Hey, does anyone know some places where you can legally post a flyer? Like community boards or in grocery stores or anywhere else. Any locations, thanks!
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Soon this view will be just a memory but it will always be the apartment where we got engaged and married.
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I am hosting a stop on a virtual book tour on my theatre blog... ( I met Bill during Naplwrimo and he was a fun participant !)
We are happy to announce that, “Freedom Spice in the New Mash-Up World", will be interviewing author Bill Frederick about his newly released ebook, “My Virtual Book Tour Secrets,” on Friday, July 25th.
What should you know about Bill Frederick?
Bill is the author of, “45 eBook Marketing Opportunities,” and, more recently, “My Virtual Book Tour Secrets!” He blogs at: http://wffrederick.com/blog/. He’s the former editor of FineLines, the Central Pennsylvania’s Writer’s Guild Newsletter, The Prince Gallitzin Chronicle, and was the founder and editor of the literary ezine, Le Mot Juste. His articles have appeared in Connections, The Benedictine, The Star-Courier, and several other local and regional newspapers and websites.
Through his publishing company, Apogee Publishing, he’s worked with writers from around the world, helping them realize their dream of becoming published authors.
How can you participate in the virtual book tour?
Bill will be discussing all aspects of virtual book tours, particularly how to organize your own virtual book tour. He is also happy to talk about writing or to lend writing tips and inspiration to any aspiring authors out there. So if you have questions for Bill, visit: http://myvirtualbooktoursecrets.com/ask-me-a-question.html, before 6pm EDT on Thursday, July 24th and submit your question. Why not visit his web site now while it's still fresh in your mind? I will publish his responses on July 25th. If you'd like to know more about Bill Frederick and his ebook, “My Virtual Book Tour Secrets,” check out his website at: http://myvirtualbooktoursecrets.com/.
Followers of the tour can win a free copy of, “My Virtual Book Tour Secrets.” To learn more, visit the “Win a Copy” page at: http://myvirtualbooktoursecrets.com/win-a-copy.html
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![[info]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/syndicated.gif) cuteoverload |
| 2008-07-24 10:02 |
| The Amazing Remote-Control Otters! |
| Public |
http://mfrost.typepad.com/cute_overload/2008/07/the-amazing-rem.html OK, for this next trick, you need to get a remote-control device. TV, stereo, it doesn't really matter, as long as it has a really big button on it. Go ahead, we'll wait. (elevator music, dum dee dum...) Got it? Now, incredible as this may sound, your remote control will let you switch off these otters' brains all at once. Start the video, and get ready to push the really big button ... right ... about ...
(00:24) ... now. Was that cool or what?!
Wait, we're gonna do it again. On your mark ... get set ...
(00:36) ... click.
Wow, Philip K., that was totally (click) ...
... awesome.
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| jameswolcott |
| 2008-07-24 11:10 |
| Pity Party at the Wee-Wee Pad |
| Public |
http://www.vanityfair.com/online/wolcott/2008/07/up-at-the-progressive-book.html Up at the Progressive Book Club's blog is a three-part video interview with The New Yorker's Jane Mayer, author of The Dark Side, an investigative indictment capable of awakening the American conscience, if America still had a conscience capable of being awakened. Pathos lifts its spaniel eyes at John McCain as he closes in on cinching the uncoveted title of "Pity Fuck Candidate" (tm: TBogg). Of course it's an all-day, everyday pity titty rub for McCain over at Commentary's monotonous Contentions blog, whose predictable kvetch over Obama's foreign jaunt provoking one of its regular commenters, Grumpy Old Man, to avuncularize: It [the trip] hasn't done him any political harm so far. Nothing will win BHO love on this blog. Nothing will revive the sad campaign of Johnny Mac, a decent man, but past it. Rage, rage. 'Twill do ye no good a'tall. Related question: What is James Kirchick doing posting on Commentary's blog? Doesn't he have an editorial position at The New Republic to keep him occupied in his evolving, ever-expanding role as resident irritant twit? I don't understand why he's allowed to stray from his wee-wee pad at TNR and drivel away at another publication's blog, or why that publication would welcome him instead of tutoring their farm team of interns and junior editors in the pesty art of sophistry. I mean, you don't see me running wild over at Teen Vogue, despite the luminous insights I'm just bursting to share regarding Taylor Swift's rhapsodic shower video. Opinion journalism apparently practices looser supervision than do we at the quality "slicks."
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| cuteoverload |
| 2008-07-24 07:59 |
| FYI: Petite mohawked monkey OWNS YOUR SOUL |
| Public |
http://mfrost.typepad.com/cute_overload/2008/07/this-monkey-own.html [sucking thumb + bamboo strand]
Here's the deal.
I'm a golden-haired, mini mohawk-sporting, teeny-nostrilled monkeh.
And I own your soul. all of it! All. FYI.
Ooh-ooh-ah-ah, Sparkling T.!
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Hey,
Just thought I'd share this. If any women are interested in trying something different, visit the Women's Center Karate Club website for a great opportunity: http://wckc.oceansfree.com/index.html
If you sign up by August 9th, you could get September for free. They have three try out classes: Aug 4th, Aug 7th, and Aug 9th. Visit the website and email/call for more information!
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myspace.com/deathbyaudioshows
L - Bedford Ave or J/M/Z - Marcy Ave
cheap beer & wine
all ages
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http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=397 I'm going to tell you a funny and true story that will reveal, for all you animal lovers, the true quality of canine lexical semantic competence. The story comes from my friend Moshe Vardi, who has a dog (a schnauzer, if you keep track of the different breeds) to which he has carefully taught various spoken commands. One of these commands is transmitted by uttering the English word down. When that command is issued, the dog obediently and immediately relaxes all four legs and drops to the ground, belly and genito-excretory organs in the dust.
Well, there came a day when a large pizza had been set on the table in preparation for the Vardi family's dinner, and for a few seconds, before people were seated, Moshe's wife foolishly left the room unguarded. When she returned from the kitchen, she was shocked to see the dog up on the table, standing over the pizza and licking at it tentatively.
"Down!", she commanded, in stentorian tones.
I rather fear you are ahead of me at this point. But let me just continue at my own pace and detail for you the denouement you probably already expect.
The dog obediently and immediately relaxed all four legs and dropped, right where it stood, belly and genito-excretory organs in the pizza.
So that is how well word meanings for dogs match up to word meanings for humans: they don't. The sound of a human voicing the phonetic sequence [daun] had simply been tied by a conditioned reflex to a particular bodily movement. The concept of being lower (closer to the ground in some appropriate sense) than one's present position was not there in the doggie brain at all. (And the pizza, in case you were wondering about this, for it worried me, was not any longer regarded as humanly consumable. I don't know what they had for dinner instead that night.)
Comments are closed because I just know there are thousands and thousands of pet-loving Language Log readers out there who hate me because of my views on the non-existence of animal linguistic readiness (my claim is that no non-human has ever actually voiced a proposition or asked a question, not even once), and you would flood comments area with complaints about my being unfair to doggies. You all remember what I said about Rico the collie and his 200-word vocabulary, or what I said more recently about comparisons between parrots and children, and you hate me, and you want to tell me huffily that linguists like me "don't seem to have any interest at all in how animals communicate, and in fact cannot mention the subject without making a snotty comparison with human language" (the quote is from a comment by Jeremy Hawker here). Well, I don't want to hear it, O.K.? I am so far from wanting to hear about it that I would rather eat that pizza than read your indignant comments about my unfeeling speciesism. So put a sock in it.
No I wouldn't. But seriously, I'm not being especially snotty here. I'm not, pace Hawker, denigrating animal communication or the study of it: of course animals communicate — just not linguistically, that's all. And I'm not implying that humans are superior in virtue of their linguistic abilities: who can say whether our incessant babbling and blogging makes us absolutely better than non-babbling, non-blogging organisms like orchids or ocelots? One would need some absolute standard of betterness, and we don't have one. I know that with respect to some skills dogs are definitely my superiors: I can't tell by any amount of sniffing the ground that a certain person passed this way recently, and I can't leap my own length off the ground and catch a frisbee in my mouth. Many dogs are very good at these things. I also can't fly, though every normal parrot can. But neither dogs nor parrots can use or understand human languages, nor even understand a single word in a sense that can be meaningfully compared to human lexical semantic knowledge. Every normal 4-year-old human can.
I'm not interested in any bragging rights for Homo sapiens. I'm merely concerned that the definition of what linguists mean by such things as knowledge of a word meaning or ability to form a sentence should not get blurred by over-hyping of the extremely loose analogies between animal abilities and human linguistic behaviors.
So comments are off, understand? Back off! Down, I say! Down!
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http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=398 I thought I'd revisit the current presidential-candidate nickname situation, based on a study of headlines in the New York tabloids, well known as the Drosophila melanogaster of onomastic evolution. When I took a look at the nicknames that the French press used for the candidates in their presidential election last year ("Political hypocoristics", 4/18/2007), the consensus among readers was that American papers tend to use first names or initials, like Rudy, Mitt, Hillary, and W, rather than diminutive forms based on last names like Chichi (for Chiraq) or Sarko (for Sarkozy). But my current research results suggest that this consensus was wrong.
Looking at recent headline on the New York Post and New York Daily News web sites, I see plenty of examples of Barack Obama's first and last names in full form, as expected:
"Baghdad Boosts Barack", "Barack's Iraq Trip", "Barack Doubles The Dough Of Mccain", "Barack On 'track'"
"Nyt: All The Views Fit To Boost Obama", "Obama Defends Plan To Talk With Iran While In Israel", "Obama's Overseas Education", "Jesse Griped To Obama Before Going 'nuts'".
But I found two two shortened versions of his last name, "O" and "Bam", and no nicknames based on his first name:
"O Staunch On Support For Israel", "O's Health Rx: Cover Illegals", "Mac And O Go To War", "Radical Joke On O & Wife"
"Wimp Staff Undercuts Bam's Iran Tough Talk", "Bam Is In The Zone", "Bam Buddies Up To Bigs", "GOP gripes: So we're running vs. Prez Bam?", "McCain takes bite from Bam lead in new poll", "McCain rails against Bam's "9/10″ mindset"
(I've seen "Barry" in some blog entries, but not in any MSM heads. And I'm sure that Senator Obama's staff is happy that the tabs have ignored the egregious Maureen Dowd's attempts to promote "Bambi".)
John McCain is often represented by his last name ("Mccain: I'll Catch Osama Bin Laden", "Mccain's Way Forward"), but perhaps because it's so common in general use, his first name is uncommon in headlines — I could find only one example, in a rather special context: "George's Advice For Barack & John".
And "Mac" is common as a short form of his last name ("Mac Attacks Dem's Pledge To Meet Mahmoud", "Mac Gives Ny Silent Treatment", "Mac Tattles On O's Secret Trip To Iraq", "Mac To Reveal His 'lesson' Plan", "War hero Mac goes on attack"), along with one instance of "Mcc", which might be a typo: "Mcc Rips O Timetable For 'defeat'", but no headline nicknames based on his first name.
The 53 electoral votes in NY, NJ and CT seem to be pretty securely in Obama's column, so the headline choices of the New York City tabloids aren't going to have much influence on the race. And I haven't been able to find evidence that these headline monickers are being picked up more widely. But if they do spread, my impression is that this will be good news for Senator Obama. "Mac" is a fine nickname, but "Bam" sounds like a winner.
[Note that the capitalization of the quoted headlines is as they were reproduced on the papers' online sites, not as they would have been rendered in print. I've resisted the temptation to correct the resulting oddities, like "Ny".]
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http://mfrost.typepad.com/cute_overload/2008/07/you-lookin-at-m.html Whaddya lookin' at? Huh? You lookin' at me? Well, I'm the only one here, so you gotta be lookin' at something. What, I look funny to you, like I'm a clown, I amuse you? I make you laugh, I'm here to frickin' amuse you? Whaddya lookin' at? Hah? HAAAAAHH?! Yeah, that's right, you better keep walkin', ya goombah.
He's such a good fella, Judy K.
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| cuteoverload |
| 2008-07-24 04:35 |
| The Worlds are COLLIDING |
| Public |
http://mfrost.typepad.com/cute_overload/2008/07/get-out-of-town.html Oh puh-lease. Give me a LARGE McBreak that is so effing sweet. Cute words on a bodacious tatt.
I think 'Kronsche Kronsche Kronsche' would have been more... apropos!
Glurptastic, Sender-Inner Stephanie C. and Pierced Wonderland Mr. RooRaaah Crumbs!
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| languagelog |
| 2008-07-24 08:25 |
| Nick v. Bethel - Voting in Yup'ik |
| Public |
http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=396 The case of Nick vs. Bethel, a lawsuit by Yup'ik Eskimos against the city of Bethel, Alaska, has elicited a good bit of comment recently due to a recent ruling that Yup'ik is not a "historically written language". A not atypical example is this comment on an indigenous language mailing list to which I subscribe:
This ruling seems to express a deep bias of Western culture. That is, written language is taken to be the model product of language/cultural evolution overall. Certainly, one could say that as a ruling it not just discriminates against Yup'ik speakers, but against most all indigenous languages in general as well as against oral-based cultures world wide.
Few people commenting on this ruling seem to be familiar with the details of the case, which it is helpful to understand before forming an opinon.
The gist of the case is well described in this press release by the Native American Rights Fund and American Civil Liberties Union. In short, the plaintiffs, all Yup'ik elders, claim that they have been unable fully to exercise the franchise due to their limited understanding of English and that the State of Alaska via the city of Bethel has made inadequate provision for assisting them. Here are the complaint and the plaintiffs' statement of fact. The suit requests a preliminary injunction forbidding the use of the inadequate forms of assistance hitherto in use.
The defendants moved for partial summary judgment on the question of whether the state is obligated to provide assistance in writing. The ruling that has generated the recent controversy is Judge Burgess' decision on that motion, in which he held that Yup'ik is "historically unwritten" and that therefore the State of Alaska is not obligated to provide written assistance, such as a Yup'ik translation of the ballot. His ruling has no effect on the question of whether oral assistance must be improved.
Why is it relevant whether Yup'ik is "historically unwritten"? This is not a criterion created by the court, but a provision of the Voting Rights Act, the relevant section of which, 42 USC 1973b 4(f)4, reads as follows:
Whenever any State or political subdivision subject to the prohibitions of the second sentence of subsection (a) of this section provides any registration or voting notices, forms, instructions, assistance, or other materials or information relating to the electoral process, including ballots, it shall provide them in the language of the applicable language minority group as well as in the English language: Provided , that where the language of the applicable minority group is oral or unwritten or in the case of Alaskan Natives and American Indians, if the predominate language is historically unwritten, the State or political subdivision is only required to furnish oral instructions, assistance, or other information relating to registration and voting.
The Voting Rights Act requires oral and written assistance for speakers of languages other than English, but requires only oral assistance for Alaskan Natives and American Indians if their language is "historically unwritten". It is this provision of the Voting Rights Act on which the defendants based their motion for partial summary judgment, and this is why the court had to decide the question of whether Yup'ik is "historically unwritten". Given the evidence before the court and the vagueness as to what exactly it means for a language to be "historically unwritten", I do not think that Judge Burgess' decision can be regarded as unfair. It certainly does not reflect any judgement as to the relative value of literacy and orality or of purely oral languages and languages that are both oral and written. Nor does this decision mean that Yup'ik speakers are not entitled to better assistance in voting. All it means is that Alaska is not required by the Voting Rights Act to provide that assistance in writing.
What is curious is why Congress included the word "historically" in the text of the statute. If the purpose of the law is to facilitate informed voting by members of linguistic minorities, it would seem that it would require the use of such measures as are appropriate, which would likely including written materials if the language is presently written. Why the state should be exempted from providing written materials if literacy in the language is recent is unclear. A charitable interpretation would be that Congress did not wish to put the states to the trouble and expense of providing written materials in minority languages where few if any members of that minority would benefit from them and that the inclusion of "historically" was a perhaps less than adequate attempt to restrict the requirement of written materials to languages whose speakers are truly literate in them. Of course, this being politics, I wouldn't rule out a more nefarious purpose, but it isn't at all obvious what that would be.
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![[info]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) epenthesis |
| 2008-07-24 01:52 |
| The Largely Unspoilery Reason I Love Project Runway This Year |
| Public |
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On tonight's episode, the two potentially most disastrous designers (a) hugged, and (b) made really good dresses. That might not seem like much. But remember the last two years? Remember Vincent, who made ugly shit week after week, and who didn't seem to be liked by anyone else? Remember Ricky, so unctuous that my mouth forms a disgusted grimace just thinking of him? Remember how they each got through almost the entire regular season, just barely getting knocked out before Bryant Park? How they actually won a challenge apiece, as Alison and Kit and other likable and very talented people were tossed aside for the slightest of aberrations? It was like an expression of contempt for the audience. That's what you want to see, isn't it? Those repulsive guys who have no business in a design competition? Don't worry; they're not going anywhere. The people who made the very worst hot messes (and who showed signs of being hot messes themselves) last week have now redeemed themselves both as reality-TV characters (by showing a warm and funny side) and as designers. The only remaining designer whose first two dresses were both unambiguously bad is not interesting enough to be dwelt upon by the producers, and will surely be eliminated forthwith if (s)he doesn't step it up. Whatever happens--I like most of these people, and I'm not going to be rooting for any of them to fail. This is (thus far) what I wanted Project Runway to be, and what it has not been since the second season.
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busy
chipper
