KEIN SCHWEIN. 6th of April, 2008 POST·MERIDIEM 07:41

Ihr weigert euch, an Gott zu glauben und sagt: Es kann gar keinen Gott geben. Ihr haltet euch für klug und fragt: Wenn Gott allmächtig ist, kann er dann einen Stein schaffen, der so schwer ist, dass er ihn selbst nicht zu heben vermag? Wenn ja, dann ist er nicht allmächtig, weil er den Stein nicht heben kann, wenn nicht, so ist er nicht allmächtig, weil er diesen Stein nicht erschaffen kann.

So redet ihr moderner Pharisäer, und dann verschränkt ihr die Arme und grinst überheblich. Doch ich sage euch: Gott existiert und wenn ich euch seinen wahren Name verrate, werdet ich vom Unglauben abfallen, und Gott preisen, denn Gottes wahrer Name ist: KEIN SCHWEIN.

Un so ist Gott allmächtig, denn KEIN SCHWEIN ist allmächtig und weil KEIN SCHWEIN einen Stein aus Nichts erschaffen kann, der so schwer ist, dass KEIN SCHWEIN ihn nicht zu heben vermag, kann Gott dies tun, denn Gott ist KEIN SCHWEIN. Und wenn ihr das nicht glaubt, wird KEIN SCHWEIN euch strafen! Wenn ihr aber glaubt, dann wird KEIN SCHWEIN euch eure Sünden vergeben und das ewige Leben schenken.

Woher ich das so genau weiß? Nun, eines Nachts hatte ich eine Erscheinung: Ich wachte auf und sah, dass direkt vor meinem Bett KEIN SCHWEIN stand. Erst wollte ich es selbst nicht glauben, ich rieb mir verwundert die Augen, doch es blieb dabei: KEIN SCHWEIN stand vor meinem Bett, und sprach zu mir: Micha, du bist auserwählt, meinen wahren Namen zu verkünden. Und mein wahrer Name ist KEIN SCHWEIN. Nun gehe ich hin und verbreite diese Nachricht unter den Menschen und richte ihnen auch aus, dass Gott sie liebt, denn KEIN SCHWEIN liebt sie!

(aus einer Predigt von Micha Habak, Gründer der Kirche Des Wahren Namens Gottes)

(aus Volker Strübings „Das Paradies am Rande der Stadt“, ein Buch das ich herzlich empfehle.)

T’auld sod … Wer hat uns verraten? … The Afrikaaners say ‘koop’ 11th of March, 2008 POST·MERIDIEM 05:13

I will be in Ireland for a week from Thursday, but am booked out until Saturday evening. Shout if you’re there and you’d like to catch up!

In other news, a German left-winger and släm poet, disenchanted with the SPD, picks up an old Communist refrain, and it gets distributed on Youtube:

(Note, not remotely funny unless you have some exposure to German politics. And speak German.)

Word of the day; купить is Russian for “to buy”, and, via Gothic, is cognate with German kaufen, meaning the same thing.

Hopefully the last IRC log in a long time I post here 4th of March, 2008 POST·MERIDIEM 10:05

*** tatica (n=tatica@nelug/designer/tatica) has joined channel #linguistics 
<kehoea> tatica, ♥ 
<kehoea> cómo estás? 
<tatica> :O 
<tatica> bien cielo... como estas tu? 
<saimazoon> a heart, kehoea? 
<saimazoon> you’re not gaining his favour in that way 
<saimazoon> her *
<kehoea> estoy bien, gracias, pero tengo que estudiar más 
<kehoea> saimazoon, we need to campaign to get the spurting pеnis added as a code point to Unicode 
<saimazoon> hahaha 
<saimazoon> so that you can show it to the girls, right? 
<kehoea> the most effective way seems normally to get it added to a national standard 
<kehoea> and thence the Unicode people are prepared to accept almost anything 
<kehoea> cf. lots of the non-Kanji Japanese glyphs 
<kehoea> saimazoon, I propose that we travel to Tajikistan 
<saimazoon> we’ll push them to accept our teary pеnis 
<saimazoon> I’m ready for that, kehoea 
<kehoea> and talk the local standards committee into revising KOI8-T 
<saimazoon> just tell me the date 
<BlearyBram> kehoea: Haha 
<kehoea> excellent! 
<saimazoon> I have the money 
<saimazoon> and I have the tools

Kloß und Spinne und die Jugend von Heute 17th of February, 2008 POST·MERIDIEM 02:54

Kloß und Spinne are great. If you speak German, start here, and keep watching the other Teile.

In particular from Teil 10, I like this:

„… und was willst du denn nun, dass er dich wie einen der Irren behandlen…“
„welche Iren?“ [from Norbert, the barman]
„he, welche Irren?“
„na, ’as frage ich dich, Iren machen guten Umsatz, nette Jungs, was das angeht“

Χρήστου Ζαχόπουλου … Squall 17th of January, 2008 ANTE·MERIDIEM 12:59

There’s a political sex scandal in the news in Greece right now; the Süddeutsche Zeitung reports on it here, and you can find commentary in English via Google News. The Greek minister of culture had an affair with his secretary; she secretly filmed about 100 hours of them having sex, and then threatened to release them unless he gave her a good job and 200,000 € in hush money. He refused, she sent the videos to his boss, who forced him to resign, and a few days later he jumped from a fourth-floor window. So far, so sordid. What I found hilarious about the case, searching for images related to it to paste into IRC, was that this Turkish paper, when reporting about it, omit photos of the unlovely pair entirely, and show a photo of an attractive couple instead. Worried about their readers’ aesthetic sensibilities, bless ’em.

On the personal news front, I’m doing essentially a mock version of an important exam the Saturday after next, and good God am I underprepared for it. Fuсk. Otherwise, living a quiet life, committing to XEmacs too much, puttering along with Spanish and other bits of work here and there.

Word of the day: шквал is Russian for ‘squall’; the Polish is much the same, szkwał. I was a little surprised to see a Germanic word in that context; this dictionary entry suggests that at least the Russian word is from English, but doesn’t say when it was borrowed.

Malleus & Incus 3rd of December, 2007 POST·MERIDIEM 11:44

My favorite example of this phenomenon [that particular traits can take very non-intuitive paths through evolutionary history] involves the three little bones in our middle ear—the malleus, incus and stapes. Now used for hearing, two of these bones (the malleus and incus) were originally part of the lower jaw of our reptilian ancestors, who used them for chewing. Reptiles needed flexible, multielement, multihinged jaws so they could swallow giant prey, whereas mammals preferred a single strong bone (the dentary) for cracking nuts and chewing tough substances like grains. So as reptiles evolved into mammals, two of the jawbones were co-opted into the middle ear and used for amplifying sounds (partly because early mammals were nocturnal and relied largely on hearing for survival.) This such an ad hoc, bizarre solution that unless you know your comparative anatomy well or discovered fossil intermediates, you never could have deduced it from simply considering the functional needs of the organism.

(Dr. V.S. Ramachandran and Sandra Blakeslee, ‘Phantoms in the Brain’, p. 210)

JavaScript and UTF-8 … Kennan, Russia and the West … Чекист 16th of October, 2007 ANTE·MERIDIEM 09:34

Google™ing yesterday, I noticed that the first results for searches for decoding and encoding UTF-8 using JavaScript look at each character in the string to transcode, on the JavaScript level. This is unnecessarily slow and memory-intensive, since modern JavaScript and ECMAScript interpreters provide support in C++ for converting to UTF-8 with the function encodeURIComponent→, and converting from UTF-8 with decodeURIComponent→.

So, hopefully for the benefit of future searches on the same thing, here’s a reimplementation of this library object:

var Utf8 = {
    encode : function (string) {
        return unescape (encodeURIComponent (string));
    }
    decode : function (string) {
        return decodeURIComponent (escape (string));
    }
};

As a usage example, if you have some text that looks like this: “€ 40.00”, and would prefer it to look like this: “€ 40.00”, you would stick the above code somewhere on your page and then call Utf8.decode(string), where string holds your text. I can’t think of a good reason to go in the opposite direction on the web, but I include it for completeness; it is something I need to do with the JavaScript I write, however.

(I was Google™ing the terms because an unrelated bug in the garbage collector—well, as far as I can work out it’s there, which is part of the problem—of our local ECMAScript interpreter segfaulted after using the above code. But it won’t provoke anything of the sort in Mozilla or IE.)

In other news, I’m currently reading George F. Kennan’s Russia and the West Under Lenin and Stalin, by an educated and articulate scholar of Russia and Europe and a one-time US ambassador to the Soviet Union, back when it was important not to send any random campaign donor there. I’ve been planning to get to it for ages, and it’s as good as I expected. Which is nice. See Russil Wvong’s pages for some serious Kennan fandom.

Word of the day: чекист is Russian for a member of the ЧК, one of the predecessors of the KGB; it was also used after the dissolution of the former to describe members of the latter, reasonably enough given the overlap in members

‘Blew, away’ … God Hates Ireland … ¿Sabes que eres un gafudo de mierda? 29th of September, 2007 POST·MERIDIEM 08:10

Ora convivo con una’austriaca,
Abbiamo comprato un tinello marron
Ma la sera tra noi non c’è quasi dialogo
Io parlo male il tedesco, scusa, pardon,
Io non parlo il tedesco, scusami, pardon…

Paolo Conte is well known in Italy, and you’d recognise his ‘Via con me’ as a jazz standard (go watch that animated video if you speak some Spanish, it’s awesome). He mostly sings in Italian, but switches to English for stretches here and there perché è più cool.  And something that’s had me laughing today is his impressive incompetence at it in a song called ‘Blue Haway’ [sic]—not the lyrics above, they’re from another song which appealed to me because I identified with speaking German badly—where his attempt at a chorus goes ‘Blew, away, / I dreamin’ a dream / Just away / Dreamin’ a dream / Away, away, blew in far away / Blew away’. Awesome.

(Which is not to say I dislike him in general—my drinking and listening habits are those of a retired ex-military type, I’ve been told, and that I’m a huge fan of this seventy-year-old crooner is one more datum in support of that.)

In other good news, I learn that the old country has raised the ire of Fred Phelps, the well-known face of the worst-case-scenario for religious freedom; he and his Westboro Baptist Church picket funerals, theatres, pop concerts, American football games and الله knows what else, and write off their expenses for this against the tax they pay. If Phelps hates you, you’re doing something right.

Phrase of the day: ‘Cuatro ojos! Cuatro ojos! Capitán de los piojos’ is a schoolyard taunt in Spain directed at people wearing glasses.

—itis … Solecism 4th of September, 2007 ANTE·MERIDIEM 07:25

Today’s entry is mainly lexicographic. The –itis  suffix in medical Latin and thence in English, though etymologically only a feminine Greek ending regularly used with νόσος, ‘disease’, is often and especially used with the name of an organ or a body part to indicate inflammation of that body part. Examples are tonsilitis, appendicitis, peritonitis and I’m sure you can think of any number more

Word of the day: solecism is a fairly common English word meaning ‘infelicity of use of language’; what I didn’t know until yesterday was that its Greek root arose among Athenians to describe the language of their colonists in Σόλοι, in modern Turkey. So if you use it, consider this context of mother-country snobbishness. Which, okay, is unclear to most speakers today, but will have motivated lots of the usages of the word in the past that speakers today naturally model their usage on. The French word is le solécisme, the Spanish el solecismo, the German Fremdwort der Solözismus.