Archive for the ‘Princeton’ Category

PAW days

March 31, 2024

🐅 🐅 🐅 three tigers for ultimate March (3/31) and for Princeton University (from the 19th century, the Princeton locomotive cheer “Rah rah rah! Tiger, tiger, tiger! Sis, sis, sis, boom, boom, boom, ah!”), plus 🐇 a rabbit for Easter (no doubt soon to be devoured by the tigers — though it will be succeeded tomorrow by a tougher trio of rabbits inaugurating the month of April, who might be foolish but have the power of three)

And so I turn to the Princeton Alumni Weekly (which is a monthly publication, but try not to dwell on that) — PAW, from now on — and my relations to it in recent years. While noting that when I die, PAW is the only place where I’m sure to get an obituary, though my Stanford department’s weekly newsletter, the Sesquipedalian, will have a notice, as will the news bulletin from the Linguistic Society of America (the LSA), and friends will say something on Facebook; otherwise, I expect my death to go publicly unremarked (and I encourage my daughter and grandchild not to spend their money on paid announcements), so at least in the death department, PAW looms large.

Now: I’ll re-play (with little further commentary) some history from the past three years in which PAW has been involved, ending with a section from my class notes in the issue that arrived in the mail yesterday (with rather more commentary).

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Posted in Awards, Death notices, Gender and sexuality, Holidays, My life, Princeton | 4 Comments »

Writers’ night at the Hotel De Luxe

March 28, 2024

Last night: a long — stretching over three hours of sleep, with a whizz break in the middle — and vivid story dream in which Ellen Kaisse (an old friend and a frequent character on this blog) and I were holed up for an entire night in an elegant hotel — much like the actual Beverly Hills Hotel — where we had a suite in which we were expected to produce a script for a film. The place looked like your ordinary luxury suite, except that it was dominated by a huge desk. Which, at the pressing of several buttons, converted magically into a fully functioning office, with computers, printers, phones, paper files, assorted office supplies, and of course a coffee maker. (But no staff, not even assistants to take things down for us. If we got hungry, we were to order food from room service.) Our work site for the long dark night.

We were expected to hack out an entire draft script, as well as suggestions for casting for the parts, costumes, and sets, plus a sketch of a score for the movie (I suspect that the score was especially significant to my having this dream; details to follow).

Somehow the actual subject of the film, which Ellen and I labored over, elaborately, for all those hours of my sleep, has dissolved, as dream material often does on awakening.

We didn’t question being put to work at the Hotel De Luxe through the night; apparently, that was a regular thing in Hollywood, just the way things worked there.

The dream was not at all unpleasant, sometimes actually delightful. Well, Ellen is wonderful company and an excellent person to exchange ideas with.

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Posted in Earworms, Language play, Mathematics, Music, My life, Philosophy, Princeton | 9 Comments »

Building wealth

December 28, 2022

A wry note on the news about pathological fabulist George Santos and his apparent amassing of millions of dollars in a mere two years. Santos’s remarkable ability to build wealth rapidly called to my mind the parallel achievements of the three men in the song “Little Tin Box” from the musical Fiorello!

After some background on the extraordinarily opaque Mr. Santos and his (apparent) meteoric accumulation of great heaps of money, I will entertain you with the full lyrics to the song. Then the basic facts about the musical, and more personal recollections from the giant album of Things I Learned at Princeton, in this case about how I became acquainted with the musical, which will lead to a brief note on Clark Gesner and still another musical, You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown (for which Clark supplied the book, the words, and the music).

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Posted in Homosexuality, Language and politics, Movies and tv, Music, My life, Princeton | 5 Comments »

AZ: LXII

March 7, 2022

No, not Linguistics 2, though LX, Lx, or lx often serves as an abbreviation for linguistics. (Meanwhile, when I was a lad at Princeton, the Lx / Ling 1 course — whatever its actual number was — was the Introduction to Descriptive Linguistics (taught by Samuel Atkins, a linguist in the Department of Classics), and the Lx / Ling 2 course was the Introduction to Historical Linguistics (taught by Henry Hoenigswald, commuting from the University of Pennsylvania for the semester).) But in any case, not the second linguistics course (or, for that matter Lx.2, the 2nd release of the field of Linguistics: only the second?).

Instead, Roman numerals for ’62, my class at Princeton. From my 2/11/22 posting “A note of pedagogical pleasure”:

I’m working on a silly photo for the 60th reunion of my Princeton class [May 19-22] — wearing a LXII class cap (provided by the class for this purpose), plus (as per instructions) “some orange and black” (and, because it’s me, a bit of rainbow Pride). Stay tuned for the visual.

Well, the request came in January, and I didn’t get around to fussing about the photo until well into February — my life is constantly fraught (‘affected by anxiety or stress’ (NOAD)) — and then, as I’ll detail below, I did a piss-poor job of it, so here I am reporting on the whole affair in March, well past the time when the photo might be useful, and anyway I’m not going to Reunions.

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Posted in Abbreviation, Clothing, Color, My life, Princeton | 1 Comment »