On Pinterest this morning, this Crock Pot Cowboy Casserole:
(#1) Two stages in preparation and the final product
Ah, the N + N compound cowboy casserole. Clearly not an Ingredient compound (‘casserole made from cowboys’), but instead a Use compound, roughly ‘casserole for cowboys (to use)’, or — most likely — an Object compound, roughly ‘casserole of the sort that cowboys (like to) eat’.
Alerted by NPR this morning and entertained by the band’s name, I checked out Mandolin Orange and really liked what I found.
(#1) Mandolin Orange recording “Wildfire” 11/2/16 at Paste Studios in NYC
And they’ll be playing at the Fillmore in SF next month:
In a private corner of Facebook today, this family exchange:
Child A was very busy.
Parent about A: He has an agenda
Child A: I’m not a gender
Parent: An agenda is when you have something you want to do
Child B: A gender is someone who serves food at baseball games
Parent: That’s a vendor
Child C *dies laughing*
And then from another parent:
My kid was so proud she tried cantaloupe at school. “The fruit, not the animal”
The Hi and Lois cartoon from 2/7/16:
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Super Bowl Sunday — today, this year — joins Thanksgiving and Christmas as a holiday that serves as an occasion for gatherings of family and friends plus a spread of characteristic food. A family food holiday, for short.
The SBS holiday crucially involves the Super Bowl football game, for the NFL championship: this year, SB LIII (El Ay Ay Ay!), New England Patriots vs. Los Angeles Rams at Mercedes-Benz Stadium in Atlanta GA (6:30 ET).
While much of the US population gathers around tv sets for the game, its half-time show, and its ads — virtually emptying out many public spaces — others seek out alternatives. (I myself have an unbroken record of studied inattention to the game, from SB I in 1967 on.) Alternatives that are cultural, recreational, commercial, and even sexual. (This posting will devolve into tales of SBS mansex, but I’m putting that material at the end, so kids and the sexually modest can enjoy the rest of this material and then bail out when the gay guys strip and go at it with one another like weasels in heat.)
Once again, Ruthie grapples with ABC order, in the January 6th One Big Happy:
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The larger context: test tasks for kids, and what they’re for. Eventually this will take us to queens.
The author of the little — 67-page — guidebook The Old Editor Says: Maxims for Writing and Editing (first published in 2013), the old-school newspaper editor John E. McIntyre, writing as a curmudgeonly, sometimes imperious, character of the same name, as seen on the book’s front cover:
(#1) The name of this image file is McIntyreOldEdtor.jpg; that fact will eventually become significant
The rooms in the grade school of my childhood — West Lawn Elementary School in West Lawn PA, west of Reading — had high ceilings, and all the rooms had, I believe, reproductions of artworks above the blackboards, where there was plenty of space for them. Uplifting artworks on patriotic, social, or religious themes (yes, religious; every day started with recitations of the Pledge of Allegiance to the Flag and the Lord’s Prayer).
One classroom — my third grade, I think — had Jean-François Millet’s The Gleaners:
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The significance of the painting, we were told, was that just as these women were gathering food in the field, so we children were extracting useful knowledge — gleaning it — from our lessons at school. (This is a specialized metaphorical sense of the verb glean: ‘[with object] extract (information) from various sources: the information is gleaned from press clippings‘ (NOAD)). I don’t think anyone ever explained to us who those gleaners were or what they were actually doing, so I recall being surprised when, more or less by accident, I came across the details in my World Book Encyclopedia.
The title of an abstract of mine for the 20th Stanford SemFest (Semantics Festival), to take place on March 15th and 16th (the Ides of March and National Panda Day, respectively). The SemFests feature reports (primarily 20-minute presentations, plus 10-minute question periods)
on recent work on any topic touching on meaning broadly construed, ranging from traditional topics in semantics and pragmatics to social meaning to natural language understanding and beyond
This posting is primarily about my snowclone paper, but there will also be some very personal reflections on the conference and its significance in my academic life.