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At long last we are returned from our two-week journey to the Far East (of Canada) and back. I am planning on collapsing out of utter exhaustion very shortly, leaving piles of presents and garbage strewn all about. But I felt I should mark today as the first time Arthur got to make a D&D character, which he'd been asking us to do for months now, but most vigorously over the past few weeks while we'd been away, and we promised him that once we got back to Windsor in January he could play. Well, we hadn't been back for three hours before he was ready to go, making his first character, Roy, who is, essentially, Roy from Order of the Stick, except that he looks like an older version of Arthur, apparently. The setting, such as it is, will be Julia's Aveyrone Empire and it looks like I'm the GM for the two of them. After making the character (with help of course) he insisted on playing a 'demo', for which he pulled out one of the dungeon tiles that  balthcat gave us and insisted that I run it for them. A hobgoblin was defeated and there was much rejoicing. Arthur hasn't quite figured out that he doesn't just get to say what is going to happen next, but seemed to have a good time and insisted on telling the enemy, just as he was dying, that he'd be back in the real game, since this was just a demo.
So I present to you: ( Roy!Collapse ) Tags: arthur, geekery, rpg
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Arthur has taken an interest in chemistry lately - well, not *actual* chemistry, but he has discovered that when you put elements together, you get molecules, and so he spends a lot of time asking me things like, "What happens when you put six titaniums with one hydrogen?" and so on. So this evening we were at the pool, and so of course he asked about chlorine, and happened to ask: A: What happens when you put one chlorine with one hydrogen? S: Oooh, then you can get hydrochloric acid! A: Did you say ACID? S: Yup! And if you stuck your hand in it, it would burn and burn! We might even have to amputate! A: You mean like Terry Fox? S: Yes, but Terry Fox didn't dip his leg in hydrochloric acid. He got cancer. A: It was very sad. Tags: arthur
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I'm looking at the official description of the boundary of my provincial riding (electoral district) just now, where I learn that it is "that part of the City of Windsor lying westerly and southerly of a line described as follows: commencing at the intersection of the international boundary between Canada and the United States of America with the northwesterly production of Langlois Avenue; thence southeasterly along said production and Langlois Avenue to Tecumseh Road East; thence easterly along said road to Pillette Road; thence southeasterly along Pillette Road and its intermittent productions to the southerly limit of said city."
I was curious about the use of the noun production and in particular the phrase intermittent productions. I wasn't familiar with this usage, so I presumed it must be some sort of legalese. When I Googled "intermittent productions" it seems to be the name of a film production company which drowns out a handful of results that lead to descriptions of Canadian electoral districts, including mine. You see it more clearly on the Image Search where five of the first-page results are electoral district maps. So what's going on?
The OED helps a little; it tells me that one of the senses of production is "6. Extension or lengthening in space or time" and one of the quotations seems relevant:
1984 Victoria Govt Gaz. 8 Aug. 2831/1 All that land bounded by the southern alignment of Arden Street, the western alignment of Laurens Street, the production of the southern alignment of Miller Street and a line 6 metres east of the Coburg railway line. So from this, along with some basic knowledge of my city, I figured out that a production is what you get when you project a street along a straight line beyond its actual extent (in this case, into the Detroit River). This makes sense of 'the northwesterly production of Langlois Avenue', since that's exactly where the electoral boundary meets the international boundary (in the middle of the river right along the line followed by Langlois). And this, then, is the explanation for 'intermittent productions', because Pillette Road is not a single road (any longer) but is divided up into several segments separated by rail lines, a freeway, an airport, etc. The electoral boundary thus follows Pilette's various segments, and where there is no street, follows the intermittent productions that result from extending the street along an imaginary line. Mystery solved. Tags: language
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Arthur was in fine form today. First, at dinner, he asked us about the word 'centurally'. I asked him, "Do you mean centrally?" to which he replied, "No, like Thirtieth Century Fox. You know ... daily, weekly, monthly, yearly ... centurally." Later during dinner, the following conversation ensued: Julia: "That's weak sauce." Arthur: "No, it's awesome sauce." Julia: "That's lame sauce." Arthur: "No, it's fame sauce." Steve: "No, it's blame sauce." Arthur: "Will-you-stop-saying-the-word-sauce sauce?" So he developed a game where you had to end every sentence with the word 'sauce' or else you were out. Then, on the way home from swimming lessons, he commented that there were a lot of signs for our local NDP candidate (which there are), and mentioned how there were some signs with his picture and others with just his name. I told him that when we go to vote, the ballots will only have the candidates' names and parties, like, for instance, Helmi Charif, New Democratic Party. To which he replied thoughtfully, "What happened to the old party?" I said, "What party?" and he said, "You know, the Old D.P. The ODP and the NDP." Good question, little dude. So being a good dad, I gave him a brief history of the CCF. Tags: arthur
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Last night, Arthur and I were reading a poem about Charlie the chattering chipmunk that his teacher sent home. I asked him, "Can you think of any other words that start with the 'ch' sound?" to which he replied with a twinkle in his eye, "Charisma!" Then, this morning, he came into our bedroom and instructed us, without any introduction, "Get me to Wikipedia and find the history of Windows loading screens." I found him a site, and then crawled back into bed. Fifteen minutes later he came in and announced, "Actually, I found a better site." Which he had, and proceeded to look at for the next half hour. Tags: arthur, geekery
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In general, I am not now a joiner of causes. It's not that I don't have social and political opinions - you better know that I do - but I generally find most organizations to be so ridiculously managed or so full of annoying people that I find myself expressing strong opinions about how they are run, and then taking on positions of leadership, because (as you will know if you know me) I am one of those "if it has to be done right, I'll have to do it myself" sort of people, coupled with the fact that I am constitutionally incapable of keeping my mouth shut. Which is, among so many other things, one of the great things about curtana in that I actually trust her to do things right, which is why, though we may certainly disagree, we work very well together organizing things. In high school, I packed my days full of extracurricularity; I think the year I was in four bands, bridge club, science club, Reach for the Top, Venturers, and ... something else that I'm forgetting, was probably the worst it got, but in none of these cases was I forced to join anything by parents or teachers or anyone else. I just ... did. And in most of these groups, I took on lots of responsibility, because that was the thing to do. And certainly my parents were models for this; both of them had very active social lives when it came to serving in various organizations. But basically, over the past 20 years (as it is now coming up on my 20 year HS reunion ... sigh), I haven't joined much of anything. I was on the executive of my undergrad anthropology club for a year ... I remember nothing else about that group other than that I was on the executive, not even what position I held. I served on various committees as a grad student, but that was more in the line of professional training. The one major exception was the McGill Gamers' Guild where I was a member pretty much the whole time we were in Montreal, even though it, like all the other institutions and organizations I've been involved in, was full of incompetence and ridiculous drama (sorry, all you old Guild people ... but you know I'm right!) and was perpetually in need of someone to kick everyone else in the pants. But there, because I was barred from serving as an executive, cruelly, because I was a grad student, I got to be the eminence grise or the First Lady of the Guild by virtue of curtana's steady leadership. But basically the only reason I was in the Guild was that that was where all my friends were. Since that time ... nothing new. So the upshot is that in general, I don't join nearly as many things as I believe in, and don't fill my days with volunteering, serving on boards of things, etc. I do end up serving on a lot of committees at work, which has some of the same characteristics as joining a group (I do seem to speak up a lot, surprise surprise), but I do get paid for this, after all, and even then, the most rewarding service I do is as the graduate director, which rarely involves me negotiating a large group of people, a handful at most. Last week I joined both the federal and provincial NDP. I've never been a member of a specific political party, but it's the only obvious one that fits, although my disagreements with certain planks of NDP policy is, I suppose, a matter of record if one should choose to go wading into my older posts. I suppose the impetus for doing so was our trip to Toronto for Jack Layton's funeral, although it was something I'd thought about before. Partly it's because as an international commuter I've got to keep ties to my home and native land and have been feeling more disengaged from our politics since we moved to Windsor. Partly it's that Canadian social democrats are so damned polite that they often forget to mention the fact in public, so they remain invisible. I don't know what I'll do with or about my new memberships - I mean, I will be 'card-carrying' as soon as they get around to sending me a card, but who cares about a damn card anyway? The things that keep me interested in politics - civil liberties, electoral reform, education, and economic justice - all desperately need attention. So I suppose I'll have to see what needs to be done right. Tags: politics
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So, I am now on sabbatical! Technically I believe my sabbatical started on August 15 which was the first day of the academic year, but in terms of its impact, it started this Wednesday when classes started and I sat around most of the day, except for the part where I took Arthur to meet his Grade 1 teacher. So that's all right. It's actually a very weird experience, so far, because I think I'm the sort of person who just isn't constitutionally suited to being told, "Go forth and ... well, actually it doesn't matter what you do, just don't come to campus." I enjoy hanging around the office, talking to students, heck, I even like the committee work for the most part. This is, well, this is kind of like grad school, with no firm deadlines and no formal obligation to do anything except a vague injunction to read and write. Oh, except I get paid a heck of a lot more and know exactly what I'll be returning to in January. So there's that.
My chair has been saying to me, "What are you doing here? Shouldn't you be on sabbatical?" since about the first of August, even though I was in the middle of my fieldwork then and thus had to be on campus, and she knew this perfectly well. And since then, she has been reinforcing to me how a sabbatical should be a time to relax, how I should spend time with Arthur, take it easy, etc. When I told this to my friend Dr. Virgo, she actually got a bit miffed, insofar as our chair has never, ever told her to relax or take it easy. My instinct is that at least part of this is that my chair is worried that I'm about to burn out, which, uh, no. I may have all sorts of problems but burning out is not one of them. It's far more likely that I'd just blow through these four months without doing anything productive than that I'd somehow overstress myself during my sabbatical and thus come back improperly ... relaxed, or whatever.
The thing is, I have three HUGE datasets to work with over the next four months: my stop signs, for which I've almost convinced myself that I don't need to collect any more data (4000 stop signs, giant photo database, GIS stuff, etc.), and for which I have a whole lot of stuff written in various fragments; my Math Corps ethnography (hundreds of hours of recordings and a four-inch-high stack of field notes to turn into some articles or maybe a short book); and a new project on the sociolinguistics of English numerals for which I have several hundred PDFs of texts from the past 200 years to analyze. Not all of these are going to be completed by January! To top that off, I have editorial duties on the seemingly neverending memorial volume for my supervisor, another article which has been hanging around for far too long and just needs to get out to a journal, any journal, and a conference paper in November. Oh, and yes, I almost forgot, I have plans to read around two books per week throughout the next four months.
Ahhh ... well, I guess I have a few things to do, and I just have to figure out how to do them. I think part of the key for me will be to shower and shave by 7:30 am and to drive Arthur to school every day, which is probably what I'd be doing anyway (Julia leaves for work earlier than Arthur needs to get to school, and gets home later than he could be picked up at the afterschool program), but actually being at home, dressed and with coffee in hand by 8:30 am will be a good motivator for doing a lot of work. The risk, as always, is that I will fritter my time away on such things as playing Civilization V, drawing maps or making hundreds of NPCs for a future RPG campaign, making long-overdue revisions to the Phrontistery, or mucking about on my smartphone. Over the past two weeks I've been doing a bunch of transcription and a bunch of new writing on my Math Corps project, though, so things are looking up. Tags: academia
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An astute Phrontistery reader inquires: I was wondering if you could help me with a word issue. I was just reading some stuff on the Internet today and came across pleonasm. Later on in the article, they used the term "pleonastic". A look up one m-w.com confirmed that this was a correctly derived form of the word "pleonasm". Seconds before reading this word, though, I wrote down (notes for my own enjoyment) the term *"pleonasmic". What is going on here that makes my word not a word? Is this a rule of English that I have neglected to learn, or is this just a quirky irregularity of this splendid/abysmal language?
The phenomenon you're observing results from the tension between Greek principles for forming adjectives and English ones. In English, -ic is productive (i.e. you can use it as a suffix on new words and are unlikely to cause any eyebrows to rise). In contrast, -astic is not productive, which is why you coined 'pleonasmic', which sounds lovely to me. However, all English words ending in -asm derive from Greek, and the vast majority of them form adjectives using '-astic', which is the anglicized version of the Greek suffix -astikos: spasm --> spastic iconoclasm --> iconoclastic sarcasm --> sarcastic enthusiasm --> enthusiastic phantasm --> fantastic pleonasm --> pleonastic In fact, plastic also follows this model, although plasm is far less common than plasma, and is mostly used in the phrase germ plasm. But there is one common word where the -asm / -astic pattern does not hold true, and where -asm becomes -asmic: orgasm --> orgasmic. Partly this may be because while Greek orgasmos is attested in ancient texts, orgastikos (the expected form) is not. Partly it may be that orgasm came into English via the intermediary of French rather than one of the classical languages. And partly it may be that orgasm is used in different, uh, contexts. There is actually an archaic form orgastic, but it has long since fallen out of use: you can see its rise and fall here, and see that in fact orgastic was more common than orgasmic in English until about 1965. Make of that what you will. However, some of those hits for orgastic may be misspelled or improperly scanned orgiastic. Surprisingly, orgy/orgiastic and orgasm/orgasmic, although both are Greek-derived, are basically unrelated to one another; orgasmos derives ultimately from Proto-Indo-European *wrog- 'to burgeon, to swell', while orgy derives from Greek orgia, 'secret rites in honour of Bacchus', and ultimately from Proto-Indo-European *werg- 'to work' and is closer to ergonomic, organ, or urge, etymologically, than it is to orgasm. Or so says the OED. Two other -asm words that normally take an -asmic rather than an -astic adjectival form are protoplasm and ectoplasm, but these are really quite rare and both, like orgasm, have archaic -astic variants. Also, there are several -astic words like drastic and elastic that, while of Greek derivation, have no -asm nominal form either in Greek or in English (e.g. * elasm, * drasm). Finally, chasm has no common adjectival form, although a couple of centuries ago you might find chasmic or chasmatical or chasmal. Thanks very much for your interesting question! I greatly enjoyed looking up semi-naughty words in the dictionary (who doesn't?), in the cause of research. Tags: language
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