Syntactic Sugar

I just found out that if you type "syntax stacia" into Google you get my Linked In page with my full name, my MySpace, and this blog. Oh sweet Frida. And to think my fake email contains these words. I need one of those "qtiekitteh23423423@aol.com" type ones now.

I bought a domain name, but I won't disclose what it is, because worse yet the whois has my home address.

I am a total germ sponge. I catch any crap that goes around the office or the bus and smear it all over Seattle.

Reasons I love Seattle:
A chunky dude in a green cape on the bus.
A soccer mom in an SUV blasting indie music or something really loud.
A lovely man with purple and pink hair and beard in a ravishing velvet dress that came into Sureshot.
The guy who gave me a purple scarf he had knitted himself on the bus one day.
Finding a pamphlet called "Chicken with penis"
A Buddhism pamphlet which talks about the joys of "urinating and defecating"

I bought a plastic bowl from Daiso for 1.50 which somehow fits PERFECTLY in my toilet. I filled it with cat litter in hopes the cats would start using it and then start using the toilet, but all they do is fling it around and get it in their water. Which is ok, since they never use it, but annoying. One of these days I am going to accidentally not take the bowl out in the middle of the night for a bathroom run, and probably just think "to hell with it" and dump it like normal cat litter, along with a slight annoyed feeling because I treat that stuff like gold. It's that expensive.

I'm going to Teavana in Bellevue next week with a co-worker. I don't really like Quan Yin teaouse - well, it's a good atmosphere and convienent, but the tea itself is quite boring. Good, but boring. Remedy Teas is also good (it has Like a Velvet Glove Cast in Iron!), as was Sureshot when they used to have the crazy herbal teas for when you got sick.

After talking to another Co-worker, I found out that the pad of the month club with trix rabbit menstraul pads is no longer on Etsy. Booo. But hand crafted nose studs are?? Sign me up,

The Season finale of L Word is this Sunday, but I think I'll have to make it to the one on Monday instead. I guess Dollhouse is going to be my new TV series now, although me and my friend Krista are still a little unsure about it given the whole kind of prositution vibe.

For this weekend, I have to allow adverbial predicates, but only negated ones, not denoms, I have to add a causitive semantic predication that WORKS, I have to fix my copula, and some other crazy stuff. I wish I could bring Mr. Derbyshire back from the dead. I have a bone to pick with him about verbal coordination. And ADJECTIVES, for Frida's sake.

I told people at work that I'd translate lessons for them into Sanskrit. I might have made a mistake on that one.

I posted a Craigslist ad this evening and got some totally redonk responses. I love how people respond when they are blatantly the opposite of what you said you were looking for in all respects. Some of them are so humorous that I'd love to post bits of them, just like the person who posted all the responses to that anonymous sex ad (I still don't morally think he was wrong at all, even though I believe he got in legal trouble), but I don't quite want to elaborate on what types of ads I'm placing. Er, that sounds ominous. Nothing bizarre, I assure you.

I will probably have a movie night with Vicki sometime soon. I'm kind of appauled that I've only shown one Seattle friend Conspirators of Pleasure.

I really have to start DOING more things in Seattle. Like going to shows, movies, etc. I have not been to one movie theatre since moving here. I do want to see Coraline.

Ruby programmers are really snotty.

It's a dangerous thing when Trader Joe's candy cane oreos are on sale for 99 cents! I bought one case, but I think I'll have eaten the whole box shortly. Even with all this junk food, I don't think I could top the following non-vegan foods.

I am noting an alarming tendency for wanting to introduce drama into my life. I will (hopefully) proceed with caution.

This post is a bit of an amalgamation abomination, but it will have to do. 6 days late on my montly post...

Wow, haven't posted here in a while. I've been a real workin' stiff, as my mom says. Well, from yesterday evening, no more. I'm not going to go into details but I didn't really like the way my boss was treating me and I left. It's really too bad, since I really wanted to work at a Coffee shop, and we just began serving ice cream. Though I guess I probably sold less than 10 coffee drinks. Oh well. If I ever work at another coffee shop, I'll have experience (but nothing to put on my resume :( )

This will give me some time to kick ass in Oblivion. I just ordered a laser gaming mouse that goes up to 2500 dpi, which is pretty insane. I think I'm on 1200 right now, and I'm getting used to it. It's got all this ridiculous stuff like gold plated USB cord and it was pretty reasonably priced. I was leaning towards to getting a Logitech one (M-518 I think?) but I heard that one was huge! This one seems to fit in my hand pretty well - the only complaint I have is that I wish it had some more buttons, on the right side or something. And the triple double click button is just stupid - you can't even customize it or anything, but I knew that when I bought it. Well, I guess I have yet to see how it works in Oblivion.

The other day I went to the Teahouse on Canyon road to buy some Matcha tea - it's very high quality powdered green tea, if you didn't know. Great to put in smoothies and such, and it's made out of the actual leaves of the plant, so you're not just ingesting an infusion. Great stuff, especially in lattes. I called ahead and apparently it was 15 dollars an ounce. Okay, no big deal, if I want more I can just order online. When I get there I find out it's not even really for sale, and if you do want to buy it, you have to pay about 30 dollars an ounce. I'm crazy, but I'm not THAT crazy. I settled on a white chocolate matcha latte to have for there, but forgot to tell them to use soy, so I had to get a new one. Oops. I'm still on my wanna-be vegan kick. It's getting harder to eat cheese, I can't eat ice cream, etc...And when I say "can't", I mean it tastes bad to me. I have no clue how I'm gonna survive once I get back to Mac. I wish I had gotten an apartment and a kitten with someone :(

Anyway, moral of the story: ALWAYS BUY THINGS ONLINE. I got one pound of matcha online for less than one ounce in the store. And it's good quality too. I'm having trouble mixing it in properly but I'm getting there.

I bought some solid state notebook hard drives on ebay - they're only 256 megs, but they would have worked perfectly with my tiny old linux laptop. You see, I had my heart set on making it a solid state machine. Hard drives are always breaking and dying on me anyway. The thing is, I had to buy a new hard drive cable, because the old one was burnt (don't ask) and had some pins stuck in it. To take out the old one, I effectively had to break off the thing pinning it to the mobo. I got this semi working when I put a bunch of tape rolls on top of it, so that enough pressure was put on it when the keyboard was put back in. However this was iffy. On top of all that, my SSD idea wasn't going so well - I couldn't get the solid state drives to work through my USB enclosure. I eventually ended up getting so frustrated with the little computer and it's hard drive connection that I shorted out the motherboad by poking it while the thing was on. Oops. No biggie though - those little laptops are basically just little projects for me. And...this lead to me finding out something great before plunking down 200 dollars on a new lil' laptop.

Asus (say it like the Mexican name Jesus, people) are the ones who manufactured my laptop and they're thinking of making a new Linux solid state laptop which is teeeeny and...wait for it...only 200 dollars new? Are they crazy? I could install Puppy Linux on it, or go with their own OS, or even try XP - the specs are pretty good. Actually they're really good for that price, considering how much old laptops go for on ebay. The only thing that is kind of lame is the battery life, and the fact that the release date keeps being pushed back so I can't get one before school starts. *grumble* I'd buy this thing in a heartbeat if I could. By the way, it's called the EEE PC, f you're interested (not to be confused with the AAAHH PC).

Some funny stuff about Oblivion: it has this crazy physics system, which means if you bump into some things, they'll fall over and go flying almost just like in real life. One of my favorite hobbies is to break into a house, and jump on their tables, making all their food go flying. It's also a good way to remember which stores/houses you've been to. "Oh yeah, this is the one where all the meat and berries are strewn all over the room." Another funny thing is the speechcraft system. If I used this in real life, I'd probably get shot. You have to do four things in every conversation - boast, intimidate, compliment, and joke. If they happen to like boasting, they will sometimes say in a very straightforward manner, "My life is drab and wretched by comparison!" I lol'd when I first heard this!

Anyway, speaking of that <ad> - *my* life was drab and wretched before I got EZScreenPrint! My mom and I bought a bunch of cheapo shirts online and stuff from EZScreenprint, and now we're screenprinting shirts with our own stuff on them. I'll post pictures later - they're turning out really cool. You can basically do any design you want - it works great with my mom's collages, you just turn it black and white in photoshop, do 100% contrast, and adjust the brightness. We were thinking that I might sell them in Taos or something as my new "job". Anyway, if you're thinking of screenprinting, give EZScreenprint a try. I'm sure you won't be disappointed </ad>

Yesterday (my last day at work), a dentist came in, bought some ice cream, and told some weird jokes. He said, "You wouldn't happen to be a grammar teacher, would you?" which I thought was really odd, since I am in fact a linguist who specializes in syntax. I told him so and then he told me the "scrod" joke, but he used "subjunctive". I was all, "Uh, I don't think there's a subjunctive in that sentence" before realising that the joke was just grammatical sounding nonsense...It's been so long since I heard that joke. I honestly didn't know what plu-perfect was, and my mind has been damaged from the beautiful (and arbitrarily named) "perfect" in Sanskrit. Speaking of which, I'm thinking of starting a Syntax blog. But we'll see.

I submitted an internship application to Planned Parenthood of Minnesota - they're looking for an IT intern, and I could get CS credit for it. Score! I probably wouldn't have to clean and stuff - I bet it just invovles cleaning out spyware and viruses, which I'm great at :) It's kind of weird, since they needed three contacts: I gave them Haiman (Linguistics prof), Whitney (Sanskrit prof) and Susan (CS prof). It'll be funny if they contact anyone other than Susan because honestly they will have nothing (or very little) to say about my computer abilities!

I guess I had more to write than I thought! Bye for now.

One more thing...I'm in love with Nedelle's new album "The Locksmith Cometh". Go buy it now, seriously. I've been listening to it on a loop for a long time. The songs just get stuck in your head, and she has such a sweet voice.

Sweet as, mate - I got runner up for Bardic in Lusternia, giving a (roughly) 40 dollar prize. If anyone's interested, you can view it here, but the text seems a little messed up for some reason, and it's probably boring and as irrelevant as hell for most people. Next month I'll probably try again. Pretty dorky, eh?

I've been doing a lot of retro-blogging lately...Anyway, I meant to post what's going on in my Syntax class, but haven't gotten around to it until now. It's really ridiculous. The teacher comes in 15 minutes late every class, goes off on random and irrelevant tangents for half the class, and gives fairly unacceptable answers to the random tangent things she's supposed to know about. I love syntax, but I'm sorry, I don't really want to be paying attention if she's bringing up the same (irrelevant) problem every single class and leaving me scratching my head wondering if it really is the same problem.

The class isn't an entire waste, though. Remember how I said I got a lovely drawing from someone sitting next to me? I got yet another lovely drawing from my friend Hannah. Where syntax dies, creativity blooms.

Sainsbury's might have just achieved the impossible - with little fanfare, I might add. Over in the small but beloved vegetarian section, I spotted "non dairy-dessert" - in other words, soy ice cream. What the heck, I'll give it a try, I thought. I got the caramel flavor and put in the fridge at the start of the day. When I went to try it that evening, I was amazed. It actually tasted like real ice cream! Now, if you've ever had soy ice cream, well it's good - but it's certainly not ice cream, and the flavor is a little bit off. So I'm not sure how Sainsbury's figured this out. However - I am not going to go completely crazy, because I think caramel is something of a strong flavor. I have caramel soy pudding which tastes delicious but the same kind in chocolate tastes a little bit off. The only other flavor was raspberry, so I'll try that and update here what the results are.

Syntax class is still random. The Irish-Italian guy I sit next to sometimes zoned out and drew an amazing cute little drawing, which I asked if I could have. I think he was a little surprised, since it was so simple, but it was just so charming. I'm going to hang it up in my room. I hope that's not creepy? Forgot if I blogged about this - I don't think so, but last time in class, I busted out my Sanskrit passive information when we were talking about passives. I think I used the example - "It is lived in the forest happily by the sages". After talking about it for some time, some dewd from the back of the class goes, "Um, what's a sage? You mean like the plant? I don't get it." And people think the British are cultured!

I had some amusing experiences on my bus rides today. On the first ride, some crazy old guy kept singing, "On top of old smokey...All covered with snow...(something something) my true lover..." Over and over. It actually wasn't even creepy, it was almost charming, although people were shooting him some pretty nasty looks. But he just kept on singing, without a care in the world. Then, when I was about to get off, a guy who I can only describe as an Arabic druid - green robes and staff with little baubles as well as a Keffiyeh. Weird stuff. On the way back, my sense of smell was assaulted with both cat food and mint toothpaste smells, although I couldn't locate the source of either (I don't know if I would have liked to know about the cat food smell, though).

As I was writing this, I got a call to say that my package arrived - Shiriusu no Densetsu, the book and DVD, otherwise known as the Sea Prince and the Fire child - just in time for my birthday. I'm just skipping through the DVD right now. I'd hoped for slightly better quality, but it's better than the cheap ass video rip I got on ebay. And of course - it's in JAPANESE, bitches. I think my translating idea was a little bit ambitious. I'll really need some outside help - maybe the tutors can help me once I get back to Mac. The book is absolutely beautiful. I'd gotten some images online from it (like the one used in this icon) but there are many more lush and beautiful images in it peppered with a good dose of female nudity that I haven't ever seen before! Also, just watching the DVD again reminds me of how touching and sweet this story was. Erk, I'm gonna cry if I keep watching. Anyway, I'm so happy I have my hands on both of them, finally.

It happened slowly...I checked out Nodeka after seeing it on Top Mud Sites. But something wasn't right. I tried Aardwolf before and I had the same problem...Maybe it's because I grew up on Achaea, but I find I can't stand those generic cookie cutter muds. I'm not sure what engine they use to make all of these - Perhaps DIKU Mud and its derivatives?  The ones that have the "practice" command and have a huge level range (like 1-200/300 or so). What's missing from these ones? There's no serious role play - you just get a bunch of people going "omg lol wtf". This, coupled with the game is fairly cookie cutter (in Nodeka's case, none of the rooms were even really described, it was more of a map system) makes these games fairly unappealing to me. Aardwolf is slightly better in this respect, as it's more original, but I still couldn't get into it. I did have some good times though, commanding my zombie legion of pink bumper cars.

So what did I do? It's back to Iron Realms again (the ones who made Achaea).  This time I'm trying out Lusternia, which has a very interesting and complex storyline and involves lots of stuff about different planes of existance and stuff like that. It's fun, but it has the same problems I always had with Achaea when compared to other MUDs or MMORPGS:

• There is virtually no specialized equipment that you can quest for or have monsters drop. I always loved this in WoW and Aardwolf, because mixing together the different kinds of EQ is fun and challenges your playing style.
• The game is overly focused on PvP. For example, in WoW, if I wanted to kill a monster with my druid, I could use complex and interesting methods. In Lusternia (and the other Iron Realms series of games) you have very few commands that you can use to interact with monsters. I have tons of ways to afflict other players, but I can pretty much only use this one ability, Cosmic Fire, to fight monsters. It gets really tedious after a while.
• The penalties for death are too harsh and make you take your leveling too seriously. In WoW, if you died, as long as you had enough gold, it really wasn't a big deal. You never loose XP, so if you get ganked or lag out or something, you don't loose all the progress you've made. In these games, you loose a fairly large chunk of XP. Okay, fair enough - but once you get to level 70 or so, it's almost impossible to gain XP (they might have changed this in Lusternia, I'm not sure) so anything you loose is a huge deal and a lot of time and effort lost.
• Quests are fairly obfuscated. This means that you may have to use a strange and unintuitive command to figure out something that should be obvious. For example, this isn't a quest, but it gives you an idea of what's going on - you need to SIT at a desk in order to write a letter. Okay, kind of annoying. "SIT IN CHAIR" - "You sit yourself down". Uh, I don't think I'm sitting in the chair. "SIT AT DESK" - I didn't understand that. After an embarrassing call for help from my citymates, I found out I had to "SIT ON CHAIR". Can you imagine the problems you could have with quests?

So that's that. Perhaps this post shall document my gradual descent into obsession - we shall see. Haven't been doing much else. I'm not quite sure how I feel about some of my classes - My new Syntax teacher is exceedingly random, and my Language Acquisition teacher is hard to understand. Japanese Calligraphy is intimidating as hell, but I dodged a bullet by actually answering a question about Japanese history correctly - only due to my teachings in my Literature course. The teacher is pretty much the sweetest guy on earth though, so I have a feeling it won't be that bad. This week I have a short break from Sanskrit, which is a nice feeling. Not having to get up at 7:30 every morning is wonderful.

I am hiding in my room now because the Chinese girl is taking cheezy photos in the kitchen and eating these poor crabs that she killed as well as a bunch of other nasty food. I wish I had a kitchen of my own sometimes so I wouldn't have to deal with these weird parties everyone throws in there. At least I have my new copy of the Pillow Book, which I even got a discount on because the cover was messed up. We'll see if the new translation (only available in the UK so far!) is good.

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?)

Hey peeps, what is the haps? I suppose I haven't written in a while and a few mildly noteworthy things happened to me.

I was stressing out a bit about my Sanskrit class, since my professor suggested a potentially flawed new class structure due to some people complaining about the amount of work (strangely enough I was not one of them, really). Right now we have a grammar lecture on Monday and a Thursday lecture to go over the reading/sentences. I'm cool with it, especially since the Thursday class lets me have Fridays off, and it is fairly small, so I can ask dumb questions. Actually not so dumb, because now I know that the crow thing I blogged about before was a joke that I didn't get at the time. Mr. Goldman, the author of our textbook, tries to be witty sometimes, or somehow act out his inner paranoias in the example sentences: "He who has nothing better to do, studies Sanskrit" and "No one listens to me" (Heh, almos placed the "and" in a Sanskrit like manner)

Anyway, the joke is this - only three things can be "twice born". Brahmans, since they're cool and can tell fuckin' kings what to do. Oh, and they have to go through a ceremony, but other people who undergo this ceremony are not called "twice born". The two other things are teeth (since you get baby teeth and then the real ones) and birds (since they are "born" as an egg, and then hatch again). So the crow thing was a joke about crows being "twice born". A real LOL moment, eh?

Uh, anyway, to get back on topic, that's our schedule now. What he was proposing was a very bad idea - Grammar lecture on Monday, going over the reading on Tuesday, and doing sentences on Friday. We would all be one class again, whereas now it's broken up (I can choose one of Mon/Tue and Thur/Fri). Potential problems with this setup:

• The class is a huge class again, so I won't be as likely to ask questions.
• Tuesday mornings would force me to move a tutorial to Wednesday, making my free Wednesdays next term nonexistent, as well as the Friday on this term, making my free Fridays gone.
• Somewhat dramatically increasing class time without decreasing the amount of homework.

I wrote him an email about my concerns and was stressed out for a while. Thankfully though, his wife thought up a new system - Only in effect next term, we will meet Mondays for grammar, a choice of Tuesday or Thursday for a tutorial going over paradigms and anything we were confused about, and an official session on Friday that we use to go through all of the reading and sentences. This is perfect since it allows me to keep my free Wednesdays and I don't really mind the Friday class since I'll have calligraphy there anyway. The increase in class hours was a secondary concern so I'm really fine with it. Anyway, it's all resolved!

Last weekend I met up with Maki at Cafe Nero. She was very nice and gave me a paper holding folder thingy with Heian court women and calligraphy on it. It was fun but I got the feeling she didn't understand some of the stuff I'd said, even though she never asked about it. I wish she would, since the point is to learn. We didn't really speak any Japanese because I'm still a little shy about it. I may see her again this Thursday at the Language pub meetup.

After class on Monday, I sat in the SOAS pub (somehow it is so alien having *gasp* alcohol inside an Institute of Higher Learning!) with Shruti and talked with her for a while. It was nice, since she'd been sick and I hadn't gotten to speak with her in a while. I also got to meet her friend who has an impeccable fashion sense.

Tuesday morning I had my Syntax tutorial at the New and Improved earlier time (although some lady got all snarky at us to tell us to get out when we went over time). You wouldn't expect it, but President Bush is actually on the cutting edge of syntactic theory. It's true! You know those kids who learned NPs in their general linguistics class and always forget to do a DP, especially when it's a proper noun? Of course you do. The hip and modern analysis of proper nouns is that they're a DP with a null D. What is Bush doing? He's sticking in that null D, a la "The Google". He is fucking cutting edge. Idiots always do the most interesting things with syntax.

After Syntax I horked some Agave syrup from the Health store (score!) and bought some eyelash dye at the drugstore, after considering getting it done professionally. I also snagged some cheese sauce for Mac n Cheese which I made that evening, but it didn't taste that great. In any case I got confused and forgot that my Zulu class started an hour earlier, and only realized this at the last minute, so I decided to just skip it. Oops. Felt bad about it, but what can you do. I'm going to have to make up for that by doing a super scary vocab drill on Thursday.

Today was a shitty rainy day, and the traffic was all messed up. I don't like walking in the rain (obviously) but I didn't know the traffic would be so congested. I was about 15 mins late to my Japanese Lit tutorial, but that's better than missing it - I'd feel pretty bad missing two classes in a row. We talked about some Noh plays (one of which the title of this post is from). I'm still not sure how I feel about Noh plays - I wish the actors were cuter and not old dudes with double chins and pot bellies in masks. After class I went down to the pub and zerged through a couple Sanskrit sentences after deciding to go home.

On the way home I stopped in Superdrug. I noticed all the employees congregating up at the front, hurting my eyes in their ugly neon pink uniforms. One of them goes down an aisle and asks a weird guy, "Sir, is that your bag?" The guy replies yes, and the employee returns back to the front to whisper to the other employees. As I was checking out, one of the guys comes up very indiscreetly to the guy behind the counter I'm buying stuff from, and goes, "What does 8 bells mean? Does that mean it's a terrorist or something?" The guy behind the counter goes, "No, it just means there's two of them." The first guy nods and says something about checking back up on them. I'm not sure what was going on there, but I didn't get my ass blown up, so that's a good sign. However, I suffered just as bad of an emotional blow as I could not understand the guy behind the counter...his accent was really thick. I kept having to ask him to repeat stuff, and at the end I jokingly said, "Sorry for being so stupid" and he replied "That's okay." Pfft!

The second weird thing is when I was on the bus on the way back. You know how people sometimes write "wash me" and stuff in the dirt on the back of dirty trucks and cars? I saw a truck that had something written about Karel Gott on the back. If you're too lazy to read the wikipedia article, or if you don't get it, he's this crusty old dude who sings these dorky ancient sounding traditional German songs in a very thick rural sounding German accent (only just found out he is Czech, interesting). Anyway, who the hell writes about KAREL GOTT on the back of a truck??

Fast forward to tonight, where I finished my Sanskrit reading at the decent hour of 9pm. Whitney was nice enough to give us only reading for tomorrow, for which I'm grateful (I didn't want to pull an all nighter again). I guess that's all that's happened...Now I think I'm going to take a shower with my shiny new shower head which a funny guy installed in my room this morning. The other one was all drippy but this one has a pretty steady stream! Can't wait to try it out YAY!

One last thing before I sign out - although I do plan to do a Linguistics Question update post...I got an email from someone who seemed to know about a lot of SOAS library stuff and had seen my "Slimy Bastards" rant. Whoops. I thought it might be some sort of Library Mafia thing but now it seems fine :) The funny thing is that he deduced I was interested in Buddhism from what I'm studying, and he gave my email address to a publisher of books dealing with the subject. I got an email from this guy actually asking if I had a book to publish, which was slightly surreal. So if you're reading this Ed, hi :) Just thought it was unusual enough to blog, as I assume I don't have many blog stalkers, although I may have quite a few in reality...

Man, my Japanese syntax class was a bummer. I actually left in the middle of it. I mean, I'm a reasonable person, but when I can't understand every other word, that's where I draw the line. On the other hand, I'll happily accept classes where I can't understand every third word - which might be a good way to describe most of my other classes. It was pretty lame, in fact...he was all "In other news: TURKISH!" when the class is called "Japanese Syntax". Okay, they're related morphologically, but you don't start with Turkish! Maybe he was trying to make some weird dramatic point that would end in hilarity ensuing, but I could not forsee that far.

I'm feeling really ticked off at TAs right now. Our "how r u guyz" TA never answered my email last weekend, and just informed us "i think u guyz r confused about waht the assignment is". Apparently we're supposed to also write a short summary of some of the papers in addition to the bibliography, which is only mentioned hidden away in the website somewhere. Oh well. A nice girl taught me how to get the full text of articles online through MIT so it shouldn't be a huge problem. I guess I am just worried about my lack of articles about what I really want to look into - do syntactic categories in the brain hold across languages? Apparently there have been many studies that show different areas are activated between nouns and verbs, but I don't know if any have been done in, say, Chinese or whatever. It would be really interesting to do it in Salish..Oh I love that class, incidentally, even though it's one of those "can't understand every third word" type ones. Salish is some crazy crazy shit! There really is not a clear distinction between noun and verb and you can swap everything around and spit out a bunch of ugly consonants. It's wild!

I'm starting to feel more and more like I'm getting sick but I sure hope it won't happen.

By the way, I absolutely love the song "Tinsagu nu hana"..it's a funky traditional Okinawan song and I just found some weird adaptations here and here. I can't really figure out what's happening in the video on the first one..it looks like a Kid's TV show or something but it kind of freaks me out. Don't forget to check out the hip version, which seems quite ordinary until some guy starts busting out a rap...Okinawan rap. I gotta get me some of that!

Well, I guess the syntax didn't really happen. I got caught up playing this weird game I saw linked on Slashdot (http://www.interactivestory.net/) . You go over to this couple's house and they start getting all weird. I kept trying to seduce the husband, but he kicked me out! Darn it! I will seduce him, just you wait and see. However maybe I should do one syntax thing...

If Pizza is the food of the programmer, then I declare as of now that tortellini is the food of the syntactician. Last weekend I was furiously coding Meliza, now I will be furiously diagramming strange sentences in Ed Stabler's crazy system! Luckily he said "do as many as you can". I don't think I'll be able to make it with a stable footing past question 0....