PG-Michelle

I found a pretty decent language learning tool today while looking for language learning tools. Coincidence? Obviously you don't watch NCIS enough. What I found was a bunch of Brothers' Grimm fairy tales in French. Usually when I learn a new language I download my trusty Harry Potter / Harry Potter (French) / 哈利波特 from my trusty internet pirates, which is why half the words I know in all but my mother tongues were made up by J.K. Rowling. But this time I was feeling adventurous and looked for some other sources of useful vocabulary.

The story I read was The Devil with the Three Golden Hairs. Turned out that the devil had more than three, but each being so potent, three were all one story could hold.

You know when there's three of something in a fairy-tale, you're going to hear every damn sentence three times. It used to be the bane of parents' existence. Imagine reading the same story to your kid every night. Now imagine reading that story three times every night, with slight asymmetries interspersed here and there. The new generation thinks the Brothers Grimm are Matt Damon and Heath Ledger and there's not a parent from infinity to beyond who's going to shatter that illusion and subject themselves to playing broken record every night.

But. For learning languages, and especially for memorizing useful phrases like "what are you doing, woman! If you pull out one more of my hairs, I'm going to slap you silly!", it's a pretty good device.

Hmm...there's something else here. Those clever Brothers Grimm were probably being paid per word. Maybe that's why the number 13 is so unlucky: originally they repeated everything 13 times, driving everyone up trees with madness (the ones left over after all that printing). Somehow they narrowed down the acceptable number of repetitions to three. And then pop and rock artists shamelessly stole their idea.

[insert transition]

One of the problems with reading French (provided one has the intent of learning it), is that it is quite different from spoken French. I don't mean the ritual sterilization applied in the process of writing, making regular sentences like "I, like, TOtally don't get this stuff, I mean what the F!" into cleanly-packaged PuTTy-approved "I don't understand this at all. Praise Jesus." I mean that when you pick up your first French book, you start seeing all the verbs you just drilled in a tense you've never encountered during your sheltered prancing outside the reading rainbow: the simple past tense. Put down the book and simple past vanishes from your vocabulary. Pick it up and your regular slightly-more-complicated past tense gathers dust in the corner, except in occasional phrases of dialogue. Most non-triumphant.

Albright Knot:


image borrowed from animatedknots.com

Fishing lines. Learning these knots is getting less interesting by the day...

New Songs...Well, New Recordings

Yuan Yuan was out most of the day today so I took advantage and recorded some songs, four to be exact: "No," "It'll all be over soon," "Unsatisfied" and "美丽冻人." The last one isn't Wingdings, it's a Chinese phrase with a play on words. The original phrase is 美丽动人, which means "beautiful and charming." 美丽冻人, which has one character different but is pronounced exactly the same, means "beautiful, freezing cold" when interpreted literally. Add a bit of sarcasm and you get the colloquial meaning: "wear sexy/revealing clothes even though it's freezing cold," or "freeze your ass off to look hot." It's much more short and sweet in Chinese, but then again asses here are also smaller. Wait, hold up, English does just fine: "feel cold, look hot." Anyway, you can listen to them all on my YouTube page.

Based on some research I did today, I think I could complete a 30 day trial of watching an episode a day of NCIS without stressing myself out too much. The great thing is, I can watch it without actually "watching." I can do flashcards or pushups while NCIS plays in the background and though I won't have the slightest clue as to the plotline of the episode, I'll get all the little jokes. Today I left an NCIS episode streaming on my laptop at home as I took a stroll to the store and I caught myself laughing several times on the way. When I came back, I cross-checked my laugh times with the episode and they were spot on. Now that's convenience.

The knot of the day is the Rolling Hitch:


image borrowed from animatedknots.com

This one's good for tying a rope to another rope, or to a pole, provided the pull is parallel to the tie-ee (the rope being tied to)...and here I thought Russian was the only language that had a word with a triple letter.

I had a weird dream today. I don't remember all the juicy details but I was definitely the baby Harry Potter and everyone around me was trying to kill me. The twist in this fan-fiction-dream was that whoever killed me would become more powerful, maybe even MORE powerful. It was like the wizard version of eating your enemies or the visiting Captain Cooks to acquire their skills. I remember crawling around like mad, under a car at one point, trying to avoid all the power-hungry people out for my tiny little head. I wish I could remember more, I just know that it's applicable to my life somehow.

Good Luck Chun =)

Watched Kit Kittredge today. Finally, a movie that met expectations. Very low expectations. The popcorn, on the other hand, was exemplary. It was so good, we popped the family free refill cherry, and downed the second serving with forty minutes of trite overacted time-filler to spare. You know you're suffering when you begin to miss commercial interruptions.

Michelle is leaving us again. I know I know, I don't deserve it, who else gets two vacations a month? To celebrate, I have a date with Barnes and Noble's and then perhaps some hours of guitar inadequacy. Life is good.

Also going to try and get back to Harry Potter y la Piedra Filosofal which has been gathering dust on my harddrive. Not doing anything useful can be really time-consuming, and I've been neglecting my foreign language studies.

I think I might visit some of my relatives this week. They all suffer from a congenital defect called "family values," and risk getting a heartattack if kin enter their vicinity and don't drop by. I definitely don't want any dead family karma. Those tend to take revenge on you by manifesting as some horrible disease. You can hope it's merely physical like cancer and not truly insidious like "family values."

Less than two weeks left till I get to visit my girl! She's probably fainted twice reading the previous sentence, expecting horrible jokes on her account. If so, I hope today is not the morning of July 10th, and I haven't made her late for her date with the MCATs. Yes, yes, she's one of those - aspiring murderers. Steady hands, loves blood, kills your rabbits for free (I'll never let this one go), and refuses to settle for a lesser profession than sending people's insurance rates through the roof. But...that's all in the faaaaar future. For now, she's a little study-monkey, working her butt off to earn herself debts and slavery for the next X years. Aaanyway, por donde iba?...It's so easy to get distracted when people have ambitions to poke at. What I wanted to say...I think...was: let's all help her with a cheer. Join hands you homophobes...and:

Chun, Chun, she's our man,
Even studies on the can,
Verbal, physics, bio, chem,
Wait a minute...what the hell is she thinking? She's an electric engineer...ahhh!...must salvage the cheer...Good Luck Chun!

Yesterday

Was invited to go to a wine/liquor tasting event in New York today. I declined, as I usually do most invitations, and instead sat at home and imbibed some Harry Potter y la Piedra Filosofal.

Michelle's steadily getting better at guitar, but more importantly, her patience is growing by leaps and bounds. She can now practice a song for 35 straight seconds before getting distracted by something shiny. What's even more amazing, there's a 50% chance that that shiny something is an item she already owns, and doesn't require me to drive her to buy immediately. These two put together explain the sharp drop in my frequency of driving to the store from 20 times/day 2 years ago to 4 times/day these days. The sneaky third factor is that she probably already has most of what's in most stores by now. I am slowly earning my freedom.

Still recovering from the emotional drain The Happening inflicted on me.

Today

About time to start a blog, if at least to give my stalkers an edge. Been resisting for a long time, but being a quitter, and in the interests of self-promotion, I'm abandoning my reluctance and embracing the soon to be enormous publicity.

Just came home for the 30 day weekend before I'm off to Texas. I'm already immune to cold, but still quite sensitive to heat, so it's time to learn that new skill - how not to get a heat stroke. I've decided the best way is through daily practice.

Our band, whose name is yet to be determined, but whose place in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame has already been assured, today held one of those once-a-year practice sessions. We ran through the staple song of our performance(s) - Clean Kitchen. It took some work, because despite having three guitars, we only had one cable, and one amp. Also, only 50% of the two of us knew how to play it. Oh, and we're still

looking for a drummer and singer.

Nevertheless, Clean Kitchen Unplugged now exists.

I've been slacking a little in my apprenticeship with the Spanish language. I started reading Harry Potter y la Piedra Filosofal hace un mes, y he leido solamente 35 paginas. My progress into the book resembles a logarithmic graph. Today I was able to satisfy my conscience with a mere opening of the PDF file.

If anyone wants to suggest a name for the band, I'd condescend to at least hearing the suggestion. So far, today, we've come up with the following possibilities:

buzz
buzzed
fuzz
strapless
unemployed
samurai love
12 string samurais
something kinky
santa's girlfriend/mistress

Our current MySpace page is Not4Profit, but we are not committed to being poor forever, so we're looking for a more permanent name.

By the way, graduated from college a couple days ago. Haven't gotten my diploma yet, not having gone to the ceremony. Is there an actual use to a diploma?

Realized I only actually left ~2 people when I left college - those few that ventured over to the couch I sat on the past two semesters. I managed to phase out most of my friends by graduation, saving myself the tearful goodbyes and future house calls. The people I will miss are so few that I can say with almost 100% accuracy that you're not one of them.

Don't expect more than two entries in this blog including this one, I'll probably forget to write in it after this entry.