Today I used my bandwidth to say:

• 08:15 Clicky and I are off to Idaho and offline for a few days - happy and joyous holidays to everyone! #

Automatically shipped by LoudTwitter

(Posted here for reference. At twitter, I'm "yeff")

• 18:06 I feel like watching "Year Without A Santa Claus" #fb #

Automatically shipped by LoudTwitter

Here's me, wishing you joy, peace, and love.

Oh.

And this, too, because it's so very cheerfully obnoxious it sort of makes me wrinkle my brow in horrified bemusement, and laugh, all at once:

Normally, we go to Chattanooga to spend Christmas with my family.  At this very moment, they are sitting down for a dinner with 32 people, all of whom I’m related to. It’s great fun and I am very sad to miss it.

Fortunately, Santa, being a wise man, knows how to cheer me up and sent me an entire box of Scenting the Dark! In hardcover! Yay!

I hope you are having a Merry Christmas, too.

Comments? -- Link.

I finally managed to do some *actual* writing. Only 400 words, but it's the beginning of a new story, damn it. My intent is to finish a draft before the end of the month.

Today I used my bandwidth to say:

• 10:24 Wayne got me a smartpen for Christmas (www.livescribe.com) and it is pretty awesome. I have named it Clicky. #

Automatically shipped by LoudTwitter

I'm off for a few days to Idaho to celebrate Christmas with Wayne's family and will be offline for the most part. Happy holidays to everyone!

(Posted here for reference. At twitter, I'm "yeff")

• 17:49 good to see that E is back to normal after the wisdom tooth extraction! #fb #

Automatically shipped by LoudTwitter

"Same Old Lang Syne", Dan Fogelberg.

Beyond its regular appearance on just about any list of Worst Christmas Songs, it is also a rather creepy song when you start to think about it. Just a slight tweak in the lyrics and it truly becomes "stalker-iffic".

Start out like this:
"Met my old lover in the grocery store
It was the fourteenth one I tried
Crept up behind her and I pulled her sleeve
She turned to me, then cried."

(You can take it from here. Make sure to mention "restraining order" and "true love forever")

Rob and I have returned from seeing Avatar.  His verdict? It’s just bad.  Mine?  It’s very silly, with horrifically bad science and yet, if you are a visually based person, it is worth seeing on the big screen in 3-D.

If you are a logic based person, then skip this film.

Question: If every life form on the planet has nostrils in their necks and six limbs, why do the Na’vi have noses like we do and only four limbs?

Question: Where do the feathers on the bow and arrows come from since we never see a feather creature, ever.

Question: Kiss? What is this thing you call kiss, James Cameron? I mean really, there are HUMAN cultures that don’t have kissing.

I could go on. That said, it’s some damn impressive CGI.

Comments? -- Link.

Today I used my bandwidth to say:

• 08:48 Last minute Christmas shopping - good thing those Hannah Montanna gift tags were on sale.... #

Automatically shipped by LoudTwitter

(Posted here for reference. At twitter, I'm "yeff")

• 13:34 taking care of daughter who just had wisdom teeth out. she's watching "glee" episodes online. #fb #
• 15:51 5 Facebook Star Wars Status Updates: www.collegehumor.com/article:1794889 [totally excellent, from burger_eater] #fb #
• 21:16 Just saw "santaland diaries" at capital stage. Funny and enjoyable! #fb #

Automatically shipped by LoudTwitter

(via burger_eater)

The best part is the "unnecessary parkour". Hey Santa, there's a ladder on the side of that building there.

Santa loves parkour.

Well, for now. ;) Finder has been tweaked its last until I hear back from betas. Files have been sent, drafts have been printed. To the post office I go! Tomorrow. By the time I was done tweaking, I managed to shave another 3K-ish words off. Finder stands now at 130,758 words. I am pleased. I hope my betas are as well. Let the nail-biting begin!

[Ok, this is me blatantly cat waxing while I'm on vacation. I suppose I really ought to post parts of this at various Escape Artists forums. They would sound like conclusions there though rather than questions that I'm still puzzling out for myself. Finally, as much as I would love Escape Artists to podcast my stories, I know I need to be patient, extremely patient.]

I started thinking about this listening to Eugie Foster's Daughter of Bótù at PodCastle. Due to some miscommunication, Diane Severson received the wrong pronunciation for the Chinese words used in the story, most notably, 奶奶. (That's nǎinai in pinyin, pronounced roughly "nigh nigh", not "nay nay"). Chinese is a tonal language and she did yeoman's work of indicating that (if the tones weren't always the correct ones). On the whole, her narration met the exceptionally high standards I associate with Escape Artist podcasts. I just found the mispronunciations a little painful. The story itself is terrific.

What I found interesting is that other people had exactly the opposite reaction to how Diane Severson handled the Chinese words. i.e., no pronunciation qualms, but didn't like that she represented Chinese as a tonal language. (To be fair, they may not have realized the words weren't being pronounced correctly.) Basically, the intrusion of a different accent disturbed them. Hmm...

Fast forward to a few days ago. I listen to S. Hutson Blount's Littleblossom Makes a Deal with the Devil. In a neat bit of turnabout, the narrator is Eugie Foster. Like Diane Severson, she easily meets Escape Artist's impeccable standards, but unlike Diane Severson, she makes a different choice when it comes to pronouncing the Chinese words in the story.

It's easy to compare their pronunciations because both stories have 奶奶, grandmother, in common. Now I'm sure Diane Severson would have used the correct vowel had she known to. Eugie Foster does use the correct vowel, but she chooses English intonation rather than Mandarin. (The story makes it clear that when people speak in Chinese, they speak Mandarin. More on this later.) She does this for every Chinese word in the story. Now, I find this jarring especially when we get to place names. e.g., 東北 (Dōngběi). The good folks at the discussion forum though praise how natural her Chinese sounds. Um, ok.

They're obviously entitled to their opinion. And who doesn't favor the familiar over the foreign? I'm just a little disconcerted that throwing out half of how a language sounds makes for a more natural experience.

(Incidentally, when demonstrating tones, I don't know why everyone uses the syllable "ma." In context, you're likely to figure out whether the person meant to say "mom", "hemp", "horse", or "scold." No one ever demonstrates more interesting mix ups like "buy" vs. "sell" or "kiss" vs. "ask." Actually, ChinesePod once did a video demonstrating the latter, among others.)

I have to admit though that some of my unease also has to do with the story itself. Again, from what I've glanced, the good folks at the discussion forum praise how Chinese the story is. Well, it feels like a veneer to me, painted on as if someone had applied rouge and lipstick. I never got the sense, as I did when I read Larissa Lai's Salt Fish Girl, of a story that grew out of the culture.

Now, rouge and lipstick are not bad things. People wear them all the time to wonderful effect. In this case though, I wonder what the reaction would have been had the author written about a papoose who had named her missiles after the animal spirits, and used fire water. Moreover, the security authorization prompt was the computer asking for a sacrifice to the buffalo, or perhaps by asking our papoose to rain dance. Would people talk about how Native American the story was? (Yes, I've mixed up cliches from different Native American traditions here. Perhaps I'm making a point here.) I'm not saying that one couldn't program a computer to replicate, in metaphor, traditional Chinese culture, but why would a military do this or allow this?

Besides that, little stupid things tripped me up. It's frustrating because they're so easily correctable. If you're going to put on the rouge and the lipstick, the rouge ought to go on the cheeks and the lipstick on the lips, and artfully.

The story refers to the main character as Xiaoying. "Xiao" could be 小, meaning "small" or "little." Try as I might though, I can not find a character pronounced as "ying" in Mandarin that means "blossom." I looked in four different dictionaries, each having over 100000 entries. Now, I'm not saying there isn't one. I'm just saying that I can't find it, making for a potentially obscure, or easily misrecognized nickname. (If I guess on the tones, Xiaoying could mean "small photo of one's self" or "smiling expression" among a few others.)

The story then refers to the bad guys as gweilo. On one hand, this is pretty expected. On the other hand, it's also colloquial Cantonese. Having gone to the trouble of making it clear that everyone speaking Chinese is speaking in Mandarin, the story springs a Cantonese expression at us. Two of my dictionaries of standard Chinese don't even list it, and the term has been around forever. I understand why S. Hutson Blount used it, but it doesn't strike me as an expression that would pop up from the point of view of a native Mandarin speaker. (There are a couple similar expressions that might though.)

This is obviously my very personal and idiosyncratic reaction. I haven't mentioned anything that would make me want to throw my iPhone against the wall. Other people enjoyed it a lot praising both the pronunciation and the story's depiction of Chinese culture. Clearly, I'm not trying to dictate how other people should react. I expect I'm fairly alone on this (just like relatively few Firefly fans know or care that much of the Chinese in that show is well nigh unintelligible). That's to be expected.

If I ever podcast a story though, and there is some Mandarin in it, I'm going to pronounce it as accurately as possible. (In some cases, like "Xiaoying" you can only go so far. Then there is my own accent to consider. It asymptotically approaches "Chinese newsreader.") Likewise, if one of my stories with Mandarin gets podcast, I'd insist on the same if I can. The people who get wigged out will just have to get wigged out.

(Posted here for reference. At twitter, I'm "yeff")

• 21:11 watching a singing group show on NBC. Lots of singing going on here, both new groups and oldies (like Boyz 2 Men) #fb #
• 21:15 Done with singing group show. Now watching South Park. South Park is so demented. #fb #

Automatically shipped by LoudTwitter

Let's see. What's been up recently?

Thursday (12/17) was the work holiday party, including white elephant gift exchange, foosball tournament (run by me), and ping-pong tournament. My foosball team (Team Arsenal) once again finished second, despite having "home field advantage". In ping-pong, I almost beat the guy who ended up in second place. In gift exchange, I ended up with a truffle collection which has proved quite tasty.

Friday (12/18) was a half-day of work before the two weeks off they forced us to take gave us. That evening was the SacFooty Annual General Meeting, wherein I was voted into the office of Vice President, followed by holiday drinks at Pre-Flight, which was much fun. I left early because I had to get up early Saturday morning.

Saturday (12/19) I got up at the crack of pre-dawn in order to drive some middle school kids down to Stanford for a math contest. A total of 15 kids went, in 9 different cars, and we all managed to get there on time. The contest was hectic but fun, as I helped with various aspects and ran a Number Sense Test. At the end, trophies were given out by me, plaques by the contest organizers, and a kid from my school actually won a couple things (he's pretty sharp)!

Sunday (11/20) was exhaustion after the long day of Saturday. I slept til 9:30, and the day's output of usefulness was doing laundry and cleaning up the kitchen. And eating a bunch of cookies. Someone had to do it!

Monday (11/21) was continued laziness, though I did manage to go to the grocery and move some earlier math contest results into a new spreadsheet. I might end up teaching myself Excel VB macros as a result, which would be a good thing.

Tomorrow E gets her wisdom teeth removed in the AM, so the day will be hanging out the house keeping her comfortable and starting the great office Clean Out. There will also be writing, as there hasn't been much writing the last few days.

And that's the update. Christmas in four days! Wow, that happened fast.

The Punjabi version of Jingle Bells (courtesy Dixon Osburn).

Reminds me of the Boymongoose and his Christmas album. Much fun.