Today is the fifth anniversary of our marriage. According to (Russian?) tradition, it is called "wooden wedding". The first year is called "cotton", the second - "paper", etc.

My husband loves to say that we got married on "Black Tuesday" anniversary. October 29, 1929 was the beginning of the Great Crash and the Great Depression.

Edward Hirsch: "Self-Portrait"

I lived between my heart and my head,
like a married couple who can't get along.

I lived between my left arm, which is swift
and sinister, and my right, which is righteous.

I lived between a laugh and a scowl,
and voted against myself, a two-party system.

I suppose my left hand and my right hand
will be clasped over my chest in the coffin

and I'll be reconciled at last,
I'll be whole again.

Tom wrote:

I always thought maybe God had a bit of sadistic streak in him but now I'm convinced that he enjoys suffering...

I don't want to start any blasphemous rumours
but I think that God's got a sick sense of humour
and when I die I expect to find him laughing.
--- Depeche Mode

I was thinking about it, and strangely, his post amalgamated with another post, which I read later, so I can't think of them separately. That another post was by someone I don't know, who signs as "elck", I am not even sure if it’s a male or female, and I don't care. Elck answered a question, which sense you would least wish to lose, if you had to lose one.

If to believe Edwin Schlossberg that the skill of writing is to create a context in which other people can think, David Weinberger is an outstanding writer.

My friend in Russia started to teach Computer Science (well, sort of) in two colleges. He wrote to me that he is probably a bad teacher (there was a more expressive epithet used, but I'll skip it :) because he concentrates all his efforts on those students who want to learn, and simply ignores the rest. I wasn't sure what to say, looked like a meaningful enough strategy... But today, reading memoirs of P. Kropotkin, a prince and a revolutionist, I found this:

Ok, to be fair and balanced... Let's ridicule my own ideas. :)

When the religious people are saying that the marriage is intended for procreation, I am thinking "isn't marriage about love?" On this ground, I can't see how gay marriages threat the "sacred" institute of our f*** marriage.

Yesterday I came across this blog and it made me laugh at myself.

What's with all the antirobotism and robophobia I'm seeing around the web these days? I am disturbed, truly I am. Some robots are humanoids too, just like Republicans. If Republicans can marry humans, why can't robots? Can't we all just get along?

At least we have truly progressive liberals, like Lindsay Beyerstein, who writes:

"For the record: If I ever have kids, and they bring home anything that passes the Turing test, I'll be okay with that."
URL

No comments. :)

"Measure 36": the Oregonians are going to vote to add a clause to the constitution that explains that "only marriage between one man and one woman is valid or legally recognized as marriage".

"On Not Translating Hafez" -- a very informative and well-written essay about difficulties in translating medieval Persian poetry.

To me, the blog concept is about three things: Frequency, Brevity, and Personality.

Evan Williams, creator of Pyra and blogger.com

I always thought it was Samuel Huntington, but today I read that he borrowed the phrase from Bernard Lewis.

We stayed in Astoria, in the Red Lion on the Columbia river, where it meets the Pacific ocean (the place is fondly called "The Graveyard of the Pacific"). The US Coast Guard has a school ("the National Motor Lifeboat School") for its cadets here, because the weather and navigation conditions on the Columbia river here are the worst in the USA. So if the cadets survive here, they will survive everywhere.

At one point he compares himself, unironically, to Moses; at another, he mentions "one of my few regrets." Could such a phrase even be uttered in Yiddish? Well, maybe, but with that particular inflection that makes "few" a quantity slightly larger than infinite.
Jacqueline Osherow. Saving a lost language.
Via The Language Feed.

I first wondered if "particular inflection that makes "few" a quantity slightly larger than infinite" is just a figure of speech, or there is some grammatical ground for it. Then I remembered, that you could perform the described operation in Russian. There is a suffix, which being added to a noun means that "the thing" is huge. There is the complimentary suffix [Ed: more than one, and this statistical difference asks for another post], which means the thing is small, and it also bears a notion of tenderness ("endearing intimacy" as I read somewhere) toward the thing -- this is probably why it is used more often. Strangely, you cannot attach the former ("-huge") suffix to the word "few" (nemnogo, literally "not-many", "not-much"), but you can do it with the latter. How much sense does it make to double the meaning of "littleness"? Probably no more than ascertain that this particular "few" is "huge". :) I tried to append the suffix of ''hugeness" to nemnogo, and the result, nemnogishe, is not a correct word [Ed.: "not a correct word" means "not a word", right?], but it makes sense, and I believe would be understood by any native speaker.

I am so happy that I can have an insight, if even imperfect ("nemnogishe" still doesn't feel the same as its apparently existent Yiddish counterpart, because it is grammatically abnormal, rather than normal for my language), into how it feels in another language. Sometimes I read interesting things about other languages, but if there is no analog in my native language, the pleasure of discovery is only intellectual.

October 17. Found today:

... But in both cases the deeper resonances of the topos are not obvious for a Western audience: they have to be explained—and to explain a resonance is like explaining a joke; when the explanation is over, no one laughs, except out of pained politeness, and no one is moved.
Dick Davis. On Not Translating Hafez

Language Hat posted a quote from memoirs of prince Peter Alexeivich Kropotkin, a prominent Russian anarchist.

Later, when we were spreading socialist doctrines amongst the peasants, I could not but wonder why some of my friends, who had received a seemingly far more democratic education than myself, did not know how to talk to the peasants or to the factory workers from the country. They tried to imitate the "peasants' talk" by introducing a profusion of so-called "popular phrases," but they only rendered themselves the more incomprehensible.

Nothing of the sort is needed, either in talking to peasants or in writing for them. The Great Russian peasant perfectly well understands the educated man's talk, provided it is not stuffed with words taken from foreign languages. What the peasant does not understand is abstract notions when they are not illustrated by concrete examples. But my experience is that when you speak to the Russian peasant plainly, and start from concrete facts,—and the same is true with regard to village folk of all nationalities,—there is no generalization from the whole world of science, social or natural, which cannot be conveyed to a man of average intelligence, if you yourself understand it concretely. The chief difference between the educated and the uneducated man is, I should say, that the latter is not able to follow a chain of conclusions. He grasps the first of them, and maybe the second, but he gets tired at the third, if he does not see what you are driving at. But how often do we meet the same difficulty in educated people.
Memoirs of a Revolutionist by P. Kropotkin. London: Swan Sonnenschein & Co. 1906.

Not too much to add, besides pointing out obvious similarities between teaching peasants to make a revolution, and teaching beginners to write a Java program. :)

From Publishers Weekly:
Pulitzer Prize–winning cartoonist Spiegelman's new work is an inventive and vividly graphic work of nonfiction. It's an artful rant focused on the events of 9/11 and afterward by a world-class pessimist ("after all, disaster is my muse"). The artist, who lives in downtown Manhattan, believes the world really ended on Sept. 11, 2001—it's merely a technicality that some people continue to go about their daily lives. He provides a hair-raising and wry account of his family's frantic efforts to locate one another on September 11 as well as a morbidly funny survey of his trademark sense of existential doom. "I'm not even sure I'll live long enough," says a chain-smoking, post-9/11 cartoon-mouse Spiegelman, "for cigarettes to kill me."
URL.

I am not a big fun of comics, I browsed through Maus in Powell's, and decided it's not my kind of book. But a reference to Maus on the sample page from Spiegelman's new book communicates a message so strong and so complex, it would took many pages of words to imitate a copy of a copy of this effect.