Knitwear Guy

One of my favourite movies is Easter Parade with Fred Astaire and Judy Garland. I think it was shown three years in a row, once, and I saw it every time. Then there was a gap of a couple of years before they screened it again, but I was waiting for it. Once of these days I'm going to have to buy my own copy.

There's one number in the movie, though, that just irks me. For one thing, it doesn't belong there - it's a showcase for some guy who isn't even in the movie. Well, he is in the movie, because he's in this number, but he isn't a character or anything. Basically, it's one of those "Hey, this is a movie musical, let's show off what kind of fancy things we can do with movie musicals and give our art-department a work-out" kind of number that peppered a lot of films of that era.

For another thing, it's really annoying. The dude-who-isn't-really-in-the-movie sings in one of those warbly tenors that always bug me, while dancers pose in "living" magazine covers before stepping down onto the sound stage floor to indulge in a really boring dance. A really, really boring dance. And the number itself? Some pointless piece of fluff called "The Girl on the Magazine Cover".

Even though I've seen the movie at least four or five times, all I can remember of the lyrics to this song are "I'm in love with the girl on the magazine cover". I've pretty much blocked the rest of it out.

Except, for some reason, it popped into my head a few days ago and refuses to leave. Just that line: "I'm in love with the girl on the magazine cover".

And for the last couple of days I've been fighting the urge to write a "response" to the song something along these lines:

I quite fancy
The fellow in the 90s knitwear catalogue
(catalogue)
The cute blonde in
The pullover with elongated rhombus stitch
(rhombus stitch)
He's ruggedly handsome
Yet looks soft to touch
Is there any wonder
I like him so much?
I'd like to go strolling
With him arm-in-arm
You could say I've fallen
For his worsted charm
For
I quite fancy
The fellow in the 90s knitwear catalogue
(catalogue)

Perhaps I haven't been fighting that urge as much as I could have...

Under Cup

It's strange how much of the Estonian I've been trying to absorb over the past year is suddenly clicking into place now that I'm learning German.

One of the first things I learnt in Estonian (thanks to a CDROM called Talk Now! Estonian) was "cup and saucer": tass ja alustass. It was part of a whole section on food related words - which are still, sadly, the words I remember best. The other day in German class we were also learning food related words and, wouldn't you know it, the German for "cup and saucer" is Tasse und Untertasse. What with the Germans occupying Estonia for a while, it makes sense that they'd have a few words crossing over.

However, the thing that suddenly clicked into place for me was the significance of the "alus" in "alustass". The "word" for saucer in both of these languages is "undercup". I finally connected "alus" with "all". It was also nice to note how often the Estonian word for this, that or the other would pop into my head when I was learning the German version. It means something is sticking in there after all.

I've been getting frustrated lately with the fact that I'm still looking up the same words in Estonian after all this time. It seems my vocabulary acquisition is just not cutting it. I'll look at a word in a reading, recognise it as something I've seen several times before - looked up several times before - and I just won't be able to pull the meaning out of my brain. I have to look it up again. It's dang frustrating.

It's probably because I'm not interacting with the language, just passively receiving it from various sources. Krashen would say that's perfectly valid, I should just keep reading and eventually it will all click into place. Which is a load of fetid dingoes' kidneys, if you ask me. Then again, he used to say that in the early 80s. He started to mellow out a bit in the 90s and may have moved on in the last twenty years.

Anyway, I've been trying to challenge myself lately by trying to create something in the language, which has been frustrating to say the least. Take the whole "square" incident. Question: How hard can it be to find the correct version of the word "square" in order to say "the circle is next to the square"? Answer: I still haven't found it. My best guess: "ringi on nelinurku juures".

I've been busy ploughing through all of these readings about things that are supposed to help language learners develop their vocabulary, and so far my attempts to apply them to Estonian have been a slog. Which is why German has been such a pleasant surprise. I borrowed a book in German that was at the same reading level as a couple of Estonian books I have been unable to crack, and I managed to follow it quite happily. I didn't have the 95% coverage that Nation and his ilk advise for vocabulary acquisition through reading, but I managed to glean a few words from the context, which turned out to be exactly what I thought they were, and I could read it through reasonably happily without the unknown words getting in the way... And yet, theoretically, I know less German than I do Estonian.

Also, the German words for things are popping into my head much more quickly than the Estonian words did. I'm wondering if Estonian is so hard in comparison to German that when I encounter the easier language my brain is just saying: "Oh, thank God, something I can actually process" and is latching onto it. It's so weird to have these "Oh, this is what you were talking about" moments with language learning after dismissing half of what I had been reading about in the literature as being irrelevant for beginners.

Maybe it's because German is a "cousin" of English. Maybe it's because I briefly flirted with German as a child, and something imprinted. Maybe it's because I took a semester of Anglo-Saxon at university and I've been immersed in Renaissance English for decades through Shakespeare and his mates (declension of verbs in Renaissance English skirts very close to the pattern in German). Or maybe it's just because the Finno-Ugric languages are insanely foreign compared to English. I don't know.

By the way, have you ever seen a flying undercup?

Google says...

I usually click the "nope" button whenever Google offers to translate a page for me, but for some reason I clicked "yes" this time. I'm glad I did, because I needed the laugh.

Apparently, Google is about as bad at translating Estonian as I am:

Operating at the heart of the famous face of Estonia sakslannast presenter and journalist, a strange love affair with difficult choices, and send pictures põrkumine world. With numerous turns, and paints a colorful exercise tegelaskujudega kummastava picture chaos, which could hit one safe little country, where a handful of dangerous fanatics will pocket fists.

Hmm. Yes. I feel much more enlightened as to the meaning of the words on that page, now.

Duck Wrangling

I took a week off to work on my thesis. Fat lot of good that seems to be doing me.

I've been spending days getting my ducks all in a row (I love that metaphor) based on the assumption that, once I had my ducks all neatly lined up, I'd be able to knock everything over with relative ease and efficiency.

Trouble is, it's taking an awfully long time to line up those ducks. Things I thought would take me half an hour are taking me close to three hours. And then I have to make my brain work well enough to re-write passages I couldn't write all that well in the first place.

Damn EndNote and it's promises of a better way of doing literature reviews. Damn it for being right, so I can't happily ignore it.

Damn my own tendency to put in too much detail on some days and not enough on others, so that I'm either wasting time putting in more than I need, or wasting time finding what I didn't put in.

Damn my lack of temporal awareness and poor concept of lineal time. I don't even notice how much time I'm wasting on lining up those stupid ducks until I realise I'm getting tired and finding it hard to focus - whoops, there goes another hour.

And yet, the ducks must be wrangled. If I don't waste time on it now, I'll be wasting time on it later. I know this because I was supposed to waste time on it over the course of the last six or so months, which would mean I wouldn't be wasting time on it now. But, you know, it was just so time consuming...

It's Friday, and I'm not even a quarter into what I wanted to do this week. Complete a draft? That's a laugh. I won't even clean up my first chapter by Monday.

Damn stupid ducks.

And, just for the heck of it: Damn.

Drawing with a Mac

Okay, I had to share this.

If you have previously read this blog, you may have read my previous entry regarding my MacBook and its shocking lack of anything resembling a drawing program. I still maintain that if Windows can do it, then Mac should be doing it better, darn it - to heck with this "not at all" business.

Anyway, in my previous post (which I'm currently too lazy to link to) I made a comment about it being so difficult to try to draw something with my Mac that I may as well try to force my hand-written drawing into the computer using my amazing mental powers.

Well, a couple of days ago, I tried to do just that. You see, I suddenly had this scathingly brilliant idea: my MacBook doesn't have a drawing program, but it does have a webcam! So, I redrew my picture with a Sharpie (R), held it up to the camera and...

Well, you just have to see the result:



Yeah, the program that uses the webcam converts everything to a mirror image. I had noticed this before. I had not noticed that there isn't a single thing installed on my MacBook that will flip the image. I can rotate it any direction I like, but flipping? Not so much.

I'd be really annoyed if it wasn't so darn hilarious.

Ripped from the headlines...

I have a Google gadget in my iGoogle page that's supposed to show the headlines from The Age (usually one of the few newspapers that I can read without wanting to punch a journalist). I'm not sure it's trying very hard to bring me the headlines, though. Today, the top three news headlines displayed are:

"Bashed to death"

Timeline

Factbox

Ah, "factbox", can't you stay out of the headlines for one day?

Stick it

Okay, so after wondering about this Nordic Walking thingy for over a year, I finally bought some sticks and gave it a go. Just a simple stroll down to the local park and back. I firmly believe that if you're going to do something that will cause everyone who sees you to think you're a bit odd, you should do it for the first time in your local streets were all your neighbours can see you. That way, a) it gets it over and done with so everything is much less awkward from then on (the live toad principle), and b) if you fall over and hurt yourself, someone might know where you live and get you back home.

I probably would have done it months ago except you can't buy Nordic Walking poles in North Queensland. I actually still don't own any NW poles - I bought a set of hiking poles that mentioned being "suitable for everyday use" as well as hiking. I assumed that was code for "we know that, in this country, only a small handful of fringe dwelling lunatics are even aware of what Nordic Walking is, so we won't mention it - however, should you wish to walk around with a set of poles on a daily basis, these will work."

You can, actually, buy something called "fitness poles" from K-Mart for $20 or $30, but I couldn't bring myself to buy them. It's not that I'm usually against buying cheap exercise equipment from K-Mart, but it's more to do with a vision of the future that involved a cheap fiberglass pole thingy snapping in half just as I tripped over my own feet, thus impaling myself on my own tightwaddiness. I'm mildly convinced the fact that a) I'm a klutz and b) I keep doing things that klutzes shouldn't do (unicycling, buying a penny farthing, running down a mountain, cycling through a small European country, etc) is probably an indication that I'm going to kill myself in some rather embarrassing fashion. Every now and then I stop myself and say "no, no, that will surely lead to certain death", but I just know at some point someone's going to have to tell my mother I finally managed to get myself killed - to which I'm almost entirely sure she'll respond: "Typical".

If I do end up dying as a result of my own stupidity, I'd like the following words inscribed on my headstone:

I sent a message to the fish
I told them, this is what I wish

The little fishes of the sea
They sent a message back to me

The little fishes' answer was:
"We cannot do it, Sir, because --"

Yes, I know that makes no sense - but it makes me happy. Story of my life, really...

Anyway, I don't think the NW will actually kill me at this point (although you never can tell). In fact, I think they might do me some good. It was just a little walk, but I could feel the difference in my arms and upper body afterwards. Plus, it was actually quite fun. Living in the tropics I don't really get the chance to propel myself with poles that often, but it turns out to be a rather pleasant activity.

I do believe I'll do it again. Good thing, really, since I now own a set of poles and all...

Boom Crunch, DC

So, the other day I watched an episode of Desperate Housewives. I think it was the third episode I've seen since I gave up on the show part-way through Season Two. I've been loosely keeping up with events thanks to the ads, but I don't really know who half the characters are or why they're likely to die soon.

This was the episode where the plane crashed into the Christmas block party and Dana Delany's character, Katherine, completely flipped and accused Mike of stabbing her.

My mother, who had never really watched the show, was also watching, due to the fact that we were both exceptionally tired and couldn't be bothered reading or trying to engage in conversation.

At one point, Katherine was curled on the floor of the hospital as nurses tried to sedate her while sobbing at her daughter that she'd asked her not to come. Susan, Terri Hatcher's character, was holding the daughter and comforting her.

“Poor Lois,” I said, referring, of course, to Dana Delany.

“You mean the other one,” said my mother, “Susan was Lois.”

“Yeah, but she was Lois, too,” I replied, and my mother seemed surprised, even though I know I have previously mentioned Dana Delany's role as Lois Lane in the animated series. My mother choses not to remember these things.

Terri Hatcher played Lois Lane for four years in Lois and Clark, but Delany provided her voice for over twelve years throughout various cartoons. Which kind of makes the last few seasons of DH Lois vs Lois.

While the two Loises have been fighting over Mike, Superman and Deadly Nightshade were about to start fighting over Bree. Kyle MacLachlan (Orson) provided Superman's voice in Justice League: The New Frontier while Richard Burgi (Karl) played the bad guy in an episode of The Flash. Oh, and Carlos (Ricardo Chavira)? He provides the voice for Major Force (another bad guy) in Superman/Batman: Public Enemies.

Just to make that particular episode more interesting, the guy flying the plane was Dan Castellaneta. Apart from being Homer Simpson, he has also provided several voices for DC characters and villains over the years in various animated series. In the same year he appeared in this episode of DH, he also guest starred on an episode of Castle, which stars Nathan Fillion. Nathan Fillion was once on Desperate Housewives playing opposite Dana Delany. He was also the voice for Steve Trevor in the animated Wonder Woman telemovie.

Both Richard Burgi and Doug Savant appeared with Fillion in episodes of Firefly, which featured Gina Torres (who is woefully underused in TV land at present). Torres provided the voice for Superwoman in Justice League: Crisis on Two Earths and was Vixen in several episodes of the Justice League animated series.

Castellaneta was also recently on Bones, sharing screen time with David Boreanaz, who provides the voice of Green Lantern in Justice League: The New Frontier, starring alongside Kyle MacLachlan. That particular movie featured Lucy Lawless as the voice for Wonder Woman. Lawless has, to my knowledge, never been in Desperate Housewives - but she should be. Preferably in the same episode as Gina Torres and David Boreanaz.

Oh, for cryin' out loud!

Well I just experienced one of the most frustrating things ever.

Funny, before I bought a MacBook everyone was telling me how great Macs were for creative stuff. Apparently, you can make all kinds of things with one. It's got all sorts of toys you can use to make stuff like music clips and home movies and all that jazz. It just doesn't seem to come with the bog standard features that you get on any Windows machine.

There's no real analogue for WordPad, (heck, the text editor is barely an analogue for Text), it doesn't come with lovely distracting card games (okay, there's chess – but, what the?), iTunes won't let you do half the stuff Windows Media does (unless you pay for an upgrade) and, as I discovered to my horror today, there's no analogue for Paint.

This thing which is supposed to be the creative's best friend does not have a drawing programme included in the basic set-up. Come on, people, if Windows can do it, it can't be that hard!

Oh, I'm sure you can buy a wonderful program that can do that sort of stuff, but a) Mac programs are hideously expensive, so I've been avoiding them, and b) it's 21.30 and I don't feel like shopping – I just want to draw something.

“Okay,” she says, thinking laterally, “You've got Open Office installed on this thing in order to avoid paying for a word processor. There's a thingy called 'Draw' as part of that package – that must surely be an adequate work around.”

Yeah, not so much. As drawing tools go, OO's Draw is soooo much less useful than Paint that I became almost entirely convinced I'd have an easier time if I just picked up my hand-drawn copy and tried to force it into the machine using my amazing mental powers. Then, by the time I had finally created something that looked absolutely terrible compared to what I could have done with Paint, I discovered you can't actually save it as anything other than an Open Office Draw file. No jpg, no gif, no tif. Well, there was the option of pdf, but I wanted an image, not a document.

Were I using a windows machine I would say to myself: “No problem, I'll just get the whole thing on my screen, press “Print Screen” and paste it into something like Irfanview. Only, a) there's no physical way I can get the whole thing on the screen given the less than useful ratios provided by this model of MacBook, and b) there's no printscreen button, so I'd have to go through some stupid time-wasting screen capture rigmarole. Oh, and c) I don't have a program like Irfanview installed on this machine, and I can't be bothered doing it now.

Quite frankly, I'm over it.

Especially since I've already had my share of annoyingly fruitless activities this afternoon. Do you know how difficult it is to find the Estonian word for “square” (as in “draw a square using Paint”)? Not one of my dictionaries was willing to admit that in English usage the word “square” can be a noun. I finally found the word for “quadrangle” (“nelinurk”), but each dictionary would only give me the nominative form. I needed the genative to make the sentences I wanted. So then I went ploughing through a few vocabulary lists to see if I could find a word with a similar spelling structure so I could guess what the genetive form might be. That proved to be about as useful as a cheeseburger to a drowning elephant. There were about six different things to choose from and no guides in sight.

Stupid Estonian and its stupid case forms. Why can't they just use prepositions like the rest of us?

So, yeah, if any one responsible for deciding what programs are included in your basic MacBook set-up is reading this: Paint rules, and you could at least try to match it, you misers. And make it available for us poor mugs who already have MacBooks to download for free. It's the only way I'm going to stop whinging about this.

Cake

Everything we eat these days is basically cake.

No, I mean it - think about the ingredients you'd find in a packet cake mix from the fifties. Tada! That's the contents of most of the things in your pantry. And your fridge and freezer.

Okay, how good is your kitchen know-how? What are the basic ingredients of any stock-standard cake? Flour, milk, sugar, shortening and a pinch of salt. Eggs are nice, but you don't really need them.

Sausages are made of flour, milk, sugar, shortening and salt. So are chips/crisps with flavouring. That packet of pasta and sauce you were going to use with your steak tonight? Flour, milk, sugar, shortening and salt. That tin of condensed tomato soup? Flour, milk, sugar, shortening and salt.

The spaghetti you ate last night? Flour, milk, sugar, shortening and salt. The can of bolognese sauce you had with it? Flour, milk, sugar, shortening and salt.

It's all cake, my friends. It's just spaghetti bolognese flavoured cake.

Okay, sure, technically fruit isn't cake. But those "fruit bars" you buy in boxes of plastic wrapped portions? Those are cake. And maybe that piece of steak isn't cake - but those meatballs definitely are.

Oh, and those "breakfast shakes" they have for people who are too busy to eat cereal? Liquid cake. Speaking of cereal, most of that is cake, too.

"How can we avoid eating cake for every single meal?" I hear you ask, although I don't know why you bothered because we all know you don't care. I mean, heck, it's food. People are happiest when they are completely ignorant of what they're actually putting in their mouths.

No one says, "My, this hamburger is delicious - what's in the patty? Oh, and while we're at it, what's this bun made of?"*

The answers to such questions are not for the vast majority of you petty, squeamish humans who, for some reason, can happily eat any given food-stuff for years up until someone actually tells you what's in it. Then, suddenly, it's all "Oh, I can't eat that! It contains parts of animals I would rather pretend didn't exist!"

Well, get over it. And get over the cake thing, too.

The alternative is to make the food yourself. You know, start with the ingredients and mix them together? People used to do that, once. Back when they would know exactly what they put in their mouths, and were perfectly okay with that.

Of course, that's actually not a guarantee that you won't be eating cake for every meal. A lot of these things always were cake. Take sausages, for example. The basic pork sausage recipe your great-grandmother used involved flour, milk, sugar, shortening, salt, blood and assorted minced bits of whatever-was-left-of-the-pig. Possibly some whatever-was-left-of-the-cow as well. Heck, if they were short on pig bits, they probably just used the blood. And, depending on where they came from and what they could afford, maybe not the sugar. But still, sausage has always been animal flavoured cake (squeezed into something's intestines). Good stuff.

So really, once you start making your own food, you'll probably find yourself making a fair bit of cake-like things anyway.

So what's the problem?

Well, I guess the real problem isn't that we're eating so much cake, but that we're eating so much bad cake. Manufacturers really don't care what they serve you, so long as you don't sue them, so they'll use the cheapest (read: worst) ingredients they can get away with. So, it's not that great, as cake goes.

Plus, something like 150 people made that tin of tuna in seeded mustard mayonnaise** you're eating, and not a single one of them knows you or cares about you in the slightest. Why do you think I used the concept of a packet cake mix from the 1950s? No one quite did "let's just serve them whatever we have lying around" quite like food manufactures in the 50s. Except, maybe, food manufacturers in China ("Hey, you know what would increase our profits? Let's put less milk in the milk and replace it with something that looks white. No one will ever notice...")

Food manufacturers. Pfft. Just another bad idea to come out after the Industrial Revolution.

Anyway, where was I? Oh, yeah, cake.

You really need to think of anything you buy ready made as cake. That is, of course, no reason why you shouldn't buy it and eat it, as long as you are okay with the crappy cake-iness of it. But I think it is helpful to be aware of what you're eating, even if you then decide it's not a problem. Plus, it makes you less shocked and alarmed when you discover you have a wheat allergy and everything on the shelves has some kind of flour content. Of course it does - it's cake.

But, the main reason why you should recognise and understand that the bowl of cereal you were thinking of having for breakfast is actually really bad cake is simple: you can make yourself a chocolate cake out of quality ingredients and know that you are actually eating something no worse than the "real food" - in fact, most probably much better!

That's right, ladies and gentlemen, Bill Cosby was right - chocolate cake is a perfectly acceptable breakfast food. Probably just as acceptable for lunch and dinner. It's certainly no worse than half the other stuff you shove into your mouths for these meals.

This knowledge is my gift to you. Enjoy.


*That would be cake, and cake
**Also cake

Postage

Apparently I'm not writing posts with sufficient regularity to keep my aunt from boredom. Personally, I think that's a sign she needs to read more comics. I have links to a couple of my favourite webcomics on this blog (although Little Dee is sadly over, you can still read the entire archive), and there are plenty of decent newspaper strips available online as well.

Plus, you have the added bonus of reading something that's, frankly, much more coherent than most of my conversations.

Comics. They're good for what ails ya.

Little Dee is Done

Little Dee is over. All good things must come to an end, I suppose.

There's going to be a gaping hole in my iGoogle page, though.

Dialogue

I have come to the conclusion that the people who write dialogue for language textbooks are either drunk or suffering from some sort of acquired brain injury.

Okay, so repetition is meant to help solidify concepts and give you a better chance of remembering the vocabulary. I accept that, and I can understand why "practice dialogue" would use the same words a couple of times. But, honestly, this sort of exchange is just ridiculous:

"I live in the country. My family also lives in the country. My mother and father live in the country, and my sister and brother live in the country."
"I also live in the country. I was born in the country. My family also lives in the country. My mother lives in the country, and my father also lives in the country."

This in an actual example of a conversation in a language book I've been working through lately, only translated into English and with a few lines removed. Believe it or not, the conversation went on to further explain how the participants' families did, indeed, live in the country.

The first couple of sentences may have been an interesting challenge, the rest is a) a waste of words, and b) practically screaming: "look at me! I'm pedagogical dialogue that will never be encountered in real life!"

Under what circumstances would two people actually engage in such a conversation? Where would you find two people who are so uncertain about whether their conversation partner understands what is meant by "my family lives in the country" that they would go to great lengths to explain how each individual member of their families lives in the country?

At which point does someone turn around and shout: "I don't care! Go away!"

Or, to enter into the spirit of things:

"I don't care. My family doesn't care. My father doesn't care and my mother also doesn't care. My sister and my brother do not care. I'm reasonably certain my cat and dog do not care, either. Now please go away."

Something vaguely resembling a realistic conversation. That's all I'm asking for, people.

Aino Chapter 4 - We Sneak Behind the Iron Curtain

So, I noticed I'd let it go four weeks since I last posted a chapter of Aino.

Sadly, no one else noticed and nagged me, which means my brilliant plan of getting you lot to act as my deadline enforcers may not be working.

I'm trying to convince myself it's because two-weeks is too long for short attention spans, and not because you don't care.

You know, back in the Victorian period there was a whole month between chapters for serialised novels.

Crazy stuff, eh?

Anyway, the latest chapter of Aino is here: Chapter Four - We Sneak Behind the Iron Curtain

In this chapter, we find out what our Narrator thinks of van Havien's idea. Something else might happen, too. Perhaps involving teeth.

Mul on Ananass

In what is quite possibly a hideously ill-conceived idea, I've created yet another blog. Sort of.

I've decided that, if I'm going to make any real progress with learning Estonian, I'd better start trying to use the language for something. Since I'm not yet up to paragraphs, I thought I'd better stick with sentences.

How do you make a sentence worth reading? Stick it in a picture.

Thus Mul on ananass exists. Although, perhaps, it shouldn't.

Let's have someone who can't draw create a comic in a language they barely know. Doesn't that sound brilliant?

If you're lucky, I might start mixing some German in there, too. Just to make sure no one can ever understand anything.