http://www.mdcclv.com/log 'Cause my head's a dictionary / Of long spring days and the speech of crows Sun, 11 May 2008 18:52:50 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en I've been rediscovering corn tortillas.  When I was growing up, we never heated or fried them, so I thought of corn tortillas as these horrible crumbly things that tasted like styrofoam.  Last month I made a fun Diana Kennedy recipe (she credits Sra. Josefina Velásquez de León), Indios Vestidos (if ... http://www.mdcclv.com/log/2008/05/11/breakfast-lately/ S and I have been really happy with our first-ever Metropolitan Opera subscription this year. Last week we got a renewal packet in the mail, and the same problem presented itself this time as last time: subscriptions are grouped by the day of the week of the performances you're ... http://www.mdcclv.com/log/2008/03/11/opera-opus-mosh/ Sometimes when you read a dictionary definition aloud, sense 2 becomes a punchline. http://www.mdcclv.com/log/2007/08/30/sometimes/ I was at Heathrow last Saturday evening, picking up my betrothed, and as I watched the people exiting the Secure Area I saw a serene white spiky head strolling out. David Byrne! No. Maybe? Peer intently. I'd have to look closely at a recent picture ... http://www.mdcclv.com/log/2007/05/29/sighted/ I looked up misogyny on onelook after seeing what I considered an inadequate definition somewhere. I found a glut of inadequate definitions. I think misogyny, and in fact all miso- and -phobia words, need more attentive corpus analysis in order to reflect the full spectrum of their use. Consider: OED: ... http://www.mdcclv.com/log/2007/05/25/misdefining-misogyny/ I've been wanting to make two short films of my favorite parts of the Lord of the Rings, both sadly omitted from the Peter Jackson adaptation: Tom Bombadil in a black-and-white, silent-Buñuel style; The Scouring of the Shire in a contemporary setting. It opens just before dawn as the four hobbits ... http://www.mdcclv.com/log/2007/05/14/lazyweb-greenlight/ I found this on the ground near my laundromat in Sunset Park. I don't know any movement notation to know whether Yassin is just regurgitating something taught in class; I prefer to imagine that the homework assignment was "devise a dance notation". This seems so abstract for a ... http://www.mdcclv.com/log/2007/05/09/yassinotation/ I went to the Aston Corpus Symposium last week and it was exciting and even moving; at every talk I jotted down notes that didn't relate to the talk but to tangential ideas that the talk was unearthing and catalyzing. One of them was from a talk by Bill Dodd, 'Semantic ... http://www.mdcclv.com/log/2007/05/08/the-causes-of-causes/ Abstract: The present dictionary interface is the same kind of information display as a multiplication table; current online dictionaries are putting big, searchable lexical multiplication tables on the web. But today's dictionary data allows much more. Who/what will spark the dictionary-display revolution? Body: Consider the multiplication table: a mute, ... http://www.mdcclv.com/log/2007/05/06/nns-nns-144/ I was walking home from work the other day and happened to notice (for the first time) the Lamb & Flag Passage and, not having any urgent need to get back to my turret, decided to walk along it to see what it held. Backstreets are always enjoyable, and ... http://www.mdcclv.com/log/2007/05/06/are-you-stalking-me/