Archive for the ‘Stanford’ Category

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Our multifaceted undergraduates

May 16, 2023

From today’s (5/16) Stanford Report, a feature on the outgoing Stanford Tree, Grayson Armour, who cavorted on the football field of Stanford Stadium as the team’s mascot, the Tree, a costumed figure representing El Palo Alto, the redwood tree featured on the university’s logo; meanwhile, Armour was preparing himself for “a career in human spaceflight”.  Kids these days!

From the Stanford Report:


(#1) Armour in Stanford Stadium

Meet Grayson Armour, ’23: The former Stanford Tree grew up on a dairy farm in Illinois, where nightly views of the Milky Way inspired a fascination with distant horizons. He graduates in June with a bachelor’s degree in aerospace computational engineering and a master’s degree in aeronautics and astronautics, and plans to pursue a career in human spaceflight.

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Posted in Academic life, Logos, Mascots, Palo Alto, Stanford | Leave a Comment »

Blogger, interrupted

September 15, 2022


The Blogger, tied in furious knots

I was about the do a quick posting on Roger Federer, who announced his retirement from professional tennis today — because Federer is an admirable person in a whole series of ways, and because Federer is really really Swiss (he and I share the Alpine nose!).

But I was interrupted by Life, in ways mostly gratifying, but both time-consuming and exhausting, so the piece about RF and his splendid Swissness remains unfinished.

Well, the Federer piece interrupted my progress on a “RELAX ARNOLD” posting (about something that had popped up in a Facebook ad).

And “RELAX ARNOLD” took me away from posting on two other ads that had appeared suddenly: “funny aperitif board” and “the social lives of ruff dudes”.

And those two interrupted my advance on a whole set of half-prepared postings: “tastes like glazed donuts”, “ride the wild okapi”, and more.

I can’t imagine how I’m going to dig myself out of this hole.

But, you ask, how did I spend this day (after taking in the hot news about Federer)?

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Posted in Academic life, Language and medicine, Language and sports, My life, Stanford, Switzerland and Swiss things | 6 Comments »

A journal of my thoughts

August 24, 2022

The old Calvin and Hobbes — from 8/25/92 — that came up in my comics feed yesterday:

This blog is, in a sense, a journal of my thoughts:

— responses to things I’ve come across (things people have said, events I’ve seen, events I’ve experienced, news reports, cartoons and comics, movies and tv, music, artwork, food, plants, animals, whatever);

— reports on my life history, family and friends, emotional and physical states, beliefs and opinions and guiding moral principles; reports on research (mine and other people’s) in linguistics and  psychology and in g&s (gender and sexuality studies, though Gilbert & Sullivan do occasionally appear; I do not, however, deal in goods & services);

— and creative writing (fiction and poetry) and artwork (mostly my collages).

The responses and reports are not just passing on of things but attempts to place these things in some context (which often involves exposing my personal involvement with them, sometimes in open and unsparing detail), to analyze them, to interpret them, to connect them (sometimes in unexpected or surprising ways) to other things, and often to play with them, to use them to entertain — in displays of Martians attacking Indianapolis, so to speak.

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Posted in Academic life, Linguistics in the comics, My life, Stanford, This blogging life | 2 Comments »

respite space / area, area of respite

June 23, 2022

It’s Midsummer Eve, the day before St. John’s Day and Midsummer Night, on which we can dream about reveling with the fairies. High summer, fiercely hot — I’ve been poleaxed by the heat for several days and trying to write this before today’s shimmer fells me once again — and Stanford (the edge of which is, like, six blocks from the Palo Alto house I’m writing this in) is in day 3 of a PG&E power outage crisis (my electric power is supplied by Palo Alto Utilities, which has so far coped with the heat demands and the occasional small fire, though it all seems distressingly tenuous to me).

Stanford has shut down everything it could and told staff and faculty to stay away if at all possible. But there are all those students in university housing, which is without power for cooling, for lighting, for charging electronic equipment, for opening (keycard-controlled) doors. For them, the university has provided places — spaces or areas — that have emergency power sources and can provide temporary relief in the form of cooling, lighting, and charging. What to call such places?

Stanford’s solution was expressions using the noun respite — respite space, respite area, area of respite — which were new turns of phrase for me, though they probably have a history I’m ignorant of. They have the advantage of being general (cooling station, which has been used in other public heat-crisis emergencies, covers only one of the students’ needs), but not so general that it’s uninformative (as, say, emergency area would be), and not, at least yet, associated specifically with the excretion of bodily wastes (as expressions with the nouns rest, comfort, and relief have become). (Not that excretion is irrelevant in a power outage; the lighting supplied in respite areas lets people see what they’re doing in bathrooms / toilets there, and that’s a very good thing. Meanwhile, back at the dark stifling dorms: flashlights.)

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Posted in Connotation, Gender and sexuality, Holidays, Homosexuality, Lexical semantics, Stanford | 1 Comment »

The Stanford Dragfest

May 25, 2022

From the Stanford Events Calendar for 5/20: at 7 p.m. on Wilbur Field:


(#1) The poster

The announcement:

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Posted in Clothing, Gender and sexuality, Homosexuality, Movies and tv, Snowclonelet composites, Stanford | Leave a Comment »

An address from the former Adjunct Professor

April 22, 2022

On the Stanford Linguistics weekly newsletter, the Sesquipedalian, this morning (timestamped 7:36 am):

Artifact of the Month: Zwicky’s Linguistics Quilt
In the spirit of reminiscence, this month we bring you former Adjunct Professor Arnold Zwicky’s linguistics-themed quilt, composed of 12 t-shirts from different linguistics events…

(The quilt, and its component parts, can be viewed in my 12/11/19 posting “The linguistics quilt”.)

My Monty-Python-dense response (which the Sesqui might or might not choose to print, but you, my readers, can see it here):

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Posted in Academic life, My life, Stanford | 8 Comments »

Yo Day 2: OY/YO at Stanford

January 6, 2020

(Continuing the Yo! theme for today, following “King/Saint Melchior”. I note that these postings have absolutely nothing to do with the Star Wars character Yoda.)

From Stanford News, the piece “Saying hello to OY/YO at Cantor Arts Center: Deborah Kass’ bold sculpture welcomes guests from its new home at Stanford’s Cantor Arts Center” by Beth Giudicessi on 12/30/19 (mailed out today when the university reopened after the holiday break):


(#1) From the YO viewpoint

Cantor Arts Center hopes its newest sculpture, OY/YO by artist Deborah Kass, acts as an extension of the museum’s new vision to present art and ideas in contemporary and inclusive ways. The piece was installed Dec. 20 and is now on view to the public.

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Posted in Art, Interjections, Stanford | Leave a Comment »

Yo Day 1: King/Saint Melchior

January 6, 2020

The 6th of January, generally known as Epiphany, but this year in my house it’s Yo Day. For the Three Kings (especially Saint Melchior) who came to Bethlehem with their gifts, saying (I translate freely), “Yo, baby Jesus! We got some stuff for you!” For Deborah Kass’ statue OY/YO, a version of which was recently installed on the Stanford campus (as announced in today’s Stanford News). And for two raunchy shots of verse inspired by today’s Daily Jocks ad: the supremely unsubtle “Yo, Faggot!” and “Yo, Fucker!”.

One at a time, one at a time. This one is about the old guy with the gold.

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Posted in Art, Names, Slang, Stanford | 1 Comment »

A new address

September 22, 2019

noun address: 1 the particulars of the place where someone lives or an organization is situated: they exchanged addresses and agreed to keep in touch. … (NOAD, with some degree of vagueness)

No, not for me, for my department, and in fact for the whole university. From the Stanford Report on 9/18/19:

(#1)

Serra Mall will be renamed Jane Stanford Way and become the university’s official address on Oct. 7, honoring the university’s co-founder and implementing a proposal that came out of a review of campus historical names.

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Posted in Lexical semantics, My life, Names, Prototype semantics, Semantics, Stanford | Leave a Comment »

On this day in 2019

June 16, 2019

At least seven occasions of significance to me today: three fixed to the date June 16th, plus four movable occasions that happen to take place on this Sunday this year. There will be a section in the middle with seriously raunchy material from gay porn that some will want to avoid; I’ll provide a warning when this stuff is imminent.

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Posted in Books, Gay porn, Gender and sexuality, Holidays, Homosexuality, Language and religion, Masculinity, Music, My life, Signs and symbols, Stanford | 4 Comments »

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