Passed on to me by Steve Wechsler under the punning title above, this work by conceptual artist Terry Adkins:
(#1)
(from the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, where its title is “Native Son”).
Archive for July, 2015
Cymbalism
July 15, 2015Morning names: The Secret of Susanna, The Jewels of the Madonna
July 15, 2015They came as a pair, two operatic works whose names have the same syntactic pattern. Only a bit later did I realize that they were works by the same composer, Ermanno Wolf-Ferrari.
Dead Tongues
July 15, 2015News from the 2015 Linguistic Institute (at the University of Chicago), from Stephanie Shih: a performance yesterday by Dead Tongues, the (un)official band of Stanford Linguistics. Plus a stunning Lingstitute2015 logo for the band by Stephanie:
(#1)
Cue the Rolling Stones.
The Far North
July 14, 2015On KQED-FM (public radio in San Francisco), a boost for:
Redding — the best of far northern California
You see the problem: Northern California takes in way too much (if it’s understood as covering the northern half of the state), and, worse, it’s likely to be interpreted as a regional name centered on San Francisco (or maybe San Francisco and Sacramento) and actually excluding the far northern part of the state. The designation far northern California is an attempt to carve out a culturally relevant area.
Recall my discussion of Southern California in connection with the town of Ojai, here. We do in fact need more regional designations, if we hope to capture the culturally relevant regions.
Define slavery
July 14, 2015Today’s Dilbert has our office hero confronting the CEO:
So you buy people and make them work without pay. How can you “spin” that as anything but slavery? Politicians manage to achieve similar feats of denial every day.
Maybe the CEO is going to maintain that the two acts (buying people on the Internet and making people work without pay) simply have nothing to do with one another: the first is just a purchase, a commercial transaction, and the second is just an unpaid internship; it’s an accident that the same set of people are involved.
Jeri Ryan and Luke Perry and more
July 14, 2015I realize I should be out storming prisons today, but I seem to be caught up in actorly stuff again, so no Bastille action and also very little about language.
In the past few days, it seems that every other tv show I see on cable reruns features Jeri Ryan prominently. Yesterday it was an episode of Leverage (season 1, episode 13, “The Future Job”), in which the familiar face that appeared early in the show was, yes, Luke Perry.
I’ll start with Ryan, go on to Leverage, and then engage Perry and follow these leads to some other tv shows.
Pernicious nostalgia (with John Stamos)
July 14, 2015In the NYT on the 12th, an opinion piece, “What Type of Nostalgic ’90s TV Fan Are You? (The Wrong Kind)” by Maris Kreizman, which begins by reounting childhood gatherings of the writer with other young girls.
We had gathered to discuss “Full House,” a sitcom in which a recently widowed man named Danny Tanner teaches his three adorable daughters very important life lessons, with the help of his brother-in-law and best friend. The show was the perfect answer for little girls who had enjoyed the wacky nontraditional family structure they saw in the 1987 film “3 Men and a Baby” and thought, “I’ll raise you two more kids.”
… This was my childhood in the late 1980s and early ’90s, a time that, hairstyle-wise, and even teen-idol-wise, is perhaps better forgotten. But it will not be. Especially not now. Our nostalgia is greedy. It’s not enough to look back fondly on the past; now we are rebooting it. Our nostalgia compels us to go beyond rewatching dusty old VCR tapes, to actually wanting fleeting childhood obsessions to be revived and re-enacted to fit our own times. This is why Netflix’s announcement this spring that it would air a 13-episode continuation of “Full House” in 2016 made my inner 9-year-old swoon, even though adult me remains wary.
out way
July 14, 2015On ADS-L on the 8th, Geoff Nunberg reported this reanalysis of outweigh, from a comment on an article at Atlantic.com:
Emotion and logic are not of equal value. Does not science and the collective efforts of humanity qualify as a higher form of discourse? The needs of the many out way the feelings of a few.
It turned out that Google gives over 400 actual hits for “out way the”, the vast majority of them involving reanalyses of outweigh. It’s hard to see this as a garden-variety eggcorn (how could it be an improvement in semantics?), so the ADS-Lers considered other possibilities; in particular, from Dan Goncharoff:
Do we have any idea how many eggcorns [well, reanalyses — AMZ] today are generated by speech-to-text programs? I imagine lots of educated users who can’t be bothered to fix errors on their phones or tablets.
An intriguing idea. Surely this must happen, even if out way turns out not to be an example.
In any case, more technology-caused errors, first cousins to cupertinos.
Soothing boxes: or the pleasures of corrugation
July 13, 2015Today’s Zippy:
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Zippy finds cardboard boxes aesthetically satisfying as well as soothing to crouch in.
piadini
July 13, 2015New at Applebee’s Grill & Bar:
NEW MAPLE BACON CHICKEN PIADINI
Cedar-seasoned chicken, cheddar, maple mustard, bacon, grilled Piadini wrap. $10.49
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This is one of Appelebee’s new “handheld” sandwiches, a wrap-and-roll inumber that should (depending on the diameter of the roll) be reasonably manageable with one hand.
Three things here: the meter of the sandwich name; the notion of a handheld sandwich; and the word piadini.