Suspension of Disbelief

Yesterday was a Friday. I supposed I was a little tired of the week so I called it early. Together with my friend, I left campus earlier than usual, then we did grocery shopping together, with an additional stop at the department store, since we needed stuff that aren't found in supermarkets usually.

Anyway, after that, we watched a movie that was released ten years ago. It is a movie with John Cusack, Cameron Diaz, and John Malkovich, entitled Being John Malkovich.

I have to say that this is a movie that you would either love or hate. I happen to love it, which is bizarre, because I usually like things to make sense, but nothing in the movie makes sense. Or maybe, I am making sense of it due to the fact that I know that this is a movie, therefore I suspend all disbelief.

The main plot revolves around a puppeteer, who finds a job in a certain office building in the 7 and a half floor. Yes, that is 7 and 1/2. The ceilings are really low. There is a portal somewhere in the office building, which he discovers, which leads apparently to John Malkovich's head. One gets to experience being John Malkovich for fifteen minutes, until one is ejected out near the New Jersey Turnpike.

The plot is rather complicated, which involves gender-changing characters, and philosophical questions regarding the mind. It is comic, though, and watching it is really an exercise of how much one can suspend disbelief. I am amazed at how the writer was able to come up with this storyline. Very very original. I totally recommend this.



(Spiky Tree, from my Mount Vernon Series)

Choobie

A blogmate of mine, Zhu, who happens to be traipsing down South America at the moment, escaping the North American winter (I so envy you, by the way), asked several people, including me, to write a travel story. She says it can be three pages long, or just two lines. We'll see with this one.

Even though my most recent travel overseas was to Europe this past summer, where I visited Denmark and Hungary, I will opt not to write about that. I will write about a series of incidents instead, that happened about a year and a half ago, when I was in Quito, Ecuador.

I stayed at this hotel in the old town, next to Plaza Sto. Domingo, where there looms this huge church. I was awaken every morning by the sounds of the city, such as the people chatting nearby, the school children walking, the cars honking, and so on. Watching the buzz of the local citizens was fun, especially when I was at the very top floor of the hotel, where they have the restaurant and breakfast area. The hotel I was staying at had a very nice view of the plaza, and I could see everyone.

I was there, enjoying my breakfast, consisting of eggs, bread, jam, some strong Ecuadorian coffee made with real killer-strong coffee liquid, called essencia, diluted with milk. It was too strong that I think milk took three-fourths of the cup to make it drinkable. Otherwise it was fine.

Breakfast was fine, until someone sat next to me. I suppose I should say I was traveling alone at this point. When I looked next to me to see who sat next to me, there was this rather interesting woman, around late 50's or early 60's perhaps, and she was trying to make conversation.

I have to say though, that I made a mistake in preparing for Spanish when I did this trip. I bought a Teach Yourself Spanish book several months ahead, but it didn't work. I should have just bought a Spanish Phrasebook, which I did a year later, which worked, when I was in Peru. But I digress. When I was in Quito, all I knew was Buenos Dias! and Disculpe, pero mi Castellano es no bien. and Puedo sacar una foto? I cannot believe I got by those few phrases while I was there. Obviously, this woman situation was one in which those phrases did not help.

She asked me what my name was. I got that far. I think I repeated my name twenty-seven thousand times for her, and yet, all she got was Choobie. What the heck was that? It reminded me of blue-footed boobies in the Galapagos. Ah, I could possibly instruct her to do the proper articulations in order to pronounce my name, but she wouldn't understand that anyway.

That was Day 1.

The next morning, I was taking my breakfast again. And then again, she was there. The moment she entered the hall, she shouted Good morning Choobie! It was so loud I really wished I could just vanish and disappear. And somehow, on this morning, I learned that she was a widow, and that she was from Peru. She and a few other middle-aged women are having a vacation in Quito. I also learned that the day after would be their last day.

Somehow, gestures and the fact that Tagalog had plenty of Spanish borrowed words proved helpful.

I didn't see her the next day, since I skipped breakfast to board an early bus heading to Otavalo. However, I saw her when I came back to the hotel. Around late afternoon, I was on the lobby, using the Internet, when someone from behind shouted nothing else but Choobie! Good thing her group's airport shuttle was already there. Before leaving, however, she gave me a keychain, a wooden one, shaped of an owl. To this day, I use it, although the paint on the wood is all chipped and fallen off. She said it is a souvenir from Peru.



(Barren Trees, from my Mount Vernon Series)

Book Review: Telex from Cuba by Rachel Kushner

Rarely do I hate a book. I do admit that there are books that simply do not capture my interest, such as the previous book I have read. But this one is a little different.

I checked this book out of the library a few months ago. It has been sitting on my drawer for quite a while now, and so I finally picked it up and started on it. It started quite ok, but it stayed flat. In short, it was quite painful to finish, although I didn't skip the chapters, and faithfully read until the end. When I finished, I was more than happy to return it to the library.

Now what could be wrong with this novel? Well, to start with, there was no character that seemed to be the protagonist. Everyone had a chapter or two of their own. None of the characters were likable. It seemed that everyone was an enemy: the Americans were enemies because they were sucking the life off Cuban land and living like they were having their own fiefdoms, or the Cuban rebels for torching the sugar plantations and planning and executing the revolution. Everyone seemed to be the enemy in this case.

The narration also shifted constantly from an omniscient point of view, to the point of view of K.C. Stites, which is a character, not really major, but not really minor either. It was quite dizzying when the shifts occurred. There were so many characters, so many American families and other characters that I wished there was a genealogy chart in the beginning of the book, instead of a map of Cuba. It could have been a good historical novel, but the spotlight was shown on multiple people that it was quite hard to keep track. The book lacked a cohesive element, except that everything was just set in Cuba.

If you like Cuban historical fiction, go ahead and read this. Otherwise, I say pick up something else.

See my other book reviews here.



(Dead Leaves, from my Mount Vernon Series)

Tom Kolor Percussion Recital

Last Friday, a friend of mine and I went to see a faculty recital in the Department of Music. I especially was looking forward to this performance due to the fact that it is a solo percussion recital. I have been to orchestral performances, solo piano recitals, string quartets, and other types of recitals, but not a percussion recital. So I was excited. And when I saw the program, I was excited even more, due to the fact that the composers' names were not familiar at all, at least for me.

So a couple of pieces by Philippe Hurel were played, and also two solo percussion pieces by Iannis Xenakis. Finally, there were three short pieces each lasting not more than a minute long, by Rene Leibowitz.

I was sitting at the edge of my seat for the whole time. It was simply captivating. Tom Kolor appeared on stage, and unlike other faculty recitals, where the faculty performer went along explaining to the audience what each of the pieces were, and what the historical setting was, and all that explanations, Tom Kolor simply performed. He walked into the stage, and he didn't say a word. He let his mallets talk instead.

Beginning with Hurel's Loops IV, I was instantly captivated by the virtuosic marimba piece. It is modern music, composed in 2005, and yet there are elements of traditional harmony in there. It was fun watching Tom Kolor's hands and arms flying across the marimba. Leibowitz's Trois Caprices was next, which was played on the vibraphone. It was fascinating, but I wasn't too impressed, maybe because each piece was too short, and it ended just when I was about to settle into it.

Then there was Iannis Xenakis, with his composition Rebonds. This is played on a percussion set, and it is definitely a study in rhythm. It calls to mind my father's description of rock music, that is, pots and pans banging aimlessly. But this was more than that. It was not noise, but music brought to a whole new level.

After the intermission, another Hurel piece came along, Loops II, played on the vibraphone. I like this one too, although I should say, I am partial to the marimba's timbre, so I preferred the earlier one to this one. Finally, Tom Kolor ended the concert with another Xenakis piece, Psappha, written back in 1975. This was another percussion set piece, where the rhythms of many different types of drums just filled the room.

In short, it was a very eye-opening concert. I am sure it is not for everyone, but those who understand this type of music are fortunate that there are virtuoso artists around that are capable of interpreting it well.



(Potomac River Dock, from my Mount Vernon Series)

Throwing Tomatoes

Isn't it a nice feeling to feel that one has accomplished something? Recently, I got that feeling again, since I was able to check off some things to do from my plate.

So yesterday, as I was doing my laundry, I was sitting down working on my laptop, trying to finish my slides for my upcoming talk. After all, my talk was exactly three weeks from yesterday. So I had to finish the slides and make the handouts. And around mid-afternoon yesterday, I finished it.

Yippee!

I think I have all of what I need. I will then type a manuscript of my talk, although I do not intend to deliver that talk using a manuscript, but having an example manuscript will be easier to time the whole thing. I have been allotted twenty minutes of talk time, and an additional ten minutes of questions. The usual time limits apply.

It shouldn't be hard delivering this talk; after all, I know my research like the back of my hand, but I am reminded by what my adviser told me the other day. He told me that our job as academics is to throw tomatoes at other people in a nice way. By that he means that we have the obligation to critique and shoot down other people's research in a diplomatic manner. That's how science works. The current view is held as true, until someone comes up and challenges the current view. People who think that the current view is correct will come up with challenges against the person who has a new idea, but if after every test and trial, the new idea is still the better idea, then the community adopts the new idea and holds it to be true. That's just how the scientific method works.

And now it is my turn to be thrown tomatoes at. We'll see, I think I will still be standing after the affair.



(Meandering Path, from my Mount Vernon Series)

Linguistic Factoid No. 5: Logic and Language

I suppose almost everyone here has heard of formal logic. Maybe in a past life, sometime in undergrad, we have taken a course on logic. You know, those propositional logic operators of and, or, if...then, if and only if, and so on. There also is modal logic, which involves possibility and necessity. And there is also first order predicate logic, which concerns predicates and arguments.

Now the thing is, many logicians and semanticists have tried to relate logic and language. The thing is, logic is a type of language, albeit a formal one, not a natural one. The language one uses to represent these different types of logic has a syntax, which tells us how the terms combine with, and a semantics, which tells us what the terms are supposed to represent.

Modeling natural language, however, is not easy, if one attempts to model it using formal language. One of the reasons have something to do with the fact that formal languages were created so that there are no ambiguities. Natural language on the other hand have plenty of ambiguities. Natural language also do not follow some of the rules that formal languages assume. Let me illustrate it with an example.

Formal languages have a concept called transitivity. So, observe the following example.

A. If it snows this morning, I will be late for school.
B. If I am late for school, I will be reprimanded by my teacher.

From the above two premises, one can conclude the following:

C. If it snows this morning, I will be reprimanded by my teacher.

That is fine and dandy, but natural languages have more uses than the ones simply specified by formal language. Consider this example, courtesy of Philip Johnson-Laird:

A. If you need any money, there's a pound note in your wallet.
B. If there's a pound note in your wallet, then you don't need any money.

Now can we conclude the following?

C. If you need any money, then you don't need any money.

Obviously not. The tools that formal language gives us say we can, however, the way we use language is not the same.

It is indeed a good venture that one tries to model natural language using formal language, but one must always keep in mind that formal language isn't always sufficient given the wide range of uses that natural language has.



(African American Memorial, from my Mount Vernon Series)

Energy

The semester is just two weeks over, and yet things are already moving forward, very fast. Very busy too.

So I just had a meeting with the professor that I am a research assistant to, and I had a meeting with my adviser as well. The results of those meetings are very busy schedules for the future.

I have a stack of papers that I need to read: the last two classes that I am taking are both heavy-reading classes, so I already printed all the papers that are required, and it also used up all of my print quota. My print quota is worth 600 pages, or about 30.00 USD, but I paid 13.00 USD extra already. I now have two piles of papers in my office, one for each of my classes.

After meeting with the professor that I am research assistant to, I had additional work with regard to his research. I am now designing an experiment to test some hypotheses and right now, I will be designing stimuli for a 6-list experiment, including fillers. But I don't want to talk about the details here, it's more of not counting the chickens until they are hatched sort of thing.

Then I had a meeting with my adviser for my dissertation. I will then be brain-storming for possible ways of extending what I have been doing so far, utilizing the resources I can possibly tap here. There is a lab in the next building, the one I am participating in, where we can actually measure lots of different stuff, from offline experiments to high-tech experiments that involve measuring reading time and reaction time, and we have equipment to measure eye movements as well. And if I really need it, I may also tap into another lab in the university where they do ERP research, where I can actually hook up the heads of participants and measure their brain waves. That would be sexy.

Anyway, I have a lot of things on my plate. It is just the second week of the semester, and yet things are already piling up. Tough life, but then again, I like what I am doing, so I am not complaining.



(Obelisk, from my Mount Vernon Series)

Motivating Change

I need to lose weight. Not that I am obese or anything; in fact, those obese people on reality television still have much weight compared to me. However, I am not at my finest at the moment, and I want to change that.

The thing is, back in 2006, people were surprised that I was rather lean, including my mom. Then when I visited them again last year, they were surprised that I gained weight. Not only that, in 2007, when I was in Manila, my friends also remarked that I gained weight.

So I suppose it is time to take the pounds off. However, I have had trouble finding the motivation to do it. Do I want to lose weight to feel good? Well, I don't know about that. Do I want to lose weight because I want to have an attractive body? I don't know about that either.

But, I finally found motivation.

The other day, I wasn't able to sleep due to the fact that I made the mistake of drinking coffee late in the afternoon. Because of that, I was wide awake, surfing the Internet. I then did what I usually do to kill time, that is, plan a vacation that I would not take in the near future.

This time, it took me to Borneo. I could easily fly to Kuching, do some sight-seeing, then go to Kota Kinabalu, and finally, proceed to Bandar Seri Begawan, thereby adding Malaysia and Brunei Darussalam to my collection of visited countries. And somewhere there, I could hike Mount Kinabalu. Mount Kinabalu is 4,095 meters high and can be hiked in a couple of days. I then surfed some mountaineering sites, and the common itineraries that people do.

They also emphasized that physical fitness is a good asset.

Thus, I have found my motivation. I need to be physically fit before I climb Mount Kinabalu, whenever that may be. I suppose I would revert back to my vegetarian diet back in 2005-2006, since that was rather effective. I don't really want a body to show off to others, but I want a body that could take me to places, including mountain tops.



(Finding the New Grave, from my Mount Vernon Series)

Visiting Southeast Pennsylvania Part III

So where were we? Oh, we stopped at the end of January 9, when we finished visiting the Masonic Temple, a building that houses a secret society. Anyway, the day after, January 10, we decided to drive up to Doylestown, Pennsylvania. This is not in Philadelphia, but in the surrounding area. It is an hour away from Reading as well. We had a late breakfast, and so we got on the road at around a little before noon. Then we arrived.

Doylestown was on the itinerary for one reason: to see Fonthill Castle and the Mercer Museum. These two buildings are connected through one man, Henry Chapman Mercer. He was a historian and archaeologist, and a tilemaker as well. His house, Fonthill Castle, reflects his interests. Unfortunately, photography is not allowed inside, so all I can show you is the outside of his castle.



This is Fonthill Castle. It is big, but once you get in, it is way bigger. Henry Chapman Mercer built this building by himself, designing everything and working with people. He had no architectural background, so inside, the layout sucks. There aren't any hallways, but more like lots of different passages here and there. There are also plenty of tiles from all over the world that are displayed inside the house.

Before I move on, let me show you a shot of some snowy chairs. These are found in front of his castle.



After visiting Fonthill Castle, we went to the Mercer Museum. This is a museum that houses all of the items that Mercer collected. He had a way of cataloging the items, so everything had a number on them. This is a museum that had objects from his days, back then, it was ordinary stuff, and he had to convince people that these objects were worth preserving.



As you can see, the layout was rather bizarre. He had plenty of items to store, and yet not much room. He had things hanging from the ceiling and the wallposts.

So that was basically January 10. The next day was also the last day we were in the area, and we were going to drive back up north to New York. However, before we left, we did a driving circuit, touring the covered bridges of Lancaster County. We saw 6 different covered bridges, driving around a circuit that was 44 miles long.



This one is Herr's Mill Bridge. Obviously, it is not in use. Apparently, it is very fragile, and so they decided to close it for safety reasons.



Finally, this is Colemanville Covered Bridge, the longest and the farthest bridge that we have seen. It is rather long, and still looks sturdy.

So that was my short vacation during the winter. The day after that, classes started.

Visiting Southeast Pennsylvania Part II

The last post ended with us getting out of the Independence Hall National Park. After that, it was almost lunch time, but we were not yet hungry, so we thought of visiting another site. So we decided to walk to the Athenaeum.

The Athenaeum is a special collections library. It is not big, but it is a library nonetheless. One can actually do research there. The building is also listed in the National Register of Historic Places, so we decided to visit it.



The shot above is taken in the staircase. Not the best shot, I agree, but it gives one an idea of the luxurious interior of this library.



The picture above depicts a small reading room, known as the Chess Room. The name is due to the large chessboard that can be seen in the right background. The pieces are not there anymore, but they would be larger than the standard chess pieces, if they were in proportion to the table.



This is a shot of the second floor gallery. One can see the original light fixtures, and the globe that is cracked at the bottom. The guide mentioned that the reason the globe was cracked at the bottom was because during the time in which that globe was widely used, people were all hyped about the Antarctic exploration, so they always tipped the globe upside-down. Due to all the tipping that was done, the globe eventually got damaged.

After that, we had lunch in a Mexican canteen. I refuse to call it a restaurant, since it was more like a cafeteria, but people seem to be walking in and out of it a lot, and sure enough, the food was great. After lunch, we walked westward, towards the city hall. We initially planned on touring the city hall of Philadelphia, but opted against it, because we entered another premise, whose guided tour was about to begin in a few minutes, and that was the Masonic Temple.

I cannot even begin where to start describing the interior lavishness of this building. First, let me show you the museum.



This is the interior of the museum. Technically, the whole building is a museum, but this is just the room that is officially designated as such. The tour guide for that time was also the curator of the museum, so he had a lot of insights that he passed on to us. In the tour, there was one other person who was obviously a member of the secret society, and his questions just made us feel more of an outsider.



The picture above depicts the Oriental room, styled after the Alhambra in Spain. One thing that strikes me in this building is the multitudes of light bulbs. I simply cannot imagine what the cost of the upkeep of this building is.



The one above is the room of the Knights Templar. The interior design is rather spartan compared to the other rooms.



The Egyptian room is depicted above, with the fake hieroglyphs. It does not mean anything in Classical Egyptian. Look at the gaudy wall paintings.



I believe this is the Corinthian room, if I am not mistaken. One can see plenty of references to the ancient Greek culture, including the Caryatids of the Erechtheion. Again, plenty of light bulbs.

So this concluded January 9. On my next post, I will show pictures of our drive to Doylestown, where we visited concrete castles and a weird museum. Plus, I might also show pictures reminiscent of Clint Eastwood and Meryl Streep.

Stay tuned.

Visiting Southeast Pennsylvania Part I

I figured that I should stop this habit of going to places and mentioning I have been to those places, without actually showing what I saw in those places. I guess the last time I made a trip report was back in the summer, when I went to Peru and saw Machu Picchu. Or was it when I went to Denmark and Hungary? I cannot remember.

So anyhow, this post will be about my short stay in southeast Pennsylvania, where I spent 4 days with a friend.

We began the trip by simply driving from Buffalo to Reading on Thursday, January 8. Nothing special happened on this date. We left town shortly after eating brunch, and so by noon, we were already on the road. We took New York Route 400, passing through East Aurora, and then we took US 20A heading east. That took us all the way to Interstate 390, which we took, passing Corning and Binghamton. When we got to Binghamton, we switched to Interstate 81, which we took, entered Pennsylvania, and when we got to Frackville, we exited the thruway and transferred to a major road, Pennsylvania Route 61. That took us to Reading. We arrived around a little past 8:00 PM. The good thing was they had no snow, compared to us.

The next day, we decided to drive to Philadelphia. Philly is about an hour away from Reading, so when we left the house at about 10:00, we got about an hour later. It was cold, but snowless, which is a very good thing.

So, upon getting there, I took my camera out, and took photos. This is one of the things I have seen.



Yup, we visited the building where the Liberty Bell is stored. There are still plenty of people in there even though it was winter, but considerably less than the summer of course. One proof of this is that we didn't have to take timed passes to enter the Independence Hall National Park, where the Declaration of Independence was signed. By the way, yes, this bell is cracked. I just took this angle because this was the angle that I could shoot without shooting the people observing it.



Our next stop was the Independence Hall National Park. The picture above shows a statue in front of the building. Again, it has a weird angle, because otherwise I would have included the crowd, which I didn't want to do. I suppose by now you have noticed that I don't do people, I just do places when I take pictures. I may try taking pictures of natives once in a while, but why would I be interested in taking pictures of strangers wearing the same things I am wearing?



So we entered the building, and it was a guided tour, with a staff member of the National Park Service giving the tour. The shot above is from the courtroom.



The shot above on the other hand is a shot of the actual room in which the Declaration of Independence was signed. There is a lot of green in this picture. The ornaments and the implements in the room are not original, but the room was designed to recreate what would have been used back in 1776. You can see candles, feathers for writing, and inkwells that are laid on the table.



After seeing the first floor, we all climbed up to the second floor, passing through the blue staircase.



There were plenty of items on the second floor, including a full dining room, some other office materials, and as you can see on the photo above, a harpsichord.

Ok, so this post covered my activities from January 8 to January 9, ending at around noon time. The next post will continue the day, with photos from temples of secret societies and concrete castles coming up.

Stay tuned.

Book Review: The Natural Disorder of Things by Andrea Canobbio

Take a man nearing his middle age, single, lives alone on a farmhouse, and follows random people through the night. That is the hero of this book. Claudio Fratta is a garden designer, more like a landscape architect perhaps, and he has his own business. He has no family of his own, so his nights are spent by following random people and tailing them on his car.

Enter a beautiful woman by the name of Elisabetta Renal. As Claudio was sitting in his car, watching a man walk on the parking lot of a supermarket, Claudio sees a van hit the man, and then another car drives by, and runs over the man lying down on the parking lot. The man dies instantly.

Claudio follows the car, but the car gets into an accident itself. Claudio pulls the driver out of the car and brings the driver to the nearest hospital. The driver is Elisabetta Renal.

Fast forward a few months, and Claudio is contacted for a garden designing job, by none other than Elisabetta Renal. They start to have an affair, and later on it is revealed that the man who got killed on that night a few months ago was related to Claudio's father's demise. The opportunity for revenge appeared.

As you can see, the storyline of this novel is a little complicated. The thing is, the book is easy to read; it is not a bore when one goes through the prose. However, the plot is rather long and drawn out. It is not until the end of the story that the plot moves, therefore in that sense, this book is in need of a little stimulation.

There are plenty of things that are left unanswered at the very beginning, and even when one is just ten pages away from the very end, things are still unanswered. For example, I was left in the dark as to why Claudio, the protagonist, follow different people around, for no apparent reason. And isn't it too much of a coincidence that the person he chose to follow, namely Conti, was somehow crucial to his past? It seemed to be too good to be true, that the stars simply aligned that night, and he became a witness to a very crucial event in the story, namely, the killing of Conti. I think this book wants to be an airport novel and literature at the same time, but it just doesn't make the cut.

See my other book reviews here.



(Old Grave and Staircase, from my Mount Vernon Series)

UBreathe Free

I saw that the front page article for the university's paper today was about the debate that is on-going for and against the current initiative that the whole university, with all of its three campuses, would go smoke-free starting next semester of Fall 2009. Many students are either for or against it.

I wholeheartedly support it.

I could see why there could be students and other people who would be against this. After all, this is a state university. This is not a private university, and therefore, the administration should not insist on its faculty, students, and staff to follow certain rules, like adhering to some Code of Conduct.A state university should be by all means democratic, following the wishes of the taxpayer.

Smoking is also in a way, a personal right. If people reason this way, then yes, one has the right to kill oneself. I totally understand that argument. So, if I choose to buy a pack of cigarettes and kill myself slowly but sweetly, then nobody should stop and prevent me. I have the right to breathe, I also have the right to terminate my breathing.

I am a non-smoker.

Thus, no matter how hard people argue for their right to die, no matter how hard people argue for their right to suck 4,000 different types of chemicals and have them bond to the oxygen molecules in their lungs, no matter how arguing for those rights is indeed a statement of personal choice of which I am an advocate of, I would never argue for the right to kill another person just because you want to kill yourself as well.

Both the American Lung Association and the National Cancer Institute have published the dangers of secondhand smoke. There is no risk-free level of secondhand smoke exposure. Thus, if smokers are exercising their right to kill themselves, I am also exercising my right to live. And if my university will go smoke-free starting next semester, I will support it.

Some people argue that a total ban on smoking, including buildings, parking lots, and open spaces is incredulous. They say that this ban was unilaterally passed, and is a violation of personal choice, since after all, smoking is not illegal. Yes, smoking is not illegal, but killing other people is. It may be a personal choice for the smoker to blacken their lungs, but it is never a personal choice for the other person inhaling that smoke that the smoker just exhaled after a joint.



(To the Old Grave, from my Mount Vernon Series)

Lowest on Record

For my whole life, I think I have never experienced a day as cold as today. Yesterday, today, and tomorrow are three days in which it is predicted we will experience record-breaking cold weather.

For instance, right now, at 3:00 PM, the temperature is between -13 and -18 Centigrade. That translates to between 9 and 0 Fahrenheit. There is a wind chill warning, coupled with a frostbite warning. And I am supposed to be happy, since there are other locations that are supposed to be colder than Buffalo, like Minnesota for example, where the temperatures have reached -20 Fahrenheit. That's one condition where one can freeze within ten minutes of outside exposure.

So I have been thinking of past instances in which I was exposed to extreme temperatures. I suppose this is the first for me. This is the coldest I have experienced so far. Yes, I lived in Denver for two years back in the 80's, but I was a toddler and I do not remember anything back then. The hottest I have experienced perhaps are certain days in Manila, where it would reach about 37 Centigrade, or about 99 Fahrenheit.

Should I say I can go and endure the weather in a gulag? Maybe not, but I am sure these weather conditions for the past few days are a close approximation.



(Presidential Sheep, from my Mount Vernon Series)

Must Be The Water

So, it is three days into the semester, and things have been busy again. There are lots of things to do, lots of things to read, and lots of things to take care of. I already attended my first of two classes for the semester yesterday, and the other class I have will be this Friday.

I already printed the reading material for the first class, and I am slowly knocking them down.

Then, there are a few surprises that happened during this Winter Break. I suppose this past break was a fruitful period that is conducive for romance. Why do I say that? It is because at least three people in the department got engaged.

It seems that everyone around me are catching the love bug. I wonder why is that. Maybe it is the water. Because if it is, then I would want to avoid it so I don't get engaged myself. I don't think I need another thing to get busy about at this moment. I always say that romance is like a supply and demand. If there is demand, then I would supply it. At this point, there isn't one yet.

I suppose I am just amazed that more and more people I know go through this stage in their life by this time. Of course, before, we were just kids, playing around the corner, going to school, and now some of us are now getting married and having a family.



(Barn Gate, from my Mount Vernon Series)

Eerie Drive

So the semester began again, today. Although I didn't have a class today, I decided to come still and work. I then scheduled meetings with professors, and later in the week, I will schedule my lab hours for the current semester.

Coming in to campus earlier this morning was a bizarre experience. The week before, there were nobody in campus, and it was so easy to get a parking spot that was close to the buildings. However, today, it was different. Arriving on campus at 9:30 AM meant that we had to park several buildings away.

Yesterday concluded my short vacations. A couple of weeks ago, I went to New York City and visited my sister. Then, this past weekend, together with a friend, I went down to Pennsylvania. We stayed at a friend's house in Reading, and we drove back and forth to Philadelphia, Bucks County, and Lancaster County. We visited certain historical sites in the city, and we also visited a couple of castles in Bucks County. Finally, we also hunted for covered bridges in Lancaster County while dodging horse and buggies by the Amish, also known as the plain folk. Of course, pictures will be posted this time, but not today.

The drive from Lancaster to Buffalo was rather eerie. There isn't a direct Interstate route from Lancaster to Buffalo. If we wanted an Interstate highway, we have to backtrack east to take I-81, then at Binghamton, take I-86 which would then lead to I-390 then to I-90. Or, we could simply take I-81 all the way to Syracuse and then switch to I-90 to Buffalo. However, if one looks at a map, these are all indirect routes involving backtracking either northward or eastward. The reason for this is the mountain ranges that lie between New York and Pennsylvania.

But, the weather was not bad, so we decided to take smaller roads and cut through the mountains. So from Lancaster, we drove to Harrisburg, which is the Pennsylavanian capital. Then, we took US Route 15. This is a highway, but not an Interstate highway. Therefore, there are parts that are not limited access. Some parts act as main streets of small towns, and some parts seem like mountain roads, with only one lane for each direction.

It wasn't snowing at all, but there was snow everywhere. The roads were plowed, but still there were piles. Add to that, the radio was acting weird, since the reception was bad, due to the mountainous location. And the moon appeared in its full glory, appearing larger than usual.

It felt like a night that werewolves would appear.

Anyway, after about 6 hours of driving, we got back to Buffalo safe and sound. I plopped in bed, slept, and this morning, woke up to get ready to go to school.



(Barn Path, from my Mount Vernon Series)

My Blogroll Does Not Roll

I hate it when I am stuck. And now, I am stuck at one certain trivial thing. My blogroll. I have this blogroll on the side, and when it functions, I like it. I only insert one code, and all of my blogs that I read show up. That's a good thing, instead of actually typing all the codes for the different blogs that I read.

However, for a couple of weeks now, my blogroll is under construction. They are revamping the website for what seems like ages now. Therefore, I cannot edit my blogroll! I want to edit it so much, like put new links in and take old links out, but I cannot. I have a couple of new blogs that I want to put in, and a few blogs that are outdated and I want to take out, but due to the fact that they are renovating the program, I cannot do so. And it's been more than two months!

Is it that hard? I know I am not a programmer, but there are tons of programmers out there! Anybody, give Blogrolling.com a solution!

Ok, that was selfish, but I needed to rant.



(Porch, from my Mount Vernon Series)

Trivial Pursuits

Well, this is one of those posts in which it serves no purpose whatsoever but to tell you of some information that is not useful at all. There's two, both related to travel.

Recently, German police has foiled an eloping attempt of two German toddlers, ages five and six. According to this report by the BBC, German police noticed a group of three toddlers on the train station, without a parent. Apparently, two of them decided that it was too cold in Germany, and so they decided to pack up and leave, and their destination was Africa, where they would get married. They even had a suitcase packed with bathing suits and sunglasses. They also have an official witness, a seven-year old sibling.

So, even though it is cute, somehow, it makes one think as to how these toddlers already know the concept of marriage. For all I know, they may already know the concept of sex. It seems that people grow faster than a decade ago.

Another totally useless information comes from this blog, where it blogs about things you can do in airports, if your flight is delayed. Apparently, one of the most annoying things a person can have is a delayed flight. I know, it can be annoying, if you have a connecting flight after the delayed one. In fact, that happened to me, I got stranded in Chicago once, due to a delayed flight out of Miami. Due to that, my flight to Buffalo went without me, and my airline had to book me in a hotel. Yes, chaos in an otherwise smooth schedule is annoying. So, if you are stuck in an airport, this blog may be the solution. You can see whether your airport has things you can do as you let the time pass. Heck, I believe I once saw in some news article that there is a karaoke machine in Houston airport.

So there, two bits of trivia for you.



(Overlooking the Potomac River, from my Mount Vernon Series)

Book Review: Signed, Mata Hari by Yannick Murphy

So what do you get if an author decides to write a fictional biography of an exotic dancer back in the early turn of the century? You will get this book. This was a quick read, the prose was rather easy on the eyes, and the plot was simple. No twists and turns that are unexpected.

Mata Hari was a certain Dutch exotic dancer, who lived in Java, and then came back to Holland. Later in her career, she was found guilty of being a spy for the Germans in the First World War. She was then executed by firing squad. This book centers on her life, first as a married woman by answering a marriage ad in the paper, and the husband was a good-for-nothing army person stationed in Java. They had a bad marriage, both people were cheating on each other, and they have two kids. One kid dies, and the other is estranged to the mother, since the father always made the mother the bad guy in the family. Eventually, the family returns to Holland, and the father takes away the remaining daughter and leaves Mata Hari. Then she becomes a dancer. Then she gets plenty of different lovers, from different parts of Europe. Some of these men are generals, and therefore the possibility of being a spy comes up. The book does not really say whether she did espionage work, or whether she was just framed into it. In the end, she gets executed.

This book makes one feel like one is part of a dream world along with Mata Hari. However, I felt that the book was too fantastic, and the characters were rather underdeveloped. All the book focused on was Mata Hari's marriage, her quest to get her daughter back, and her sex. Yes, plenty of erotic descriptions of how men entered her and how it felt. It was very much like soft porn. This is one of those novels that you read, but then after reading, you ask, what was the point of that? Yes, it brands itself as historical fiction, and no, this is not a biography of the person, but I cannot help but feel that there was something lacking in this novel. Cohesion, maybe? I hated the fact that the novel started out with two story lines, juxtaposed together, one with Mata Hari's answering MacLeod's marriage ad, and another with Mata Hari in prison, eventually resolving into one storyline near the end of the story. The most irritating thing I suppose was the fact that the novel alternates back and forth between a first-person account and a third-person account. It was very confusing. All in all, I read it, I sort of enjoyed it, I won't recommend it.

See my other book reviews here.



(Entering the Mansion, from my Mount Vernon Series)

Linguistic Factoid No. 4: Grice's Maxims

So, for the fourth installment of the linguistic factoids, I give you Grice's maxims. There was once a philosopher named Paul Grice, who analyzed how discourse and conversation should function. In the end, he posited four different maxims which are deemed to be important in carrying out a well-formed discourse. These are the following:

1. Maxim of Quantity: Make your contribution to the conversation as informative as necessary. Do not make your contribution to the conversation more informative than necessary.

2. Maxim of Quality: Do not say what you believe to be false. Do not say that for which you lack adequate evidence.

3. Maxim of Relevance: Be relevant.

4. Maxim of Manner: Avoid obscurity of expression. Avoid ambiguity. Be brief. Be orderly.

If one follows all of these maxims, then a smooth discourse would be carried out.

However, it is not the case that people do not violate these. In fact, people do intentionally violate these maxims for a desired effect. And no, I am not just talking about the obvious, say, violating the Maxim of Quality when one is lying.

Sarcasm, for example, is an example of a violation of the Maxim of Quality. Say you are shoveling your driveway in the middle of a snowstorm, and your friend watches you. Then you say, I totally love shoveling my driveway in the middle of a snowstorm. You say this with a square face, but obviously, you are not enjoying the task. You are therefore violating the Maxim of Quality, in order to convey sarcasm.

Another example where Gricean maxims are in play is the following. Say a woman asks hier friend, Is Paul single? Then her friend answers by saying Well, he flies to Chicago every other weekend. On the surface, that may not make sense, but due to the Maxim of Relevance, this is a good example of discourse, and the reply is assumed to be relevant to the question. Thus, flying to Chicago every other weekend may be evidence that the person in question is indeed seeing someone in Chicago and therefore the answer to the original question is that he is not single.

There are plenty of other instances of interesting uses of obeying and violating these maxims. These are just a few examples. I suppose since I do not work with these directly in my research, I won't say more, or else I might say something wrong. So there, there's your linguistic factoid for today.



(Big Trees, from my Mount Vernon Series)

New Toy

So this is a guy entry. You know how guys usually are happy when they get a new toy? You know, like a camera, a computer, a car, those types that they call toys for the big boys? Well, I got one recently. And I am happy.

So, what did I get?

I got myself a Toshiba 320 GB external hard drive. Just like the one on the left side of this entry. And so far, I am liking it. I found it on sale, so for less than a hundred bucks, I got myself a good back-up method.

So why did I decide to get one of these? Well, there are several reasons.

It used to be the case that back in undergrad, I had a collection of floppy disks, yes, remember those? Floppy disks, the ones that come in different colors, and I had one for every class I took. Inside those, I had my papers, projects, and all the things related to class. Then, when I finished my undergraduate education, I burned them up in a CD. I now have one CD full of my undergraduate history. It later proved useful because for one of my papers here in graduate school, I used the data I collected for a class I attended back in undergrad, so it was very useful to be able to dig up my past.

Then, for graduate school, I initially had a rewritable CD as a back-up. I have a rather smallish flash drive, about 512 MB, and it had a back-up of all the files I have that are currently active. Then, what I would do is that every end of the semester, I would take my flash drive and dump it all to my rewritable CD. That was fine and dandy, until my rewritable CD failed me. Somehow, it wouldn't write anymore. Good thing I had all the data from the previous semesters saved before that. So, I bought a larger flash drive, 2 GB this time, and then I transferred the data from the rewritable CD to the large flash drive.

That was academic-related. Now, I also have about two dozen CDs that have photos in them. I don't have any other copy of these photos except these CDs. And after reading an article in the National Geographic Traveler about backing up my pictures, since after all, they are my memories, I decided to do so. So now, I do have a back-up of my photographs, categorized by year, and by country.

Another reason is again academic-related. Given the fact that I am in graduate school, I am reading plenty of papers. There are so many PDF files that I have, related to the different classes that I took. There are also PDF files that I have read because of my research. I have them in different folders in relation to the classes that I took, but then sometimes I have to re-read some papers that I have read before, and it is a pain to remember which class I took in which it is related, so searching for the right folder is a pain. Thus, I need a cyber-library in which I can store all my PDF papers. Thus, again, the solution is a gigantic external hard drive, where I can just store the papers depending on the author, and so I don't have to search for where I filed it in.

I know, it's geeky, but the fact that I now have a place to store my stuff is cool, don't you think?



(The Footpath, from my Mount Vernon Series)

Social Networks

I suppose most of the people here have heard of social networking sites, such as MySpace and Friendster and Facebook. You know, those sites that allow you to have friends, and link them to your own account. I suppose I didn't see the value of that until recently.

It was the case that I was one of the late ones in establishing a social networking account. I remember back in 2004, when I finally opened a Friendster account. The main reason was because once, upon coming back from Cuyo to do fieldwork, I boarded this bus that would take me to my house. I met a former classmate of mine back in high school, and we chatted for the whole time while I was in the bus. And I asked about the other folks, how they were doing, and so this friend of mine told me that I could find everybody in Friendster. So there you go, I signed up.

3 years later, I found myself living in the United States, and a different social networking site crept up into me. I signed up for Facebook, and found that most of my friends are there as well. I then decided to shift all my activities to Facebook from Friendster, given the fact that I like the mechanisms of Facebook better than Friendster. Friendster was just too cluttered, the backgrounds are all different depending on the user, and navigating the whole thing was just a pain. But mostly, the main reason why I shifted to Facebook was because of the unlimited number of photos that I can upload. I keep all my travel photos there now. Back then, Friendster only allowed me to upload a certain number of photos. I think they revised that recently, but still, there are more incentives to joining Facebook. So I established my Facebook account and closed my Friendster account.

Now, people would ask why you would have friends on your account, when you see them in real life? True, I give you that, but there are times in which people from the past would be active in the present again, and wonderful things happen.

In fact, if not for Facebook, I would not have met a good friend of mine from Japan again, in New York City nonetheless. Social networking sites allowed me to keep track of how my friends from all over the world are doing. I just got contacted by someone a went to college with, who is now living in Bogota. I also just learned that a friend of mine I went to high school with in Guam is now going to be a father. I few months ago, I learned that another friend of mine who was originally from Belgium who I went to school with in Osaka got married, and is now living in London. I also am being kept updated by another friend of mine who currently lives in Israel about the number of rockets that Hamas has fired into Israel.

However, the main point of this entry is not to advertise social networking sites, but something else. The other day, another friend of mine and I had a conversation about friends and inner circles. The fact that we live our lives one page at a time, and that people come and go to our lives. The thing is, we have a common friend, from Kuwait, who seemed like he fell from the face of the earth. Yeah, one year, he was inviting me to his wedding in Kuwait, the other year, he moves to London and disappears completely.

People don't want change. But change is inevitable. So how do people keep track of people from the past? The other day, I looked into my email inbox, and found a few emails dating back in August. I figured I better respond to them and tell them how I am. In that way, the relationship is kept alive. I mean, what else can one do, if one is now living in a different part of the planet? I wrote to another friend of mine, who I went to college with, and is now living in Switzerland, and updated her with my life. I suppose I do these once-a-season emails, because if I contact them more frequent than that, I might as well give them a link to my blog, and if I contact them less frequent than that, then obviously the familiarity fades to black. I suppose we have to thank technology for making this possible.



(The Mansion, from my Mount Vernon Series)

Book Review: Ella Minnow Pea by Mark Dunn

I have noticed this book a while back, when it was released, but never really picked it up. A well-known online bookstore sent me a notice about this book's existence. At that time, I figured that this would be a cute read, but I didn't pay much attention after that.

Not until when I decided to go to the university's Undergraduate Library, and spend some time reading there. I gave in to temptation and browsed the shelves where they have fiction, and sure enough, Ella Minnow Pea by Mark Dunn was there. I decided to check it out.

After spending just an afternoon reading this book, I finished all 200-something pages of it. It is subtitled as a "progressively lipogrammatic epistolary fable" which I thought was very apt.

So, this book is about the fictional country of Nollop, off the coast of South Carolina, where the supposed creator of the well-known pangram "The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog" is revered to a God status. There is a high council composed of five elders, which then issue laws and statutes that should be obeyed all over the island. There is also a monument to Nevin Nollop, where the pangram sentence is written, using tiles that bear the letters.

Now one day, one of the tiles fall off, and the council thinks that this is the voice of Nollop from the grave. They then decide to ban the use of that letter. Obviously, you may know where the story is heading, given this premise. People are made to resort to different strategies in order to avoid the banned letters, and when they make a mistake, they get banished off the island.

A number of points are worth mentioning here. I like the novel due to the fact that even though the story is presented with a comedic air, the issues that the novel deals with aren't comedic at all. The novel deals with totalitarianism, where the only voice that matters comes from a council composed of five men. No one is allowed to argue with the council, who thinks that they serve Nollop and Nollop alone. They are in essence, infallible. There was an episode in which an American researcher visits the island, and provides chemical samples that the reason the tiles are falling off is that the glue that was used years ago are just wearing off, instead of attributing it to the will of the dead Nollop. However, the council interprets that as Nollop operating through science. Again, an untestable statement.

In essence, as funny as this novel may be, this is a novel portraying the battle between dogmatism and rationalism. This is another appeal that humans ought to use their heads and think, that humans ought to test ideas and subject them to scrutiny, not just merely letting other beings do the thinking for them.

See my other book reviews here.



(The Open Field, from my Mount Vernon Series)

Frozen Weekends

I suppose the fact that it is currently winter break makes me relax a little. It used to be the case that I would be in my office at least on a Saturday or a Sunday. Weekends usually are reserved for my house chores, such as laundry, and when I finish doing it on one of those days, then I usually go to my office to work.

But then, the university is conserving its power to they don't heat the offices during weekends, so I figured I would take that as an excuse to not go to campus. Sometimes, I still bring work at home, but I just cannot find my house to be a conducive location of intellectual activity.

The other night, which was New Year's Eve, I was rather jetlagged, without actually flying. Maybe it was holiday-lagged. My good friend and I rented four movies, and we watched three of them way past midnight. I got to bed at around 3AM, and woke up at around 8 AM. We had breakfast, then watched the fourth one, and did some stuff. Obviously, we felt tired during the day, so we decided to take a nap. This was already around 1 PM. However, that nap took longer than expected, and so we woke up around 6 PM. We fixed dinner, and I went home.

Of course, I was wide awake in the evening.

I stalked people online, I read articles in Wikipedia, I read my novel, I even planned a trip to Guatemala. How fascinating the mind is, the imagination goes wild, and one can write tomes and tomes of books describing the human imagination. I have mentioned before that I won't be taking any vacation trips this year due to certain priorities, but just planning a trip without actually taking it is fun as well. I am so happy that the age of the Internet is here. If I were born fifty years earlier, I would not have this luxury.

So yeah, did you know that it is cheaper to fly to Guatemala from where I am than to Honolulu? A flight to Honolulu costs about 200 USD more than a flight to Guatemala City from Buffalo. I would need a visa to go there, but that is just 25 USD. Lonely Planet tells me that I can survive there for about 30 USD a day. And they have amazing Mayan ruins to entertain me. I could easily spend two weeks exploring the country.

Oh well, that's another pipe dream. Maybe in the distant future, perhaps. For now, I should be content in seeing Berkeley, California. That reminds me that I should prepare my slides and I have just about 5 weeks to do it. I actually borrowed the Beamer manual so I can figure out how to make slides without using Microsoft Powerpoint. Instead, I will be using LaTeX, but I haven't tried making one using LaTeX's Beamer package.

Oh, guess what? I have a new photo series. I got sick of my Arlington Cemetery photos. Good thing that was the end of it. Here's a collection of photos taken from George Washington's house in Mount Vernon.



(The Path, from my Mount Vernon Series)

Book Review: The Last Temptation of Christ by Nikos Kazantzakis

They say that curiosity kills the cat. If that were the case, then I should have been dead ages ago.

There were times in which I select what I read based on what people think about it. Back in undergrad, I picked up a few books due to the fact that they were revolutionary, and that they were banned previously. I have read quite a few of those books, such as Tropic of Cancer by Henry Miller, and The Rainbow and its sequel Women in Love by D. H. Lawrence. These three books were controversial in past generations for its sexual content.

This time, I picked up another book, which is controversial as well, but for a different reason. This time, I read The Last Temptation of Christ by Nikos Kazantzakis. Written in 1951, this is a fictional account of the life and death of Jesus Christ, from the perspective of Jesus. The reason why this book is controversial is because Jesus is not immune to the different types of temptation that humans face.

And as I was progressing through the book, I could see why people would go up in arms against this book. If a book paints God as having weaknesses, then obviously, this shatters the belief system of plenty of people who believe in an infallible God. But Jesus, as portrayed by this book, has desires, has weaknesses, and longs for peace and quiet, financial stability, and the touch of a woman. Jesus as painted by this book is in no position to be the Savior and God that multitudes of humankind believe him to be. In the end, Kazantzakis still lets Jesus die and accomplish everything that was destined for him, but not without presenting alternate episodes of his life, presenting an alternative scenario of what may have been the outcome should Jesus give in to temptation.

Another thing this book has tried to do is to rationalize the events around Jesus' life. For example, where the Bible talks about Jesus walking on water in order to save his disciples from drowning, Kazantzakis tells it as a very vivid dream by Peter. This is Kazantzakis' way of explaining what would otherwise be an impossible feat given what we know about physics.

Perhaps, the most disturbing scene involves the climax, in which Jesus, at the brink of crucifixion, is whisked away, and taken away from Golgotha. He then comes into the house of sisters Mary and Martha, and takes both of them as wives. Mary and Martha both have plenty of children, and Jesus continues his trade as a carpenter. Jesus, Mary, and Martha all age, until they get a visit from a bunch of old men, who turn out to be Jesus' former disciples. The disciples all call Jesus a coward and a traitor, blaming Jesus for their lost investment, since they were persuaded to leave their possessions and follow Jesus during their prime. The scene ends dramatically, until it is revealed that all of those are visions and dreams that Jesus saw in the split second before he shouts "It is accomplished!" and dies.

The Last Temptation of Christ is not meant to be a substitute for the Bible. It simply presents an alternate universe, a different possible world, a scenario that could happen if Jesus was indeed prone to the temptations that face humans here on earth. I see no reason why the faith of those who believe would be shattered if this book is in existence. For me, it is one of the best pieces of literature that I have come across.

See my other book reviews here.



(Freedom Fighter, from my Arlington Cemetery Series)

Linguistic Factoid No. 3: Garden Path Sentences

For the third installment of my Linguistic Factoids, let me tell you about garden path sentences. It has something to do with garden paths, in a metaphorical sense. So first of all, kindly read the following sentence.

The horse raced past the barn fell.

Is it a grammatical sentence? Actually, yes. But, sometime while you were reading the sentence, you had to backtrack and reinterpret a word seen in the past in order to make the sense of the whole sentence fit. Explicitly, when you first read this sentence, you may have thought that raced was the main verb of this sentence, but upon encountering fell, that interpretation was not plausible anymore, therefore reinterpreting raced as the past participle modifying the head noun (horse) and giving fell the correct interpretation as the main verb of this sentence.

Now why is this called a garden path sentence? Because of the metaphorical image that garden paths provide, that some paths lead you to dead-ends and you have to backtrack and find your way out.

Of course, there are ways to disambiguate these sentences, and in the above example, one way can be by just not reducing the relative clause, as in the following.

The horse that was raced past the barn fell.

Most of the time, lexical ambiguity plays a role in whether a sentence is a garden path sentence or not. World knowledge also plays a role, such as seen in the next sentence.

The bomb buried in the sand exploded.

This sentence has the same structure as the first one, but world knowledge tells us that bombs do not bury things due to the fact that they are inanimate entities, which decreases the likelihood of interpreting buried as the main verb of this sentence.

Now what do garden path sentences tell us? Well, they prove one important point in psycholinguistics, that is, human sentence processing is incremental. Humans process words and sentences the moment they see them, and repair them later if needed. It is not the case that humans wait for the period at the end of the sentence and then start processing, no, processing as it occurs in the brain is an automatic event, and the fact that we backtrack and reinterpret things proves that we process things one-by-one until we hit an obstacle, to which we give a different interpretation to a previously processed item in order to make the whole sentence fit.

Some more garden path sentences:

The old man the boat.
Fat people eat accumulates.
We painted the wall with cracks.
I convinced her children are noisy.



(The Dead on Holiday, from my Arlington Cemetery Series)

Reviewing 2008

This is my first post for the year. With this in mind, I would like to take this moment to review what happened back in 2008 in my person, and around the world.

2008 saw me living in Buffalo for three straight years. I suppose I got used to the weather here, especially the tough winter. I was shoveling my driveway the other day due to a snowstorm, and I remembered the look of the New Yorkers down in New York City, who looked like they are in a snowstorm, when all they had was rather mild winter weather for Buffalo standards. Although I wish whenever I settle down somewhere, it would not be a city with this kind of weather.

2008 saw me visit 6 new countries. In May, I traveled to Peru and Colombia, and in July, I headed to Denmark, Hungary, and Slovakia. And finally, in autumn, I got my visa for Canada, and so I was able to take daytrips to Toronto and its environs during the weekends. This has brought the total number of countries that I have visited to 18.

2008 was the year in which I started to be active again in conference presentations. I attended and presented my first conference talk back in 2005, and I didn't do anything until 2008, due to the fact that I was busy with coursework and not about my own research. But in March 2008, I presented a poster in a psycholinguistics conference held in North Carolina, which was co-authored by my adviser. I plan to make it a goal to present in at least one conference a year, and so far, 2009 is looking good, since my abstract for a talk was accepted for presentation. That means I have to give a talk this February in California. But more details about that later.

2008 was also the year in which I saw first-hand what the human brain looked like. And because of this, a major switch was turned in my head. I have lost some friends due to this, but as regards the friends who supported me during this ordeal, they have become closer than ever.

So, that was about me. What about the rest of the world?

2008 was the year in which the price of gas fluctuated from 4.25 USD to 1.85 USD, at least here in New York State. Venezuela and Ecuador moved their troops to the Colombian border, due to the Andean diplomatic crisis. Kosovo declared unilateral independence, and so far, 53 other sovereign states recognize it. 69,000 people were killed in an earthquake in Sichuan, China. Robert Mugabe is still the President of Zimbabwe. Nepal ceases to have a monarch. The South Ossetia War was fought between Georgia and Russia. Michael Phelps wins a gazillion medals in the 2008 Olympics. Multiple countries initiate methods on countering the global financial crisis. The first African-American US President is elected. Frozen water is found on Mars. Feudalism is finally abolished in Europe, with Sark holding elections.

2008 also saw the deaths of Bobby Fischer, who was constantly chased by the United States authorities for playing a match against Boris Spassky; Heath Ledger, from a drug overdose; Albert Hofmann, the Swiss chemist who is credited for discovering LSD; Yves Saint Laurent, the French fashion designer; Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, author of One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich; Jacques Piccard, known for exploring the deepest parts of the world's oceans; and many others worth mentioning but aren't for space restrictions.

So that was 2008 for me. Is 2009 going to be the same? Probably not. Is it going to be better? Maybe, maybe not. I suppose the only way to find out is to wait and see.



(The Kennedy Graves, from my Arlington Cemetery Series)