“No accent”

In the previous post I mentioned some inane commentary from one of the people who were part of the staff on Buffy. I won’t mention any names because this thing is Googlable, but it was one of the creators of the show, not one of the actors. And yes, she did say some really stupid things. Such as the line “James Marsters isn’t British… in fact he has no accent!” James Marsters, for those who don’t know Buffy at all, is an actor who plays a vampire with a “British” accent. (In fact, once you know he’s American, you can hear the non-Britishisms from time to time, although I do think he does a good British accent - but then, I’m foreign.) However, he as I just said he is American, you can hear him in this clip from an interview, and would you say he had no accent? He has a normal, not particularly broad American accent, that’s what. And claiming that somebody - anybody - has no accent is just an ignorant thing to say.

And that’s quite enough of that.

After, I watched another episode commented by Joss Whedon, and that was great fun. He says the oddest thing with a completely deadpan intonation, it’s excellent. Yay Joss.

Failure and atonement

Yes, yes, I failed. I didn’t manage to blog every day during PeBloWriMo. I guess I got fed up with writing pointless posts just for the sake of writing, and also I got home much later from choir practice last night than I’d intended. But still, I wasn’t supposed to fail, and definitely not with only two days left to go.

I did write a lot yesterday, though, and ended up submitting a chapter to my supervisor, plus an updated and corrected version of the chapter I sent her last week. So that’s some writing done. And then I had a - not sleepless, but insufficiently sleepful, night, so am not doing much of anything today. The “not much” includes watching some episode commentaries on Buffy the Vampire Slayer; we’re re-watching the series, and are currently just started on season 3, so I’m watching a couple of Season 2 episodes, which unfortunately are commented (commentaried??) by one of the series’ staff who says the most inane and frankly rather stupid things. This bothers me. I may have some more specific comments to make later, after I’ve watched the whole episode.

Eyesight

I now have a supply of contact lenses that will last me 6 months if I use them every day. Which I don’t, so I should be good for a bit longer than that. Last time I got new lenses was in 2004.

I also have three different spectacles, or frames anyway, to try out for a couple of days. They look radically different from my old ones. Scary, that.

Also, I have booked an appointment with a naprapath on Friday. I have needed one badly for months now, so it’s quite impressive, knowing me, that I actually did it. (I probably wouldn’t have if they hadn’t had a web booking form - much less scary than picking up a phone!)

Next thing you know, I’ll probably book a dentist appointment. Which is also way way overdue. I am turning into Efficient Néa. (Well, not really. But more so than usual.)

Yellow-Eye

Cassandra has a phobia against closed doors. Who knows, perhaps she fears being shut out of our lives, or something; in any case she looks (and sounds) as if she is personally affronted by all those closed doors we have. Sometimes in the evenings when we’re in bed we’ll hear her open every closet in the house. I don’t think she tries to get into the closets or anything, she just can’t abide a closed door.

Today she was more insistent than usual, trying to get into the linen closet. So I thought I’d let her see what was in there, and maybe she’d lose interest….

Her eyes are actually amber-yellow, it’s just the flash makes them look green.

Det fina i kråksången

A very cool music video with ditto song. It makes me sit and dance on my chair, so the neighbours think I’m even stranger than usual. And there are birds, probably crows, in it.

Random Beer Name Generator generates random beer names. Most of them are silly or bland, but some are pretty good, such as the Amber Solstice Russian Imperial Stout.

Oh, and Kicki? Are you reading this? The GROW! games guy has published two new games since last time I checked: GROW! Island where you find the right order to introduce new technologies to the island - and watch out, cos there are two radically different endings! - and GROW! Nano 3 which is a small and fairly quick, but very sweet, grow game where you help the little guy get healthy again. Not only Kicki will enjoy these, but I know she’s a special fan of the series.

(The first two links from MCiOS. The GROW! links from Jay is Games.)

All happy families are alike

As I’m typing this, Anna Karenina is being downloaded to my computer as 712 mp3 files. (Part 156 coming down right now.) I bought it for EUR 12 from the site emusic.com where we buy a lot of excellent music. It’s a very good music store, with a LOT of good music, cheaper by far than iTunes store and without any limitations to how many devices you can play the music on (there’s two people in our family, we have one computer each at home, J has another computer at work, and we both have an iPod. This doesn’t exceed the number of times you can play an iTunes store bought track, but I think it comes close. And I like not supporting that kind of stupidity by buying from them, anyway.) And if a track you’ve once bought is lost for some reason, you can download it again from emusic.com without any extra fee.

This wasn’t going to be a sales pitch for emusic, though I do recommend checking them out, for anybody who is interested in music or audio books. I look forward to listening to almost 34 hours of Anna Karenina. I’ve never read it, as a matter of fact, just excerpts. An audio book is a very different animal from a regular book, not only for the obvious reason that it’s mediated by a person narrating it but also because there is no skimming, and the reading pace is set by another person. The narrator is very important, of course. As I wrote a few days ago, I wouldn’t want to listen to an American voice narrating Jane Austen - though that would depend on the person’s accent. Too-flat narrations are no good either, not if I’m paying money to listen to them, and I’m a bit sensitive to overly theatrical performances as well. A while ago, somebody read his own book on Swedish radio and it was just really painful to listen to, because he was trying to do various regional accents. Which is not a good idea unless you are a genious at accents.

There are enough excellent narrators in the world to keep me happy, though. Torgny Lindgren, as I mentioned before, and also my grade 7-9 Swedish teacher who taught us the history of literature partly by reading parts of the classics to us, making them come alive to us in a way that mere reading of the works wouldn’t have done (and I say this, who has always been fond of reading silently to myself.) Unfortunately neither of those gentlemen is available through emusic, which limits itself to English-language literature. I’m looking forward to discovering the best English narrators; I know of a few I like very much, but there has to be hundreds and hundreds that I would like if I’d heard them.

The download is complete and J is setting the table for lunch, so I’ll wrap this up. Keep listening to books.

Oh dear

A large Swedish daily newspaper has an article about netiquette and how to (not) write a successful business email. And some of what they say is correct. Only, some of it isn’t. And I know this, because it’s what I write about in That Thesis. So do I drop them an email and say “Um, no, actually it’s fine to begin a business email with ‘Hello [first name]‘, especially to the US, or ‘Dear [first name]‘, especially to Britain; and almost nobody opens an email with ‘Dear Sir’, and in fact most USAnians open business email to utter strangers with only the person’s first name - and ‘best regards’ is a perfectly fine ending in a business email to Britain as well as the US, ‘Yours faithfully’ is like ‘Dear Sir’, so formal it’s almost insulting.”?

But then, the result of such an email would either be that the journalist would ignore it, or else misinterpret and mis-quote me. And after all the thesis isn’t finished yet so I shouldn’t go pretending to actually know anything (although I do!) No, it would end in tears. I’ll be quiet and let any Swedish businessmen who take that advice make fools of themselves - which is probably all for the best.

[Edited later: Bother. Somehow - I have no idea how it happened - this post was linked from the article, in their list of blogs that link to them. That is not supposed to happen unless you ask for it to happen which I certainly didn't, but in any case I removed the link to the article from the post and hopefully that will remove the link from the article to the post. If anybody wants to read the article you can go to dn.se and look up the article called "Bomma inte e-tiketten".]

To be a pilgrim

There is going to be a pilgrimage to me on my next birthday. Which is something not everybody can say. Oh, not exactly to me I suppose, more because of me. But still and anyway. Several people I haven’t seen for years will be there, and some people I’ve known for a long time and never met. It is still a little bit up in the air, but it seems it definitely will happen.

Meanwhile, J and I are both ill at the same time, which is unusual. We never seem to get each other’s colds, but this one we both got from the same source, most likely. Which is my excuse for yet another short and fairly pointless post…

Phony design, or, Meet me at Fagelsangen

I have found one design flaw with the Nokia 6085, and it is a rather annoying one. With the old Nokia phone I had, it was simple to temporarily switch off the word list for txt messages, only a matter of two clicks on the same button. That functionality has been removed - it takes eight or nine clicks, using two different buttons, to turn off the word list, and another two or three clicks to switch languages. Language switching was also quick on the old model, you had to access the menu but it was one of the first choices rather than hid in the middle of the menu as in this model.

The reason why this is a problem is that I do switch a lot between languages when txting, sometimes within the same message even (but more commonly between messages). In particular I think it’s unreasonable not to have a very simple way of turning the word list on and off, since that function used to exist. Another thing that is just stupid is that if the language is set to English, it is impossible to type Swedish characters - so when I send a message in English, arranging to meet somebody somewhere in Uppsala with a Swedish char in the name, writing the txt takes three times as long as it would have if they hadn’t broken the functionality. This is presented as a feature so you won’t “accidentally” use foreign characters. I guess Nokia have no world traveller customers who may need to send txts with foreign street names, to take one obvious example.

Paraphrased conversation

Colleague (slightly worriedly) : So how did your meeting with the supervisor go??
Me: It went really well, as a matter of fact. I have lots to do still, of course, and she still isn’t completely happy with my structure, though it’s improved since the previous version.
Colleague (encouragingly) : Well that’s excellent.
Me: *giggles*
Colleague (suspiciously) : What are you laughing at?
Me: Oh, just, she was telling me a funny story about when you wrote your thesis…
Colleague (in mock outrage) : There was NOTHING FUNNY about when I wrote my thesis!!

So yeah, it’s going ok. I am trying not to focus on where I ought to have been by now, and more on how to get to where I need to be. (My supervisor is really good at helping with that kind of focusing. There wouldn’t be any point in her berating me for being tardy, because I beat myself up over that with great skill, but that doesn’t stop lots of other supervisors from doing that sort of thing to their students anyway.) And apparently the issues I have right now are the ones everybody has been through, whatever they try to claim afterwards.