Here is a pecise depiction of a New Year in Russia. :)

It has come to this: I’m sitting under a tree
beside a river
on a sunny morning.
it’s an insignificant event
and won’t go down in history.
it’s not battles and pacts,
where motives are scrutinized,
or noteworthy tyrannicides.

 

And yet I’m sitting by this river, that’s a fact.
and since I’m here
I must have come from somewhere,
and before that
I must have turned up in many other places,
exactly like the conquerors of nations
before setting sail.

 

Even a passing moment has its fertile past,
its Friday before Saturday
its May before June
its horizons are no less real
than those that a marshal’s field glasses might scan.

 

This tree is a poplar that’s been rooted here for years.
The river is the Raba; it didn’t spring up yesterday.
The path leading through the bushes
wasn’t beaten last week.
The wind had to blow the clouds here
before it could blow them away.

 

And though nothing much is going on nearby,
the world is no poorer in details for that.
It’s just as grounded, just as definite,
as when migrating races held it captive.

 

Conspiracies aren’t the only things shrouded in silence.
Retinues of reasons don’t trail coronations alone.
Anniversaries of revolutions may roll around,
but so do oval pebbles encircling the bay.

 

The tapestry of circumstance is intricate and dense.
Ants stitching in the grass.
The grass sewn into the ground.
The pattern of a wave being needled by a twig.

 

So it happens that I am and look.
Above me a white butterfly is fluttering through the air
on wings that are its alone,
and a shadow skims through my hands
that is none other than itself, no one else’s but its own.

 

When I see such things, I’m no longer sure
that what’s important
is more important than what’s not.

Wislawa Szymborska

I sent this Russian communist song to the people I feel most close to. I had to decode what "Revvoensovet" means, and then I remembered that when a child I read a story called "R. V. S." - "Revvoensovet". I wasn't sure who wrote it, I suspected Gaydar. Indeed, it was he. Here is the text: http://lib.ru/GOLIKOW/rvs.txt I remember I read it when I was 8 or maybe 10. I liked the story, but gosh, only now can I appreciate it ! This is an absolutely ingenious text. It was written by a 21 years old boy, who was canonized by communists later. He is a legend, being a commander of a regiment when he was only 16, during Russian Civil War.

Via Lilechka.

This night
Was so desperately dark
The cat cried
I let her outside
I walked there later
Leaves, leaves everywhere
The ground was cold
I found the cat by her sounds and her smell
Her nose, her ears
Her warm body
We went home together

We were visiting my husband's parents this Christmas. Three idle days, I was reading Hofstadter's Le Ton beau de Marot for the second time, and came across "Music and sadness" section, where he mentions the Italian song "Bella Ciao".

I've been wondering all these years why I am so addicted to writing in English. You would think that if you have something to say, it's much easier to say it in your native language? Yet I avoid writing in Russian unless it's absolutely necessarily.

If you married a conservative in a liberal state, you got a problem.

I decided it would be a good idea to get my husband a T-shirt with some funny writings on it. The most conservative and the ONLY NOT anti-Bush T-shirt I could find recommended:

On October 15, 2004, at 10:57 am, Michael said: "I like". It happened in a private forum, so I won't quote him in full, but it was something like "X did y. I like."

Normally, "to like" is a transitive verb, which means you need to specify what it is that you like. There are many situations, however, when using transitive verbs without an object isn't ungrammatical. Geoffrey K. Pullum even went so far, to conjecture that perhaps any transitive verb could be used as intransitive in certain situations.

"I like", of course, isn't such situation, it is a creative violation of the rules of grammar. That's why I like it.

And here is a promised quine:

I like "I like".

Language Hat quoted a story about I. Brodsky, who used to make his students memorize poems, and said in comments:

but you get a much deeper feel for it (a poem) by memorizing it. It's the difference between meeting somebody for coffee and living with them.

Memorizing poetry

It seems that, when leaders are pressing hard to achieve their goals, people in the trenches will develop ways of ignoring all but the most direct of orders. And for good reason.

In the trenches in World War I, the Germans and the English were not continually fighting. Instead, they developed a complicated system of co-operation that meant neither side sustained heavy losses unless the Staff Officers had ordered a charge.
<...>
This etiquette was finely honed over the course of the war. Both sides knew that if one side lost a man during dinnertime, then the other side would lose three when they were having their meal the next day. Similarly, flags on both sides marked places that that enemy snipers should consider out of bounds. This unlikely alliance was so deeply felt that apologies were made if it seemed to have been broken.

Insubordinate Survival Techniques

This summer on the corner of Pioneer Square in Portland I watched a group of young people. They were dancing, although the dance was stylized as a fight. The music was mostly rhythms, performed on some kind of a drum. There were two dancers, making attacking movements, or some acrobatics elements. When one was "attacked", another avoided the attack and then attacked himself -- or herself -- it was a mixed group. Periodically one of dancers was changed by somewhere from the circle of other dancers, without interrupting the dance. Then the second dancer was replaced, and so finally they all took part. As I understood, the movements were improvised, so the dancers had to watch what their partner was going to do, to react accordingly - on such close distance movements could easily result in injuries.

Ellen, specially for you! :)

Linguists own the word verb ; others are only borrowing it.

Geoff Nunberg

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German is the best Language for Philosophy because all its Nouns are capitalized.

Steve Matuszek

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Aristotle Thirty Years Later: He's gotten a lot smarter since the last time I read him.

David Weinberger

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Visual thesaurus

The Visual Thesaurus is a visual representation of the English Language. In particular, word proximity is represented in 3-D space.

In the left upper corner there is a "look it up" button. I used the word "think" to get a pretty good idea of how it works -- other words may not have so many synonyms.

Non-Geographical Map

Shows a world map based not on the "formal" distance, but on how long it would take you to get there. Click on a city. I suspect the thing is mostly a joke yet, because for Irkutsk it said: "optional horseback ride through frozen Tundra", well, I don't think so. :-) But the idea is wonderful.

Word frequency animated visualizer

I guess, what all three have in common, is they represent proximity.

If you come across other um... visualties, please e-mail me at map@javaranch.comDeleteThisPart.

Don’t try to impress someone by thesaurusizing your email with terms you wouldn’t use in person– it sounds diaphanous, limpid, and transpicuous.

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Robert Merton once wrote that "Anticipatory plagiarism occurs when someone steals your original idea and publishes it a hundred years before you were born".

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This one is a translation from Russian:

My girlfriend complains that her mother estimates all her purchases in ... bananas. "Ouch! You could by 5 kg bananas for it!"

She has been doing it for last 10 years.

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I've been enjoying Fabian Pascal's (he is a buddy of C.J. Date) fierce writings on the relational model and SQL very much. Today to my surprise I found something political among his usual diatribes.