Victorious -> Victory
Harmonious -> Harmony

Serious -> Sery?

I was looking up taupe earlier today, since I couldn't recall exactly what sort of shade it was, and was amused to find that pedantically, it's the color of a French mole. Not too far off from puce, which is pedantically the color of an over-fed flea.

This got me off on a side-track when I started to think about how to phrase this. I mean, English has a slew of words for someone who is in need of food (EG: starving, hungry, famished), but very few words are coming to mind for the over-fed side of the spectrum that aren't compound words, nor can they be easily applied to something else.

Sure, starving, hungry, and famished can also be applied to knowledge instead of food, but I'm rather sure it's comparing it to the food-origin. Mirriam Webster lists these antonyms for "hungry":

Antonyms: full, satisfied
Near Antonyms: engorged, glutted, gorged, overfed, overfull, replete, sated, satiated, stuffed, surfeited

Now, most of those seem to work, but can be applied to other things. Sated/Satiated? Can't that also just mean appeased? Stuffed could be in the taxidermy sense. Full could mean "not partial". Engorged could mean swollen. Replete can just mean well-stocked (I think?) Overfed and Overfull are just compound words and not, eh.. whatever something that isn't a compound word (like how hungry, famished, and starving aren't compound words).

Glutted seems about the only one that's a stand-alone word for "well-fed".

Have I mentioned Borders' online used media-store? Today at work, I was listening to a Dire Straits tape of mine and it finally gave up the ghost. Annoyingly, if the tape was the type that was held together by little screws (instead of being glued together), I could've fixed it -- you know the little springy metal bridge, and the bit of felt that keeps the tape flush against the tape-head? The bit of felt came off of the springy metal bridge. If I could open it up easily, it's no problem just gluing the felt back on. I've done it many times before. With the tape's case being a glued-shut version, though, I'd have to pry it open with a nail file and a flathead screwdriver or a knife or something, and hope that it decided to break along the glue-band instead of across the actual case.

Anyway! Through the good graces of Borders Used Marketplace, getting it on CD is no big whoop.

Brothers in Arms $2.09
Subtotal $2.09
Shipping & Handling 2.99
Total $5.08

Ayep. $2 pre-shipping, $5 post-shipping, for a CD that (based on the dozen or so CDs I've ordered through this setup) is all but brand spanking new. The "worst" quality of CD I've gotten through them so far had a fingerprint on it, and that was it. And since they're offering used stuff, one can get things that Amazon.com says, "Sorry, not made anymore" (like say.. David Byrne's "Feelings" or Michael Penn's "Resigned")

On another note, someone recently had mentioned Un Chien Andalou, to which someone else replied with a summary of, "it's about cutting someone's eyeball open and then a girl gets raped or something."

...

Yeah, I didn't feel like trying to explain how it's a surrealist film, so it isn't really about anything in a manner of speaking, since it wasn't my comment thread. Still, it got me to wondering just what does define surrealism, since I've never actually sat down and taken any Art Theory courses. As far as I can tell, it works out a bit like this.

Dada is, as I'll point out at the drop of a hat, not so much an art movement/style as a meta-movement/style. Folks were getting sick of other folks saying that X isn't art or Y isn't art, so they started to whip up things that seemed to meet whatever criteria other folks wanted to have define art, but in the stupidest way possible. If folks say, "Well, art requires taking somethings and combining them", they'd glue fur to a teacup and say, "There! Does that work as art?" The gist of Dada is like the thwomp upside the head to induce a satori -- neither the thwomp nor the Dada art is really important, but more the train of thought that it might bring about, and the letting go of expectations.

Surrealism isn't Dada, though. Surrealism seems to be, as far as I can tell, more about what the work can imply than what the work is. Y'ever look through Amphigorey, or some other Gorey book that has 'The West Wing' in it? The West Wing is (REALLY COOL!) a good example of surrealism, as far as I can tell, even if Mssr. Gorey didn't intend for it to be so. It's basically lots of still-life scenes in an unoccupied house. With one, it's generally normal room, save for the large body-shaped stain on one wall. Another is a scene where you can see one end of a thin-legged table, with a massive boulder on top of it. What's cool isn't so much what's being shown as being in the present in the rooms, but instead what may have lead up to it, and what might come of it. The point of surrealism (again, as far as I can currently deduce) is to present some unimportant things to the audience, so they can think about the un-presented things that relate to what has been presented. If I'm right, one could say a radio play is, in a way, surreal, since it's trying to make you think about what's going on in the scenes by just presenting the sounds.

Mind, when I started to poke around other art styles to try to get a gist of what surrealism isn't, I also decided that expressionism is "The scene, with more". One could say many comic strips are expressionistic, since they have idea-bulbs over folks' heads, motion lines, et cetera. And impressionism is a representation of not the scene, but what one might remember the scene as being (with all the faults and foibles that come with memory).

A picture of mine made it into the "Blog" of "Unnecessary" Quotation Marks (sic)!

If you look to the left of the sign, you can see my hand in my pocket. If you look between the two upper-case 'S's, you can see my dark tie on my light shirt.

PS: 134 over 92? 92?! That's just seriously weird. Mind, by the general UK blood-pressure standard, between 110-140 over 70-90 is perfectly fine (the US goes with a straight 120/80 as fine), and a little wiggle room is perfectly understandable (I've been known to wake up with 70-ish over something), but still...that's just bizarrely over-inflated for my usual rate. Bring on the leeches.

PPS: For those of you reading this via the RSS feed to FaceBook, I don't enter any of the pre-set "Moods" for my LiveJournal posts. Instead, I've been just listing my blood-pressure and heart-rate since mid-August, since I have an auto-sphygmomanometer right at hand.

The other day, on my way to work, I was thinking about female Greek/Roman (I actually think it's just one of those) Mythological names and the suffixes thereof. Why? No clue. If it's worth the going it's worth the ride.

Obviously, most end in -a. But then when I was thinking of various names from the Odyssey and the Iliad and all, I noticed that Eris doesn't have that. For a moment I wondered if it was due to her nature -- if there was a God of Discord, might he be named Sue? But then Artemis came to mind and blew that out of the water.

But! Then Paris came to mind, and he's a he! So is it that Paris has a rather swishy name, or do Eris and Artemis have rather 'butch' names, or is "-is" a gender non-specific suffix?

So before going to work today, I decided to do a little checking on the rumored effects of elf-shot (see, there's this new fae character over on Windy City MUX who's toting around a longbow, so I got to thinking about what could be done with that).

In the general Wiki article about elves, I found two rather keen things.

1) The term 'stroke', in regards to a little bit in your brain going *pop*? Came from saying the person was felled by an elf-stroke. It seemed the most logical, back in the day, to presume that a person lost control of half their body and died due to an invisible elf whacking them with a blow.

2) For those who've read the Dead Witch Walking Hollows books, does this sound familiar to Jenks pixing folks?

The elves are typically pictured as fair-haired, white-clad, and (like most creatures in the Scandinavian folklore) nasty when offended. In the stories, they often play the role of disease-spirits. The most common, though also most harmless case was various irritating skin rashes, which were called älvablåst (elven blow)

Y'ever run into the rare instance of discovering that what you thought was a word actually wasn't?

About the only times I've run into it before has been the occasional 'snuck' vs 'sneaked' thing, as well as phrases ("mute point", "all intensive purposes", "when all is sad and done", etc..), but I recently stumbled upon one that really surprised me. I was writing up a thing about a particular statistic showing how well one can, eh.. "take" damage. When I was dictating to myself pre-typing, I said that it was how much damage one could withstain, but I wasn't sure if I was spelling that correctly. So I tried "withstane" on a whim. When that failed, I tried http://M-W.com and found that it wasn't a word at all! "Withstand" is the actual word (sort of, since I imagined it as something withstaining damage, hopefully withstanding it), but I've no clue where I got "withstain" from.

---

In other surprising news, I'd been going on for a few years now about the idea of Google having an image search, such that it renders a given image down into some simple form, then trawls the web for other images that match that simplified image. Google's yet to get around to doing that, but TinEye has started doing it! Woo hoo!

Example: I like skulls. You like skulls. (I want your skulls. I need your skulls...sorry. I had a little Danzig moment, there). Here's a nice little picture of some skulls. Gosh, I wonder where that picture is from, other than someone's PhotoBucket account? Why, with the magic of www.TinEye.com, we can discover that Ben Johnson apparently took that picture while he was at the Czech Kostnice Ossuary!

While on the subject of internet searching, there was a fellow named John Charpentier who was in the greater Bangor area (Bangor, Orrington, Bucksport, etc..) in 2006. Apparently he backed up into someone else's car (while drunk with a 20-something young lady), embezzled from a church, and held up the Mt. Hope Variety Store with a claw hammer, all in a couple of months back then.

I really couldn't care less about Mr. Charpentier, quite frankly, but instead my point is to track down his sister. She came into town from Boston back when he was pre-trial for the hammer bit and I ran into her at Christopher's. It was a slow night, so it was just the bartender, myself, and herself there and talking. She seemed nice and I only just now found the letter I'd never gotten around to sending to the Bangor Jail while Mr. Charpentier was being held.

Surprisingly, although I can find reports of these three charges, I'm not finding any internet records of if he was actually convicted of anything.

Ok, so I finally broke down and added to the Lost Wiki (that would be the Wiki about Lost, not the Wiki that has gone missing); I just couldn't keep quiet about how Cerebus is like Rover (it's the last one on the bullet list as of this writing). Trouble is, I'm not too happy about my use of "juxtaposition".

The idea I'm trying to express is that the two are similar due to how different they are, or more to the point, similar in the details of the difference. If you take the two central aspects of their appearance (IE: structure and color), one went with the exact opposite of the other. "Contrast" doesn't quite swing it since that doesn't imply that the reversal is akin to an homage, and "Juxtaposition" doesn't seem to really swing it, either. And I'd prefer to not make up fruity terms like "counter-reference" or "diametrically balanced". The sort of thing that could be used to cover how Gulliver among the Lilliputians is, versus Gulliver among the Brobdingnagians is, you know? Or the sort of story where Character A has a particular relationship towards Character B at the start, but by the end, the roles are reversed so B is now that way towards A.

I'm at a loss for a simple, yet accurate, word/term to cover that palindromatic dichotomy.

I'm about two thirds of the way through the second season of Lost and I've already established an absurd theory (as I've decided to support by fabricating faux-evidence):



( Random Lost Bits - from the start to episode 2:16 (The Whole Truth) )

In other news, someone suggested that, for some reason, I set up an Amazon Wishlist. I thought, "Eh, how bad could it be? I mean, there's probably just two or three things I'd put on there.". I really didn't expect it to get four pages long before too long.

In other other news, some folks (like allegedly), might be interested in such LJ Feeds as glossographia1 and languagelog.

In other other other news, I presume y'all have heard the pending hypothesis about dream colors? Some of you may have run into the oddness of hearing and reading that folks dream in black and white, and yet you clearly recall having a dream that featured some color. Now, in the past, I'd always guessed it must have been a matter of the dream actually being in black and white but there being a "dream memory" of a particular shade of gray being a certain color. Seems a current theory is that if you grew up with black and white movies and television, you dream in black and white. If you grew up with color movies and television, you dream in color. It's just that the research into it initially took place with subjects who grew up on B&W.

Now what I'm wondering about is what happens with folks raised without television or movies? And what about the whole "you can't read text in your dreams" thing that folks have claimed for years, yet I (and others, like yamiko) have clearly experienced evidence to the contrary.

Oh, and in other⁴ news, it's really quite handy to live in a state where you don't have to provide a reason to request an absentee voting ballot. It's much nicer being able to sit down and research the topics at your leisure, instead of trying to work out the double negatives in the ballot phraseology.

Person A: Thank you!
Person B: You're welcome!

Just what is Person A welcome to do? Thank Person B again? Ask Person B again for the task that Person A is thankful for?

It came to mind yesterday when I went to the post office to send out a package and was attended by the deaf desk-clerk. He ended the transaction with a gesture that looked like it had to do with talking, but then I remembered scant seconds later that it was actually the sign for "Thank you". Alas, it was a few seconds later, and I couldn't recall the sign for "You're welcome" at all (although I looked it up at home. Do a Boy Scout three-finger salute, then drop it down to your chest with your palm turning up. Sort of a "With the letter W, from my mind, I offer my heart" type of gesture), so I turned while heading out the door, flashed a smile, and gave him a thumbs-up.

Upon reflection, I think the conversation ended with "Thank you!", "Bottle!" in ASL.

Mind, that also got me to wondering about the whole Thanks/Welcome transaction when dealing with service-providing folks. One time, when getting blood drawn, I thanked the nurse and she pointed out her amusement at how often folks would thank her. "Why are they thanking me?", she asked rhetorically, "I just jabbed a needle in their arm! They'd have to be pretty strange to enjoy that!" My equally amused reply was, "Maybe they're thanking you for not making it worse?" Still, let's think of that post-office bit; I just came in and demanded a service from them, so shouldn't I be the one thanking them instead of the other way around?

I'm sure I shan't force the issue when dealing with the deaf postal desk-clerk though. If I reply with, "No, I thank you" (EG: head-shake a pretend hand-puppet + point at me for emphasis + that kiss-blowing thank-you thing + point at him for emphasis), he might accidentally think I actually know my way around ASL. I can at least fake a "I don't really speak [insert language here]" disclaimer in a number of Euro languages, but I'm quite sure I couldn't pull it off in ASL.

Actually, what would the signs for "I don't really speak ASL" be, moominmolly?

So in kicking around FaceBook, I noticed that my second-hand pal Favor Ellis studied ( Transformative Language Arts ) at Goddard. Can't say I've heard of it as an idea with a name before, but it certainly seems keen!

PS: I would've just linked to something instead of doing this odd LJ-Cut-as-Hypertext thing, but the Wiki entry that I've quoted here apparently has been deleted. Thank you Google Cache.

For those English Majors out there:

Taking a book down off of the shelf, Bob starts to flip through the pages, "Ok, where was that quote?"

What form of English is this? Obviously, it's some variation on present tense and it's third-person, but what variation of present tense tends to rely on "Bob verbs" and "Bob is verbing"?

Again, for the usual suspects (mgrasso, quizzicalsphinx, allegedly, etc..), The Compendium of Lost Words.

And for those who want an RSS feed for everything from nanotech to hovercrafts, Doctor Who talk to Barbarella talk? Io9 RSS LJ-Feed

As reported by yamiko, Merriam-Webster announced their Word of the Year.

W00t.

I'm not saying that to show elation at the word, but instead that is the word of the year...the interjection (to show excitement or emotion; They're generally set apart from a sentence by an exclamation point, or by a comma when the feeling's not as strong) "w00t". Somehow, "w00t" beat out "quixotic".

PS: Here's some keen stuff about whale songs.

PPS: Edited for accuracy (thank you, harmless_drudge!), since it's the 1337 form with a zero in place of each "o". The font that The Boston Channel used made it hard to tell "0" from "o".

1) So in watching Stormhawks last night/morning before going to bed, the plot of this episode involved them having to get a rare and elusive concentrate that is produced in the guts of dragon -- serpegris. Yes, like ambergris, but dragons instead of whales. This struck me as cute enough that I started to come up with other -gris terms (why should ambergris and verdigris have all the fun, no?) and realized that if someone needed a term for 'the concentrated blood vampires have in them, which they can ick out to make new vampires' and they didn't want White Wolf on their tail for intellectual property and all? Sangregris seems like a really nice term for it!

2) For some reason, at work last night, I was thinking about the Biblical "If thine eye offends thee, pluck it out and cast it away" quote. Why, I've no clue. Still! It dawned on me that maybe, just maybe, the whole eye-plucking thing really is supposed to be that nasty and drastic sounding. Perhaps the idea is that since obviously you're not going to be plucking your eye out at the drop of a hat, perhaps one should take an equal amount of time to consider what is truly offensive or not. IE: It's a sort've Solomon baby-test affair about being quick to judge what should be deemed universally offensive.

Alas, I looked up the rest of the quote once I got home. No luck. Basically, it runs, "If your eye offends you, tear it out and throw it away...because it's better to be pure and one-eyed than sullied and not maimed". Ah well.

3) Talking about being sullied, the idea of a Wizard of Oz based porno came to mind the other day while watching Tin Man. I'm still not sure about the pacing, though.

So blindseeking and I were talking and the idea of a Steampunk Victorian Gothic Horror RPG came to mind.

Pardon me as I wipe the drool off of the keyboard.

In other news, moominmolly, harmless_drudge and allegedly might take particular note of this.

So on a random whim, I got to wondering about Mandarin vs Cantonese while at work. A little poking around seems to indicate that if one were to learn conversational "Chinese", one would probably want to go with Mandarin if one were planning to visit China, while Cantonese would be preferred if one were to visit their local Chinatown (...or the area around Hong Kong...)

But what they don't say is "why". Is it a matter of Cantonese previously being the standard, but recently falling out of vogue (thus explaining why the folks still in China would be speaking "Chinese 2.0" Mandarin, but those who ditched the homeland would be speaking "Chinese 1.0" Cantonese)? Did the Brits decide (while running Hong Kong) that Cantonese was better, thus pressuring emigrants to use Cantonese abroad? Is Cantonese the language of the lower class (thus the folks who couldn't make it in China and hit the New World to make their fortune brought Cantonese with them)? Is Cantonese the language of the upper class (thus the folks who could afford to easily globetrot brought Cantonese with them)?

As ganked from mimisoliel: Origin of Everyday Punctuation Symbols

Although I have to wonder about their summation of the dollar sign, since I've generally seen the progression as being like this..



..originally being a combination of U+S overlapping, then the bottom curve of the U was dropped, and then the two remaining || lines were simplified to the more modern single line. Yes, we ganked the system from the Spanish (which is why we call 1/8th of a dollar as a "bit", based on the fact that you could break up "Pieces of Eight" into eight little pie-slice bits), but the oldest dollar symbol I've seen was one with the U+S instead of a P+S.

Of course, there's a slew of Wiki theories. Note though that the primary basis listed actually has two theories presented (and that they don't have much listed to disprove my notion, other than Ayn Rand also liking it).

In other news: Isn't/Wasn't there some legend somewhere concerning zombies eating spices? I want to say it was that you're not supposed to let them get ahold of spices, but I can't recall if it was because it riled them up (basically, it woke them up from their trance so they realize what their situation is) or if it was for some other reason.

So I was talking to myself about weeds (there might be a photo-example of these in a few days) and something came to mind. You know how when historical Scottish folks yell out, "Gardy Loo!" before they dump their used washwater into the street, and how that's a corrupted version of the French "Guarde l'eau" (or however it's spelled), which means (more or less), "Look out! It's water!!"?

Ok. Alley oop. Not the caveman, but the thing folks say when someone is hoisting someone (or something) up? Is that not blatantly French in origin? Allez...something? Any Francophones want to take a crack at this one?

Without looking anything up (I'll save that until I get home), I can clearly tell that "allez" would be a word of passage. All it takes is a slight vowel shift and you get the English "alley" (as in alleyway), much like what it takes to get from an Old World "salon" to a New World "saloon".

So there's a question posed over here with an example by me:

"I was recently trying to see if there was a technical term for the "in-dream invented backstory memories" (EG: In a dream you pick up a book from a shelf and wind up its central spring, like you do with books, you know? -- Obviously, books aren't clockwork. But in the dream it seemed perfectly normal as if books just were always clockwork. What I was and am wondering about is what the term is for those in-dream memories that preserve continuity within the dream)"

-- youngwilliam

It's a good question. I have no idea.

..so? Anyone out there in TV Land have any bright ideas? It seems like the sort've thing that you'd guess someone had coined a term for (oneiromemoria..whoosits?), but my passing Googly-research is just turning up examples and terms for when someone suffers a trauma and has "false memories" implanted by their subconscious for what went on -- which is similar, save that these aren't due to trauma.

PS: Also involving leora, this is just awfully keen!

PPS: And in asking a someone I know who is an editor for one of the leading dictionaries out there, she had this to say:

The word I keep coming back to is "cryptomnesia," which the Med Dictionary defines as "the appearance in consciousness of memory images which are not recognized as such but which appear as original creations." That's pretty close. I think it was coined by Myers (of the Myers-Briggs Personality Test), and it refers to subliminal or hidden memories that are not apparent to the supraliminal consciousness.

But...you could come up with something that's based on "cryptomnesia" and "automnesia" ("memory of earlier experience without any apparent associative condition"), since what you're describing has to do with continuity. I guess that would be "autocryptomnesia"? No, sorry,
"cryptautomnesia"--secret suddenly revising memories.

But if you want to go with the Greek "dream-memory," then yep, it's "oneiromnesia."

Psst! colubra!

According to this Wiki bit and the Andalusi person at the bottom of this thread, it's looking like your "The Duke, his ships" thing might be off.

At least, I think it was Colubra that I got that story from.

Yesterday, I noticed this wine at work. I'm just -really- liking that sundial! Not sure about the Latin, though. Left side is something about time and life, right side has something about shadows, bottom has something about praise and the name of God?


EDIT TO ADD:
“Vita fugit, Sicut umbra”
“The life flees like the shade”
“Laudabile nomen domini”
“It is necessary to rent the name of the Lord”
“Sit nomen domini Jesu benedictum in secula”
“That the name of the Jesus Lord is blessed during centuries”

http://michel.lalos.free.fr/cadrans_solaires/queyras/img_cadrans/abries_03_08_10_cs1.jpg

http://michel.lalos.free.fr/cadrans_solaires/queyras/cs_abries.html

..featuring more slick French monastic sundials than you've ever seen in one place!

PS: I blame karjack, quizzicalsphinx, mgrasso, and elaina for the fact that I am, at this moment, listening to "Crane Wife", "Picare.. Picard.. Picarwhoosit" and "The Tain" on random shuffle at work.

And yet another dumb question! Utterly different topic, though.

( Read more... )

I tried seeing if I could ferret up an answer elsewhere, but I suspect folks either don't know or are a bit worried about my vague request. I'll give y'all the preamble that involves two things I like to wax both geeky and pedantic about: Religion and Role-Playing Games.

( New from TSR: 'Crosses and Crusades' )

So elsewhere, I happened upon this trivial little odd thing where one would plug the letters of your name in and get a 'reading' about yourself. The key letter (whose result is the basis of this query) is 'U', but I've included some others so one can get a feel for what sort've things they're aiming for..


S- People think you are so sexy, especially your bf/gf
T- You have an attitude, a big one.
U- You usally r hella tight.
V- You are not judgemental.
W- You are very broad minded.

..ok, I can get "hella" (IE: overtly/very), but "tight"? I can think of a few ways tight can be used in slang (way back there it'd mean miserly, or it can be a variation of "cool" used by Kerouac and Mingus, or meaning "drunk" used by George Thorogood and the Deleware Destroyers, etc..), but I'm unsure just which is applying here.

And on an unrelated note..."dissing"? Is that term still in vogue (meaning to disrespect someone, otherwise known as "harshing on" someone), or has a newer form of the same notion come about?

In other news: I'd say that either the folks at the local Borders are taking their sweet time reviewing my job application (that's one heck of a background check!), or they lied about getting back to me. After eight years of waiting, I'm starting to suspect something is up (that'd be me, the crafty one).