A Girl With a Sword

oh chomsky what?

So I was reading some examples about Government and Binding Theory the other day, and let me just say that I found this far too entertaining.

(1) The magazines were sent to Mary1’s mother by her1 (the idiot1, the idiot1 herself) yesterday.

(2) Money was hidden from Bill1's son by him1 (the bastard1, the bastard1 himself) yesterday.

(3) Tabs were kept on Bill1's workers by him1 (the idiot1, the idiot1 himself) last year.

(the little numbers mean things are coreferential) I'm not really sure what it all means (I think it's about substituting the nouns and the reflexives for the pronouns), but it makes me happy.

who would have thought

a perfume blog!

and I heard about it through the NPR review of the new Diddy album.  I noticed that the reviewer spent a lot of time sort of mocking the fact that Diddy keeps changing his name, and although I understand that, I started to wonder why it is we get so annoyed when artists change their names, the whole "artist formerly known as Prince" thing.  Is this a cultural faux pas?  Are we annoyed at them for not obeying naming rules?

Also, heard this fun interchange on the college radio station tonight:
DJ1: Sure, let's put some John Darnielle in there.
<pause>
DJ2: Now you're name dropping.
DJ1: I can do that, I'm a hipster.

wish I was warmer

I just read Funke's blog and she told me that blogging doesn't need your brain and I thought, that sounds good right now, so I decided to blog. It's cold in Columbia this week. I thought I moved to oh my sweet Carolina to get away from this. Oh well, no freezing to death at the bus stop this year anyway. Yesterday afternoon I drove over to Goodwill and bought me some sweaters. I realized I'm missing all of Keri and Tami's sweaters so I probably need some. Now, I'm not a thrift store kind of girl. Why do I want something someone wore in '93 and then rejected? But then I remember that for the last few years most of my clothes have come from those end-of-the-semester giveaway piles. Leaving college is a bad idea in so many ways.

Here is a useful phrase I learned the other day while studying about compliments in Polish:
Tadeusz, naprawde masz rewelacyjne spodnie!
'Tadeusz, you have really terrific pants!'

these days

fallbreaking it down

So, I got to Chattanooga yesterday evening. I'm so happy to be on Fall Break (even though it isn't a real break). I've hauled half the books in Thomas Cooper Library over here and I don't want to look at them. I am so tired of studying.

Last night was a nice break, though. We walked down to Mojo for dinner. Then later on Michael, Eb, and Katzman came over here. Around midnight, Eb and I went over to Lamar's where they were having the crazy Wolf Eyes show. I had no experience with the Noise genre, except I guess Gang Gang Dance, but really, that night we went to see them at the Drunken Unicorn is kind of vague in my memory (I think it was the noise). Wolf Eyes was very much noise, hard to fit the term "music" in there, let alone "rock." I kind of liked it, really, it definitely conjured an emotional response. It reminded me of that kind of poetry that doesn't really have structure, that's just words and made up words used to trigger emotions. The thing about Wolf Eyes, though, was that it was all the same emotion the whole time--a kind of primordial panic.

After the show Eb and I and some other people we'd met up with ended up driving around in circles through town, first looking for a Kareoke bar that ended up being closed with a parking lot full of homeless people, then looking for parties at addresses that didn't exist. Somewhere in the circles I got pulled over by the police, which I blame entirely on Eb. Apparently Eb magicked one of my headlights out. Darn him. (I only got a warning, though, no fine.) Then we ended up in a neighborhood near UTC, going up a narrow curvy staircase, following people who were carrying furniture. The night ended with tofu burgers and horseradish and videogame fights to the death.

oh my

Jack's making labials!

hear it in your voice

We spent the entire Sociolinguistics class on Thursday discussing voices. It really got me started thinking about how important voices are in the way we think about people, I mean there's deep voices and high voices and there's "smoker's voice" "telephone voice" "gay voice" "valley-girl voice". As a class we decided that we associate deeper voices with more rational thinking and higher voices with more emotional sensitivity. And of course we associate deeper voices with men and higher voices with women. That's not too exciting, but then I started thinking about trends in voice-coolness. At different times different kinds of voices are kind of en vogue. Think of all those recordings we hear of women from the fifties singing, and how they all sound the same, high and chirpy. Now granted singing voices are different from talking voices, but when I was little all those high chirpy voices really freaked me out because I thought they sounded unnatural. Then there are those women who have deep voices, Lauren Bacall, Nico (Donna on That 70's Show). There's the deep, sultry voice and then the deep, authoritative voice--Margaret Thatcher (Captain Catherine Janeway).

But what really intrigues me is the recent trend toward higher-pitch in men's voices lately, the main examples I have are Ira Glass and Conor Oberst (aka Bright Eyes), but I hear this all over. It's not the same as the gay voice, which is also higher than normal, but it does have some similarities. This kind of metro/hipster voice conveys emotional sensitivity with a kind of geekiness (I think we're all familiar with the stereotypical geeky voice) and thus counter-culture hip intelligence. It's a very contrived voice, but, as proved by its presence on radio, it's very easy to listen to. This kind of all goes along with what I wrote earlier about hipster men as more sensitive. What I find really cool is that the trends of culture manifest themselves not only in dress and what we talk about but also in the voices we talk in. Our voices, as well as our words, give a kind of mini-biography to anyone able to read these highly encrypted messages.

crane wifery

I love The Decemberists, and Amp Camp my new Decemberists facilitator. I was concerned about the move to a major label only because I thought, "oh no! what about my free stuff, my stickers, my posters, my free samples of obscure bands I have never heard of?" Well I needn't have worried, it's all still here, together with my own personal message from Amp Camp that reads as follows: "Hey Linnea, Enjoy!" How endearing. I'm just listening to the CD for the first time now, having miraculously managed to keep my Crane Wife virginity for this long. And even though I preordered I didn't get the album until today. Do the little Decemberists band member pictures on the liner notes remind anyone else of the American Girl books? I just expect to look under the picture of Jenny and see the words "Felicity Merriman, a spirited and spritely American girl" and under the picture of Colin "Uncle Gard, Samantha's outrageous handle-bar moustache-sporting male relative." New music, it feels good. New stickers with band members faces on them, oh yeah.