Moving Right Along

Gavage

svenonius — Fri, 06 Jul 2007 00:25:46 +0000

I just read about how the ideals of female beauty in the Islamic Republic of Mauritania are such that girls are force-fed fatty camel’s milk so they’ll grow up fat. The procedure is called ‘gavage’ from the French, but the French use it for geese. The article said pretty much all the women in Mauritania are obese and suggested that a contributing factor is that that’s the only way they can have any curves that show through their tentlike clothing. I’m not making this up!

Stanford

svenonius — Thu, 05 Jul 2007 11:02:21 +0000

I’m now at the Stanford LSA Summer Institute, having survived a 25-hour trip from Tromsø. It’s blazing hot and the place is teeming with linguists. I’ve only been to one course, so far, David Beaver’s on the semantics and pragmatics of discourse particles; he said at the outset that it would mostly be about ‘only’ but today he mostly talked about general ideas of topic, focus, and intonation. There was a really good turnout, I guess something like forty people.

Passport

svenonius — Wed, 04 Jul 2007 16:45:03 +0000

Up all night before my 8.00 AM California-bound flight, typical — I took a cab to my office at six AM to go do a few last-minute things there on my way to the airport, and to pick up some important things there I needed to take with me to California, like my passport. Did a little e-mail, then noticed that the passport wasn’t in my computer bag where I thought I had left it, so at sometime around seven I decided it must be in the jacket I had been wearing on my way back from Brussels a week ago, so called another cab to dash back home and find it. The cab arrived at 7.14, and I had it wait for me outside my house. After forty minutes of fruitless searching I realized the passport must be at the office after all, so I jumped back in the waiting cab and dashed back to the university, found the passport, and made it to the airport at 7.53, seven minutes before the flight was scheduled to take off, and of course the electronic check-in machine wouldn’t let me check-in, but fortunately the staff did, and I even checked bags!

In Copenhagen, they tried to get me to take a later flight, because the flight to Chicago was overbooked. I was too frazzled and stressed to imagine killing a day in Copenhagen, so I stood fast, despite their offers of 600 Euros and free tickets to Tivoli. Finally, when I wouldn’t give up my seat, they put me in business class! Fantastic! Actually got some rest over the Atlantic.

Writing from Chicago O’Hare.

Full panic mode

svenonius — Tue, 03 Jul 2007 16:26:36 +0000

Now I have just minutes to get forty zillion things together before a 5000 mile journey to the Land that Nobody can Forget. And here I am updating my blog about it, yeesh!

Thesis in the making

svenonius — Mon, 02 Jul 2007 06:26:11 +0000

Kristine Bentzen is just about to deliver a thesis, on verb movement in Northern Norwegian embedded clauses, among other things. How exciting!

And the sun is still shining strong.

July 1, 2007

svenonius — Sun, 01 Jul 2007 18:14:39 +0000

My LSA Summer Institute course is just four days and 5000 miles away, and I’m working hard on the course material. Meanwhile Tromsø has heated up under a torrid midnight sun and everybody is running around distractingly half-naked.