From Ryan Tamares, on a postcard arriving yesterday (8/21) at my place (it was mailed much earlier at Stanford, passed for some reason through San Francisco, and then shunted back down to Palo Alto; the ways of the USPS are sometimes inscrutable), this extraordinary artwork by a Redbubble.com artist using the name UkiyoCities:
“The Scholar’s Path at Stanford”
Yes, Stanford in the Floating World, simultaneously in the California of today and in the Tokyo of more than 200 years ago.
My right hip joint is now a metallic wonder, a titanium replacement in 2012 for the joint nature gave me, which had excruciatingly degenerated from osteoarthritis. I love the name titanium: it trips off the tongue, and as a proud gay man and an enthusiast of MND (A Midsummer Night’s Dream) in several of its incarnations, I choose to understand the name as a reference to Titania, Queen of the Fairies — silly faggot, titanium is for ur-deities.
Now to unpack all of this.
The gratifying increased sharpness of my senses of smell and taste continues to enhance my life (it’s presumably a gift of the increased prednisone dosage). Leading me yesterday to create a stunningly rich-tasting casserole out of simple leftovers from a local Nick the Greek outlet (I don’t actually cook, but instead microwave new dishes — tending towards the soup and stew zone — using leftovers from restaurant take-out). The gyro casserole.
Having just done two little postings on brief subjects this morning, I’m now going to wade into a few somewhat meatier subjects that have the potential to explode into larger matters of some weight.
The first of these came to me in tv commercials for the Liberty Mutual insurance company, featuring a Struggling Actor character — all of which delighted me and made me laugh out loud. One of my favorites, “Biberty Bungle” (the one with the bubbles), you can view here.
The Wayno / Piraro Bizarro of today (8/20), depicting a preposterous cartoon event:
It’s a Renaissance Faire and a Ren & Stimpy Show animated cartoon (if you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Wayno says there are 3 in this strip — see this Page)
A crossing of the decorously ornamental and the enthusiastically down-and-dirty.
News flash. In the Stanford Report (faculty and staff news, serving also as p.r. for the university) today (8/20), this headline:
Oh, the font! The trickster font!
In the last few days, I’ve returned to two movies from long ago that gave me great pleasure then and have just brought me fresh joy. From 1953 (when I was in high school, in Pennsylvania), Roman Holiday, starring Audrey Hepburn and Gregory Peck (which came up on a free classic movie channel on my cable service). And from 1963 (when I was in grad school, in Massachusetts), Tom Jones, starring Albert Finney and a cast of wonderful character actors (which I had just gotten the DVD of in the mail).
Committed in speech, by me, on 7/27/26:
help get through me the day [1]
This is an error in the ordering of the parts, localized in the underlined portion.
[1] is the production. What was the target? What did I intend to say? There are two possibilities:
help get me through the day [2] (with reversal of the underlined adjacent words)
help me get through the day [3] (with reversal of the underlined adjacent constituents)
(side note: [1] is in fact a possible construction, though it’s very awkward, and has the wrong structure: it has through me as a constituent, which neither of the targets does)
Now the question is how any of this fits into what we (think we) know about reversal errors in syntax. There are important generalizations about the kinds of reversals we see again and again, generalizations that can then be used to suggest hypotheses about the processes of speech production; the overarching observation here is that we’re forever planning ahead, metaphorically assembling, in stages, chunks of stuff that will eventually get manifested in speech. Glitches in production are then indirect evidence about what’s going on behind the curtain. Some of them are extraordinarily common, others less so, and down the line, but we don’t see just random word jumbling.
The end of the story is that I have stumbled onto a vein of relatively uncommon reversal types (some of which Vicki Fromkin had already recorded), so it’s worth pointing out that they too are principled; I will characterize them roughly, as reversals of adjacent elements — as in [2] and [3], yielding [1].
Latin silentio ‘in silence’. Where I live now (also vivide ‘vividly, vigorously’, but that’s a topic for another posting). I’ve had profound laryngitis (probably a concomitant of cryptosporidiosus, which I’m otherwise holding at bay), occasionally moderating a bit so I can have actual conversations. But mostly I’m a whisperer, and the people on the reception desk at my facility have begun to ask me to write things down instead of whispering unintelligibly to them.
