...then I introduce you to the latest and greatest on livejournal: hallstabo. Yes, it's the Swedish roommate, or rather the one who isn't the roommate, anymore. I'm so glad to have a way to keep track of him. I don't know how prolific he'll be on livejournal, but I look forward to his juicy stories from Southern California ( Read more... )

Last week, I received from my niece what is probably the sweetest email.subject: just saying hi
body:Dear blobert, How are you doing? I'm doing fine.
It's one thing to be remembered by friends and relatives. It's another thing to be remembered by my young niece. Every once in a while, this old bachelor gets a taste of that paternal imperative, where I'd do ( Read more... )

So I whined about a chest cold/cough a little while ago, and dismissed it as nothing. Well, I think I offended it, because it came back fighting. I think that my roommate worried that either I was dead or I'd moved out, because I was in my room, quiet, no lights for a few days. Feeling much better now. Since my recovery coincided with a weekend, I ( Read more... )

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I'm feeling much better today. I think I was just being a wuss about my cough. I did grow up asthmatic, so I tend to baby a cough before it gets worse, because back in the day, worse was a trip to the emergency room.

I have nothing else to say today, so I've prepared a video montage. I call it ( Anything you can do, gays can do better! )

I feel like I miss out on most of the good boycotts because I'm such a limited consumer. In respect to most markets, I really don't consume. I live well below the poverty line. I've actually had a couple years when I had to seriously consider whether or not I should file my taxes because my income was small enough that I didn't LEGALLY have to file ( Read more... )

I apologize for back-to-back, linguistic posts. But while the last one was boring, this one's interesting.

On the Laguage Log, Bill Poser discuss an interesting way English movies are affecting language change in Turkish. Now you might expect the usual borrowing, which is when language A adopts a word from language B directly into language A. An ( Read more... )

A part of my graduate coursework has been on computational linguistics. Loosely defined, this can cover information extraction, language translation, speech recognition, language generation, etc. Pretty much anything that involves a computer. One research method is to look for n-grams. ( A quick explanation of n-grams )

Rather than ask my friend to entertain me on my birthday, I told many that their present to me would be to attend a Rewind the 80s music party with me later, on Saturday. I'd been to one of the DJ's 80s parties before, and he played good music. Well, last Saturday proved that his previous party had been exceptional in all meanings of the word. The ( Read more... )

I'm secretly worried whenever I take these quizzes that I'll perform subpar. As much as modern linguistics argues (I would say correctly) that knowledge of and adherence to "grammar codes/rules" are inaccurate measurements of one's linguistic competence, my insecurities whisper to me that I can't scoff at these grammar rules unless I can perfectly ( Read more... )