aMMusing

I used not to be much of a TV watcher. In fact, I went through the ’80s and half the ’90s without watching TV at all. But last Boxing Day, while La Chelita was visiting, I spent my Christmas gift from my mother to subsidize the purchase of a new TV. I went from a tiny TV with no cable, to a tiny TV with cable two years ago, to finally a big ass TV like this one.

Before heading to the store, we found online a 36-inch screen at the right price, but it couldn’t be had once we got to the store. But, for a mere $30 extra, I was able to buy a 42-inch screen. I couldn’t refuse: an extra 6 inches for only $30! And for the remaining week of her visit, I would occasionally declare loudly out of nowhere, “Chelita! There’s a big ass TV in my living room!!!”

Am I watching more TV as a result? Well, let’s just say I get sucked into the stupidest shows whenever I want to put the brain on tilt — like world’s fattest dad or mom, world’s tallest teenager, or buying a house in Montevideo. However, there are times when I come across stuff that, after watching it, I feel I’ve actually learned something.

For instance, one night on ARTV, there was this documentary about the history of movie censorship in Québec. The most important film distributor (and eventually producer) in Montréal from the 1930s to 1950s was a man by the name of Alexandre de Sève. Turns out he was a big-time enforcer of state censorship in the city’s cinemas, and by the early ’60s, with television taking a bite out of movie-going, he founded Télé Métropole, which is known today as the TVA network. But the reason why I felt I had a mildly edifying moment is that, in the heart of the Village, there’s a street named Rue Alexandre-de-Sève. And, indeed, on that street between De Maisonneuve and Ste-Catherine, is located the headquarters of TVA.

As it happens, the nerd in me loves finding out how city streets got their name. Sometimes, changing the name of a street can cause a lot of hoopla, like when the City of Montréal suggested changing Avenue du Parc to Avenue Robert Bourassa in honour of the late, multi-term Liberal premier of Québec in the ’70s and ’80s. The clamour against the proposed change was such that the city backed down. Yet, Dorchester, one of the main thoroughfares in downtown Montréal, was quite easily changed to Boulevard René Lévesque shortly after that premier’s death, …except for the portion in the tony (anglo) enclave of Westmount, which of course remains Dorchester since its residents and politicians would sooner die than rename a street after a sovereignist premier.

At any rate, it didn’t take me much poking around to find that the city of Montréal has a searchable online directory of street names. The estranged hubbie used to be driven crazy by how so many streets here are named after saints, but that’s just a reflection of how the Catholic church literally controlled Québec society up until La Révolution Tranquille of the 1960s. This irk he felt struck me as odd, coming from someone from the land of the Virgin of Guadeloupe, whom everybody knows must be respected and revered or else be accused of somehow holding deep contempt towards Mexicans. But that’s a whole different ball of wax worthy of an entirely separate post.

For now, I’m just enjoying me some big ass stupidifier that occasionally offers a few nuggets of interesting information, albeit trivial.

There have been powerful, destructive tornadoes for two days in a row in Manitoba.

I spent the whole evening going through the video clips at TornadoVideos.net. Those storm chasers are completely nuts …but at the same time, I can understand what’s drawing them.

You see, I love thunderstorms. And extreme weather fascinates me. But having experienced a Category 2 hurricane in a place where such storms are uncommon, I have to say that tornadoes are one type of extreme weather I never want to see up close. They are so frighteningly absolute in their destructiveness.

Tornadoes are more likely to occur in the Great Plains of the U.S. and the Canadian Prairies, although much of the eastern U.S. and southern Ontario are prone as well. But perhaps what struck me the most in those videos is the stark beauty of the plains/prairies. The towns and cities look depressing to me, but oh, that open sky and those lush fields! And that’s coming from someone who has always lived near the ocean and probably couldn’t stand being landlocked for very long.

March 31, 1998, fell on a Tuesday. I used to teach on Tuesday afternoons and Thursday mornings. But that’s not why I remember it so well; it’s because I remember the weather record that was shattered in Halifax: fuelled by a strong El Niño, the temperature that day went up to 25C when the seasonal average at that time is 6C. Also, 1998 was the first of two consecutive years when the leaves on the trees were completely out a full three-and-a-half weeks earlier than usual.

The “real” winter started very late here this year. It only started at the end of January. But notwithstanding a few exceptions, it’s been below zero or just marginally above zero every day since. That gets to me after a while.

I have always been interested in trivia. As a consequence, as a reader, one notion I read on a page can trigger questions about completely unrelated matters. Before the Web, it was unlikely I would pursue the questioning very far, but with the Web making everything just one click away, I do. Hence I can start reading about Topic A, and 5 hours later I can find myself reading about Topic R which not only has nothing to do with Topic A but also has brought me to forget what Topic A was, although the fact I’m a big-time users of tabs in Firefox can help me jog my memory.

While eating supper last night, I happened to catch another little bit of that impossibly bad, stretched out, multipart interview with Anna Nicole Smith on Entertainment Tonight. Truth is, Anna Nicole Smith is someone about whom I have never before given a second’s thought. But something about how she comes across in this interview intrigued me: she looks like a plastic doll whose perfection renders her extremely unattractive (in my eyes), plus she strikes me as incredibly strung out and sedated if not simply a spectacularly stunned effort.

I turned off the TV and began wondering what’s all the fuss about Anna Nicole Smith since, as I mentioned, I never before gave the woman a second thought …so I went online and looked her up to satisfy my new curiosity about what all the fuss is about and if or why I should give a heck. Within minutes, I found myself on Wikipedia. For me, though, that’s an invitation to get off topic really quickly.

• While married to her second husband who was more than 60 years her senior, she had numerous love interests including Scott Baio, whom I didn’t know is a staunch conservative Republican.
• During her modelling career, she capitalized on her strong resemblance to Jayne Mansfield.
• Jayne Mansfield was killed in a car crash in June 1967 on U.S. Highway 90.
• United States numbered highways, the precursor of the American interstate, were conceived in the 1920s and follow a relatively logical pattern in terms of how they’re numbered.
• The fabled U.S. Highway 66 has long ago been decommissioned and largely replaced by Interstate 40, although many of the states through which 66 went through keep its memory alive as State Highways bearing the same number.
• The idea of the U.S. interstate system was brought forth exactly 50 years ago this year by President Eisenhower. The system was supposed to take 12 years to complete but in the end took 35 years, and some roads, like I-95 that spans the entire east coast, remain technically unfinished.
• Eisenhower appreciated what Germany was doing with its autobahn system, now known world-wide as a freeway system on which there’s no speed limit.
• Speed limits…

Okay, you get the picture.

No, I didn’t just “discover” how one can get lost reading on the Web. And you didn’t just “discover” that I’m ecclectic and nerdy, as manifested, for instance, by my nearly obsessive number-crunching propensities with regard to proportional representation. However, what I find fascinating is that when I least expect it, little bits of what I read last night will come back to me in context during some discussion or another. Sometimes we can mistakenly believe that some notion or event is a “first-of” or has been around forever (due largely to the fact it already existed when we were born). Often, when we look beyond the current-day artifice, we can often trace parallels that remind us of the extent to which humans do seem fated to repeating their own history. Yet at the same time, in other instances, we can see more clearly where significant shifts have occurred over a relatively short period of time.

Some things seem to change a lot on the surface but don’t really change that much. Other things don’t change a lot but that minute change has a far great impact. Hence, in my mind, what might seem like trivia on the surface might not be so trivial after all.

…to like Christmas so much that you can’t stop yourself from putting up your decorations immediately after Hallowe’en. People in a house on Brunswick Street here in Halifax go completely to town with decorations each year, and early, too. It’s quite garish. And although much more subdued, other people down the hall from me have had their decorations up since the weekend. But as much as I’m no fan of Christmas, I have to admit that the pretty lights do serve a purpose during this time of year when it’s so grey and the days are so short. This evening we’re on the mild side of a nasty storm that’s bringing tons of rain and winds gusting to 100 km/h (62 mi/h), and somehow the pretty lights seem like the equivalent of putting your hands on your ears and singing, “La, la, la, I can’t hear you!”

I’ve had it with people who uppercase all their nouns and noun phrases in English to make those common nouns seem more important. Except possibly in legalese — and even there I’d argue uppercasing is overused — there’s no need to uppercase nouns in English. The uppercasing of nouns is the practice in German, not in English. And don’t get me going on some lawyers’ insistence on having full clauses in contracts in uppercase letters! I’ve read somewhere that practice is the only reason why one still encounters such passages in contracts today. The irony, of course, is that the attempt to emphasize in such cases backfires badly: such passages are in fact more difficult to read!

But I digress…

The worst culprits of needless uppercasing of nouns are business/marketing types and academics. For instance, business types might write, “Thank you for your Cooperation,” as if the uppercase C was meant to signal to me that they value my cooperation so much that they’re compelled to emphasize it with that lousy (and incorrect) uppercase C. Another example: recently I received a notice about a job opening for “a Sessional Instructor to teach the Department’s Advanced Studies Classes.” The only uppercase letter that’s marginally acceptable in that phrase — and even it could be dispensed of — is the D. Or if the department’s name hadn’t been mentioned yet, then one could have written “a sessional instructor to teach the Department of Noseblowing’s advanced studies classes.”

Don’t ask me why such insignificant Details drive me Nuts as much as they do.

After supper tonight I just had to have a nap. It’s the first time I’ve done this since I’m in my new place, and I must say that napping in my new bed is as heavenly as sleeping a full night in it. (I have a draft posting waiting completion in which I elaborate on my recent move downstairs.) But for whatever reason, the first thought through my mind as I woke up was “whosbetterthan” — Michael in New York.

While I’ll grant you the man’s a hottie, it wasn’t that kind of thought I had when I woke up. He simply came back to mind, so while my evening coffee was brewing, I thought I’d check to see if he’d decided to resume blogging. He hasn’t, although he promises he might once he’s done grad school in May. I don’t remember how I found his blog, but I do remember how compelling I found what he had to say — right down to the time he lost his job, fell into a kind of depression (as one would under the circumstances), but finally, well into his 30s, built up the guts to do what he always wanted and went go back to school.

I hope he does decide to blog again this spring. He’s not the kind of guy I’d likely “meet” weren’t it for blogs, and I suspect we probably wouldn’t be friends “in real life” even if we lived in the same place. But that doesn’t take away from the fact I think he’s a very decent human being.

I dropped a line to Damian, the Australian guy I mentioned in my previous post, and he certainly has quite an order on his hands. Of the five languages in which the site in question has to be published, only one uses the alphabet we all know and love.

As he put it, that’s one of the joys of living in Oceania. But it got me thinking, though, about how being anglophone in that part of the world mustn’t be dissimilar to being francophone in North America. I believe there are fewer than 10 million francophones in Canada and the United States, which is less than 5 percent of the continent’s population. While English is spoken in countries around Australia, the fact remains it has 3 of the most populous countries in the world nearby — China, India, and Indonesia — where English is not the primary language.

Talk about being dwarfed!

Just as I’ve been feeling pretty good lately about the massive progress I’ve been making on my TextStyleM CMS, I come across a post in the Hosting Matters discussion forums that makes me think that perhaps I haven’t thought of all the possibilities. Indeed, I’m pretty happy that I started off thinking about having TextStyleM be able to publish the same site simultaneously in two languages — an imperative in this part of Canada, really. But then some guy comes along and inquires about how we might handle a site that has to be published in five languages!

The worst thing is that:

1. I immediately started thinking about how much work might be involved in going over my code and database structures to accommodate a five-language website, and
2. I wished the guy who posted to the forum weren’t in Australia.

I think I would consider some kind of arrangement, but I’m weird about my code. Not only do I fear giving it away and/or losing control over it, but — dare I admit it — I’m not sure how it would measure up if someone who has had formal programming training were to poke around in it.

Call it the Impostor Syndrome. I’ve always suffered from it. And add a dash of Control Freakness for good measure…

<RANT>
I don’t know what it’s about, but lately I’ve been reading a lot more texts — from e-mail messages from clients to various forum postings and blogs — that are filled with comma splices and run-on sentences. I remember when I used to teach and would tell my students that a sentence was a “run-on,” they would assume that I meant that it was too long (i.e., went on and on and on). So afterwards, I would start getting a lot of short, staccato sentences that would still be run-on sentences (e.g., “The semester runs through April, the break begins in May.”).

It drove me nuts then and it drives me nuts now, albeit for a different reason. When I was teaching, it bothered me because the students would keep doing it despite all the effort I would put into showing them what was wrong and how to fix it. Today, it’s just because I’m under a lot of stress professionally and, as a result, probably have a shorter fuse than usual.

I understand that people might view e-mail messages, forum postings and blog entries as somewhat ephemeral or as being less important than a formal letter or proposal. But I’ve found that those who adopt this view are often at the beginning of a slide down a very slippery slope. They form bad writing habits by letting their defenses down, so when they need to write something “important,” they continue, although perhaps to a lesser extent, to litter their prose with comma splices and run-on sentences (among other grammatical faux pas).

Trust me: I’ve seen plenty of reports in which the writer seemingly forgot that he or she was writing something formal, or who lacked the formality and eloquence that would have helped him or her get a point across. (Honey is better than vinegar at attracting bees.) Instead, a reader is left having to figure out the writer’s stream of consciousness in addition to the argument being put forth. As a professional, I don’t mind wading through a long, detailed document, but I don’t want the mechanics of language getting in the way of understanding what are possibly complex concepts. Put the two together — bad writing and complex concepts — and I’m not inclined to want a professional relationship with you because it’s just too damn hard to figure out what the heck you’re talking about.

No, I don’t expect literary perfection — certainly a subjective entity in itself — nor do I believe there is only one style of writing. Ungrammatical sentences have their place provided that they appear on the page with the writer’s knowledge that they are ungrammatical. Advertising copy comes to mind as a good example of how an ungrammatical sentence can be an effective rhetorical device.

Maybe you think it’s odd that I should be so judgmental towards bad writing. Some even go so far as dismissing such rants with a startling array of insults suggesting that I’m just too picky and uptight. They fail to see that it’s not the mistakes per se that bother me. What gets to me is what your resistence to correcting those mistakes tells me about you.
</RANT>