Wednesday, September 22, 2010
Tuesday, September 21, 2010
Meet Buck Trailer: hail to the antlers, baby.
http://player.vimeo.com/video/13681161?portrait=0
Aaand let's follow that up with the trailer for an upcoming short in much the same zany, CGI-used-right cartoon style with a handsome buck for a hero.
The Bouyer boys sure do have some talent brewing, don't they?
Monday, September 13, 2010
Thursday, August 19, 2010
Genealogy of Eurasian languages, Chaucer and Eddie Izzard. #languagenerd
I once saw an episode of the BBC program 'All Things British' (wherein former Action Transvestite Eddie Izzard traces the foreign roots of various aspects of British culture) that dealt with the English language and its origins on the mainland. I'll get back to that in a bit.
The remaining influence of the Roman invasion of the island then known as Albion, and later the Norman and Saxon occupations left a hodgepodge of a language that, really, has far too many words. For example: royal (related to French 'roi'), kingly (related to German 'König') and regal (related to Latin 'rex') all mean the same thing!
Dutch is the closest living relative to English. I grew up Dutch-English bilingual, and we learn German and French in high school here, so when I first read the Canterbury tales it felt as if I were Harry Potter and realized I could enderstand snakes. If I turned my head like this, closed oned eye, squinted the other and bit my tongue just right, I could easily parse eighty percent of any passage. The biggest help was that the rhyming scheme could inform me how a word was expected to be pronounced, which allowed me to pick the language it most probably sourced.
Here's the first lines: <!--more-->
Wan, that April, with his shores sooth,
The droghte of March, hat perched to the rote,
(note that these are not the officially correct lines; this is how they appeared in the version I read)
Soothing shores don't make much sense for April, but March reveals himself more clearly. A dry month, parched to the root... and if that's how they pronounced rote, then maybe sooth sounded more like soot. If you then guess that this is cognate to Dutch zoet, meaning sweet, then shores makes sense as showers. Sweet April showers? That's imagery that survives to this day. And droghte is so clearly related to Dutch droogte that it didn't occur to me until later that it might have been pronounced drought.
There was a lot of guesswork and likely a lot of false friendship, but it was a fascinating experience that greatly informed how I perceive the cultures of the world as intertwining threads of a single fabric. Most curious of course are the nonsensical frays and knots, like Finnish and Hungarian (the Finno-Ugric isolates) which don't connect to anything.
Anyway, Eddie Izzard. In this episode of All Thing British he went down to Oxbridge of Camford or some such to take a crash course in Middle English (despite what the above tree would have you believe, Middle Dutch and Middle English still had quite a few linguistic dalliances) to learn conversational and mercantile phrases. On a plane he hopped and arrived at Schiphol airport, the zenith of my daily commute, after which he traveled north, to that strange province of Friesland.
In Friesland they speak Frys, a language ostensibly related to Dutch but so alien that we can't understand each other, under most circumstances. The Frysian populace actually campaigned for quite a few decades to have Frys reclassified as a language on its own right rather than merely a Dutch dialect.
So our Eddie goes up to a Frysian farmer and uses his Middle English to try and purchase a cow... and amazingly, succeeds. Quick-witted, he observed the patient farmer's responses and figured out how the patterns of his phrases connected to the patterns of Frys -- for instance, the Middle English for cow is pronounced more like kew whereas the Frys actually sounds completely like the modern English cow.
And so he spent the rest of the episode followed by an inquisitive calf on a rope.
Wednesday, August 18, 2010
21 years late, Wil Wheaton sends out a touching letter to a formerly 8-year-old fan
This is simply adorable.
Wil Wheaton, who played the reviled part of Wesley Crusher on Star Trek: The Next Generation, came upon the story of Teresa Juniso, aged 29, who never received her membership package for the now-defunct WilPower fanclub.
8 years old, she'd saved up the $12 membership fee, and didn't receive her welcome package... until 21 years later. Wheaton, a renowned Friend of Fanboys/girls, wrote this heartwarming apology to 8-year-old Teresa on behalf of his 15-year-old self.
Wll, we've long gotten over our displaced revulsion of Wesley Crusher. Secretly many of us envied you the opportunity to play with the blinkenlights on the Enterprise-D, and admire your ability to stomach some of the ghastly lines they fed you when you were too young to put up a fight. Really, you don't need to keep being this awesome to impress us.
But please do!
Sunday, August 15, 2010
Friday, August 13, 2010
Happy 50th Birthday to Echo 1, Grandpappy of Satellite Communications
I'd never heard of this thing. Not once. Even though it's fantastic:
Essentially a wafer-thin reflective membrane filled with nitrogen and sent into orbit as a massive balloon, which allowed radio signals to be reflected off its shiny bulbous skin.
How cool is that?
