At SFMOMA from March 9th through June 2nd, an exhibition on the photographer Garry Winogrand, a great American street photographer.
Two significant San Francisco exhibitions of photography, on Gordon Parks and Garry Winogrand. Parks first.
Today’s Rhymes With Orange, with a pun for April 15th (income tax day in the U.S.):
The Accounting Crows, instead of Counting Crows (a Berkeley rock band).
In the NYT today, a fascinating story from Dzilam de Bravo, Mexico (“Quest for Illegal Gain at the Sea Bottom Divides Fishing Communities” by Karla Zabludovsky), beginning:
Whispers of high-speed boat chases, harpoon battles on the open sea and divers who dived deep and never re-emerged come and go around here like an afternoon gale.
The fishermen eye strangers — and one another — with deep suspicion. “We’ll tear them apart,” said one, Jorge Luis Palma, squinting into the horizon at a boat he did not recognize.
What has wrapped this village in such hostility?
Sea cucumbers.
Greart variation in sea cucumbers. One example:
Passed on by Paul Armstrong, this site (from 12/23/11), which purports to be about English pronunciation:
If you can pronounce correctly every word in this poem, you will be speaking English better than 90% of the native English speakers in the world.
The poem is of course about English spelling, and the mapping from spelling to pronunciation. Corpse, corps, horse, worse; heart, beard, heard; and all that.
The poem is by Dutchman Gerald Nolst Trenité (1870-1946).
Today’s Zippy:
I can’t identify the diner, but the names are familiar: Bill Griffith finds -wick names intrinsically funny, and he’s not alone in this.
A week of holidays: lunar New Year on the 10th, Mardi Gras today (the 12th), and Valentine’s Day on the 14th. Last year, for the last of these Mark Liberman posted this Frazz cartoon:
along with two links indicating that others had noticed this pronunciation (and the corresponding spelling) and objected to it: a Facebook page “It’s ValenTINE’s Day not ValenTIME’s Day” and a Yahoo! answers page “WHY WHY WHY do people say Happy “ValenTIMES” Day when it’s ValenTINES Day…?” (the answers there are profoundly unsatisfying). The expression isn’t in the Eggcorn Database — for reasons that are made clear in discussion in the Eggcorn Forum.
Ask AZBlog. From a Stanford student who’s worked with me, a query on behalf of her mother and her brother, who was confronted by this item on a PSAT exam:
31. Viewing it (A) from Earth, the planet Mars seems to be rushing (B) eastward through the constellations, as if (C) in a futile (D) effort to escape from the Sun. No error (E)
In this sort of question, the student’s task is to identify one of the four underlined expressions (labeled A through D) as an error in grammar, or to answer E if there’s no error in the sentence. There are not many such questions, so that getting just one answer “wrong” affects the student’s score significantly.
In this case, my friend’s brother answered E (as I would have), and that was marked wrong. What’s going on here?
(Not about language.)
The lesbo brides are out of their wedding gowns and off on honeymoons, with an unusal itinerary, starting at Ohio Stadium in Columbus, going on to the potato fields of Prince Edward Island, west to Baghdad by the Bay, back east to Frankfurt, Germany (why? why?), and then the return to the academic world, at MIT, where one of the couple seems to be dissolving into pure information.
