There was mentino in the papers today of how people aren't using encyclopedias any more because they have Google. It occurred to me that I haven't used an encyclopedia since elementary school, because they contain the wrong scope of information.

I do three types of research: academic research, work-related research, and personal research. For all the academic research I've had to do since the beginning of high school, encyclopedia articles have been too much of an overview without enough details. They would be helpful if I knew nothing about the subject, yes, but when I'm assigned an essay or a project I already know the basics of the subject and need more in-depth and specialized material than one would find in an encyclopedia. For these projects I use a mix of internet, books, and academic journals.

In my work-related research, I'm usually looking for something extremely specific, or extremely specialized. For example, I'm looking for a particular clause of a particular law, which I wouldn't find in an encyclopedia but on the internet (or in a law book). Or I'm looking for the title of a specific individual, which obviously wouldn't be in an encyclopedia. Or I'm trying to figure out what a "CU time-out sequence" is, which is far too specialized to be in an encyclopedia (and even if it were, I couldn't look it up without context). I use specialized terminology banks for most of this stuff, but if those don't help, Google will get me closer to what I need than an encyclopedia ever will.

My personal research is very diverse, about any little thing I happen to be wondering at the time. "What's that song I heard that keeps repeating 'Wo bist du? Wo bist du?'" "What was the name of that cop show sendoff on Square One when I was a kid?" "When's Easter in 2007?" While an encyclopedia might be able to tell me that Easter is the Sunday after the full moon after the spring equinox, it won't be able to give me the specific answers I need. My questions are too small, and they fall through the cracks of an encyclopedia.

Encyclopedias are useful if you need to write 500 words on the main causes of World War I, or you need to write a paragraph about trees, or you want to look at the retro 60s pictures in your parents' old World Book (which is thinly disguised US propoganda), but they are inherently finite and can't address the day to day research needs of the 21st century.

Helpful hint of the day: When reheating pizza, sprinkle a bit of shredded cheese on top before reheating. This a) freshens up the pizza a bit, and b) help you know when it's sufficently reheated - it's done when the cheese is melted.

Two thoughts:

1. The problem with the word "feisty" is that it's never used to apply to men

2. For most of my life, I thought that if you were falling, but you were on a surface that was also falling (for example, standing in a free-falling elevator) you couldn't get hurt. I just realized the reason for this was the scene in the Wizard of Oz where the house lands from the tornado but Dorothy is okay because she was on her bed.

On the subway to work this morning, the train started honking and slowing down. I looked out the window, and saw a group of workers in hard hats standing against the wall of the tunnel so the train could pass. I don't know what they were doing, but imagine if that were your job! The trains come by every 2 minutes during rush hour, so their work gets interrupted every 2 minutes, and they have to drop everything and get out of the way!

They should invent a substance that you can put into caffeinated coffee and it will make it into decaf. Without affecting the flavour. Or having intoxicating or narcotic side-effects.

Helpful hint: even if the second pizza is only $2 extra, and even if you're so hungry you could eat all the pizza in the world, it's not a good idea to order two pizzas if the two-pizza box is too big to fit in your fridge.

Canadian women under 30, click here. Sign if you agree, and pass it on.

I'm not 100% sure of the point of this, but I'll support anything that reminds the politicos that my demographic is politically active.

I just found out that "bemused" doesn't mean what I thought it meant!

I didn't see the preshow and I'm going to stop watching at 11:30, so if anyone watches the whole thing, is Peter Jackson wearing shorts, or did he deign to wear proper pants today?

I finished two books this weekend. The first was Pattern Recognition. I already mentioned how much I love the language in this book, but I wrote that entry about 25 pages in, before I'd gotten into the plot. The problem is that the plot is not as good as the language. There's nothing wrong with the plot, it's a perfectly decent plot, but it drew me in (as a good plot should) and soon I found myself reading to find out what happens next instead of swimming around in the language. Which is how a novel is supposed to work, I suppose - the language is only a means to deliver the plot - but I didn't get out of it what I had hoped. But it is a good book, the female protagonist doesn't suffer at all from Male Author Syndrome, and she's cunningly ageless - I think anyone from 18 to 45 could identify with her as "she's my age". Very enjoyable, and I'd read it again. I'd also read it in translation, just to see how Gibson's language is handled in translation.

The other book I read was Black Bird - Oiseau noir by Michel Basilières. I loved this book! It's a story of an unpleasant family of thieves and shady characters in 1970s felquiste Montreal. The author manages to take a story completely populated with unpleasant, unsympathetic characters, and make it into something that's amusing to read for me, and not just from a schadenfreude perspective! Basically, this book succeeds at doing what Married with Children attempted. Usually I find these kinds of characters difficult and not fun to read, but I really enjoyed this!

But that's not all - it's also full of beautiful magical realism and gorgeously subtle irony, and helped me greatly to increase my fluency in Quebecois profanity! Huge fun, made me want to keep reading (finished the 300 page book in two halves of weekend days), probably the book I've enjoyed the most since I discovered Harry Potter.

I was walking down the street, and there's this guy walking
two dogs. Behind him there's a little girl in a stroller.

"DOGGIES!" the little girl in the stroller announces.

"That's right," says her mother, "How many doggies are there?"

The little girl thinks about this for a moment, then decides "THREE!"

Helpful hint: remembering your Cyrillic isn't enough to look something up in a Russian dictionary. You also have to remember Cyrillic alphabetical order.

I saw in the newspaper an ad for a gay and lesbian wedding show. This is good, this is progress, especially since it's being advertised in a daily broadsheet.

However, it will be even more progress when same-sex marriages don't get their separate wedding show - when they are marketed to in the excessively-giant annual wedding show just like opposite sex marriages.

I propose that the deadline for this changeover be next June 10, which, if I remember correctly, will be the one-year anniversary of the legalization of same-sex marriages. On this date, newspapers stop making a note of what percentage of marriages conducted at city hall have been same-sex, wedding magazines make their language and photography inclusive (and not by doing a special article about same-sex weddings every once in a while), and the wedding shows amalgamate.

This is not an attempt to hide same-sex marriage or sweep it under a rug, but to normalize it. A same-sex wedding needs to be no more and no less noteworthy than an opposite-sex wedding. We need to get to the level where a same-sex wedding is no more worthy of commentary than a woman who happens to have a career, or a successful professional who happens to not be WASP.

I saw FOUR black lab guide dogs on the way home today!

Yesterday I had a discussion about how yesterday was Mardi Gras. Today I saw in the newspaper pictures of crews cleaning up from Mardi Gras. I also noticed in passing an article about the pope doing Ash Wednesday.

And yet it took me until 5 pm today to realize why there seemed to be an inordinate number of people with these mysterious dark spots on their foreheads.

Things they should have in movies:

1. A movie in which every single character wears glasses, for no particular reason.

2. A movie in which the entire soundtrack is covers of well-known songs, sung with commonly misheard lyrics.

3. A movie in which each character speaks a different language, but they all seem to understand each other anyway. Fully subtitled.

I had to wear sunglasses on the way home from the subway! Winter is coming to an end!

In the mail today I got a flyer talking about a new residential property, advertising "No condo fees! No downpayments!" "Hmm," I thought, "whatever kind of new condo could this be?" I perused the flyer further, and found that there are no condo fees and no downpayments because it is a rental property!

I live in a rental building! I don't have condo fees and downpayments! You can't sell me rental property that way! Do your research people! Read the "apartments for rent" sign out front!

I just started reading William Gibson's Pattern Recognition. I know I shouldn't write about books when I haven't finished them yet, but this is MY language. This is the English language if my cerebral synapses had total control over it. I'm welcomed into the novel with Google as a verb. Cleverly placed at the beginning of a sentence to avoid the debate over whether it should be capitalized. The fridge smells of long-chain monomers. I know what that means, but not everyone does. The character drags herself out of bed, sleepless, and goes to her favourite online forum. It's so natural, so real, so much like my life and so something I've never seen in a novel before. "No spoilers" she warns. Would my parents even know what that means?

Then, casually, idly, the most perfect verbing ever. The word could not possibly be more perfect for communicating the concept:

Zaprudered. Once again at the beginning of the sentence, to avoid capitalization issues. Zaprudered.

A sound that only mi cielito has heard escapes my lips.

I don't think the plot even matters any more.

Just finished reading I Should Be Extremely Happy in Your Company by Brian Hall. It's a novel about Lewis and Clark, where the author used all the existing documents and historical knowledge about them and filled in the gaps himself to make a historical novel. As a historical novel, it was quite well done. It was rich in detail and didn't gloss over the misconceptions or less glamourous aspects of the era. (One of my pet peeves is historical novels that don't even mention the fact that everyone had dysentry and rarely bathed). However, it was very easy to put down. This is probably because it had to conform to known historical facts, which prevented it from having a compelling plot line. This is a good choice on the author's part - he gave the reader some credit by assuming they already knew the story (I didn't already know the story, but that's due to my own ignorance, and I knew I could have found it in 10 seconds on Google) so he focused on the process rather than forcing a phoney Hollywood movie treatment on it to give it a compelling plotline. It was the correct choice, but it did make the book easy to put down.

I was disappointed with the portrayal of Sacagawea. She suffered from "male authors who can't write women" syndrome, and the chapters written from her viewpoint showed a disappointing lack of abstract thought skills. I know she's supposed to be "savage", but I think her intellect, just based on the fact that she's a human being and has the ability to learn bits of other languages, was rather patronizingly underestimated. Her chapters were interesting though, because the author took what was known of her native language and used it to construct her way of thinking. This was extremely interesting from a linguistics perspective, but I doubt he got it right. You see, he also tried to do the same thing with Charbonneau's chapters, but instead of representing the French train of thought, he came up with a stereotyped Pythonesque caricature of a Frenchman. I suppose I'm particularly sensitive to this as a French to English translator, but French does agree its verbs and nouns and you can't represent French thought just by messing up the grammar. It would have been much better to use abstract verbs, eliminate verbed nouns, and, if that wasn't enough, use "he" and "she" instead of "it". The author's inability to carry off the Other Language train of thought in French make me doubt his ability to do so in Sacagawea's language, which made me disappointed in what I had originally thought was the most interesting part of the novel.