Nocturne

 It's New Years, but I'll spare you the "Good riddance, 2020" takes. (Which tend to come from people who need to take a long look in the mirror, but we'll glide over that.)

A friend who shall remain nameless has a nocturnal complaint. He'll get up in the middle of the night to use the bathroom, as we all do. Then he can't get back to sleep. 

The thing is, he can tell me the exact time he was awake from. And I tell him that's his mistake, taking notice of the time. When I have to get up and then go back to bed, I at no time take a look at the digital clock by my bed. I get back in bed and face the other way. It's called peace of mind.

Ha ha...ha?

 UnHerd has become a daily reading habit of mine, and I generally respect its content and the people creating it. So at first I didn't know what to make of this column. It might be best to regard it as a joke. Not one that I get, necessarily, and maybe the author doesn't either. But a joke nonetheless.

The part about Biden's nomination being "more accident than design" is certainly hilarious, if you remember how he came up 4th or 5th place in both Iowa and New Hampshire, occasioning a full establishment panic to get him over the top in SC.

Tongues

 I've had this alternate history in my mind for a while. Don't know if I'll ever do anything with it except to amuse and torment myself. Basically it reverses the historical place of the Romans and the Thracians, so that the former are a once formidable but now forgotten band that once roamed Italy, while the latter ruled most of the known world from east of Greece. I won't go into all the differences, which are quite capable of shifting in my head anyway. But here are some key ones.

• Southeastern Europe, and a little bit of Asia Minor, is considered the height of Western Civilization. So that's where the prestige is, at least through the Middle Ages and early Renaissance.
• But the countries of Western Europe still become global powers during the exploration and colonization of the Americas. This is because they're right on the Atlantic so don't have to cross other people's territories for access.
• Odrysos did settle these places, but it wasn't the same kind of unifying force that far west as Rome was in our timeline. So the equivalents of, say, France, Spain, and Britain are more disparate. Thus, so is their influence in the Western Hemisphere.
• Otherwise things are just different, sometimes in unpredictable ways.

Anyway, thinking along these lines has made me also think about the relations between language, culture, and nationhood. There's an adage, attributed to linguist Max Weinreich, that "A language is a dialect with an army and navy."

This is pithy and witty, but not quite accurate. The United States, Mexico, and Brazil all speak languages that originated in countries that they could wipe out militarily. Catalan and Occitan are among the languages that don't have their own nations, although they might wish otherwise. India is a stew of thousands of languages, with the middle classes retaining English to smooth things over. And of course China is a whole can of worms.

It's more that a dialect is a language that hasn't started thinking of itself as a separate language. The US, again, is a prime example. The various strains of American English differ from British dialects on a number of matters. "Separated by a common language" and all that. But despite being separate from the British Commonwealth for about 2.5 centuries, Americans still think of themselves as an English-speaking people, and thus remain so. The same is true in a number of former colonies, including some that have also managed to preserve their native languages.

The same is true of old literary language. Shakespeare's English being called "modern" for example. It takes nothing away from his accomplishments to say that he remains "modern" in large part due to the efforts of good teachers, actors, directors, etc. Because they approach his words as revealing psychological dialog instead of pretty-sounding metered gibberish.

12

 Today was, of course, Christmas. Now I'd say I had things to be thankful for. At the same time, it was a hemmed-in day. It rained hard as long as the sun was up. Everything was closed because it was Christmas, and much of the world is shut down in general now. So going anywhere wasn't much of an option.

This will be different tomorrow. Boxing Day. A time to start over.

Vince on the keys

 

Vince Guaraldi's music from A Charlie Brown Christmas and other things was a comforting element of my childhood and has stayed with me. I think there are a lot of us of whom that could be truthfully said. 

This piece isn't Christmas-related. It's not from one of the Peanuts specials either. It does seem to scratch that itch, though.

Fruit of the vine

 Grapes tend to become less flavorful during the late fall and winter. Likely a result of their having to travel further in inclement weather. I'd be very surprised if it were just grapes, so everyone could probably point to some other foodstuff being slightly off.

So it's notable that today I found some firm grapes that were sweet and tart in just the right measure. Maybe it's a good omen.

Hand me my nose ring, show me the mosh pit

 Don't know if you've heard of the movie Green Room. It came out about five years ago. Could be called a horror movie or a thriller. More than a little claustrophobic.

Here's the basic premise. An impoverished hardcore band are on tour in their van. They drive to a college town in Oregon for a college gig, only to find out that it's been cancelled and all they're getting is a minuscule kill fee. The college radio man who was promoting them feels remorse and sets them up with an alternate gig. It's in a secluded spot, a hangout for the "boots and braces" crowd, i.e. White Power skinheads. They make the interesting choice to start their gig with a cover of the Dead Kennedys' "Nazi Punks Fuck Off," but that's not where their problems start. Rather, things get hairy for them when they witness the aftermath of a murder and get confined to the titular room, with a growing understanding that the skinheads don't intend to let them walk away.

I don't want to get too far into this issue, but the prevalence of violent white supremacists has been exaggerated by the media in recent years, leading to greater polarization and some questionable decisions in general.

So it's interesting to note, and perhaps to its credit, that politics and race aren't really the driving force of the drama in Green Room. In theory the antagonists may hate any number of ethnic minorities. Their leader Darcy―played by Patrick Stewart with a world-weary gravitas and a truly bizarre accent―makes a couple of offhand racist references. But primarily he's a gangster, and his followers are violently loyal hoodlums. The Ain't Rights, as the band are known, are white themselves. Bassist Sam makes mention of guitarist and lead character Sam being Jewish, but this could be a joke. In any event he shows no outward sign of being anything other than generically Caucasian. And despite their tweaking the crowd with their song selection, they don't want to get into a political beef, just get enough money to buy gas to get home. It's just that they're in the wrong place at the wrong time.

All of which is to say that Green Room is less topical and more timeless than you may have heard. It's also pretty damn violent, so be advised.

Mucha nieve

 The first noticeable snowfall of the year was the day before Halloween. You could probably call what we got today the first big snowfall, though. Not enough to cripple the city (more than it already is), but enough to make you walk in the gutter instead of on the sidewalk for a few stretches. Also enough so that I took a ride over to Riverside to do some very light grocery shopping, because the one closer is at the end of a walk that...wouldn't have been pleasant in this weather.

Gotta say it was a good day

 I went to the library today to pick up a couple of things. One of them is an inter-library loan that would have gone back to its home branch if I hadn't gone to pick it up today. I'd intended to go Saturday, but as it turned out I was unavailable due to something that could laughingly be referred to as "work." But anyway, I caught it in time.

Also I took note of a couple of reopenings today. Some businesses and other orgs closed down for late November and the first two weeks of December as part of something called the "Rhode Island Pause." Basically a "let's pretend we're accomplishing something" C19 policy. So those particular places are springing back to life at least. 

A quick one (not necessarily while he's away)

 As I say, this one won't take you long.

I'm not sure where the music comes from. I'm reasonably positive it's not actual surf music from the sixties. Does bear some of that influence.

Not too complex. Basically I like this stop-motion film because it's fun. A girl and her surfboard and some fishes. What could be better?

Further pigeon discussion

 This video host is quite the perky one, I have to say. While people adopting and taking birds into their own homes may not be a great idea in general, there seem to have been exigent circumstances in this case.

One other thing about pigeons, which I can infer from a number of recent finds on YouTube, is that they're popular in the Mideast. Not just for racing and messaging, but as pets in themselves. Curious how that came about.

Night visions

 

Stop helping

 The writing assistance company Grammarly advertises a lot, and I guess they've gotten pretty successful. As a result, it appears that Microsoft Word is trying to imitate their services. That means a lot of "helpful" advice in the form of a crinkly blue line that underlines your words whenever you write something that strikes the algorithm as ungainly or wordy.

The thing is, yes, I agree that it's better in general to be economical in your word choices. But having every stray modifier flagged while you're in the process of writing is distracting. Sometimes you have to figure out what you want to say first before you start the process of trying to say it better.

So I've pretty much turned off grammar check and am happy for it. Not spell check, though. That's a necessity.

Day of cold drizzle

 I got a ride today from one of my former neighbors. She just happened to be in the neighborhood, doing some errands (for other people) and saw me out in the rain. So yes, she did a nice thing.

It was kind of rainy at the time, something that started yesterday afternoon and would continue until after sundown today. Although eventually the temperature would drop so low that we'd be getting sleet, then snow. For which reason I made my grocery shopping trip later on in East Providence instead of the place closer by, but at the base of a hill with lots of potholes and puddles.

Snow doesn't seem to have stuck. Pretty sure we'll have ice tomorrow, though.

All is vanity

 This story, which isn't short but isn't ridiculously long either, is depressing in a lot of ways but fascinating in the detail that author Jonathan Kay goes into. The upshot of it all is that the striking students at the quite exclusive Haverford College got some nice perks for themselves. The school administration debased themselves, but at least turned the protests into a PR victory of a sort. The family, friends, and neighborhood of the man in the incident that started everything―a man whom the system failed before the fatal 9-1-1- call was ever made―don't have their lives improved in any meaningful way at all. They might not know this protest that quickly became about nothing but itself ever happened, and maybe that's for the best. 

Also on the "depressing" side of the equation are the excerpts from the demands made by students toward the administration, which could be described as sounding "righteous" or "incendiary" but for the most part say nothing at all. But as a wise man once said: 

As I have tried to show, modern writing at its worst does not consist in picking out words for the sake of their meaning and inventing images in order to make the meaning clearer. It consists in gumming together long strips of words which have already been set in order by someone else, and making the results presentable by sheer humbug. The attraction of this way of writing is that it is easy.

That essay has never left me, and it never ceases to be relevant.

The hard-hitting content you come here for

 Passed a bakery cafe today. Since a lot of places have been bribed and/or threatened into closing their doors for the next couple of weeks, I thought I'd have a look-in. Wasn't sure what if anything to get until I saw they had fudge brownies. Brownies, that is, with fudge frosting on top. Not necessarily something I'd indulge in every day, but destiny had brought us together.

No walnuts, which is fine. Walnuts always strike me as the most generic nut. They've got an interesting look―kind of like a flattened brain―but not a great deal of flavor.