10 Years After

The Best Dishwasher I Ever Had

Friday night I went to a show, a stop in Kid Koala's Short Attention Span Theater, in Asheville with Rich and Greg. At the end of September, when I learned that Rich was moving back to the area from Minnesota, I had stumbled onto the fact that the show was stopping at the Orange Peel (a place I previously overlooked in my exploits in Asheville). While Kid Koala was impressive, I enjoyed Lederhosen Lucil best of all. She took the stage after DJ Jester (The Filipino Fist), who did a lot of 80s smashup/mixes. Rich picked up a few of DJ Jester's CDs for Cary since she was stuck in Minnesota waiting for the final paperwork on selling their house. DJ P-Love was at the show cutting it up and the animated shorts by Monkmus were great and way too few. I had really expected there to be a lot more of the animated shorts. Still, I couldn't complain as it was a great night. Asheville is always interesting anyways due to its bohemian culture. However, it seemed as if the whole city was dressed up Friday night for Halloween.

This morning was my second Introduction to Linguistics test. After dinner at Charlie Peppers (Yummmy Buffalo burger!) last night I studied relative clause information from the chapter on Syntax at Borders. After waking up this morning I refreshed over a few items and made it to campus early. The test didn't seem as long as the first one and was still broken into parts. The first part consisted of 5 questions of which I had to choose 3 to answer. The second section was made up of 3 questions of which I had to select 2. I thought all was going well and at a nice pace. However, with only two people done with the test the professor wrote a message on the board: 7 minutes left. What?! I was on the first of the two questions I needed to answer in the second section. I had planned to answer a lengthy question as the second one. However, due to time constraints I took the easy way out. I finished with 3 minutes and felt great about the answers I had given.

On the way out we had to pick up a take home portion of the test. It is weighted as 20% of the total exam score and is comprised of 2 questions, each broken into multiple parts, and which span 3 pages. We need to only answer one of the two questions. I had a chance to look over this during the break between Intro to Ling and Dialectology. The first question deals with the construction of tag questions. The second questions, which is a two pager, deals with question formation in French. I am definately going to answer the first of the two.

In Dialectology we discussed a 1984 article by Allan Bell, Language style as audience design." In this article Bell argues that the audience is a more important factor than monitoring, setting, or topic. We discussed how it's impractical to always seperate audience from setting. At the end of the intructor mentioned a slightly (read:very slightly) modified 1991 article by Allan Bell, "Back in Style: reworking audience design." In this later article Bell discusses a linguistic experiment with a male and female Maori and a male and female Pakeha (European descended New Zealander) where each subject interviews the other three and this is monitored for convergence, divergence, or maintainance. The instructor asked if anyone wanted to borrow the book containing the later article and, due to my intrest in Maori language and the fact that the experiment concerned Maori/English doblets, I thought it would be an interesting read.

This brings us to the last class of the day, Computers, Writing, & Literature. When I was down in the department office asking for the key to the computer lab I was told that the instructor wouldn't be here today but that he left a message that we should know what to work on. As I expressed to the receptionist/secretary, in fact I didn't know what we were to be working on, but that we could find the next project to work on. My understanding was that today we were going to upload the departments to the JEST Web page and then create a splash page for our issue of the electronic journal. With the instructor absent I know we won't upload any files (only he knows the password required) and neither will any progress be made on the splash page. Oh well, maybe I'll have a chance to write up the survey for my Dialectogy project and then split early for work.