He said: "She has a lovely face..."

Go read this post on my other blog. It's the closest thing to a real post I'm going to produce today:

http://thesharonb.blogspot.com.au/2012/02/he-said-she-has-lovely-face.html

Strange things (Google)

I noticed the picture I was using as my backdrop on this blog fell off a few days ago, so I replaced it with a new image (trees, sunsets, calming afternoony type things), but now I've noticed that picture keeps dropping off as well.

I'm going to leave it alone for a little bit to see if it's a glitch Google fixes, but then I may have to go to a more boring template so I can get a better background.

Maybe I'll put one of my own photos back there...

Something else I noticed today (don't know how long it has been happening): My blogspot address has decided to change itself to a .au

Take a look - it doesn't matter if you take out the country code to go back to the domain name I picked in the system, it keeps changing to self to blogspot.com.au

I didn't chose this - I don't have the option to change it either. Wonder what Google's playing at?

What process did they use to decide I should be a .au? Yes, I do live in Australia at the moment, but what if I move to Europe? Once I settle into my new job in Switzerland, is my address suddenly going to change to .ch? (I don't actually have a new job in the Confoederatio Helvetica at present, I'm just using it as an example).

My language settings for other things attached to this Google ID swing between German and Estonian, and the majority of hits to this blog come from Estonia, so why didn't they consider that I might have wanted a European country code - or no code at all?

Value judgements are being made - and without consultation. Never a good thing.

How do you spell...

One of the primary problems with the English language is its spelling system - if, indeed, you can call it a "system".

Even if you ignored regional variations in accents, three different letters can make the same sound, and one letter can make three different sound - perhaps more, depending on the word and the speaker. Sometimes, the same letter can make a variety of different sounds within the one word. It's what we in the business call "ridiculous".

There is no way a person running on nothing but logic and reasoning will be able to tell how to spell a word by the way it is pronounced - or how to pronounce a word by the well it is spelt.

Take the following words, for example: rough, cough, bough, through, thorough, thought.

Essentially, our written language isn't phonetic so much as pictographic (and the pictures don't look like anything). It's no wonder our kids have difficulty learning it.

I blame the French, myself. We could have survived quite happily with Germanic spelling conventions if the Normans hadn't taken over from the Saxons and pushed French on top of an already tense linguistic situation.

Well, the French and Johnson. I mean, surely he would have realised that in creating a dictionary he wasn't actually "observing" the language so much as creating a model for people to follow? Couldn't he have tidied things up a bit before jotting them down for posterity?

I can't believe I'm going to say this, but... the Americans were onto something when they created their own spelling system. It makes sense to get rid of a couple of extra letters that aren't actually adding anything to the sound - and to use a 'z' for voiced alveolar fricative and an 's' for voiceless one (that actually is phonetic).

I don't want to do this, but I think we need to follow the American example and tidy our written language up a bit. Start with what they've already done, but go further. We need to narrow down to one symbol per sound.

Now, this may mean bringing in diacritics, but quite frankly that's how I learnt to read anyway. I don't know about your school, but my teachers started me out on learning the different sounds of vowels by putting breves over the "short" sounds, macrons over the "long" sounds (actually, often not really long sounds but rather diphthongs), and so forth and so on. Then as we "advanced" we were supposed to learn without these crutches.

Bring back the crutches, I say! Let's see what happens to our literacy levels when reading English becomes something reasonably straightforward, rather than a Herculean challenge.

Of making many books there is no end...

...and much study wearies the body (Ecc. 12:12).

So, in spite of the fact that I'm supposed to be saving towards a European holiday, the other day I spent $15 on a book called Better Reading: Italian.

I bought this book - not because I'm learning Italian (I am so not learning Italian, especially as it doesn't look like I'll get around to visiting Italy this year after all) - but rather because I've developed an addiction to language books. So much so that I'll buy a book I'm never going to use just because I like the way it's designed and I want to have a closer look.

I was having a conversation over drinks a few weeks back in which someone asked me what I'd do if I was self-employed. After initially saying I'd make ceramic dogs to sell at local markets, I answered honestly: I'd like to write a couple of text books.

"Textbooks? Why would anyone want to write textbooks?" she says.
"Because they're fascinating," says I.

It wasn't a measured response - it was the first thing that came out of my mouth. It's also quite true. There's an element of design that goes into a textbook that you don't find in any other type of written material.

And the skill it takes to write didactic material that is clear, succinct and easy to digest without being condescending or oversimplified! I yearn for that kind of skill. My own writing is usually overblown and excessively quirky.

So, yes, at some point I'd like to write a couple of text books. I've started various projects that were intended to produce text books, but never actually made it past the initial planning stage. Sadly, I am most effectively motivated externally - give me a person who is waiting for me to finish something, and I will do my best to finish it. If I'm the only person who cares, it's probably not going to happen.

Modern(ish) Pentathlon

I like the idea of the Modern Pentathlon. I like the fact that it's full of all the skills a good army officer would need to function in the field:

Fencing, pistol shooting, horse riding, cross country running and swimming.

Did I mention that this was a "army officer" circa 1912?

I'm especially fond of the fact that they've now combined the running and shooting events so that it's more like the Biathlon - run for a bit then shoot something; run for a bit more then shoot something again.

It's all been a bit controversial, apparently, with people saying it was more like a tetrathlon than a pentathlon - which is something I'd find insulting if I were a biathlete, as surely it would imply a Biathlon was actually a monothon?

Personally, I think they should combine all of the events, and it should always be competed in knock-out rounds between two competitors.

Picture it: one-on-one, Competitor A vs Competitor B. It all takes place in one big course. They start with the fencing round, and the loser has to lie on the ground for the start of the first running leg. That leg takes them to a lake, which they have to swim across. Then they mount the horses and complete a lap of the circuit, then it's the running and shooting rounds - only instead of stopping at a shooting station, they have to carry the guns with them and shoot at targets located around the track whilst still running. Just to make things more interesting, you can't actually go past a target until you've hit it, so if you miss you have to stop and keep trying. Bad marksmanship slows you down.

The first person over the finish line wins.

Who wouldn't watch that?

The grand plan

So, Luanne and I are planning to start our own Modern Pentathlon club.

A bit by accident, really. We've been talking about riding lessons for a while but haven't got our act together, but we did recently enrol in fencing lessons (starting in a couple of weeks)...

It seems perfectly logical that we may as well take up pistol shooting, cross country running and swimming while we're at it.

Then we can start our own pentathlon club, hold regular competitions and take turns in first and second place.

The word "planning" might be a bit strong. It would probably be more accurate to say "have joked about".

Still, it would be fun, wouldn't it?

The Uke

I've heard that Kingaroy is a nice town - worth visiting. I actually spent an hour there recently, but it must be said that I have no idea what the town is like.

I meant to spend that hour traipsing up and down the main street and having a look around.

I got as far as the music shop across the road from where I parked.

An hour later I came out again with a ukulele.

This was, to be honest, a little unexpected. Buying a mandolin or a mountain dulcimer was entirely on the cards, but the ukulele kind of came out of the blue. Much like the pocket trumpet I bought in Tasmania.

By the way, does anyone know someone who wants a second hand pocket trumpet? It turns out I have great difficulty playing any trumpet (the mouthpiece is too small for my lips), and a pocket version doesn't really help with that...

But anyway - a ukulele was something I really didn't expect to buy - and partly because I had an anti-ukulele at home.

Many years ago I was given one of those cheap $20 soprano ukuleles as a Christmas present (you know, the ones you see everywhere and assume are fully functional ukuleles), and it was possibly the worst thing that could have happened.

The fact that it existed and I owned it meant I kept trying to play it in one way or another (there were several attempts to retune it and treat it like another instrument). The fact that it was truly terrible meant I kept giving it up and deciding I'd never play a ukulele again.

And, of course, I wouldn't think of buying a better ukulele because I already owned one I never played...

It was (and still is) a horrible, horrible thing - not really worthy of the word "instrument". The strings simply will not tune so that they agree with each other on more than one note at a time. It's terribly frustrating - all chords sound foul and wrong and finger picking melodies can only be done on one string. I suspect the frets are actually in the wrong positions.

Truly, it is an anti-ukulele. It doesn't not perform as a ukulele should, and it encourages you to avoid ukuleles for fear of similar bad experiences.

So, why did I buy a ukulele? Because the mandolin didn't have a hard case.

Seriously, that was my sole reason.

I may be pretty rubbish as a musician, but I'm addicted to playing music, sadly. I get itchy fingers when I don't have an instrument to pluck or strum lying around the place. The banjo didn't have a case and isn't really suitable to travelling light, so I don't take it with me when I go anywhere.

I'd been thinking for some time that I needed a smaller, more travel-friendly stringed instrument, and I wanted to get a proper hard case so I could throw it in with my luggage without worrying.

The mandolin seemed logical - same tuning as the banjo so I could play the same songs the same way... but it was actually a bit uncomfortable to play and didn't come with a hard case.

After thinking long and hard about how much I really needed the mandolin, I looked a little more closely at the ukuleles that were next to it on the display. The concert sized ukes looked strangely appealing - and they had a hard case that would fit, and a book of ukulele chords that would slip into the case along with the instrument...

So I bought a uke - and, you know what? They're actually pretty sweet to play, if you get a real one. I've been playing it a lot lately, as my banjo strings react badly to rainy weather, and it's just lovely.

So, my unintentional quest to own the world's most annoying instruments appears to be continuing unabated.

Oh, and never ever buy anyone one of those cheap $20 ukuleles. They're only suitable as props for people who don't actually intend to try strumming the strings.

Not losing!

Have I mentioned that "my" football team has taken out the minor premierships after having gone through an undefeated season, and is now set to compete in the semi-finals (on my birthday, no less)?

This whole "supporting a team that doesn't lose all the time" thing is quite a novel experience.

Back when the Fury existed (and I was paying attention to the "boring league"), I once mentioned that supporting a team that usually loses makes winning seem sweeter. It may be true, but it's nice to have something you support win a lot.

If Canberra United make it to the finals, I will be rather happy.

White.

Minu uues kontor on väga valge. Valge ja hall. See on valgus, aga ei ilus. Ei inetu, aga liiga napp, et olla 'ilus'.

Mein neues Büro ist sehr weiss. Weis und grau. Es ist licht, aber nicht schön. Es ist nicht hässlich, aber zu spärlich, um "schön" sein.

My new office is very white. White and grey. It is light, but not beautiful. It is not ugly, but too sparse to be "beautiful".

Doors

A great amount of of fuss, bother, noise and tumult was generated by attempting to position six liaison librarians in a new seating plan based on the location of a certain door.

It was quite painful, really.

Then, it turns out, the door isn't where they put it on the map - it's on the other side.

As one of the people who eventually came down to saying "I don't care, stick me where ever you feel like", I had to resist the urge to say "suffer in your jocks!" to those who fought to be away from the door and associated throughway, and are now squarely in the throughway they tried to avoid.

And, by "resist", I mean I said it anyway, but tried to make it sound like I wasn't saying it:

"You know, part of me really wants to just say 'suffer in your jocks', but I can understand how you would find the current situation distressing...'"

The unluckiest dog in the world

So, last night they killed off Rex's human partner again. In summary, here's the career of everyone's favourite police dog:

Watched partner get shot and die
Watched partner get shot and die
Parnter dissapeared without explanation
I have no idea what happened to the next guy
Watched partner get blown-up in a car bomb.

He's not really having the best run, is he?

Fancy Sausage Jellyfish?

So, I was having had a deep and meaningful conversation with my peers on the sausage jellyfish front and we've decided it could totally be jazzed up a bit.

So here we go:

Fancy-pants Sausage Jellyfish

Ingredients:

• Chorizo sausages, sliced into 1.5 - 2cm long pieces
  
• Quick-cook Spaghetti
  
• Four very ripe tomatoes
  
• Two tablespoons olive oil
  
• One small-to-medium onion
  
• 2 Cloves garlic
  
• One tub of tomato puree
  
• Half-cup of red wine
  
• Water
  
• Salt, Pepper and Soy Sauce (optional), to taste.
  
• Two large handfuls of spinach

Method:

Break strands of spaghetti in half and insert approximately 8 half-strands into one side of the chorizo pieces, as legs for the jellyfish. Bring a pot of water to boil while cooking the sauce.

Dice onion and crush garlic, then saute in olive oil until tender. Add tomato puree and wine, then enough water to turn into a thin sauce. Roughly chop tomatoes and add to sauce. Add salt, pepper and soy sauce to taste.

Meanwhile, add chorizo and spaghetti to the boiling water and cook according to the directions on the spaghetti package. Leave in the water until ready to serve.

When the "jellyfish" are cooked, take sauce off heat and quickly toss through the washed spinach leaves. Quickly drain the jelly-fish and divide between plates, pour the source over the "fish" and serve immediately.


Now to answer a few questions:

• No, I haven't tried this myself. Well, I have, but I haven't. I've used the chorizo in the sauce, which I have used with actual spaghetti. So I have eaten all of these ingredients together in the same meal, and found them to be tasty and not horrible. I haven't done the thing with the jelly-fish, and I've never tried quick-cook spaghetti.
  
• I will grant that soy sauce isn't a "typical" ingredient in tomato-based spaghetti sauces, but it's quite nice. Trust me. In my family we never make bolognese without it. This is partly because my grandmother used to add soy sauce, tomato sauce and Worcestershire sauce to everything - which is either incredibly odd or very cosmopolitan, depending on how you look at things.

Some things need no translation

Now, my ability to read French is not non-existent, but it is terribly limited.

However, I think it's good enough to pull of this recipe:

http://recettessimples.fr/news/saucisses-aux-cheveux-de-spaghetti

Also, I think I kind of have to make sausage jelly-fish now...

I love a good complication...

I have this strange idea in the back of my head that I like things to be simple, and that I'm the kind of person who will seek out ways to simplify a situation...

This is, of course, rubbish.

Truth is, I have a knack for compounding complications.

Take my desire to study three degrees simultaneously, for example. On the one hand, it all seems perfectly reasonable. I have the intelligence to deal with the subject matter and I have good reasons for studying all three, and it's not that much different to studying multiple subjects in the same degree, when you think about it...

On the other hand, it's daft and unnecessary.

And then I go and think about taking a 6 week European holiday with an extra language course in the middle of that.

See what I mean? Compounding complications.

Fortunately, I was smart enough to realise it was a bridge too far and decided to only combine studying two degrees simultaneously with the European holiday/language course idea.

But now, you see, I've worked out a way I can complicate that even further.

My language course is in Estonia and finishes on the 10th of August. A library conference starts in Helsinki on the 11th - and will be approximately four hours away from my location on the 10th.

I could throw in a week's conference attendance (and hopefully a paper presentation) in the middle of my holiday, which would actually give me 7 weeks in Europe, but this would eat into more of my study vac, which I was going to use to catch up on the German assignments and coursework I would be doing on my vacation...

I'm starting to think I can't reconcile my ideal of living a simple life with my desire to do Everything.

My mother (and probably Helzapoppin, who occasionally has a strange habit of repeating things my mother says) would "suggest" that I give up on the "doing Everything" side of things, but what's the fun in that?

Life is short, and one day I won't be able to do this stuff. I may as well squeeze as much in as I can, while I can.

When I die, it won't be from boredom.

It may be from eating something stupid, but I'm okay with that.

Objects at rest? (aka, some more rabbitting on about Estonian Grammar)

Okay, so I've finally decided to start my little cross-comparisons project. I've been thinking for some time that I need to go through everything I know (or, at least, am familiar with) in German and Estonian and make sure I can do it in both languages.

I'm hoping this will also help with revision, and I might finally be able to remember things like ordinal numbers. Have I looked at them several times? Yes. Can I remember them when I want to? Not so much.

I started the other day with creating tables for First Person Singular Personal Pronouns - lining up the case with the word. It was a small table for German, slightly longer (as in, ten more entries) for Estonian.

Then I tried "matching" the words in both sets. To do this, I had to once again go back and try to wrap my head around the way Estonian deals with direct and indirect objects.

I have often struggled with this, I have read it several times, but never quite gotten to grips with it. I think this is partly because every Estonian textbook (and teacher) I have consulted tends to withhold the Partitive case for an interminable amount of time.

I don't know why they do it. Straight up, you get introduced to Nominative and Genative, but then they take you on a journey through all the locative cases and the Abessive and Comitative before talking about the Partitive.

Yet the Partative case is reasonably important for answering the "whom?" question in a sentence. You can't really talk about the object of a sentence without it, so withholding it is terribly frustrating for someone who comes from a Subject-Verb-Object language background.

I can deal with the S-V-O pattern being changed around, but not being incomplete. "Okay, this is how to recognise the subject, and this is what to do with the verb, and, you know what? Let's just leave the object out of it for a little while whilst we talk about everything else".

Plus, it's a bit hard trying to fully appreciate the fact that the Allative case is used for indirect objects when no one has properly addressed what to do with direct objects yet.

Okay, yes, the Partitive case is a bit weird and challenging when you don't have an equivalent in your language, and the locative cases are much easier to understand, so you can get them over with quickly, but still...

So, anyway, the upshot of my little table game is that I'm starting to finally get a grip on objects in the Estonian sentence. So, here's a little summary of my scribblings:

Sentence Part	English	German	Estonian
Subject	I (Nominative)	Ich (Nominative)	Mina/ma (Nominative)
Object	Me (Accusative)	Mich (Accusative)	Mind (Partative)* OR Mina/ma (Nominative)**
Indirect Object	Me (Dative)	Mir (Dative)	Mulle (Allative)***

*If the action isn't completed, involves only part of something or is negative, then you use the Partative (mind, in this example). This seems to be more common than the alternative.

**You only use the Nominative (Mina or ma, in this example) if the action is positive and complete and involves the whole of the thing in question.

***The Allative case is used for indirect objects as well as a locative case, so mulle is the equivalent of "me" in the sentences "he passed it to me", "he did it for me" and "he landed on me".

So, "me" in English could be "mind", "mina" or "mulle" in Estonian, depending on the context of the sentence.

Why it took the better part of three years for me to finally stitch that together in a coherent manner is beyond me.

(Mind you, I can't remember ever seeing it as "mina", so I'm not sure if the thing about Nominative case applies to pronouns exactly...)

Endlessly amusing

I don't know why, but every time I think of Morris Dancing I smile.

There's just something about grown men wearing bells and flowers while waving sticks around in the air that pleases me immensely.

You could argue that, like Capoeira Brazil, Morris Dancing is actually some form of warrior training disguised as dance:



But then I have absolutely no explanation for the hanky waving:

In Green...

My membership pack for Canberra United finally arrived (only six months after I sent in my membership form).

I'm ridiculously excited, and currently wearing the scarf. It's a bit of a dorky scarf, being made of a material that would be a) not warm in colder climates and b) not cool enough to get away with wearing in warmer climates without getting it all sweaty. Plus, it has "member 2011-2012" written on it, which is a touch annoying. I don't like things that are self-dating. Oh, and it's a scarf for a football team, so wearing it at work is also a bit dorky, I suppose. Must remember to take it off before leaving my cave... er, office.

But still, you know, I just got it, and I was beginning to think I never would, so I'm wearing it, darn it.

I actually joined the club to get a hat. I read somewhere that members got a hat. Instead I got a scarf and a flag and tickets to every game.

Sadly, there are only two games left, and I'm not likely to be "in town" for either of them. Such is life, when you follow a league that is based entirely in the bottom half of the continent and you life in the top half.

Oh, and I also got a ridiculous number of bumper stickers, which are also self-dating. Now I can tell the world that I was a member of Canberra United during the 2011/2012 season by applying these stickers to an entire fleet of vehicles.

At least the flag doesn't have a date-range applied to it.

The other reason I applied to be a member was the promise of regular updates. Surprisingly, it's actually getting harder and harder to find out what is happening in the national women's football league. The ABC, which is my hero because it screens one of the games every week, used to have a fairly easy access to stats and things. Now, not so much. The W-League website (which is based on the same useless structure as the A-League website) has never been the most easily navigable source of information.

It still bothers me greatly that our major newspapers don't even give the barest amount of information about the women's league. Women's basketball has a slightly better run of it, but it still gets short shrift in the grand scheme of things. As I may have mentioned before, it's the 21st Century. Surely we can give some attention to women's sport? Especially football, which is such a global thing...

Anyway, it's nice to support a team that's actually winning (we may take the premiership this year). Makes a pleasant change from the Fury.