Suavely

Ĉu vi parolas Esperanton? Mi volus korespondi kun esperantistoj ĉirkaŭ la mondo. Aĝo kaj nivelo ne gravas, sed mi preferus samaĝulinojn. (Mi havas 16 jarojn.) Memoru, ke mi estas komencanto. Estas malfacile, trovi saminteresajn esperantistojn, kiuj volas korespondi retpoŝte. Do anstataŭ serĉi ilin, ili serĉos min… mi esperas. Mia retadreso estas . Dankon!

I apologize for the “Esperanto moment” right there — a lot of you reading the RSS feed have probably skipped over this post for that reason — but it’s just a plea for pen pals with which I can practice my abilities. It can be so hard to find someone with the same interests as you. I’m glad to have found Eric, who is eerily similar to me. But why don’t the hot chicks go for Esperanto?

Mi: (suavely) It’s a facilitator of cross-cultural communication, baby.

Samaĝulino: (biting lip voluptuously) Oh, say “facilitator” again.

Mi: (whispering suavely) Fa-ci-li-ta-tor.

Samaĝulino: (trying desperately to hold back) Say it… in Esperanto.

Mi: Well, let’s see here… “facilitate”… “to make easy”… “facila,” easy… “ig,” to cause… “ilo,” tool… so that would be… “faciligilo.”

Samaĝulino: (breathing heavily) I love the way you tie words together.

Mi: (suavely) Don’t forget to make the “c” sound halfway between “t” and “s.”

Samaĝulino: Ĝi… ĝi…

Mi: (suavely) Ĝi — t.e., Esperanto — estas faciligilo de interkultura komunikado.

Well, I suppose your imagination can take it from there. In fact, you’d probably be glad I didn’t finish that little dialogue. This is no place for firakontoj.

The fallacy of many questions occurs when you ask something that presupposes something that has not been agreed upon by the people involved. In other words, it means you’re asking someone about something that isn’t true. If they give a straight answer — “yes” or “no” — that means they must agree that the presupposition is correct. A common example is “Have you stopped beating your wife?” Whether you say “yes” or “no,” you admit to having beaten your wife in the past (and, I suppose, to having a wife). So how would you answer a nonsensical question like that? According to hackers (good or bad), the correct answer is “mu.”

Quite exciting, this Potter magic

Well, as I suspected, my sister finished “Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince” before Monday, so I started reading it. This book has once again confirmed my suspicion that I’m a horrifyingly slow reader. But how can anyone read a 600-page book in two days? I start to get bored after a while, so I put it down. And I have better things to do, like what I’m doing now.

Right now I’ve knocked down between a half and a third of the book. I think if I read it fast, I can finish it tomorrow, and my sister will no longer have to go off into some other room when she’s talking to her friends about it on the phone. (She’d like that, I’m sure.) Indeed I’ve been avoiding spoilers like the plague, but I’m afraid I might have found out a semi-important plot point somehow. Oh well, I’m not even sure of that, and I don’t know anything else about the ending. Meanwhile I’m making my own little predictions about what’s going to happen, and it’s quite fun.

Tearing through the blogosphere faster than a speeding… weird site… it’s Google Moon. The folks at Google have outdone themselves this time, giving an aerial view of the lunar landing sites on the anniversary of the first moon landing: July 20, 1969. (As everybody is doing when they post this link, I should tell you to zoom in all the way to see what the moon is really made of.) I guess this would also be a good time to snuff out the nutty claim that the moon landings were faked.

San Francisco, I think, is the Esperanto capital of America

For this post, I’m going to try something different. I’m actually going to write in Esperanto. Appropriately, the topic of this post is Esperanto meetings. Do they occur? Certainly. But where? Certainly not around here. Here’s a very long list of Esperanto events around the world in 2005. Only a handful are in the United States, and those that are aren’t anywhere near here.

I just realized while writing the below section that I still have a problem with the “-n” ending in Esperanto, which denotes a direct object.

Por ĉi tiu blogaĵo, mi penos ion malsaman. Mi efektive skribos esperante. Konvene, la temo de ĉi tiu blogaĵo estas esperantokunvenoj. Ĉu vi okazas? Certe. Sed kie? Certe ne ĉirkaŭ tie ĉi. Jen tre longa listo de esperantaj eventoj ĉirkaŭ la mondo en 2005. Nur kelkaj estas en Usono, kaj tiuj ne estas ie ajn apud ĉi tie.

Dum skribante tiu ĉi sekcion, Mi ĵus konstatis, ke mi ankoraŭ havas problemon pri la “-n” finaĵo.

That’s enough of that. I had to look up a lot of those words. I apparently still have a long way to go in learning Esperanto. I can’t expect to be fluent in less than two months, but it would sure help if I could meet other Esperantists in person (that would help with my speaking and listening, anyway). Too bad I only know of one around here.

I should also practice my writing, but what can I write about when I can’t write about anything? Oh well. To me it seems that I should learn the skills in this order: reading, writing, listening, and speaking. Once I can read fluently I’ll have picked up the various grammar rules that maybe my book won’t have taught, and I’ll have a stronger vocabulary. That would be it for the easy part. The hard part is finding a way to listen to and speak in Esperanto (besides talking to yourself).

Nu, eble mi devas skribi uzanta nur la vortojn, ke mi scias. Tio ne estas tre malfacila. Kvankam mi ne povas diri ion ajn, mi povas peni. Mi esperas, ke mi ne eraras.

Well, maybe I have to write using only the words that I know. That isn’t too hard. Although I can’t say anything, I can try. I hope I’m not making mistakes.

Kion mi ĵus lernis? Mi forgesas… ho, jes! Mi lernis pri la vortoj fininta de “-ita”, “-ata”, kaj “ota”. Diri “la konstruota domo” estas pli facile ol en la angla (plej mallonge, “the house to be built”). Kun ĉiu leciono, mi scias pli pri la genio de Zamenhof. Li faris la lingvon por ke ĝi povas esti simpla sed potenca (kaj nekonfuzanta).

What did I just learn? I forgot… oh yeah! I learned about the words ending in “-ita,” “ata,” and “ota.” Saying “la konstruota domo” is easier than in English (at the shortest, “the house to be built”). With each lesson I know more of the genius of Zamenhof (the creator of Esperanto). He made the language so that it can be simple but powerful (and not confusing).

Mi trovas, ke estas pli facile unue skribi esperante, uzante nur la vortojn, kiujn mi scias, kaj poste skribi angle.

I find that it’s easier to write in Esperanto first, using only the words I know, and then write in English.

Sudoku is something that’s supposed to be popular. It’s a puzzle with numbers, but there’s no math involved. You have to ill in the grid so that every row, every column, and every 3×3 box contains the digits 1 through 9. It sounds like it would be interesting, but I don’t think I’d pay for the program after the free trial expired.

Questionnaire

It’s nice to know that I still get noticed.

Yesterday my spam filter caught an e-mail from Dr. Vincent Miller of the University of Kent, Canterbury, England, UK. He’s a sociologist and so he presented to me a questionnaire about blogging: with questions like why I blog, etc. This was interesting. Bad spam filter!

I was happy to oblige, because I appeared to be part of a select group (according to the e-mail) of 40 bloggers between the ages of 13 and 18. Seeing as there are zillions of bloggers in that demographic, and a zillion minus 40 of them don’t know how to spell or use punctuation, I considered it a compliment.

Dr. Miller said that the data would be used by a private report for a major European/African/Middle Eastern ISP whose name I shall not mention. And seeing as I don’t like companies, I will admit that I had some doubts about it. But he also mentioned that the data might find its way to “future academic articles,” so I thought that would be cool.

It also gave me a chance to reflect on why I blog and what this blog is for. I feel that I blog because I can pour my ego into it instead of heaving it around with me everywhere I go. But more importantly, I blog because I want to keep a record of my life and because I like to entertain people. That’s how I answered most of the questions, except that when asked “Are you different offline compared to online? How?” I started with “Yes; when I am offline I am far less apt to say foolish things to girls.”

I hope this questionnaire isn’t supposed to be a company secret; I’ve tried to mention as little of the content of the questionnaire as I could. Nevertheless, I didn’t see a legal warning, and I myself don’t see what harm it could do to state why I blog anyhow. It’s not like it’s a doctor-patient matter, anyway. Unless I’m the patient.

Here’s an interesting instrument for those into woodwinds. It’s the xaphoon. Be sure to listen to the audio clips on the site. It’s a smallish thing, but it has the sound of a saxophone or a clarinet. Quite cool. And they start at $54.95. Hey, I was going to scoff at that seemingly high price, but then I realized that since my birthday, I’ve had a lot of money. That might be something to think about, but I can’t imagine reading sheet music or any of the usual boring woodwind stuff. I have to remember that I’ve also tried (and failed) to learn the harmonica and the piano before being interested enough to succeed at the guitar.

Books

In yesterday’s post I noted that I wouldn’t be getting “Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince” anytime soon. Well, yesterday my dad went out and bought it for my sister and me. Costco was selling the huge and popular book for $15 — half price! Kristen, who’s always been an extremely fast reader, has read between a third and a half of it already. By the time I get a chance to pick it up, she’ll be done with it.

Also yesterday, I got some Esperanto books that I ordered from ELNA, the Esperanto League for North America (serving, despite the name, only the United States). They’re technically a birthday gift because my dad decided to pick up the charge.

The books were packaged interestingly. They were placed inside a box that once held one of those garbage bag holders that you would hang on a wall. So they could put the postage, etc. on the box, they wrapped it in paper — specifically, a 10-year-old table of international postal rates. The books were contained inside a Safeway plastic bag, which was padded with a page from the New York Times and a Portuguese-language newspaper (!), both from April. Also included for more protection were little bits of paper that kind of fell out when I got everything else out.

As for the books themselves, there was a varied selection. But I noticed that only one of them was bound with an actual cardstock cover, like a paperback book. All the others had covers of slightly thicker paper. Also, only one or two of the five books had an ISBN. By the order in which I intend to read them, they are:

• “Gerda Malaperis!” by Claude Piron. This is the quintessential quasi-advanced Esperanto reader, starting in Chapter 1 with simple Esperanto and ending at an advanced level that I can pretty much read already. Published in Brazil by a Swiss author.
• “Ĝis Revido Krokodilido!” by Sten Johansson. A collection of short stories, some of which are about life in Esperantujo (Esperantoland, i.e., wherever Esperanto speakers are). Published in Sweden.
• “La Seĝo Dektria” by George E. Wagner. An original short story in booklet form. Published in the USA.
• “La Besto-farmo” by George Orwell. A translation of “Animal Farm,” which I’ve never read, by Gerald Tucker. I know it’s a short book, but it seems impossibly small in such a slim and tiny volume. It looks all the cooler that way, though. Published in Germany.
• “Tri Homoj en Boato” by Jerome K. Jerome. An old translation of “Three Men in a Boat,” which I’d never heard of. Will the late 1800s British humor translate well into 1934 Esperanto that can be understood by this 21st century reader? I don’t know, but I don’t think the binding of the comparatively large book, which appears to never have been read, will stand up to my reading if I’m a slow reader. That’s why this is last on the list. Published in Hungary.

Pouring out of my head yesterday were these thoughts:

I want to live somewhere scenic. I want to be able to go out into the mountains in the afternoon… or at least the foothills… maybe live in a little town abutting a National Forest. A place that only a few people know about, with a small general store and a gas station that’s part of a chain that you thought wasn’t around anymore. And I want to just as easily have a quaint but modern Northern city, with ancient two-story houses lining wide concrete roads, within reach. In the city I would see the skyscrapers old and new, the ancient buildings seeing another day on busy corners. Perhaps I could split my time between the town and the country.

I want it to snow there, without fail, every winter. To be able to stay inside with a good excuse and a mug of therapeutic hot chocolate would be nice. And then maybe I could go into town, chains on tires, and see the white-blanketed city, street sweepers running and Weather Channel camera crews on the sidewalk. Maybe pick up a newspaper and go into a coffee place. Read about what’s happening in our big city, and maybe a footnote about building a tunnel in the mountains where I live.

South Florida is hot and flat and built up. There’s nothing to do but live your life in the most boring fashion imaginable. It’s nothing but an ever-widening string of suburbs with no “urb” in sight, except for Fort Lauderdale, which I rarely visit, and Miami, which I never visit. Winter and summer are one and the same. It’s about a six-hour drive to the nearest hill.

A list of words ending in -onym. There are a lot.

Butterbeer

To the delight of zillions of fans, “Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince” hit the shelves (only to fly off in an instant) at midnight. Even though nobody got it for me for my birthday, and I don’t intend to buy it right away, my sister, her friend Katherine, and I thought we would celebrate the occasion yesterday with a quasi-magical recipe.

As several books in the obviously immensely popular series have attested, “butterbeer” appears to be the preferred beverage of Potter & Company. For a long time, knowledge of anything about this exotic-sounding drink had evaded me. Does it taste like butter? Does it taste like beer? Perhaps both? Is it even real?

On Thursday my eye caught a butterbeer recipe — among other Harry-Potter-related ones — in the newspaper, and so I just had to try it. So yesterday we Potter fans (or whatever they call themselves) got together for some sort of Potter Party, complete with authentic drinks.

(The units of measure used in this recipe are those archaic English measurements that we still use in America. I would convert them to metric for you, but I don’t want to be held accountable if somebody’s butterbeer exploded due to too much or too little of this or that.)

Ingredients:
1/2 stick (4 tablespoons) butter, at room temperature about 2 hours
1/3 cup light brown sugar
2 teaspoons ground cinnamon
1/2 teaspoon ground nutmeg
1/4 teaspoon ground cloves
1 pint vanilla ice cream, softened 30 minutes
1 (24-ounce) bottle (3 cups) sparkling apple cider

In a large bowl…

…cream together butter, sugar and spices. Add to ice cream…

…and refreeze. This took about an hour and a half, so we entertained ourselves in the meanwhile:

Pour out the appropriate amount of cider…

…and heat it in a pot over medium heat until warm but still carbonated (at least 3 minutes).

Fill each glass with a generous scoop of ice cream mixture. Pour warmed cider over ice cream; it will foam like beer, hence the name.

Got butterbeer?

Basically it tastes like what you think it tastes like: apple cider, vanilla ice cream, cinnamon, and nutmeg. Despite the name, it doesn’t taste like butter. I don’t know what beer tastes like.

It’s an interesting blend of tastes hot and cold. Katherine thought hers was too hot, and my sister’s thought hers was too cold. Mine tasted just right and I drank it up promptly. The recipe says it makes six servings, but we were basically able to split the batch up between us three.

You kind of have to like the sparkling apple cider in order to like this recipe. Otherwise it’ll taste funky. It tasted kind of funky to me, but I could see why you’d go for it on a snowy day in Hogsmeade.

Now the ubiquitous cheesy smile shot:

See also these unrelated but cool pages with recipes for root beer and ginger ale.

Wine-ing

My parents like wine. I’ve always noticed that. They drink wine with dinner often. I see their wine glasses out, I see bottles all the time. That’s understandable. But I’ve noticed several things appearing around the house. I swear these are all new.

My mom bought this mat while on vacation in the Florida Keys last month.

I wouldn’t trust my food to this guy. The picture seems to have been in place for no more than a week.

I don’t know when this wine rack thing showed up, but it’s new.

My parents’ cork collection. While not new in itself, the other day they brought it into view on a chalkboard they just bought (previously the corks sat in a drawer). They want to combine the two somehow and make it a corkboard.

With all this alcohol-related paraphernalia, it’s a wonder I don’t “fall down the stairs” every once in a while. (Just kidding!)

Calculators are an amazing tool, making possible such things as rapid, accurate mathematical calculations and spelling funny words when turning the calculator upside-down. Come on, who hasn’t done that? Oðblgshezi is a “language” consisting only of the letters you can make with a calculator. Punch “1234567890″ in a calculator and you get the name of the language (“ð” means “th”). I’d like to see somebody write a meaningful sentence in this calculator lingo.

Whithersoever you throw it, it will stand

I got some pretty good stuff for my birthday. I got two Beatles t-shirts (good thing, my supply’s been running low) and an interesting book about the Beatles which I’ve started to read. It’s called “Magical Mystery Tours: My Life with the Beatles,” and it’s by a fellow named Tony Bramwell, who claims to be a childhood friend and assistant of the Beatles. He paints a good picture of the personal lives of his friends Paul, George, and John (he didn’t meet Ringo till later). Paul McCartney is quoted on the cover: “If you want to know anything about the Beatles, ask Tony Bramwell. He remembers more than I do.” Shockingly, I’ve never heard of this guy, but his recollections merit further reading.

Happy birthday to my friend Sean, who turns 16 today (the day after I do). Hope you enjoy your birthday.

Today my grandmother came over. She’s staying with us for a few days because they’re doing something to her house (exterminating it, I think). That should be a nice change of pace.

Has anyone ever ruled the entire world? No. But many entities over the history of the world have made it their goal, to varying degrees of success. This list ranks the top 27 world powers in recorded history by their greatest extent in area. So, looking back on history, who has controlled the most land? It’s not the celebrated Roman Empire (#17), the mind-bogglingly large Mongol Empire (#3), the United States (#12), Alexander’s empire (#19), or even the Communist world (#2). The answer may surprise you (if you haven’t been using your brain).

(The title of this post is the motto of the Isle of Man. In Latin it is “Quocunque Jeceris Stabit.” In Esperanto I figure it is “Kien ajn oni ĵetas ĝin, ĝi staros.” Now figure out this English-language colloquialism translated into Esperanto: “Mi ne havas vivon.”)

My birthday

On this day in 1989, I was born.

You know, I usually say that I don’t care much about my birthday, but it’s actually kind of nice that people care about you for a day. I think everybody should celebrate their birthday. Those who don’t will have no suitable outlet for their egos.

I’d like to take this opportunity to wish my “evil twin” Eric a happy birthday as well.

How will I spend my birthday? I’m going to my grandmother’s house for dinner, where we’ll have roast beef — mmm, my favorite* — among other things.

So, I’m actually 16. Sixteen years old. That means if I had gotten my learner’s permit a year ago, I could get my driver’s license now. I could. If I had. But you know what? I don’t want or need to drive car. Not at this point. I have nowhere to go. There’s no point in wasting my time. So what if all my friends can drive? I could always take the bus, maybe*. At the very least, I need to get some form of ID. That way people will know I exist and that I’m not an alien from outer space or something.

I’m 16, and I’ve never been on a freaking date. People enter a state of awe if they can pry this fact out of me, making me all sorts of promises that “someone will come along.” I don’t know why they’re so surprised. Surely with my charm*, money*, wit, and chin*, someone should at the least find me more than just “a nice guy.” But you know what? I don’t want or… wait, that doesn’t work. I need it.

Well, that’s enough self-deprecating for one day. I’m outta here.

*not

I’ve got the power!

In September I switched from Internet Explorer to Firefox. There are numerous extensions for Firefox that allow you control over the web sites you visit. For example, I’ve downloaded Adblock (which blocks ads from pages), StumbleUpon (which allows you to find cool sites based on your interests), and others (including a program that displays “alt” text for images… something Firefox does not do by default).

Now I’ve discovered the Extension to End All Extensions. It’s called Greasemonkey, and you can use it to manage the content or features of any site you visit. It doesn’t do anything by itself; you download mini-extensions, called user scripts, that do the dirty work. These basically function as extensions, except that they are easier to write (being only JavaScript) and to download. Some improve usability around the Internet, while others are designed to work at specific sites. So far I’ve downloaded three, all for general use.

MouseOverThis! gets rid of JavaScript that makes the status bar say something when you hover over a link. Immensely useful for sites such as snopes.com which are good but, for some strange reason, don’t want you to see where their links go until after you’ve clicked them. (The Adblock extension also works wonders on Snopes, making it actually navigable.)

Frame Killer Plus gets rid of all frames but the largest (but, by default, only on the sites you specify). It’s good for those annoying sites that keep external links wrapped in their own frames. About.com is a good example, and again, another prime opportunity for Adblock to do its magic.

Another one I downloaded was No Middle Man, which gives you direct links instead of redirection links (for example, when you leave the web site of a government agency, and they just have to say before you get redirected that what happens on the rest of the Internet isn’t their fault). But I removed this user script because I couldn’t get it to exempt Google’s cached pages.

In short, Greasemonkey gives you the power to control the Web. Twenty cool points to Greasemonkey.

To sleep, perchance to dream…

Speaking of interesting and possibly useful things, we have here a watch called the SLEEPTRACKER (intended to be shouted, hence the caps). It’s a pretty cheap-looking watch, but it’s actually expensive. And here’s why: it monitors your sleep and wakes you up at the opportune moment.

You know one of those rare days when you wake up just bursting with energy, ready to go out into the world and take on anything that comes your way? I don’t either, but I’ve heard good things. Anyway, that’s what you’re supposed to feel like when you wake up at the proper point of your sleep cycle. And that’s supposedly when the Sleeptracker wakes you up. Just at the right time. Oh, what a feeling.

And it’s only US $149.