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.

If anyone is watching the Simpsons right now, what's the music they're playing as Lisa wanders through the museum?

I've been making a point of consuming as little American media as possible over the past few months, but yesterday I decided to watch a movie on US network television. The cultural difference is quite apparent when you compare commercials! I can't quite put my finger on it, but the commercials on the US stations seem to be intentionally alienating me. Sometimes on Canadian networks there are commercials where I'm not the target audience, but I get the impression that they don't mind if I sit in. But the US commercials make me feel like they actively don't want me there. Maybe it's because the American commercials seem to assume more strongly that the viewer is suburban and has a family of their own, I'm not quite sure yet. Also, they are positively infested with patronizing anti-drug commercials that trivialize the complexity of the problem.

What's the opposite of a dry martini? It can't be a wet martini...

Fun with the English language!

It occurs to me that the source of the main structural differences between English and French is that English verbs more willingly.

I have lost nine socks since I moved in here last April. That doesn't include any complete pairs I might have lost.

They should invent window blinds that are also solar panels.

I fucked up today. My boss was talking to me, and I misinterpreted a tonal modulation and thought she was asking me a question when she was in fact giving me a compliment. So I answered with a rather apathetic affirmative acknowledgement (nodding head, half-hearted "mm-hmm" equivalent) when I should have answered with my trademark slightly embarrassed, brief-modest-lowering-of-eyes thank you.

Last night I had a dream that I was at my university graduation (BA) and in my package of stuff there was an acceptance to the MA program. Interesting.