lasciare = to leave (someone or something)
I can never bring myself to write the word poseur because its reassuringly proletarian meaning is totally undermined by its pretentious French spelling. It'd be like calling someone a fuckeure, or a skanque.
This is something that I have secretly wondered how to do for a long time: calculating the probability that a given event will happen at least once if you try to make it happen a bunch of times. Thanks to Google, today I can.
Probability of x = 1 - (probability of x NOT happening ^ number of times you're trying it)
For example: probability of getting tails at least once (1/2) if you toss the coin three times:
1 - (1/2)^3 = .875 = 88%
probability of rolling at least one 12 with two dice (1/36) if you roll the dice 10 times:
1 - (35/36)^10 = .2455 = 25%
So a while ago my old musical theatre professor gave me, by way of increasing my musical theatre literacy, a bunch of DVDs containing a truly enormous collection of musicals. Added to my computer they something like tripled the already-not-insubstantial amount of music on my computer, which is nice, but and also means that when I listen to my iPod on shuffle I listen to nothing but musicals. Often, weird-ass musicals that neither I nor anyone else in the car has ever heard of. Sometimes, bad musicals. Every once in a while, musicals that closed on Broadway on their opening night in the early fifties, that someone really ought to have thought twice before cutting a cast recording of. But yesterday I was in the car and my iPod happened to select a little ditty that I had to endure twice because it was too good not to transcribe:
Don't leave me
Don't go away
Please don't leave me
Say that you'll stay
Now, given the versatile theme of that first line, there are an awful lot of possible continuations, but I have to say that of all the thousands of possible quatrains using that first line and fitting that particular meter, I would venture that this is the single most obvious possible lyric. That's impressive.
In a fit of retro goodness, I just finished Mansfield Park. I started to write a spoily review, but thought better of that because this book is too good to have a freaking blog ruin the whole plot for you. But I will volunteer that I sympathized with the ostensibly disagreeably forward Mary Crawford as much as I did the actual protagonist, because every time I was supposed to find Mary Crawford offensive I instead found her hilarious, e.g. when she opines that it would be a mistake for masters to force their servants to go to chapel twice a day every Sunday, since the sermons are generally boring and no one really pays attention anyway unless the parson* is attractive. This is I guess doubly impertinent because since she's unwittingly talking to someone who's planning to take orders, which admittedly is a little rude, but doesn't really justify the convulsions of embarrassment that the protagonist goes through on her behalf in the next paragraph. On the other hand it was nice to read about someone whose response to awkwardness is even more visceral than mine.
* N.B. parson, as distinguished from minister, pastor, priest, rector, chaplain, reverend, preacher, vicar and curate. Don't even get me started on the six different words for carriage, whose intricacies are detailed in the appendix.
All right, I need to finish packing. Until next week. Or, in the immortal words of the second stanza of "Don't Leave Me":
Believe me
You know it's true
You need me
And I need you.
This is something that I have secretly wondered how to do for a long time: calculating the probability that a given event will happen at least once if you try to make it happen a bunch of times. Thanks to Google, today I can.
Probability of x = 1 - (probability of x NOT happening ^ number of times you're trying it)
For example: probability of getting tails at least once (1/2) if you toss the coin three times:
1 - (1/2)^3 = .875 = 88%
probability of rolling at least one 12 with two dice (1/36) if you roll the dice 10 times:
1 - (35/36)^10 = .2455 = 25%
So a while ago my old musical theatre professor gave me, by way of increasing my musical theatre literacy, a bunch of DVDs containing a truly enormous collection of musicals. Added to my computer they something like tripled the already-not-insubstantial amount of music on my computer, which is nice, but and also means that when I listen to my iPod on shuffle I listen to nothing but musicals. Often, weird-ass musicals that neither I nor anyone else in the car has ever heard of. Sometimes, bad musicals. Every once in a while, musicals that closed on Broadway on their opening night in the early fifties, that someone really ought to have thought twice before cutting a cast recording of. But yesterday I was in the car and my iPod happened to select a little ditty that I had to endure twice because it was too good not to transcribe:
Don't leave me
Don't go away
Please don't leave me
Say that you'll stay
Now, given the versatile theme of that first line, there are an awful lot of possible continuations, but I have to say that of all the thousands of possible quatrains using that first line and fitting that particular meter, I would venture that this is the single most obvious possible lyric. That's impressive.
In a fit of retro goodness, I just finished Mansfield Park. I started to write a spoily review, but thought better of that because this book is too good to have a freaking blog ruin the whole plot for you. But I will volunteer that I sympathized with the ostensibly disagreeably forward Mary Crawford as much as I did the actual protagonist, because every time I was supposed to find Mary Crawford offensive I instead found her hilarious, e.g. when she opines that it would be a mistake for masters to force their servants to go to chapel twice a day every Sunday, since the sermons are generally boring and no one really pays attention anyway unless the parson* is attractive. This is I guess doubly impertinent because since she's unwittingly talking to someone who's planning to take orders, which admittedly is a little rude, but doesn't really justify the convulsions of embarrassment that the protagonist goes through on her behalf in the next paragraph. On the other hand it was nice to read about someone whose response to awkwardness is even more visceral than mine.
* N.B. parson, as distinguished from minister, pastor, priest, rector, chaplain, reverend, preacher, vicar and curate. Don't even get me started on the six different words for carriage, whose intricacies are detailed in the appendix.
All right, I need to finish packing. Until next week. Or, in the immortal words of the second stanza of "Don't Leave Me":
Believe me
You know it's true
You need me
And I need you.