Urban sightings: Tumbleweave

Sometimes when speaking about crime rates in Oakland, some people refer to it as the wild west.

On that note, this is what we in Oakland call 'tumbleweave'.

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The basement

Imagine my surprise to find a BART route map (albeit an old one -- notice the SFO-Millbrae connection) in the basement bar area.

Turns out it was legally obtained and everything. How awesome is that??

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Delicious!

At least until Adam mentioned it smells like a wet dog.

UPDATE: It did.

Burying the lede

I'm reading Steven Pinker's The Language Instinct cover to cover out of a bit of shame, due to the fact that it's a rather seminal work in the theory of language and I made it through seven years of higher education without reading more than excerpts from the damn thing. That aside, it's an interesting book, and substantially easier to read (doubtless as a result of the fact that when he, e.g., throws up Minimialist syntax trees I sort of take them in with a single glance) than I expected, and honestly, a little more thought-provoking as well.

So far, I feel like he's running the risk of falsely boosting descriptive / functional linguists beyond the claims their data and studies should be making (which is an oft-levied criticism of that group), while poo-pooing the inane complexities of formal linguistics approaches (which is an apt and oft-levied criticism of our side, too).

But Pinker does a great job of always, always keeping one foot in the real world no matter how far into some linguistics minutiae he chooses to delve. And for that, I commend him. The book was published nearly 15 years ago, and yet some things he says I still find striking today:

[P]hrases that are ordinarily buried deep in the tree can be moved to early in the sentence, where they can hook up with material fresh in the listener's mind*. For example, if a play-by-play announcer has been describing Nevin Markwart's progression down the ice, he could say Markwart spears Gretzky!!! But if it was Wayne Gretzky the announcer had been describing, he would say Gretzky is speared by Markwart!!!** Moreover, because a passive participle has the option of leaving the doer role, ordinarily the subject, unfilled in deep structure, it is useful when one wants to avoid mentioning that role altogether, as in Ronald Reagan's evasive concession Mistakes were made.

V Smoothe writes about a near-riot at a community development block grant meeting in West Oakland. Now, while I'm as stunned as you are that there would even be enough people at a CDBG meeting so as to facilitate a riot, I doubt either of us are as stunned as Nancy Nadel or the crowd whose authority she totally tried to usurp.

To watch all these people overfilling the room, people who just live here and want to make this city better and don’t know what the hell to do about it, so they latch onto this one thing and they all show up here for something that has just sat, neglected by most people forever, well, that’s just so incredibly cool to me.

Um…then it went…let’s say, downhill. Once the crowd quieted down, District 3 Councilmember Nancy Nadel stood up and spoke. I had been under the impression that the meeting would begin with us all getting an overview of the strategic plan developed by last year’s Board, in which they had identified four key areas they believed future funds should be spent. Instead, Nadel informed us (and I am not exaggerating here, she was quite explicit about this) that she had unilaterally decided that every last penny of D3 CDBG money would be going to her personal money pit, oh, I’m sorry, I mean “teen center,” and that, by the way, the CBDG Board, which used to meet monthly, would now meet only quarterly, and its only function would be to serve as the Advisory Board to her teen center.

The only thing more surprising than that to me is that through some supernatural act on the level of divine intervention, people this crooked manage to get re-elected time after time! Check out the quotage here:

It took a little while for the room to grasp what exactly was going on (myself included! I was just watching, in this kind of stunned daze, and then all of a sudden it hit me - omg what she’s trying to do here is like off the charts insane and why the hell am I not writing every word of this down and get your damn notebook out now you moron!), but suddenly, it was like you could practically see all the light bulbs going off in peoples’ heads as everyone in the room simultaneously realized just how much they were getting screwed. The protests got louder and louder and Nadel fruitlessly tried to calm the crowd, saying:

I hear that people are unhappy with that. But the decision has been made.

"[T]he decision has been made." Can you believe it? Good for her, to recognize that people figured out she was all up in their funding and that nuh-uh Nancy, you did not! So she dropped the agent, herself, from the sentence and now it sounds as if ta-da a decision happened! Wheeee!

But the dandiest of dandy little gems on this tack came from none other than Sarah Palin, who took time off from her legal wranglings with the Alaska legislature to Talk to Charlie Gibson:

"I believe that what President Bush has attempted to do is rid this world of Islamic extremism, terrorists who are hell bent on destroying our nation. There have been blunders along the way, though. There have been mistakes made."

Never mind the fact that she and the current administration are Christian extremists, terrorists who are hell bent on destroying other nations. Let's leave that aside and just go for the grammar of that last sentence.

One downside to using the passive is the promotion of the object to 'subject' position (or however you want to put it -- basically the object becomes the thing the sentence is about now). But what she does here is essentially to leave the object in situ in a small clause ('mistakes made') and fills the subject position with the dummy subject 'there'. She's not only passivized the agency out of the sentence, she's also basically swept the problem under the rug, keeping it as deep in linear order and syntactic structure as possible. Ronald Reagan, by comparison, looks like he's issuing an outright mea culpa, throwing himself prostrate before us in search of forgiveness.

Very crafty Sarah Palin. Very crafty indeed.

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* - That's not an asterisk, it's my grain of salt.

** - You see how this doesn't actually have anything to do with "phrases ... hook[ing] up with material fresh in the listener's mind"? It's just putting one argument prominently at the front of the sentence. I don't see any hooking up going on really at all. I just don't think that this makes his point terribly well, something I think he may just be prone to. Not saying his underlying message is necessarily wrong, but this isn't the first time in the book that his supporting data has missed the mark.

Toaster

While reminding myself to really sit down and bang out a good post this weekend, I also passed a toaster on my way to work.

Surely that indicates good luck in some culture?

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Major disasters and miserable failures

AP sez: "Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff is telling The Associated Press that he can't remember a time when FEMA was juggling so many major disasters at once."

Not true. I remember three years ago when FEMA was dealing with three major disasters at once: Katrina, Michael Brown, and George W. Bush.

Thankfully, it looks like Gustav let up a little bit before making landfall. Here's hoping for the best.

You're damn well right we can.

So I've been meaning to write about all this gay shit for a long time, and it's just been difficult to sit down and crank it out. Not sure why, but I'm glad to have the challenge. Thanks for stopping by!

Several years ago, in another incarnation of this here blog, I posted an image of two elderly ladies who were the downfall of moral society and perhaps all of civilization. They were lesbians, you see. Lesbians, getting married. Not being happy with just an eternity of damnation, they were also intent on bringing us down with them.

I wrote that in jest, of course, because two old ladies exchanging wedding vows is somewhere between rainbows and teddy bears on the threat meter. And it was darling. They'd been partners almost their entire lives and finally realized the dream that nearly no lesbian couple in America had experienced before them: the exchange of wedding vows and the license of a state-sanctioned marriage.

And I now mention with a sadness and an incredible amount of respect that Del Martin passed away yesterday, at the age of 87. Her lawfully married parnter, Phyllis, had this to add:

"Ever since I met Del 55 years ago, I could never imagine a day would come when she wouldn't be by my side," Lyon said in a statement issued by the National Center for Lesbian Rights. "I am so lucky to have known her, loved her and been her partner in all things.

Fifty-five years -- may we all be so lucky. Rest in peace, and thanks for giving 'em hell.

And to turn the topic now, let's move from an activist ending her long slog to a new young fellow whose bestowed titles range from 'freshly-minted gay icon' to 'Olympic champion'. For the first time ever, an out 'n proud gay man won an Olympic gold medal -- not that you would have known that from watching the coverage. With this stunning and essentially perfect dive, Matt Mitcham made Outsports cry and also lash out at NBC for its coverage which neglected to mention that, oh by the way, Mitcham's partner is in the stands and the significance of a out homo winning gold. I wish the kid my best, because like it or not, he's now an international celebrity and a hero to many (just read the first link in this paragraph if you doubt me). It doesn't hurt that he's just adorable, either.

On the one hand, I think it's a compelling story -- absolutely the kind of cutaway material Olympics coverage is known for -- how he walked away from diving, piddled around and did some odd jobs; thanks to his rock and partner, found a renewed interest and desire to compete; won the Olympic gold. I mean, really, that's the kind of stupid storybook stuff they can't make up.

On the other hand, I also think it's totally true that in a reasonable, compassionate society, the headline "Gay person does X" wouldn't be worth mentioning for most values of X. So in an odd way, I kind of appreciated watching the competition and not really having that be the big deal (I totally knew he was gay once I saw him mug for the camera after a dive, but still). At this point in our society's evolution, there's probably room for a little of both.

I look at Rachel Maddow, who's getting her own show on MSNBC here in a couple weeks, and it's like, well yeah, she's a lesbian. But that's not what the hokey pokey is all about, y'know? It's her intellect and insight and wit that make her the compelling show host that she is. But we have to, on some level, laud or understand or appreciate the fact that she's the first out lesbian to be in that position, and yeah, you know, that's pretty damn cool.

I'm getting ready to watch Barack Obama accept the nomination for the presidency, and as much as I wish our country was at a post-race-divisional* level, we so very much are not. Exhibit one: Obama is the first black man to stand up be held up to accept a major party's nomination for the presidency. So let's acknowledge and appreciate the fact that he's the first black guy to be in that position, and yeah, you know, that's pretty damn cool.

So like I was saying, in a reasonable, compassionate society, you wouldn't expect to see the headline "Gay person does X" for most values of X. But we don't necessarily live in a reasonable, compassionate society just yet. I live in a state that's supposed to be full of fruits and nuts, and we still deal with shit like this.

You can't tell, but I just took a break to watch Barack Obama's nomination acceptance speech. I'm so stunned by it I don't even care to comment, beyond this: In 2004, I said that in his speech, Barack Obama served notice he would be the first black President of the United States. Today, in his speech, Barack Obama just served notice he will be the next President of the United States. I'm contributing a modest amount to his campaign as a result of the not-exactly-what-I-wanted-to-hear but anything but platitudinal (all right, amazing) speech. I'm also contributing the same amount to the campaign to defeat Prop 8. I hope you'll consider doing the same within your means.

We may not have the reasonable, compassionate society I dream of, but we can get there, with the groundwork established by pioneers past like Washington, Lincoln, Anthony, Dr. King, and of course Del Martin. And more and more we will realize the benefits as a society, of unsuspecting, everyday, regular people who sometimes manage to do extraordinary things and obliterate a tacit barrier like Rosa Parks, Matt Mitcham, or (I guess even) Rachel Maddow. And as we look to extraordinary leaders of all shapes and sized, races and creeds, in an increasingly diverse array which represents the true American Way, I feel only more and more confident. We'll get there, and we'll start by defeating Prop. 8. We're going to have a woman or a black man as chief executive or first officer of this country. And we will reap the benefits from now into the future every time someone achieves a pinnacle that today we would say "the first whatever". By then, "whatever" won't even be in the headline and the whole of society can rejoice.

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* - I now live in Alameda County, CA, and the societal integration here is just breathtaking. It does me better than eating Wheaties in the morning, seriously.