Syntactic Sugar

We moved into the new house! The cats are back! Oliver and his family came to visit!

Damn, I found the most awesome book trolling Wikipedia for information on posionous mushrooms. Its theory is that Christianity was a sex/hallucinogenic drug cult and Jesus WAS the mushroom. OMG! Too bad it's so hard to get a hold of.

I bought The Ultimate Uncheese Cookbook and I've basically been gorging myself on cheez. I am apparently "doin it wrong" because the agar (vegan gelatin) set up and it turned into a tasty but very uncheeselike spread. Also I have yet to get the right balance of lemon juice to citric acid, and my mozzarella turned out very sour...eww. The chedda had more or less the right amount of citric acid but it was still a little overpowering so I'll definitely cut down the next time I make it. I'm also an idiot and I don't know what cheese tastes like so I'm like "Whoa this tastes just like cheese!" and apparently it doesn't. I'm almost out of my nutritional yeast and my pee is turning neon yellow from the crazy B-Complex. Also, flax seed (not oil) is a LAXATIVE. Be aware.

The new house is pretty awesome. It's located really near everything and it's not on some twisty road in the mountains...I get my own bathroom and the cats have stopped fighting and love eachother again. Yay! I bought a desk from Craigslist so the only downside now is that I have a million boxes in my room and I have some nasty-ass bruises all over my legs....

It was really great having Oliver and his family come to visit...we went to hike at this place called Sugarloaf mountain and then went to Pearl Street and kind of passed out from the heat...

I was lonely after he left, so I put an ad on Craigslist looking for friends...I actually got one response from a pretty cool sounding guy so we might have coffee this weekend. I've also gotten a response from "grababootienpinch" and two guys from Texas, one of whom thought that Bubble tea was a Texas phenomenon. These have been quietly shoved aside. It's kind of embarrassing posting on Craigslist or whatever, but I figure if things go terribly wrong (a la my "showing Conspirators of Pleasure to a group of people I hardly knew" incident) I won't be in Boulder again for some time. So take that, bitches!

My mom brought home a CD today and asked if I knew the band. At first I thought it was Amandine and I got super excited, but then I realized it was the Arcade Fire album Funeral with an album cover I wasn't familiar with. So now my mom is turning into an indie snob, just like me! Although, I'm not sure if she'll honestly like them...She'll probably think they're bad singers.

Oliver lent me a book called Summerland which is sort of like American Gods for kids with baseball. The baseball is kind of turning me off, but there was a pixie in it, so I kept reading. We'll see if the faeries outweigh the baseball. It actually has kind of a Sam Snoozle feel to it, which I like (no one is gonna get this reference so just keep on movin'.)

Roger, over and out.

I have a very strong desire to sign someone up for this club, which lasts for one year!

You might even get one with a Trix Rabbit design, which is personally my favorite choice of fabric to bleed on.

Also, The Tallest Man on Earth is a pretty awesome band. It's like all old-timey and stuff, but when you watch the guy playing, it is really just a skinny indie guy from Sweden? I'll probably buy the MP3 album in the next few days when I get around to it. If this guy were from the south and was a farmer or something, I may have been uncomfortable, but a Swedish indie boy appeals to my intellectualism and snobbishness.

OMG, someone impregnate me so I can make my bebeh wear this shirt. I don't think babies pass over anything in silence, though.

Too bad my Philosophy teacher's kids are all grown up now.

Ok, maybe I'm really immature for posting this..So sue me, I went to (part of) Lysistrata last night, so my mind is corrupted. Man, I was giggling like hell after reading parts of this Wikipedia article. Look at the text below and try to figure out what [censored] is referring to.

Excerpt from :
How to Harden [censored]s
"On the television show [name deleted], an experiment took place to see how to best harden one's [censored]. The best contender was a [censored] that was rolled around in hand cream...One factor that can affect the strength of a [censored] is to ensure that the hole is clean.. Also shown is that [censored]s explode when microwaved."

Link to actual article

The More You Know:
Coconut water is actually "endosperm", and so is the fleshy part of many nuts, and grains. Tasty! Remember to get your daily recommended amount of endosperm today.

Did I mention that a Japanese person asked me if I'd "be going home to Texas for Easter"? Ouch. Obviously we're totally different from Texas. First, we have Santa Fe, with rawkin' artistos and liberals, second we didn't spawn he-whose-aftermath-must-be-cleansed-by-mayan-priests, and third, most importantly...wait for it...

In New Mexico, Pluto is still a planet, bitches! Take that, Texans, and all other states. However I'm going to declare a small area, roughly the size of our property, under which the name of the so called "Pluto" is called Zig and Charon is called Pawo. Yay for being able to arbitrarily designate names to planets when they pass overhead! I think the government in New Mexico needs to play some Noctis to get the naming thing out of their system.

I just ordered 8 shirts and a skirt on Esty. Mom's gonna bring them over for me when she comes. I haven't bought any new shirts in a long time so that'll be good.

I looked at this for about 3 seconds trying to figure out what it had to do with linguistics.

Cats in things they're not supposed to be are AMAZING. Ignore the syntactic ill-formedness for a moment and listen, yo. (sadly enough, I can't tell you WHY that's ill formed. Island constraint violation? We haven't learned that yet.)





It's official: unless the schedule changes, every weekend until the term ends is going to be miserable. This is because Whitney's wife had to go and have a baby on us (the nerve!) and caused him to miss a class. Now, the chapter is reviewed on Friday, and we go over the readings on Monday. This reading is longer than all of the readings we've done so far, too. Usually what I did before this was to do half of it on Wednesday, and half on Thursday. I'm cool with that, because it's during the week. But now that means I have to do half on Saturday (probably not going to happen) and half on Sunday (i.e. staying up all night). Fun stuff. Although deireadh seachtaine is just a term, (with lots of silent consonants, I might add) so I might as well call Wednesday and Thursday my weekend.

Was trolling the library today for Calligraphy books... Some biyotch was all up in my territory so I came back later. When I was going over one book, there was a dewd named Emō. I'm not making that up. I almost lol'd, but I didn't want to defile the sanctity of the library with my silly musings. I bet he writes his calligraphy in blood and whines about how no one can understand his tortured soul. And then he goes in a corner and cries because only one calligraphy book actually mentioned him. Just don't hook him up with Tickle me Emō. On a slightly unrelated note, if you did a search for "hentai" on my computer, you'd find one file, but not what you'd think...

The calligraphy class has kind of reached a whole new level. We're doing ones with Kanji in them. Kanji that a guy fluent in Chinese can't read. On a good day, I can read maybe 500. Which doesn't include 嘯く. Imagine if you only knew the letters for the vowels, and a few consonants here and there. Then a doctor gives you a prescription and signs his name, and it has something weird like an x in it. Also, he wrote it in Fraktur with a long s. Then someone comes along and says, "look for the x and the long s", despite you not knowing what the hell those are. Yeah. That's where I am right now. Wish me luck.

Considering doing something kind of crazy...I've always wanted to buy some web comic inspired t-shirts, despite their high cost. What do you think of the following?
Unicorn Power (Perry Bible Fellowship)
Science: It works, bitches, Stand back, I know Regex, possibly the heart one? (xkcd)
Math is Delicious, <\3, Possibly Monster one? (Questionable Content)
Bacon is a Vegetable (would be ironic as hell), It's fun to use learning for evil, I'm a rocker, I rock out (Diesel Sweeties)
a wizard has turned you into a whale (cause it's random) (dinosaur comics)

Should get a linguistics t-shirt sometimes...something syntaxy, but I'd really like one that says "mo'fologist"

This post is going to be sort of random thoughts, so watch out.

• 作戦成功！ I finally got passionfruits at the market. The guy must have thought I was crazy for lurking around there every day asking for passionfruits. I also bought fresh blackberries and I made a blackberry/passionfruit smoothie as well as a mango/passionfruit smoothie, both of which were awesome.

• Does anyone remember that song about Jacques Cousteau? It's driving me crazy, I always used to sing it when I was a kid but I can't find one mention of this song on Google! My mom can't remember either. The first part went like this:
  

(Side note - the name of this post comes from this random wikipeida article. I found the title hilarious for some reason - at least the socialists here never went that far. I guess it would be more appropriate if I had actually cut my hair but I'd probably forget by the time I did. I had a dream about cutting my hair - does that count?)

(warning, this post links to images that may be disgusting and/or offensive - click them at your own risk)

As we all know, Wikipedia is a highly collaborative effort. A lot of the images on Wikipedia were taken for the express purpose of being on Wikipedia, to avoid copyright problems and such. You can often look at the info of the photo and see that the author took the photo themselves. This often leads to humorous results, such as this photo on the Tights article.

I wonder if you know where this is going. With the potential to post any picture, especially the emphasis on self-made pictures, we turn to bodily functions. Here is a helpful image of dried mucus, apparently taken by the author themselves. But it doesn't stop there. Say you were out one night, drinking, and you kind of threw up on the sidewalk in front of your house. But wait - you can turn this into a win-win situation. You remember that the Wikipedia article on vomit doesn't have a photo! Of course, the first moment you get, you go out and take a photo of your masterpiece. Let's not forget to detail what it consists of for posterity - "Consists of chicken wings, lots of tortilla chips and salsa, pizza pockets and bagels, hunch punch, beer, and a small amount of Goldschlager. Brought on by overeating and excessive alcohol use (both isolated instances, not long term)." Ah, Wikipedia! You learn something new every day.

Wikipedia is also a haven for exhibitionists, which is what the title of this post comes from. What better way for everyone to get a view of your god-given genitalia than to post it on the relevant page? Oh wait, I mean...All in the name of science and the pursuit of knowledge, of course! This particular user (note, link is to talk page, not to photos) has found his manhood so monumental that he had to post no less than 23 photos of it. At least the users of Wikimedia commons see the inappropriateness/hilarity here:

Stop taking pictures of your penis please, it's pretty gross and is creeping out the wiki community and such. yours, 193.63.197.246 09:53, 5 December 2006 (UTC)

I think this guy IS the wiki community --144.132.236.78 09:21, 21 December 2006 (UTC)

Seriously, man, wikipedia is not intended for your exhibitionism. 62.30.197.24 13:11, 21 December 2006 (UTC)

Jesus christ, stop taking pictures of your wang. Wikipedia isn't the place for your masturbatory exhibitionism.

So, a tip when you're feeling down - got a disgusting growth or disease? Have you vomited up some bile and want to contribute to the sad, pictureless article? No worries - the internets have given you a way to immortalize yourself forever. I just get warm and fuzzy inside thinking that someone out there is going to see my growth/body part/body secretion and smile - and that makes it all worth it.

In our world, there is a growing epidemic that the vast majority of people are unaware of. Each year, hundreds of people subject themselves to a cruel procedure without being aware of the dire consequences it could lead to. This growing trend is Uvula Mutilation. This consists of a ring, bar, (or in extreme cases, perhaps several) placed through a hole in the uvula, more commonly known as "that thing in the back of your throat". The piercing is often done under unhygienic situations without the use of anesthesia. While several piercing studios refuse to perform this cruel act, other studios are willing to do so without giving their clients the important information that they need. Many languages worldwide use uvular stop consonants or trills, which require an intact uvula to produce these sounds. (Imagine removing one's lips and trying to produce the consonant sounds "b" or "p" ). Another risk that people with pierced uvulas face is involuntary nasalization, due to a possible incomplete closure of the velum.

The renowned phonetician Sarah Dart, has this to say on this controversial issue:
As for piercing the uvula... don't you even think of it!!!! I would predict that it would be next to impossible to make either a uvular stop or a trill. They would both come out as fricatives, because of incomplete closure. Depending on how it was done, and the individual shape of the person's anatomy, it could also contribute to a lack of complete closure at the velum-- so involuntary nasalization. As far as being able to be understood, I'm sure the speaker would learn to compensate in various ways, to better approximate the sound. And people would hear it as that person's particular idiolect.

Uvula piercings are gaining popularity every day, despite the linguistic disability that this piercing inevitably causes. Please, help spread the word about Uvula Mutilation. If you only tell one person about this, perhaps you will have kept one uvula perfect and intact, as nature intended it to be.

I'm not really sure why, because the class really isn't all that silly, but Sanskrit brings out a very silly streak in me.

First, is this comic, inspired by a sentence we had to translate in our reading. The word harass was conjuring up really funny images, so I made this small comic. Rated M for language omg!!!

This is going to be a very short post. I may be getting sick, despite all the echinacea and vitamin C I've been taking, and I am going to bed "early" tonight, without having finished every one of my Sanskrit sentences. And if I get sick, I probably won't post for a while. For now, I am going to recount the things I want to post and then post in detail about them later.

• My Japanese Lit Teacher's Accent
• Why kids these days should not be getting Uvula piercings, from Sarah Dart
• Why Sanskrit comes with a guarantee (tm) other languages don't
• Heidi knows that kid who was in The Red Violin (YAY) but he looks like a person I don't like (boo)
• Maybe something emo about thanksgiving
  

By the way, if anyone's curious, the quote from the title of this comes from a weird English reinterpretation of the lyrics to the Finnish Ducktales theme song. I always appreciate those, but I appreciate them even more when they make references to circumcision propaganda, taco Nazis, and Sanskrit.

I also uploaded a few more userpics, so we'll see how that goes.

Oh my, I have not blogged in a while. This is because Sanskrit is eating my brain and driving me to Chocoholism. I think I have a few things to write about, though!

The secret mission which I referred to in my last post was heading to CyberCandy in Covenant Garden. I wanted to get Dan some Twizzlers as a gift and also maybe stock up on some American candy. I got Hershey's Kisses and Reese's Peanut Butter Cups since for some reason, Brits aren't so big on the peanut-butter chocolate thing. They also stock Marsupial Butt Poop Coffee (I would have bought some, but it's so freaking expensive), a candy called Goetze (*shudder* I think I'll pass), and Lucky Charms - BUT they were out of stock when I went there. I'll have to go there again sometime when they have better stock of things. I actually had to buy the straw type Twizzlers so Dan didn't end up getting as much but oh well. I also sent a very artistic gay card since I still don't know where to get cards except at Gay's The Word.

I didn't go to Notting Hill to shop that evening but I did hang out in China town a little bit. I got some expensive Bubble Tea which wasn't quite what I expected (more like a smoothie or something almost) but it was good. I still have to find a real bubble tea shop. Anyway I also bought some Udon noodles and stuff at a little grocery store, as well as cutesy buttons to put on my boring day bag (I just can't drag my kitty bag around town anymore).

Since I couldn't go shopping Friday night (it was too late) I decided to go with Heidi Saturday afternoon. I found out later that Saturday probably isn't the best day to do Portabello Road - that's the antique day, not the fashion day. I hardly saw anything that I was interested in even when we went to the promising looking "retro" stores. I put that in quotes because I guess their definition of "retro" is "things that your Grandma wore in the 80s." The sad thing is that a lot of this stuff was 20 pounds or something crazy. I wanted to keep my general spending range to 10 pounds and under unless I saw something really special.

And guess what - I did. We passed a hippy-ish Indian clothes store and I stopped dead in my tracks. That's when I saw what Heidi calls my Technicolor Dream Coat. It was a long velvet coat which was tie dyed crazy colors and embroidered with flowers. It was 50 pounds though and wayy over what I wanted to spend for the day. I decided to think about it and me and Heidi then walked down Porabello road a little longer and stopped at a "free trade coffee house" - which I'm not really sure what that means now that I think about it -  and then later to the closest thing we've seen to a real tea shop. I bought some loose leaf berry green tea there which turned out to be quite good, but I'm still looking for a place that rivals the Teahouse in Boulder. I mean, this is the UK, where is all the flippin' tea?

Anyway, after thinking it over, I went back to the place with the coat and decided it wouldn't kill me to use my feminine wiles to bargain for the coat. I fluttered my eyelashes charmingly and got him to take it down to 44 pounds which was quite decent! It was getting cold and I hadn't bought anything, so I thought, fuck it - and I bought it. Strangely enough, it's been really cold here lately so I have been wearing it pretty much every day! I thought people would think it was a little too over the top, but I have gotten several complements on it so far. Here's a photo of it if you're so inclined:


Sunday night I stayed up forever doing Sanskrit...as usual. Then Monday evening I went to a Jan Svankmajer film at the London Film Festival! Heidi let me know about it and I was thoroughly excited. I had a headache but I dragged myself down to Water Closet station or whatever. Nothing will stop me from seeing a Svankmajer film! There was a small cafe there and a very nice Italian man who made my weird sandwich choice (Cucumbers and cheese with Mayonnaise). I also had a guy giggle at me since I sauntered up to the bar looking all cool and then ordered hot chocolate.

The film is called Lunacy in English. I'm not quite sure how I feel about the plot yet. It seemed a little cliched, because the students at a Zaki Gordon workshop I went to came up with a similar plot. You know, there's a looney bin, and you don't know who is crazy and who is not...But of course, since this is Jan Svankmajer, a bunch of animated brains, flesh, eyes, and of course tongues were showing up in between every other scene. It was a pretty blasphemous film and I'm glad I didn't take anyone because they probably would have never spoken to me again! I recommend the film with caution - maybe see Conspirators of Pleasure and then work up to this film.

The rest of this week I've just been scrambling to get all my work done - especially all my Sanskrit. This has involved me chanting noun paradigms under my breath while walking to school, causing one guy to mutter, "Crazy" at me (I think so, at least.) I didn't do anything on Halloween which was a little sad, but I did eat too much chocolate and then talk with Heidi for a long time. To prove a point to her, I posed a sort of ridiculous hypothetical question, but I think it's interesting to analyze this question. Here it is:

What better way than to interact with an inebriated flatmate?

Oh my, this is brilliant! Pirate Rap? Who would have thought that existed. Too bad this wasn't around back when me and Megan compiled those bad music CDs. Enjoy!

This movie is awesome! I just wish I could understand the language. Who knew that you can turn nervous tics into dance moves??

myveryownme pointed out a funny photoshop contest going on at SA. The theme was "mispelled movie titles". I liked this entry:


Since I just revealed my phobia of computers messing up in the middle of the night with no one around, this movie might be really scary for me! Especially if the ending is, "Error reading drive C: Abort, Retry, Fail?"

I just got a useless (but amusing) email from the study abroad coordinator. It turns out NBC is making a reality show called "Junior Year Abroad". Boo hoo, I don't make their requirements. Seriously, who is going to watch this show? And why does the college want our students to be on it?? I might just watch it to see how shallow and superficial the students are. At least our study abroad coordinator will make anyone at Macalester sign a paper to say they won't be typical asshole Americans.

Wow, I've been having fun today looking at embarassing old Bollywood movies on YouTube. This kind of thing makes me sad I don't have enough time to learn Hindi at SOAS. Here's a funny Beatles rip off, and here's a Mohammed Rafi song. Classic.

Last night, me and my mom watched In the Realms of the Unreal. It's a really excellent documentary about a somewhat crazy guy named Henry Darger who wrote a 15,000 page crazy story about little girls with penises who were enslaved by the non-Christians. He was just a janitor and a very reclusive guy, so no one knew about this huge amount of work he'd done until he died and they checked out his room. I really recommend it. We're going to be watching more weird movies soon so I'll keep you posted on that.

Oh yeah, and I'm back in Santa Fe. I'll be going with my mom to Boulder in about two weeks but for now I get to hang out here at home with my cats and my mom.