Another good thing that stemmed from High Fidelity was it’s introducing me to the first Bob Dylan song I actually liked: Most of the time(mp3, lyrics).
In an attempt to expand my melodic horizons I had previously downloaded his discography, planning to plod through it eventually. The going, though, proved sheer torture. I don’t like his voice nor his instruments, and all his songs seemed to blend into the same inane harmonica.
When I first listened to Most of the Time I thought an old black woman was singing. I liked the pace though, and I started listening. The structure revealed with a couple of lines and I was hooked. In its epistropheWP and nostalgia it reminds me a lot of Alberto Cortez’s Distancia(mp3, lyrics).
I started browsing around with more method (listening the intersection between his discography and Rolling Stone’s 500 greatest songs of all time). I “discovered” I want you, Like a Rolling Stone, Lay Lady Lay, Blowing in the wind, Mr. Tambourine man, Knocking on Heaven’s Door, and Visions of Johanna. Most I’d heard before, covered, but I’d never really listened to them. A masterful songwriter (he’s been nominated several times for a lit Nobel) with “unusual” voice and renditions, Dylan reminds me a lot of Jose Alfredo JimenezWP and Georges MoustakiWP: they’re all acquired tastes, popularized by covers, appreciated only after attentive overexposure. All of which is fine by me, acquired tastes tend, oddly, to be the most rewarding.
A 16-line hack to make the JS DOM API a tad more humane.
...absolutely amazing. I’ve yet to find a smaller and yet more astounding example of how you can encapsulate functionality within JavaScript and create brand new APIs on the fly.
Web pages are written in HTMLWP but as they have become more and more complex, they now tend to be written, clientside, through JavascriptWP, which can manipulate and insert HTML. Google Images, for instance, uses Javascript to write the HTML that displays your image results.
Yes, it’s roundabout, but it’s due to the nature of the languages: Javascript does stuff, HTML displays stuff. When you want the browser to do things (instead of merely displaying dumbly what it receives) and when these things themselves involve a lot of displaying, you end up writing HTML through Javascript.
It’s a little like writing French through English (André went to Marie and said: ”Bonjour! Ça va, ma chérie?”) and just as frustrating, particularly because you sometimes have to narrate whole scenes in French (pidgin tends to be painfully verbose) and your English self is left completely in the dark—so you end up naming things in both French and English and it gets as ugly as you can imagine.
HyperScript is a bizarre and quixotic attempt to write French in English; that is, HTML in Javascript. Basically, you do what went on in the Norman conquest of EnglandWP: you anglicize as many French words as you can; that is, you turn into Javascript as many HTML words as you can.
The lark itself takes gratefully (and rather surpisingly) only 16 paltry lines of Javascript code (highlighting thanks to Mark “Tarquin” Wilton-Jones.):
functioneach(a, f) { for(vari=0, l=a.length; i<l; i++) f(a[i]) };
each('a big blockquote br b center code div em form h1 h2 h3 h4 h5 h6 hr img iframe input i li ol option pre p script select small span strong style sub sup table tbody td textarea tr ul u'.split(''),
function(label){
window[label]=function(){
vartag=document.createElement(label);
each(arguments, function(arg){
if(arg.nodeType) tag.appendChild(arg);
elseif(typeofarg=='string' ||typeofarg=='number') tag.innerHTML+=arg;
elsefor(varattrinarg){
if(attr=='style') for(varstyinarg[attr]) tag[attr][sty]=arg[attr][sty];
elsetag[attr]=arg[attr];
};
});
returntag;
};
});
and you can play with it right here, right now:
Test Area:
does it work now?
The translation between HTML and Hyperscript is straightforward, where you would have written
KinKey is now running in the background (and will run itself at every startup unless you uninstall it). At any2 text-editing place you want, you can now, say, press E and ^at the same time(in the same way you press Ctrl and C to copy) to get French’s e circumflex, ê. The order doesn’t matter, you could just as easily have pressed ^ and E to get ê.
Here’s a list of the characters you can type with KinKey:
Example:
Pressing A and / results in á.
Pressing Shift (or with CapsLock on), A and / results in Á.
To uninstall KinKey, close first the program by right-clicking its traybar3 icon, , and selecting Exit. Now just delete KinKey.exe itself and Kinkey’s gone. Similarly, if you want to move KinKey.exe close first the program.
1 Groupie-ly stolen from Instiki. 2 There are two known exceptions where KinKey won’t work: Vim and Adobe Photoshop. 3 The traybar is the area on the bottom-right part of your screen, right next to the clock, where many system-state icons are located.
KinKey es una mini-aplicación para facilitar la escritura con un teclado Estadounidense de los caracteres especiales del
-Español
-Francés
-Alemán
-Portugués
-Italiano
-Catalán
Funciona en Windows XP/2000/Vista.
KinKey está corriendo ahora en el fondo (y correrá automáticamente cada vez que inicies tu computadora a menos que lo desinstales). En cualquier lugar 2 para ingresar texto puedes ya, por ejemplo, presionar E y ^al mismo tiempo(de la misma forma que presionas Ctrl y C para copiar) para obtener la e circunfleja del Francés, ê. El orden de las teclas no importa, presionando ^ y E también obtienes ê.
Aquí está una lista de los caracteres que puedes escribir con KinKey:
Ejemplo:
Presionando A y / obtienes á.
Presionando Shift (o teniendo CapsLock activado), A y / obtienes Á.
Para desinstalar KinKey, cierra primero el programa haciendo click con el botón derecho en su icono a la derecha de la barra de tareas (al lado del reloj) y seleccionando Exit. Ahora simplemente borra Kinkey.exe y Kinkey ha sido desinstalado. Similarmente, cuando quieras mover el archivo KinKey.exe cierra primero el programa.
As I said on a previous post, I believe Spanish, my mother tongue, has a low status on the web. And as I laid there pondering the subjectivity of my assessment, I remembered Mihaly CsikszentmihalyiWP’s fascinating account of how (and why) he became a scientist (it appears in John Brockman’s excellent Curious MindsAM, a compilation of similar tales by top-notch scientists and a sure recommendation to anyone).
The particular anecdote that came to mind was when he and a friend quarrelled over whose neigborhood was the more communist (the matter was relevant because he was living in Italy and the country was then in political turmoil). Their brilliant analytic idea to try to settle the question was to count out the circulation of the left- and right-leaning newspapers in each of their neighborhoods’s newsstands. This of course sent them into all sorts of interesting statistical considerations, but it put them on the path of finding the subtle answers to their question, and it was certainly better than “the hocus-pocus most adults rely on to bolster their arguments”.
So I want to try to do something similar with my question—what is the linguistic vitality in the web of 14 languages?—and this post will be the beginning of my investigation. For reasons of practicality and personal bias, the 14 languages I’m going to settle to are: EnglishWP, GermanWP, FrenchWP, PolishWP, JapaneseWP, DutchWP, ItalianWP, SwedishWP, PortugueseWP, SpanishWP, FarsiWP, ChineseWP, EsperantoWP, and HindiWP.
Eran las ocho y media de la mañana, yo subía la escalera del metro, mal dormido y encantado de la vida, porque nada es más hermoso que ser joven, subir unas escaleras temprano y aparecer en la plaza de Saint-Michel.
Fernando Savater, Mira por donde, p257
It was eight thirty in the morning, I was climbing the metro stairs, poorly slept and delighted with life, because nothing is more beautiful than to be young, climb some stairs early in the morning, and appear in Saint-Michel’s plaza.
Ex fan de sixties (“Ex-fan des sixties, / Où sont tes années folles? / Que sont devenues toutes tes idoles?”), Babystrich (“Am Bahnhof Zoo hängt ein Riesenplakat: ‘Ego, Berlins größte Diskothek’”), Tokyo Mon Amour (“Ce jour-là en été sous le soleil”), Ma Radio (“Je ne peux pas vivre sans ma radio /
Mon transistor j’adore”), Schoen Von Hinten (“Geh, es ist vorbei / Goodbye!”), Heaven’s In The Back Seat Of My Cadillac (“Makin’ love, makin’ love to you / Is a beautiful thing to do”), L’amour à 3 (“Je sais c’est démodé / ça fait hippie complet / mais je le crie sur les toîts / j’aime l’amour à 3”), Kleptomane (“Je pique c’est un tic / j’adore ça, ça m’excite”).
The concert will be part of some sort of France-Mexico musical festival, Mundo Latino. Date: this Thursday, May 4. Time: somewhat confusing, all one knows is that it’s somewhat after 8PM. Place: ”Terreno localizado en López Mateos, entre Plaza del Ángel y Plaza del Sol”. Price: $150 or $350. Be there. And if you are, say hi.
I must confess that I love Spanglish in a kitschy, campy, and yet honest kind of way.
It all started with Molotov and their ¿Dónde jugarán las niñas? album of my early adolescence. I loved their mongrel insults (”fuck you puto baboso!”) and their Voto Latino song:
I’ll kick your ass yo mismo
por supporting el racismo. Blow your head
hasta la vista
por ser un vato racista.
Que sentirias si muere en tus brazos a brother who got beaten up by macanazos?
Que sentirias si cae junto a ti
una hermana que canto una ”Rebel Melody”?
Pinta tu madre patria de colores so you can’t tell the difference entre los others.
More recently, a song by Yolanda Perez (featuring “Don Cheto”), Estoy Enamorada, has brought it all back to me:
Don’t tell me por favor, que no lo puedes creer,
Si mis amigas tienen boyfriend yo tambien puedo tener.
Tu no me entiendes, Dad.
Yo no soy niña, Dad.
Yo voy a tener novio and I don’t care if you get mad.
Se que sigues saliendo con ese, stupid.
Ya se que se besaron no creas que no lo supi[!].
Yo lo unico que entiendo es que si lo veo por aqui, I kick his cholo ass.
Akwid, a recently famous group from Los Angeles, is a slightly different matter. Their music itself, for one thing, is something both truly different —mixing Mexican Pacific brass band with hip-hop— and truly good —the tuba “burping along like a nimble elephant.” But they don’t really speak Spanglish. It’s mostly just Spanish, but a different one from mine. One even more imbued with American influence.
They have a song called Pobre Compa in which the singer tells about a romantic triangle between him, his best friend and a girl. There’s a voice-over at the middle of the song in which the singer addresses the girl. One hears knocking, a door opening, and the following brief dialogue:
Akwid: Hola. Girl: Hola. Akwid: Se puede? Girl: Pienso que si. Akwid: Esta aqui? Girl: No.
You can’t tell by the text, but the girl speaks her 5 words with a distinct accent that I love: crisp Spanish with an English cadence —which, btw, is completely different to gringo Spanish: broken Spanish with no cadence at all; an English tongue trying to mimic, unsuccessfully, Spanish sounds. And there was something else, beyond the accent, that I found interesting and appealing but couldn’t precisely pinpoint. I know now: it’s that “pienso que si”; a perfectly valid Spanish sentence, of course, but it feels somewhat unnatural to my Spanish sensibilities. “Pienso que si” mimics the English “I think so” where I would have more naturally said “creo que si” (“I believe so”).
It’s similar to the phrase “dulce para mi ojo” in their Taquito de Ojo song. That’s a quintessentially English phrase, “eye candy”, translated to Spanish inside a song with a quintessentially Spanish phrase as its title: “taquito de ojo” (“eye taco”). I like that.
Truth is, I love this blending whatever the language involved, I “delight in mélange.” Just to give an example, yesterday, via Diana, I found about a French Canadian group called K’maro and I was thrilled. They have true talent for Franglais, just look at this gem:
Welcome dans mon monde si tu party. Welcome parmi nous si t’es naughty.
Or think about how “weekend” is now a French word. It’s much more natural to French cadence that the clunky “fin de semaine”.
...es el titulo de una cancion de Miguel Gallardo. La cancion es buena pero a mi lo que me encanta es el titulo. Es mi eleccion para ristra de 5 palabras mas romantica (y cachonda) de la lengua Española. En Frances, mi delfin es aquel inovidable (y fatalmente ironico) Je veux baiser votre âne! de Vince Cassel a Monica Bellucci en Irréversible (al que ella responde, sonriendo y tambien con 5 palabras, Tu es un tel romantique!)
Aunque ahora que lo pienso, siendo el campo de juego ristras (y no solo frases), preferiria: lima, axila, cadera, media-mañana y pupila.
En que cosas divago… supongo que yo tambien ando en busca de una amitié amoureuse.
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, and selecting Exit. Now just delete KinKey.exe itself and Kinkey’s gone. Similarly, if you want to move KinKey.exe close first the program. 