stevengharms.com

Greeting any new Leaguers while The League is away

I am a huge “This American Life” fan. Last year, for my birthday, The Leagues’ bought me an iTunes gift card which I promptly spent on TAL episodes. I got into it when I first moved to CA. Not knowing many people, having those stories there late on Saturday night became part of a ritual that helped me transition to living there.

My absolute favorite episode is #74 “Conventions”. The first segment ( or, “act”, according to show host Ira Glass ) introduces John Connors, a man from the midwest who goes to New York City for a weekend to celebrate “Dark Shadows”.

“Dark Shadows” is the Gothic–themed soap opera that showed on ABC in the late– 60’s: it’s pacing is nothing short than glacial, the production value is iffy, and the egregious use of the Theremin might be against the Geneva Conventions.

At the end of the convention, Conners feels “Dark Shadows”–fatigue and seems to be experiencing slight embarrassment while relating a story about a woman who, in the convention hall, before a panel of DS cast, bellowed:

“‘Dark Shadows’ Rules!”

Conners seems to have felt the shame that only a true fan of something cultish can experience. You’re shamed by the action of the other fan, but you’re also a bit shamed because the zeal of that fandom exists in you, although maybe not in dictum–bellowing grandiosity.

In the end, Glass gives Conners a chance to say on the radio “‘Dark Shadows’ rules”. Laughing, with a hint of shame, and very quietly, he says it.

I think this explains the way we all feel about our guilty pleasures that we obsess about.

“Danielle Steel rules!” or “WWE rules” or back in 18^th England: “roman’s rule!”

I have felt this way about my love of Rush for many years. There’s a huge fan-base for the Canadian power-trio but most of our lives we live in the closet, but upon finding one another, there’s the immediate understanding.

How can you explain the voice of Geddy Lee from 1974-1981? How can you explain that dressing in robes was a good idea?

How can you explain the talent that barely makes it possible for Neal Peart to even be classified as a human? How can you explain lyrics about

science,

a black hole,

Ayn Rand’s Anthem re-cast as a rock opera,

the unbelievable bass breakdown to the slapback-effects laden “Free Will”, the poetic allegory of “The Trees”, or the master’s essay in Moog known as the record Signals? Much less to a pretty girl?

In the utterance of “Rush Rules” to end them all, enters the pean by one Stephen Colbert:

Recently I discovered that fellow Leaguer and former resident of the Hall of Justice itself, Nicole, has an aptitude for sythesizer. How totally awesome would it be if sweet, petite, gently sweet-Texlahoma-lilt-voiced Nicole were to get up behind an ersatz wood–paneled Moog and rock the socks out of the synthesizer-solo of “Tom Sawyer”? Equally acceptable would be the synth denouement out of “YYZ ( that’s Why-Why-Zed for the uninitiated )”

Although, playing that synth solo may be the synth crowd’s version of walking into Guitar Center and playing “Stairway”.

Rush fandom is a weird thing, but it’s oddly virulent. Even my Sublime-n-Sunshine SoCal girlfriend, of late, under the sway of the Teutonic Thunder drumming of Neal Peart has confessed that she has the sneaky suspicion that what I’ve known for many years may be true:

<h1>Rush Rules</h1>

We went to a Balboa / Bal-swing class workshop all day today.

I woke up around 7:30 to do GRE study until 11:30 when we left.

From 12-3 we were dancing and thus about 3:30 when I got home I promptly took a nap…for 2 hours. It was awesome.

I finished watching Season 1, Disc 1 of “Mad Men” which I consider to be one of the most interesting and best–acted dramas on TV at this moment. It’s a fascinating glimpse into the weird parallel universe that ’50’s life appears to have been.

The beautiful intro to “Mad Men”

Afterwards Lauren and I headed over to Serrano’s Arboretum and had some chips and salsa with drinks. I have acquired a taste for Michelada’s of late and Serrano’s makes a fine one. Lauren had a fruit-a-rita of some sort.

Afterwards we returned home and watched “The Road to Perdition” which was good in so many technical regards, it was surprising that it was such an uninspiring and predictable movie.

I’m hoping to catch Hellboy II tomorrow…maybe if I study real hard in the morning I can make that happen.

Here are choices from “Pre-20th Century Period Pieces from the 1970s”

Based on your interest in:

I, Claudius
The Adams Chronicles
1776

Geez, talk about a niche of a niche of a niche that I fall into. Scary, this data mining.

When I started¹ college I was monolingual ( if you don’t count public-school Spanish ). By graduation I was exceedingly comfortable with Dutch and French². These studies, along the way, showed me the wider possibilities of the expression in my native tongue and, as such, I feel as though I lost the sense of the original linguistic constraints of my class, culture, and region. In some ways, it made it harder for me to speak my native tongue.

Allow me to explain.

You see, the first language I really mastered was a Germanic one that maintains some legacy structures which are permissible in modern English, but which are either anachronistic, or, at the very least, unusual, to the modern ear. I’m not sure how second ( and third, or fourth ) language acquisition remaps synaptic paths, but things that didn’t pass my “acceptable English” filter before Dutch did pass after.

A simple starting example:

English:

I think that the apple is red

Dutch:

Ik denk dat de appel rood is.

In Dutch, and other Germanic languages, after a relative pronoun ( “that / dat” ) one has the permission to stack all the verbs at the end of the clause³. Thus, a literal English translation would be:

English:

I think that the apple red is

Now here’s the thing, this utterance is not wrong, rather it’s merely quirky, odd, but legitimately comprehensible⁴.

Now to a more complex example. One idea that became legitimate for me post–1998 was that both “to be” and “to have” were legitimate auxiliary verbs for making the past-perfect.

That is, in traditional English I would say:

I have come to Amsterdam to view Golden-Age paintings.

But in Dutch the helping word is from a form of “to be” (“zijn”) not “to have” (“hebben”) and thus is the translation of “I am” or “ben”, not “heb”. Thus:

Ik ben naar Amsterdam gekomen om Gouden-eeuwse schilderijn te zien.

That is:

I am come to Amsterdam in order to see Golden-Age paintings.

Having been interested in the history of the Manhattan Project since 4^th grade, I certainly knew J. Robert Oppenheimer’s alleged translation of the Bhagavad-Gita:

Behold, I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds

Or, having a traditional Christian upbringing:

Joy to the world the lord is come.

“Ah-hah”, thought I, “it appears that somewhere the use of ‘to have’ overtook ‘to be’ as the auxiliary term for verbs.” Dutch, which shares an approximate common ancestor with English around the time of Chaucer, seems to have preserved something we English-speakers have removed.

But in 1999-2000 I also studied French, and the past perfect ( or passé composé ) also uses a form of “to have” (être) or “to be” (avior) to indicate something that happened, and completed ( i.e. perfected ) in the past.

I came to Paris to visit Shakespeare’s bookstore.

French:

Je suis venu à Paris pour visiter la librarie «Shakespeare’s».

Literal English:

I am come to Paris to visit the bookstore, Shakespeare’s.

Hm, so here we are with French, the other influential parent in English’s family tree, asserting that forms of “to be” are legitimate helping verbs.

Now, what can we note among the French and Dutch verbs that use “to be” as the helping verb?

French: To fall, to come, to go, to leave, to return…

Dutch: To be, to become, to burst, to be startled…

Answer: These words seem to have a tendency to be intransitive; that is, they cannot take a direct object. Surely there are exceptions, but this seemed like a good hunch to base my research on.

Via Grammar Girl⁵ I found this citation by The Mavens.

This legitimate, but now archaic usage is known as: the “resultative form.”

As stated at The Mavens:

An Historical Syntax of the English Language says that the change from the type “he is arrived” to “he has arrived” may have been partly due to the identical pronunciation of is and has, reflected in the contracted spelling ‘s, found even in Shakespeare’s time: “I’m glad he’s come” (The Taming of the Shrew).⁶

Learning these languages, and most definitely Latin which influenced scholarly writing in both linguistic communities, has made me love the subjunctive and given me the tendency to pepper my expression with seeming anachronisms, but it’s really just that my English syntax filter was made a bit more malleable than is usual.

Knowing where English can be bent to allow these subtle and fine archaic constructs occasionally makes my expression a bit sharper to the ear and, given that these constructs are so heavily used in the legal and religious communities, can quickly whip the ear of a listener to attention without the listener even knowing it⁷.

I feel that learning the languages of others gave me new tools for understanding the mental constructs that frame the realities of those speakers. Experiencing this is an epiphany of the liberal arts education and is as fundamentally mind-blowing as a hallucinogen.⁸

Footnotes

1: 1995

2: My mastery of both Dutch and French have suffered from disuse and Latin muddling their compartments.

3: There are some variations for prepositional phrases, but let’s keep the matter simple.

4. Yoda’s syntax, for example, should illustrate the point. Further discussed in another Grammar Girl episode.

5. Fogarty. unaccusative-verbs. 2006. Grammar Girl. http://grammar.quickanddirtytips.com/unaccusative-verbs.aspx (accessed July 1, 2008).

6. Carol. be+intransitive. 2001. The Maven’s Word of the Day. http://www.randomhouse.com/wotd/index.pperl?date=20010912 (accessed July 1, 2008).

7. Shades of Snow Crash

8. I believe this may be, in part, what’s working in Joyce’s “Ulysses”—he’s trying to blow your mind with words, not mescaline.

“Beautiful British Columbia”, that’s what it says, right there, on every license plate in the city. To match a boast like that, you had better back it up, to wit:

Texas: We make sure everyone’s textbooks teach nonsense, or
Texas: More food involving puddles of cheese than Switzerland, or
Texas: Still debating merits of annexation

But BC delivers, it is simply like someone thought of the best parts of natural vistas, cut them out of magzines, pasted them together, and in some sort of Anthony Michael Hall bit of hilarity, made the dream reality.

In this vista Lauren and I had a bit of a vacation and we fêted the marriage of my former room-mate and the subsequent birth of his daughter.

Pictures coming soon, but for now the funk of flying west to east all day long must be slept off.

I’ve been pretty good lately about not over-engaging in web reading: you know, the sort that launches three windows each with 15 tabs.

But today Lauren said she wanted to go look at a few things and that my attendance was not required.

As such, I overdosed on Hillary campaign post mortes, browsed web sites to exhaustion and, slowly but surely, closed tabs and browser windows that I have had open for weeks.

I finally watched that DrScheme IDE demonstration, I took a nap, I broke a glass of iced tea, I read more stuff. I backed up my hard drive and ate some peanuts.

But now I am bored of this inter-net and want her to come home so we can do fun things, together.

Update:

We went to Chuy’s, sat outside, and are now going to play some Boggle. w00t.

Today I took my Latin II final which represents a substantial weight off of my shoulders. It’s weird not to have the nagging sense that somewhere, somehow, i should really be reciting conjugational or declensional paradigms.

My efficient professor offered to grade it there on the spot and I walked out knowing that I got 97 points on it. Not too shabby. That locked me an “A” in the class.

I celebrated with a pho meal and trip to Target with my beautiful girlfriend.

Brian Blessed, scenery not being chewed

Last night instead of cramming, we watched the 1976 mini-series “I, Claudius” — it was at least in the Latin vein. Major cool part: Vultan from “Flash Gordon”, Brian Blessed, playing a (to my mind, rather portly) Augustus. Primus inter pares needs to be primus intering the gym.

I say, upholding the customs of the elders is paramount!

Tonight I hope to relax a bit and head to bed early.

Or maybe enjoying a tender family moment with Ming:

“with a mighty flash” indeed…

I’ve been pretty quiet of late because I’ve been trying to get ready for this year’s review season at work and because I have a very sick application ( as in, it is on a server with an indeterminate and short lifespan ) that I’m trying to clone on new hardware with an interface facelift and move to a new standard of Perl.

Additionally, I have my Latin II final tomorrow.

Probably won’t be much action here until I get the finals behind me and some writing done.

Several weeks ago I was visiting “Ironic Sans” and noticed David, the proprietor had written this comment about a kerning error:

I thought it was a hilarious observation and went so far to buy the t-shirt.

And thus was my relation with keming. Then, the other day, while on a call with some service operator or another I was, in the custom of such operators, over-politely subjected to my surname being repeatedly mangled as I was called “Mr. Hams”.

It then struck me, that it was not the general deplorable state of American education, it might have been the typeface that was to blame, for you see, the poor operator may have been the victim of a tiny serifed font turning my familial name from a descendant of Hermann into a titan of hog rumps. In short, I believe my last name may have been kemed.

That is:

Harms

versus:

Harms

During SXSW my house-guest, wired up on too much of the highest points of the Web 2.0 society and jet-lag, graciously headed over to Wal-Mart to buy some basics as his luggage had gotten misplaced by American Airlines; one’s pickings are slim, mind you, at 3 in the morning.

Part of the booty that was left behind by said guest was an exemplar of the all in one coffee-making cup. Being a daring sort, I drank it upon his departure.

The first element to note is that this thing is heavy: comaprable to a Slim Fast can in density. You might be needing a trip to the ER were this thing to fall an your foot.

Speaking of slim fast, the preserved coffee herein tastes reminiscent of the “low fat shake” icon.

The real magic ( or science ) of the device is that by puncturing some liquid bladder on the bottom ( I can feel your desire growing here ) you begin an exothermic chemical reaction that warms your slim-fast coffee right up. I admit it, I drank it, and it was about as good as the stuff in my office break-room.

But what really struck me is that the thing was still tarsal-damagingly heavy after consumption of the liquid payload. I have checked out their site which re-assures me that our reaction only produces natural bi-products [sic].

I just hope everyone drinking these is putting them in the recycling bins.

I found a dissection of a out-of-date can can as well.