death to productivity

thanks to this cool mac widget i can now blog discreetly through a text window in the bottom left corner of my screen while all the time appearing to be hard at work. excellent.

choonping

-- you are blogging again! see how many marvellous things are coming out of this su-lin debacle!

sfn (ii)

quite surprised, actually, that i was chosen, considering i've only been around for a couple of months. still, no complaints, and already i find i'm looking forward to (a) seeing some of my duke professors again, (b) the weather, and (c) bagels. life is tough without bagels.

grammar police (ii)

henceforth, not herewith. sigh. it's a long, hard life.

sfn

ooh...i'm getting to go to the sfn conference in washington in november...would anyone like to drop by?

grammar police

fs mentions that i meant "herewith" and not "heretofore" in the post below, and he is entirely correct. oops. oh well; at least i can't be corrected by my students.

also auden

The Average

His peasant parents killed themselves with toil
To let their darling leave a stingy soil
For any of those smart professions which
Encourage shallow breathing, and grow rich.
The pressure of their fond ambition made
Their shy and country-loving child afraid
No sensible career was good enough,
Only a hero could deserve such love.
So here he was without maps or supplies,
A hundred miles from any decent town;
The desert glared into his blood-shot eyes;
The silence roared displeasure: looking down,
He saw the shadow of an Average Man
Attempting the exceptional, and ran.

The Novelist

Encased in talent like a uniform,
The rank of every poet is well known;
They can amaze us like a thunderstorm,
Or die so young, or live for years alone.

They can dash forward like hussars: but he
Must struggle out of his boyish gift and learn
How to be plain and awkward, how to be
One after whom none think it worth to turn.

For, to achieve his lightest wish, he must
Become the whole of boredom, subject to
Vulgar complaints like love, among the Just

Be just, among the Filthy filthy too,
And in his own weak person, if he can,
Must suffer dully all the wrongs of Man.


                                           W.H. Auden

admittedly

-- my reaction was pure schadenfreude, but i am thoroughly unrepentant. it's been a long week.

(su-lin, on the phone: omg! i'll never refer to myself in the third person again! i am heretofore i!
me: shouldn't that be su-lin is heretofore i?)

can you milk a whale?

catachresis

remember the teacakes? well i just glanced over the I/S restaurant review for spizzico, the opening line of which reads:

Hankering for fulsome Italian cuisine, in an unassuming homey space?

very unfortunate. one really shouldn't use words one does not know the meaning of.

Attempted to read:
M/F - Anthony Burgess. I know when I'm in over my head; the introduction says that the novel is a riddle though..interested Minz?

Currently reading:
A Gun For Sale - Graham Greene

perhaps i'm being a smart-aleck by admitting this publicly, but i always knew where the word 'foolscap' came from

*runs away and hides*

From The Trick Is To Keep Breathing

Other people. Other people interest me. How they manage. There are several possibilities.

1. They are just as confused as me but they aren't letting on.
2. They don't know they don't know what the point is.
3. They don't understand they don't know what the point is.
4. They don't mind they don't know what the point is.
5. They don't even know there are any questions.

The first is too paranoid. Paranoia is a joke. I will not be a joke, Rejected on the grounds of unpalatability. The second unlikely: it rests of the unpleasant assumption that other people can't work out what I can work out. Since modesty is a becoming trait in a woman, I reject the second. The third is interesting and enviable but gets things no further forward. One can hardly unknow something, ie I am in no position to alter the facts. The fifth makes me lonely and is rejected on the same modesty clause as postulation 2 (see above.)

That leaves me with the fourth.

From The Trick Is To Keep Breathing:

Preparation for the Doctor
A short exercise lasting anything up to forty minutes.

[The surgery is blue. The patient stands while the doctor scratches his neck, sits, rifles through pieces of paper. Some of the pieces of paper fall and he picks them up, sighs, grins tightly to himself, scratches the back of his neck with his ring finger then looks up.]

DOCTOR:
Sit. [Pause] So how are things what's new who are you anyway?

PATIENT:
I'm tired and I still need somebody to talk to. I need to get less angry about everything. I'm going nuts.

DOCTOR:
Don't tell me how to do my job. Relax. You can talk to me. I made a double appointment so we can have twenty minutes. Go ahead. I'm listening.

PATIENT:
What can I say that makes sense in twenty minutes?

DOCTOR:
Try. You're not trying. You're looking for something that doesn't exist, that's why you're not happy. Look at me. I'm under no illusions. That's why I'm in control.

PATIENT:
How can I be more like you?

DOCTOR:
That's not what I meant. That's not what I meant at all. Envy is a destructive emotion. Besides I had to fight hard to get to feel like this. I'm buggered if I'm giving away the fruits of my hard work for nothing. You must tell me how you are.

PATIENT:
I don't seem to know how I am except bad. There's nothing there but anger and something scary all the time. I don't want to get bitter because it will ruin my looks.

DOCTOR:
Maybe a hobby would help. Facetiousness is not an attractive trait in a young woman.

PATIENT:
I know I know. I can't help myself.

DOCTOR:
OK. We'll try these green ones for a change. And step up the anti-depressants. Don't drink or drive. Make an appointment for a few days time and try to be more helpful in future.

While I try to imagine him shouting the last bit, he comes out of the surgery and takes in a little boy with a huge stye on one eye. Maybe he guesses I sit out here rehearsing.

IMPATIENT:
OK let's talk straight. You ask me to talk then you look at your watch. What am I supposed to take from that? This whole thing is ridiculous. Can't you send me to someone who's paid to have me waste their time? You don't know what to do with me but you keep telling me to come back. And stop sending that woman to see me. All it does is make me guilty and secretive.

DOCTOR:
Look, this is reactive depression. I don't see that sending you to a specialist will help things. Talk to your family if you can't talk to me.

IMPATIENT:
I have no family.

DOCTOR:
Don't be melodramatic.

laws of nature

was in the canteen today with a few of the lab folks, and the topic of conversation turned to whether sociology is, indeed, a load of bunk. this arising because none of the sociological studies we could think of could even pretend to have any explanatory power in the real world. for example, someone mentioned that her friend, for a senior thesis, wrote a qualititative description of the lives of transexuals in prison, in the hopes of showing that the common factor linking incarceration and the desire for a sex change is a need for rebellion against social norms; this argument would have been far more persuasive, of course, were it the case that the incidence of transexualism is higher in jails. it is, in fact, lower.

social sciences, fuzzy as they are, still ought to be grounded in scientific logic. i shudder when people talk about "descriptive science" (these people are, on the whole, lawyers). if i were a sociologist, i think i would study the multifarious corollaries of murphy's law, for instance, the inverse rule of glass-filling in restaurants, which states that how quickly your water glass is filled is inversely correlated with (a) how full your glass is, and (b) how badly you need the water. now that's something that can be quantified. i'd even make nice little scatter plots. hell, i'd probably be able to spin an entire phd out of it.

fall TV

-- more new dramas that look interesting this year than last (though last year really was slim pickings).

Hard to tell whether Surface is going to be fantastic or really suck. Of the several supernatural-themed dramas premiering it's the only one that has my attention at the moment. Part of its credibility, I admit, comes from the fact that it's on NBC.

HBO's Rome I have blogged about.

Prison Break has buzz and Wentworth Miller. That's good enough for me.

Reunion looks like it could be intriguing, despite my premonition that it won't be picked up for a full season order. Thing is, with the exception of Mathew St. Patrick I don't think I've seen any of these folks before. Playing the same character over the course of 20 years sounds challenging; I hope they can act.

I might also watch Invasion if I have the time.

Not much reality to speak of, and with the exception of AD I think I may not watch any American sitcoms ever again. Pilots aside, I'm going to soldier on with the somewhat disappointing Lost, if for no other reason than to mock it mercilessly on Internet forums. Veronica Mars, renewed by the skin of its teeth, is of course on the yes list. Alias for Lena Olin. And I think that about covers it. (Considered starting House since Su-Lin made me watch an episode but just can't bring myself to like procedural drama, no matter how glib the main actor.)

finally got round to checking out the new library. fiction shelves still largely denuded, but even from the remains you can tell that the collection is decent. unfortuantely, the place itself is not at all reminiscent of the old stamford road library - or any of the other nlb branches for that matter - and i think that was, perhaps, a misstep. i like there to be a certain measure of uniformity in things. horrible as galilee sometimes is, at the very least you can peg having a coffee there as part of the library experience, and even the rest of the branches without galilees have a certain je ne sais quoi that make them feel similar somehow. maybe it's just that buildings need time to collect history and acquire their essences or something, but for the moment, i'm distinctly unimpressed.

Currently reading:
The Trick Is To Keep Breathing - Janice Galloway

the previous discussion arising because it transpired that someone else in the lab calls you2 tiao2 "oilsticks" with no trace of mockery.

(one can see how in this respect at least i kind of fit in)

the kind of thing von thinks of

someone from the lab recalls the time about a year ago when a professor from the prc visited the lab, and people were trying to translate 'general linear model' for him. one of the suggestions: 'jiang1 jun1 heng2 mo2 xing2'. heh.

last night: after getting conned (once more) at alley bar with cp and cp's friend and jianyi, we ended up walking through oxley road to en japanese dining bar down mhmd. sultan, where we ordered half the menu and two bottles of sake and settled in to converse about possible holiday destinations and whether or not i'm a civil servant (i'm not). on the former: it seems that a bunch of us are interested in cambodia/vietnam. whether or not this is actually going to happen remains to be seen -- taking leave is a trickier affair than i imagined before i started working. office politics can really stomp on your vacation plans.

(i didn't even get to go to japan because of quitting the-place-which-can't-be-named. not that i'm really complaining)

by the way, the food in en is really spectacular -- go for the okinawan dishes, particularly the pork belly which has about twice as much fat as lean. what's that you say? well at least i'll die happy.

Currently reading:
Aloft - Chang Rae Lee

got the ibook. does apple have a copyright on the particular shade of white they use on all their machines?

bbq 2: electric boogaloo

at last, the weekend. still no mac.

while not exactly one of the great levellers, office bbqs do help bring people towards the median, and for that i was grateful. i've been feeling a little stupid since starting this new job -- particularly when people start talking about physics and statistics and math. the only academic environments i've been in thusfar have been full of people who are paid to build you up, to tolerate incompetence for the grander purpose of learning, and it turns out that in the real world there are incorrect answers and stupid questions and bad data and just plain pressing the wrong bloody button.

anyway, bbq. the highlight was a three foot salmon marinaded with lemon, salt absolut and very little else. surprisingly, it was perfect. also: steak, lamb shank, three-month old crab sticks (largely untouched), portobello mushrooms, various peppers, potato salad, mixed-leaf salad, vegetarian fried rice. marshmallows, but only for the non-vegetarians, because they apparently have gelatin in them (au revoir, numinousness). the best part, though, was that everyone was so full of sake that (a) it didn't matter to me that other people occasionally talked about work, and (b) other people were able to feign interest when i didn't. therein lay the levelling.

charlie and the chocolate factory, consensus opinion

freddy highmore: much improved. helena bonham carter: eternally perfect.

backdated

I have, for once, a reasonable excuse for not blogging; my Dell Inspiron, trusty companion for four years and in three continents, has committed suicide. All things considered, it lasted a very long time (I thought that the backpacking would kill it off for sure) – full marks to Dell.

Onwards and upwards. I’m thinking of getting an iBook as a replacement. Three (immature) reasons really:
1) I'm sick of the blue screen of death
2) Apple products have always appealed to my aesthetic sense,
3) I get a discount if I order it through the workplace

A little afraid that 12.1" will be small for video; worst comes to worst there's always the desktop for that though.