting. After doing some research I realized that it was because of when it was released that I whatever memories I had, or motivations to see it, were so fleeting.
It was basically released a week after "The Matrix", the live-action anime movie that changed the action-film vocabulary from that point forward. There are camera angles seen during yesterday's Super Bowl that exist because of "The Matrix."
Anyway, reading the synopsis was also when I learned that David Cronenberg was the director. You know you're in for something whacky with him involved.
That tidbit pushed us over the edge. We settled in and hit play.
Holy cow! I was not prepared for the gore and overt sexuality brought to the table. There is no gratuitous sex in the movie, but a whole lot of sexuality.
Jennifer Jason Leigh plays a virtual reality game designer who is sharing her hotly awaited game with an eager group of gamers. Okay, I said to myself, as they all seemed to be connected with umbilical cords and fingering what looked like hairless vaginas with nipples.
Have you seen this movie? That's what the controllers look like: weird vaginal lap-animals with tits and nipples. To "play" the game, players tweak the nipples and rub the pink, twitchy, "pod."
They call them pods; after a mishap with one, Ian Holm repairs it but it looks like an autopsy.
The controllers connect to the players using so-called umbys; you learn this as the movie unfolds. These umbys connect the vaginal-nipple-pod to the player's bio-port. The bio-port is a butthole sized hole about four inches above the belt line.
Besides the sexually rubbing of the pods, there are these awesome bio-ports, with lots of lubing and fingering and even some tonguing. Seriously.
The gore is equally explicit. At one point Jude Law's character, chocking up the desire to eat the specimen to "game logic", chows the meat off of some random animal carcass. By the looks of the bystanders, it is fetid at best. He uses the greasy and sinewy carcass to make an organic firearm, which is, upon closer examination, the handgun from the poster-avatar. It shoots teeth; Jude loads with a tooth bridge that his character in "real life" didn't have.
That was how you knew it was part of the game. This movie is a set of nested realities that never lets the viewers get too comfortable. "Inception" is a spiritual offspring.
It made over $2.5 million at the box office, against a budget of $30 million.
Norm and I saw "The Matrix" at least three times in the theater, with Norm possibly closer to five times. The redefinition of the terms of action movies and the creation of a whole set of cliches that the Wachowski siblings augured swept movies like "eXistenZ" and "Thirteenth Floor" away from the collective consciousness.
The conversation had changed.
The "Thirteenth Floor" is up next...
Sunday, February 7, 2016
Under the Drill for Ninety Minutes
Saturday is one of the few days I am able to get stuff done. This Saturday was for the dentist.
After having a scary meeting with a dentist (my second in twelve years) in Texas back in 2010, I found a very agreeable dentist right around the corner from us here in Long Beach. What the office in Texas told me would cost in upwards of fifteen grand (!!!!!!)(seriously), the fine crew around the corner did for two-hundred bucks after my new and better insurance picked up their end.
Now I have even newer and even better insurance and, apparently, a continuing and rather personal battle with my own teeth. Did I start smoking crack or letting my life be taken over by meth?
Math maybe, but not meth. Pretty sure anyway.
Somewhere in November or December a filling in my upper left bicuspid, an amalgam deal put in while I was a kid, came out. From then until the end of January I was getting crud stuck into the gaping hole in my tooth. Dental floss was my close homey.
I had the tooth filled and a bunch of coral chiseled off my teeth, and another appointment set for a week later---this past Saturday---to finish the last of the fillings they never got to back at the place around the corner. (This new and better insurance has me driving across town rather than walking down the alley.)
This past Saturday it was dead at the dentist. The previous Saturday it was busy as hell all day, and I waited in one of those chairs for over an hour. They had a television on the wall in the operating nook, which seemed too opulent before I stared at it for an hour.
This past Saturday they found new cavities they needed to fill. That brought my total to either five or six---the details are a bit fuzzy, as I had hands in my face for a full hour and a half.
It turns out the lower jaw is harder to numb than the upper, and it took four shots to numb it just enough that I could handle the drill. That side of my face felt invisible for hours afterwards
After I was all done and ready to get a few X-rays of this most recent work, it turns out they had forgotten a tiny cavity in the front and, hey, since you're already numb, we should just get it done now.
Are my teeth are more filling than tooth at this point?
After having a scary meeting with a dentist (my second in twelve years) in Texas back in 2010, I found a very agreeable dentist right around the corner from us here in Long Beach. What the office in Texas told me would cost in upwards of fifteen grand (!!!!!!)(seriously), the fine crew around the corner did for two-hundred bucks after my new and better insurance picked up their end.
Now I have even newer and even better insurance and, apparently, a continuing and rather personal battle with my own teeth. Did I start smoking crack or letting my life be taken over by meth?
Math maybe, but not meth. Pretty sure anyway.
Somewhere in November or December a filling in my upper left bicuspid, an amalgam deal put in while I was a kid, came out. From then until the end of January I was getting crud stuck into the gaping hole in my tooth. Dental floss was my close homey.
I had the tooth filled and a bunch of coral chiseled off my teeth, and another appointment set for a week later---this past Saturday---to finish the last of the fillings they never got to back at the place around the corner. (This new and better insurance has me driving across town rather than walking down the alley.)
This past Saturday it was dead at the dentist. The previous Saturday it was busy as hell all day, and I waited in one of those chairs for over an hour. They had a television on the wall in the operating nook, which seemed too opulent before I stared at it for an hour.
This past Saturday they found new cavities they needed to fill. That brought my total to either five or six---the details are a bit fuzzy, as I had hands in my face for a full hour and a half.
It turns out the lower jaw is harder to numb than the upper, and it took four shots to numb it just enough that I could handle the drill. That side of my face felt invisible for hours afterwards
After I was all done and ready to get a few X-rays of this most recent work, it turns out they had forgotten a tiny cavity in the front and, hey, since you're already numb, we should just get it done now.
Are my teeth are more filling than tooth at this point?
Wednesday, February 3, 2016
The List Continues...
Some vices are hard to verbalize.
I found myself on a work-holiday today and saw a series of notes I had scribbled about either blog posts or trips---trips like OKC in September and SD last month, trips that would make for some fun, light reading...
I have an example of what I want from my journalistic wards floating around.
Maybe this is a vice...
I'm heading in the direction of "poorly-xeroxed-socialist-newsletter-available-from-smoky-dude-on-the-corner" for my journalism wards. It shall be fun.
Other things are happening as well, and my writing, and posting, lags...
Still OVERthinking our camping trip down the coast from June...
Still lagging on a long(ish) soccer post about my own heritage (the Gerries, but on me da's side...).
The march of time waits for no one.
I found myself on a work-holiday today and saw a series of notes I had scribbled about either blog posts or trips---trips like OKC in September and SD last month, trips that would make for some fun, light reading...
I have an example of what I want from my journalistic wards floating around.
Maybe this is a vice...
I'm heading in the direction of "poorly-xeroxed-socialist-newsletter-available-from-smoky-dude-on-the-corner" for my journalism wards. It shall be fun.
Other things are happening as well, and my writing, and posting, lags...
Still OVERthinking our camping trip down the coast from June...
Still lagging on a long(ish) soccer post about my own heritage (the Gerries, but on me da's side...).
The march of time waits for no one.
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