The day in review:
- R.E.M. is over; the Reverend Horton Heat is up …
- Boris Yeltsin is dead (heart failure?)
- On this day in 1945 the U.S. Army “liberated” the Flossenbürg concentration camp in Bavaria; they were 16 days too late for theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer, one of the conspirators in the failed plot on Hitler’s life.
- Heroes returned to NBC this evening. Peter lived (as expected); Isaac finally died; Claire met more family; and Mr. Lindermann is turning into an interesting yet twisted individual.
- I have an episode (3×04) of Doctor Who to watch.
- At Fair Trade I wrote a bit — was working on Bonhoeffer — and it turns out Julie was there, so we conducted her little interview for her project. We contemplated the identity of Mr. Verb (is it Joe? is it a multi-person project … a group pulling the strings? is it another linguist?), she showed me Matt’s blog, and she showed me her own new project (under a different name, so I won’t post it here). We also discussed the new Hofstadter (sort of) and she gave me a few good linguistics leads on (de)grammaticalization — Raimo Antilla, for example. Brian Joseph, another.
- I read some more Hofstadter.
- I baked some brownies and finished a bottle of red.
- Leena called and we chatted for half an hour or so.
- My checking account is closer to empty than I would like; savings? fine.
- I’ll be finishing collecting Avengers: Earth’s Mightiest Heroes II soon; I haven’t read them (or the first series) yet — I think they’re limited series of stand-alone stories. Most Avengers tales these days are large, drawn-out, cross-over affairs … big EVENTS.
My students wrote their 2nd exam; now I have a shitload of stufff to grade.
Happy Happy, Joy Joy.
As Eliane would say … not that I expect to see her there.
Links:
- The Last Question — a 1956 Isaac Asimov story. The telling is straight-forward, almost more thought-experiment than anything else, but it is poetic in the end. The first two sections parallel Jack Chalker’s The Birth of Flux & Anchor … that is, the needs and drives.
- Will a Nearby Supernova Endanger Life on Earth? by Michael Richmond, last updated April 8, 2005
- Colbert v Penn: Metaphor-Off … hilarious Sean Penn vs. Stephen Colbert stuff … with a former poet laureate.
- Supernatual Brownies — I basically went or a half-batch. Or something similar.
