TRAVELS WITH THE NUMBERS PEOPLE

Typical family conversation from the road trip up to Canada for my aunt R's 80th birthday:

"What's our room number?"
"315."
"That's not as good as 314."
"Or 357."
"But it does have the whole odd numbers thing going for it, like your old work extension was 357 and my mobile phone extension is the first four odd integers out of order."
"Does anyone remember R's number? We should call."
"It's the old Dormline prefix, which is a perfect square, plus equilateral triangle, plus right angle. 225-6090."
"And her apartment?"
"There's one James Bond. 1007."
"Damn. we should have looked at the odometer a bit earlier. It just passed 161616."
"Do we have a plan for how we're getting to the bridge?"
"We're taking the Route 12 shortcut."
"Route 12 isn't a shortcut."
"Yes it is. It's the hypotenuse."
"There is no hypotenuse. It's isosceles."
"Scalene, actually."
"Once you take the lower speed limit into account it is definitely not the hypotenuse."

And so on. What does normal families' car talk sound like?
. . . posted by Diana 5/12/2005 02:07:00 PM

Friday, May 06, 2005

My supervisor did some of his critical early work on the Finland-Swedish dialect (all right, I hear you, language) spoken in his home village in Western Finland. Over the years, I have been heard to remark snottily that if my home village had a language, I'd be forgetting it as fast as possible. Confident in the belief that back in Bedford we didn't have a special language of any kind.

But, as the household pet works diligently on growing an opposable thumb, it turns out we Bedford people have been working diligently on developing an intensified variety of Boston English through a kind of slambook online genre. I give you bedfordite.com. I don't pretend to understand all of it, though I recognize many of the names of teachers, juvenile delinquents, actors in the Bedford Murder, etc. The best period so far is about 1500 posts back when my brother and his friends were writing still-intelligible things like:

- Bedfordite Dictionary: keepin' busy (phrase): wicked townie way to say you are working and not in any immediate trouble with the law: "So, kid, you keepin' busy?"

- Petty-bourgeois college toolbags should remember that the working class can always drop a revolution on your candy asses.

- Don't bash the hardworking college students. We work hard so we can get out of this town.

- You must be part of the New Bedford. Don't be late for sensitivity training.

- I saw: a new and terrible suburban revolution. Mullets and Members Only jackets rampaging thru town grabbing every MILF in an SUV and dishing out The People's Revenge! Gonna be sweet.

- How Bedford works: If you went to BHS in the 70s or early 80s, you are automatically a legend, because that's when BHS rocked. If you went to BHS between the mid 80s and early 90s, you still rock; it just wasn't as crazy as the 70s. If you entered BHS in the 90s, then you have no clue about the legends.

This was also the era when the vote to remove a post was labeled "Kid, that was harsh." I forget what the positive vote was labeled.

submitted by: automatically a legend (unregistered)
. . . posted by Diana 5/6/2005 06:33:00 AM

Saturday, April 30, 2005

There were eight people in ballet class today. "I figured that in this class there were enough grown-ups that I needn't cancel it," said the teacher while we were putting on our pointe shoes. "I don't like Vappu myself. It's like you have to celebrate. I don't like the 'have to' part." I concur with this completely; in fact, you could say the failure of my brain-clock to coincide with the national holiday calendar is a driving force behind my recently-completed PhD, Given and News: The Creation of Community in Media Discourse on National Holidays.

So our proud little nonconformist band of Vappu resisters did our pointe work and then, since it was on the way back, I went and stood through the statue capping, which actually turned out to be a particularly good show this year. Photos to come.
. . . posted by Diana 4/30/2005 11:34:00 AM

Saturday, April 23, 2005

Academic conference, noun phrase: the exercise of taking a flight halfway around the world to a meeting where you will learn what the people in the next office are working on.

Actually that's more like what I will be doing in July. This time I only took a train an hour and a half away to a meeting where I learned what people in other departments think we should be working on. Among other things. And several of us got our pictures in Kouvolan Sanomat (mine, which shows me holding a hand next to my face in an effort to block the photographer, doesn't appear online). It was good to get out of Helsinki. I hadn't been out of town since January and didn't realize how much the walls were closing in on me.
. . . posted by Diana 4/23/2005 02:00:00 PM

Wednesday, April 20, 2005

Miguel interviews Apocalyptica. Slightly condensed tidbit:

Perttu Kivilaakso is a tall, slender young man with some fancy dye work in his hair, black fingernails on his left hand and a can of Red Bull connected to a vein in his arm by IV drip. When he pronounces the word "knife" he doesn't let the letter "K" go to waste.

Paavo Lötjönen (pronounced "Paavo Lötjönen") is a bit shorter, stockier, athletic, with short black hair and a little thing growing on his chin. Maybe he's more hyper than Perttu, maybe he just got more sleep.

They show me their cellos, they tell me which rosins they use, they explain their pickups and their earplugs and why they use new Chinese cellos. Basically, new Chinese cellos are cheap. When a baggage truck runs over one at Schiphol Airport, they merely laugh derisively and say, "Schiphol is as hard on cellos as we are."

Whole interview here, concert notes here.
. . . posted by Diana 4/20/2005 07:46:00 AM

Monday, April 18, 2005

Why is rhythmic juggling (to music) not an Olympic event? Meet the Galchenkos. You'll need a video player to get the full effect. Circus skills went out of fashion as a geek hobby shortly before I was an undergrad but they seem to be coming back; for the first time since the early '80s, I saw a teenager riding a unicycle just the other day.
. . . posted by Diana 4/18/2005 07:55:00 AM

Friday, April 15, 2005

After eleven years in Finland I finally got to a kantele concert last night at Sibelius Academy. The kantele is the Finnish table harp or zither (fretless, one string per note) and these days it is played not by windblown sages but by meek-looking girls with long ponytails and downcast eyes. The first one messed up and had to start again, poor thing; she must have been a first year student. The second one was like a Windham Hill recording: pleasant enough in the background, not enough substance for a concert. The third one did a rather impression of French ballet music (it was an Ibert transcription) with actual dynamics, which the first two had missed. There were a few more varied and technically challenging new agey pieces, one with a singer for distraction. And then, thank god, Hedi came on and did the Bach chaconne from my favorite Segovia album, grabbing handfuls of notes out of the strings and letting them fall in perfect arrangement. All right, technically I have been to a kantele concert before; I was at Hedi's recital last year. But technically she does not play the kantele. She plays the kannel (Wikipedia folks: you might want to fix the links in music entries that automatically point there).
. . . posted by Diana 4/15/2005 01:19:00 AM

Saturday, April 09, 2005

The Unitarian Jihad meme that's going round would strike me as a lot funnier if I had not been asked, at the age of nine, by another little Jewish girl in my hometown, why my family didn't go to the Unitarian church the way her family did. Nonplussed, I replied that we liked to sleep late on the weekends. She thought that was a poor excuse.

This was in the town where the Unitarian minister was named Mendelsohn and the Baptist minister was named Katz, by the way. So I guess it was somewhat radical that we were unconverted, unrepentant, and out of the closet.
. . . posted by Diana 4/9/2005 08:23:00 AM

Tuesday, March 29, 2005

With its ambient whale-call string bass intro and projected constellations and mandalas, Resonanssi at first resembled nothing in my experience so much as the multimedia physics shows at the Cahners Theater of the Boston Museum of Science in the 1970s. Ann-Sofi Kyrklund's tapping emerged in its initial variation as an additional percussion line for a Brubeck-style jazz duo, evolving into a monologue with the words just out of reach. Left alone on the stage she got bored talking to herself (and we were starting to get bored listening to her) but was saved by Jussi Lindroos's prisoner response knocking and subsequent Houdinic emergence from a box under her feet.

A rock solid tapper with loose, tai chi influenced arm style, Lindroos first did a not-quite matched pas de deux with Kyrklund before trading licks with the musicians with hipster humor. He makes it look easy, as they say, which Kyrklund, like many superb teachers, does not; her eyes rarely left the floor and my knees creaked just from watching her. She did have a few more airborne moments near the end of the show where the dialogic metaphor was made explicit as her taps alternated with the auctioneer-speed Indian vocal percussion of Sheila Chandra. In this section her upper body movements also broke free of the traditional energy-economic chicken-wing flapping to incorporate sinuous southeast Asian styles that would have meshed interestingly with Lindroos's solo karate had the choreography allowed for it instead of making her Spooky the Owl.

Okay, that was a cheap shot from someone who has never seen a tap show before. The show is on at Stoa tomorrow night as well (open seating).
. . . posted by Diana 3/29/2005 11:06:00 AM

Saturday, March 12, 2005

Just for the hell of it, I'm going to translate part of Heikki Patomäki's "Open Letter to the Rector," which shows that the professorial angst detailed each week in the columns of the Chronicle of Higher Education has come to Finland as well. Patomäki, a political science professor, was writing against the new salary system in which civil service pay grades for university employees, with set increments for job title, degrees, age, and length of service, are being replaced by a supposedly meritocratic system of subjective evaluations by immediate supervisors, with possible bonuses to be paid to top performers if there is extra money. This is part of the plan to make Finnish universities like efficient businesses:

I first tried to suggest deferring the implementation of the salary system reform until next fall (when I would no longer be the head of department but only the deputy head) - not understanding the frenzied determination with which the new system was being pushed through. I appealed to the many other ongoing processes and the unjustified hurry and extra work they were causing, but the reason was also that I felt the new system was bad and potentially downright dangerous. In any case my suggestion met with threats of "serious consequences" if I did not get the reforms in place by the deadline.

Then I took the bull by the horns and decided to start implementing the system on a minimal basis and a sped-up timetable. When I had already conducted some of the required salary appraisals, I was told by the Faculty of Social Sciences that the personal appraisal form had not yet been finalized. (Note: the new system consists of an appraisal of the tasks of the job, followed by an appraisal of the worker's performance in the job.) I put the already-completed forms in the shredder and completed only the job appraisal parts in the rest of the discussions.

The events of Wednesday, March 3 forced me to reconsider the situation. When I got to work first thing in the morning I found in my in-box a message from a colleague at another department in the Faculty exhorting people to refuse to fill in the forms for the new salary system. At 11 am there was a Rector's meeting with the heads of department and the main topic was the new system. Jorma Äijö, who was responsible for matters relating to the salary reform, spoke arrogantly at that meeting. His basic assumption seemed to be that the Ministry of Education and the central administration of the university would dictate what should be done and how, and no matter how often and arbitrarily the rules were changed, the job of professors was just to implement the orders on time and in addition to crack down on their colleagues who asked questions, expressed doubts, opposed the system or resisted following orders. Finally, later the same day I had my own appraisal with the Dean and confirmed that the round of interviews I had done with my direct reports would have to be done over again, because the forms for the second (individual performance) part had not been finalized. All of this raised again in my mind the deep doubts I had had about the nature and intent of the new salary system.

Patomäki then gave five main reasons why the system was bad and ought not to be implemented in any Finnish university:

salary negotiations take up a great deal of time in departments that are already too pressed to do any research;

a very small amount of money (2-7% of salary funds) will be spent on bonuses for high achievers with the result of increasing inequality and dissent;

the success of the academic enterprise is built on making the exchange of ideas as free and relaxed as possible, while the new salary system promotes competition and hierarchy;

academic freedom requires that people should be able to choose what they will work on without worrying too much about politics with their department head, and to disagree with each other without fear of reprisal, and the subjectivity of the new system will erode necessary diversity;

the university governance system was reformed in the 1960s to give the teaching staff more voice in affairs and the current developments reverse that progress toward democracy.

He then resigned as head of department.

I had my first review under the new system last week. Identification of high and low achievers in the new meritocratic world does not take place through reviews of portfolios by committees of superior scholars, but in short conversations with busy higher-ups who may never have had time to get to know you at all. I was told straight off that "you're getting 3s (out of 5). Everybody is getting 3s except for some senior people who will get 4s. The Faculty doesn't want to see too many high marks." This was naturally very motivating and I am wondering whether to apply the principles to my own marking to save time.

No matter how many procedures are undertaken to make them look like businesses, Finnish universities differ from the average company in two important ways: first, they have a worldwide monopoly over higher education in Finnish, and no new universities can be started without the government's consent; second, they do not have the ability to adjust supply to demand. We took about 70 major students if I recall correctly, plus some more minor and teacher-line students. We had no control over this number and it was likely set by the Ministry of Education. Now, selective universities in the United States also reject large numbers of qualified applicants, but students there have many more options and everybody fairly soon ends up somewhere satisfactory for their needs, whereas here there is a substantial backlog of people waiting to retake the entrance exams year after year. One of my extremely talented cow-orkers at the translation firm took our entrance exam four or five times before getting in. Part of the difficulty is that the university system pays students rather than students paying the university; all undergraduate students in Finland automatically get a stipend from the government for 60 months; however, this amount is not enough to live on (about 500 € a month) and therefore most students work, often full time [a separate problem, discussed in 1) below]. So by all means, let's support the government's effort to make universities into business enterprises - on a seventeenth-century business model.

[1] While I have no love for the American tuition and financial aid system, the Finnish student funding system badly needs reforming. The absence of tuition and existence of a stipend for all is something people feel strongly about and previous rumors of cuts have brought students out on protest marches, but perhaps it would be possible to redistribute the money. For example, students could get twice the amount for half the time, that is a study and rent stipend of 1000 € a month for three school years of ten months each which would be sufficient for them to get a good grounding in university work and do some growing up; after that, they are usually working as much as they can and studying part-time anyway.

I would also keep the first five years of education tuition-free but introduce a program of class and service fees for those who want to take more time or remain enrolled as continuing education students after their degrees, to take care of the problem of students who are delaying finishing their theses because they will then lose their right to take elective classes and use the libraries and computer centers. The Open University could also be expanded so that those who did not win free study places through the exam could study for pay if they were qualified. More students would earn more degrees, and then, with the fees collected, we could expand our classes and service offerings for all - everyone in society would win. However, I don't see this happening because I suspect people would go on strike against even the most modest course fees.
. . . posted by Diana 3/12/2005 10:15:00 AM

Tuesday, December 14, 2004

Mark's post says it all.
. . . posted by Diana 12/14/2004 09:43:00 AM

Wednesday, May 28, 2003

Tourist season is upon us. My three best overheard tourist quotes (ever, so far):

Lost dad on bus this morning: I tried asking the driver where the railway station was. I tried train. I tried statión. I tried in German. But hell, they're probably more likely to speak Russian around here anyway.

Proud dad of exchange student: So after you get registered, Mindy, we can go look for all that Viking stuff they've got here.

Child to father: Daddy, there are lots of places around here that change money into Euros!
. . . posted by Diana 5/28/2003 01:38:59 AM

Friday, May 16, 2003

Reading between the lines of this story on second-order effects of wireless communications, it seems that societies with different initial levels of punctuality are converging on the model of "fifteen minutes' grace period, and call if delayed" as the use of mobile phones here. (Summary without the ad noise at TechDirt Wireless.)

On the same topic, it would have been interesting to attend Society for Phenomenology and Media's mobile communications conference here this week, but as of Tuesday they still had not posted a complete programme, though there's one there now. This is the academic syndrome a colleague described (speaking of someone in a different part of the university) as "So-and-so is very bad at announcing things, especially in advance."
. . . posted by Diana 5/16/2003 07:34:16 AM

Sunday, May 11, 2003

There is - has been for some time, in fact - a forum for recovering adult children of Daily Mail readers. The Daily Mail is a British tabloid (owned by the same company that runs the Metro free-paper empire) that is so tabloidy I can't believe it exists and I certainly can't believe that people read it non-ironically. But then the New York Post was hard to believe too.

The website fails to give the full impression of an actual copy of the newspaper, which is a running drumbeat of Toryism, double entendres, Page Three girls, Royalty worship, Royalty bashing, celebrity worship, celebrity bashing, plutocrat worship, plutocrat bashing, warmongering, warm puppy stories with a message, yearning for the good old days, and did I mention the worship? And the bashing?

But all this is just background for what I think of as the quintessential Daily Mail story: A mother leaves her children alone for a little while and returns to find them drowned, abducted, abused, mutilated, killed. Her remorse is probed for pages under the headline: "I Only Took My Eyes Off Him/Her/Them For A Minute."

Contrast this to the American version, in which the grieving family is, to be sure, hounded by the press, but their real interest is the community response: "Neighborhood Organizations Start Vigilante Program / Hold Rock Concert For 'Jimmy' Fund / Call For Safe Streets." This was apparent in the 9/11 coverage, where the city was reconstructed by the press as a community pulling together. The Onion got it just right with "Not Knowing What Else To Do, Woman Bakes American Flag Cake," and Donna Tartt got it just right in the paragraph of The Secret History on the community response to Bunny's death.

There are occasional tragedies and violent crimes involving children in Finland, but they are downplayed in contrast to the weekly headlines about celebrities who want children: "My Life Is Not Complete," "Finally Expecting," "Baby Changed My Life." Press interest falls off after children are born - in a small natalist society, it is the job of women to produce new citizens and the job of the state to keep them safe. There is no law here against leaving underage children alone.

The national tabloid presses generally leave fathers and potential fathers in peace, but this is made up for the the charmless advertisements in the global business press suggesting that male parents are being insufficiently competitive if they aren't setting up trust funds and taking the Concorde home to see their kid's softball game.

In other news: more on second-order effects of mobile phones, from tech porn weblog Gizmodo.
. . . posted by Diana 5/11/2003 12:00:00 AM

Tuesday, April 15, 2003

As a teenager I naturally assumed that after I graduated from college I would save up some money and go explore Europe with a friend, in the manner of Cornelia Otis Skinner and Emily Kimbrough. By the time I could afford to go to Europe, Caroline was married (and moving to Japan for a year), and by the time I actually got to Europe she had a baby. It was only this past month that we were able to do anything remotely Skinner and Kimbroughish, and this was due to the fact that she wanted to go to a meeting of OpenACS software developers in Copenhagen and I was able to take a long weekend and join her there.

"Of course you're welcome at the meeting and social events," she said.

I said, "Uh, yeah," sure that (if I wasn't kicked out for not having a badge) I would be falling asleep or playing with my own papers in the back of a darkened lecture hall while some suit talked in Powerpoint about how his company was going to make ninth-generation middleware that would allow companies to enable users to reach their potential to achieve their desire to reshape the world.

Or maybe it would be just like college: Caroline would be sitting there with nothing but her breakfast of Diet Coke, concentrating and remembering everything, and I'd be writing down every word I heard including the professor's jokes and still finding my brain empty as soon as I let go of the pen ... more in the new Cahiers Intimes entry ...
. . . posted by Diana 4/15/2003 12:00:00 AM

Monday, April 14, 2003

Smart folks meaning well.
Open source - open culture.
New geek paradigm.

A report of my travels to the Copenhagen open source software meeting with C- will be up in Cahiers Intimes at some point when I've worked out my hard disk problems (the predictable major crash in the last months of dissertation writing). Meanwhile, here is a partial list of words and phrases learned in the last four days: open space meeting, pretty names, TCL, WiFi, hotspot, wireless cloud, drinking the Kool-Aid, governance, culture of transparency, "I work at the coffee shop," Generation D (for dotcom), HTML monkey, moblog, brainwipe, tarball.

Candles, check. Royal Copenhagen style plates, check.
Carlsberg bottles, check - it's dinner in Denmark.
. . . posted by Diana 4/14/2003 09:10:02 AM

Friday, March 28, 2003

For the last month, there's been a discussion in Blogland about the town and gown divide and the problems of PhD programs in particular. Dorothea Salo seems to have kicked it off (see here and here), followed by Naomi (featuring Tim Burke in the comments, follow-up post here), Renee, Alex Golub (cannot find the post I remembered, but see "Microcosmographica Academica," March 13), Alex Halavais, and others.

I have plenty to say about this, but no time to say it and no conviction I won't change my mind tomorrow, so I'm saving most of it for that wonderful time after I finish my degree and fix up the essay section here. I will say now, though, that the single most irrational thing about academia for me is the dysfunctional money and career planning habits that the ivory tower life encourages and indeed, almost requires. Along these lines I was interested by some peripheral comments in the discussion (blue type is them, black type is me):

What's struck me most forcefully in my very limited sample set is the overwhelming extent to which one's status as sheep or goat seems to have been determined by a single factor: the relationship with one's doctoral advisor. (The Bellona Times, start reading with Proselytizers and Apostates. Oh, and my doctoral advisor just won a big teaching award, thank you for asking.)

Midway through my much-aided private college education, the Reagan administration started making Academe a gated community. The results were apparent by the time I graduated ... (The Bellona Times again, here and be sure to follow the link to here. This applies at the graduate level as well; that is, the opportunity cost for graduate school, especially in the US, is getting so high that you run an increasing risk of getting not always the brightest researchers and teachers, but the ones who can most afford that career relative to their other chances. This was always somewhat true, but more so after tuition hyperinflation started and after they started taxing graduate incomes in the mid-80s.)

[The view from inside the academy on what to do with the surplus PhDs we produce is:] 'let's continue to recruit people into our graduate programs even though we know they'll never find full-time work in the academy; after all, they can always find work afterwards as ... well, as something or other, Hollywood screenwriters or something...; [we] can't think of anything too specific, but the Ph.D. must surely serve as preparation for a wide variety of nonacademic careers.' I find this intellectually specious and morally bankrupt. (Slightly reformatted rendering of a view from The Invisible Adjunct, see posts here and here and (this just in, and it's a zinger) here, and maybe the workplace happiness task force I'm serving on would like to read about academic therapy as well)

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. . . posted by Diana 3/28/2003 03:49:05 AM

I missed the Oscar broadcast on Wednesday because I was staying up all night in my office to meet a deadline. I wonder how old I will be when I pull my last all-nighter - for something I have to do, I mean. I was sorry to miss the awards, not that I'm such a big movie fan, but it's something one must see in order to keep up with the culture. Kymm saw it though, and her synopsis is almost as good as being there:

Jennifer Garner is wearing a colour! A bright colour! Is that not against the rules of Life During Wartime? Blacks and dulls only, I'm certain that that was what the memo said. Stone the frivolous bitch!!

Geena Davis no longer dresses like an insane person. I'd say that's a shame, it was always one of the more interesting parts of Oscars past, trying to figure out what the hell she was thinking. Although the blue aviator glasses do give one pause.

Documentary Feature. As though anything besides Bowling For Columbine has a chance to win. And of course I was right. Are we sure that's Michael Moore? I've never seen him without his baseball cap, it could be a ringer. Ah no, he's talking about the war and the president as no-one else would, it's Michael Moore alright. Whether you agree with his views or not, you can't help but admire his great clanking balls of bronze. He must have to have his trousers especially made.

Full report here.
. . . posted by Diana 3/28/2003 03:03:34 AM

Wednesday, March 19, 2003

Within 24 hours after getting the fifth largest number of votes of any candidate [1], Tony Halme had his first scandal. He called President Halonen a lesbian on a radio show - apparently, this is an insult - and then apologized under duress and amended it to "former president of SETA" (the national gay league, it's a longstanding item on her CV). A list of his other insults about "Somalit," "neekerit," foreigners, women, and so on is making the mailing list rounds. Tony Halme, MP for the Redneck Party - he'll be here till 2007, folks, try the reindeer fricassee.

Also: it just wouldn't be a war without a George Lakoff rant. I can't believe I've only gotten one copy of this so far, from the systemic functionalist list; the other 30 linguistics lists are sure to have it by the end of the week, plus rebuttals.

[1] This is called being a "vote rake" (ääniharava) or a "vote vacuum" (ääni-imuri). I also saw something like "vote hoard" (äänirohmu) this time around, referring to Miss Finland (third in the popularity contest).
. . . posted by Diana 3/19/2003 01:39:32 PM

Monday, March 17, 2003

I was wrong about everything, of course. The Center Party won the largest number of seats, mainly on the strength of voters in the provinces wanting a change; SDP still got the most votes in Helsinki and increased their number of seats. Anneli Jääteenmäki will most likely be the first woman Prime Minister; I didn't even realize this would be a first, since we're all now used to Tarja Halonen as president and Riitta Uosukainen (who just retired) as speaker of Parliament. It seems likely that there will be a Center-SDP government, with the Coalition, who lost seats, left out.

None of the hopeful new faces I listed two days ago got in, though Johanna Sumuvuori was agonizingly close - at one point the TV showed her picture and said she was probably going to get in, then rescinded it as the Greens lost a seat. For the most part, incumbents and ex-MPs who spent a few years at the European Parliament were re-elected. This is an older Parliament than the last two. But there were still some unconventional winners: singer Mikko Alatalo, track and field star Sari Essayah, shipyards magnate Martin Saarikangas [1], and professional boxer and writer Tony "Viking" Halme, who represents a tiny party that nobody was taking seriously, called the Perussuomalaiset ("Fundamental/Basic Finns," though their preferred translation is "True Finns").

Now the log cabins are being dismantled and the bouquets of party balloons that floated from prams on Saturday are gone - along with the brief liminal euphoria of election day. The weather is turning cold again and all the news is bad.

[1] who also holds the antiquated honorary government post of Titular Mining Counsellor, which sounds like something out of early Isaac Asimov. There are also Minister Counsellors, a higher honorary post that I've heard your friends can buy for you.
. . . posted by Diana 3/17/2003 09:01:19 AM

Saturday, March 15, 2003

Today was practically the only day of the election season with decent weather, and the candidates were out in force around their temporary clubhouses (picture to come). I accepted a Green Party newspaper from Minerva Krohn, Irina's lookalike sister, who is a doctor; a Leena Harkimo [1] jacket reflector from a Coalition person; a postcard of Anneli Jääteenmäki [2] from a Center Party person; and various ephemera from the Left League; and then Tuija Brax gave me an official Green Party compost bag with pictures of her and Heidi Hautala on it, to put the whole mess into.

[1] Leena Harkimo, MP, is the soon-to-be ex-wife of Hjallis Harkimo, the chinless playboy owner of the big hockey club Jokerit (the Jokers) [3]. The link is to a page of jokes about him. If I understand the supermarket magazines correctly, he has taken up with a young Green Party MP, Merikukka Forsius, whose first name could be translated as Seaflower, and who says, "He isn't funding my campaign - we don't discuss money."

[2] If the Center Party gets the largest number of votes, Jääteenmäki will probably be the next Prime Minister. She is fairly conservative for Finland - makes noises about law and order, and tax breaks to stimulate small business - but still, according to her platform, ten miles to the left of Margaret Thatcher and five miles to the left of Tony Blair. Practically the only scandal of the campaign was when she tried to imply Lipponen was more in favor of war in Iraq than he was, giving her the peace position. And if the Social Democrats get the largest number of votes, we're looking at a Lipponen III government, whose strongest recommendation resembles the lackluster incumbent campaign went in Wag the Dog: "Don't change horses in midstream."

[3] This is not the silliest hockey team name in Finland, by far. There is one up north that translates as "the Ermines" or "the Stoats."

The rather posh election cabin belonging to the Coalition Party.
. . . posted by Diana 3/15/2003 09:19:16 AM

Friday, March 14, 2003

On Sunday, Finnish citizens will vote in the most boring parliamentary election ever - I'm an election junkie and even I think it is boring. The only certainty is that a few very young women [1] or otherwise supposedly unconventional candidates [2] will be elected and the press will be all over them as if they are real groundbreakers and this proves that democracy works [3]. And of course it is good that the Finnish parliament is demographically diverse, represents the population more accurately than most legislatures do, and so on.

But at the same time, very little has been said during the campaign, or will be said during the results coverage about what the sitting MPs have actually done, and what the candidate MPs promise to do. The reason for this is not simply that politics has turned into a superficial beauty contest; there are structural factors involved [3]. In many other countries, there is an upper and a lower house, and the lower house members at least represent a specific patch of land whose residents they are expected to serve. In Finland, the seats are divided into 15 regional groups. There are 20 MPs from Helsinki at the moment, each of whom represents all of Helsinki, and there are 225 people running for those seats, including plenty of teachers and housewives and scientists and nurses who are not going to get in, but are helping gather votes from their friends and demographic peers for the parties they represent. The party gets seats based on its total number of votes, so votes for losing candidates are never entirely wasted.

Since there are 20 MPs from Helsinki, it becomes very difficult for any one of them to claim credit for anything good that the national government has done for the city. It's also difficult because much of the decisionmaking is done before debate meetings, rather than through them; and because there doesn't seem to be a culture of claiming authorship of a particular bill. The government writes bills, or parties working together in committees write bills. Even if it's the government, which these days is a coalition of just about all the parties except for the Flat Earth Party and the Meadow Party, you're still not going to hear people referring to a law as "The Lipponen Act." The group structure also makes it very difficult to blame any individual for representing you badly, because they can just shift the blame to the other local reps from the other parties [4].

Hence, the beauty contest.

And hence also the popularity of the various "vaalikones" (election machines) where you answer some questions and they tell you which candidates are closest to your views - although it's frequently acknowledged that you could go take the Which Buffy Character Are You? quiz and it would be about as helpful. See the Helsingin Sanomat vaalikone, YLE vaalikone, and MTV3 vaalikone (thanks to Ernestiina for the links).

[1] For example: in 1995, Säde Tahvanainen (Social Democrat from Joensuu, then 22); Janina Andersson and environmental lawyer Tuija Brax (Greens); kewpie doll Kirsi Piha (Coalition, the businessy party) who is now retiring to be a talk show host. In the 1996 EU elections, skiing champion Marjo Matikainen-Kallström (Coalition). In 1999, rock lyricist and single motherhood poster child Anni Sinnemäki (Greens).

[2] For example: in 1995, beret-wearing beatnik psychologist Veltto Virtanen (independent) and theater director Irina Krohn (Greens); in 1999, former Miss Finland Tanja Karpela (Center, the agrarian party).

[3] Possible fresh young faces this time: Johanna Sumuvuori (Greens), Aysu Shakir (SDP), Timo Riitamaa (Greens) (these three are already being treated as celebrities by the student newspaper), Sanna Hellström (Greens), Paavo Arhimäki (Left League, which begs to be distinguished from the two different hardcore Communist parties), Markus Drake (Greens, recently removed from the presidency of the Young Greens - at least I think that's what the Metro article said - for smoking dope in the Green party clubhouse - the log cabin outside Stockmann's where they hand out campaign materials). Most of these people were sitting in the Helsinki Student Union a few years ago when I was an alternate there.

[4] There are also historical reasons as well why this is a particularly vague election - for example, the public has now made the association between tax cuts and service cuts, so none of the major parties can loudly promise tax cuts although the Center Party is suggesting tax breaks for small business. The next four years are going to be a grim business of slicing a shrinking pie and everyone knows it.

[5] Except for the guy from Åland. Since he's the only MP from there, he has to run on his record.
. . . posted by Diana 3/14/2003 07:20:02 AM

Wednesday, March 12, 2003

Most of my ballet classes take place on the heavy-industry side of Sörnäinen, in an area I have come to think of as the Fight Club district because of its unusual number of martial arts schools. On the main road is the judo place Anna-Maria used to take classes at, and a store selling gis and belts. For a while there was a tae kwon do school operating out of a fallout shelter (see below). In the same building as the ballet school there is something called the Combat Academy of Finland, which in the absence of an indigenous Finnish martial art specializes in krav maga, the fighting technique the Israeli army inherited from the Slovakian resistance. According to its fliers the Combat Academy also teaches "kickboxing, thaiboxing, shootfighting, jujutsu, boxing, ladythai, wingtsun and kali." I'm not sure what half of those are but I walk cautiously in Sörnäinen.

The classes I take are taught by Taru (not her real name), a young ballet teacher I loathed on sight when she substituted for my regular teacher last year. She looked exactly like the ballet dancer on a child's jewel box, little and blonde with a gauze skirt on over her leotard, and her style of dancing was simply obnoxious. It was what Edward Gorey has described as "all mannerisms," what Mark Morris has described as "dancing at you instead of for you," and what Dave Barry described in a recent column as "mincing." She minced. That was when she wasn't showing off how high she could kick and doing the "I can practically go on pointe in my bare feet and you can't" thing.

And yet a year later, here I am voluntarily taking class with this person. Why? For one thing, I had to admit she was a good teacher for my needs, explaining things rather more thoroughly than the average for a dance teacher (which is hardly at all). She learned everybody's name and gave reasonable corrections. She has also toned down the showoffiness and pointe dicksizing quite a bit. But the interesting thing was what happened when she got us in a regular class of her own. She invented torturous exercises, during which she would sit on a campstool and scream at us something like the following:

"NYT ROHKEASTI! TAISTELE! PYSY! PYSYPYSYPYSY! SITKEÄSTI! LOPPUUN ASTI! VIELÄ KYMMENEN SEKUNTIÄ! PYSY! ÄLÄ ANNA PERIKSI! ROHKEASTI! KORKEAT JÄLÄT! TAISTELEEEE! IHAN LOPPUUN ASTI!"

This sounds to me not like what ballet mistresses in the movies say to their classes, but what drill sergeants in the movies say to their corps. Roughly:

"NOW BOLDLY! FIGHT! KEEP IT UP! KEEPITUPKEEPITUPKEEPITUP! BE TOUGH! RIGHT TO THE END! TEN MORE SECONDS! KEEP IT UP! DON'T GIVE UP! BRAVELY! LEGS HIGH! KEEP STRUGGLING! BATTLE IT OUT! RIGHT TO THE END!"

In other words, in her head, she's running her own Fight Club.

The word that's conspicuously missing from her script is sisu, which foreigners are told is an untranslatably Finnish concept referring to fortitude in the face of hardship. It took me about five years to work out that a) it isn't untranslatably Finnish at all, since it literally means 'guts'; and b) nobody actually uses it, except when trying to impress foreigners. I've come across it a couple of times as a brand name (it's the name a very popular species of licorice, for example), but never in real life [1]. I've listened to many Independence Day and war anniversary and election speeches where you would expect to hear such a word - and never heard it. While Taru's fight words are the substance and sinew of those texts.

[1] Naturally as soon as I finished typing out that bit of snark, I started to come across sisu everywhere - in a book on Finnishness as a strategy, in an election slogan "Sydäntä ja sisua" ("Heart and guts"), for example. Clearly this bears looking into.
. . . posted by Diana 3/12/2003 08:17:18 AM

The answer to What's That appears in the comments below.
. . . posted by Diana 3/12/2003 07:57:58 AM

Monday, March 03, 2003

What's this? #2
If you know for sure, don't say it right away - make something up instead. You will need this image to properly appreciate the next entry.
. . . posted by Diana 3/3/2003 08:44:55 AM

Cigarette packaging in Finland is different. It's not just that there are unfamiliar off-brands like North State, Colt, and numbers 1, 3, and 5 in addition to the imported Marlboros and Camels; it's not just that the packages are delivered through oddly shaped vending machines at the supermarket checkout, it's the fact that they have serious warnings on them, warnings that would warm the heart of a militant antismoker - none of these discreet little Surgeon General Says footnotes for the Finns. Two of the following notices appear on the plastic wrapping of each pack of cigarettes, in big letters that take up two thirds of the front and back [1], with a black border around them:

Smoking can shorten lifespan.

Pharmacists and doctors can help you quit smoking.

Protect children - don't force them to breathe cigarette smoke.

Smoking can weaken circulation and cause impotence.

Smoking can endanger sperm and reduce fertility.

Pretty serious warnings, right? I never heard the ones about impotence and fertility before, which points to either exaggeration on one side or a coverup on the other. Not that any of it seems to stop people - 20 percent of Finnish men and 25 percent of Finnish women smoke, according to official statistics.

[1] And could be even bigger if they didn't have to be in both Finnish and Swedish.
. . . posted by Diana 3/3/2003 07:43:54 AM

Wednesday, February 26, 2003

My metaphor for this stage of the dissertation process: It's like the moment in doing laundry when you've put the clothes in the washer, added the liquid detergent, and turned the machine on. No matter how much drying and folding and schlepping lies ahead, at this point finishing the job is easier than turning back.

Speaking of graduate school, all grad students and prospective grad students should read the advice in the right hand column of Tim Burke's weblog (newly discovered via Electrolite, permalink). The February 12 entry on weblogs and public spheres brings back strong memories of the glory days of Usenet:

I am also pretty well done with one major alternative, the closed-membership or heavily moderated virtual community or listserv. I’ve done a number of those, one of them for five years until I semi-quit this week, and they lack some things that I desperately crave.

For one, no matter how much people try to keep fresh blood flowing in, eventually any virtual community gets senescent. Eventually everyone knows what everyone else thinks, and the more you know about how some people think, the less you want to talk to them. Even in the case of the people you really like and find interesting, you eventually run out of old things to talk about and find yourself sitting and waiting for some new event or issue to hash out with them. At that point, no matter how determined everyone is to avoid it, metathrash is going to start happening, for the same reason that animals kept in cages that are too small start picking at their own scabs: just because it provides some momentary amusement ...

I was on one of the listservs he refers to, and at the time someone compared it to a group house. At first, everyone is infatuated with one another and their new utopia, and then it wears off and other people's habits start to grate and you get sick of finding their dishes in the sink and their underwear drying on the radiator. See, everything comes back to laundry.
. . . posted by Diana 2/26/2003 01:17:42 AM

Thursday, February 20, 2003

So much crazy cat stuff in the world. My cat hates you dot com is back (via Fussy, permalink). And the Viking Kittens have a certain scary charm (via comments at Making Light, permalink).
. . . posted by Diana 2/20/2003 07:07:44 AM

Tuesday, February 18, 2003

I forgot to mention that it's parliamentary election season in Finland (official Ministry of Justice site, in Finnish). Over the weekend, the frames for the party posters went up all over town: 20 identically sized panels because there are apparently about that many parties operating in Helsinki. On Monday morning they were filled, and the buses and trams were full of election posters for specific candidates, some of them absolutely comical efforts at self-promotion. At some point I'll dig up a picture from the last campaign to post here, but for now, go look at the cat lady "that even dog people vote for." She's running for the Greens and that picture on the left is all over the metro.

Update: I misspoke - as of Thursday there were still no party posters in the frames, which I've finally seen in daylight. Can't remember this much of a delay in past elections. The election season is clearly open though.

The cat lady (at left) campaigns. At the back right
is the election shack belonging to the Greens.
. . . posted by Diana 2/18/2003 04:21:38 AM

You know, the only thing that is making it possible for me to let go of these dissertation chapters one by one is the knowledge that this is just the first draft, and I can revise it. An option I would not have if I had caved to professorial pressure to write an "article PhD" consisting of four published articles and an introduction.

The thing that surprises me is that I am capable of revision. In high school and college I was one of those writers who either got it right the first time, or didn't, and this was such a powerful self-image that I never seriously tried to revise anything. One of my advisors told me what seemed at the time to be a pointless story about Harvard [1]: she was coaching a Radcliffe student who swore she couldn't revise and then found that she could revise. Well, the lightbulb went off over my head sometime when I was either finishing my bachelor's thesis or working for The Computer Magazine, and now the story doesn't seem quite so pointless. Now I am a compulsive reviser.

(Really. I rewrote my master's project twice from the top just to show that I could, and also to keep my supervisor from getting bored with it. I often change these entries after posting them if improvements occur to me.)

There's another side to this, though: in the days when I was a one-draft writer, I was mostly working on a typewriter. I was probably part of the last generation of college students to do this. The clumsiness of the physical production probably made me think things out better before I sat down at the keyboard, and make a greater effort once I was there. I wrote my last Technology Review column in two hours the morning it was due, partly because I had it down to a formula (as I very obviously do not have the dissertation) but also because there wasn't going to be time to rethink it. Once I got used to word processing (which was several years after I first got regular and uncontested access to it at The Tech and Project Athena), and especially once word processors became reliable, I learned that nothing was final.

This was perhaps not a good lesson to learn and I'm trying to unlearn it in the other half of my life, at the translation firm.

[1] I characterized nearly everything H. said to me as "a pointless story about Harvard." She had one other advisee, a guy named Joel who was badly miscast for MIT. It wasn't just that he spent all his time at the newspaper office and the Shakespeare Ensemble, and it wasn't even that he had serious artistic ambitions, which quite a few people did; it was that he failed to also learn a trade along the way. One day Joel dropped into the newsroom and announced that he'd just been to H.'s office and signed the paperwork for dropping out of school, after which he planned to go into summer stock, after which he planned to go into whatever the year-round equivalent of summer stock was. I asked if she told him a pointless story about Harvard. "Actually, yes, that's exactly what she did," said Joel, looking surprised.
. . . posted by Diana 2/18/2003 01:58:01 AM

Thursday, February 13, 2003

Read Uzbekistan Diary, quick, before something terrible happens to it. Via Central Asia Central, the journal originally known as Tashkent.

Read Sure Thing, Babs, quick, so when she gets a book contract to be the American Bridget Jones, you can say you saw it here first. Incidentally, Pamie's book is almost ready, and it's fiction, which means we still have her autobiography to look forward to. Via Tomato Nation.

Speaking of which, read Tomato Nation, quick, because, uh, well, actually the current entry isn't so hot but I couldn't stop rereading the Columbia entry and the silly cat walks entry, and there's always The Vine, where you only have to skim the questions to appreciate the answers.
. . . posted by Diana 2/13/2003 11:52:23 PM

Tuesday, February 11, 2003

Once again, Helsinki is on the cutting edge of culture: We in Finland Alumni have been playing Mafia for almost three years (and some, especially the Russian members, for much longer) and now it's the craze of the moment among literati in New York. Read quickly, before the cache goes away.
. . . posted by Diana 2/11/2003 04:12:01 AM

Another research flap that I would be trying write up for Lingua Franca if they still existed, if I were still in contact with them, if I weren't buried under dissertation work, and if I didn't have multiple conflicts of interest is the Baryshnikov affair.

Briefly, a Russian historian published a book saying the Finns were responsible (or more so than previously allowed) for the Siege of Leningrad - a significant attack on the prevailing view of Finland as a victim and not an aggressor country in World War II. (In their own history, Finns actually refer to their participation mainly in terms of the Winter War and the Continuation War, the two main border fights with Russia, in preference to "World War II.") Other historians from both countries reacted, and then the whole thing quickly degenerated into the classic Usenet fight about comparability or lack thereof to the Holocaust, at least in the listmail I was getting about it.
. . . posted by Diana 2/11/2003 04:07:56 AM

Friday, January 24, 2003

Here at the research unit's winter symposium, people are all aflutter over Kalevi Wiik, a crank linguist in Turku who has long claimed that Finno-Ugric tribes once extended over most of Europe, leaving traces such as first-syllable stress in German. Real linguists don't take him seriously, but he does have a professorship and a public following, and his latest book was nominated for this year's Tieto-Finlandia prize for scientific or scholarly writing. (He didn't win.) I can't be bothered to explore his ideas further, but you can read more here, especially if you speak Finno-Ugric (note that I am not responsible for the author savaging two of my close colleagues on another of his pages).

Also: The Prolific view of Asian cuisine consumption. Which actually maps to my experiences of being Englished in Finland, even when I know I've got the Finnish words spot on.
. . . posted by Diana 1/24/2003 10:12:20 AM

Thursday, January 16, 2003

I first came across Patrick and Teresa Nielsen Hayden at a panel discussion on publishing (specifically, chain bookstores vs. independents) at a science fiction convention (highlights here, scroll down). The discussion continues in a recent post on Patrick's weblog that at last count had attracted 128 comments, providing a nostalgic survey of bookselling in America. The point is made that many areas of the country that formerly had small independent bookstores or none at all (and not much chop in the way of libraries either) now have chain superstores that have significantly improved people's access to books. Another transformative change, not mentioned so far in the thread, is the automation of interlibrary loan.

Also bookmarking: Teresa's post (and the ensuing comments) on the Judaism-Chinese food connection.
. . . posted by Diana 1/16/2003 06:54:37 AM

Monday, January 13, 2003

Anna K. posts the list of ways to know if you are an expat (scroll down to October 30, then up again for more). I identify with all of them except the first, "When purchasing anything, your first thought is always "How much does this weigh?", immediately followed by "And how much will it cost to ship this when I move?" I am already in the mover-hiring, ship-container booking category, so I don't obsess about each item the way I used to. Although it is still true that I can lift most of the things I own, and the aggregate of them is only what Molly Ivins' mover famously called a "pahtial load," that load is beyond my schlepping powers. Which is okay, since it allows me to live in a dense and comfortable setting that I enjoy. I'm through with camping out.

I don't make New Year's resolutions, but there are some good ones here.
. . . posted by Diana 1/13/2003 11:26:20 AM

Wednesday, January 01, 2003

. . . posted by Diana 1/1/2003 12:00:00 AM

Monday, December 16, 2002

If we can abstract pathogenicity and hygiene from our notion of dirt, we are left with the old definition of dirt as matter out of place. This is a very suggestive approach. It implies two conditions: a set of ordered relations and a contravention of that order. Dirt, then, is never a unique, isolated event. Where there is dirt, there is system ... We can recognize in our own notions of dirt that we are using a kind of omnibus compendium that includes all the rejected elements of ordered systems. It is a relative idea. Shoes are not dirty in themselves, but it is dirty to place them on the dining-table; food is not dirty in itself, but it is dirty to leave cooking utensils in the bedroom, or food bespattered on clothing; similarly, bathroom equipment in the drawing-room; clothes lying on chairs; outdoor things indoors; upstairs things downstairs; under-clothing appearing where over-clothing should be, and so on. In short, our pollution behavior is the reaction which condemns any object or idea likely to confuse or contradict cherished classifications.

From Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger, pp 44-45. Although, try telling that to my immune system when I'm having an unfortunate encounter with a gerbil.
. . . posted by Diana 12/16/2002 12:00:00 AM

Saturday, December 14, 2002

Fall Books are up, at least all the ones I had time for. I received two unexpected e-mails with useful information about The Paper and After a Funeral, reviewed earlier. I'm grateful for the contacts and have posted a summary of the information after those reviews (look for the purple type).
. . . posted by Diana 12/14/2002 11:33:18 AM

Thursday, December 12, 2002

In keeping with our multilingual orientation here at Field Notes, here's a scene from Russian class. I should say as a preface that I have been going to elementary Russian classes on and off for ten years. I really want to learn the language but have never been able to get my spoken production up to speed for a proper combination. And I never seem to have quite enough words to read the newspaper, especially since the vocabulary has shifted dramatically in the time I've been studying. But this course, taught very professionally to a small intensive group [1] at the Russian Embassy's own cultural center, seems to be working.

Teacher: Cevodnia prazdnik! Vy znaete, kakoi prazdnik?
Us: ...
Teacher: Kakoi prazdnik cevodnia? Vy pomnate, shto PRAZDNIK? PRAZDNIK!
Me: Aha! Eto shvedskii prazdnik!
Teacher: Shto? Kakoi prazdnik?
Me: Den Lucii.
Teacher: Shto?
Me: Den Lucii. Lucia-den. Luciadagen. [2]
Teacher: Ya ne znayu eto praznik. Cevodnia v rossii Den Konstitutsii.
Me: Shto delaet v Den Konstitutsii?
Teacher: Shto? Ya ne ponimayu.
Me: Eto Den Konstitutsii. Shto chelovek delaet?
Teacher: Nishto ne delaet. Eto nerabotnii den. Eto PRAZDNIK!

[1] Our group has some openings for the spring. If you live in Helsinki and have had a term or more of Russian, let's say enough to read this conversation but not enough to point out my mistakes, and want to join a group taught in English, ask me about it.
[2] At this point I struggled to formulate, "St. Lucia Day ... you know ... where the girl sticks candles in her hair and comes down the stairs singing ..." but quickly gave up.
. . . posted by Diana 12/12/2002 12:00:00 AM

Saturday, December 07, 2002

Linguists' example sentences #5: Camilla Wide

Ég hef séð ísbjörn (einhvern tíma)
I have seen a polar bear (at some point)

ég vil selja þennan fálka
I want to sell this falcon

þær kunnu ekkert að spila á hljódfæri en voru samt að
they couldn’t play the instruments at all but were still –

en hven ær var þetta Frostrokk haldið
but when did this Frost rock [a band competition] take place

The first sentence, via Friðjónsson (1989), is or ought to be an obligatory example for Polar Circle languages. Other lines come from transcripts of conversations (and do not exemplify the structure studied in the PhD). Full report available from the Department of Nordic Languages. Previous example sentences at April 6 2002 (John Haviland), November 7 2001 (Helena Halmari), August 29 2001 (William McGregor), July 31 2001 (Peter Svenonius), July 5 2001 (Charles Fillmore). Permalinks may be approximate due to Blogger flakage.

. . . posted by Diana 12/7/2002 12:00:00 PM

Friday, December 06, 2002

For my Independence Day fieldwork this year, I went to Lohja, one hour away from Helsinki, to see the army parade. It's held in a different city each year, but never in the capital, because that would be too militaristic. I took many pictures, all of which will probably be bad, because the parade road ran through a pine forest, most of the soldiers and all of the equipment was covered in camouflage, I had black and white film, and it was December in Finland.

There was a bonus to the trip: the best bar in the world is in Lohja. It's also a used bookstore, and it has armchairs and Persian rugs. It's like sitting in your living room. Well, like sitting in my living room. How come we don't have one of these in Helsinki?

. . . posted by Diana 12/6/2002 09:17:09 AM

Friday, November 29, 2002

Where else but in Finland could you go to a Thanksgiving dinner and hear Georgian spoken (as in the country of Georgia, not the state of Georgia), get a live performance of national anthems on clarinet and cornet, learn where you can do swordfighting in Helsinki, and see a pair of matched tuxedo cats play with what looks to be an official Harry Potter model dreidel?

"Now that we're playing Personal Geography, I have a feeling I'm about to have the Bedford conversation."
"Oh, you're American too? Where in the States are you from?"
"Massachusetts ... See, this is the Bedford conversation. Listen up."
"Where in Massachusetts?"
"Near Boston."
"Where exactly? Because I know Massachusetts."
"Bedford."
"Oh, I know where that is."
"You do? How?"
"Well, I have an aunt in Newton and I used to drive out to visit friends in Western Massachusetts where the colleges are."
"Okay, if you know where Bedford is, where is it?"
"Northwest of Boston."
"Hey, that sounds like you do know which one it is. Because the Bedford conversation usually goes like this: They go, Bedford, that's the one the whaling ships sailed from, right? And that's where Jodie Foster got raped on a pool table in that movie? And I go, No, that's New Bedford. And then they go, Okay, so Bedford is the one where Tufts University is? And then I go, No, that's Medford. Bedford is the one you might have driven through on the way from Lexington to Concord, the one with the McDonald's, the wide spot in the road between 128 and 4-225. That's Bedford."
"These are Finns who make these guesses?"
"No, these are usually people from Massachusetts."
. . . posted by Diana 11/29/2002 04:07:02 AM

Thursday, November 21, 2002

Over the last year I've had several discussions with different people about travel-based jobs as a source of income for graduate students: Rick Steves was discussed, and Elderhostel, and In Your Pocket. Well, I've found the tour company I want to work for: Exeter International. Mind you, once they've parked their demanding upscale travelers in the Hotel Kämp, fed them a meal at Bellevue or one of the other touristy Russian restaurants, and sent them to Suomenlinna on a special yacht, there won't be much to do here. Finland does not cater well to the snob market, which is generally one of the nice things about it, but does reduce the profit to be made from tourism.

At the other end of the scale, I did not know that there were four degrees of squalor. Via Teresa Nielsen Hayden (read her entry and the comments, permalink). As soon as I got home after reading this, I did the dishes.
. . . posted by Diana 11/21/2002 04:12:36 AM

Desbladet doesn't cover the British Royals, leaving them wide open for other bloggers. I've lately been fascinated by the royal line of succession, specifically the following unexpected features:

The Untitled, who I suppose are technically commoners, start at #9 due to Princess Anne's decision not to burden her children with being Their Royal Highnesses.

Just about everyone after #55 is recognizably part of another European monarchy.

Those in line are not all named things like George Philip Arthur Alexander Edward Charles. The first half includes people named Cassius, Zenouska, and Tewa, followed in the non-English section by names like Benedikt, Melita, Saygan, Ragnhild and Tassilo.

Roman Catholics and those married to them are still excluded, but their children don't seem to be. I was unable to determine whether any member of the line of succession had married someone who wasn't a Christian at all.
. . . posted by Diana 11/21/2002 03:47:16 AM

Friday, November 15, 2002

Up until I started this translation job four weeks ago, I was scared that I'd forgotten everything I ever knew about how to fit into an organization and work with real people on actual useful tasks - that I'd only ever be good for vaguely defined research jobs where you could die in your office and nobody would notice until the nosecount for the next funding proposal.

Well, I haven't forgotten how to operate in the real world. And scenes from past jobs keep coming back to me, all kinds of buried experience I'd forgotten I had. I'm not sure what triggered this memory, but in one job we'd start every big writing project with a meeting where the boss would say something like, "Now for this one we have to talk to Jerry Grabwell at Consolidated Microsystems. That's the most important thing we have to do. He's key. We have to build the rest of the schedule around him, because without him there isn't a story."

I would then spend the next three months going to libraries [1] digging up dirt on Consolidated Microsystems and Jerry Grabwell. I'd build article files and stock market analysis files, I'd gossip about the company with people at other companies and my engineering school classmates, I'd write a perfectly informed letter on engraved stationery asking for an interview (which was invariably granted), I'd prepare a briefing paper and possible interview questions and give them to the boss well in advance.

Finally the day of the interview would come. We'd get into the rental car and the boss would turn the key in the ignition and grip the steering wheel. His shoulders would slump. He'd look out at the traffic. And then he'd say, "So tell me, who is this guy and why are we going to see him?"

[1] That was how people did things before the Internet. When I started doing business research, the school-venerated Reader's Guide to Periodical Literature, which was the American national magazine index, had just been supplanted at major metropolitan libraries by an online index whose name I forget. Once you had the dates of the articles, you still had to photocopy them by hand. In at least two of my jobs my biggest asset was an NYU library card, acquired through night school courses or something. NYU had lots of publications the public library didn't. One of the reasons I'm scared to go back to New York is that Google has clearly replaced half of what I used to do.
. . . posted by Diana 11/15/2002 05:51:04 AM

Monday, November 04, 2002

The Chart of European Bigotry seems destined to become part of the folk culture that reinforces cherished national stereotypes: the "Perfect European" joke that adorns a thousand Erasmus exchange student dorm rooms, the various Xenophobes' guides, the thick volume of national legends whose cover boasts that it is used in the curriculum of over 60 universities (blurb at bottom of page here, sample chapter). The chart needs some fact-checking, though; I have it on good authority that what Estonians think about Finns is not "white gods" but more like "drunken tourists." Via Paul Schindler, via my college classmate REM. Small world.

Also, get your Donna Tartt news here. I'm in no hurry to read The Little Friend, since there is no way on earth it could push my buttons as well as The Secret History. I'm now reading TSH for about the tenth time and am only just beginning to notice the places where she smudged over the plot holes, but I love it no less for that.
. . . posted by Diana 11/4/2002 06:19:56 AM

Thursday, October 31, 2002

Black licorice skulls. Gummi spiders. Gummi worms. Toffee mushrooms. Orange slices. Giant gummi spiders. They didn't have the gummi rats.

Yes, it's for a Halloween party.

Not that they asked. They never make small talk at the checkout here. You could go through checkout with a box of apples and a packet of razor blades - old Halloween joke of my brother's - and nobody would say anything. I'm used to it now and it's restful.
. . . posted by Diana 10/31/2002 04:39:19 AM

Thursday, October 24, 2002

I used to have a very simple definition of a good teacher: A good teacher was someone who explained stuff well. Who had lots of explanations and could offer alternative views when you didn't understand the first one. Who wasn't stingy with explanations. Who couldn't stop explaining. I applied this not just to academic subject teachers but to music teachers and editors and coaches [1], and one of my frustrations with dance classes has been that the explanation thing doesn't apply to dance teachers. They don't do much explaining. They learned to dance by copying patterns and that's the basis of their teaching: exemplify and repeat. Now do whatever we just did one more time, left side!

And yet there are good dance teachers and bad dance teachers, and something sets them apart. I've decided that the good ones set an example you want to follow - for whatever reason, you look at them and think, Oh I want to do that, oh, I will try to do that the way she did. The good ones are the ones who come across as fantastic, inspiring (yet not too inaccessible) examples. I could not pay attention to one ballet teacher who used to teach in a T-shirt and shorts. She looked as if she'd come to mow the lawn, not to pass on the secrets of an elite art form. I have no right to be a snob about matters of dress, but I couldn't focus on her. Equally, I found a teacher with supermodel good looks ineffective because it was painful to take your eyes off her beautiful face and look at her feet, where you should mostly be looking.

My current teacher has the world's most active and prehensile feet, and they're her distinguishing characteristic. She can probably hang from the barre with her toes, slothlike, though she hasn't demonstrated this move yet. The possibilities she embodies are motivating even to people like me who have stiff bladelike feet. The current jazz teacher is inspiring because she has rhythm. Her feet always come down on the beat and she can't stop dancing even after she's turned the music off. She looks like she'd be fun to go clubbing with. I was frustrated almost to tears by her predecessor, who ignored the music and ran the class like an aerobics workout.

Oh, and one more thing. I could not pay attention to the ballet teacher who was eight months pregnant. The suspense of wondering whether someone with the center of gravity of an engorged, inverted beetle could do grand battements without tipping over completely overwhelmed the pedagogical purpose. I'd like to be able to report that these observations have influenced my own classroom dress and deportment, but probably not. I'm more the inveterate explainer type.

[1] Only in retrospect did I realize the importance of mood management in coaching. The year I did college crew, there were two coaches. The varsity coach had never rowed, but was a motivational genius. Her crews won all the time, to the consternation of the other coaches along the river since she wasn't part of the rowing fraternity and wasn't much of a jock in general. The novice coach had been a champion rower and had a degree in sports psychology. Her genius was for saying the wrong thing at the wrong time. You could just see the motivation leaking away after she opened her mouth. We always lost and sometimes even got cut from planned races ahead of time, because she wasn't any better at selling her program to the other coaches.
. . . posted by Diana 10/24/2002 04:17:01 AM

Tuesday, October 15, 2002

"When I got my degree, my mother told me, 'Now you can open a sociology shop.'" That's a rough paraphrase of one of the good lines from the boards lately. I don't know if they have sociology shops in France, but I did see a philosophy office there:

. . . posted by Diana 10/15/2002 07:16:52 AM

July 2002, August 2002, September 2002
April 2002, May 2002, June 2002
January 2002, February 2002, March 2002
October 2001, November 2001, December 2001
July 2001, August 2001, September 2001
April 2001, May 2001, June 2001
January 2001, February 2001, March 2001
October 2000, November 2000, December 2000
July 2000, August 2000, September 2000
May 2000, June 2000