Newsmap: I'm not going to pretend I can explain it, but it sure looks interesting.
short history of the letter Q -
"During the Old English period, we didn't use Q in English: we wrote, for example, CWICU for 'quick' and CWEN for 'queen' (Old English, like Latin, preferred C for the /k/-sound instead of K). But then the French-speaking Normans conquered England, interrupting the English literary tradition, and, when English once again began to be written after the Conquest, a number of French spelling conventions were introduced, including the business of always writing Q for the /k/-sound when the next letter was U. And we're still stuck with it."
"I wish I could place a chair for you, sister." - Billy the Kid (shackled and chained to the floor) to a visiting nun
gorgeous
Man, I love these linguistics projects; probably would be useful for placing those accents you can never figure out. Unfortunately, the IPA they use is different from the one I learned, but at least it's still mostly comprehensible (phonetics alphabets = fun because you can take them and use them to learn said accents just by reading).
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Beyond the reach of human range
A drop of hell, a touch of strange...
-Stephen King, The Gunslinger
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They clung to each other, balanced on the edge of the moment of parting, trying to say now, with the pressure of their bodies, everything they might ever want to say to each other. Then they pulled away, and looked at each other through tears.
-George Martin + Lisa Tuttle, Windhaven
Demolition Man is silly, yes. Also very funny - lots of great lines. Sandra Bullock is very hot in an idiotic way. There is the single greatest Schwarzenegger reference, ever, which made me jump up and down in a towel. But there ain't no way that Sylvester Stalone would ever beat Wesley Snipes. Ain't happening.
my interpretation (and a shallow close reading) of Event Horizon, arrived at while explaining the movie to Carolyn while she watched it, over the phone:
The main point is that the doctor who originally designed the ship was in-effect playing God, because he was trying to do something that is generally filed under should-not-be-possible. In accomplishing said act, he made the ship go somewhere it shouldn't have --> connected with him 'playing God' = so they saw God/the incomprhensible, as it were (re: the climax of The Gunslinger; literal translation of "Allahu akbar"). In and of such, through a grand extrapolation of 'humans fear that which they do not understand,' not only does the crew (and subsequent characters in the movie) go loco-in-the-braino, but the inanimate ship is also affected, later making a connection with it's designer to create horror movie fun.
Interestingly, there is also the twisty relationship that the audience has with the movie. Because the story is in effect being narrated by the main characters, they are generally thought to be reliable. But the trick is that as the movie progresses each of them becomes more and more unreliable, which either leads the audience to simply accept their perspectives as the reality of the movie, or try to recognize when they have become unreliable and then read between the lines, as it were, of their hallucinations.
All of that stuff about the nature of how the story is being told also plays into the personification-of-incomprehensibility that the ship has become after encountering it, as the longer the characters interact with it the more they take on its aspect, and thus produce the movie's effectiveness at scaring people.
Well, it's nice to know that totally random people like the Penny Arcade guy have interest in this stuff too. Yay...um...linguistic nerd solidarity?
Whoa! The guy who did Akira is doing a new movie, Steampunk style....teeensy bit of a change in style, but looks somewhat interesting.
In the doctor’s office I hear a piano playing,
and I think of you.
We sit across a candlelit table in a deep blue club,
your eyes a cool hand laid upon my cheek -
our smiles entwined.
We dance through the soft lit shadows,
the piano player smiles and our hips sway gently -
your cheek warm and velvet against mine.
The door opens and the white-coat comes in.
He sits on his plastic metal chair, but won’t look at me.
He looks away anyway, and speaks.
I look away too.
Assent is murmured, and the door closes behind him.
I hear a piano playing, and you hold me in your arms.
Our hips sway gently in the soft lit shadows,
Our eyes closed, your forehead cool and gentle
and laid against mine.
"Let's get married."
"WHAT?"
"We'll go to Boston or Frisco or Toronto or...or Belgium, and get married."
"Is this a proposal, or some kind of post-modern intimacy avoidance strategy?"
"Both. Rather clever of me, you have to admit."
-from Dykes to Watch out For
Despite it being random Japanese flash, I think one could look at this as an interesting take on how aural and written components of language can be connected.
If you understand, things are just as they are. If you do not understand, things are just as they are. – Zen saying
+both by Charles de Lint
The best artists know what to leave out. They know how much of the support should show through as the pigment is applied, what details aren’t necessary. They suggest, and let the viewer fill in whatever is needed to make the communication complete. They aren’t afraid to work with a smaller palette, to delete excess verbiage or to place rests on the musical staff, for they know that almost every creative endeavor can be improved with a certain measure of understatement. For isn’t it the silence between notes that often gives music its resonance? What lies between the lines of the poem or story, the dialogue the actor doesn’t speak, the pauses between the dancer’s steps? The spaces can be just as important as what’s distinctly portrayed. – Dream Harder, Dream True
A long time ago a bunch of people reached a general consensus as to what’s real and what’s not and most of us have been going along with it ever since. – Where Desert Spirits Crowd the Night
"Get your traditional Japanese three-stringed guitar-on! Fun for about 30 seconds *(hours if you're stoned)."
“Don’t worry about what the world needs. Ask what makes you come alive and do that. Because what the world needs are people who come alive.” Howard Thurman
(paraphrased/summarized from Scientific American, April 04)
Further into the idea that one's language shapes one's perception of reality, there is the subject of colors. The way different languages name cultures is possibly one of the only areas where there seems to be a relative universality to naming. More industrial cultures often have more names for colors than more primitive colors, but they are generally sorted into very similar patterns. Some languages have only two or three terms - one for black/blue/green and "cool" colors, one for red/yellow and "warm" colors, and one for white or "light" colors. If there is a fourth they often split blue/green from the cool colors. English has eleven terms, which are generally similar, if not identical, to most other languages associated with similar technological levels: black, white, red, green, yellow, blue, brown, pink, orange, purple, and gray. These are the most basic: colors like 'blue-green' or colors associtated with specific things like 'emerald' or 'salmon' are not included.
Interestingly this could be interpreted to say that one can assume that humans generally percieve color in the same fashion, if not at least similarly. Thus, what I say is 'red' is probably also percieved by, say, Bob as 'red,' as opposed to Bob seeing what I say is 'red' as 'violet-magenta.'
Also interestingly as a converse tangent are the way different languages deal with space. Some languages do not have words for subjective directions such as 'left' or 'right,' but only absolute directions such as 'north' and 'west.' Speakers of such would thus say something like, "You have something on your cheek....no, your south cheek."
"Just now as I watched the ever-changing beauty, I saw a cloud pass over the earth on long grey [sic] stilts of rain. And then as I looked I saw its shape and knew that over the pueblo moved the Thunder Bird. With wings outspread he slowly passed, broad tail sweeping the thirsty earth. Down from his breast fell feathers of rain and out from his heart the lightning flashed its message to the people that the gods never forget. Thnuder roared from his long black beak and all earth sounds were hushed. He has gone, leaving only his mark on the land, but I still see his broad wings stretched, and the white rain-feathers dropping from his breast. And any fear, lingering from those childhood days when I, unafraid, was made to fear lightning, has gone. Did it not come from his heart? If it should seek me out or find me wandering in its path, would it not take me back with it? I should not mind going so much if I could look down on beauty like earth's today." - Edith Warner, September 1929
"From my window I can see a storm coming down from the mountains. The white mist spills over the arm of the mountain. I can hear the heavy rain beating across the canyon. Thunder rolls in antiphonal effect from peak to peak. The wind surges down from the mountains, spills into the canyons, wells up with an added strength against the house. The green curtans flatten themselves against the window as if they were hunted things. After all this frenzy of preparation at last only a few silly drops spill onto the roof of the garage. Was the storm only a pretense? No, the mist I thought was thinning has gathered again. It is marching nearer like the gray shadow of an army. A swift flame leaps across it and crashes into thunder. Now the rain wrestles with the wind for mastery in the tree tops. It pours down from the clouds like a river. How strange the trees look, like ghosts caught in a gray curtain. The rain is all between and among them. It is a world of the newly dead groping in a purgatory without color. Humans creep now beneath what little shelter they can, and whisper and touch cold hang to hand till the storm is past. They dare not be caught when the rain gods march." - Peggy Church, August 1929
Spain's sudden change might be a good one for the country as an individual nation, but that's still only a 'might' and definitely isn't good for the global community. It's like when Hitler was appeased before WWII. While they may have obtained relief from Al Qaeda, they are just letting the Basque terrorists that are indiginous know that if they kill enough people they can get what they want. Similarly, Al Qaeda has gotten a boost by setting out to do a mission having its goal fully accomplished; I'm sorry that all those people in Spain died, but I'm also sorry about the response to it.
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