Friday Video - History of Music by String Fever

This week's video features music...again...but not just any music.  It's the history of music by an awesome string quartet called String Fever.

Ah, ah, ah, ah, stayin' alive!  Stayin' alive!

Things to Check Out III (A crafty earring holder)

This week's thing to check out is a craft project of my own invention.  I found myself in possession of many pairs of earrings and nothing but a box to put them in.  This caused them to get all tangled up.  Worse yet, I often was unable to find the 2nd earring of a pair.  So finding myself armed with an extra shoebox and some pipe cleaners left over from Christmas, this little craft was born.

Yes, those are Beatles-themed buttons on the bottom.

Simpy take a shoebox and poke holes in the sides across from one another with sharp scissors.

I would recommend off-setting the holes so that you can put more pipe cleaners in.

Then push the pipe cleaners through the holes and twist up the ends.  The fuzzy pipe cleaners keep the earrings from sliding or falling off.  Easy, right?

Granted, I also recently received a real jewelry holder from a friend.  And while it's lovely...

A little treasure from World Market

...I think I'll delegate it to my larger pieces.

Friday Video - What American English Sounds Like

Hey all, this Friday's video was sent to us by one of our professors.  The title is "What American English sounds like to non-English speakers" and it's a clip of an Italian comedian from the 70's.  I'm inclined to agree with their interpretation of us.  It's especially good, I think, if you mentally situate it with other 70's music videos.

Also the dancing is...well, you'll see.


Note that blogger doesn't let me embed videos that aren't my own.  For the video, click on the linked words.

Things to Check Out II (Cake Pedestals and Martha Stewart Living)

For this week's Things I wanted to share Martha Stewart Living magazine.  It's highly commercialized, I know, and I don't love Martha herself all that much, but if you like cooking, entertaining, and/or design, you simply must check out this magazine.

I honestly don't know how much of this magazine is due to Martha herself and how much is due to a very talented team of editors and designers, but the ideas are completely divine.  There are recipes and organization tips and landscaping and so on and so forth.  However, the one article that especially caught my eye came from the February 2010 issue.

It's called They Take the Cake, and it's a feature on cake stands and cake pedestals.  I don't have one, but my mom has a clear glass one, which I have used maybe twice in my life.  I do like the rare moments in which I get to use a cake pedestal, so this article just sucked me in.  It's not so much the information as the pictures, as you can see in the picture above.  The elegance of entertaining is, in some ways, a lost art form (kind of like calligraphy), and this article whisks me away to that time.

Which is to say, I have designs on owning a cake pedestal or two.  Colored glass, anyone?

Of Bread and Baking

So, I find myself unable to make from-scratch sourdough bread.  Maybe it's because all the recipes I look at go by weight in flour rather than cups, but it's always a gooey mess that will never form a loaf.  I will eventually find myself a kitchen scale, but until that day comes I will just stick to beer bread.

As it turns out, beer bread is ridiculously simple.  The recipe is standard across sources, so that success is pretty much guaranteed (assuming you don't burn it).  You take 3 cups of self-rising flour, 3 tbsp of sugar, and 12 oz of beer (a normal bottle or a can), mix them, and bake.  Obviously, the average person doesn't have self-rising flour, so you merely substitute it for 3 cups of normal flour, 3 tsp of baking powder, and 1 and a 1/2 tsp salt.  ...and then the beer and the sugar.

Then you simply bake for 50-60 minutes at 375 degrees Fahrenheit, optionally brushing with a tbsp of butter during the last 5 minutes.  You can add cheese or spices to the dough or sprinkle the unbaked loaf with nuts or oats.  It's a pretty resilient, yeasty bread.

I've also seen a suggestion where you split the dough in half and let it rise in two separate pans.  The original beer bread is pretty dense, so if you like you dough light, this is probably the way to go.

Finally, the beer you choose does matter, so choose wisely.  I've tried it with a pale, citrus-y ale, so my next goal is to make it with a heavy stout and see how the flavor differs.  In fact, that might be an interesting party--having a via-bread beer tasting.  Ideas, ideas.... (Click for "Read More" for Recipe)

Friday Video - Literal version of Total Eclipse of the Heart

This week's Friday video was shared with me several weeks ago by a classmate.  We must have watched it 3 times in a row.  It's the Literal Version of the song Total Eclipse of the Heart.  Honestly, the real video is just as weird.

Note that blogger doesn't let me embed videos that aren't my own.  For the video, click on the linked words.

Some words on SyntaxFest 2010 and how different programs make different linguists

As I mentioned last Friday, in June my classmates and I went to SyntaxFest 2010. SyntaxFest was held in Bloomington, Indiana at Indiana University.  It was technically called a "workshop," but I'm more inclined to refer to it as a summer school. SyntaxFest was a four-day even that featured Norbert Hornstein, Jason Merchant, Željko Bošković, and Norvin Richards.  Howard Lasnik was also scheduled to be to be there but had to cancel at the last minute.

A grotesque on the roof of Maxwell Hall, Indiana University

I think one of the most interesting aspects of spending four days with four top-notch linguists and a group of students is the mix of backgrounds and the subtle differences in approaches that come with them.  I particularly remember a Berkley student politely objecting to a statement about pro-drop.  The presenter, if I recall correctly, was explaining pro-drop in terms of prosody.  Her objection was along the lines of not wanting to lose descriptive adequacy by moving away from the assessment that pro-drop languages were by and large those that were morphologically rich.  My mind immediately went to the obvious criticisms of her objection:  (1) linking pro-drop to morphologically rich languages is not empirically sound because Japanese also has pro-drop though it's less morphologically rich than English and (2) even if it were empirically sound, linking them does not help us in any way with explanatory adequacy.

And then it hit me that she probably doesn't work with Romance languages, or she would have read the relevant papers (excuse me for not citing them here, but I can provide them upon request).  So, out of all this, I learned to appreciate that who we're exposed to in our formation as linguists (both professors and literature) has a huge impact on our linguistic world views.  I probably knew that from a logical standpoint, but it takes seeing it firsthand to internalize it.