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Below are the 20 most recent journal entries recorded in
Philip Newton's LiveJournal:
| Tuesday, July 7th, 2009 | |
| 5:40 pm | |
| Monday, July 6th, 2009 | |
| 7:45 pm | sein vs. haben Today (while pondering which verbs in German take sein as an auxiliary to form the perfect tense), it struck me what a difference the choice of auxiliary verb can make: compare Die Tür ist zugeschlagen "The door fell shut (loudly)" with Die Tür hat zugeschlagen "The door hit (someone forcefully)". |
| 3:16 pm | Funny spam subject lines "Get an omnipotent porksword!"—I don't think I've ever heard it called that before :D Relatedly, over 10'000 spam emails in a spam folder = not fun. Especially since occasionally, some ham will get trapped so I tend to skim over the folder every once in a while to see whether anything obvious got stuck. (Also, Google claims to delete mails older than 30 days, but the oldest ones seemed to be about six weeks old.) Current Mood:  amused |
| Thursday, July 2nd, 2009 | |
| 6:31 pm | I love you I'm amused that there's an island called the I love you... I mean, Isle of Ewe. Current Mood: amused |
| 5:05 pm | Eskimo words for snow There are some people who believe that Eskimo have some large number of words for snow, and/or that this is somehow significant. Someone on a mailing list just pointed out that English has nearly 100 terms for different clouds (though many of those are a basic noun combined with a more specific adjective). I wonder whether English speakers are obsessed with clouds, then. |
| Wednesday, July 1st, 2009 | |
| 6:38 am | Gifted? I suppose every parent thinks that their child is the smartest kid ever to walk this earth. The BabyCenter newsletter this week had a bit about gifted children and a link to a column about how to tell whether your child is gifted. Amy didn't really seem to match any of the criteria there—which is, I suppose, a relief as well, since giftedness often brings its own share of problems with it. I still think she's pretty clever, though :) |
| Tuesday, June 23rd, 2009 | |
| 4:12 pm | UN General Secretary demands an end to violence in Iran While skimming my friends page, I saw a headline from a news source saying that the "UN General Secretary demands an end to violence in Iran". Well, that's good to know. Perhaps he should also demand other things, such as equal rights for everyone or fair elections or enough to eat for all or something. For all the good that "demanding" something does. |
| Friday, June 19th, 2009 | |
| 6:16 pm | Weather The weather is really nice here right now. White clouds are drifting across the sky and you can often see blue patches; the sun occasionally shines into the courtyard. Apparently, it's pouring with rain at home. |
| Monday, June 15th, 2009 | |
| 2:41 pm | Mornington Crescent, De-Luxe Edition Via Current Mood:  geeky |
| 10:41 am | Antihistamines The cetirizine (generic Zyrtec/Reactine) tables that my doctor had prescribed me ran out. Stella offered me her Xusal tablets, which she said she didn't need, since abstaining from milk products helped her allergies quite a bit. I was a bit confused at finding that the active agent was "levocetirizine" and wondered whether it was the same as cetirizine. Now that I've checked Wikipedia, apparently, it's the active enantiomer of cetirizine. When I asked the doctor's assistant this morning, she said that they were different active agents, and that furthermore, levocetirizine required a prescription while cetirizine was available OTC, but that if L-c. helped me I could go on taking that. I decided to buy another 50-box of c., though, partly because I was unsure due to the fact that the recommended dose of c. is 10 mg while for L-c. is only 5 mg (though that makes sense if c. is a 50/50 mixture of L-c. and D-c.), and partly because Stella only had 20 left so I'd run out eventually anyway. Anyway, when I went down to the chemist's to pick up my prescription nose spray (which I'm close to running out of) and asked for cetirizine, she asked me which company I'd like it to be from and I said I didn't care. She brought me HEXAL brand c., which surprised me a bit since on the display shelves, they had ratiopharm brand c. on display with a sign saying that it was on sale—but she said that HEXAL brand was on sale, too, and was cheaper than ratiopharm brand. Oh well, whatever, should be all the same. The ironic thing was that she gave me a free packet of paper handkerchiefs with it, which had advertising for ratiopharm brand c. on it.... |
| Thursday, June 11th, 2009 | |
| 9:27 am | Another Amyism: become Heard this morning: "And Jana becomes the bear spoon". I found this one especially adorable because I know that this is a mistake I used to make, too. In first grade, we used to have to write little stories about "what I did on the week-end", and I still remember being corrected after having written "I became my pocket money" once. (Fortunately, the teacher knew enough German to know where that came from.) Current Mood:  accomplished |
| Wednesday, June 10th, 2009 | |
| 1:18 pm | How not to spell things phonetically (Inspired by this comment) How not to spell "Waceys" phonetically: "W as in 'why', A as in 'are', C as in 'cue', E as in 'eye', Y as in 'you', S as in 'sea'". ("Wait, was that 'why are cue eye you sea', YRQIUC?") Current Mood: amused |
| 12:57 pm | 0.02% of perl is my fault I just saw a journal entry of Léon Brocard's in which he says that 0.02% of perl is his fault, and giving the breakdown for all those who contributed at least 2 lines to the perl interpreter according to a script he found. According to the results in that entry, I contributed 491+4 = 495 lines, or 0.02%, to the current version of perl. I'm rather surprised that the number was that high; I wonder what my contributions were. (I seem to recall submitting a bug about the Y2K testing code which got things wrong—looking for '19' being tacked to the end of a variable rather than onto the beginning IIRC—but other than that I'm not sure what I contributed.) |
| Friday, June 5th, 2009 | |
| 8:19 pm | An unpleasant surprise We had rented a car to go and visit my sister in Wuppertal for the christening of her little boy. This evening, we decided to go shopping and buy some more heavy things (mostly drinks) since we had the car already. When we moved the back seats a bit forward in preparation for putting more things into the boot (US: trunk), Stella got an unpleasant surprise: there were a bunch of peanuts that had fallen behind one of the seats. Stella didn't want to ride in a car that had peanuts in it because of her allergies, so Amy and I headed off to a filling station. I filled up the car (since I would need some more petrol anyway for the long trip tomorrow) and vacuumed the car. Then we met Stella at ALDI. She inspected the area and pronounced my efforts sufficient, and thanked me for doing that for her. We were both annoyed that the car hadn't been cleaned completely, *especially* of such an allergen. Though to be honest, that part of the car was only visible (or accessible) if you move the seats forward most of the way. We're not going to return the car now, but we'll make sure to mention it when we do bring it back on Tuesday. |
| 12:31 pm | In the spirit of "tap water" coming from "faucets" John Wells just pointed out in an aside in an article on his "vortaro-blogo" that
Current Mood: amused |
| Wednesday, June 3rd, 2009 | |
| 1:54 pm | "That are you and this am I" Inspired by this entry and, more specifically, She'll say things such as "That are you and this am I", when pointing to a picture she's drawn. Fine by German grammar, where the verb agrees with the right-hand side (I suppose that's the grammatical subject?), but not in English, where you'd say "That's you and this is me" or "That's you and this is I", depending on how prescriptive you were being. |
| Tuesday, June 2nd, 2009 | |
| 4:18 pm | When Euphemisms Attack The Straight Dope attacks the question of why a "restroom" is sometimes called that when its primary purpose is not for resting, and ends with a quote which I simply have to share with you:
Current Mood: amused |
| Saturday, May 30th, 2009 | |
| 8:48 pm | The Sims 3 So... Stella was looking at some promotional videos from The Sims 3, and I had read a brief review of the new Prima Game Guide, and together, they kind of whetted our appetites. So I caved and we've ordered the game. We had considered ordering two copies, so we could play simultaneously, but we're not even sure how well our computers will handle the game, plus we usually play at different times, so we went with one copy for now. I also ordered the English Prima Guide, though they don't have it in stock right now. Stella said that if the game is good, we're going to sell our Sims 2 stuff while they still fetch decent prices, which is a bit :'(... we shall have to see. And whether I even play the old game at all. (I remember playing Sims 1 once after having Sims 2 for a while... it really wasn't what I had remembered, and after that I had no more qualms selling our old discs :D) Ah well. We shall see. |
| Tuesday, May 26th, 2009 | |
| 8:42 pm | The things you learn: omitting the apostrophe in German Apparently, it's allowed to omit the apostrophe when the "e" in "es" is omitted: "Mir gehts gut. Er macht sichs gemütlich. Nimms nicht so ernst." Huh. I would've thought the apostrophe was obligatory there, but quoth Duden (Richtiges und gutes Deutsch, s.v. "Apostroph"):
Huh. Oh, and Duden also says that according to the new orthography, no apostrophe need be used when a final -e in certain verb forms is dropped:
And the apostrophe is explicitly not to be used in general ("in der Regel") with common short-form imperatives ("allgemein üblichen verkürzten Imperativformen (Befehlsformen)"):
I wasn't sure about the apostrophe rules there, so that was interesting to know. But the "es" rule? That's one I never would have guessed. At least apostrophe-dropping is optional there, rather than mandatory. |
| 8:01 pm | The art of telemarketing I just got a call from a research company on behalf of Enterprise Rent-a-car, where I had rented a car over the week-end. The lady said she had a few questions for me and would I have a few minutes to answer them? I said sure. She asked me how satisfied I was with the overall experience and how likely it would be for me to choose Enterprise again when I wanted to rent another car. Short and sweet, though the enumeration of the possible answers after each question I found a bit annoying. But afterwards, she said that my answers were valued and that they were helpful for Enterprise, and thanked me for my time. Which would have made a better impression on me had it not sounded as if she was reading from a script. Scripts are fine. Sincere appreciation is also fine. But "appreciation" from a script just doesn't cut it somehow. The way she read them off, they sounded like empty words—or shall I say, like words that weren't hers. I think that was the most insincere bit: that it sounded as if she was reading them off a sheet of paper or off a computer screen and saying them because she was expected to say them, but without feeling and without giving the impression that the emotion expressed in them originated from her. I suppose that's part of the art of telemarketing: making it sound as if you're speaking naturally and you're really interested in the customer's business, not reading formulaic phrases off a script that someone designed to make customers feel good. (Because lady: they don't if it's so obvious that you're not putting any life into them.) It's not that she sounded bored with her job or anything; it was just a neutral delivery. |
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