"...I am assuming that [women] will vote in the next election, and that is going to be good for the election, because I think women are more sensible than men."
--Prince Saud al-Faisal, Saudi foreign minister
"Some of the districts look literally drawn by a drunk with an Etch-a-sketch"
--The Governator
Both quotes pulled from Newsweek, the former from a Newsweek interview with the minister.
However, I've recently upgraded my glibc. I don't know why, but for some reason I decided to check strncmp to see if the behavior had changed. Well, it looks like strncmp is "fixed"! I guess I trashed my original test program, so I coded up another one, which looks like this:
#include <string.h>
int main() {
char *a = NULL;
char *b = NULL;
int t;
t = strncmp(a, b, 0);
printf("(a > b) == %d\n", t);
return t;
}...and it gives the output "(a > b) == 0"! Not "zsh: segmentation fault ./a.out"! So I wonder if my complaints had anything to do with this. Unfortunately, I can't find the source file for strncmp in the CVS web interface.
Every now and then I check out the Blogspot blog Baghdad Girl, which seems to have gotten very popular. It is really nothing more than what the title says: a 13-year-old girl who lives in Baghdad (and writes passable English). Like many 13-year-old girls, she likes to post pictures and things about cats. And like most people living in Baghdad, she occasionally sees or hears about some nasty shit going on, and writes about that. But it's mostly cats, school, and daily life.
Anyway, I checked her out today, and saw this post, which has as its sole sentence, "Beautiful 2 cats sleep in a blue bed." At first this seems quite inept, and, well, putting "beautiful" immediately before "2" definitely is incorrect in English. But what's interesting is how extremely unnatural it is in English -- it just wouldn't occur to most native speakers to try to say that -- with no special reason. I took notice of this construction of B'Girl's, because I have often noticed similar constructions used in Korean. In fact, in Korean it is even permissible to put adjectives before articles! (Well, Korean has a very limited set of articles, corresponding more or less to "this", "that", and "that one over there", but still...) But it's something I was never really taught to do, and it always jarred me a bit, even when reading it in Korean. It seems to be more popular in poetry, for some reason.
So read that sentence a couple of times, and ask yourself why you shouldn't be able to say "beautiful 2 cats". Don't come up with a quote from some book that merely says, "the proper order of adjectives is this"; give me a good aesthetic or logical reason.
Reading Maloney philosophy (and wondering if, immediately before typing this, I might not have been some wierd sort of fish in a world without gravity).
My Newsweek arrived today sans staples. Indeed, there aren't even holes to show where staples have been. It's like an 8½x11 tabloid!
From now on we are enemies, you and I. Because you employ trombones in your symphonies, with no idea how to use them, and add them to your score just to niggardly dole out a few uninteresting notes. You wrote a wonderful storm sequence in your 6th symphony, full of fire, bombast, wailing and gnashing of teeth. The sort of stuff that trombones were made for (indeed, I've seen photos of Renaissance-era trombones with the bells shaped like dragon heads with paper "flames" emanating from them). How did you choose to score for the trombones here? By having us sit in bewildered silence, thinking we must have miscounted the measures! We sit, with bated breath, ready to do that which we were put into this world to do, literally drooling with expectation, and we slowly realize we are expected sit by while the party goes on without us. When you finally call us to duty, it is for a series of almost invisible whole notes and on-the-beat quarter notes with nary a contrapuntal melody in the whole work.
We are enemies, you and I.
On Sunday we had a rehearsal for this newest group I'm in, the Maryland Sinfonietta. The conductors didn't send out an e-mail saying how the rehearsal would be run, unusual for these guys. I got there at 7:10 to find them rehearsing the Ginastera, which only has one trombone part, in which I therefore do not play. I talked to a trumpet player who was idle like me, and he informed me that rehearsal for the Beethoven would begin at 8. I went out and grabbed a Checker's burger, and got back around 8. The conductor wanted to work with the strings a bit; eventually, without really being prompted, the winds wandered in and took their seats. Maybe 8:20 or so. But it was after 9:00 before the trombones played their first notes. Aaargh!
I love it when interviewers say things like "That doesn't answer our question about [something]", and respond with "I beg your pardon?" after the interviewee says something everyone knows is dubious at best. Read Der Spiegel's interview with Bill Gates.