LK heading to the Mainland

I'm off to Chicago, representing the East-West Center in the book exhibits at the International Studies Association conference. Should be an adventure. It only (!) takes about 12 hours of travel to get there from Honolulu (stop in L.A.). I'll be there for a week, and the first couple of mornings I will be even able to go outside during daylight hours -- most days I'm in the exhibit hall 9AM-6PM. I plan to have bagels every morning for breakfast, hot dogs from carts for lunch, and to look for good Mexican places for dinner. The planned highlight of the trip: I have my ticket for 'Wait Wait...Don't Tell Me' for Thursday night!

Yes, I'll take loads of pictures.
Yes, I'm packing long underwear/gloves/hats/mukluks/etc.

Perhaps B will post while I am gone to keep you all entertained. (Although he is preparing an article on a deadline and likely can't be bothered with such frivolites...)

Thinking in pictures

High-functioning autistic-savant, Daniel Tammet, author of memoir Born on a Blue Day, describing what the world of numbers looks like:

Every number to me is beautiful. Every number has its own shape, its own color, its own texture. Thirty-seven, to give an example, is a lumpy number, lumpy like oatmeal. Eighty-nine is soft and flowing, like snow. A number like one-one-one would be very bright and shining. When I look at a very long series of numbers, like pi, for example ... for a number of that size, what I'm doing is I'm pulling all the colors and shapes and textures I see in the individual numbers together and the result is a visual landsacpe -- a number-scape in my mind's eye. It's full of color, texture; it's beautiful. It's like a second country -- a country of the mind.

From an interview on To the Best of Our Knowledge (PRI and Wisconsin Public Radio).

Tammet is also quite gifted with languages. I wonder if language is visual for him as well.

Yes, it's not true

As is the case with so many stories that are forwarded via email, the Neiman Marcus $250 cookie recipe is not true. Snopes.com traces the history of this trope back to a 1948 cookbook with a recipe for "$25 Fudge Cake." It was reincarnated in the 60s as the Waldorf Astoria $350 Red Velvet Cake recipe and later as the $250 Mrs. Fields cookie recipe in the 70s and 80s. In the 90s, this morphed again, with the bad guy this time being Neiman Marcus. In response, Niemen Marcus now posts a chocolate chip cookie recipe, developed for the very purpose of putting it on their website.

The recipe contained in the slanderous email is quite good -- a co-worker brought some in recently, referring to the story. But I find myself wondering where this recipe came from. It's either some home cook's own great recipe, for which they are not getting credit, or it's a published recipe that the original author of the email deliberately used without citing the true source. This story, therefore, is actually less about corporate greed and the revenge of the little guy -- as it is intended -- and more about the importance of responsibly citing your sources.

The Neiman Marcus's own recipe, by the way, is also quite tasty. I made some this afternoon.

It's a perfectly cromulent word.

From BBC Radio Five Live Film Reviews, about Blood Diamond
(These two actually discuss etymology quite frequently.)

Mark Kermode: It's issue-tainment.
Simon Mayo: That's not a word!
MK: Well...I'm using it in an ironic sense.
SM: Yes, but you're using it!

Out and about

We were out and about this weekend. Seeing and being seen. Phew. That's a lot of pressure.


We met the usual crowd at a place called Ward's Rafters for music, food, and wine. And fantastic people watching. The Rafters is actually the converted attic of Jackie Ward's home in Kaimuki (that's a nearby neighborhood). She opens her home up to the public, usually once a week on Sunday afternoons for jazz. You bring your wine and snacks and contribute to the "musicians kitty." The band we went and saw Friday night, Cerro Negro, was what I termed jam-band meets the Gypsy Kings, and while it wasn't ground-breaking, it was great fun. One of our friends who dances flamenco and Sevillanas got up to dance (she's Japanese, not Spanish) and there was also a belly dancer in full costume who danced one song (we don't know the belly dancer, but we've all decided we should learn how). It was a really eclectic bunch of people and the place was absolutely packed. But it also reminded me how small our community really is here -- lots of familiar faces.

Oh, and yes, that wine bottle is wearing a little dress. I have no idea what that was about.

Language Log on superbowl ads

I'm quite fond of Language Log, although the contributors are so prolific I don't even attempt to keep up with it on a daily basis. It is consistently very good, and, as I generally lean toward an anti-perscriptive stance on grammar (not one english majors or copyeditors are generally expected to take), I usually like their perspective on the use of language. I couldn't resist linking to Mark Liberman's post on superbowl ads when I saw this line in the post intro:

Frankly, I think it's obvious to any objective observer with access to an internet connection that the emergent theme of this year's superbowl ads was linguistics.

Clearly! While Lynne Truss may have a sense of humor, it's the linguists, not the grammarians, who have the real fun.


And on a related note, one of the ads Liberman cites, "Check Out Girl," is one of the two winners in the Doritos Crash-the-Superbowl Contest. Leann Emmert, producer of this commercial, is a CU grad ('95) who majored in international affairs.

See how irrelevant a student's choice of undergrad major can be?