Category: silliness

easy as pi

Happy Pi Day!

Pi Day caught me a bit off guard this year, but was not going to let my unpreparedness result in pielessness. I had some errands to run this afternoon, so I stopped by the store while I was out to get a pie crust and some frozen berries, and voila! The Pi Day Pie tradition has been upheld.

This pi pie is the 3rd such pie I have under my belt. (Not to say that I ate three whole pies today. Though I could imagine such a feat. I do love me some pie.) My Pi Day tradition started with a pi post back in 2008, which then inspired me to bake my first pi pie. Pi Day of 2009 was a pieless day, due to traveling and attending a wedding, but then I did recapture the pi magic in 2010.

In celebration of Pi Day, I offer you a gallery of pi pies past and present.


My original pi pie, from 2008. I was so fond of it, I even wrote its obituary.


Last year’s pi pie was an apple pi.


This year’s pi Pie is of mixed berry heritage.

paddling on the river

I haven’t participated in PhotoHunt for ages, but this week’s prompt of “silhouette” was too good for me to resist. Because one of my all-time favorite photos is a silhouette, taken on the riverfront in Sevilla, Spain:

a big, squishy heart for you

Happy Valentine’s Day, friends. I cut out some hearts just for you.

For more Valentine’s treats, please revisit eat your hearts out (all about little candy hearts), heart in my hands (an anatomical heart-themed list), and getting over V.D. If you are seek more heart-warming valentines, please see giving a rat’s ass for Valentine’s Day. Don’t say I never gave you anything for Valentine’s Day.

comment spam: now with more flattery!

This blog has been around a few years now, and my spam filter has caught quite a few spam comments. 107,662 spam comments, in fact. Which is way, way more spam comments than actual bonafide comments from actual bonafide people.

A few years back I made a post in response to some spam comments that amused me, but mostly I don’t give spam much thought.

I recently checked to see what was in my spam box, though, and was amused to see another recent trend in spamming: flattery. Many of the comments were very complimentary about the blog, the post, etc.. The sort of comment that can be nice to get. Take this one:

so much good information on here, : D.
                                            –Natalia Dandoy

Yes, I sometimes do feel like I post good information. But, well, this was on my about page. For that matter, so were all of these¹:

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                                            –Ada Matuszewski

At least thrice weekly!

Youre so cool! I dont suppose Ive read anything like this before. So nice to find somebody with some original thoughts on this subject. realy thank you for starting this up. This website is something that is needed on the web, someone with a little originality. useful job for bringing something new to the internet!
                                            –buy mini cooper s

This one I could almost let pass though. Yes! Me! I’m so cool! I’m original! But what exactly is “this subject?” Oh, right. My about page. And what kind of a first name is buy, anyway?

This is great information. Folks, listen to this guy. He’s very bright and knows what he’s talking about. You can’t go wrong with following people who can walk the walk – like him. Great information, dude. Just the way I like it!
                                            –Sudie Franpton

I’m glad Sudie likes my blog. It’s so nice to feel appreciated. On the other hand, it would be nicer if Sudie had bothered to note that I am female. Especially given the fact that Sudie was visiting my about page, where I have a picture of myself. (Of course, in that photo, I have a fish on my head. Maybe Sudie thinks the fish is the blog author…though how the fish could “walk the walk” is unclear to me.)

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                                            –Wagers

Thanks! I take pride in having an internet website which supplies wonderful source for totally free. If there’s one thing I do, it’s provide it away!

An impressive share, I just given this onto a colleague who was doing a little analysis on this. And he in fact bought me breakfast because I found it for him.. smile.
                                            — mini cooper for sale

I can’t help but wonder what sort of analysis this person’s colleague was doing on “this.” “This,” again, being my about page. Clearly, though, I have underestimated the value of the information on that page. When will someone buy me breakfast?

This is the right blog for anyone who wants to find out about this subject.
                                            –classic mini cooper for sale

I couldn’t agree more. This is absolutely the right blog for anyone who wants to find out about alejna. It is a key resource for those engaged in alejna studies, and is widely considered essential reading for anyone attempting to undertake any sort of thorough alejna analysis.

—

¹ I decided to cite the names given for the spam comments. I wouldn’t want to be accused of stealing credit for this phenomenal writing. Of course, I also wouldn’t want to provide links for them. Also, I will not share with you the details of exceedingly dull comments left by individuals who elected to be known as qgnxwlnpkg and Bzcsmtmq, even though I applaud them for their originality in choosing names.

down the rabbit hole

Happy New Year! It’s Chinese New Year today, marking the start of the year of the rabbit. In keeping with my tradition of welcoming the lunar new year with a themed list,¹ I present to you a bunch of rabbits:

  • “rabbit, rabbit” A tradition of saying “rabbit, rabbit” first thing when you wake up on the first of the month to bring you good luck. I used to do this as a kid. I hadn’t remembered it in years. (Maybe my luck would have been better…)
  • Bugs Bunny: a famous cartoon from the Looney Tunes/Warner Brothers. (What’s up, doc?)
  • Binky and Bongo: somewhat less famous rabbit characters from Matt Groening’s comic Life in Hell. (Bongo is the one with one ear.)

  • Who Framed Roger Rabbit (1988) A movie combining live action and cartoon characters, one of whom is a rabbit.
  • Harvey (1950) A movie starring Jimmy Stewart and a 6-foot-tall invisible rabbit.
  • Little Rabbit Foo-foo/Little Bunny Foo-foo. A folk song. …hopping through the forest. Scooping up the field mice and bopping them on the head…
  • The Bunny Hop: a conga-line type dance involving hopping
  • Rabbits are popular anthropomorphic characters in children’s literature, such as The Tale of Peter Rabbit and others by Beatrix Potter, or Runaway Bunny by Margaret Wise Brown.
  • Watership Down: a novel by Richard Adams about a very complex rabbit society. Complete with their own language. I’m quite fond of the Lapine words tharn (which is the feeling one gets of being a deer caught in the headlights) and hrair (which is a number larger than 4–rabbits can only count up to 4.)

  • Other well-known stories feature a rabbit among other characters and species of creatures, such as Rabbit from A. A. Milne’s Winnie-the-Pooh books or the White Rabbit in Lewis Carrol’s Alice in Wonderland. There was also Thumper from Disney’s 1942 animated film Bambi. Br’er Rabbit: is a character from the traditional African American Uncle Remus folktales

  • Other stories feature bunny-shaped toys, such as The Velveteen Rabbit, by Margery Williams, or the more recent Knuffle Bunny, by Mo Willems.
  • The Easter Bunny: a rabbit said to bring colorful eggs and candy for children on Easter.
  • Here comes Peter Cottontail: a song about the Easter Bunny. (…hopping down the bunny trail…hippity hoppity...)
  • Cheddar Bunnies: rabbit-shaped snack crackers.
  • Welsh Rabbit: a kind of food that is not actually made from rabbit. It is a thick sauce, traditionally made with cheddar cheese and ale, and served over toast. (Here’s a sample recipe.)
  • VW Rabbit: a kind of car, not traditionally made with cheddar cheese or ale.
  • rabbit food: what some call salads and other raw vegetables
  • rabbit’s foot: a good luck charm made from the foot of a rabbit (less lucky for the rabbit)
  • rabbit ears: antennae for a TV, not generally made from the ears of a rabbit (lucky rabbits)

  • Rabbits have appeared as mascots for products, especially in TV commercials, such as the Energizer Bunny (it keeps going), the Trix rabbit (Silly rabbit, Trix are for kids.) and the Nesquik bunny (I have nothing to say about this rabbit.) For that matter, the logo of Playboy magazine is a stylized rabbit in a tuxedo. (I don’t have anything to say about that rabbit, either.)
  • Finally, we must not forget that rabbits, while typically portrayed as docile, may have big pointy teeth.

—
¹ …with pigs in 2007, rats in 2008, and cows in 2009. Last year, I didn’t put up a list for the New Year, in part because I had put up my tiger list before, and in part probalby because I was busy with something else.²

² In fact I shouldn’t be doing this list now, as I have loads of other things I am supposed to be doing, but I can’t resist. So I will be quick like a bunny. And I will pull this rabbit list out of my…hat. I’ve tried to keep it short, but the bunnies seem to keep multiplying. (You know how rabbits are. Though I can’t help but notice that just about all of the rabbit characters on the list are male. You’d think that would make the breeding tricky…)

Image sources: Book cover for Watership Down, movie poster for Harvey, Peter Rabbit, Bugs Bunny, TV with antenna, Binky, Bongo, and John Tenniel’s illustration of the White Rabbit.

an ambiguous array of vegetables

Tonight we had dinner with my in-laws, and we had a lot of vegetable options: green beans or peas and carrots and rutabagas and potatoes or butternut squash. As you can imagine, it was difficult to keep track of them for serving, not to mention difficult to determine their syntactic bracketing, due to the combination of the coordinating conjunctions and and or. In the end, one person had green beans and potatoes only, one had green beans, potatoes, butternut squash and peas, one had peas and rutabagas and carrots and potatoes, and three of us had peas and carrots and rutabagas and potatoes and butternut squash. (Though one of those three did not actually eat any of the butternut squash, though it was on his plate. And one of us got a fair amount of butternut squash on her face. One of us attempted to feed a carrot to his pants. One of us enjoyed saying the word rutabaga.) It is important to mention that the peas and carrots were not bracketed together, as the carrots were roasted with the rutabagas and some of the potatoes. Some of the potatoes were therefore bracketed with the carrots and rutabagas, and some of the potatoes were mashed. While everybody ate potatoes, the potatoes were either mashed, or roasted with sage and bracketed with the carrots and rutabagas. Nobody who ate mashed potatoes and green beans ate rutabagas and carrots. (The green beans only came bracketed with ham, which is not a vegetable.) It is entirely possible that every person had peas. At least 2 peas ended up on the carpet, though the carpet was not given a fork.

I would attempt to diagram this, but then I might not be finished with this post before midnight. Instead, I will show you my plate.

My plate held many vegetables. Also tofurkey and a roll.

more carrots (and peas)

A few years ago, I was working on an intonation project with several people. As part of the research, we were annotating soundfiles for specific phenomena. One of the things we were annotating was the location of a the maximum f0, the point in a given region of speech where the pitch is highest. For the specific project we were doing, we were labelling this point with the symbol ^, also known as a caret. It came up along the way that in some examples, we also wanted to mark another point that was linked to the caret to indicate when the peak f0 formed more of a plateau in shape. It was decided that we should use p to indicate a plateau. In reviewing our decisions about our labelling scheme, one of the women on the project was stressing that while not every peak would have a plateau marker, every plateau should be marked also for the peak. My coworkers looked at me questioningly when I started to snicker at this review of our protocol.

“No Ps without carets,” I said, by way of explanation.


Here are some multi-colored carrots I got at a farmer’s market in July of 2009. I took the picture then, too. I don’t think the carrots would still look this attractive if we still had them.

Here’s one last serving of vegetables for you:

Eat every carrot and pea on your plate.

Try saying that one out loud to a small child (or to an adult with the mind of a 12-year-old).

peas and carrots or green beans

Imagine that I say to you, “Tonight for dinner we’ll be having peas and carrots or green beans.”

What do you think our menu options are? Can we be having both peas and green beans? Are just green beans an option? If we have peas, do we have to have carrots?

What I’m trying to get at is that the phrase peas and carrots or green beans is ambiguous. How you interpret it depends on what syntactic structure, or bracketing, you assign to it.

In this case, there are two different ways you can bracket it. You can have:

So, with the one bracketing you can either have both peas and carrots or you can have both peas and green beans. With the other you can have both peas and carrots or you can have just green beans. I’m afraid that if you want only carrots, you are out of luck. You are only allowed to have them with peas, or not at all. And if you don’t like peas, you’ll have to hope that you’re getting the bracketing on the right, because at least then you stand a chance of getting just green beans. Artichokes are completely out of the question, which is a shame, because I really like artichokes.

Why am I telling you this? Because I like vegetables. Also because this actually relates to my research. The project I’m working on right now is looking at how people produce and perceive ambiguous coordinate structures like these, especially with respect to intonation. Because when you speak, you generally (but not always) give cues to the structure you intend. You may not even realize when you’re saying it that your menu options are ambiguous, but chances are that if you are offering peas and carrots or green beans, you will use aspects of your speech–specifically the timing of what you say and the patterns of the pitch of your voice as you say it–to indicate which structure you mean. Your prosody acts to group the words you say into meaningful chunks so we know what our vegetable options are.

So, what will it be? Do your options look like this?

Or this?

Images by John. Vegetables prepared by me.

(This confusing bit of a post is brought to you by a tired brain, and was in part prompted by a two-month-old request from Nora that I write more about linguistics. I just hope she likes peas.) (At some point, I’ll try to tell you a bit more about what I’m actually looking at, when it doesn’t involve vegetables.)

cough, cough

I have a cough. It’s very annoying, and it’s been interfering with my work and keeping me from getting enough sleep the last few days.

This is what it looks like:

Image: Screenshot of a recording of my cough, displayed in Praat.