waste

A change of scene

I appear to be blogging here now, as ogged is, sadly, leaving.

Not sure how many posts will be here in the future---some, no doubt.

Technical questions

1. Is quasiquotation just a hack to get macros to work in Lispy languages, or does it stand on some firm logical footing?
2. Is there a graceful and elegant way randomly to select n items from a list of unknown length without reading the whole list into, and retaining it in, memory?  I know there's a way to select just one item this way, but don't know if there's a generalized method.

A pure heart is an excellent thing, and so is a clean shirt

The lovely ladies of go fug yourself like to harp on people for wearing clothes that, in their opinion, look as if they've been fashioned from curtains or sheets or pieces of fabric intended originally for uses other than being draped around the human body.  But they would do well to remember this bit of Lichtenberg's:

Her petticoat had stripes of broad red and blue and looked as though it had been made out of a stage-curtain.  I would have paid a lot for a front seat, but there was no performance.

After all, perhaps the so-called "offenders" are actually alluding to it via their clothes!

Kant, the comedian

Even better than the awesome jokes in the third Critique is this line from the first:

Rather than pausing now for a dry and boring analyis…

Heh.

He stabbed her in the heart, and the heart blood did flow (x2)

Who would have thought that hearts would be so heart-shaped?
Recipe, as given to me by a kindly egullet poster, reproduced below the fold.

Verdict: eh.  Sauce was good (if rich); the stuffing was good, and while there wasn't anything terribly off-putting about the flavor itself, it also wasn't that great, and the texture wasn't the most attractive.  A different preparation, maybe.  I think if it had been better-done (the 12 minute cooking time was low, even for mid rare, given the size of the heart).  The garlic confit, though, was excellent, and resulted in some great garlicky oil, used to cook some chard.  If you can stuff the chambers (don't know why it's "arteries" below) without thinking anything sexual, then you can do something I don't think I'll ever be able to do.

Next: pork belly.

Friday Afternoon Secret Keeping

I made another pie

Perhaps this is more a function of professors than of class level, but I seem to be encountering more and more bluntly expressed professorial opinion in graduate classes than I recall from undergrad.  For instance, today we learned that if you like model theory, you'll want properties to be "just sets plus palaver".

Vielle à roué

That is the kind of musical instrument I would like to learn to play.

History

Who, in the Oxford Readings in Philosophy volume titled Truth, do you think is represented in the writings collected under the heading "The Early Modern Debate"?  Spinoza?  Locke?  Hobbes?  Descartes?  Leibniz?

Hahaha!  No, it's Austin and Strawson.

In the spirit of the tutor

To the moiling and toiling head mohel
There came a goy boy with a boil
He put him under the foil
But made blunders royal
And changed him from goy into goil.

Here's a hit for "goils", containing this:

Amster's family arrived here to cold-water poverty on the Lower East Side — his earliest memories are of horse-driven fire engines and of stealing food from pushcarts and coal for the family's tenement stove.

I didn't know that you could get food from coal.

Matte kudasai

"Conciliation" is what happens when two people become so close and such constant companions that their hair starts growing together and it gets all matted and tangled up and soon they can't move very far apart without it hurting because it's pulling on the hair and ew, just ew.

A regular schedule

Every Thursday, from 6am to 9am pst, on the radio, provided I can guide my no sleep–addled self to the station.

My new fallback plan

As part of the growing area of "international degree programs", German institutions are increasingly offering Master's and PhD courses--many of which are entirely or partially in English. There are no tuition fees for international students for these courses. Fields as diverse as computer science and engineering to European studies or intellectual property can all be found in the international degree course database here.

But aren't they starting to charge German citizens tuition?

An open letter to the Clarendon press, and the editors of this edition of "On the Aesthetic Education of Man"

In English, we do not typically employ W e d n e s d a y   s p a c i n g for emphasis.  Thus, even though this does occur in German texts, reproducing it in the English is folly, on the order of retaining « and » to delimit quotations because that's the punctuation employed in the German.

Nunc autem manet fides spes carnitas tria haec maior autem his est carnitas

Mmmm, carnitas.

I did a radio show yesterday, and I'm doing one tomorrow, 12-14pst.  It may be … my most audacious yet.  Will it feature a ten-minute drum duel?  Will it fade Sunn 0))) into Cuong Vu?  Who knows!

This common idiom has an odd feature! Core dumped.

Hey, check it out: "take a long walk off a short pier": why is the walk long and the pier short?  Because the idea is that the walk will be a straight one, and will exceed in length the length of the pier, so the foolish ambulator will fall into the water!  But isn't all the work here really being done by that least appreciated of speech elements, the preposition?  Consider: "take a long walk on a short pier".  Here, our hypothetical walking person could simply walk back and forth on the short pier several times, without once being in danger of falling into the sea, lake, or what body of water have you.  Even "take a short walk off a long pier" would work, if the goal is to get the instructed party wet (provided that either a pier is within walking distance, or h/s has transportation to the pier, and that either length of a long walk is greater than the length of a long pier, or someone takes h/h part of the way down the pier).

So why not just say "walk off a pier"? The really crazy thing is that if you started at the beginning of a short pier, you couldn't take a long walk off of it—precisely because you'd be walking off of it, onto water.  You can't do it!  This instruction specifically sets impossible conditions for its own satisfaction.  What could possibly be the point of phrasing it this way?

I hope that this will have been but the first of a series of posts in which I analyze the foolish inefficiencies of your English.

Superhero origin: the setup, or, potential literature

"An eight-top, young 'uns, and be swift, or—urkh!"  (A bared edge into jugular!)  Entering: oud-player & religious ascetic Iouanna, deciding to undulate (& inciting to unwanted scenes the men present), sights in confus'd madness the beëdged neck in, & now out, a perilous place!  She thinks: "would that Man exit, or, unmastered, fight this dischord?  Ouds aren't", she frets, "effective" (frowns, plucks) "at ending viol—lunk!" A man has grabbed her right tit!  Iouanna whacks that savage with oud.

It's not exactly strong on coherency, but I think some specialized word lists would improve that.

Bitters end

I knew watching scads of Channel 101 episodes would finally pay off.

Not quite enisled

The rocky division between little Corona del Mar and the other one (just plain Corona del Mar, I think) (both of which you can approach via a street called Marguerite) can, it turns out, be transgressed.  In the past, I thought this was impossible (though in the past I've always been there when the tide is higher).  There was a point, very close to the end, when I thought to proceed would require me to wade through some shallow sea water.  "Crumbs!", thought I, "I've tried so hard and come so far, and in the end, it won't even have mattered.".  But soon a path presented itself and all was well.