At this rate, I might have a first draft in time to read to my grandchildren.

Assuming there's anything to this "technology" stuff people have been on about lately, clicking on the links below will enable you to virtually attend the concert your correpondent gave at the Berkeley Jazzschool yesterday. "Scrapple from the Apple" is my favorite. (On a couple of these you will hear an additional tenor saxophonist who is not me; ( Read more... )

UCB Ling Dept has graciously offered me admission to their PhD program, which I have graciously accepted. The plan worked. Bye bye anthropophagy, hello linguipsticks.

I made the update bracket of a Language Log post.

I was rereading one of my favorite action sequences in fantasy, the mantichore battle in E. R. Eddison’s The Worm Ouroboros, and was struck by some of the technical devices in it. Here’s the passage:( long! )

Customer: Hi, I'm looking for Lacan.
Storekeeper: Sorry - Kubla Khan?
Customer: No, Jacques Lacan.

There once was an amateur dervish
Whom spinning made terribly nervish.
  He said, “When I whirl,
  I feel ready to hurl,
But the others all seem quite impervish.”

The characters wouldn't stop talking, so it weighs in at 11,400 words - much longer than I expected, even after I snipped off part of the last scene to start the next chapter with - but as of ten minutes ago, Chapter One of the nameless novel is now complete.

Yippee!

And now onward...

A new LJ friendomine says,

I would so, so, so love to find "Erev Ba." It was one of the loveliest Israeli folk melodies I've ever heard, and there are a lot of them.

I must be the least folklore-savvy Israeli on the planet, but you lot know your own heritage, don't you, dammit? Has anyone heard of it?

Should your humble correspondent, who is still not sure what an Anthropologist is but is increasingly certain he does not intend to be one, (1) throw in the colors, (2) strike his uncle, or (3) cry, "Towel!"?