VDH has a column up about the root causes of anti-American politicking in Europe, among other things.

I watched some of the spelling bee yesterday. I would have gotten knocked out on dipnoous. Those kids are pretty amazing. One of the finalists was a third grader. The best was a jamaican girl who stalled every round for about five minutes. It was hilarious because she had to spell fusuma, and had stalled for so long that the crowd was laughing and the head judge pretty much told her to sh*t or get off the pot. When she started to spell, she yelled into the mike: “F-U” then waited for a few seconds before continuing the rest. Don’t know if she did it on purpose or not, but I got a kick out of it.

Time’s like this, I really wish I had a birthday coming up.

SDB tells you all you need to know about geopolitics. Who’s the good, the bad, and the ugly. And pat me on the back, I got my 10,000th pageview today.

Is today’s astronomy picture beautiful or what? Did you know that corn syrup can be used as a polarizer? It’s pretty amazing. My physics prof in college took a glass of syrup and a polaroid sheet and set them on an overhead projector. The polaroid sheet filters out all waves of light except for in one direction, so you can take two of them and rotate them 90 degrees relative to each other and block out all the light. The syrup isn’t as discerning, and polarized light shining through it changes colors and makes some stunning effects. Some things you never forget.
Oh, and Happy 77th, Hef.

Here’s the line: Simontacchi (2-3) walked none and struck out five in his 34th major league start, needing only 106 pitches.Beautiful game. Go Simo-man. I watched the ninth of the Sox-Yankees game. Hideous defense, embarrassing. I think my reaction to that 4th ball was “Gutless Cur!” But in as angry a voice as I can muster.

I used to live in a slum saturated with hippies. I lived there for two years and so became accustomed to using the barber nearby. Today was about the two week anniversary of when I should have gotten my hair cut so I went in after work. On the way, passing by my former slum, I saw a fantastic sign in one of the windows. On a bedsheet, written in shoe polish, was “Bush is a dumbass.” It is my serious hope that the design phase of that project took up more time than construction. This is the current state of the far left. Discredited and moping. I’ll go mow the lawn now with a smile.

Donald Sensing was irritated by FoxNews channel’s exclamation of “Happy Memorial Day!” I heard something even worse. A commercial on the radio in St. Louis was having some sort of a blowout sale for cars or carpets or something, and the prices were so, so low that “There’s never been a better time to celebrate Memorial Day!!!” Golly. Memorial Day is a pretty odd holiday. People grill out and play baseball to honor the memories of their slain countrymen. I grilled out and played baseball yesterday. This makes sense, so I’m not ashamed.

Today’s Bleat is fantastical. I haven’t seen Matrix Reloaded yet, and haven’t planned on seeing it until all three are out on DVD. He compares the experience of seeing it to Batman Returns, which is damning criticism of the highest order.

Back from the “vacation.” Friday night was good, it was sunny for the ride down and the night was clear. I drove down with Dave and we made some pretty good jokes. My favorite:

Dave: What’re those grooves on the shoulder for?
Liam: Those are to wake you up when you fall asleep and start to drive off the road.
Dave: You serious?
Liam: That’s the only thing I’ve ever used them for.

Since the night was so clear, I was reasonably confident I could sleep under the stars without waking up in the middle of the night soaking wet and climbing naked into someone’s tent. Saturday I got up nice and early since I was outside in the sun. Keydog and I tossed around the baseball, my first game of catch since teaching myself to throw properly. I need some more practice. We got on the water around noon as the sky started to become overcast. The float trip was great, although my sandwich decided to dive underwater in the cooler. I fed most of it to the dog that came with us. After drinking about a twelver, I started to have a problem staying in the rafts and banged up my back and legs pretty good on some rocks. Jumping out of trees and off of cliffs into the river did a number on the soles of my feet too. Not much sun, overcast sky. Back at the campsite we had dinner and rehydrated just in time for the rain to start falling. I hadn’t brought any warm clothes and discovered the error in that. It rained all night, and in scatters the next morning as we were cleaning up the campsite. Sunday was my dad’s birthday, so I spent the evening with him. Monday I helped my mom stain her deck then met my homie Brian and his mom at Manchester pool. They have some pretty kick ass slides there, so I’m glad I bought a resident pass. I aim to go back every time I’m in St. Louis, which I hope will be more frequent than it has been of late. Monday evening Jeff had a barbecue. I haven’t had much of an appetite since I got back from the float trip, and couldn’t eat anything more than beans and a few bites of potato salad, but his yard is huge so we had a home run derby and played some catch. Left there around 8 and stopped by the Maj to see Pete and his perty Bulgarian waitresses on the way out of town. All in all, a fine weekend vacation, a refreshing change of pace.

I’m taking a vacation this weekend, heading to Steelville, MO for a float trip with the crew. Nick leads the annual expedition, which should hopefully be significantly warmer than last year, known without love as the Float of Stiff Nips. Have a good memorial day weekend, and don’t forget what the day off work is for.

Soccer is a sport for women and children. Period. Someone go remind the Greeks, those fallen, dog-burning bastards.

Donald Sensing comments on the war crimes accusations against Lt. Col. Tim Collins.

My main email account has been down for the past ten days or so and I didn’t notice. It’s fixed now, but if anyone sent me an urgent email in that time and is wondering why I haven’t replied, it’s because I didn’t get the email. I’d been wondering what happened to all the offers for enlargement medicines and money laundering for relatives of Nigerian dictators. I finally freed my home computer from the clutches of Windows ME, upgrading to XP. So far, so good. A new roommate moved in last Saturday and I still haven’t gotten the wireless network up and running. The router doesn’t seem to be able to authenticate with the ISP. There’s a short dialogue that you see in a window that lets you know the status of the connection, and the router says it’s contacting the server and negotiates successfully, but then it fails at the authentication procedure. Very frustrating.

Bill Whittle’s new essay, Magic is online.

Fro:boy points out a useful article on writing these blog things. It’s pretty sound advice. I try not to mention anything too specific about any of my friends and never use last names of people I know. I try to mention as little as possible about anyone but myself. It’s possible I might have blown it twice over the past two years or so that I’ve been writing this crap. I dated two gals that I was a great deal too excited about and mentioned them on here in glowing terms. It’s within the scope of possibility that this contributed in them not returning my calls. My best guess is that it’s the rows of nipples running pig-like up and down my chest that sent them running, but chicks aren’t too into glowing praise these days, so who knows. Not me. Commencement was yesterday, so congratulations to all the folks who graduated and set off on new adventures.

Now that the semester is over, it’s ok to waste a little time for a while. I took this IQ test and came up with a score of 62. But it said I’m a visionary philosopher, whatever that means. Something about being equally bad at math and verbal skills.

I suppose that as a linguist, I should comment on this article about language death and the pandemic loss of linguistic diversity. I would comment at length, but Steve has already nailed the important issues raised. Do follow that link. Frankly, I don’t care all that much about language death. You can’t blame a guy for choosing to speak a language that he can use to get a job and live a productive life rather than living in the traditions of his grandparents’ childhoods for the benefit of high-minded folks who think it’s more important to keep those traditions alive. The approach that the linguistic academic community has taken is a good one. We could either have worked to destroy civilization, and so remove the advantage of speaking a popular language over another, rarer one; or we could work to record the grammars of the rare languages and let the speakers’ children decide for themselves what language they would go through life using. We took the latter tact. At least most of us did, I suspect that Chomsky and his minions might sympathize with the former. It’s a pragmatic approach, the equivalent of sequencing the DNA of endangered species. If that species dies off, we can always clone it in a more enlightened age and return the species to viability. As a pragmatic solution, it is not perfect. In the biological analogue, the DNA we would have would be of an individual of the species, representing the population only to an extent, and the first clone would grow up without the culture of his species to cultivate his behavioral development. In the linguistic context, if there is someday a revival of Dyirbal or Illini, and people decide to learn the languages recorded ages ago and teach them to their children, it will be a similarly artificial rebirth, a cloning from the internalized grammar of an individual from a large population of subtly differently speaking individuals. But it sure as heck beats anarchy, or forcing people to speak rare languages and suffer the social and economic consequences just to satisfy our diversions of ideal linguistic and cultural diversity.

It would be fantastic if the Lambs manage to sign Jason Sehorn, absolutely thrilling. We need some skill veterans on our D, but more importantly, it means his lovely wife, Angie Harmon, would be in my neck of the woods. Mmmmm, copper…

Damn ye gods!!! There’s a total lunar eclipse tonight, and the prime viewing location is my backyard. Unfortunately, the sky is aswarm with clouds and not a patch of clear sky is in sight. Nothing to see here, move along. I guess I’ll have to watch the webcast. Just one fewer distraction, albeit one more annoyance, from my proper responsibility of finishing my paper: Cataphora in Dynamic Montague Grammar.