Say No to...What?

I find myself growing more and more averse to mob movements the more I read about them. Consider the following comment made by a partaker of a demonstration following the release of the Mehlis report "implicating high-level Syrian officials in Hariri's death":

"We are protesting against the Mehlis report because it is untrue," said Marwa Jelaylat, 17. "We were very surprised to hear these accusations against our government."

The first thought that popped into my head after reading the word "untrue" was What does she know? She's a 17-year-old Syrian common citizen for crying out loud. Gee, now I sound like one of those baddies on tv that pushes the heroine out of the way saying "get outta the way little girl, you don't know what you're doing, go play with your dolls." But come on. How can she just say that a report presented by the U.N. is untrue, and with such conviction?

What percentage of individuals in a protest crowd really truly understand what they are fighting for or against, I wonder? Maybe that's not the point. Maybe the point is to get passionate about some issue or another, even if the stance is chosen mostly out of ignorance or misinformation. At least they care enough to shout themselves hoarse and raise picket signs.

Revelations:

The scariest book in the Bible.

My life is full of epiphanies and revelations. Of course, what's a revelation for one can be mundane fact for another, hardly worth an eyebrow-raise, if you have the ability to raise one eyebrow at a time. I myself can only do it with the left brow.

...On another note: Mandarin and Cantonese are known as Chinese "dialects", but they are completely different languages really. How are they different? Well, if you ask a linguist, you'll get a really convoluted reply about tones, syllable-final sounds, merging, phonological change, and so on.

A much simpler answer would be: Cantonese is ugly, while Mandarin is not. So if you ever hear someone (most likely a guy) say adamantly: "Chinese is hot!" and maybe even furnish you with an example involving that girl in Rush Hour who's in every other hot-Asian-chick role, then most likely, he is talking about Mandarin.

Absolutes

Random internet find #47:

"When your mama says you should never run with a sharp stick, she was probably right. Of course, if you don't, you'll never win the Great Sharp Stick Race!"

Learning from the best

Whatever happened to those educational cartoons of yore? And now, the Warner Bros (and Warner sister!) present: the U.S. presidents!

Note: the astericks indicate the original lyrics
Note: the prophetic nature of the bolded verse

Yakko: Heigh ho, do you know
The names of the U.S. residents
Who then became the presidents
And got a view from the White House loo
Of Pennsylvania Avenue?

Wakko: George Washington was the first, you see
He once chopped down a cherry tree
Dot : President number two would be
John Adams and then number three

* Yakko: George Washington was the first, you see
* He once chopped down a cherry tree
* Dot : President number two would be
* John Adams and then number three

Yakko: Tom Jefferson stayed up to write
The Declaration late at night
So he and his wife had a great big fight
And she made him sleep on the couch all night

* Yakko: Tom Jefferson stayed up to write
* The Constitution late at night
* So he and his wife had a great big fight
* And she made him sleep on the couch all night

Wakko: James Madison never had a son
And he fought the War of 1812
Dot : James Monroe's colossal nose
Was bigger than Pinocchio's

Yakko: John Quincy Adams was number six
And it's Andrew Jackson's butt he kicks
So Jackson learns to play politics
Next time he's the one that the country picks

Dot : Martin Van Buren, number eight
For a one-term shot as Chief of State
Yakko: William Harrison, how do you praise?
That guy was dead in thirty days

Wakko: John Tyler, he liked country folk
Dot : And after him came President Polk
Yakko: Zachary Taylor liked to smoke
His breath killed friends whenever he spoke

Wakko: Eighteen fifty, really nifty
Millard Fillmore's in
Yakko: Young and fierce was Franklin Pierce
The man without a chin

Dot : Follows next a period spannin'
Four long years with James Buchanan
Then the South starts shootin' cannon
And we've got a civil war
YW+D : A war, a war down south in Dixie

Yakko: Up to bat comes old Abe Lincoln
Dot : There's a guy who's really thinkin'
Wakko: Kept the United States from shrinkin'
Saved the ship of state from sinkin'

Dot : Andrew Johnson's next
He had some slight defects
Wakko: Congress each
Would impeach
Dot : And so the country now elects

Yakko: Ulysses Simpson Grant
Who would scream and rave and rant
Wakko: While drinking whiskey
Although risky
'Cause he'd spill it on his pants

Yakko: It's eighteen seventy-seven
And the Democrats would gloat
But they're all amazed when Rutherford Hayes
Wins by just one vote

Dot : James Garfield, someone really hated
'Cause he was assassinated
Wakko: Chester Arthur gets instated
Four years later, he was traded

Dot : For Grover Cleveland, really fat
Elected twice as a Democrat
Then Benjamin Harrison; after that
It's William McKinley up to bat

Yakko: Teddy Roosevelt charged up San Juan Hill
Wakko: And President Taft, he got the bill
Yakko: In 1913 Woodrow
YW+D : Wil...
...son takes us into World War One

Yakko: Warren Harding next in line
Dot : It's Calvin Coolidge; he does fine
Wakko: And then in nineteen twenty-nine
The market crashes, and we find

* Yakko: Warren Harding, he does fine
* Dot : It's Calvin Coolidge next in line
* Wakko: And then in nineteen twenty-nine
* The market crashes, and we find

Yakko: It's Herbert Hoover's big debut
He gets the blame and loses to
Dot : Franklin Roosevelt, president who
Helped us win in World War Two

Wakko: Harry Truman, weird little human
Serves two terms and when he's done
Yakko: It's Eisenhower who's got the power
From fifty-three to sixty-one

Dot : John Kennedy had Camelot
Then Lyndon Johnson took his spot
Yakko: Richard Nixon, he gets caught
And Gerald Ford fell down a lot

* Dot : John F. Kennedy, he gets shot
* So Lyndon Johnson takes his spot
* Yakko: Richard Nixon, he gets caught
* And Gerald Ford fell down a lot

Wakko: Jimmy Carter liked campaign trips
Yakko: And Ronald Reagan's speeches' scripts
All came from famous movie clips
And President Bush said "read my lips"

Dot : Now in Washington D.C.
Wakko: There's Democrats and the G.O.P.
Yakko: But the ones in charge are plain to see
Dot : The Clintons, Bill and Hillary

* Dot : Now in Washington D.C.
* Wakko: There's Democrats and the G.O.P.
* Yakko: But the one in charge is plain to see
* Dot : It's Clinton, first name Hillary

Yakko: The next President to lead the way
Well, it just might be yourself one day
Then the press'll distort everything you say
YW+D : So jump in your plane and fly away

How I Ended Up in a 7-11 at 2:30 in the Morning in my snowflake pajama pants and eeyore nightshirt, holding a brownie in one hand and cheetos in the o

ther. (Title space has a limit?) Otherwise titled: Nighttime Wanderings.

I woke up from a nap at around 2 in the morning (so far, nothing out of the ordinary). I picked up the book that I was currently reading, "In the Shadow of the Law" (nothing strange there). I found my place and started losing myself in the story again (great book, by the way). Then, somewhere down the line (line 9, page 347), my mind started wandering.

After some random pit-stops, it wandered to "Meet Joe Black"- possibly the weirdest movie ever made in the history of movie-making. And damn, way to kill the effectiveness of the "dramatic pause" through overuse. Also, I don't think the director realized that if you pause for too long, intensity and level of anticipation and interest actually decrease exponentially, members of the audience actually start to forget why we are pausing in the first place, the link between the pre- and post-pause line lost in the silence. And so, we are left scratching our heads and wondering why the word "Death" has just flown out of the Brad Pitt's lips.

Anyway,...after ambling into Meet Joe Black, my mind then wandered effortlessly to Brad Pitt, who plays Death, and made a smooth connection to peanut butter (in the movie, Death develops a rather obsessive taste for peanut butter). *Gurgle gurgle*. My stomach approved. So, slave that I am to the desires of my tummy, I pulled out the pb and started eating it straight out of the jar with a spoon, just like Brad Pitt does in the movie.

Then, instead of wandering further into the murky depths of undiscovered associations, my mind remained a passenger on the food train, and I began to think how wonderful it would be to have a nice big decadent slice of 7-11 (we say "magic") brownie on a plate in front of me. But it's 2:30 in the morning! protested my voice of reason. He was quickly silenced. Throwing a coat over my pj's, I was out the door in a minute, down the escalator,...and that's how I ended up at 7-11 at 2:30 in the morning in the said get-up, with said comestibles in hand.

But what about the cheetos? That was to balance out the sweet with a little salty. Apparently, my voice of reason was not completely and properly silenced upstairs. That shall be remedied in good time.

Otherwise entitled: Why it takes me so long to read even a good book like "In the Shadow of the Law".

Do the dew, not the doo

Oh man. I dunno whether to laugh or be embarrassed, so I am currently doing both. I was sitting in front of the computer annotating WSJ sentences (OK OK I was surfing the net, reading the Times), when the bottle of mountain dew I had this morning called for a trip to the freezing cold bathroom down the hall. I opened the door, walked in, and exclaimed aloud to no one in particular: "pee-EWWWW!" because man it smelled like the worst case of doodoo in there, and because I thought I was alone. Only I wasn't because the next moment, I saw a pair of feet peeking out from under a stall from the reflection in the mirror. I had the horribly impolite but involuntary urge to giggle, and then thinking how embarrassing it would be to come face to face with the doodoo-doer, I quickly shuffled out of the bathroom. And now, I'm sitting in front of the computer once more, desperately needing to go pee.

Welcome Home

Gee, Philly is supposed to be the hub of violence, but so far, I've witnessed nothing in the city of brotherly love (KNOCK ON WOOD!). Then I come home to Tacoma for a 3 week vacation, and in one day, a fight breaks out at our local mall, right in front of my eyes, where a woman actually gets tasered, then later that night, I come out of a club in Seattle, and there's a guy knocked unconscious on the ground, his body twitching, and blood dripping out of his skull, forming a dark pool around his head. Then a couple weeks later (today), I learn that there was a fatal shooting at my old high school.

What's with that?

Yet, I still had a marvelous time yesterday in the beautiful city of Seattle, where I saw the Dead Sea Scrolls(!!!) which were on tour at the Pacific Science Center, and then had an interesting sushi dinner at U Village, which is all lit up with fairy lights at this time of year. It was interesting because it involved swiping our entrees directly from a giant conveyer belt. As for the scrolls, I've got a keen interest in ancient scripts/paleography, so no doubt it was fascinating and linger-worthy, seeing those arcane scrawlings on scraps of goathide which when deciphered, revealed stories about the genesis of the world and frightening tales of the fiery end of the world. And I even got to carry out a black-ops mission on the side, which involved faking a major coughing fit in order to get past security. OK, the coughing fit was real. The mission? Not so much. But y'all already figured that out...

Cobalt out.

Dinosaurs

Does anyone else find it amazing that dinosaur fossils are being uncovered to this day, that new dinosaur species are being discovered and outrageously named and studied, to this day? How can anyone believe in the Creation theory while knowing that these eons-old, gargantuan, sci-fi-ish creatures actually existed? Or is there a way to make the existence of dinosaurs compatible with Creationism? On "Friends", Ross is given a lot of crap for being a nerdy, boring paleontologist, but I think it would be a really cool job.

Obama and a dash of Dubya

Here's a brief, interesting article on Obama. I don't agree or disagree just yet, but I think it's time for me to stop making a god/savior-figure out of the poor guy and actually open up my mind to his faults as well as his strengths.

"You know, I, when I speak, like right now, for example, I'm speaking to the American people, of course, and I want them to know that I know how tough it is."
-- George W. Bush

Both are from Slate, which I never read until now, thanks to the influence of Eric and Jess. Maybe I'll vote for it next year.

Jack Kerouac On Madness

The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn, like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars and in the middle you see the blue centerlight pop and everybody goes "Awww!"

Reading Lolita Made Me Crazy

Does a book have to be serious in order for it to be taken seriously? I'm almost through with "Reading Lolita in Tehran", which I heard was an amazing memoir- and it is, but it is so ultra heavy and serious that now, all I want to do is curl up under my covers with a good comic book. I miss laughing with my books. It's ironic because part of the purpose of "Reading Lolita" is to convey the author's love of literature; it's about her desire to impart this love upon the reader. Instead, her book created in me this intense, semi-irrational aversion to the very thing she wanted me to love.

I'm reminded suddenly of the story I heard in psych class of a perfectly healthy man who pretended to be crazy in order to escape prison. When he was released and sent home to the care of his wife, the prison received a letter from his wife later thanking the guards for taking such good care of her crazy husband; that he was now safely in the care of a mental house. Turns out, after weeks/months of pretending to be crazy, he really did go insane.

In the same way, Nafisi took me, a perfectly healthy individual who loved to read novels, and through her desire to cure me (read: impart her love of literature on me), instead instilled in me a fear of "good literature". It's no surprise that I am often found these days sitting in the back of the car reading "Mutts" and laughing hysterically, or even sitting at a Barnes reading Godel Escher and Bach, which although it is no light read (literally), at least does not engage my emotions too much with depressing stories about the drudgery of living in an oppressed land.

Speaking of light reads, this morning I opened up a window to the Times, and started gasping and nearly hyperventilating (ok, exaggeration, but whatever).

"What?! What is it Angie?!, what's wrong?" asked Sarah and umma (mom).

"Guess what? The title of the 7th Harry Potter- it's been announced! EEE!!"

"OHMYGODWHATISIT?" cried Sarah.

"Gee, I thought it was something important," grumbled umma.

So exciting. Harry Potter gets serious too, but unlike "Reading Lolita", it's also funny and contains magic, fantasy, imagination, and thus bears little semblance to reality (although one can definitely draw some parallels if one really has the hankering to do so). In short, my kind of book.

Time & Space

Time:

Pun with non-native English speakers: Yesterday, my family and I decided to update the family portrait that's been hanging on our walls for the past 11 years. We had more than 2 hours to kill before our appointment (because we're not the kind of family that makes appointments before going into the studio...and also, the updating of the family portrait was kind of a spur-of-the-moment idea), and so my cool dad decided that it was indecent for girls that graduated from Penn to go around without watches (yeah, now you see where I inherited my amazingly rational brain). We spent such a long while browsing the Sears watches that I wondered if we'd missed our appointment, but Cool Dad assured me, "don't worry, we have plenty of time."

"Ho, ho, get it? We have lots of time?" I said, gesturing to the gazillion watches that surrounded us at the mo', and winking a couple times in case they didn't get it. Well, maybe I didn't wink enough times, because Cool Dad, after releasing a couple plosive 'ha's', said, "but you do know that shi-geh ('watch') is different from shi-gan ('time'), right?

I knew I should have winked a 3rd time. See, in the Theory of Joke-Telling, the winking, among other functions, serves to sway the audience from their inherent tendency to be so literal-minded, allowing individual words to cluster into groups of words that are similar enough to be deemed identical (we say the words are isomorphic) within the particular joke-world.

Thus, my winking should have dispelled the notion, for the moment, that "watch" and "time" were two distinct words. Unfortunately, I forgot the often-ignored corollary, that when the audience consists of either non-native English speakers or members of the Chung family- double whammy- than the jokester ought to consider throwing in a couple extra winks for good measure.

Space:

I discovered the true relative position of the sun to the Earth way back in the first grade- which in itself was kind of an embarrassing moment. See, we were doing a poetry unit, and Mrs. Bornander had each of us stand up in front of the whole class and read our poem aloud. I guess in my lame first-grade poem, I was describing the various objects found on planet Earth, like sky, grass, flowers (and rainbows and butterflies yay), and when I reached the part about the stars, moon, and sun, my classmates started snickering for some reason unbeknownst to First Grade Me. I stood there clutching the piece of paper with my poem written on it in one hand, and staring up at Mrs. B. as she tried to explain very nicely that the sun actually lived outside of the Earth. How traumatizing. No wonder I hate class presentations. I think that is the first time I ever considered that anything existed outside of our humble planet, past the blue sky.

When Two Jobs Meet

Here is a sentence I had to annotate for my linguistics job:

"The Penn bookstore charged John $100 for a mechanical pencil."

Heh. I love real-life examples.

WPSM

I now carry around a screwdriver in my purse, so that the West Philly Screwdriver Mugger (WPSM) and I can have a proper duel for my wallet. I imagine the scene to play out like this:

WPSM: Gimme your wallet (wields an intimidating-looking screwdriver in his hand)!

Me: Wh-wha? Oh hey, you must be the Screwdriver Mugger! Hold on, lemme just look in my purse here...(I rummage through my purse much like the way Mary Poppins rummages through her carpetbag, muttering to myself)...Ah ha! I've got my own screwdriver, what now Screwdriver Man?!

WPSM: Gimme your wallet, or I'll poke your eyes out!

Me: Oh-ho-ho-kay, fine, just take it. And keep the screwdriver, too. (By now, I'm too chicken to call him a "filthy animal" like in Home Alone.)

Damn! Instead of making the world safer, I've managed to arm the Screwdriver Mugger with a second weapon! Woman!

Good thing this isn't real.

Most people just laugh and say "Silly Angie" when I tell them about this new habit, but when I mentioned it to the Penn Shuttle driver last night/this morning, he said, "Instead of a screwdriver, you should carry around a screw. You know, he's probably just a harmless, guy who wants to unscrew a screw, and here everyone is thinking he wants to attack them." What can I do but laugh, because that's just the funniest goddamn response I've gotten yet. And so I laughed, saying, "Oh, wow, yeah, he probably just wants a screw!" And then I stopped laughing because that's not so funny. Eep! I hate violence.

Rhyme Time

Inspired by Vinod's cousin, who fell asleep in the tub yesterday, followed by a discussion of disgusting bathtubs, I present a poem of neither rhythm nor rhyme, but plenty of alliteration:

Orange gunk gathers
Cracks 'n' crinkles caulk
Along yellow, aged edges
Where sprawling limbs lie
The slumbering sot

(A drunken snore here would be appropriate, but not entirely necessary)

Working Toward Self-Destruction, or Irrelevance

"The goal of the GALE (Global Autonomous Language Exploitation) program is to develop and apply computer software technologies to absorb, analyze and interpret huge volumes of speech and text in multiple languages, eliminating the need for linguists and analysts and automatically providing relevant, distilled actionable information to military command and personnel in a timely fashion. Automatic processing "engines" will convert and distill the data, delivering pertinent, consolidated information in easy-to-understand forms to military personnel and monolingual English-speaking analysts in response to direct or implicit requests."

This description of the GALE program is taken directly from the DARPA website (DARPA is a research program funded by the Department of Defense). What worries me just a smidgen is the bolded part. So essentially, we're working to eliminate our relevance in the workplace is what they're saying, which sounds like a bad thing doesn't it? But after a moment's thought, I realized that machine translation research is only one of many fields in which the work is, as I called it "self-destructive". Research scientists in disease prevention, alternative energy sources, anything technology-related- all these can be self-destructive in some way. But I'm not that worried, because most of the time, a solution to one problem only generates more problems (more work for us!), like infinite recursion, and also, it will be way beyond my lifetime before a solution is even found. Although, judging by this really interesting article on machine translation, it may be sooner rather than later in this particular field. (Okay, looks like the article "Me Translate Pretty One Day" won't be posted on line until December 1st.) Here is a text version of the accompanying picture:

"Dos burritos, por favor"

Human translator: 2 burritos, please!

Machine translator: 2 young donkeys, please!

Ducks Backward Sans Vowels

Check this webcomic out, it's awesome!

Ponder This

"Chew the cud" means to ruminate, and "ruminants" are cloven-hooved quadrupeds of the suborder Ruminantia, like cows, who chew their cud. Which begat which? My guess is that the name of the class of animals comes from the thoughtful expression that appears on a cow's face when it chews its cud. I also think we give cows too much credit. What kind of deep thoughts do you think ole Bessie is mulling over as she chews her molasses-like abc grass? Certainly nothing as deep as world domination.

"I Dunno"

What do you say when someone asks you a question you don't know the answer to? You can either

a) reply in Belgian ("waffle waffle") with the proper intonation and accents and stuff, or

b) go Poppins on the inquirer, singing "Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious!", or

c) gaze fatefully and absentmindedly at the moon, and say "Mars is bright tonight."

Think of these options as the equivalents of a blank stare. That last one is from Harry Potter 1.

Wow how did it become a post about Alias? I thought the world revolved around cheese

I decided that I am not a pathological liar. In order to be a pathological liar, I must believe in the lies that I tell, which I most certainly do not. Lying is a valuable skill to have/develop, especially if one is involved in the business of crime-stopperage, espionage, getting out of sticky situations, and being a good mother.

For instance, Irina Derevko was an awesome mom, and what was that line that defined, directed, and defended her actions from beginning to bloody end? Truth takes time, baby! Come to think of it, we still don't know the truth. "Ah, but there was neither truth nor an endgame in the Alias-verse, little grasshopper" says the wise, objective non-viewer. Lord, if life, reality, and morality are anything like Alias, then we're in trouble folks. No objective truth, no official moral code that is above human interpretation, we may as well be Lost on a little island in Hawaii. With a fat guy named Hurley. And a misplaced polar bear.

To be honest, I'm not far from believing that the subjectiveness of the Alias-verse well reflects the realities of our own Universe, but that's another story for another time. (Something to do with colors and evolution and moral codes.)