Glasgow is in Lanarkshire (at least the part of Glasgow I'm in...), and, as far as I can tell, they drink mainly Stella Artois, which is one of my favorites!
Tomorrow I have an appointment with destiny, in the form of Gary's Licenced Grocers.
 | This seems to be rapidly (rabidly?) changing into a PHOTO BLOG. Check back for comments and photos from Scotland, where they do things funny. I'm leaving Saturday... |
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Shelley driving me (mad) to Yakima
Heather and Eddy preparing to float the Yakima
More preparation
I thought I'd be a little unorthodox and just put a standard news update--a list of all the important issues--here.
Item 1:
I have a girlfriend. Her image may be viewed here. Her name is Heather and she is wicked cool. Her blog, however, is dead, or, as Heather says, its glory days are over.
Item 2:
I'm leaving. I was accepted to the University of Glasgow for my MLitt in English Language and Linguistics. I'll be gone from September of 2005 to September of 2006. Anyone wishing to make a large monetary donation...
This also means that I've graduated from UW.
Item C:
I have a temporary job for the summer. I'm an apprentice! Hopefully I get to learn some carpentry, tile work, and stone-cutting... And my employer is a dadaist! At least, I think he is... That, or the lack of eight ambulatory lemons.
Item 4:
I stepped on my own finger the other day. Now my fingernail has a little white scratch on it and my finger is sore.
Item 5:
This is more convenient and more annoying than just emailing myself the list.
http://seattle.craigslist.org/ret/79704167.html
http://seattle.craigslist.org/trd/79748885.html
http://seattle.craigslist.org/wri/79366906.html
More to follow.
We've resolved that it should be formal government job etiquette to not make calls to other departments after a certain point in the afternoon. It seems that everyone waits until the last minute to try to press all their orders through, which makes us all ... up-tight.
To this end, my co-workers and I propose that beginning at 4:20 on weekday afternoons, reggae be piped through all government office sound systems. Mellow mood has got me...
I have decided that I have another story worth telling.
Last Sunday, Heather, Shelley, and I, after partaking in a truly EPIC feast of the Thai variety (hosted and prepared with help by my new family, the Dickersons), were talking about how to spend the rest of the afternoon. Suddenly, someone (I think Shelley) said, "we could go to Canada..." So that's what we did. We left at about 6:00 pm from Seattle and, having decided to go somewhere less conventional than Vancouver, drove up to the border at Sumas/Abbotsford- we got there at around 7:30 or 8. On that crossing, the patrol on duty was slightly suspicious of our motives, but let us pass unhindered.
Upon crossing the border, we decided to drive the extra 20 minutes to Chiliwack: we found the name exotic and enticing, and expected the town itself to live up to the standards it had set by adopting this title. We were not disappointed. The restaurant we ate at (masquerading as a sports pub) was actually a culinary Mecca, specializing in such delicacies as Yorkshire pudding. To boot (as they might say up there), we dined in an amazing outdoor patio by a gas firepit.
After finding and touring a Canadian store, which, counter to its appearances, assured us that it was not simply a Fred Meyer with slightly raised vowel pronunciation, we prepared to cross the border (at around 10:00) to return Stateside. At this crossing, however, the guards were less easygoing and were incredulous at our claims that we had traveled all the way from Seattle just for dinner on a Sunday night. We proceeded inside, at their urging, and waited while they searched our car and made us fill out customs forms. We were too happy and tired to care, however...
Here is an anecdote from my new place of occupation.
The other day, I was sitting at my desk in the Health Sciences building, working, and the phone rang. I answered it "Classroom services," as I was accustomed to do.
"Hi," said the voice on the other end. "We're having a blood drive over here in the lobby, and we can't really see what we're doing. Could you turn on the rest of the fluorescent lights for us?"
"I'll see what I can do," I answered. I asked my co-worker Joe if I could go down and do that for them.
"No," he said, "I think the Physical Plant handles lights."
"So should I call them?" I asked.
"Yeah... You could probably do that."
Then I called the Physical Plant. "Physical plant," the lady said.
"Hi, this is Joel in classroom services," I began, "and I'm calling regarding a request I've just received to turn on the rest of the lights in the Health Sciences lobby for a blood drive they're having. They can't really see what they're doing."
"The lobby? Man! I put in a work order a week ago to have those turned on."
"Oh... Right..."
"They're on break now, so they won't be able to turn on the lights until 10:00..."
"I guess that will be fine," I said, and promptly hung up the phone in amazement at the mass amounts of eerie glowing crimson tape suddenly spilling out from the phone and inundating my desk.
Though there are interesting features both in the consonant and vowel repertories of Icelandic, this paper will focus primarily upon Icelandic consonant phenomena, primarily those of aspiration, and where related, gemination. This paper will contain a brief introduction to the Icelandic consonant inventory and some cursory information on the diachronic progression of Icelandic consonants (which is helpful in that it enables one to predict Modern Icelandic pronunciation from the orthography, as I have done for this paper). Also introduced are some of the previous and current theories related to Icelandic consonant preaspiration. This will be followed by a survey of some of the data I have compiled from grammars and dictionaries, an analysis of the data as well as a discussion of possible derivations and rules governing preaspiration, and finally a discussion of some problems inherent in a purely syllable-based analysis.
Icelandic stops, instead of contrasting between voiced and unvoiced, use aspiration contrastively. Historically, consonants all contrasted based on voicing, and the orthography represents the earlier voiced contrast rather than the modern, aspirated one: though there are no longer any voiced stops in Modern Icelandic, the orthography includes b, d, gj, and g. Underlyingly, however, these sounds have changed to unaspirated [p, t, c, k], which are in contrastive distribution with [ph, th, ch, kh] (p, t, kj, and k, respectively, as seen in the orthography).
A feature of Modern Icelandic that makes it an interesting study is the presence of preaspiration in certain environments. Several arguments have been suggested to account for preaspiration, which Hansson (2003:24) deems a 'diachronically highly unstable' phenomenon. It is important to consider these arguments before examining the data, in order to assess their appropriateness. Preaspiration is not reflected in the orthography of Icelandic (though it can be accurately predicted from it, either from the orthographically represented gemination or based on environment), but it does not appear to be an allophonic phenomenon. There are several minimal and many near-minimal pairs that illustrate its contrastive status, and Hansson (2003), based on durational studies, suggests that, rather than a 'preaspiration' feature of the consonant, there is a full [h] segment, as part of a surface cluster. Implementing Hansson's suggestion, the Icelandic word epli ('apple') is transcribed as [ ɛhplɪ ] rather than as [ɛhplɪ], the method which had often previously been used. Because of the extreme vowel coloring that almost always occurs in a situation of preaspiration, Hansson also reflects the devoiced vowel in his analyses, and an allophonic equivalent to the previous example includes a devoiced [ɛ]. Though I accept Hansson's suggestion that there is no actual [preaspiration] feature, I continue to use the word to describe the phenomenon of h + deaspirated stop clusters, due to convenience.
It's nice of the paper to group all the comics I hate together into one section—I just wish it didn't take up all four pages.
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Breaking news: For all of my readers in England (I'm pretty sure that excludes just about everyone): I managed to hook up a British phone number to my computer phone in addition to the Olympia one. So, if you're English, and reading my blog, please call me and tell me WHY.
0870 - 3404200
Someone told me recently that my blog is boring. It's true, I haven't posted all break. It's hard to do so when to go home means a 6,000 mile trek on foot across tundra and volcanoes, and to get anything put on the Internet you have to use a combination of smoke signals, carrier pigeons, and flares. Those flares get expensive out there! Anyway, I hope everyone had a good Christmas and New Year's. Me, I caught malaria. Or a cold- I'm not sure which.
Let me know when you've had enough...
Let's all jump on this bandwagon!
Last night I dreamed that I was asleep, and my sister came in the room and woke me up, and asked what I dreamed. I smiled because I had had a really awesome dream, and I knew that when I woke up I'd be able to put it in my blog and it would be way more awesome than everyone else's dreams. I had her type up my dream for me so I could copy it and paste it later into my blog. She laughed the whole time because my dream was so funny. Then she left and I realized that it was still pretty early, so I went back to sleep.
That's all I can remember about my dream. I had another one, too, and it was something about monocles (I blame that on my discovery of this jewel yesterday). I don't remember what, though.
Man that dream in my dream was funny, though.
In other news, read this story and the ones surrounding it.
...UNTIL NOW!
Noteworthy enough to resort to capital letters, even! I got a phone number! Not a phone, or a cell phone, just a number. And I can answer it on my computer. It's an Olympia, WA number for some reason... I don't get that, but I'm not complaining. So if anyone's bored, here it is (against my better judgement): 1-360-516-1972. Don't no weirdos call, and don't call after 11 or so at night (my roomie likes his sleep), but you can even leave me voicemail if I don't answer. It's busy a lot, I can't call out, and sometimes the program crashes randomly, but I love it.
Also, if anyone has a service called FWD (free world dialup), my number on that is 519789
(edit: 30 seconds later)
This blog is a reflection of my soul: boring and stagnant. Don't expect any more than that or you'll be disappointed. Of course, you will be anyway... You should probably get used to it.
