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Monday, July 14th, 2003
A milestone of sorts at dinner today; Sylvia figured out her first spelled-out word (i.e. one whose meaning Ellen and I are trying to keep from her by spelling it out). I served the corn and Ellen asked if she could please have a little pat of B U T T E R -- this going on the assumption, as we have for a while, that hearing the word "butter" while at the dinner table is a bad combination for Sylvia -- it drives her into a butter-eating frenzy that does not seem to be provoked by the mere sight of the comestible. But I digress -- Sylvia asked, "What['s] B R?"* So I gave her a little help -- passed the substance over to Ellen and said "Here you go Mommy, here's your B U T T E R." Now Sylvia, "I like some B R too!" So we talked about it in spelled-out form throughout the meal; by the end of dinner Sylvia was calling it B R T R, reminding me of the "Frances" books. ... In other Sylvia news, I was glad to read a book with her today (Dan and Dan, about a boy and his grandfather) and have her do almost all the reading -- she said about 12 sentences out of the book's 15 or so. She has taken to calling Lola "Mr. Dog"; and yesterday on the front lawn she wrapped a flag around her like a toga and said, "I'm Mr. Flag!" ----- * A note on punctuation -- when I use square brackets quoting Sylvia, it is something I think she said but I may have just filled in for her out of habit of listening to her learn to talk.
posted evening of July 14th, 2003: Respond
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Saturday, July 12th, 2003
I spent much of this morning and afternoon pruning bushes in our front yard, and came to really enjoy it. This is something that I am doing without investing any research in it, trying to go purely by instinct. (Plus I got a little advice from my father when he was here, and from the tree surgeon who worked on our big maple tree.) Figuring out which branch needs to come away and tracking it back to the appropriate separation point can be quite pleasurable. And trimming the hedges was really fun, like giving someone a haircut.
posted afternoon of July 12th, 2003: Respond
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Friday, July 11th, 2003
Two new entries on the blogroll: Crooked Timber is brand-new and one of the finest things to come down the pike in a long while; it features two of my very favorite bloggers, Kieran Healy and Daniel Davies, plus some others that I was not familiar with before but am glad for the introduction. (Note: if you browse with an old version of MS Explorer, the site will be hard to read. Current MS Explorer and current Mozilla both display the site well.) And Planned Obsolescence, which has been referring people over my way for a while now -- speaking of which, if you surf over here for the first time from whatever point of origin, I'd love if you'd give me a shout and let me know who you are. If you have any interest in Julian Jaynes' theory of consciousness -- or if you think the subject is played and I ought not waste my time on it -- let me know about that too.
posted morning of July 11th, 2003: Respond
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Wednesday, July 9th, 2003
For the past while I've been reading two books. The book I like is Cartoon History of the Universe part III, by Larry Gonick -- it surpasses the very fine parts I and II, it just shines. Gonick's history is excellent, lots of stuff I didn't know mixed with lots of stuff I knew but had forgotten or not bothered to really learn, and dry humor, and slapstick! I have been reading it before I go to bed and it is beneficial to my dreams. The book I don't like so well is Donleavy's The Ginger Man, which I have been reading on the train to and from work. Yesterday I found a passage that I think sums up everything that is wrong with this book, as well as its virtues. I look into Tone's face, which is Ireland."What would you do, Tone, if you ever got money. A lot of money." "Do you want the truth?" "I want the truth" "First thing, I'd get a suit made. Then I'll come along to the Seven Ts and put a hundred pound note on the bar. Drink up the whole kip of ye. I'll send a hundred quid to O'Keefe and tell him to come back. May even, if I get drunk enough, put a plaque in the sidewalk on the corner of Harry and Grafton. Percy Clocklan, keepr of the kip who farted on this spot, R.I.P. Then, Sebastian, I'll start from College Green and I'll walk every inch of the way from here to Kerry getting drunk at every pub. It'll take me about a year. Then I'll arrive on the Dingle Peninsula, walk out on the end of Slea Head, beat, wet, and penniless. I'll sit there and weep into the sea." So... this passage is clever, pretty funny, very cynical. But that's all it is. Tony Malarky has no soul, is just a creature put on the page to communicate to us this sardonic fantasy. (And I wouldn't really consider him a foil to Sebastian Dangerfield, either -- Dangerfield himself has no fullness of character.) That's how the whole book feels to me, kind of pretty but with no depth to it, and no unifying thread. I might call it juvenile. It tries to present cynicism in a romantic light which seems to me a pointless exercise.
posted afternoon of July 9th, 2003: Respond
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Following up on the spelling post below -- I wonder what Sylvia's understanding of "spelling" a word is... My impulse is almost to think that it is purely a collection of sounds, poetry without meaning. I mean, let's say she knows how to say "N O spells No" -- I am pretty sure that started out as just a sound pattern. But let's say she later puts the "N" and "O" magnets next to each other on the refrigerator door, points at it and says, "spells No!" This happened sometime last week, and at this point I think it is pretty clear that the sentence "N O spells No" is a fully fledged semantic unit for Sylvia. Where does recitation shade over into meaning? Update: Rereading this post, particularly the last sentence, I think it could easily lead in to a discussion of language along the lines of Jaynes in "The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind". I have no clear ideas at the moment of how to move the discussion in that direction; but if you have any such I would most appreciate if you could share them with me.
posted morning of July 9th, 2003: Respond
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Tuesday, July 8th, 2003
The latest step in Sylvia's language acquisition, is spelling. She has known the letters of the alphabet pretty well for close to a year now (I think, or maybe half a year) and has associated each with a word that begins with that letter; S="Me!", D="You, da-da!", C="Clifford!",... A few weeks ago she started saying "N O spells No!" which we assume she picked up in nursery school; and at around the same time we started trying to teach her to spell her name. She's just about got her name down (long and difficult though it be) and is starting to get some other words, too. When I got home this evening she told me "P R A spells Monkey!" -- she said this several times, I don't know its genesis or if she was just riffing on the notion of spelling words... Eventually I told her, "M O N K E Y spells Monkey," and she got a big grin -- for the next 10 minutes or so she would ask me to "spell word —" (mostly animal species) and I would do so, then I thought I would try to pull the game back into pedagogical territory and asked if she knew how to spell Mom. "...help." "M O M." "No, no, you forgot the A! M A M A M A M A..." Turns out Ellen had been practicing spelling Mama with her earlier.
posted evening of July 8th, 2003: Respond
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Friday, July 4th, 2003
No, I'm not talking about 3.1... Today I rehung the first of the stuck windows in my house; there are about 5 in all, plus several that open and close but with a lot of resistance. Since I could not find actual, step by step instructions anywhere on the web or in any books I looked in1, I thought I would write them out here. These instructions are only for windows with weights inside the frame; and specifically for windows built just like mine. I'm sure there are many variations on old window design; if you're taking yours apart and run into something different, you're on your own. The first thing is to remove the sash molding. This is the rounded piece running up and down the side of the window frame, which holds the lower sash in place. ("Sash" is the thing that has glass in it and slides up and down.) The way to take this off is, first run a utility knife along where the molding joins to the window frame, i.e. the middle of the concave curve there; this will score the paint so that it does not chip during the next step. Now drive a chisel into this joint (assuming the molding is nailed on, not screwed) to force the joint apart. Once it is apart, use a crowbar to detach the molding. If the molding is screwed on, you will need to unscrew it first; this will probably be a huge hassle as there will likely be multiple coats of paint on top of the screws. It is a good idea to take both moldings off; being lazy, I only did it on the side where the weight was off, and this worked alright. Note: William Duffield, of the Woodcentral Hand Tools Forum, recommends using two 1" putty knives, instead of a utility knife and chisel. One of them should be sharpened at the end. You will be able to run the knives along the joint and find the nails, and only pry where there are nails. This should significantly reduce the damage done to the molding. Now you need to get access to the inside of the window frame. The way this was set up on my window was, underneath the sash molding was a screw holding a segment of the frame in place; once I undid it that piece came away. I have no idea how standard this setup is. Inside the frame will be a weight with a chain attached to it; the other end of this chain is supposed to be attached to the sash. Remove the chain from the weight -- this should be straightforward -- and thread it through the pulley at the top of the windowframe. Your pulley may be stuck in place by old layers of paint -- mine was -- I do not think this is a big deal, the chain will just slide over the wheel instead of turning the wheel. Thread a nail or paperclip through the end of the chain, so you can leave it alone at the top of the pulley and work with the other end. Go back to the access hole in the frame, and fish out the chain, and reattach it to the weight. Put the weight back inside the frame. Now you need to put the chain back onto the sash. Examine the other side of the sash (assuming that the weight was only off on one side) to see how it is attached. The way mine was on, was it threaded through a hole in the wood and then hooked on to a spring which was larger than the hole; the spring sat in a mortise in the side of the sash. Once both sides have their chains attached, you can put the sash back in its track, and nail the moldings back on.2 What I did next may be totally unconventional, I really don't know. At this point, the window slid up and down but, like several others in my house, it did not slide easily. This is particularly a problem for Ellen, who can't get some of them to move at all. So I just coated the sash track with bowling alley wax, and slid it up and down until it moved easily. I don't know how long this will last, but if it is still moving easily in a couple of days, I am going to do the same for my other resistant windows. Otherwise I guess I need to try something else... ----- 1 -- to tell the truth I found several step by step guides to rehanging a window; but all were extremely non-specific, along the lines of "1. Take off the moldings. 2. Take off the sash. 3. Take off the sash cords. 4. Put it all back together." -- with accompanying full-color pictures that added nothing to the written instructions. 2 -- Several books recommended reattaching the moldings with screws, so that it would be easier to do maintenance in the future; this strikes me as ass-backwards thinking. Everywhere in my house where there are screws on an exterior surface, they are covered with many layers of paint and hugely frustrating. (The screws which held the piece of the window frame in place above were underneath the sash molding, so not painted.)
posted afternoon of July 4th, 2003: Respond
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Wednesday, July second, 2003
Be sure to go check out Scott McCloud's The Right Number which went up yesterday. Only 25 cents for 32 views! And his main page says he will be restarting "Morning Improv" later this month.
posted morning of July second, 2003: Respond
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Monday, June 30th, 2003
Weird ... I'm looking at my referrers log and there is at 3:08 this afternoon, a referral from www.iaea.org -- the home page of the International Atomic Energy Association. Why would they link to me? I surfed over there and did not see any link to READIN. Does anyone have a clue what this would mean? Is there a way to make your browser spoof web pages with the wrong referrer info? And if so what is the point of doing it? Update: Mark Paschal writes in to let me know the IAEA referrer is an "abusive spider", and to point me to a discussion of it on Webmaster World. From what I can gather, the reason to report a false referrer URL is, to prevent sites from blocking spiders. ... Also, another blogroll link to me -- this one is from Tim Dunlop's excellent Road to Surfdom.
posted evening of June 30th, 2003: Respond
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Inspired by Invisible Adjunct and Kieran Healy, I am seeking input from my readers as regards my summer reading list. I am, however, doing it a bit in reverse: I went to the bookstore this weekend, bought a bunch of books which caught my eye -- these will make up my summer reading (at least until they are exhausted); and now I want to find out if any of you have impressions about them. I do not, alas, have a comments feature; but if you send me e-mail in this regard I promise to put it up as part of this post. So fire away! Here is this list, with comments: - Travels in Hyperreality, by Umberto Eco
- The Ginger Man, by J.P. Donleavy
- Under the Net, by Iris Murdoch
- Nuns and Soldiers, by Iris Murdoch
- The Beginning of Spring, by Penelope Fitzgerald
- Journal of the Fictive Life, by Howard Nemerov
- Quetzlcoatl and the Irony of Empire, by David Carrasco
- Black Spring, by Henry Miller
posted evening of June 30th, 2003: Respond
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