very very nice blog.

Can I link it to my blog?

Thanks

OscarB

I was doing a search on Pessoa’s Time Passage and your blog came up. I read what you wrote about him and I am impressed by you. I have been impressed by Pessoa about one week ago when I was first introduced to his works in class.

Anyways, I am keen on reading more of you. I hope you will continue blogging!

Here is the song performed by Chava Alberstein from a 1990 TV show dedicated to Shemer:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XJxkWauK0Qs

youtube has a few other versions. search for שיר סיום

I saw an interview once with Lefteris Papadopoulos, another lyricist, and the interviewer had asked him why he had never worked with Hadjidakis. He said they had met once and had agreed to work together, but Hadjidakis asked him to write a song that would have as its title the name of his dog — Kemal. Papadopoulos said he didn’t like the idea, and he lost interest in working with him.

It seems Hadjidakis got his long-time collaborator Gatsos to write it instead. I think Hadjidakis didn’t care what the song was about, as long as its title was “Kemal”. The rest of it was all Gatsos’s idea.

Thanks for leaving a comment, and reminding me of her.

One way of ensuring a character looks the same when drawing repeately such as in a comic books is to do a thorough study of the character/s.

Draw the head from multiple angles.(keep doing so until you are happy with the results). Do the same with the body.

After a while you should many reference sketches of your character. So all your preping should be done before starting your comic. Somewhat like finding and actor before shooting a film.

For my part, I want to be able to convey, variously, precise meanings without ambiguity, ambiguous meanings when they are needed, subtle shades of communication when appropriate, different levels of meaning, sometimes… The crude and inept grasp of language by the mass media and general population makes intelligent communication very difficult. This, in my view, is what this blog post is all about: all else is merely complacent acceptance of a decline in our ability to communicate.

Doubly sadly for you, xenos, you are plain wrong, for the reasons I gave. I note that you did not provide a counterargument, unless you believe an argumentum ad verecundiam will pass here.

I am not a linguist, but I find it essential to write in grammatically correct English (or French) simply because I like to do things properly. Journalism, on the other hand, is a profession more concerned with rapidity of communication and money-making. Can we see a problem here? Some of us can (the educated ones) and the rest cannot.

I agree 100% with the content of this post. However, my opinion counts for nothing as I represent nobody, have little money or political influence. Of course, I have an IQ of around 170, examine PhDs, advise governments and the United Nations, etc etc… but in reality, my view is a minority view (like yours) and the cretins will prevail.

however, I’ve always had an issue about the cost of it. it’s not that i can’t afford them. but i can’t help but feel somehow cheated and dirty about myself every time i cash out this unreasonable amount of money for _a notebook_.

i very much doubt that Hemingway, chatwin, van gogh or who ever the hell used these notebooks a century ago would deign to buy one if not use one if they were alive today. what, this, this notebook every yuppie has nowadays to jot down golf scores and how much the new ipod costs?!

they would have used cheap notebooks, possibly or even probably Chinese knockoffs, yes, because they are artists and generally don’t have money to throw away, and many of them wouldn’t buy them even if they had. mark rhotko turned thought it was immoral to pay more than $5 for a meal, let alone a notebook.

not that i think of myself as an artist, quite the opposite. ergo, all the more reason not to pay so much for my worthless scribbling. therefore, BRING ON THE CHINESE KNOCKOFFS, let’s teach those greedy Italian bastards a lesson!

Watch the video again. It happens more than once. Once before Dion asks to start over again, and again afterwards, as soon as the question is put to him again. He clearly asks, “Starting when?” and still does not get a simple answer. At 2:35 the interviewer says, “No, if you were the Prime Minister during this time already”. (Come on. You have to admit that’s a poorly phrased sentence.)

You and I understand what he means, and if Dion had simply chosen one of the two possibilities and proceeded nothing would have happened. Politicians get tons of leeway to not answer questions. But he chooses to clarify what the interviewer means, and the interviewer refuses to clarify, perhaps because he doesn’t see the difference that Dion sees. Then, on top of it all, he makes a story out of it all, about how Dion’s English isn’t good enough to understand a simple question.

Why does the interviewer twice refuse to answer the question “Starting when”? Non-native speakers do not assume as much as we do, they stop and think and analyse more, to make sure they’ve understood. Native speakers recognise more clearly, “I know what you mean”, I know that what you mean and what you’ve said may not be exactly the same thing.

“I often feel when I see videos of journalists on television, or look at comment and message boards on the internet, that I’m watching a civilisation collapse from within, eaten up by bitterness and pettiness.”

Rarely do I see commentators actually engage in civilized, intelligent discussion or give constructive criticism based on something solid. There’s a lot of pettiness, which I attribute to personal psychoses or lacking self-esteem…or maybe it’s something as simple as people having too much time on their hands and losing touch with reality. I don’t think about it too much; I just move on.

There is nothing ungrammatical about the sentences unless you assume you know what the speaker or writer intended to mean, and I am doing that, rightly or wrongly.

When Dion asks, “If I had been elected two and half years ago?” the interviewer says no. I agree that there could be an elided parenthesis, but the interviewer rejects it. So, in effect he is saying, “If you became PM today, what would you have done differently in the past?”

I’m saying that the problem is grammatical in that the interviewer is not using the tenses in such a way as to express what he wants to express.

The examples you’ve given me describe more permanent states. You don’t say, “If you became older today, you would have seen Grease when it came out.” You are not saying “If you developed a taste for mulberries today, you would have eaten mother’s dessert.” The difference between your sentences and the interviewers is that yours clearly imply a past development that has led to a present state, or a permanent state that exercised influence on the past as it continues to do today. I can think of lots of examples when a present condition or situation has a “result” in the past, and they often involve making a deduction.

Dion makes the same assumption you make, and asks to clarify it. But the interviewer says, No, that’s not what I meant. This is not overthinking. Dion simply does not know how to go about answering the question. Should he talk about what he would do starting today, or should he talk about what he would have done? Should he talk about fixing or preventing a problem? The question says “What would you have done?” but the interviewer insists that he’s only become PM today.

“If you were Prime Minister now, what would you have done about the economy and the crisis that Mr. Harper has not done?”

This is perfectly okay really. It’s basically the first conditional you mention: “if you think that, that’s fine”. The perfect tense is a present tense, not a past tense.

Please compare with “If you were older, you would have seen Grease when it first came out.” or “If you liked mulberries, you would have eaten mother’s dessert.” Are you claiming (you seem to be) that these sentences are ungrammatical?

The Dion thing is odd. You are strictly correct but I think the speaker’s sense is “if you were PM today (and consequently have been for the past however many years since the election), what would your record be?”, which is okay. You are simply not reading the elided parenthesis in there that seems obvious to the speaker (and to me).

Forgetting is the same. Did you eventually remember what you’d been thinking about? If so, it’s the first kind. Did what you had been thinking about come to you on its own later on? Then it’s the second.

If it was the third, you wouldn’t even be able to talk about it now. You obviously remember some of it now, if you can describe it.

(Like the photos, too!)