I stayed with the dogs until mid-day; then I packed up and drove back home, enjoying a nice, uneventful drive along the way. Inside/Below:
1. For Chocoholics
2. Grammar Nazis
3. Follow the Procedure
I. For Chocoholics
A. For the actors (and crew) of the production last week Ms. S. purchased a couple bags of Hershey’s mixed bite-size chocolates, aka Hershey’s Miniatures: … some Special Dark, Mr. GoodBar, Krackel, milk chocolate …
They were a pick-me-up before each performance, but Friday night we found ourselves bring back about nine or ten little pieces of candy. Ms. S. laid them out on the liquor cart, well-organized, with like stacked upon like in little piles of two. And I took two with me when I went to dog-sit Saturday morning. The actors left behind the darker chocolates. And it is ‘that thing’ … how tastes change over time, how young people tend not to like bitter foods (chocolate, dark leafy greens … coffee), though when it came to most bitter foods except coffee I liked them when I Was young. And coffee may have been a matter of having only tried really bad coffee when I was a child. But I digress.
We split the last of them this evening as an after dinner snack.
B. NPR’s food blog has a new post, “Sandwich Monday: Breathable Chocolate“, described as “They’re like little plastic chocolate cigarettes, filled with some kind of chocolate powder.”
What follows in the blog are contributor / office-mate reactions and responses to trying it, most of them snarkily negative, and the enterprise reminds me of the A.V. Club’s “Taste Tests” (such as a 2010 installmen on military MREs).
Robert reports: “Much more effective than the Hershey’s patch.”
C. I have little chocolate lying around the apartment. Sure, there are a couple blogs of Baker’s Chocolate, especially the “German Chocolate” variety, which I have for a batch of cookies that I’ll make for Ms. S. at some point.
But mainly it’s cocoa powder, which lends itself to puddings and ice cream, panna cotta and baked custards. Or brownies. None of which I’m likely to make in the next few days. What I would like to do is brew of chocolate porter or stout, but luckily I do not have to, as I have a big bottle of Rogue’s “Chocolate Stout” in the fridge.
There are all manner of ‘comfort foods’ out there, including but not limited to mashed potatoes, mac & cheese, just plain cheese … and chocolate. But Rogue’s “Chocolate Stout”? It’s a high-class ‘comfort beer.’
We also have the next best thing … well, not the next best thing, but something still quite delicious … sitting in the fridge: the remainder of a half-gallon of Chocolate Silk. Crack in a carton is what it is.
You just have to pace yourself.
II. Grammar Nazis
A. As a language instructor and lifelong language learned I am a lover of all manner of linguistics texts, but in particular I have a perverse fondness of and for grammar. It’s something I enjoy teaching.
What I came across today was Leila White’s Grammar Book of Finnish (Porvoo: WS Bookwell Oy, 2006), an approximately 360 page translation into English of the author’s 1993 book. What I always find fascinating about Finnish and Hungarian, each with their one to two dozen noun “cases,” depending on how you count them, is how by having so many cases they pretty much explode the system — not their own system, the language, but the meta system, how we talk about grammar — and make us reevaluate what we mean by ‘case’ in the first place. In some languages we have a close enough mapping between form and function, or sometimes we just conflate the two, and by having, say, a handful of forms we conclude that there are about as many functions.
We end up with the same questioning of (noun) “gender” once either the number of genders escalates (beyond the common 0/1, 2, or three), or when the mapping stops resembling so-called natural gender in any meaningful way.
B. We are, however, frequently unclear as to what we mean by the term ‘grammar’ … a situation not at all aided by our use of the word in common parlance to signify orthography. So many “sticklers” for “correct grammar” are really just priggish normativists who think that the written language is primary and that grammar concerns itself with the placement of commas or how you spell words.
There is mistaking grammar for something else (or the other way around), and then there are the many things we legitimately mean by grammar. A starting point would be the brief “Ten Types of Grammar” at about.com, with generative and transformative being the two that speak most to my inner syntactician.
Of particular interest the past few days has been the distinction between “Type 2” and “Type 3” (context-free and regular, respectively) grammars (in the Chomsky Hierarchy), something of greater interest to computer scientists than language pedagogues.
C. But some of us are not just language pedagogues but also language pedants, so to speak. And my recent re-interest in lightweight markup languages (see also: last entry or two) rekindled, too, my interest in HTML (not particularly lightweight), and that brought me back to one of the better rant-ish posts on the topic of HTML and how you can or cannot deal with it.
To contextualize a bit: web-pages run on HTML in a sense. HTML has many strengths and quite a few weaknesses, not the least of which is that while it’s easy to use it’s also easy to mess up, and by convention, beginning nearly two decades ago, browsers and the like became very lax, accepting syntactically incorrect HTML and doing the best they could with it. And yet we still use it, there are millions of pages of incorrectly-written HTML out there, and we still need tools to manipulate the tag soup. We also want certainty. And people keep reinventing the wheel.
And so new generations of amateur coders keep trying to parse HTML with regular expressions. In short: regular expressions go with regular languages, go with regular grammars. Type 3. HTML … not Type 3. Type 2. Context-free. You can complete plenty of tasks on HTML using regular expressions, but you cannot ‘solve’ HTML with them, and yet authors of forum and blog software keep trying. And in answer to them, or in particular in aswer to “RegEx match open tags except XHTML self-contained tags,” we have the glorious reply that begins “You can’t parse [X]HTML with regex. Because HTML can’t be parsed by regex. Regex is not a tool that can be used to correctly parse HTML. As I have answered in HTML-and-regex questions here so many times before, the use of regex will not allow you to consume HTML.” And continues “The force of regex and HTML together in the same conceptual space will destroy your mind like so much watery putty. If you parse HTML with regex you are giving in to Them and their blasphemous ways which doom us all to inhuman toil for the One whose Name cannot be expressed in the Basic Multilingual Plane, he comes.” And it gets better … and it gets better.
If that sort of thing amuses you.
It does me.
III. Follow the Procedure
A. Being away a couple days meant that Ms. S. and I were a bit behind on the ‘rotation.’ We finished season 5 of ‘Oz’ at the end of last week. But there was a new episode of ‘Elementary’ to view. Time-shifting to the rescue, etc.
And we employed the rules of procedural dramas. There is a crime — double homicide — early on. So who did it? Must we watch the entire episode to figure it out? Probably not. First, is there a big-name-guest-star? Alas, no, not this week. The first suspect, though, is behind bars for murders in the same vein committed about thirteen years earlier, and we suppose there are enough witnesses to show that he was actually behind bars when the newest killings occurred. Accepted. So of course he didn’t do it. We are given another bonafide suspect later on — isn’t him, but he has another crime he’s covering up (sex slave in the basement) — and yet another after that (he has the murder weapon, so it’s not him). Have we met anyone else along the way? Hey, who was that nice young man our protagonists ran into while looking for somebody else. Misdirection? Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain. He couldn’t possibly be important.
He was introduced early on. He was not presented as a credible suspect. Of course it was him (and the guy behind bars), and, alas, the connection was obvious, with only the details left for us to figure out. Young guy is the son of the dead woman who was having an affair with the guy behind bars; of course he’s that guy’s illegitimate son. Of course he’s helping dear ol’ dad in the family murder business.
B. Wednesday I met up with Ms. S.’s parents for dinner while Ms. S. was at work, and over dinner we discussed a variety of interesting — to us — topics, including library science, Kevin Kline, New York, and more. As we were leaving the father figure made an inquiry about the genre of procedurals. They’re not really his ‘thing.’ But they are a thing. And they’ve moved quite far beyond the so-called “police procedural.” In fact, not to many of the plain vanilla variety of those exist anymore, I suppose.
But ‘Elementary’ fits the bill, as did ‘House,’ another riff on Sherlock Holmes. There’s the whole Law & Order ecosystem. The CSIs fit the bill to an extent, too, though they’re in their own ‘forensic’ sub-genre. Of course no such series is obligated on an episode-by-episode basis to remain faithful to the procedural format, but it’s entertaining to observe how strictly they follow the rules of their shared grammar. You know that if there’s an important guest star that he or she is involved (why else have them guest star?) You know that there must be ‘red herrings’ of sorts, so that means you know that almost suspects introduced in the middle of the episode have little chance of being the perp. You know, too, that in order to be “plausible” we don’t want the criminal to be sprung on us last-minute as almost a kind of deus ex machina … which means the criminal needs to have been with us since the beginning.
Which was novel the first time it was done and acceptable a few times after that. But few of the shows are self-aware enough to play with the absurdity of what they do episode after episode.
C. And now it is nearly midnight and I have two variations on the procedural them awaiting me (and I do love themes and variations), the latest time-shifted episodes of ‘Bones’ and ‘Castle’ (in some order). Which of the background characters introduced at the beginning will it be this week?
