Dieulefit! … Distant young heathen … A diferencia de Inglaterra 10th of April, 2006 ANTE·MERIDIEM 12:19

One of my idle plans (together with moving to some Arabian city-state without income tax, or to Tajikistan to get the language fluent to my satisfaction) is to spend a summer wandering around France. I’ve spent a weekend in Paris, but that’s the extent of my experience there, despite working with and getting to know lots of French people over the years—this is a shame, because at least St. Malo and Carcassonne look spectacular, and I’m sure there’s a lot more to it.

And it occurs to me that one amusing thing to do during that would be to visit Dieulefit and, when asked, say that I was there purely on the grounds of the Jacques Brel song, and watch how people react. He mentions it only in the context of

« Meme si on m’appelle Dieu le Père
« Celui qui est dans l’annuaire
« Entre Dieulefit et Dieu vous garde … »

so I can well imagine it fazing them.

In contrast to France (well, to big parts of it, Dieulefit excepted, perhaps) and to Ireland, in (local) historical times Berlin has only been settled by people speaking what is (or what developed into) the current everyday language. This means that the place names are in large part understandable German; and they can be striking in their meaning (especially without further investigation!).

I change trains every day at Jungfernheide; “distant young heathen (!?!)” (okay, it’s actually named for some heathland that was owned by a convent, (full of »Jungfern«)), another station is Gleisdreieck “triangular rail lines, platform,” another Holzhauser Straße “wooden house street” , another Hohenzollernplatz “high tolls square” (okay, with this one, the family name of the kings of Prussia occurred to me long before the detailed translation), another Feuerbachstraße “fire brook street” and so on. It’s nice to have one more source of a few minutes’ amusement in your day, I find.

Word of the day: El Reino Unido is Spanish for the UK; they use Gran Bretaña for it quite a bit, and tangentally Bretaña means “Brittany,” as you would expect.

We’re coming soon, little tomato! … Tangent Jukebox pluses and minuses 7th of April, 2006 POST·MERIDIEM 04:47

I’m listening a good bit to Pink Martini’s Hang on Little Tomato  (of 2004) lately, and China Forbes—the main singer—really improved her French accent between Sympathique  and it. She still does the North American [ɹ] in « savoir », but between vowels it’s much more the French sound, and she has much fewer spelling pronunciations. Well done China Forbes!

La  Forbes is brightening up my day by means of a Tangent Jukebox, a tiny piece of plastic holding 256MB for which I paid 30 €; I am very content with this piece of hardware, I found with my previous Creative MP3 player that that amount of storage is ideal for me, I like the discipline of choosing new albums every three or four days and listening to nothing else. And, at that price, I do not need to be paranoid about losing it, which is nice.

However, it is annoying that copying files over to it (perhaps it’s relevant that this is from NetBSD), then starting the MP3 player aspect of it, involves the latter often destroying the contents. I’m experimenting a little on this—it seems to be a variant of http://​www.​s1mp3.​org/​ , and perhaps the firmware there will sort out the issue. But eh, small annoyances, it’s the price you need to pay for living in this future.

Gestern abend als ich zu hause ging, gab es einen Punk mit rosaroten Irokesenhaarschnitt, einem Bier, und einem Fahrrad auf der S-Bahn. Er setzte sich auf dem Boden, und fängte an seine Musik anzuhören. Nach einiger Zeit kam eine junge Stimme von seiner Richtung: „Gott weiß ich will kein Engel sein!“ Das Mädel gegenüber von mir lächelte ruhig; ich auch, weil es war wirklich komisch dieses drohende Lied so engelhaft, so cherubisch zu hören. Mir scheint es, einige Bands sollen ihre Fans ein bisschen mehr beeindrucken, dass das Thema der Band eine Kleinigkeit seriös sein soll. Oder, falls nicht, das wäre auch nicht schlecht—wir brauchen alle ein bisschen mehr Komödie in dem Leben.

Word of the day: Макола is Tajik for “Welcome.”

Plan 9 for Victory! … Ridgy-didge country … I blame my cold on the French 5th of April, 2006 POST·MERIDIEM 06:02

The first thing that turned up in my RSS reader this morning was this, and I haven’t read anything better since, nor had I for several days beforehand: http://​www.​thepoorman.​net/​2006/​04/​05/​plan-9-for-victory/​ . The whole thing is perfect writing—here’s just a short extract to whet your appetite:

“[…] Amen to that. The absurdity of a situation in which the military might of modern industrial hyperpower is unable, after three full years of battle, to crush a fractious insurgency of foreign terrorists, rag-tag ethnic militias, and Baathist dead-enders is almost too much to bear.”

“Professor Christmas feels that, in order to win the war, Bush should take the bold [and] decisive step of impressing Canadian theater critic Mark Steyn into service as his new speechwriter. (And damn the torpedoes!) You may be forgiven for feeling that this is a rather timid definition of “whatever it takes”. Can nothing, then, be done? Perhaps history can provide an answer: […]”

The piece effectively and powerfully makes a point that wasn’t clear to me before reading it; the US (and the UK, and Australia, and whoever exactly it is that’s still there) in Iraq neither want to win decisively nor behave humanely, if we are to judge their motivations on their actions. That leaves “massive public-relations exercise” as the plausible motivation for continuing the occupation, which makes me throw up a little in my mouth. Anyone know an antonym to “artisan of government?”

What makes the Amazon recommendation to my right particularly funny is that Jespersen is famed for his intemperate, batty male chauvinism (in the limited circles where people know who he is); the pure randomness of it is distracting, too, I can’t imagine Amazon meant to do it. Or, of course, maybe they did, to get this sort of mention in low-readership blogs and drive their mighty corporate stock price more stratospheric still ... Nah.

Ach, und; endlich habe ich meinen Flug für die Hochzeit gebucht; drei Tage in Australien, das genügt schon für mich, man hat keinen Mangel von Gelegenheiten in Europa Australier kennen zu lernen, und Brisbane ist doch nicht Ayer’s Rock Uluru. (Oder vielleicht will ich Zombie werden; 27 Stunden für jede Richtung, und das ohne die Bahnfahrt zu FRA!)

Word of the day: Грипп is Tajik for a cold; die Grippe is German for the same thing, la gripa the Spanish.

Also sprach Раҳманов … I hate you one and all … Vespuccia 4th of April, 2006 POST·MERIDIEM 06:28

Also, um auf die Wünsche eines so großen Publikums besser zu achten, schreibe ich hier öfter auf Deutsch. Zunächst; ich habe es schon bei Cliph gesagt, aber ich finde es merkwürdig genug um es hier zu wiederholen—der Präsident Tadschikistans interessiert sich gerne für Zarathustra, und nicht den modernen Zarathustra von Nietzsche, mit seinem „der Mensch ist ein Seil, geknüpft zwischen Tier und Übermensch—ein Seil über einem Abgrunde“ und solchen Schwachsinn, sondern den ursprünglichen Prophet des Parsens. Ich verstehe, dass nach 65 Jahren von einem antinationalistischen Kommunismus in jenem Teil der Welt, er will eine einheitliche Kultur für Tadschikistan fördern—was nicht einfach ist, das Land selbst besaß keine eigene Kultur im Gegensatz zu der von Usbekistan, die Region ist ein Schmelztiegel von Kulturen. Aber Zarathustra ist heutzutage etwas prähistorisches, Führer einer fast gestorbenen Philosophie; kein seriöser Grund für eine politische Weltanschauung.

Anyway, not our problem here in Europe, but I thought it interesting enough to comment on. Moving quickly along, here’s one of the most interesting Wikipedia stubs I’ve seen in a long time, via José on a mailing list I’m subscribed to:

http://​en.​wikipedia.​org/​wiki/​Sam_Hall

Its last line:

“Categories: Mercenaries | Members of the Ohio House of Representatives”

To which, the only thing to say is Whisky Tango Foxtrot, I think. (No, it’s not just Wikipedia vandalism; cf. http://​www.​amazon.​com/​gp/​product/​1556110499/​ )

Word of the day: Амрико is Tajik for “America” (I imagine it’s used for the US quite a bit too).