whip · leather · and · polished · paddle · wood

I have not written for NaNoWriMo today though finished last night a few hundred words ahead of schedule. If I am in the mood before I get sleepy tonight I may do a few and then attack it tomorrow hopefully after a better night's sleep.

"Why are shape-shifting soldiers from another universe stealing frozen heads?"

Current Mood:

amused

Today and Tomorrow is the Allston Open Studios. I've never been, not even in the ten or twelve years that I lived in the neighborhood (and was an art student and such). The current soaking rain is keeping me from heading over there at the moment.

Tomorrow is a benefit for Pinups for Pitbulls. They put out a calendar featuring pretty girls and cute dogs together, and they are selling the latest one at the event. It's happening at a place called Revolution Rock Bar (warning: music plays when link is clicked) which I've never heard of. It calls itself "Boston's Hippest Nightclub for Dancing, DJs, Live music and more," which makes me feel like I'm probably too old and unhip for the place. But hey, it's for educating people about pit bulls and should be full of women dressed in quasi-retro 50's ish burlesque rockabilly sexywear so that oughta be worth leaving the house.

Maybe I'll see you there!

Fascinating to find these texts coming back into the grimoire tradition, rather than simply the limited canon of Lemegeton, Key of Solomon, and Abramelin.

We will also be posting an interview with Eric in due course.

She spends a good amount of the book discussing three of the most successful invented languages: First, Esperanto, an attempt at a universal language using mostly Latin roots, with simple grammar and syntax and pronunciation rules, with vague notions of world peace and harmony as its origins. It lives on today, is pretty easy to learn (I'm taking a half-hearted whack at it), and has a body of literature, and even a William Shatner movie.

Of course, the same can be said for the Klingon language, and Okrent explains how a few gutteral hacking noises were assembled by a scholarly linguist into a working language with hundreds of casual users and a couple dozen conversational speakers. She goes deep, taking the Klingon language aptitude exam and accompanying the Klingons as they embarrass the crap out of her at a restaurant.

And she also hangs out with the speakers of Lojban, a mind-bogglingly complicated set of logical rules that comprises a language that enables incredibly precise and non-ambiguous statements to be made. Of course programmers love it, and I can only imagine its appeal to the Asperger's community. This was a good lead in to the modern "comlang" community of people who spend an awful lot of time making up languages and arguing with others about made up languages. I suspect that many of the people reading this know a lot more about this than I do.

I enjoyed the discussion of what made an invented language a success or a failure, and about what each language actually reveals about language itself. The stories about language inventors of the past, and what lengths they took to promote their creations tell us much about human nature, ingenuity and passion. I love the inescapable conclusion that there is no such http://www.livejournal.com/update.bmlthing as a universal set of symbols: they all reveal individual and cultural influences and biases.

Today I came home to discover an autographed copy of The Sibley Guide to Trees on my front step. A friend who still works at Drumlin Farm sent it to me, an extremely thoughtful gift. (I did telegraph my great desire to own it across Facebook and Livejournal.) I haven't even flipped through it yet, but I have a long weekend to try and soak it up and use it. Alexis, her IM voice dripping with vitamin D deprived scorn, said "does it have a way to identify trees using their leafless silhouettes?" Of course it does, where appropriate. Bark, buds, and twigs are also depicted, so I believe it is a guide that will be useful year round.

The friend who got it for me described talking to Sibley about the book: "He had a great analogy comparing bird field guides of 100 years ago with the still current tree ID guides that start with ‘is it opposite or alternate’. 100 years ago the way to ID a bird was to shoot it and then look at it in your hand. He’s trying to get people to look at trees in a similar way to bird guides now where you ID from distinguishing characteristics of the whole organism – the geist of the tree as it were." Well, hopefully after this weekend I'll have an idea of what that means.

ĝis revido!

It's the day President-Elect Palin will announce that Douglas Feith will be the Secretary of State in her administration and John Yoo will be the Attorney General.

IOW, it's the day we'll wish the world had ended.