Category: lists

this list goes up to 11

action_125x125.jpgToday has been declared Blog Action Day, an event in which bloggers around the world can participate in writing about a common cause on a common day. This is the inaugural year of the event, and the cause that has been chosen is to tackle issues relating to the environment. I feel strongly about the environment. It must be stopped! Down with the environment!

No, wait. I’m all for the environment. I was confused. I must have been thinking about uncomfortable shoes. Can’t stand ’em. Or overcooked pasta. Yick. That just shouldn’t even be legal.

Where was I? Oh, right. The environment. I should write about how we, as a society, can make progress in protecting the environment. But I’m afraid I don’t have time for that. I have a work deadline looming, and I shouldn’t be blogging at all. So I must be quick, quick. Like a bunny. In a threatened ecosystem. So I give you a list.

Here is list of things that I should be able to manage to improve my own impact on the environment, improve my knowledge of the issues, and to help generally support environmental causes. What’s more, I will set myself a timeline to accomplish these things. I plan to do these things by the end of the year. There are 11 full weeks of 2007 left, so 11 seemed like a good number to aim for.

11 planet-friendly resolutions for (the rest of) 2007

  1. cancel 10 catalogs or other junk mail items
  2. explore additional local food options, such as for dairy and eggs
  3. block drafts in windows in doors to reduce heat loss
  4. give holiday gifts that minimize shipping and packaging
  5. watch Al Gore’s documentary “An Inconvenient Truth” (I’m sorry to say I haven’t yet seen it)
  6. write at least one letter (or email) to a company or politician about some action
  7. Change our electricity options to include use of renewable resources
  8. Give support to an environmental action group (whether with money or by way of petitions)
  9. line-dry 1 load of laundry a week
  10. reduce my usage of disposable products (I may try keeping a cloth handkerchief in my pocket instead of a tissue. At least if I leave it in my pocket when I wash my pants, it won’t dissolve and decorate the rest of the load.)
  11. Cook my pasta al dente. This will both fight the evils overcooked pasta and reduce the time I have my stove on. (Okay, you caught me. I ran out of time, and don’t have a good 11th item in mind. But if I manage all 10 of the above items, I think I can feel like I’ve made some personal progress.)

turning into a pumpkin

pumpkinshoes.jpgI mentioned briefly that I’m going to be a bridesmaid in a wedding coming up soon. Well, that “soon” has now become “this Sunday.” Which is, technically, very soon. As is the standing tradition, in U.S. weddings at least, I will be wearing a dress chosen by the bride. As it will be an October wedding in New England, the bride has chosen fall colors. My dress is in burnt orange, a very pretty color, though a somewhat unusual one in my wardrobe. And is also often the case for such occasions, I am to have shoes that match my dress. This means that I have needed to get some dyed. I picked up my shoes yesterday afternoon. And I have to admit that I was quite startled to see them. You see, they are orange. I now have shiny orange shoes. I don’t think you can ever be fully prepared to see orange shoes.

Anyhow, this weekend I will be donning the orange, and perhaps as such, feeling a bit like a pumpkin. Hopefully an elegant pumpkin, mind you, but a pumpkin nonetheless. But seeing as it’s October, pumpkins are all the orange rage right now. And in honor of their orange pumpkiness, I bring you a pumpkin-based Themed Things Thursday.
pumpkin_pie.jpg

  • pumpkin
    A vegetable. Or a fruit. Depending on your choice of taxonomy. Generally eaten cooked. Used in lots of baked goods, like pumpkin pie.
  • Pumpkin (2002)
    A movie starring Christina Ricci.
  • Pumpkin
    A song by Tricky off Maxinquaye (YouTube video)

    • pumpkin_carriage.jpg

  • Cinderella’s carriage
    In many versions of this fairy tale, Cinderella’s fairy godmother turns a pumpkin into a carriage to carry Cinderella to the ball. Cinderella must leave the ball before her ride turns back into a pumpkin. Leading to the expression turn into a pumpkin, meaning depart, go to bed or otherwise turn in for the night.

    •             the_headless_horseman_pursuing_ichabod_crane.jpg

  • The Headless Horseman
    A ghostly character from Washington Irving’s story “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow“, who carries around a pumpkin head.

    • 200px-jackpumpkinheadpng.png

  • Jack Pumpkinhead
    A character from the Oz books by L. Frank Baum. Later had his own book, Jack Pumpkinhead of Oz, though it wasn’t by Baum.
  • Pumpkinhead (1989)
    A horror movie involving a demon dug up from a pumpkin patch.
  • The Ballad of Peter Pumpkinhead
    a song by XTC. (YouTube video) Later covered by Crash Test Dummies.
  • Peter Peter Pumpkin Eater
    A nursery rhyme. Also a song you can play on the piano using only the black keys.¹

    Peter Peter pumpkin eater
    Had a wife and couldn’t keep her
    He put her in a pumpkin shell
    And there he kept her very well

    • peter_peter_pumpkin_eater_1_-_ww_denslow_-_project_gutenberg_etext_18546.jpg       great_pumpkin.jpg      nightmare_before_christmas_poster.jpg

  • The Great Pumpkin
    A mythical holiday character that never appears in the animated Peanuts special It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown (1966)
  • Jack, the Pumpkin King
    A character from Tim Burton’s animated movie The Nightmare Before Christmas (1993).

    • pumpkin_porch.jpg

  • jack-o-lanterns
    It’s a Halloween tradition to carve a face into a pumpkin. These are then typically set outside, with a candle inside. It’s also a Halloween tradition for mischievous kids to steal other people’s pumpkins, and smash them.
  • Smashing Pumpkins.
    A band. Performs songs such as “Tonight, tonight” and “Tarantula” (YouTube videos)
  • punkin
    An endearment or nickname based on the word pumpkin, which is sometimes pronounced without the word-medial [p]. Gives us [pʰʌŋkɪn] (Where the nasal has then assimilated to the place of articulation of the following consonant, a velar. Not that you asked.)

    • phoebe_cat_pumpkin.jpg

    ¹ I admit that I’m recycling this particular item from my vegetable ThThTh list. But recycling is good, right? Or should I be composting, since it’s vegetables we’re talking about?

    unread, unread

    This here is a meme (or whatever you like to think of it as) based on the top 106 unread books from Library Thing. (At least as of the date when this was started. The earliest I could find was a post from October 1st at Once Upon a Booshelf, saying the meme had been found at Lady Strange. I couldn’t find, it there though.) I myself found this at Lori’s Book Nook, and then re-found it shortly thereafter at casa az.

    Here are the instructions, as found chez az:

    Bold what you have read, italicize your DNFs, strikethrough the ones you hated, put *asterisks next to those you’ve read more than once, and put a + cross in front of the books that are on your bookshelf.

    (Note that DNF=”did not finish”)

    My Reads of the Unread

    + Jonathan Strange & M. Norrell
    + Anna Karenina
    +Crime and Punishment
    + Catch-22
    One hundred years of solitude
    + Wuthering Heights
    + The Silmarillion
    Life of Pi: a novel
    + The Name of the Rose
    Don Quixote
    + Moby Dick
    + Ulysses
    + Madame Bovary
    + The Odyssey
    + *Pride and Prejudice
    + Jane Eyre
    A Tale of Two Cities
    + The Brothers Karamazov
    Guns, Germs, and Steel: the fates of human societies
    + War and Peace
    + Vanity Fair
    The Time Traveller’s Wife
    + The Iliad
    + *Emma
    + The Blind Assassin
    The Kite Runner
    Mrs. Dalloway
    + Great Expectations
    American Gods
    + A heartbreaking work of staggering genius
    Atlas shrugged
    Reading Lolita in Tehran
    + Memoirs of a Geisha
    Middlesex
    + Quicksilver
    + * Wicked : the life and times of the wicked witch of the West
    The Canterbury Tales
    The Historian
    + A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
    Love in the Time of Cholera
    Brave new world
    The Fountainhead
    + Foucault’s Pendulum
    + Middlemarch
    Frankenstein
    + The Count of Monte Cristo
    + Dracula
    A Clockwork Orange
    Anansi Boys
    + The Once and Future King
    The Grapes of Wrath
    + * The Poisonwood Bible
    1984
    Angels & Demons
    + The Inferno
    + The Satanic Verses
    + Sense and Sensibility
    + The Picture of Dorian Gray
    Mansfield Park
    + One flew over the cuckoo’s nest
    To the Lighthouse
    + * Tess of the D’Urbervilles
    Oliver Twist
    + Gulliver’s Travels
    + Les misérables
    + The Corrections
    + The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay
    + The curious incident of the dog in the night-time
    + Dune
    + The Prince
    The Sound and the Fury
    Angela’s Ashes
    + The God of Small Things
    A people’s history of the United States : 1492-present
    + Cryptonomicon
    Neverwhere
    + A Confederacy of Dunces
    A Short History of Nearly Everything
    Dubliners
    + The Unbearable Lightness of Being
    + Beloved
    Slaughterhouse-five
    + The Scarlet Letter
    + Eats, Shoots & Leaves
    + The Mists of Avalon
    Oryx and Crake : a novel
    Collapse : how societies choose to fail or succeed
    Cloud Atlas
    The Confusion
    + Lolita
    + Persuasion
    + Northanger Abbey
    The Catcher in the Rye
    On the Road
    +The Hunchback of Notre Dame
    + Freakonomics
    + Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
    The Aeneid
    + *Watership Down
    + Gravity’s Rainbow
    + The Hobbit
    + In Cold Blood
    + White Teeth
    Treasure Island
    + David Copperfield
    The Three Musketeers

    Notice that I haven’t crossed out any books to mean “I hated them.” It’s hard for me to say that I hate a book. The only book I can think of, off the top of my head, that I really hated was The Horse Whisperer. Piece of total crap. I wanted my time back.

    On this list, there were a couple of books that I found painful to read, though I could appreciate the writing and the storytelling: Crime and Punishment and Confederacy of Dunces. I seem to have trouble with anti-heroes. I had the same problem with The Mayor of Casterbridge.

    Notice also that I have marked a lot of books with a plus (+) that I have not read. This is partially John’s fault. I have marked them as “on our bookshelf”, even if they are not books that are ones that I selected. And even if they are not technically on a bookshelf. (We have a lot of books. Some of them live in stacks on the floor.)

    de-lightful, de-lovely, de-lurking

    The Great Mofo Delurk 2007 I hear, via Magpie, that tomorrow, Octber 3rd, is a grand holiday: The Great Mofo Delurk.

    I have to say, I like getting comments. And I like celebrating made-up holidays. (Remind me that I should start making up holidays. I could design a whole line of greeting cards. Maybe I should declare some day to be “Make Up Your Own Holiday Day.”) Anyhow, we were talking about comments, weren’t we. Well, I like them. So do other people. So some folks have decided that people need a little bit of an extra nudge to leave some comments, at least this one day a year.

    I plan to celebrate by leaving a few comments around on blogs where I tend to lurk. (Actually, first I plan to celebrate by getting up, engaging in some sorts of personal hygiene rituals, getting dressed, getting Phoebe dressed and off to daycare, doing some work, commuting, having a meeting, doing some more work, commuting again, and maybe having a festive holiday scone. Because I think every holiday needs a tradition of baked goods. And I don’t think scones are taken.) By the end of the day, I hope to work myself up to leaving at least a quick “hello” on a few blogs.

    And I’d love it if you’d join me in this celebration. You could start right here, by leaving me a scone. Or a comment, since they are less likely to get crumbs on my laptop.

    I know that it can be hard to come up with just the right comment to leave, so I thought I’d offer up a few possibilities for some quick-and-easy, down-and-dirty, alpha-and-numeric comments that are ready-to-wear. It’s easy to convey lots of meaning with just a few keystrokes. Just refer to the handy chart below.

       comment        translation
       yo  Great post!
       yoyo  You rock!
       yoyoyo  You rock. Like someone in a rocking chair. Knitting socks. That don’t match.
       oy  Your corniness pains me. Please stop.
       oyo  This is meaningless
       3752  I think you may have miscalculated
       555 That color isn’t the most flattering for you.
       12  I would like to sing you an aria.
       9  This post was one of the most poignantly written, beautifully crafted, impassioned things I have read in many long years. I was moved. I cried. I wept. I did an interpretive dance.
       pants  alejna, you are cracked
       squid  this was a disturbing, but strangely compelling post
       dude  all of the above

    Introducing AHTV: The American Hovel TV Network

    American Hovel Magazine, April 2007 coverAHTV
    Lowering Acceptable Neatness Standards in the Home
    …and Beyond!

    Following the incredible success of American Hovel Magazine, the magazine dedicated to lowering acceptable neatness standards in the home, this month will see the launch of AHTV, the American Hovel TV Network. Here are a few shows that you’ll be able to see on AHTV:

    • Fashion Programming
      • Laundry Day Style
      Getting dressed can be a challenge on those days when laundry is overdue. But with a little help from our fashionistas, you can throw together outfits that make a statement using what’s left in your closet.

    • Science and Nature Shows
      • The Wild Kingdom: Indoor Edition
      Ever wonder what kinds of things are growing in your refrigerator? What sorts of animals have taken up residence in your garage or attic? Tune each week to find out.
    • Sit Coms
      • The Oddly Compatible Couple
      Oscar is a messy slob. Felix is a messy slob. What happens when two messy people move in together? Hilarity ensues!

    • Dramas
      • Law and Disorder
      A courtroom drama about a group of attorneys whose offices are in constant chaos. They’ll get to the bottom of the case, once they find the tops of their desks.

      • The X-Piles
      Is that fuzzy gray thing in the vegetable drawer becoming sentient? Are rooms really disappearing in your home? Did aliens steal your remote? Join special agents Molder and Sullied as they investigate reports of supernatural occurrences.

      • Max Clutter, P.I.
      Crime is a messy business, especially when Max gets involved. Join the Detritus Detective each week for a new mystery, as he searches for clues, missing persons, and his missing car keys.

    • Home and Garden Shows
      • Trashing Spaces
      See some of America’s most beautiful showroom homes.Then see what happens when real families move into them.

      • Martha Stewart’s Not Living Here
      Join our hosts, who are nothing like Martha Stewart, as they give ideas for ways to appreciate your messy home. Topics for upcoming shows include “Loving Your Dandelion Garden,” “Clutter Chic,” and “Feng Shui is not For You.”

    ——

    This programming is brought to you by…The Monday Mission, sponsored by The Flying Mum, now with more TV programming than ever. Nothing brightens teeth better!

    How do you like them apples?

    Fall has fallen here in the northern hemisphere, and in my neck of the woods, this means it’s apple-picking season.¹ Which seems like as good a reason as any to pick apples for this week’s Themed Things Thursday.

    1. Apple of my eye. An expression meaning one who is most dear to the speaker.

      2. cortland_apple.jpg

    2. The Big Apple. A nickname for New York City. One source identifies its origins from usage by African-American stablehands at a New Orleans racetrack in the 1920s. (Wikipedia says it was first used by touring jazz musicians in the 1930s.)
    3. Snow White. A fairytale in which a girl falls asleep after eating a poisoned apple.
    4. An apple a day keeps the doctor away. A saying suggesting that eating apples is good for the health. I found a bit on origins of the saying:

      From “Random House Dictionary of Popular Proverbs and Sayings” by Gregory Y. Titelman (1996): “An apple a day keeps the doctor away. Eating fruit regularly keeps one healthy. First found as a Welsh folk proverb (1866)” ‘Eat an apple on going to bed,/ And you’ll keep the doctor from earning his bread.’ First attested in the United States in 1913…”

    5. Adam’s apple. A bump on the front of the neck, tending to me more prominent in adult males, from the “forward protrusion of the thyroid cartilage.” Likely nicknamed based on the Biblical story of Eve giving an apple to Adam.

      6. archibald_apple_tree.jpg

    6. Newton’s apple. A falling apple (which may or not have bonked him on the head) may or may not have contributed to Newton’s theory of universal gravitation.
    7. The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree. An expression meaning that the offspring will often turn out like the parent(s).
    8. Johnny Appleseed. An American folk hero famed for planting lots of apple trees.
    9. Apple Inc.² A company. Makes computers. One line of which is named after a type of apple, the macintosh. Has a logo shaped like an apple_rainbow.jpgapple_clear.jpg
      apple with a bite out of it. Has a variety of iProducts: iMac, iPod, iPhone, iCup…
    10. An apple for the teacher. An apple is known in the US as traditional gift to give to a teacher. (The fruit, not the computers. But I bet most teachers would appreciate getting an Apple.) Has (probably) led to apples showing up on greeting cards and coffee mugs as symbols of the teaching profession (along with rulers, blackboards and squid). (No wait, scratch that last one. I was just checking to see if you were still reading this.)

    ——–

    ¹ We live in an area with many apple orchards, and Phoebe even got to go apple picking with her daycare last week. I hope we’ll get to go together some time this year. Late October last year, we went to a nearby orchard that grows over 50 varieties of apples. Pick-your-own season was past, so our experience was less about apple picking than apple choosing. But it was still fun. And the apples were yummy.

    ² I read that Apple Inc. officially dropped “Computers” from its name earlier this year. I hadn’t even noticed.

    apples_triangle.jpg

    squawk

    pirateparrot.jpgHere it is, the day after International Talk Like a Pirate Day, and I’ve still got pirates on the brain. But rather than bringing you a list of pirates for this week’s Themed Things Thursday, I’ll bring you a list of the frequent pirate’s companion: the parrot.

    A Flock of Parrots

    1. Parrots are frequently to be seen on the shoulders of pirates¹, specifically of fictional pirates. Captain Flint was a pirate’s parrot in Treasure Island, the pirate novel by Robert Louis Stevenson. More recently, we’ve seen the pirate in the Pirates of the Caribbean movies.
    2. Parrots, especially African Grey Parrots, are well known as birds who can imitate human speech.
    3. This is no doubt the source of the use of the word parrot as a verb (transitive), meaning repeat without really understanding. As in “They parroted my parrot jokes, but none of them laughed.”
    4. You can find a variety of parrot jokes out there. (These even a site with pirate and parrot jokes.) This is probably my favorite parrot joke.
    5. Polly want a cracker? The stereotypical parrot sentence, whether said to a parrot, or by a parrot. Possibly popularized in Robert Lewis Stevenson’s Treasure Island.
    6. Poll or Polly has been a common parrot name for centuries, with an early documented use from 1611.
    7. Also in the nursery rhyme:

      Little Poll Parrot
      Sat in his garret
      Eating toast and tea;
      A little brown mouse
      Jumped into the house,
      And stole it all away.

    8. Then there’s the song “Polly,” by Nirvana

      Polly wants a cracker
      I think I should get off her first
      I think she wants some water
      To put out the blow torch

    9. Or Paulie (1998), a movie about a parrot.
    10. Parrots have been featured in various folktales from around the world, like 2 Buddhist folktales from India “The Brave Little Parrot.” (who puts out a forest fire²) and “The Steadfast Parrot” (who is faithful to a tree) and an
      Italian folktale (involving a prince who has himself turned into a parrot).
    11. Other moderately famous parrots include Waldo the Parrot, from Twin Peaks (who seems to have been present, and biting, the night of Laura Palmer’s death) and Parrot, the parrot with biting sarcasm from the Terry Pratchett novel Faust Eric
    12. Parrot Heads are the nickname given to fans of the musician Jimmy Buffett
    13. And to round things off, I bring you Python’s parrot. The ex-parrot. He is decidedly not pining for the fjords.

    ————————–

    ¹ Or about the arms and head, especially of those posing as pirates.

    ² Kind of like a friend of mine did recently, except he used a plastic bag to put out the fire.

    how to talk like a pirate

    jolly_roger.jpgWell, it’s finally arrrived. Today, September 19th, is Talk Like a Pirate Day. You’ve gotten yourself a pirate name, and brushed up on your pirate job skills. But are you still unclear on how best to talk like a pirate? Have no fearrrr.

    There arrre many avenues to explore in learrrning how to talk like a pirate. An important resource is the “how to” page of the official Talk Like a Pirate Day website. There you can learrrn the basics (the 5 “A”s), more advanced pirate terminology (don’t confuse your hornpipe with your bunghole), and even advance all the way up to pick-up lines like this one:

    How’d you like to scrape the barnacles off of me rudder?

    In case you don’t have time for such intensive language study, you may find one of several translators handy, like this one or this other one. This one acts as more of a phrase book, and allows you to produce such eloquent discourses as this:

    Ahoy, me proud beauty! Be that th’ market? I’ve a fierce fire in m belly t’ have a bit of a lie-down’

    Of course, it’s also important to work on your arrr, long considered to be one of the hallmarrrks of pirate speech. (If you’d like to learn the history of this phenomenon, The Language Log discussed this a couple of yearrrs ago.)

    Here’s what you do to say “arr”:

    1. Step one: Say “ah”. (Your vowel may vary by dialect; [ɒ], [a] and [ɑ] are probably all legitimate.) You’ll probably want to put in a glottal stop at the start [ʔ].
    2. Step two: Quickly lower your third formant to produce the [ɹ] sound. This can be accomplished by curling the tongue back (retroflex “r”) or by bunching your tongue up (bunched-tongue “r”)

    Now, if you want to say “arrr” like a pirate, the instructions above are just a starting point. To produce the piratical “arrr” tha we’ve come to expect. (Cf. Geoffrey Rush saying “arrr” in Pirates of the Caribbean), you really need to growl it. And for me, at least, this seems to possibly involve some pharyngeal frication, and possibly also some additional voice quality modifications. I’m not sure what I’m doing (not really just creakiness or breathiness), but it sure as hell isn’t modal phonation. A really effective arrr will also be quite loud: push the air strongly through those vocal folds, dammit. On top of all of this, you’ve got to really drag it out, especially the [ɹ] part. (Keep that 3rd formant down.) Arrrrr!!!!!

    In an experimental study, subjects (N=2) produced both “normal” and piratical arrrs. Piratical arrrs were between 2 and 3 times the duration of “normal” arrrrs. See figures 1 and 2, below.

    Figure 1: Arrrr! vs. ar, speaker A (male)
    j_arrrr.jpg

    Figure 2: Arrrr! vs. ar, speaker B (female)
    a_arrrr.jpg

    And in case you don’t have occasion to speak out loud today, you might try some pirate-style typing.
    piratekeyboard1.jpg

    RRRRRRRRRRRRRR!!!!!!!

    listless

    Here it is Thursday, and that means I’m due for a list of Themed Things. But the thing is, I’m tired. It’s been a long week, with a couple more busy days ahead, and well, my brain is fried. So I suppose I could come up with a list of fried things. But I have to say that is not a theme I can envision myself making a list about. So instead, I’ll make a list of things I can’t envision myself making lists about.

    • bricks
    • doorknobs
    • mold
    • tissues
    • ethernet cables
    • plungers
    • eyebrows
    • curtains
    • gall bladders
    • pocket lint

    If you have any suggestions for other lists I shouldn’t write, please let me know.