Caveat: Batman back in… forgot to drop the mic

I’m not really the type of person to get excited about new movies. I almost exclusively see movies only when they have been around for quite a while and show up on my television, or because I’ve managed to get a copy on my computer. I haven’t been to a movie theater in many years.
Nevertheless, I can muster some excitement for the upcoming Lego movie. The first Lego movie was remarkably well-written given its genre, with many layers of meaning and actually pretty complex, as a work of fiction. I had been quite impressed with it. So I expect the same of this new movie. So far, I’ve seen some positive reviews.

picture[daily log: walking, 7km]

Caveat: the shining Big-Cheez-Burger

Apparently Longfellow's poem, "The Song of Hiawatha" has been rewritten in a LOLcat version (LOLcat, for those unaware, is a kind of internet 'meme' – i.e. a faddish and famous complex of behaviors, images and what might be called internet text-based dialect slang).

By the shores of Intar-Webbies,
By the shining Big-Cheez-Burger,
Stood the macro of Blue Kitteh,
Pièce de résistance, Blue Kitteh.
Dark behind it rose the sofa,
Rose the roomy gloomy sofa,
Rose the pics with lols upon them;
Bright before it post the comments,
Post the wry and funneh comments,
LOl@shining Big-Cheez-Burger!!

For comparison, here are the first ten lines of the original.

By the shores of Gitche Gumee,
By the shining Big-Sea-Water,
Stood the wigwam of Nokomis,
Daughter of the Moon, Nokomis.
Dark behind it rose the forest,
Rose the black and gloomy pine-trees,
Rose the firs with cones upon them;
Bright before it beat the water,
Beat the clear and sunny water,
Beat the shining Big-Sea-Water.
– Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (American poet, 1807-1882)

Credit for finding this belongs to the linguistics blog All Things Linguistic.

[daily log: walking, 7km]

Caveat: Englyn #88

(Poem #193 on new numbering scheme)

The green gorillas will gasp
and dance below clouds. A wisp
of mist gropes the trees that grasp
the hills. The cool air is crisp.

– an englyn proest dalgron. It may be surprising to hear that this is based on a fragment of a vivid dream I had 36 years ago, in 1981, while still in high school. I recorded it then in a journal I had. But this poem was written without consulting that journal – it’s just an image/story/vision that sticks with me. The full dream ended with nuclear holocaust – recall that I was in high school during the age of Reagan.

Caveat: No

I have an elementary 2nd grade student who goes by the English name of Alisha. She is a bit behind her peers in social development, with a lot of pre-elementary age behavior (i.e. “babyish” or young for her age), but she is plenty smart. She doesn’t really know what to make of my “alligator bucks” – the “dollars” I give to students as a kind of reward points system. She destroys them systematically, when she receives them, rather than saving them like other students do. But she derives a great deal of pleasure from destroying them, so perhaps they still serve as a kind of reward.
She has pretty good comprehension of my English output. She’s good at following instructions, and has a recognition vocabulary higher than some of her peers in the same class. On the other hand, she mostly never writes anything using English letters. She “sounds out” the English words she wants to write using the Korean alphabet, hence her name 알리샤 [allisya], or 캣 [kaet = “cat”], etc. And even her hangul is full of misspellings and variants from Korean orthography.  She suffers some substantial dyslexia – she cannot differentiate ‘d’ and ‘b’, and I’ve seen her writing hangul with reversed glyphs, too.
She also is quite defiant, at times. She will refuse to answer questions. But mostly, she simply doesn’t talk at all – in Korean or English. She gestures and has a very expressive face, to compensate.
On Monday, she was more talkative than usual. “No no no no no” she announced, upon entering the classroom. Later, when we were doing flashcards, she described each card as “No.” I appreciated the English, but was a little bit frustrated by the defiance. I turned the card so I could see it – a cat – and said, “That’s not a ‘no’, is it?”
“No,” she agreed.
OK, that was a badly phrased question, wasn’t it?
“What is it?” I tried again. She shook her head, and tried a different type of defiance. She waved her hand, with a kind of stop-motion style, and said, firmly and with excellent intonation, “Bye!”
I moved on to other students, who get impatient when I spend too much time with Alisha. Later, it was back to “No.”
But then, we took our quiz. Often, on quizzes, she leaves her paper blank, or just scribbles on it. Other times, she’ll diligently transcribe all the words in hangul. Without direct supervision and letter-by-letter guidance, she will almost never write a word in English letters.
On Monday, she wrote, using a fat orange marker she’d taken from my basket:

  1. No
  2. No
  3. No

I was impressed. “Wow, you’re writing English! That’s excellent,” I praised. Small steps, right? I gave her an alligator dollar, which she promptly began to gleefully destroy, peeling off the laminated backing.
Then she pointed proudly at the wall. There, in large, orange-colored letters, she’d also written “No.”
“Oh, well… ” I was so torn. On the one hand, I was happy with her finally expressing her sincere feelings in English letters. It was, truly, her first such success. On the other hand, I felt that doing so on the classroom wall was problematic. I ran from the room and fetched a bottle of spray cleaner.
“I am so happy you’re writing English letters. There’s ‘N’, there’s ‘O’… ‘no.’ Great job. But we need to clean that up. No writing on the wall, OK? 그렇게 하지마 [don’t do like that],” I said, gesturing at the wall and shaking my head.
I paused and took a picture, to document the event. I knew this would end up in my blog.
picture
“OK!” she said, grinning.
“Let’s clean that up,” I urged. The other kids were feeling entertained by all this, so I wasn’t too worried about them. I let her wield the spray cleaner bottle against the wall, and we tried to clean up the word. Now there’s a white stain on the wall.
The problem was mostly resolved. Several times more during the class, she sad “No,” but she also said several other words, including “car” and “cat.” And she wrote “alligator” at the bottom of her quiz paper – copying the word from the board, where that particular word is always written, for my lowest-level classes. Given how much I use alligators as a kind of mascot in my classes, kids often feel a need to write this long, difficult word.
On Wednesday (yesterday), Alisha went up to another teacher, Helen, before class started. Apparently, in Korean, she whispered to Helen, emphatically, that she really liked her phonics class with Jared. Helen reported this to me. Helen asked me what I’d done to earn her endorsement. I really have no idea. Perhaps just trying to validate her efforts? Not exploding in anger and violence at her writing on the wall?
[daily log: walking, 7km]
 

Caveat: Englynion #85-#87

(Poem #192 on new numbering scheme)

On a long trip on a bus,
from Temuco's rainy moss
to Santiago's vast mess,
I read a small, torn book. Thus,
because of Neruda's songs
there took root a vague longing.
my inner poet grew wings.
Although maybe I am wrong,
since, in fact, I still long failed
at becoming more controlled
in habit, till I was told
perhaps this blog could be filled.

– three englynion proest dalgron

Caveat: By wintry hills his hermit-mound

Monody

To have known him, to have loved him
After loneness long;
And then to be estranged in life,
And neither in the wrong;
And now for death to set his seal—
Ease me, a little ease, my song!
By wintry hills his hermit-mound
The sheeted snow-drifts drape,
And houseless there the snow-bird flits
Beneath the fir-trees’ crape:
Glazed now with ice the cloistral vine
That hid the shyest grape.

– Herman Melville (American novelist and poet, 1819-1891)

The poem is probably about the novelist Nathaniel Hawthorne, a contemporary and sometime friend of Melville's. The two of them were close friends for a while but estranged in later life.

[daily log: walking, 7km]

Caveat: meery me

This note appeared unsolicited in my basket after my Newton1 cohort class yesterday.

picture

It reads,

     HI! My name is Jared's green white monkey, I think my friend colorful monkey is very pretty. I want meery colorful monkey! Newton-1M June♡

I should note that the Minneapolitan rainbow monkeys were recently supplemented by additional magnetic monkeys, two of which are pale green in color. I think meery here means 'marry.' I have always been quite deliberately ambiguous as to the monkeys' genders, so I found this interesting.

[daily log: walking, 7km]

Caveat: 초능력자

As I often do on Sundays, I let my television run. It’s just Korean basic cable, as far as I know – I don’t pay anything for it, so it must be included in my building services fee, which includes heat and water and electricity. My television is an ancient, CRT TV, that was abandoned by the previous tenant in my previous apartment. But it’s OK.
I surf around the channels, kind of randomly. Yesterday I caught a rather strange movie, entitled 초능력자 [choneungryeokja]. It always intrigues me when Korean-made movies feature foreign actors in major roles, speaking Korean as if it were par for the course. It makes me feel optimistic about Korean culture making its way confidently in our cosmopolitan world. This movie itself was quite strange, though. As usual, when mentioning movies, I won’t try to summarize it – there are better summaries available elsewhere. But anyway I recommend it.
[daily log: walking, 7km]

Caveat: Englyn #82

(Poem #189 on new numbering scheme)

White, red, black, and pale: masses
plunging among the grasses.
Hooves pound. There are four horses. You see them?
Now watch them join forces.

– an englyn unodl crwca

Caveat: 목수가 많으면 집을 무너뜨린다

I realized recently that I started neglecting my long-standing habit of posting occasional Korean-language aphorisms and proverbs. Part of what happened is that my little “stockpile” became empty, and I got too lazy to replenish it, which led me to a situation where posting an aphorism was always more work than I wanted to deal with, at the last moment when deciding what to put on my blog.
Lately, too, I have been very depressed about my Korean ability. You might observe that I am always depressed about my Korean ability, so what’s really different? Well, obviously, if I’m so depressed about it that I’m actively avoiding my little self-study sessions, such as trying to understand various proverbs, well, then, that’s more depressed than before.
I’ll have to get over that, right? I have about 7 months remaining to become fluent – since I jokingly said, about 9 years ago, that I thought it would take me 10 years to become fluent. At the time, I thought I was giving myself more than enough time. Now, I’ve passed my 9th anniversary in Korea, and frankly, it looks like I’d been overly optimistic.
I may be a linguist, but that doesn’t seem to mean I’m necessarily very good at learning languages.
Here is an aphorism from my Korean book of aphorisms.

목수가 많으면 집을 무너뜨린다
mok.su.ga manh.eu.myeon jib.eul mu.neo.tteu.rin.da
carpenter-SUBJ be-many-IF house-OBJ destroy-PRES
“If there are many carpenters, the house is destroyed.”

This is clearly the same aphorism as the English, “Too many cooks in the kitchen (spoil the broth).” That’s fairly self-explanatory, and therefore a good proverb for me to try to resume my occasional Korean proverbs.
It’s a cloudy Sunday, but the snow turned to rain. I made a broth to gowith my pasta, but it wasn’t spoiled because I was the only cook.
[daily log: walking, 1km]

Caveat: If they can get here

The topic of immigration periodically looms in my political imagination. I have never done much about it, however. I once tried to build a website on the topic of “open borders,” but my own inertia doomed that effort (the site only lived about a year).
I’m pretty sure I wrote somewhere, but I can’t find where, that I have sometimes thought that the issue of immigration and open borders will be a new kind of abolition movement. I was gratified to read this post at a blog called spottedtoad, which appears to argue the same idea, more cogently than I ever could. It may fade, but at least at the moment, the issue is becoming more noticeable and more politically polarizing in the US. This is not dissimilar to the way abolitionism took hold of political discourses in the first half of the 19th century.
In the meantime, I leave with that same Herman Melville quote I’ve cited before:

“If they can get here, they have God’s right to come.”

picture[daily log: walking, 7km]

Caveat: A primer on international relations

What I'm listening to right now (NSFW).

Run The Jewels, "Nobody Speak." Anyway I found the video entertaining.

Lyrics (NSFW).

[El-P]
Picture this
I'm a bag of dicks
Put me to your lips
I am sick
I will punch a baby bear in his shit
Give me lip
I'ma send you to the yard, get a stick
Make a switch
I can end a conversation real quick

[Killer Mike]
I am crack
I ain't lyin', kick a lion in his crack
I'm the shit, I will fall off in your crib, take a shit
Pinch your momma on the booty
Kick your dog, fuck your bitch
Fat boy dressed up like he's Santa
And took pictures with your kids

[El-P]
We the best
We will cut a frowny face in your chest, little wench
I'm unmentionably fresh, I'm a mensch, get correct
I will walk into a court while erect, screaming "Yes!
I am guilty motherfuckers, I am death"

Hey, you wanna hear a good joke?

[Refrain]
Nobody speak, nobody get choked

[El-P]
Get running
Start pumping your bunions, I'm coming
I'm the dumbest, who flamethrow your function to Funyuns
Flame your crew quicker than Trump fucks his youngest
Now face the flame, fuckers, your fame and fate's done with

[Killer Mike]
I rob Charlie Brown, Peppermint Patty, Linus and Lucy
Put coke in the doobie, roll woolies to smoke with Snoopy
I still remain that dick grabbin' slacker that spit a loogie
Cause the toter of the toolie'll murder you friggin' Moolies
Fuck outta here, yeah

[Refrain]
Nobody speak, nobody get choked, hey
Nobody speak, nobody get choked, hey, hey
Nobody speak
Nobody speak

[El-P]
Only facts I will shoot a
Baby duck if it quacks, with a Luger
Top billin', come cops some villainous shots is blocked, shipped out, and bought, and y'all feeling it
El-P killin' it, Killer Mike killin' shit

[Killer Mike]
What more can I say? We top billin' it
Valiant without villainy
Viciously foul victory
Burn towns and villages
Burning looting and pillaging

[El-P]
Murderers try to hurt us we curse them and all their children
I just want the bread and bologna bundles to tuck away
I don't work for free, I am barely giving a fuck away

[Killer Mike]
So tell beggin' Johnny and Mommy to get the fuck away
Heyyo here's a gun, son, now run, get it the gutterway
Live to shoot another day

[Refrain]
Nobody speak, nobody get choked, hey
Nobody speak, nobody get choked, hey
Nobody speak
Nobody speak
Nobody speak, nobody get choked

[daily log: walking, 7km]

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