Nothing Special?

"It doesn't really feel like Christmas, this year, does it?"

I've heard that from a few quarters.  I've heard a few different reasons for behind the lack of festive feelings, too:

• It's not the same without small children
• We've all been so busy, it's just kind of snuck up on us
• It's become such a bother - so much to *do* and not really much fun...

The last time I felt really Christmassy was a few years ago when I decided to make all of the decorations myself, out of paper.  It was back when my grandmother was still at home, and my mother and I were living with her to take care of her.

I don't know why I came up with the idea, I just felt I needed to actively do something for Christmas.  That, and all of the traditions we used to have when our family was bigger than four people (the youngest of which being 29 or 30) had pretty much atrophied and died.

We no longer "all got together" for Christmas - we were "all together" more or less full time.  My uncle was the only one who had to come over - and he came over three or four days a week, anyway.

We used to get dressed up and go out for Christmas lunch, and then come back to my grandmother's house for Christmas dinner.  Now, we just ate lunch at home, stayed there and ate the exact same food for dinner (and then ate it again the next day, because we don't eat much, but we still have enough food to feed a family of ten).

My grandmother used to make Christmas themed food for most of December - shortbread, fruitcake, that sort of thing.  She wasn't up to cooking any more, and my mother and I were both so busy with work and things that neither of us really remembered to do simple things like baking.

And, then, the food we did eat?  Well, apart from the prawns, there was nothing we couldn't or didn't get any time during the year, if we felt like it.  Heck, we could get the prawns whenever we wanted, too, we just didn't.

So, I thought I'd make a new tradition.  A tradition where we took the time to make things for Christmas.  I encouraged everyone to join in with me, bought enough coloured paper for us to deck out the whole place and found some easy designs to make (paper chains, paper angels, paper snowflakes, paper baubles, paper water-balloons-that-could-be-baubles...).

My family did not take to the idea.  In fact, my mother and grandmother both acted like I was somehow insulting them.  Not only did they not try to join in, they also both glared at me for asking them to.  Oh, and they steadfastly insisted on decorating the house with the plastic baubles and tinsel that they already had in the Christmas decorations box, and made it clear that *my* paper decorations were just silly, thank-you-very-much, but we'll include them anyway to make you happy.

Apparently, in my house, things should only be handmade by small children.  In the absence of small children, they need to come from a store and be shiny.  Actually, I think it had more to do with my family's inbuilt hatred of anything that seems fake.  They probably thought the idea of imposing a "new tradition" was tacky.

I didn't try it again next year, which was a bit of a pity because I really enjoyed it.

It was something that I just didn't do every other day of the year.  It was pretty pathetic (I'm about as dexterous as a trout), and quite frankly a small child might have done just as well... but it was still me going out of my way to make an effort to celebrate something.

I think that's what has been missing from most of my Christmasses.  I don't know about yours.  The lack of a special effort.

I don't feel very festive, because I turn around one week before Christmas and say:  "hey, it's Christmas - I should do something..."  and then I throw something together that takes no real time or effort on my part, is only there for a week and then gets thrown back into the box.

I don't make or find or do anything special for Christmas - and I don't look forward to seeing the effect of things I make or find or do.  We just go through the motions and get it over with.  Even the gifts we buy seem more like a chore than anything else:  "Oh, gawd, Christmas is coming.  What do you even want for a gift?"  "I have no idea".

So, this is my theory on why Christmas doesn't feel special or festive any more:

I'm doing it wrong.

Angela Harding

Discovered a new artist today, courtesy of Slightly Foxed:

Angela Harding.  She does this sort of thing:

Which seems pretty darn awesome to me.

Van

You know how, occasionally, you get to certain points of your life and want a thing?  Like getting to age X and thinking "why don't I have a house?"  Or age Y and thinking "Damn it, I forgot to secure a family to take care of me in my old age!"

I've been feeling a need to stave of my impending mortality by buying a new car.  I've never owned a new car.  Every car I've had has either been on loan, an ancient hand-me-down or a second-hand car that was at least eight-years old when I bought it.

My current car is actually my mother's old car.  When she bought a new one we used my car (which was older than hers) as a trade-in, and I inherited hers.  Technically, it still belongs to her - we never bothered transferring anything into my name.  I don't actually own anything at all.

Now, maybe my complete lack of property is a good thing - it fits in with my desire to be a stateless nomad.  It doesn't fit in with my desire to pack my life up into the back of my combi van in order to be that stateless nomad.

It also doesn't fit in with my desire to own a large farmhouse where I can raise six kids on a diet of fresh apple pie and make jam and vinegar for the local markets - but then again nothing in my real life does.  I'm not entirely convinced that's even my dream.  I think I borrowed it from a version of myself from an alternate reality.

Anyway, over the years I have often felt a desire to at least own a new car for a little while.  I know the car will age, but it seems as though it would be nice to have a brand-new car at least once.  However, I keep meeting some strange resistance on this front.

I have this conversation with my family on a semi-regular basis that goes a little like this:

Me:  I'm thinking of buying a new car.
Them:  You don't need one yet.  Drive the car you have into the ground a bit more, first.
Me:  I'm thinking of fixing up the car I currently have.
Them:  Why bother?  It's so old it's not worth repairing.

Which, to my mind, translates as:  "you don't deserve nice things.  Keep your bomb and be happy about it."

But, you get that.

Anyway, due to the fact that things have been slowly disintegrating on my mother's old car, I'm slowly convincing my family that they don't need to keep talking me out of buying a new one.  The fact that every single other member of my immediate family has bought a new car over the past few years might also have something to do with it.

So, now the conversation has taken a similar, but more peculiar turn.  I am at a point in my life where I want boot space.  I don't want to scale down from the station wagon I'm currently driving - I want to scale up.  A ute would be nice - a van would be better.

Utes and vans aren't cheap.  They also aren't what my family have in mind.  Both my mother and uncle bought smaller cars when they upgraded, and they don't quite understand why I would want a larger one.  My uncle knows a thing or two about cars, and I keep asking him what he thinks about Ute A or Van B - to which he answers "why don't you just get a hatchback and learn to tow a trailer?"

It seems vans and utes cost money (duh), and are expensive to run (duh, again) and come with all sorts of features that don't interest him at all (I can live with that).

I think he's starting to finally take me seriously, though, and give me some real advice about the kind of cars I actually want to own.  You never know - by the time I can actually afford one of these things, my family may have finally made peace with the fact that I want it.

English was my first love...

...but will it be my last?  English of the future, or English of the past?

I've noticed, lately, that I've been dismissive of English.  I've been having such an interesting time exploring other languages that I've fallen into the trap of seeing the baggage of English rather than the magic of it.

There was a time when I was spell-bound by the linguistic possibilities that English could offer - and the intricacies of the language throughout time.  I studied Old English, Middle English and Jacobean English at university and loved every minute of it.  I loved the poetry of the language itself, but also the joy of the literature.  Plays, poetry, novels...  I revelled in the written word of my native language.  I used to write sonnets just for the pleasure of playing with the rhythms and structures of the language.

I seem to have left that somewhere.

When I started learning German I was excited by what it could teach me about English - English is a Germanic language, after all.  Then I started to get enough of a grip on German and Estonian that I began to see the poetry in those languages, and I'm so hungry for these shiny new words that I've forgotten the joy I used to find in my own.

Also, I'm so caught up in the global language debate that I tend to see English as something holding people back, rather than a source of wonder and poetry.  I feel so strongly that everyone should try to learn another language, that I've almost begun to hate the English language purely for its hegemony.  It's such a shame that people who speak English don't feel the need or desire to learn anything else - and such a shame that most speakers of other languages see learning English as the best use of their time.

Granted, anything is better than having French as the international language (that has to be the worst spelling system known to man), but I don't think English should be the ultimate lingua franca of the world.  I don't think it's good for native English speakers - it makes us lazy and gives us a sense of cultural superiority that we don't deserve.

But...

But I used to love English.  I used to love exploring the nooks and crannies of the language - the ebb and flow of the grammar, the endless possibilities and nuances of the vocabulary.  I used to cherish the way a word like "cherish" could add a completely different colour to a sentence than, say, "adore".  I used to love seeing how we gathered together words from all over the world and piled them up in an almost reckless order, like a bowerbird gathering shiny things for his bower.

I loved the way you can say "a gaggle of school girls" to evoke a mental comparison between school girls and geese.

Evoke.  Such a beautiful word.

I guess I still love English, but I've stopped appreciating it.

I have finally decided to take the TESOL subjects for my Master of Applied Linguistics next year.  It took me a while to make up my mind.  I knew that, with my background as an English teacher and my recent acquisition of a Graduate Certificate in Tertiary Teaching, the TESOL subjects would be useful, logical and relevant.  I could probably get a job anywhere in the world teaching English...

But I wanted to play with different toys.  For some reason, even though all of the projects I want to do for a PhD could easily be done from a TESOL perspective (and the TESOL subjects would be useful grounding for that), I wanted to look at them from different angles.  Two years ago I would have jumped at the chance to learn about TESOL, but right now the idea of teaching English almost bores me.

Language is such a big, big pie, and English is just one slice of it.  A rather large slice, but only one slice none-the-less.  Yet I will never know another language as well as I know English.  And at the end of my days, when all my knowledge bleeds away, I will have Shakespeare and Yeats long after Liiv and Goethe have gone to dust.

And that's okay.

Skellig decoded

So, for those of you who just sighed at the sight of a post in poorly written German, allow me to elaborate on the last entry.

Skellig is a book by David Arnold.  I had seen the telemovie a few months back and I thought I should probably read the book at some point... but then I simply forgot it existed.  About a week ago on of my friends mentioned it on Facebook as a highlight of a recent reading club thing, so I decided to borrow the copy in my library and read it myself.

It was a really good book.  I can thoroughly recommend it - especially to people looking for something a young teenage boy wouldn't completely hate (but isn't full of bum-jokes or "warriors of the whatever").  It's something I consider a good stretching book in that it half straddles a few different genres, so it can move you out of reading the same thing all the time.  It's a little bit fantasy, and little bit family drama, a little bit kids-own-adventure.  Once upon a time it would have been classified as "fantasy", but these days I guess it would be "speculative fiction".

The lead character, Michael, narrates the story, which takes place over a few days in his life.  His family has just moved house to a complete wreck of a place.  The previous owner was too old and infirm to take care of the house (he basically moved into one room on the ground floor in the end - even having a toilet installed), and the place needs a lot of repair work in order to get it ready for the new baby...

Except the baby came early.  Too early.  Everyone is trying to fix the house and worry about the baby at the same time.  Michael feels incredibly out of sorts.  He isn't sure what he should or could be doing, and he's worried that the baby might die.  He isn't worried without reason - the baby really might die.  He hopes he can make her better just by thinking about her - and getting other people to think about her as well.  Even the weird man he found in his shed.

There's a weird man in the shed.  He's just huddled in the back corner, behind piles of junk stored by the previous owner, apparently living off bugs, mice and the occasional Chinese takeaway   He's grumpy, crotchety, stiff with arthritis and waiting to die.   This distresses Michael no end, as he doesn't particularly want anyone in his house to die - even the weird people his parents don't know about.

Speaking of weird people, Michael's new neighbour, Mina, is the kind of girl who would no doubt be the weirdest kid in the school - if she actually went to school.  She's home-schooled, which perplexes Michael initially, but then turns out to be very useful.  She helps Michael get the strange man out of the shed (which is very unsound and might collapse at any moment), and in the process they discover something quite remarkable.

Let's just say the strange man might definitely be strange, but he might not necessarily be a man.

The book consists of very short chapters (most only two pages long), which are quite easy to breeze through.  It's the sort of book where you just want to read "one more chapter" before you put it down.  It gets oddly hypnotic, in places, but vocabulary is, by and large, true to the character.  It sounds like something a "Nothern" boy might say.  I'm not sure exactly where the book is set, but it seems to be somewhere in the North-East of England.  I'm also not sure exactly what age Michael is, but I'd say somewhere between 9 and 12.

One of the things I really liked about the book was the relationship between Michael and his father.  They clearly love each other very much and get along quite well.  There are a few fights and scuffles, but you always get the sense that Michael can see that his father cares about him and is concerned about him.  It makes a pleasant change from the kids' books where the parents are the obtuse people who are getting in the way, or the jerks who just don't understand.

Now, I obviously didn't say all of this in my last post, but I did, at least, say this:

"It was very good, and quite interesting"

Practice German Journal: Skellig

Ich habe das Buch Skellig von David Almond gelesen.  Es war sehr gut und ganz interessant.  Der Held des Buch (auch der Icherzähler) ist ein Junge, der Michael heisst.  Seine Familie hat eines neues Haus gekauft, und Michael ist nicht froh.  Das Haus is alt und heruntergekommen - es braucht viel reparieren.  Aber, das ist nicht warum Michael nicht froh ist.  

Michael ist nicht froh weil seine kleine Schwester sehr krank ist.  Sie war zu früh geboren.  Sie ist sehr klein und sehr schwach.  Er ist besorgt wegen sie.

Aber...  Etwas seltsam ist in seine Garage.  Ein Mensch?  Ein Mann?  Eine Kreatur?

Ein Engel?

Mit seine neue Freundin, Mina, helfe Michael der Mann.  Michael und Mina finden etwas erstaunlich, und lernen viel.

Michael ist eines sympathisch Charakter.  Er scheint meistens realistisch - jedoch manchmal ganz unwahrscheinlich.

Die kurzer Kapitels des Buch gefällt mir.  Das Buch war sehr einfach zu lesen. Ich fand es schwer zu anzuhalten.  Ich empfehle dieses Buch Ihnen.  Es war gut.

Cheese smuggling!

Something to warm the heart of every Thursday Next fan:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-19751695

The journal

Every now and then I realise I haven't been following my own advice.  I was flicking through George Kutash's book on learning skills for language learners (very late-80s/early-90s, but still worth a look) when I came across a chapter where he talks about replacing action with substitute action (or something like that - the book is in my house, this computer is in my office).

He talks about how we frequently focus on the tasks we're good at to act as a substitute for the tasks we actually need to work on.

It's something I do far too often.  I will often do something where I can see quick and obvious improvement instead of taking the time to work on something harder and slower going.

It's also very similar to one of the study skills techniques I often recommend to my students:  the "what am I avoiding" question.  At some point, you will notice that you are actively avoiding doing a particular task.  That's the task at which you are probably weakest, and the one that probably needs to be directly addressed.

For me, it's writing (well, producing).  I'll happily read another grammar rule to avoid actually producing a sentence.  Seems strange, given that I would probably write underwater if I felt the urge...

...which is probably the reason why I avoid doing it in my target languages.  Because I don't have the skill to write the kinds of things I usually write, it doesn't feel enjoyable to me.  I have to rethink and "simplify" everything I want to say to the point where it isn't what I want to say anymore.

I had plans to write a journal in both languages, and I let it all go while I distracted myself with reading other things instead.

It's time to face the music and dance, though.  Yes, I will write poorly.  Yes, I will get the sentence structure wrong.  Very, very wrong.  Yes, I will struggle to find the right vocabulary (especially since I really should stop looking things up in Google - it's not a good habit to get into).

And, yes, I will occasionally post my ugly, ugly journal entries on this blog.  I see no reason why I should suffer alone.

Maybe I am - just a little

Learning Esperanto, that is.

I really shouldn't.  I'm wasting valuable time that I could be spending on revising and shoring up my German and Estonian.  But...

But it's like a cross between a language, a game and a cult.  It's just so much fun to play with.

And, apparently, I *am* the average Esperanto speaker.  I read a blog post that listed the following people as the folk who are most likely to learn Esperanto:

• Travellers
• Geeks
• Language Lovers
• Vegetarians/Vegans

Now, I'm pretty sure those are meant to be separate categories, but the only description I don't match is vegetarian... and I have a habit of ordering vegetarian meals at restaurants anyway.

So, apparently it's fate.  Nothing for it - I'm going to have to learn Esperanto.

And the word of the day is...

...dubitative

It means means using a modal verb that indicates "showing doubt about whether an event will occur" (LING550 lecture notes): You might make it on time

The other modals also have fun words:

Obligative = must (you must pay the rent)
Permissive = may (you may be excused)
Abilitative = can (but I can't pay the rent!)

In prescriptive grammar, "can" would always be abilitative, I suppose, but in descriptive grammar "can" can be used for permissive moods

Hey, wait a minute... "I'll pay the rent!"

Were does something like shall/will come into this?  That's not in my notes...

The Ultimate Solution

Of course, if you really want to avoid the problem of having to fend of vampires from the unreliable safety of a vampire-proof bunker that's bound to fail eventually, you could just jump the cue and become a vampire earlier in the piece.  No messy, being-pulled-to-pieces-by-vampiric-hoards scenes, that way.

Ever since I read Matheson's I Am Legend, I've found the movie adaptations a bit, well, wimpy.  They completely chicken out on the ending.  Both The Omega Man with Charlton Heston and I am Legend with Will Smith insist on bringing in a real live human girl (forgive the spoilers, but I can assure you there ain't no human girl in the book) and a promise of an enclave of human survivors.  Neville's great contribution to the world is helping humanity.

Pfft!

In the book, it turns out that he's pretty much the last man standing - and he had the situation all wrong.  He wasn't a lone human holding out against mindless monsters that were trying to eat him (although they kind of were trying to eat him); he was a scary serial killer murdering innocent vampires in their sleep.

In the book, everyone who survived the plague became a vampire.  Everyone.  Neville was really the only exception (that we know of).  What was left of society went a little crazy for a short time (well, wouldn't you if you had died and suddenly everyone was a vampire - including you?), and then they got over it.

It's such a brilliantly simple idea.  If everyone is a vampire, then vampires are the normal people.  You get over it and get on with it.  You form yourself a nice little vampiric society where you don't have to worry about being attacked by the vampires.  The only thing you have to worry about is the occasional human serial killer who goes around staking vampires in their sleep.

But those Hollywood types do like to hold out hope for humanity...

Things to keep you awake at night

You know, it's no wonder I have difficulty getting to sleep most nights.  I have so many deeply important things to think about and worry over.

Why, take last night, for example.  I was lying in bed for a good hour, wondering how one could convince Australian primary schools to teach Esperanto in years 4, 5 and 6 (I now have a plan - but I'm not sure why), and then I spent some time thinking about the perfect vampire-proof bunker.

These things are important, and it's a good idea to think about them ahead of time.  You don't want to be stuck in a vampire or zombie infested dystopian town without a good plan for how to hunker down and survive the inevitable attacking hoards.

Granted, the odds that I'll actually find myself as the protagonist of an I Am Legend type situation are slim, but you can never be too careful.

Obviously, you want to avoid any of the horror movie cliches that would be involved in using a traditional bunker or storm cellar.  Eventually, if you have a bolt-hole that's naturally dark, you will come home at the wrong time to find something lurking in the dark.  Vampires like dark places, and therefore have the natural advantage.

No, you want it to be full of natural light - so, above ground, away from trees and things that can cast shadows, and plenty of windows.  At the same time, you don't want the windows to be the weak point of the design.  Strong (thick steel) walls and roof with a lot of thin windows and skylights consisting of thick glass bricks should do the trick.  It probably wouldn't hurt to have a couple of spots where you could pull back a small section of steel wall and use it as a gun sight for a rifle or a flame thrower.  It just needs to be too small to fit a hand through.

There would need to be plenty of ventilation that could be quickly sealed off - both electronically and by hand.  Redundant methods of everything.  That's always the weakest point in any plan - relying on only one way to do anything.  If the ventilation can only be closed electronically, and the vampires think of trying something when the generator is off-line...

It's probably an idea if you don't rely too much on a generator, anyway.  There's got to be a way you can keep a stock of batteries charged, and have enough firewood and tinder to keep things lit even without power.  Using fire would create smoke, though, which could blacken the windows.  Better make sure everything is easy to clean.

Still on the concept of ventilation, it would probably help to have some stores of oxygen in the bunker - as long as you understood that they would, of course, eventually explode, and made sure they were positioned so that any explosion would cause more harm to the vampires than to you.

I think a few bolt-holes within the bolt-holes wouldn't be bad for business, either.  A number of holes in the ground with skylights (and mirrors to amplify whatever natural light can get in) - each equipped with water, sugar and battery-powered sunlamps.  If the vampires manage to get into the bunker you can jump down the nearest hole and seal the trap-door.  Then, it would be handy if you had a number of methods for torching everything above ground.  Mind you, if you have designed the bunker well enough in terms of picking up natural light, you really only have to wait until morning (as long as you are definitely fighting vampires, rather than zombies)...

Still, redundancies are always the way to go.

So, it would be useful if you had more than one door into the bunker (and perhaps a tunnel) as long as you understood that each door (and definitely the tunnel) could be the weak point that dooms you to vampire lunch, and prepared accordingly with redundant methods of killing anything that gets through any entrance (understanding, of course, that they could be used against you - or result in a terribly unfortunate accident).

It would also be handy if you had a way to tell if anyone was already in the bunker before you opened any of the doors.  A lack of interior walls would be good, but at the same time it might not be a bad idea to have a series of heavy-duty tables that could be overturned to make "emergency walls" when necessary for shooting things from behind a low wall.

The point is to always assume everything will fail, and have a number of alternatives available.

Then your biggest concern will always be making sure you get back before dark...

I am *so* not learning...

...Esperanto.

Esperanto has taken over from Italian as the language I'm not really learning, but occasionally allowing myself to be distracted by.

I found Italian strangely alluring right up to the point where I went to Italy.  Now I find I'm over it.  It seems as though all of my vague and ill defined reasons for being interested in Italian have been trumped by "yeah, but Italy kind of sucks".

Maybe I'll come back to it one day through my love of English (once I rekindle it).  It is one of the close cousins of the English language - both languages having Latin as an ancestor.  I have a feeling I'll get around to revisiting French first, though.

Right now, though, Esperanto seems more interesting - and a lot easier.  It's sliding into my head in a way I find strangely appealing, but also slightly alarming.  After reading over a basic grammar key, I can remember not only what "kio estas tio" means, but also why it means that - I'm parsing sentences much more easily than in the early days of German or Estonian.

Actually, I think it would be exceptionally interesting to compare Estonian and Esperanto.  Estonian is complicated and difficult (and the Estonians seem almost proud of that), while Esperanto is simplified and straightforward (and the Esperantists are definitely proud of that), but I've noticed a lot of similarities.

The whole building-blocks approach that Esperanto has seems very Finno-Ugric to me - and there's even a similarity in some of the vocabulary.

Take the question "Do you love me?" for example.

In Estonian it is "Kas sa armastad mind?" and in Esperanto it's "Ĉu vi amas min?"

Now, both "Kas" and "Ĉu" have exactly the same function - they just flag the rest of the sentence as a yes-or-no question.  It's a catch-all for the way we start questions with certain verbs ("do you", "are you", "does he", "is she", "did they", etc).

"Sa" and "vi" ("you") are the subjects of the sentence, so they have no endings.  If they were the objects, they would be "sind" and "vin" respectively.  "Mind" and "min" ("me") are the objects.  If they were the subjects, they would be "ma" and "mi" respectively.

"Armastad" and "amas" ("love") are both constructed by putting specific endings on the root of the verb ("armasta" in Estonian, "am" in Esperanto).  The "d" in "armastad" signifies that it is present tense - which is exactly what the "as" signifies in "amas" (the "d" also signifies that it is performed by "you", which is a distinction that doesn't exist in Esperanto - but that's another story).

If I were to push the sentence into the past tense, I'd add an "s" and an "i" (not necessarily in the same order) into the verbs in both.  "Armastad" would become "armastasid".  "Amas" would become "amis".

All of which leads me to attempt to write a short poem in both languages:

Kas sa armastasid mind?
Kas ma armastan sind?
Kus meie oleme, nüüd?
Ja, siit,
Kuhu?


Ĉu vi amis min?
Ĉu mi amas vin?
Kie ni estas, nun?
Kaj, de tie ĉi,
Kie?



(Actually, I suspect I should have written "ĉi tiam" instead of "nun" - but I've probably made a heck of a lot of other mistakes as well.  At least one of which being crappy poetry...)

The Numbers Game

There is something weird in our collective psyche that seems to think quantity counts.  Deep down, on a fundamental level, we equate value with numbers.

Take juggling, for example.  If you tell someone you juggle, and they are not jugglers themselves, one of the first questions you will be asked is "how many balls can you juggle?"

Not "do you juggle knives?" or "how long can you go without dropping them?" (and certainly not "contact or toss juggling?" - because only other jugglers ask that).  No, all they care about is "how many?".

Now numbers juggling can be interesting to watch, but so often the routine just devolves into keeping the balls moving, rather than trying to move them in an interesting way.  Personally, I prefer to watch the routines which involve juggling smaller numbers of props but with a wider range of interesting manoeuvres.  I once heard someone say that the mark of a good juggler was what they could do with three balls.  I think there's a lot to that.

It's the same question, regardless of what you seem to be talking about.  Always "how many?"

"How many books has he written?"

"How many times has the article been cited?"

"How many downloads has it had?"

"How many tickets were sold?"

"How many native speakers does the language have?"

I think the biggest problem with the numbers game does not come from confusing the value of quantity with the importance of quality; I think it comes from the slow death that is often inflicted on things with low numbers.

High citations beget high citations (whether the content is worth it or otherwise), but articles without high citations are often overlooked in favour of their highly cited cousins - and many people won't even bother looking at them.  It's possible they will never be cited again.

Languages with low numbers of speakers will dwindle and die, as everyone makes the decision "what language shall I learn?" based on the answer to the question "how many people speak it?"

As we make decisions based on numbers, we condemn things to obscurity, rather than just "poor numbers".

It's better to have low numbers than none at all...

Posting on the Other Blog

Sometimes I don't know which of my blogs a post rightly belongs in, but I've recently spun out something a bit long and vaguely scholarly, which I thought wouldn't be embarrassing on my other blog.  So it's over there:

http://thesharonb.blogspot.com.au/2012/11/a-fantastic-language.html

Borrowed energy

I'm currently running on borrowed energy.  Sadly, I'm actually borrowing it from 2010 - specifically the 2010 Oslo Eurovision Song Contest.

I decided, in a weak moment, to buy the Eurovision albums from 2010 and 2011, seeing as I've been using the 2012 album to keep conscious for the past few months, and am starting to worry about the fact that I think I'm beginning to understand the lyrics from the Italian entry (whadaya mean it was in English?  That doesn't seem right...)

The 2011 album was unavailable through the shop I used, and they cancelled my order, but I've been listening to 2010 for the past few days.  If I start muttering "Allez allez allez" in the middle of otherwise normal conversations, or talking about the blue underwear I bought just the other day, you'll know why.

It was actually much better than I remembered.  Mind you, this is coming from someone who is using Europop to stay awake.

I haven't been able to think coherently for more than a few minutes at a time for a while now.  The music helps.  Well, it helps with the task at hand - it's not quite capable of making me remember the other things I have floating around on my lists of things to do.

I have no good reason for being so out of it.  I'm just tired.  I live most of my days backwards, waking up feeling exhausted and then beginning to perk up and get things done just as I should be thinking about going to sleep - and then I hit a point where I know I'm definitely over-tired and I should have gone to sleep hours ago, but for some reason I'm still doing something else.

I'm not alone in this - there are others who have it worse, so I really have nothing to whinge about.  I'm just feeling the effects of what amounts to self-inflicted exhaustion.  I do get at least 5 hours' sleep most nights, so I actually have it pretty sweet for an insomniac.

But I'm tired.  I'm physically tired, and only seem to wake up when I'm moving (and finding it harder every day to actually start moving).  And I'm mentally tired and only seem to be able to keep going when there is some sort of rhythm feeding through my ears.  And I feel tired on a deeper level - I'm tired of trying to figure out what I want from life and coming up empty every single time.  I thought I knew what I wanted earlier in the year, but now I'm back in limbo.  I'm so tired of being in limbo.

And I'm completely resigned to being tired.  When I was younger I used to have these one-sided arguments with God, asking him what stupid lesson I was supposed to learn and why he hated me so much ("for he grants sleep to those he loves" Ps 127:2).  But these days I'm like, "Eh, God hates me.  Whatever."

I spend so much time in this place where nothing moves that I've stopped expecting movement.  I've spent so much time in this place where all I feel is "tired" that I've stopped expecting to feel anything else.

I suppose that sounds depressing.  It doesn't feel depressing.  I've been depressed so I know what depressing feels like, and this isn't it.  I feel happy enough, cheerful on most occasions, just tired and washed out.

So I whistle a happy tune, and it keeps me upright.  I remind myself to keep functioning, and I keep functioning.  I'm just running on music until I can find some reserves.  I must have some somewhere...

And they went to sea in a sieve

There are days when I feel like my brain could
If it wanted to
I suppose
Although I must admit that it doesn't
Not really
Not often
And very rarely does it make any
Although,
It must be said
That I never really
And that's what I've been
Kind of
All at sea in a sieve...
One day I'll remember to sleep

Everything done is a minor victory
Everything not done is my own damn fault
I have no one to blame but myself
That I'm all at sea in a sieve

I know what I do and I know what I should
And if only I'd listen to me, I'd be good
But all of it ends in a heap at my feet
And I'm all at sea in a sieve

And I'm all at sea in a sieve, my dear
I'm all at sea in sieve.
And in the end it's my own damn fault
That I'm all at sea in a sieve...

We all got problems

There are days I call "Squid days".  Days where I walk into a room to do one task, and find myself thinking:  

"Before I can do this, I need to that, but I can't do that until after I've finished the other thing... and while I'm thinking of it I should really get this fourth thing out of the way or it's going to be a problem later... oh, but I needed to do this before I could finish that... and I should do this other thing instead because it's a quick job and I can get it out of the way..."

And, before I know it, I've wasted the last 10 minutes reading a piece of paper I was going to throw out, and I can't remember what I had come into the room to do...

These are days when I think of the Wondermark comic above, and wonder how long it's going to be before the whole building is just rubble.

Don't Eat the Crab in Shanghai

I saw the most horrifying thing on TV the other night.  I was so disturbed I actually lept off the chair and lunged for the off-switch on the TV itself, because I knew changing the channel on that particular TV set would take too long and I wanted it gone.  I couldn't bear to see one more image and I wanted it gone.

It was a cooking show.

I came into it part way through, so I'm a bit hazy on the details.  It was, I think, Singaporean, and involved a TV chef from Singapore doing the whole "chef on tour" thing in Shanghai.  When I came into the show he was buying crabs in a local market and talking about one of his favourite crab dishes, which is made with lots of chili.

We then went to the restaurant kitchen of a local chef and watched him (the local chef) prepare the meal.  He prized the top shell off the crab and started scrubbing the exposed muscles with a stiff brush under running water to clean it.  So far, not too horrific, right?

Then the TV chef asked him why it was so important that the crab should be alive while he was cleaning it...

And suddenly I realised what they were doing.  They had ripped the shell (skin and backbone combined) off a live crab and were in the process of brutally torturing it - quite without care or remorse - all because they think it has better texture if it is "cleaned" this way.

I couldn't stand to watch it for one more second.

Every day of the week, we do a hundred thousand horrible, painful things to the creatures with whom we share this planet.  We do it because we are big and clumsy and not paying attention.  You can't walk through this earth without causing death and pain.

However, we should never - NEVER - cause avoidable pain and suffering to another living being just because it tastes better.

It is reprehensible and wrong, and whatever gods you believe in will surely punish you for that.  The more extreme the pain, and the more avoidable it is, the more you deserve a slow and painful retribution.

When I visited Hong Kong I thought the way the Chinese kept live animals in their markets (the cramped, dirty cages with chickens that were clearly freaking out; the shallow Styrofoam boxes containing a few inches of water that didn't quite cover the gasping fish...) was an absolute disgrace . This was just...  Unspeakably wrong.

You don't flay something alive.  You don't rake stiff brushes over living, exposed muscles.  Surely anyone could see that was cruel and wrong?  What is wrong with these people that they think this is okay?

If you want to eat something, you catch it and then you kill it as quickly and humanely as you can.  Otherwise every second of torture that animal experiences is one that makes you more of a monster.

I have a feeling I'll be going vegetarian if I ever go back to Asia.


For the record, I'm not a big fan of a lot of Australian practices when it comes to food production, either.  Live exports are not good for the animals, or for your soul.  Battery farming is very bad.

I think every culture in the world would greatly benefit from a decision to cause less pain.

Things that must exist

I have a theory that some things must exist.  The universe will keep shopping the idea around until it finds someone who actually follows through.

I base this theory on the fact that I'll often have an idea for something that I think would be pretty neat, and then about five years later someone goes and produces it.

Take this, for example:  http://zike.net/products.html

For years I've been thinking about combining a scooter with an old treadle-powered velocipede.

No, seriously.

Years ago I read about the treadle bicycles - a stage between the foot-pushing-against-the-ground draisine and the direct drive pedals of the boneshaker, and I thought it had potential as something to come back. Not as a bicycle, obviously, because it's kind of daft - but perhaps as a variation of a scooter...

It was, after all, not far removed from some popular exercise contraptions I'd seen in gyms.

If you look at my note books from a few years ago you'll probably find drawings and scribblings of something based around the idea of a pair of 20inch wheels propelled by something like a sewing machine treadle.

My idea was less chunky than the execution the zike people have come up with, and involved something more akin to the articulated arm thing of 19th Century treadles than the stair-master thing they have going, but the basic concept is more or less the same.  My treadles probably wouldn't have supported much weight, anyway.

When I saw one in the toy shop this morning part of me said "Oh, darn, someone's beaten me to it..."  but then I realised it was a bit daft for the universe to give me this idea in the first place.  I'm not an engineer - I don't know anyone who is, and I have absolutely zero back-yard inventor skills.

I can think things out, but I can't commit to buying stuff that I can use for tinkering or building up the skills necessary to make things stick together in a useful manner.  I've tried it in the past and I end up with a collection of useless things.  I spend about a fifty bucks on a project that probably needs about three hundred bucks worth of bits and bobs (and better quality bits and bobs than I'm willing to pay for), then spot the error of my ways and distract myself with something more cerebral - like learning German.

So, it's not surprising at all that someone else gets the same idea and then does something much more useful with it.

Mind you, now that I've seen these things in action, I'm convinced the execution would be much better if there was more of a skiing motion than a stepping one - which would bring back the treadles as a viable option...

Out of the Box

This is random advice aimed at no one in particular.  If you think it is aimed directly at you, then a) you're wrong, and b) you're so vain you probably think this song is about you, too.  On the other hand, if you think it sounds like I'm talking about you, then you should consider taking this advice on board.  And, heck, let's face it - I probably am writing about you, I'm just cleverly disguising it as generic advice.

You have written yourself into a box.  You have wrapped yourself up and locked yourself down with patterns that you have established for yourself and rules that no-one is holding you to except you - and your life is not going to get any better and you are not going to be any happier until you give yourself permission to change.

You have established a character and worked hard on confirming and re-affirming it, but you don't have to doom yourself to playing that character for the rest of your life.  You've said things in the past - things about yourself and the way you see the world - but they weren't the words of God.  They aren't written in stone, and you don't have to hold yourself to them.

You might have been mistaken - that's okay, you don't have to be right all the time.  You might well have been right at the time, but now things can be different now.  Truth has a use-by date, and life moves on (if you let it).  Maybe the person you thought you were could be something you were trying out for a while, and now you can try something else.

Let yourself be wrong, mistaken, a work in progress - and don't think for a moment that it's a sign of weakness.  The strongest people are the ones who let themselves be imperfect so they can improve.

Change.  Grow.  Move on.  Dump entire parts of yourself and replace them with something new if you need to - whatever gets you out of that damn box.

You'd be surprised by how many things you've been holding onto as important parts of yourself are not really that important at all - and how much lighter you will be for letting yourself put them down and leave them behind.

It's time you stopped making yourself be the person you thought you were ten years ago, and let yourself work on the You Mk II.

Trust me on this, I'm starting to work on the Me Mk III.

Negrini 350 fencing uniform review

Well, I thought I was being clever by looking outside the box.  Everyone in my club was wearing either Leon Paul or Uhlmann (or Absolute, but they were all in agreement that Absolute was fairly crappy), but I thought there must be other options.

Surely there were more "good" brands of fencing gear out there?  The market can't be totally dominated by two manufacturers?

Let's be honest, though, I just like making things more challenging.  Sure, I could follow the advice of other people who have been in the game for years and know what they're talking about, but why do what everyone else knows will work when you might be able to find something new that's just as good?

So I found an Italian brand - Negrini.  Their website was pretty average, but they had some good reviews (no bad ones) on fencing.net and were priced between Uhlmann and Leon Paul, so they had to be in the same league.  They also supplied the uniforms for the Italian national team, so either they were half decent or the Italians were just keeping their money in their own country.  Plus, I liked the look of their cut - particularly the mask, which pleased me more than the design of Uhlmann's or Leon Paul's.

So, I ordered a 1600N mask and and 800N plastron and a 350N uniform.

The German in the club thought I was nuts - she suspected the Italians wouldn't have the same eye for quality and detail as the Germans*.  I thought I'd be pretty safe, though, as I read a lot of bicycle magazines and I know the Italians have a good reputation for their high-end products...

And therein lies the problem:  "high end."

I have no problems with the mask and plastron - both of which are well made and very comfortable. I think the mask is much more comfortable than the Uhlmann one I had been borrowing.  The 350 uniform, on the other hand...

It's too thin.  I know one of the reasons I went with Negrini was because other reviews said the clothing was light, but this is a bit too light.  I'm sure it's suitably resistant to piercings, but it gives little buffer to protect against bruising.  Even the Absolute jackets had heavier material.  Additionally, the finishing leaves a bit to be desired.  They didn't bother tidying up all the loose edges or cleaning up the pencil marks - as though they figured anything on the inside didn't really matter.  Things just seem... cheaper than I'd hoped.  The Uhlmann 350N uniforms seem better made with more attention to detail - and they don't cost as much.

I expect their 800N uniforms are perfectly nice, but if they aren't going to put the effort into their lower-end products, I'm not going to take a chance on their high-end gear.  I don't think enough companies realise that their "entry level" products are their first and best advertisements.  After wearing the Negrini 350N uniforms for a few months, I can't say I'm going to stick with them for my next purchases.


*Having recently been to both Germany and Italy, I can completely understand why she would think that.


UPDATE:  2015

Having said that, my club has since started buying really cheap fencing gear from a company in China (Wuxi), which is producing 800N uniforms that are thinner than my Negrini 350 uniform.  Alarmingly so.  As in "I can see your underwear" kind of thin.  My Negrini clothes may have been thinner and less well finished than Uhlmann and Leon Paul, but they beat the pants off the Chinese stuff.

And they hold up really well.  I've never had any trouble with them from a durability perspective. I have to admit that I've been rethinking revisiting Negrini.  Whether I do or not remains to be seen.

Dentists

I've managed to go most of my life without major dental work.

When I was in primary school I fell over and snapped off my front tooth, which was repaired once the swelling went down (I managed to completely bust open my whole mouth.  About twenty years later, I would fall over in almost the exact same spot and completely bust open my forehead - what can I say?  I have talent.)  I've had to have the repair work repaired a few times over the years, but that was about it...

...until now.

Now, suddenly, I've had a tooth practically explode (turns out I didn't have something stuck between my teeth - it was a tooth disintegrating and getting jammed into my gums) and my dentist has identified other teeth that could do with filling.  I made it to 32 without having a single filling, but I'll have three of them before I hit 33.

Dentists surgeries are not comfortable places to be, and dentists do things to your mouth that seem rather unnatural, really.  All those devices doing abrasive things to your gum lines...  It just feels like something that shouldn't really happen.  I have to fight the urge to ask "are you sure you should be doing this?"  Mind you, seeing as there are several things in my mouth at the time, I would have difficulty saying it anyway.

I wonder about dentists.  I wonder if the people assisting them (assistants? technicians? nurses?) are career spit-suctioners or if they go on to become dentists themselves (or avoid doing anything with teeth for the rest of their lives).  I wonder if dentists do the dental work on their own staff, or if that would be weird.  I wonder if dentists can kiss without mentally noting the condition of the other person's oral health.  I wonder what dentists think about when they go to the dentist - and how they pick which dentist to go to.  I wonder if they do all the things they know they should do to take care of their teeth.

Mostly, though, I wonder if I can avoid getting any more dental work for a few years...

Gut wrenching

I have an exam tomorrow morning, and my gall bladder is playing up.  Or maybe it's my functional dyspepsia.   I don't know.  I have two diagnoses and I can't work out which symptoms belong to which one.  I suspect there's a certain amount of cross-over.

Meanwhile, whatever it is has been playing up since last Wednesday, so I'm kind of hoping it isn't my gall bladder or it might be an indication that I should be getting it removed.  I'm not a big fan of having internal organs removed if such things can be avoided.

The discomfort seems to be in the wrong place, anyway, so I'm assuming it's the dyspepsia - although attacks for both usually clear up after a couple of days, so it's a bit distracting either way.

The most annoying thing about both is the fact that I'm really bad at working out what triggers an attack.  It's the whole cumulative thing that's throwing me out.  Any given item of food could be perfectly fine or the thing that's going to give me hours of grief - it depends on what else I've eaten lately.

Take sausages, for example.  I can eat a sausage from a street vendor one day and have absolutely no problems.  I can even eat two such sausages in a week without issues.  Then, one day, I will eat a sausage from a street vendor and it will trigger an attack - not because there was something particularly bad about that sausage, but because something I'd eaten the day before (or, in some cases, two days earlier) had primed my innards for an issue, and the sausage was just the catalyst.

Maybe my gut is giving me signals that I've been "primed", but I'm not very good at recognising them, or maybe it really is a case of Russian Roulette with what I stick in my mouth.  I seem to go from "I feel fine" to "dang, my stomach is rather upset" without any middle ground.

Obviously, I should be adjusting my diet to exclude things like sausages, and maybe if I started eating like a 70s hippy I'd be able to avoid the primers and catalysts altogether.  It's just surprisingly hard to pull that off when you a) eat with other people and don't want to inconvenience them, b) get food from cafes and c) travel.

Stupid faulty internal bits.  Why can't I just eat stupid things that are no good for me like normal people?

Decorating

This photo is one in a series I like to call "Decorating house-hold objects with various things":

He's a fine chair

I love pointing out that German's think chairs are masculine while the Italians think they are feminine.

I don't know why, but I am fascinated by the fact that these two languages which are, essentially, right next to each other would have different views on the "gender" of that thing you sit on.

Yes, I still think having a "gender" for an inanimate object is daft, and I think every language that does so is somehow inferior to the languages that don't (English, Estonian, Esperanto...) but I'm also interested to know why they chose that gender for that object.

I know several studies have been done of several tribal languages with grammatical genders that have determined the they actually see these inanimate objects as having masculine or feminine characteristics. For example, there's one (I think in the Papua region) in which everything large is "he" and everything small is "she".

I think it's perfectly reasonable to assume that all languages with grammatical genders are making "value judgments" about those objects that they call masculine or feminine.

What is it that the Germans see in a chair that makes them think "that's a fine, manly chair"?  What is it the Italians would see in the same chair that would make them think "she's far to feminine to be manly"?

What is the point of difference between these two cultures that makes them interpret the same object as endowed with different gender traits?

Study

This photo is one in a series I like to call "Inefficient Methods to Study for an Exam".

Wondermark

I got a "shout out" recently (http://wondermark.com/book-sketches-from-today/) so I thought I'd shout back.

David Malki ! of Wondermark has a new book out.  It's the latest collection of Wondermarkian madness, with a heavy focus on the fantastic critters that frequently pop-up.

I'm getting a copy sent to me for free, so I probably won't be buying one myself - but that's no reason why you can't buy one for your own edification.

Head over to the Wondermark website to find more details, and read a few of the comics to get a feeling for what you would be in for if you bought the book.  Here, at random, are two of my favourites:

http://wondermark.com/442/

http://wondermark.com/238/

Call me a geek if you wish, but one of the things I love most about the one with the ninjas (apart from the ninjas on unicycles) is the correct number agreement in the third panel.

Things to do *In* Ingham...

...are apparently light on the ground.

Having just come back from a 6 week holiday, I'm planning to go to Ingham for a weekend to "take a break".  Actually, it's for my mother, who doesn't go for short breaks on her own, but wouldn't mind getting out of town for a bit during her holidays.

I like the Ingham region, and have often visited for one reason or another, but I've never actually stayed in the town itself.  I usually end up staying in one of the satellite communities, like Lucinda, Forest Beach or Taylors Beach.  This time we thought it would be interesting to stay in Ingham itself, and see the town "properly" for a change.

Only problem is, no one is willing to admit there's anything in the town worth seeing.  You look for any list of attractions for Ingham, and they'll all list the beaches and national parks that are located nearby.

What can you do in Ingham?  You can drive half-an-hour south to a waterfall.  You can travel twenty minutes west to a national park campsite.  You can travel fifteen minutes east to a beach.  The town itself is, apparently, only worth visiting during one of the two festivals they run each year - and even then most sites don't mention the second festival...

Oddly, the Tyto wetlands doesn't even get a mention on most websites, even though it is, by rights, a "must see" for any bird watchers who might be travelling through the area - and it happens to be in town.  The mausoleums at the cemeteries get mentioned more often than the Tyto park complex.

But... surely there are things in the town itself?  People live there, and I expect they do stuff.  Parks, gardens, bowls clubs, golf clubs... these things are all located *in* the town proper.  There's a cinema, there's a gallery (of sorts) - I think they still have cafes and shops...

Surely someone can come up with a list of things to do and see in the town itself?  Sure, it might not be the kind of thing that will rock your world, but why not plug the butcher who makes traditional Sicilian sausages (my uncle insists we buy him some every time we drive through the town)?  Why not promote the craft guild thingy?  Or the winery that makes booze out of tropical fruits* (although I must admit I don't know if they still have a shop in Ingham)?

Heck, you could easily put together a "picnic" list of things to buy from local shops, and then recommend places to go barbecue them.  That would be a fun thing to do, and it wouldn't take too much imagination.

Why not find a cafe that sells the best lemon meringue pie or a bakery which makes the best neenish tarts and say "while visiting Ingham, make sure you stop in at the such-and-such bakery to try the award winning neenish tarts"?

It's a town of just under 5000 people, and the nearest "big town" for nearby communities like Halifax and Abergowrie.  Surely people in the region come into Ingham occasionally to do stuff, rather than everybody going out of town to get their kicks.

So, my challenge to the good folk of Ingham is this:  tell us what we can do in your town.  It can't be that hard.



*They had a "snake bite" wine made from lime juice and chilli.  I bought some for my grandmother and she hated it.  Mind you, she tried to drink it like regular wine, even though I warned her it might be a bad idea.

Lingvon

I've been allowing myself to be distracted by Esperanto lately.  

Some readers may be aware of the fact that I find the existence of Esperanto highly amusing.  I don't know why, but the concept just tickles my fancy.  Also, the word.  I love saying "Esperanto".  It's one of those words that feel good in the mouth, if you know what I mean.

I have been known to bring Esperanto into a conversation just because I felt like saying the word.  I had the opportunity to tell a couple of Americans and a German about it's existence at my language course in Estonia, so that livened up the meet-and-greet.  They thought it was an interesting concept, too, even if they couldn't quite understand why it would actually be a thing.  The Greek girl knew what I was talking about, though, and she was more derisive.  She was, however, impressed when I mentioned that there were groups of people who spoke Esperanto as one of their first languages (always in conjunction with a "real" language - from what I've read, no one has been crazy enough to create a completely Esperanta community where all children speak nothing but Esperanto for the first few years).

I was thoroughly impressed when I discovered that ProQuest gives people the option to limit their searches to find articles written in Esperanto.  Sadly, the only journal articles written in Esperanto are more or less about Esperanto (and language in general), so if you were hoping to find Esperanta articles about rotator-cuff injuries or baseball, you would be largely out of luck...

However, while I've been fascinated by the existence of Esperanto (and quite fond of saying the word) for years, until I went to the Esperanto museum in Vienna I had never actually looked at the language or the historical/cultural space that it fills.  

To be honest, I've always regarded Esperanto as being, well, useless.

Let's face it, English actually is what Esperanto wanted to be (except for the cultural neutrality thing), and while the number of people who speak Esperanto is roughly equivalent to the number of people who speak Estonian, there isn't really any place on Earth one can go where speaking Esperanto will help you buy a loaf of bread if you are lost and alone in a small town.  At least Estonian is highly useful in Estonia.  

Also, Esperanto seems to be such a dilettante language.  It’s not something you learn to survive – you learn it because you’re educated and are privileged enough to be able to learn a language you don’t need “on the street”.  It wouldn't surprise me at all if you found that anyone who actually speaks Esperanto also speaks English, French, German or Spanish - so why learn Esperanto when you would be better served by one of the big four?

Sure, Esperanto has a large community of users all over the world who love it, defend it, gather together to speak it, translate works of great literature into it, and write poetry in it… but the same could be said of Klingon. 

Should Hamlet in Esperanto really be seen in a different light to Hamlet in Klingon?

Standing in the Esperanto museum I was struck by two things:  1) the language is actually quite interesting from a linguistic point of view, and 2) it’s not a language so much as a pseudo-religious movement.

Firstly, the language:  Apparently there’s some evidence that learning Esperanto can be a useful stepping stone to learning more complicated languages.  The structure is simple and easy to pick up, and it draws attention to the way a language works.  In theory, after learning Esperanto, language learners are better positioned to understand what they are doing when learning another language.

The language does seem remarkable easy to absorb.  I’ve spent less than two hours looking at it, and I already know how to alter a word to mark it as a nominative or accusative noun, an adjective or an adverb – after three years I still struggle doing this in Estonian.  Yet it’s also vaguely Finno-Ugric in the way you attach prefixes and suffixes to create a wide variety of words from the same basic root. 

I am mildly concerned by the weird positive-negative thing it has going.  The word for cold is “malvarma”, which literally means “not warm” – just like the word for short (“mallonga”) means “not long”.  The word for hot, “varmega”, means something like “significantly warm”.  I don’t know why, but I feel like “not warm” is an insufficient way to express “cold”.  If someone asks you what the water is like, and you say “not warm”, that wouldn’t really have the same level of warning as “cold”.

Anyway, the language is kind of interesting, and possibly more useful to me, personally, than Italian (for example).

As for my comment that it is a pseudo-religious movement?  Well, it’s kind of like the Scouts, actually – a group of people engaging in activities that are meant to make the world a better place and getting together for regular camps and conferences.  The history of the language is steeped in a concept that the world can be a wonderful, apolitical place where people speak to each other in neutral languages with no cultural baggage and share things and live in harmony.  A place where people talk to each other instead of fighting.  A place where peace and co-operation reign.

Esperanto speakers are embracers of an ideal.  They’re a club in which the members have chosen their own language and culture – and it is an oddly optimistic one.  They write books, plays and poetry, and happily forget that Esperanto will never be quite what Zammenhof was hoping for.  But, it is good that they don’t lose hope.  The very word “Esperanto” means “hope”, after all...  

muzeoj

I arrived in Vienna on a Monday afternoon, overdue for lunch and simply over Catholic churches and galleries full of Graeco-Roman art and "Old Masters".  I thought I'd like to see something different for a change, so I somehow managed to find myself in a Catholic church that very afternoon and a museum full of Graeco-Roman art and paintings by "Old Masters" the next day.  These things happen.

The Church was calling me, actually.  There I was, wondering around the streets thinking, "Hey!  I'm in Vienna!  I wonder if I'll recognise anything from Inspector Rex?" when I saw a domed roof in a gap between the buildings.  I was sure I had seen that roof before, so I went to find it.  Karlskirche.  It might have been that dome I'd seen before or another (Vienna was full of interesting roofs), but I was tired and looking for something to do that wouldn't take me too far away from my hotel...

I was a bit dubious about paying for entrance to a church, but I've done it before (I know the fee can help to maintain the building, and if they're going to have thousands of people traipse through the door for non-church-attendance reasons, they may as well get something out of it).  I always wonder how anyone joins a congregation in a church that charges entrance fees.  What happens if you're new in town and just want to come along to the mass?  I was willing to pay my dues as a tourist, though... at least, until I noticed that the church was under construction.

"What a rip-off!"  I thought, "Charging full price when there's a whopping big scaffold blocking the interior view of the dome!"  Then I noticed the church actually wasn't under construction after all - the whopping big scaffold was a semi-impermanent feature.  It was supporting a lift that could take people up to the platform that was blocking the view of the dome from the ground.

My first reaction was to be cranky about it (the scaffold was ugly, and I didn't like the fact that you couldn't see the dome at all if you happened to be afraid of heights).  Then I remembered that I'm not afraid of heights myself, so I went up the lift to look at the dome.  It was quite an experience to get that close to the roof, actually.  It's a close-up and personal view of something that is normally seen from very far away.  I still think the scaffold was ugly, though...

The next day, determined to see something different, I caught the U-Bahn to Museumsquartier and made my way to the Natural History Museum... Only to find out it didn't open on Tuesdays.  That'll teach me to read opening hours on brochures (maybe).  I hadn't intended to visit the Art History Museum.  I was trying to take a break from such things.  However, it was located conveniently close to the museum I couldn't see that day...

In the end I spent just over five hours in the Art History Museum.  Then I noticed my ticket also gave me entrance to another campus of the museum that contained historical weapons and musical instruments.  Fortunately, the woman in the information desk told me I could go there tomorrow, so I happily went back to look at the Egyptian section a second time.  Afterwards I wandered down a street and found myself in the centre of town, just in time to spend the evening window shopping.

The next day I hit the second part of the museum first thing in the morning (well, 10am - it turns out nothing really opens at 9am, so turning up then was a bit of a misjudgement).  I thought I'd be more interested in the instruments, but the rooms full of armour and weapons were quite a highlight.  I may or may not have attempted a substitutiary locomotion spell.  It didn't work (while I was there, at any rate).

Then it was on to the National Library... which was a huge disappointment.  I had seen pictures of the hall - one of the most famous library interiors in the world - and had been particularly looking to seeing it.  They had a temporary display mounted on particularly obnoxious white boards, which ruined every single view of the hall.  There was no where you could look without seeing the display instead of the hall.  I was so infuriated that I actually asked for the opportunity to write a complaint (and someone else patiently waited for me to finish so they could write one, too).

I stormed off to see the Esperanto Museum with anger burning in my heart.  Fortunately, the Esperanto Museum made me feel better... although I realised afterwards that I would have been disappointed with it if I hadn't been so annoyed by the library hall.  It was actually a pretty low-impact affair.  I could think of a number of changes that could make it more information rich (and object rich) than it was.  I left the museum with quite a number of questions and a strong desire to buy a basic "here's what Esperanto looks like" book - but the museum was such a small affair that it didn't have a giftshop attached.

The Esperanto Museum was located in the same building as the Globe Museum, which seemed odd at first, but after reading the information in the EM I realised there was a bit of a "global" theme happening.  I was quite addicted to maps when I was younger (I still love them), and it was interesting to see how the globe has changed over the years.  I thought the two museums in the same building could have supported a small giftshop.  It wouldn't be too difficult to have a few globes and a couple of reprint Esperanto posters for sale...

I must admit that, by then, I was a bit museumed out.  So I took a tram to the end of the line (I like a bit of random trammage) and found myself at a large park.  All in all, not a bad couple of days.

Quote of the Day: Klingon

"Klingon speakers, those who have devoted themselves to the study of a language invented for the Star Trek franchise, inhabit the lowest possible rung on the geek ladder. Dungeons & Dragons players, ham radio operators, robot engineers, computer programmers, comic book collectors— they all look down on Klingon speakers. Even the most ardent Star Trek fanatics, the Trekkies, who dress up in costume every day, who can recite scripts of entire episodes, who collect Star Trek paraphernalia with mad devotion, consider Klingon speakers beneath them."

Okrent, Arika. In the Land of Invented Languages.
Westminster, MD, USA: Spiegel & Grau, 2010. p 3.
http://site.ebrary.com/lib/jcu/Doc?id=10386233&ppg=13
Copyright © 2010. Spiegel & Grau. All rights reserved.

Stephen

Stephen asked me to help him right a small biography, so here's the best one I could come up with in my current state of consciousness:

Stephen was orphaned at a young age as a result of a terrible accident involving an ice-cream scoop and a decommissioned submarine - the details of which are still classified by the Swiss Navy.  He was raised by walruses on the islands off the coast of Vanuatu, and ate a diet consisting almost entirely of fish until, at the age of 14, he left to join the foreign legion.  Since then he has been horribly allergic to seafood and can only eat seal meat if it is prepared with peanut butter.  After several years serving as a peace-keeper in the war-torn country of New Zealand, he retrained as a helicopter pilot, but an incident with the Mafia led to his being place in the witness protection programme.  He now works as a librarian in an undisclosed location, under the name of "Irvin Farnsworthy".

Terra Nullis

Ma olen tagasi Austraalias.

Back in "The Land of the Long White Cloud"... Oh, no, sorry, that's New Zealand.  Australia is "The Land of the Long Weekend".  I get those two confused sometimes.

Australians do like their long weekends.  We like our public holidays so much we're actually celebrating the Queen's Birthday twice this year.  I discovered yesterday that I'm working on that particular long weekend, which is fair enough because I had the last Queen's Birthday free.

The past few days have involved far too much sitting.  Apart from sitting for approximately 23 hours for the plane flights home, I'm now back in my house (where I sit too much because it's a habit) and my workplace (where I sit too much because my workstations are designed to encourage it).  I've been spending the past six weeks on my feet more often because I've been out more.

Granted, I had two weeks when I sat in a class room for several hours a day, and two weeks where I sat in a bus for several hours a day, but I spent more time standing or walking overall.  Particularly the last two weeks, in Italy and Vienna.

The Italians have developed an interesting relationship to sitting down.  People who own places where one might sit (like a cafe) have worked out they can charge extra for the privilege.  If you buy your food "take-away" or eat standing at the counter, it costs less than if you sit at a table.  So, most Italians eat standing up if they can.  There also seem to be hardly any places to sit in public places like train stations.  It's like charging people for sitting has lead to a culture where everyone stands as a matter of course.

In Vienna I was just constantly walking around and looking at things.  One day I got back to my hotel after 9pm, and realised that I had only sat down for an hour the whole day.  That was 11 hours on my feet.  I ate lunch sitting but had dinner from a hot-dog stand, and I always stand on subways so I don't vague off and forget what station I'm looking for...

No wonder I managed to lose weight even though my diet included far more pastries and ice-creams than usual.

I've been in a bit of a daze since coming home.  I'd like to blame it on the jetlag, but it started to kick in before I left Europe.  I couldn't shake the feeling that I knew where I was as long as I was moving.  I suspected I would start feeling lost the minute I had to stand still (or sit, as the case may be).

I've been feeling a bit grey and uncertain about life, the universe and everything since January, when I came to the realisation that it was time for me to move on, but I had no idea what I want to move on to.

I still want to work as a librarian, and I want to study, and logically I want to find work as a librarian that gives me time to study...  But the question "where?" is a rather large one, and it's only slightly distracting me from "what?" and "why?"

I feel like my life has morphed into that moment when you walk into a room to get something, but you can't remember what it was.  I have a sense that I should be moving towards something, but all I can identify are the things I want to move away from.

I want to go somewhere, rather than just somewhere else.  The last few times I moved it was because I wanted or needed to move away from where I was.  I want to move to something this time.  I want to feel as if I've found something I want for a change.

Trouble is, I don't know what I want.

Travel Diary, Episode 9: Vienna rocks

It's official:  I love Vienna.  I've only been here for a couple of days, and I never want to leave. I'm not sure how I'm going to manage it, but I'm going to find an excuse to live here for a couple of years.  Or, at the very least, come back for another holiday that spends some serious time just exploring Austria.

Travel Diary, Episode 8: Italians stand too close

So, if anyone can remember my vague threats about deciding I like it in Italy and staying there...  you can set your mind at ease.  I have to say Italy is not high on my list of places I want to revisit, let alone remain.

Most of the country side was pretty, but a heck of a lot of it reminded me of Queensland.  I found La Spezia in particular may as well have been Innisfail or Ingham.  The plants were similar, the buildings were similar, the pavement design in the parks was similar, the clusters of old Italian men were similar...  I can see why the Italians settled in Queensland in droves - it was just like home, only more humid.

That said, Italy was pretty darn humid.  And hot.  So very hot.  Italy in August was not quite as hot as North Queensland in January, but definitely hotter than Townsville in February.  I was told by my tour guide that the weather had been unseasonably warm for the past week, and was likely to get better by the weekend after I left.

Here's an observation about Europeans:  Estonians like a lot of personal space, and like to leave comfortable gaps between people in queues (which the Russians have a tendency to try to fill).  Germans do not respect the queue, and will cut in whenever they can.  Italians will reluctantly queue if they can't push in, but they stand very close.  Too close.  Close enough to make you continually check to make sure your wallet is still there.  Heck, the Italians seem to stand too close even if you aren't queuing.

My Italian tour wasn't quite as good as my Switzerland tour.  Sure, it was nice to be based in a hotel and tour out from there, but I felt the included excursions in the Switzerland tour were better, and also the group I was with in Switzerland was a bit more fun.  In Switzerland I had a cluster of people my age, and most of the "older" set were cheerful.  We were all there to have a good time, and even though it was stressful changing hotels every night (and usually sleeping in pretty rubbish hotels), we all seemed to be having a great time of it.

The Italian group was a slightly different demographic, and the overall mood was more jaded.  Not that they were unpleasant, just that they seemed to find the negatives a bit more often than the positives.  That sort of thing is catching, and I tend to do it myself if I'm around people like that.

One comment I will make about Cosmos Tours - their choice of hotels is pretty sucky.  I'm sure they are running on some criteria that is not based on what people actually want in a hotel.  I've just spend 14 nights at the mercy of the Cosmos planners, and that involved about 10 hotels.  Of those, about three were comfortable, only a couple were located in a practical position (and, sadly, they weren't the comfortable ones), and one was so bad that I'm going to write negative reviews about it in on Google maps.

Heck, I'll probably dedicate an entire blog post just to elaborating on how bad it was.

On the whole, I found Italy to be a bit disappointing.  It's just so full of people.  So many, many people - and that's not even counting the tourists.  Mostly, every place where tourists *might* gather, you will find droves and droves and droves of people selling the exact same souvenirs.  Sure, in Rome they all have "I (heart) Rome" while in Pisa they have "I (heart) Pisa", but apart from that they are identical.  And you just know that half the stuff they are selling is probably some cheap knock-off made in Taiwan, or something.

I started feeling like Italy was eating its tourists - like we were cows that were to be milked until we could give nothing more, and then slaughtered for the meat.  Yes, that's an ugly analogy, but that's what it felt like.

My highlights in Italy would have to be the public gardens in Rome, visiting a castle where they filmed part of Much Ado About Nothing and seeing the most awesome dedication to a saint ever - the monument to St Barbara at Montecatini was just a random collection of artillery, fire-fighting equipment and assorted other things to do with explosives, mining and mountaineering.  It turns out that St Barbara is the patron saint of anything that involves explosives or adventuring.

I managed to get trapped behind a parade of beauty queens in Montecatini.  I'll tell you about it later.

The lowlights would be the droves and droves of tourists (and tourist markets) and the overwhelming feeling that Catholicism was still just big business in Italy (particularly in Rome and Assisi).  Who needs actual faith when you can buy and sell stuff, right?  As for Christianity, well it just doesn't cut it - not when you can focus obsessively on things that were added later because the Bible clearly wasn't interesting enough.  I found myself drifting out of the basilica in Assisi really wishing I could find a church.  Not some shrine to a saint who would probably be horrified to see what they were doing to honour him, but a place where people come to worship God.

So, I'm not planning on going back to Italy for a while.  And I have picked up a tendency to think anyone standing too close in a queue is probably Italian.  Strangely, so far I've been right...

Tavel Diary, Episode 7 - Switzerland is Overpriced

So, here's the wash-down from my "leisurely" Eight Day Grand Tour of Switzerland:

Switzerland (Die Schweiz, Helvetica, Helvetsi, whatever you want to call it) is not in Europe.  It is Europe, to an extent, but it is not in Europe.  You know how I was saying that food in Europe is incredibly cheap compared to Australia?  That doesn't apply to Switzerland.  Pretty much anything I've previously said about Europe doesn't apply to Switzerland.

I can't quite work out how a country in the middle of Europe manages to be so different to everywhere else.  It's completely different to Germany, even though there are German speaking bits.  It's completely different to Italy, even though there are Italian speaking bits.  I can't compare it with France, but a member of my group who lives in Paris says it was different to France as well - even though there are French speaking bits.

It's like it stole parts of the neighbouring countries' languages and cultures, and then shouted "sucked in, losers!" and did its own thing.

It's keeping itself out of the Eurozone, too.  I wonder how long it will take before we can stop calling the currency "Swiss Francs" and just call it "Francs".  It's not like anyone else is using Francs in Europe at present.

At the moment, the CH Franc is roughly on par to the Australian dollar, but things that would cost $15 in Australia cost something like 22CHF in Switzerland.  I spent one night wandering around Lugano aimlessly searching for something to eat that I thought would be worth the price they were asking.  Several times I walked into the Burger King, determined to eat something relatively cheap, and then walked out again, determined to not eat "Hungry Jacks" in Switzerland.  That's just wrong.  I ended up paying just under 20 bucks for a slice of pizza, a piece of cake and a bottle of water - and I didn't even want to eat pizza that night.

It was certainly a contrast to the meal I bought in Tallinn one night that was a huge club sandwich, a bottle of juice and a bottle of water (for later) for just over 5 Euro - and I couldn't even finish the sandwich.

It's beautiful, though.  The country is breath-takingly gorgeous.  We had a few "comfort stops" at alpine passes that are popular amongst hikers, and I managed to follow a couple of trails for a few short walks.  Absolutely stunning.  I've resolved to come back and walk large parts of the country at some point.  I'm also thinking seriously about a walking tour of the Pyrenees I saw while researching the two tours I'm doing this year.  If the Pyrenees are anywhere near as pretty as the Alps, it will be worth it.

As for the tour?  Exhausting.  It was leisurely in that we weren't travelling horrendous distances every day, but because we were in different hotels every night and only stopping for half-hour stretches along the way, it often felt as if we were constantly being bundled back into the coach.  I did enjoy it - although we hardly saw any of Liechtenstein (which was one of the main reasons I took this tour).

The people were great.  I really enjoyed meeting the other members of the group, and it was nice to have some new friends to share the experience with - it was also nice to be taken places I wouldn't have thought of going to myself.  It was one of the things I enjoyed most about the bike tour I did in 2009...

But the bus was taxing.  By the end of every afternoon I was dying to get off the bus and go for a walk or a run.  I wouldn't want to do a longer tour, and I wouldn't want to do one of those tours that hit multiple countries in a couple of weeks.

Oh, and I have to admit I finally did a "proper" girlie thing.  On a whim I spent $200 and bought a pretty dress in Switzerland.  Switzerland seems to be completely over run with shops selling designer labels, and after days walking past Louis Vuitton, Dolce & Gabbana and all those other shops, I finally saw a dress I just couldn't walk past.  I had to try it on, and once I tried it on I just had to buy it:

One word:  awesome.

Would it be too dorky to point out that it has pockets?