Two fun neologisms about Senator Obama

(BTW, I've decided to experiment with using lower case more in my post titles than I had previously.)

1. Obamacon n. A conservative voter who supports Democratic candidate Barack Obama in the 2008 U.S. presidential election. Also: obama-con. [Shortening of Obama conservative.]
2. Baracknophobia n. Negative feelings about U.S. presidential candidate Barack Obama, particularly those based on racism or unfounded rumors. [cf. arachnophobia.]

Various Items

Here's the story: Work is busy, life is busy (we finally cleaned out the garage loft today) and despite my best wishes to blog effusively, I get to what I get to. That's my new motto.

• Documentary being worked on about Wikipedia and wikis in general. You can contribute ideas to the film's own wiki site.
• Chris Anderson says the music biz is UP UP UP, except for CD sales.
• Map of the Star Wars Universe. Also, comparison of Star Trek and Star Wars spacecraft.
• The other night, The ♥G♥ and I watched F**k: The Documentary. Highly fucking recommended! Comments on profanity, free speech vs. censorship, the fluid nature of language, and just how silly we Americans can be about certain syllables, from Drew Carey, Alanis Morissette, Ben Bradlee, Ron Jeremy, Ice-T, Tera Patrick, Sam Donaldson, Janeane Garofolo, Kevin Smith, Hunter S. Thompson, et al. Not just them, but the no-fucking-fun crowd: Alan Fucking Keyes, Pat Fucking Boone, Dennis Fucking Prager, Michael Fucking Medved, and Miss Fucking Manners!
• Also watched 28 Weeks Later. Spoliers! I think this was even better than Days. Interesting things to note: The central family essentially doomed half the world or so by their own inability to realize that almost all of their countrymen had perished from the Infection. The whole U.S. Army involvement was very Iraq-ish, but here's the thing: They (Army) had the wrong idea about putting everyone into a confined space, but they had the right idea about trying to get rid of everyone afterwards. Very Planet-of-the-Apesesque ending.
• Django Reinhardt/Paul Simon mashup. Awesome!
• The math of vampires, ghosts, and zombies. Excerpt: Let us assume that a vampire need feed only once a month. This is certainly a highly conservative assumption, given any Hollywood vampire film. Now, two things happen when a vampire feeds. The human population decreases by one and the vampire population increases by one. Let us suppose that the first vampire appeared in 1600 c.e. It doesn’t really matter what date we choose for the first vampire to appear; it has little bearing on our argument. We list a government Web site in the references (U.S. Census) that provides an estimate of the world population for any given date. For January 1, 1600, we will accept that the global population was 536,870,911.2 In our argument, we had at the same time one vampire.

More Items

Items:

• Ever wonder how the Klingon language was created? Wonder no more. Also, if you ever need to Google something in Klingon...
• Cool blog on new wave/alternative rock of the 80s.
• Interesting, hard-to-categorize blog: Ectoplasmosis.
• Spiffed up my Wiki user page a bit.
• Bootie Top 10. (No, not this; maybe some other time.) Via Mashuptown. Make sure to check out Gorillaz + Styx and Eurythmics + White Stripes.

A Few Things

Several things:

• Amba on writing about ideas vs. narrative: Call it Mercator's Dilemma. Ideas are global in structure. Sentences and paragraphs are linear, and pages are planar. That makes the problem of writing out an idea so that it reconstitutes itself fairly faithfully in the reader's mind a lot like the problem that preoccupied early cartographers -- how to map the globe onto a flat piece of paper. Misrepresentations and distortions are unavoidable.
• Slight mistake with a few non-English characters on the Wikipedia logo. They'll be fixed soon, I'm sure.
• Thomas Jefferson had his libraryies organized according to three broad areas: Memory, Reason, and Imagination. This was an idea he got from Francis Bacon, and one that is hat-tipped by the Library of Congress. The subcategories are detailed here. I'm keeping this in the holster in case I ever tire of having the books in my house Deweyed.

Happy Hyphenated-American Day

Today is the day that I hold as evidence that these populists who are always whining about so-called Hyphenated Americans and asserting that multiculturalism is ruining America and stuff are full of shit. Their idea (in practice) is that if (for instance) Mexican immigrants really wanted to be Americans, that they wouldn't retain ties to their ancestors' culture through language, flags, holidays, customs, etc.

Listen, in Chicago they dye the river green on St. Patty's Day, fer chrissakes! This is not the United States of Ireland, is it? Until I see one of the Anti-H-A crowd lead a campaign against that, I am not going to be too sympathetic to their arguments. (To be honest, I still wouldn't be too sympathetic afterwards, either, but at least I would credit them for being consistent.) As long as Chicago does the annual greening of the river, I can't see why I'm supposed to get upset over a bunch of first- or second-generation Mexican immigrants driving around with Mexican flags on Cinco de Mayo.

I have to say that objecting to "Hyphenated Americanism" is not necessarily racist, but I also have to say that it is an easy veil to throw over xenophobia or mysoxeny. (New word?)

Speaking of new words, let me cite William F. Buckley, who opined that words exist to meet a felt need (briefly explained here). Why do the terms "African-American," "Italian-American," "Arab-American," etc. exist? Because in the market of free ideas, enough people have found them useful definitions that they have stuck. When people stop finding utility in those definitions, they will fade.

Additional Items

A few more things from around the Internet:

• I might want to check out this book by Constantine Verevis, Film Remakes. Senses of Cinema review excerpt: His approach is nothing if not ecumenical, drawing on an almost bewildering range of views on the matter as he pursues the central question, “What is film remaking?” which he properly asks in his opening paragraph... ...He canvasses the kinds of taxonomies that have been proposed: these include Michael B. Druxman’s categories of the disguised remake (sometimes involving generic shift), the direct remake (which makes clear its source) and the non-remake (same title, new plot); and Harvey Roy Greenberg’s acknowledged, close remake (near-replication), acknowledged, transformed remake (substantial variations) and the unacknowledged, disguised remake (e.g. studio-era remakes).
• Ann Althouse on how some words are funnier than others. Excerpt of Wikipedia excerpt of 1948 New Yorker article: H. L. Mencken argues that "k words" are funny: "K, for some occult reason, has always appealed to the oafish risibles of the American plain people, and its presence in the names of many ... places has helped to make them joke towns ... for example, Kankakee, Kalamazoo, Hoboken, Hohokus, Yonkers, Squeedunk, and Brooklyn."...
• Communicatrix on the visual communication ideas of Edward Tufte. This is a guy I've been meaning to learn more about for a while. For instance, here are some of Prof. Tufte's comments on mapped pictures/image annotation.
• I would have thought I would have scored a little bit higher... Via Random Abstract:

How White and Nerdy Are You?

Books Almost Organized; Teaching Chinese in Chicago; SA WWII Book; Beatles + Luda; Say It With a Slap

OK, I know it's been a while, but I think I finally have all my books all the way squared away. Here's the breakdown: 900s (history and geography) in the living room and hallway; Early 400s (general language/linguistics and English language) and 800s (literature) in my office, fiction and the balance of the non-fiction in The G's office. I still have to figure out what to do with a bunch of magazines I have that I want to go through/file/pitch.

• Via Language Hat, here, here, and here are some other comments on home-library organization.
• The cover story of yesterday's Chicago Tribune Magazine was quite interesting -- It was all about the Chicago School System's Chinese-language instruction program. Main story by Monica Eng, side pieces by Evan Osnos and Desiree Chen. Teaching Chinese (and Urdu, and Arabic, and Korean) to public school students, elementary and up, is only a good idea if we want America to be competitive in the 21st Century. Otherwise, we should just skip it. Excerpt: In a kindergarten class at McCormick, Mexican-American children cheerfully recited a poem about ducks and geese flying over a river. For many adults, the pronunciation of the word for geese (sort of like "ewwuhhhrr") would have been both daunting and somewhat embarrassing. But the 5-year olds kids nailed it, unfazed by how much it sounded like a mix between gargling and honking. The rapid growth of Chicago's Chinese language program has attracted a flood of media attention that has placed Davis into a discomfiting spotlight. He faces constant questions about whether Chinese is too difficult. He is keenly aware that Spanish is a far more useful language at the moment. His avid support from Mayor Daley--the mayor accompanied him to China last summer for the second time and has made the Chinese program a pet project--attracts a mixed bag of admiration and resentment from other educators, who requested anonymity for this article. Davis' appointment as director of the new Confucius Institute, which got $70,000 in partial funding from China, is a concern to those who eye Beijing's motives with suspicion. (In cities it partners with in a teaching program, the Chinese government establishes a Confucius Institute to promote the study of Chinese language and culture.)
• My Tank Is Fight! looks like a fun book from Something Awful about not-so-good ideas for weapons in WWII.
• As commentary on Heather's recent alimonization of Sir Paul, here's a "Love Me Do"/"Paperback Writer" mashup with "Move Bitch" by Ludacris.
• We watched a great French crime film this weekend: Touchez Pas au Grisbi. It was great! They kept slapping everybody! Roger Ebert excerpt: The world of French crime films is a particular place, informed by the French love for Hollywood film noir, a genre they identified and named. But the great French noirs of the 1950s are not copies of Hollywood; instead, they have a particularly French flavor; in "Touchez Pas au Grisbi," the critic Terence Rafferty writes, "real men eat pate," and this is "among the very few French movies about the criminal class in which neither the characters nor the filmmakers are afflicted by the delusion that they are Americans." A few years later, in Godard's "Breathless" (1960), Belmondo would be deliberately channeling Bogart, but here Gabin is channeling only himself. He is the original, so there is no need to look for inspiration.

Props to Bombippy for the slapshots.

Dominant Intelligence Test

I kind of guessed this. Via TT.

Your Dominant Intelligence is Linguistic Intelligence

You are excellent with words and language. You explain yourself well. An elegant speaker, you can converse well with anyone on the fly. You are also good at remembering information and convicing someone of your point of view. A master of creative phrasing and unique words, you enjoy expanding your vocabulary. You would make a fantastic poet, journalist, writer, teacher, lawyer, politician, or translator.

What Kind of Intelligence Do You Have?