"For those of you who don't live in a metropolis, the short-turn bus is the public-transportation equivalent of a cock-tease: you might think it's going to take you where you want to go, but at one point or another it suddenly stops short of where you really want to be." -- Ryan

Ryan and I went to Tyndale together for a year, and truth be told, I pretty much thought he was a jerk (mistakenly!). That was probably mostly due to his hanging out with a certain young Caleb fellow, to whom Sanda and I often contemplated writing "encouragement notes" that went along the lines of "Dear Caleb, we encourage you to stop being such an asshole." (Of course, we didn't [though we should have, Sanda, you chicken!], opting instead to post Adbusters posters on the bulletin boards.) Once summer came and most of the others went home, I revised my opinion of Ryan and we started hanging out and things were good. He's lived practically across the road from me since last June (?) and we both go to York University now, but haven't managed to get together for tea until today, even though we're both total nerds when it comes to our academic disciplines (psychology for him). Anyways, Ryan's started a blog, so check it out and encourage him to update often!

I should mention for the benefit of all of my Brock Vegas readers that Ryan had the dubious pleasure of being the RA for one Jeff Strikefoot for a year and managed not to strangle him. Mad props for that, yes? Oh, and I learned today that Jeff's been given the boot and is no longer allowed on Tyndale property! Who saw that coming? Oh, that's right, all of us... (Heh, remember when we duct-taped him to a tree? Good times, good times.)

In other news, I will be spending tomorrow helping my lovely boyfriend move downtown at long last. So exciting! :) And my birthday is in 4 days! Chris has been teasing me for days now that he has a surprise for me and he won't tell me what it is. He says that he's getting me back for teasing him with a list of contradictory hints about his present back in December, so don't tell him that it's not bothering me as much as it bothered him, okay? ;)

So, boys and girls, I turn 24 on March 4th, which means that this is my birthday week! For the uninitiated, birthday week starts a week before my birthday (so, yesterday) and ends a week after my birthday (the 13th), because any day that is within a week of my birthday is part of my birthday week. Including my birthday. So, it's 15 days of goodness. :)

This past week, I had two midterms: Syntax and Phonology. Syntax was actually pretty fun, I got to draw a lot of sentence trees. Phonology was a lot more straight-forward than I was expecting, so that was good. He'll probably slam me on some nitpicky stuff, but whatever. This prof seems to only comment on things you do wrong, and all his comments are in red pen. I got an assignment back last week that was covered in comments in red pen, "this is wrong," "why are you talking about this here," etc., and what did I get on it? A-. WTF? I really wasn't expecting a good mark by the time I got to the last page.

In other, more exciting news, my best friend, Janice, and Mike (who often comments here) got engaged this past week! Very exciting! :)

Yes, this link is for those among us who have to constantly scramble for new ideas for youth events:

Games to play in WalMart

Comments and some more ideas here.

Blogger stole my post about Paul Martin's fabulous speech last Monday. I'm mad.

So, I've gotten in a bit of a discussion about vegetarianism on a mailing list, and this got me to thinking... do chimpanzees eat meat? Because they are, as I'm sure you know, our closest relative and they share a measly 98.5% of our DNA. (Pretty neat, eh?) Anyways, my search led me to this: The Predatory Behaviour and Ecology of Wild Chimpanzees. Turns out that we became omnivores long before our previous incarnation split into chimps/humans. So vegetarianism is pretty much a new spin on things, as far as humans are concerned. That makes sense, seeing as vegetarianism requires access to information about how to get which vitamins and how much you need, and access to things like tofu, which I'm assuming most people in Europe weren't too familiar with. This isn't to say that vegetarianism is bad/unnatural/etc., just to say that... meat-eating monkeys aren't your run-of-the-mill variety, but the ones that are closest to us just happen to be that type, so maybe eating meat isn't bad.

Seriously, folks, vegetarians are fine by me. I know a few of them, and they are fine folks, and cute at that. I just don't really get it. I mean, okay... look at the cute little lamb, don't you want to pet him? Yes, I do. But I also want to cook him up and eat him, because let's face it, lamb is good. The cuteness just doesn't override the pure tastiness for me. Is that selfish, to say that my enjoyment of food should override his will to live? Yeah, probably, but life's a bitch. I mean, it's not like we're totally immune from life's bitchiness either, we get killed by other beings, like AIDS and smallpox and sometimes the plain old flu. It's not like that's fair either, stupid viruses killing me so they can live longer, but I don't think that the viruses are being immoral.

I guess what I'm saying is that I don't feel bad. And I suspect the chimps don't either.

(waiting for the reply from Dani in 3...2...1...) ;)

The other day, I was coming home on the subway, and I was seated across from two couples. One was a lesbian couple, and the other was an interracial couple (white woman, very black man [kenyan?]). Both were very affectionate and clearly comfortable being so in public. It's strange to think that both types of couples have been attacked as "unnatural" for similar reasons:

In the century leading up to that historic ruling, which was triggered by the Lovings' challenge of their Virginia conviction, the arguments against interracial marriage foreshadowed those used by opponents of gay marriage: God objects. Children will suffer. The majority will be tarnished. (Virginia’s law banning whites from marrying nonwhites was introduced in 1924 as "A bill to preserve the integrity of the white race," a title not unlike that of the 1996 Defense of Marriage Act.) A state may refuse to recognize any marriage that offends it. Most states and most people are offended by such unions. And the 14th Amendment’s guarantee of "equal protection" doesn’t apply to them. (Partners)

I'm not worried about whether or not the same-sex bill will be passed, because I see that in this section of Canadian society, same-sex couples can travel on the subway without harassment, just like interracial couples can. I figure if about a quarter of the country's population lives here, it's likely that most people in Canada are already used to accepting gay couples and aren't going to reneg on it.

In other news, Hunter S. Thompson killed himself. What a stupid day.

(according to GQ)

Jesus and Saint Peter are golfing. St. Peter steps up to the tee on a par three and hits one long and straight. It reaches the green. Jesus is up next. He slices it. It heads over the fence into traffic on an adjacent street. Bounces off a truck, onto the roof of a nearby shack and into the rain gutter, down the drain spout and onto a lilly pad at the edge of a lake. A frog jumps up and snatches the ball in his mouth. An eagle swoops down, grabs the frog. As the eagle flies over the green, the frog croaks and drops the ball. It’s in the hole. Saint Peter looks at Jesus, exasperated. "Are you gonna play golf?" he asks "Or are you just gonna fuck around?"

Heh. I've always liked that one. :) (via MeFi)

Edit to add: Geoffrey Pullum's linguistic and cultural thoughts on a ceremony celebrating the marriage of two women in Oakland, California. (Language Log)

Zefrank has a Valentine's Day video up today, which is funny in his awkward-improv-character sort of way. Even Gmail has gotten in on the fun:

Chris and I, on the other hand, decided not to play along with Valentine's Day this year. A few weeks ago, I asked him if he was planning on buying me flowers for it, and after a short "crap, what is the right answer?!" pause, he said he hadn't thought about it yet. (That's my boyfriend, skilled at avoiding the doghouse in the face of crazy girl questions!) He asked why, and I said that I don't really like it that flowers get so ridiculously expensive and boys spend a stupid amount of money on them just because Hallmark says they have to. So, true to the spirit of all of the anti-corporation documentaries we watch (not to mention our dwindling bank accounts), we've opted out.

It's kind of funny, I remember being on res in college and dressing in black for v-day with all the other single girls (some of them out of spite, me because I thought it was pretty funny), and now I'm in love and I'm still opting out. Things are kind of strange these days in terms of relationships. The only boy I really cared about in high school has a wife (!), my lovely Sandra deJong is getting married in October, the littlest Poelman has a fiancée and a baby, my best friend is well on her way to having a ring... It makes me feel so old! I get together every month or so with a group of 3 other girls, and we're all either married or in (getting to be) longterm relationships. Frankly, it's a little odd. I'm pretty used to being single and I still hate chick flicks, I think they're pathetic, and I'm used to the "boys don't like us, clearly they suck" discussions that girls love to have. Now most of my girls are graduating and starting to think about careers and grad school and weddings and there's even a bit of thinking about parenting at some point.

Okay, that's enough thinking about that for one day. I'm off to watch some Trailer Park Boys. :)

P.S. Yay for improved comment capabilities! All of you without Blogger accounts can now sign your name, or so I've heard! I'm glad when things get bought by Google, they make things happy.

Yesterday, the Love and Sex Guide (NOW Magazine, free weekly Toronto paper) came out. I got to school at 10, and usually, at 10 on a Thursday morning, there are about 200 NOW magazines in the first set of newspaper bins that I walk by -- there were none. At ten o'clock. Classes only start at 8:30! So, I walked over to Vari Hall, where there's another bunch, and they had five left. Insane!

I disagreed with languagehat on AskMetafilter! Oh no!! About linguistics at that! I am so going to linguistics-hell. Either that or he will say, hey, you are right, you are my new hero, and then I will be in linguistics-heaven. :)

It was a discussion about why some people say "Valentimes" instead of "Valentines" and some people who apparantly have some phonological knowledge proposed that the [t] sound made it easier to pronounce an [m] instead of an [n] after it. Which is clearly hogwash. Let's play Learning About Phonology, boys and girls! (I am so going to make my classes into big games. I learned about chemical bonding with a helpful analogy of a high school dance. "Now, hydrogen isn't picky. He gets around. Any chick with a space for an electron, and he is THERE.")

Now. Phonology is about sounds, how you make them in your mouth, and how sometimes one sound starts bossing the other sounds around. Simple example: In English, we have a prefix "in-", which is basically a negation. So, afternoon classes are tolerable, but 8:30 classes are intolerable. Simple, right? But why is it possible for me to fly in my dreams but impossible in real life?

Well, simple. In intolerable, the sound after in- is a [t], which if you think about it, you make with the tip of your tongue on the little ridge behind your teeth, which is called the alveolar ridge. Also, the [n] of in- is made in the same place, but you're doing some other stuff too, which we don't need to talk about. So, the [n] and the [t] get together and do some chatting about what's been going down lately on the good ol' Alveolar Ridge and everything's cool.

BUT in impossible, the sound after the in- is a [p], which you make with your lips. Sooooooo... Mr. [p] gets all BOSSY and says, hey! I'm not going to be preceded by no stupid alveolar-ridge nasal! I'm a labial consonant, and we only like to hang out with other labials! So get that guy out of here and get me a labial nasal, or I'm not playing this game! So, the mouth sighs and says, FINE, we will get rid of the [n] and bring you an [m], and then the [p] gets his way and settles down and voila, we say impossible instead of inpossible.

The End.

Moral of the story? The mouth is an enabler. If the mouth had an alcoholic spouse, the mouth would be blaming itself for its spouse's rages, and paying for the beer. Don't be like the mouth, you'll end up letting labial consonants make all your decisions for you.

NPR's Fresh Air had an interview with Ice Cube, which you can listen to here (mp3). A brief excerpt:

IC: You know, we got a lot of resistance. Goin' on tour, you know, we went on tour in the summer-- not in the summer, but the spring/summer '89, we went on tour, and we would have the chief of police show up with a ordinance, you know, if you say this, if you do this, you goin' to jail. We couldn't perform our most famous song, which was F the Police. We couldn't perform that, because they just said, if you perform that, the tour's over. So, you know it was just all kinds of things we was goin' through, but--
FA: Did you always comply with the police orders you were given?
IC: No. [laughs] No, we did it how we felt it. You know, we would tell the kids out in the audience what just happened to us backstage, you know, all kind of stuff. Cuz we loved it, because... we had got a letter even from the FBI, you know..
FA: What did it say?
IC: It just said that we were the cause of cop killings all over the country and, you know, our music was the worst thing that could ever be produced and we should stop. But, you know, growing up where we was from, with the LAPD and the sheriffs and how they really put the hands on you, a letter, chief of police reading an ordinance, none o' that--all that was just a walk in the park compared to how we grew up every day, so this was like, you know, we didn't take any of it seriously.
FA: Were you ever arrested after a concert?
IC: Yeah, we was, uh... we never went downtown, but we were detained and cited in Cincinnati, and in Detroit the police jumped on stage to get us off, actually during the performance, they jumped on stage..
FA: Does it all ultimately add to the legend and roar surrounding NWA?
IC: You know, you would have to ask a fan. I think so, because, just like the music, there was things that we didn't plan. We never planned for the music to take us to these heights. We always thought that we would be superstars in the neighbourhood, and, you know, we always thought as long as they loved us around the neighbourhood, where else would you rather be?
FA: Do you feel the same way about the police that you did when you recorded F the Police?
IC: Some of 'em, yeah.
FA: But not all of them.
IC: Well, you can't say "all" about anything and be right.
FA: So, no regrets about the record.
IC: No, I don't regret any record that I've done, because a record is kinda like a time capsule. It's how you're feeling at that point and at that time, so regretting it is kinda regretting living.

I find a few things interesting. It's interesting to hear his dialect of English, on a pure linguistics geek angle. It's also interesting to see how he has more of a sense of his neighbourhood and his people than I ever have. I really like his point at the end, too, about not regretting what you've said in the past, even if your thoughts have changed, because living isn't something to regret. I think that's a pretty important thought for me, especially since the ideas I was spouting a few years back are much different than how I think about things now. Sometimes people ask me if I regret the years that I spent in bible college or as a serious Christian who spent a lot of time thinking and reading about it (and a TON of time in church), and no... I don't really, because who knows what kind of person I would be now if I had taken a different path? How can I regret the route I took to get here, if I like where I'm at now? I think that all of the things that made me a good person then are what made me a good person now -- I care about my friends and I have a passion for understanding things and being able to defend my thoughts, and I find a lot of academic things beautiful in their own right, so whether that's theology or math or linguistics, I basically want to know everything about it.

That's one of the main reasons why I can't hate Christians either, even when they send me mail trying to reconvert me, because I'm the one who did the same thing with my sister when she stopped going to church. As much as it frustrates me, because there is no way to explain to those who send such letters why I would leave the faith, I can't help but remember being the one who would pen a letter like this one, which I got in my Inbox this afternoon:

Wow, I am praying for you. I am not sure why you have feelings. Although there was a time in my life when I didn't believe it God. But now I am experiencing Him like never been. Sounds like you had religion and not a relationship. I never feel bad about being human. God loves me and He loves you. I am sorry that you have not encounterd this God because I am 100% sure if you had then you wouldn't feel this way. God brought me to your website..i have no idea how I got here I was listening to music then ....There was your site....HE is calling you back home. The devil has lied to you, and all He wants is to steal, kill, and destory your life! That makes me mad!!! Please Give God a second chance. I am praying for you.... really I am.... I cried when I read this... don't run from Him. Dont do it. Hell is not worth it. You are not promised tomorrow. Hell is real!! Don't curse God.... He loves you, He loves you , HE loves you. Satan wants you to be misreable, period. And if you allow Him to steal away your eternity, He has the victory over your life. The enemy will beat you...Dont let that happen. Again....I am praying for you. --[name withheld]

(So that was what God was doing when he wasn't healing my friends' mothers of cancer. He was magically sending people to websites. It's all so clear now!)

P.S. A note to my Christian readers: Appealing to the fear of hell is really not very effective on people who a) don't believe in hell, and b) have logical objections to the faith. I can't make myself believe something. Just try believing that the world is flat. Don't just pretend, really believe it. Not so easy, is it?

On the subway the other day, mid-fake-fight (which are common with us):

Chris: I think you're the problem!!
Heather Ann: No, I'm the precipitate.
Chris: What?
Heather Ann: The precipitate!
Chris: Okay...
Heather Ann: You know that joke, right?
Chris: No.
Heather Ann: If you're not part of the solution...
Chris (grimacing in obvious pain): *groan*

I have discovered that Chris does not share my enthusiasm for word-play. Tsk, tsk.