From Geoff Arnold, it seems there is a cult of Schneier. Since I said hello to Bruce Schneier in my brief visit to Minicon yesterday, I feel that I am obligated to set the facts straight. It’s all true. He is a god among men, and the earth would tremble at his footsteps if he wasn’t so beneficent that he insisted on levitating himself everywhere.
Speaking of deities on earth, I also got to briefly meet Teresa Nielsen Hayden at her panel on conversations on the net. Yes, in person, she is exactly like she is on the web, only more so. Somebody interrupted her, she raised a finger, and with a glance disemvowelled him on the spot, something you really do not want to see occurring in the real world. Alien geometries were involved; people reduced to consonants are angular, dysphonic, disturbing, and very hard on the eyes.
Fortunately, I only waved to Patrick Nielsen Hayden from a distance, otherwise an evening in the presence of a Trinity might have perturbed even my absolutely inflexible dogmatic atheism.
I am a little jealous of Skatje, who is spending all day and all night today and most of tomorrow at the con.
Skatje’s keeping us up to date on the con at her weblog. I’ll have you know I introduced her to de Lint’s books, and now she’s going to be bringing home a bunch more for me to read. Bwahahahaha! My clever scheme bears fruit at last — there’s the true reason I had kids, merely so they would one day bring me books.
Bruce Schneier, Teresa Nielsen Hayden, and Patrick Nielsen Hayden.
I, for one, welcome Earth’s new Trinitarian Overlord.
PZ said,
Somebody needs to tell Neil Gaiman about this. Really. It sounds like a sort of horrific, Neverwhere-meets-Coraline kind of fate.
“people reduced to consonants are angular, dysphonic, disturbing, and very hard on the eyes.”
Awesome :-) Also, shows you what happens when a biologist tries to write about linguistics.
What happens when a biologist tries to write about linguistics is that a terrible beauty is born.
What happens when a biologist tries to write about linguistics is that a terrible beauty is born.
Errm, I wasn’t writing about linguistics. I was writing about Teresa Nielsen Hayden’s terrific magic powers.
Or perhaps you are one of those who takes for granted that anyone writing anything using words and grammar is writing about linguistics.
Torbjörn Larsson(a):
“Terrible beauty me arse!” — Billy Cassidy, Preacher vol. 3, p. 188.
Offtopic, but in case you didn’t know, there’s what looks suspiciously like a reference to you in a comic book that came out this week. “Fall Of Cthulhu” issue #1 published by Boom! Studios contains this exchange between a guy named Cy and his girlfriend Jordan. Cy is describing to Jordan what he found on the computer that belonged to his uncle Walt, who killed himself right in front of their eyes in the beginning of the issue.
Cy: Invisible ocean monsters killing divers in the arctic, aboriginal zombie worship, some blog entries from a Minnesota professor with a squid fetish.
Jordan: Oh God. Tentacle porn?
Cy: No no, it’s all scientific. Just… weird.
I got disemvowelled by her once on her & her hubby’s blog. My crime? I accused them of star fucking for their competitively maudlin eulogies to the Colombia astronauts.
TNH can kiss my ass.
SKFK, that definitely sounds like PZ.
Yes, it is — I wrote to the writer of the story, and he’s going to send me the book. You’ll probably see a scan of that panel appear here once I get it (it will probably go up on my office door, too.)
Never been disemvowelled; just decided I couldn’t stand commenting or reading the comments on Making Light with her attitude that her husband can be as rude as he likes to anyone, and anyone who complains about it gets told off for provoking him. (Tried to have a conversation by e-mail with her about it, pointing out that if anyone else were as rude as her husband, she’d disemvowell them: conversation terminated abruptly by Teresa with the instruction that if I republished her e-mails in whole or in part she’d sue me for copyright infringement.)
Blake Stacey: “Terrible beauty me arse!” — Billy Cassidy, Preacher vol. 3, p. 188.
Too true … as a poor unfortunate who went through the Irish school system I spent many an hour forced to kneel at the alter of WB Yeats.
Peig Sayers: “Their like will not be seen again”.
The Plain Children of Ireland: “Thanks be to Jaysus”.
PZ Myers:
/me is on tenterhooks
Richard:
An Irish fellow roomed with me one summer back in college. He came over with some exchange program which brought upstanding youth over to Boston to wallow in corruption or something. While memories of that time are unfortunately rather hazy, I do definitely recall his saying that Irish Gaelic was a fantastic language to learn, because honestly, the only people who speak it live “in the arse of nowhere.” So, if you’re ever riding the subway and want to tell your friend, “Check out the knockers on that girl. . .” you’ve got the perfect tongue for it.
Now, I won’t vouch for the accuracy of that. (I always used Classical Latin for that purpose — and now about all the Latin I can remember is, “I miss holding you in my handcuffs”. Yessir, I got the best education in Latin and classical literature that the Alabama public schools could provide.) It’s just what he told me.
Also, apparently, Ireland didn’t have Little Debbie Snack Cakes. He wreaked bloody havoc upon the snack-food aisle of the local supermarket. “All the things The Simpsons told us about — they’re real!”
Round about the Fourth of July, we got to talking over barbecue burgers how long it would take Hollywood to make a movie out of 9/11. His words: “The girl’s in one tower, the boy’s in the other. . . .” Turns out, we overestimated: I thought we’d have to wait until girls not born yet were old enough to giggle over the leading man — 2014, or thereabouts.
Ah, good times.
The status of the Irish language has changed in the past few decades.
In my youth Irish was only spoken by, for want of a better word, peasants, and the occasional crazy poet. In remote rural areas the only way to survive was subsistence farming and fishing, and hand-made craft manufacture for American tourists in search of a heritage. “the arse of nowhere” sums it up well. To the urbanites, these rural folks would be affectionately known as gobshites.
The school system required all children to learn the language and pass an exam in order to graduate. Unlike Latin, it didn’t have any utility. There was an industry in the summer holidays of sending children off to these remote areas to catch up on this worthless pursuit so they would get the required passing grade and enable them to graduate, go to college and get the hell out of there … to England, Europe or the USA. Just anywhere else.
The usefulness of the language as a secret code is true – not quite the Navajo wind-talkers but close. A relative was in Baghdad during the first Gulf War and used Irish to chat with us, knowing that any Iraqi eavesdropping was unlikely to be successful.
It is a strange self love-hate that is rooted in Irishness … pride in the tremendous literary and artistic heritage of such a small island, while being deeply resentful of the anti-intellectual role of the church, and curiously wallowing in “1000 years of oppression” at the hands of the Vikings, Normans, English and anyone else who fancied a bit of bullying the weak. For much of the 20th century, the lack of economic opportunity also gave rise to a lot of resentment.
More than a few Irish didn’t know what to make of their heritage and the language was one aspect the youth of my generation were more than happy to discard for its association with poverty, failure and backwardness. As expressed by Roddy Doyle in “The Commitments”, the Irish were the ‘blacks of Europe’.
More recently the Irish economy has done much, much better and Irish culture and the language has a different association. People I went to university with now are using the Irish variant of their names and giving their children traditional Irish first names too. In my youth that would have seemed about as ‘sensible’ as GW Bush adopting a native American name.
Indeed, “all changed, changed utterly”. I’m not sure if ‘Irish culture’ has revived, or a new one driven by the strong economy has replaced it.
Since it’s Minicon weekend again —
I keep meaning to mention an amusing fact P.Z. didn’t know when he wrote this entry, which was that Rachel Kronick, the person he saw me offhandedly silence during a panel, was the head of programming for that year’s Minicon.
What I said to her, when she tried to speak from the audience for what would have been the fourth time, was: “If you had that much to say on the subject, you should have put yourself on the panel.”