Geek of All Trades

Middle name tag

A couple of weeks ago Amodini (who has both a general stuff blog and one for Hindi films) tagged me with the "middle name tag."  I was rude and didn't respond right away, because I was overwhelmed with work there for a few weeks and haven't had time for too much blogging.  I've had a reprieve, though - a trial that had been scheduled to begin three weeks from now has been moved to the spring - and so I wanted to thank Amodini, and pick up this tag. 

The idea is as follows:

1. You must list one fact that is somehow relevant to your life for each letter of your middle name.
2.  If you don’t have a middle name, use the middle name you would have liked to have had.
3. At the end of your blog post, you need to choose one person for each letter of your middle name to tag.

So here we go:

M: Middle name.  I have one.  In fact, unlike many people, I use mine regularly, preferring to write my name out in full  - first, middle, last - in correspondence, court papers, and even informal settings.  My name doesn't sound right to me without it.  Both of my brothers have middle names too, but they don't use them, not even an initial.  I'm not sure why that is; I've never talked to them about it.  "Miriam" is an essential part of my name, and I can't imagine not using it. 

I: India.  Why?  I don't know.   I'm not Indian; I don't pretend I am, and I don't aspire to be.  But I watch Indian movies, study an Indian language, and from time to time have been known to cook Indian food or wear Indian clothes.  There it is.  I haven't been to India; mostly because David and I are poor planners and haven't yet gotten around to making it happen.  I once joked that I decided to learn Hindi because that's the language the spoken by the voices in my head and I wanted to understand what they were saying.  Sometimes that feels not too far from the truth - I have no idea where this came from.

R:  Religion.  It comes and goes.  There have been times in my life when I could not imagine Friday night without Shabbat services.  Now is not one of those times.  David and I haven't gone to Shabbat services regularly in many years.  I wouldn't mind getting back into the habit, but I don't want to take responsibility for it; I want David to select a congregation and say, "we're going, tonight." 

I: Idols.  I have one.    

A:  Ambivalent attorney.  Attorney is my real job; ambivalent is what I am about it.   I don't dislike everything about it, and I'm trying to make some changes to my practice that, I hope, will help me enjoy my work more.  But I'm already on my second career, and I'm fairly certain I won't be doing this for the rest of my life.  No specific plans yet though!

M:  Morphology.  Well, not morphology specifically, linguistics generally.  (I know, it's lame - the trouble with my middle name is that I have to come up with two entries for "I" and "M;" I can't tell you how I struggled with this one.)  I've been a linguistics dilettante for as long as I can remember.  I sometimes fantasize about dropping everything and heading back to graduate school to study linguistics.  David worries that if I did that, it would kill my interest in it; he might be right.  At any rate I remain an amateur, for now.  I'm not certain what branch of linguistics I'd specialize in were I to take the plunge; perhaps some sort of comparative syntactic studies, since that is what interests me most across languages:  the different structures used in different languages use to express ideas.  (Examples of my musings on such concepts here and here and here.)

In completing this tag I am supposed to tag other bloggers, one for each letter in my middle name - six in all.  But the last time I tried to tag some bloggers it didn't go all that well - only one of them responded to the tag.  So I'm going to do something different this time.  If you read this, and you have a blog of your own, consider yourself tagged.   Just let me know, via a comment or an email, if you pick up the thread, and I'll add a link to your post here. 

Okay, but did you need to put it so bluntly?

This is what greets me on my YouTube profile page:

We are all of us Simpsons

David and I saw the Simpsons movie and liked enjoyed it.  I'm not going to review it.  There are plenty of reviews out there that get it right - it's funny, it sustains, it's about as good as a good episode of the TV show.  We've been singing the "Spider pig" song all weekend -

Spider pig, spider pig
Does whatever a spider pig does
Can he swing from a web?
No he can't, he's a pig

And I've found myself quoting lines, like President Schwarzennegar's "I was elected to lead - not to read!"  So all in all it was a successful film, I think. 

The official website is the best part though - you can make yourself a Simpsons-style avatar.  Here are David and me.

Exoticized lettering

Prof. Bill Poser, one of Language Log's regular contributors, posted yesterday about the word "nyet" written in Roman characters stylized to look like Cyrillic.  It reminded me of my post of about eight months ago where I wrote about Devanagari lettering (I mistakenly called it typeface) styled to look like Urdu, and other stylistic exoticizations.  I emailed Prof. Poser, and before I knew it he had posted on Langauge Log a link to me.

Language Log has tens of thousands of regular readers - 1400 of them have visited me in the last 12 hours or so.  That's quite a traffic spike for this humble little blog, that hums along ordinarily at less than 40 page views a day.  Thanks to Prof. Poser for the hat tip.

One Language Log reader followed up with his own interesting post on the same subject:  Chinese characters stylized to look like Tibetan.  Tibetan script is lovely; it's a descendant of Devanagari that I once mistook for Bengali.  Here is a sample of Tibetan script and one of Bengali script.

Tagged.

I have been tagged with the "eight random facts" meme, by the author of the fascinating blog bradshaw of the future - a blog I've been meaning to highlight here for some time, so more on that in another post. 

For now, on to the meme.  I'm finding it a challenge because in a way, Geek of All Trades itself is a collection of random facts about me.  So I have to find eight facts that haven't yet made it into Geek of All Trades posts, or cannot be deduced from reading them.  I hope they are at least somewhat interesting.

Rules (edited for brevity):

1. Post these rules before giving the facts.
   
2. Then post eight random facts/habits about yourself.3
3. At the end of your post, choose eight bloggers to tag and list them.
   
4. Leave your tagees a comment telling them they're tagged.
   

Facts:

• It is entirely possible that I could recite along with the actors every dialogue from Cold Comfort Farm.  Also Howards End, and perhaps also Breakfast at Tiffany's.

• When I was in my twenties, I couldn't wait to turn 30.  Now I am well into my 30s and I can't wait to turn 40.  I also greet each new gray hair as a welcome, long-awaited guest.

• I went through a period of several years in which I frequently dreamed about witnessing a plane crash.  In the typical dream, a low-flying airplane would enter my field of vision from behind me or from the side.  It would fly across my field of vision and then be obscured by a tree, hill, or building.  Then I would hear the crash and see the explosion from behind the object that obscured the airplane.  The dreams are much less frequent now.  During that time I was also afraid of flying, though I did so when I had to.  I had not been afraid of flying at all before this, and I am not now - the fear went away on its own.

• I am the laziest, most irresponsible, most undisciplined person I know.  David says that this is only so because my friends and acquaintances are all extraordinarily highly-motivated people.  Clearly I need new friends.  Also  I am a perpetual dilettante and serial obsessionist.  Or maybe I just have the attention span of a gnat.

• According to one of my early baseball memories, on or near my birthday one year I went to a game at Yankee Stadium with my dad at which catcher Rick Cerone hit a home run.  I can't identify this game from the data at Retrosheet though.   It might be this game, if my dad took me to night games when I was in third grade.  Rick Cerone didn't hit that many home runs, and that is the only one he hit any time at Yankee Stadium any time near my birthday.  It's possible that I've conflated two memories - one of going to the stadium on my birthday, and another of Rick Cerone hitting a home run. 

• I'm on my second career now, and frequently fantasize about what my third will be.  If I could be a professional student, I would.  I sometimes dream of going to graduate school in linguistics, but I am afraid that the transition from avocation to vocation will kill my passion for it.  I think I will probably end up teaching - I'd teach just about any subject to just about any students, provided they want to be there and are eager to learn.  I would also be very happy as an editor, but it seems that fewer and fewer employers want to pay people to edit things. 
  

• An acquaintance of mine who is an aspiring filmmaker made a ten-minute documentary about me for her filmmaking workshop.  If I am feeling particularly exhibitionist, and if she gives me permission, I may just post it for all of you to see.

• I put up my first website in late 1995 or early 1996.  It is long, long gone, but portions of it can be seen via the Internet Archive Wayback Machine.  For a while I had a Natalie Merchant fan page on that site, which was gone before the Internet Archive existed, so it's lost to posterity.  Still, in that tradition, I recently started a third blog, called Sounds Like Power, which is a fan blog devoted to Shabana Azmi.  Le plus ca change ...

Passing along the tag:  I am not sure I can think of eight who have not already been tagged, but I will try.

The Real Charlie:  My friend Charlie, who writes about beer, traffic, morbidity and mortality, and his daughters, among other things.

While She Naps:  My friend Abby, who writes about the magnificent soft sculptures she creates while her two daughters (who happen to be the same as Charlie's two daughters) are sleeping.

Desi in Boston:  My friend Amit, who writes about all kinds of things.

Darkstate:  My soul-mate David, who doesn't write about anything, but perhaps this tag will kick-start him and get him blogging again.

Was Watching: Steve, whom I got to know when I was a moderator on his now largely defunct NetShrine discussion board, is a very ardent and loyal Yankees fan who is unafraid to go out on a limb with his unique and creative ideas about baseball.  I hope he will respond to this tag by posting some interesting Yankee-related facts about himself. 

Well, that's pathetic - I can only think of five.  The trouble is, I think, that most of the blogs I read are by people who don't know me and who couldn't really be bothered to respond to my dinky little tag, like Susie Bright or Language Log.  But if I think of anyone else I'll come back and update the post. 

Geoff Pullum on Will Shortz

Geoff Pullum is Language Log's saltiest denizen, and my favorite.  He is at his finest in curmudgeonly rant mode, as in a series of postings ripping into Dan Brown.  Yesterday I stumbled across this hysterical Pullum post in  Language Log's archives - I laughed so hard that tears were running out of my eyes and I couldn't breathe.  Here Prof. Pullum confesses his true feelings about the sort of word puzzles purveyed by Will Shortz on NPR's Weekend Edition Sunday:

I suppose some people would imagine a grammarian is the sort of pointy-headed dweeb who would simply love to wake up on a Sunday morning to hear someone answer a series of questions about names of cities that sound like Latin names for ecclesiastical garments or two-word phrases for types of criminal activity where each word begins with the letter the other one ends with and then be told that since they got 3 out of 10 they will get an NPR lapel pin and a paperback college dictionary. Well those people would be dead wrong.... 

The expressive power of human language is barely adequate to convey the profound level of apathy word puzzles provoke in me.  I despise them.

Read the rest of the post for more.

 

The Devil's website

If the Devil had a website, it would be Jay is Games.

I'm serious, folks - don't visit this website unless you want to look up, blink, and wonder where the last four hours of your life went.  It's the most efficient time vortex I have ever encountered.

Jay is Games is a "casual gaming" websites with links to hundreds - at least hundreds- of fun little games that you can play online, without downloading anything.  The site has reviews of the games, and hints and walkthroughs too.  There is an array in the left-frame of "recommended games" that is randomly generated each time you visit the site so there's always a cute new fun game to try.  And you can save your favorites to be waiting for you, calling you, taunting you every time you visit. 

God help me, it's a more addictive timesuck than the BollyWHAT? forums.  I love this website.  My mousing elbow aches; my neck aches; but I love this website. 

Here are a few of the fun games I've lost myself in so far:

Tontie - so fun.  It's like Whack-a-Mole meets Teletubbies.  On crack. 

Juggler - juggle little balls with your paddle; like an old break-out style game, but better.

Twin Spin - hard to explain.  Walk a little spinning barbell around and pop bubbles.  There is also Twin Spin 2 and Twin Spin 3, which I haven't played yet.

Pigalator - a strangely fun dice game.

Hoshi saga - find the hidden stars.

Ununicum - a matching game unlike any I have ever played.

There are gajillions more.  I haven't even tried a fraction of the recommended games yet, much less the zillions of other games on the site.  They are all small, simple, beautiful, and ridiculously fun. 

If Jimmy Buffett were Jewish...

... he'd be wastin' away in Manieschewitzville.

Busy little geek, and a small plug

Just popping in to issue a quick apology for the radio silence here at Geek of All Trades.  There's quite a bit going on. 

I've been juggling a lot of different projects at work, wearing both my patent prosecutor hat and my litigator hat.  I'm starting to have a strong opinion about which of those hats fits me better. 

Also, my Hindi class has resumed, with a vengeance; it now meets twice a week, and I'm lucky if I can manage to get to half the sessions.  I'm taking the class more for the social opportunities it offers than for language learning; the class isn't challenging me at all at this point, but I've made so many excellent friends from it that it just makes me happy to go.

David and I have resumed our efforts to get our house remodeled, and this time it's really going to happen, though we are still in the planning and talking and "dear lord it's really going to cost that much" stage.   I will have updates as they occur - once they start tearing our home apart you will definitely hear about it here. 

Those of you who care what I have to say about Hindi films as well as the sundry random topics I toss up here will have noticed that things have not been quite as quiet over at Filmi Geek.  Keeping things going over there does take some time.  There's more, too - I'm also now writing for the South Asian Films section at the relatively new Jaman website.  Jaman is several things.  It's a source to download high-quality movies from all over the world - not just India, I promise.  But perhaps even more importantly, it's a community for people who love to talk about movies, who watch movies and who make them.  Jaman is in a growing phase now, and it looks like it's going to be a lot of fun, so please stop by and have a look. 

That's all for now.  More substance to come in the future. 

Desi in Boston

My friend Amit has joined the blogosphere with Desi in Boston, where he's writing about the many interesting topics that strike his fancy - movies, politics, the environment, computers, and more.  He's already collected a nice list of links to food blogs.  I've added him to my meager blogroll at the right - please pay him a visit.