Ray Brinzer

Current events brought this amusing passage to mind. From Nicholas Nickleby, by Charles Dickens:

As for Nicholas, he lived a single man on the patrimonial estate until he grew tired of living alone, and then he took to wife the daughter of a neighbouring gentleman with a dower of one thousand pounds. This good lady bore him two children, a son and a daughter, and when the son was about nineteen, and the daughter fourteen, as near as we can guess–impartial records of young ladies’ ages being, before the passing of the new act, nowhere preserved in the registries of this country–Mr Nickleby looked about him for the means of repairing his capital, now sadly reduced by this increase in his family, and the expenses of their education.

‘Speculate with it,’ said Mrs Nickleby.

‘Spec–u–late, my dear?’ said Mr Nickleby, as though in doubt.

‘Why not?’ asked Mrs Nickleby.

‘Because, my dear, if we SHOULD lose it,’ rejoined Mr Nickleby, who was a slow and time-taking speaker, ‘if we SHOULD lose it, we shall no longer be able to live, my dear.’

‘Fiddle,’ said Mrs Nickleby.

‘I am not altogether sure of that, my dear,’ said Mr Nickleby.

‘There’s Nicholas,’ pursued the lady, ‘quite a young man–it’s time he was in the way of doing something for himself; and Kate too, poor girl, without a penny in the world. Think of your brother! Would he be what he is, if he hadn’t speculated?’

‘That’s true,’ replied Mr Nickleby. ‘Very good, my dear. Yes. I WILL speculate, my dear.’

Speculation is a round game; the players see little or nothing of their cards at first starting; gains MAY be great–and so may losses. The run of luck went against Mr Nickleby. A mania prevailed, a bubble burst, four stock-brokers took villa residences at Florence, four hundred nobodies were ruined, and among them Mr Nickleby.

Cooking has long been an interest of mine, but it only became practical enough to become a hobby once I had a family of my own. It’s more fun cooking for other people, I find, and now I have a regular clientèle.

Following recipes isn’t really an interest of mine. Some dishes have very exact requirements, so it’s sometimes necessary, but for the most part I’m interested in learning different cooking techniques, and what different ingredients do. I figure recipes are merely how good cooks explain what they do.

So, when I decide I want to make something, I read several recipes for it, get a general sense of what’s supposed to happen, and then go at it. When possible, I start with the most basic ingredients, though sometimes I start with certain ready-made parts, get the hang of the dish itself, and later learn to make those components. And I rarely measure anything; I figure estimating is an important skill. As necessary, I adjust as I go, judging by taste, texture, or such.

Surprisingly, things usually turn out reasonably well the first time. From there, it’s a matter of evaluating the results and making adjustments, like anything else you learn empirically.

Lately Felabi has been making chicken empanadas, starting with pre-made disks. I’m pretty good at stir-frying, but I’ve never deep-fried before, so this was interesting to me. After a few meals, I figured that these would make good desserts, as well; I decided to try making them with apple pie filling. Read more »

Somewhere along the line, the bots found me. I started getting unacceptable amounts of spam in the comments here this summer; I deleted the stuff periodically. It wasn’t until September, though, that I found time to try to address the problem.

After looking at the various solutions available, I settled upon the WP-SpamFree plugin for WordPress. This essentially authenticates visitors using cookies and JavaScript, which most spambots don’t bother to handle. I don’t like making a site’s functionality depend on JavaScript, but it’s been effective: thus far, no spam has gotten through.

As with content filtering, there is still the potential for false positives; this way, though, the results should be a lot more consistent. Most users will never have a comment flagged; if someone’s browser isn’t using JavaScript or Cookies, however, their comments will always be flagged. Possibly the registration mechanism can offer a way around the JavaScript requirement, at least; I’ll check into it.

Somewhere during the process of getting all this working, a number of old comments were mistakenly flagged as spam… and as it turns out, WordPress lacks a mechanism to inspect and redeem the wrongfully-flagged. Tonight I finally went through everything at the SQL prompt and sorted things out. Again, I’ll be looking for a better way to handle this.

Anyway, for now, if you post a comment and it doesn’t show up, fear not. I’ll find it and approve it before too long.

I’m afraid my sense of civic responsibility wasn’t up to the challenge of last night’s presidential debate. During the portion we did watch, the main thing I got was a reminder of what a drab contest this was before Sarah Palin’s nomination.

During the debate on Iraq, both of them beat their drums: if we’d listened to Obama, we’d have lost in Iraq, and if we hadn’t listened to Bush and McCain (who are exactly the same), we wouldn’t have been there in the first place. Nothing new or interesting was added.

Obama was, predictably, much better-spoken, but also seemed to be playing an academic game of presenting the best answers that hindsight could contrive and that his record would allow. I expect this was the most hawkish position he’s ever taken up in his life, but that doesn’t mean he won’t keep it up; the requirements of the presidency certainly seemed to pull Bill Clinton in that direction. McCain pulled out the “name an ordinary American in a touching situation” trick, which I loathe, talking about the bracelet given to him by the mother of a fallen soldier. Obama responded, rather absurdly, with a similar bracelet of his own. At least we’re not seeing near as much of this sort of thing as in 2000.

The best part, I thought, was McCain’s peppermint-striped tie, which I found slightly astonishing. I can’t quite say I liked it, but I’m divided on liking McCain for wearing it. Obama’s suit was noticeably sharper; at least if he wins, we’ll have a dapper, eloquent president.

After a bit we changed the channel, and found the UFC a considerable improvement. It’s not like I’m undecided: Obama’s lawyerly nature and background as a constitutional scholar convinces me that he’ll do a great job of picking judges I’ll regret. But there’s little for folks on the libertarian end of the Republican party to be excited about. Whoever wins, the country will shuffle along.

It’s pretty well-known that, “the opposite of progress is congress.” But you don’t hear so often that “the opposite of the constitution is prostitution”, or that, “if you are not a contestant, you must be a protestant.”

Like most things in English, affixes are weird. By affix, I mean a prefix or a suffix; these sometimes come in predictable opposites, as with “prepaid” and “postpaid”. But while the prefix for “prefix” is “pre-”, the prefix for “suffix” isn’t “post-”… and the postmaster’s arch-enemy isn’t the premaster. Nor can you tell, just by looking at the form of a word, whether it has an affix (though older writers often made it easier by hyphenating prefixes; e.g. to-day and to-morrow).

Now, this leads us very naturally to a deep discussion of linguistics. If you’re qualified to lead such a discussion, great; I look forward to reading it in the comments. I know just enough to be certain that a non-inflected language isn’t outflected, that you don’t find diphthongs in the lingerie department, and that you don’t wear them over your agglutination.

Which, really, is all for the better. Why labor to understand something, when you can abuse it for cheap thrills? I wrote a quick script to find matches between pro- and con- words… and to find the non-matches. The non-matches, really, are more interesting… because while the opposite of procrastinating isn’t ‘concrastinating’, it should be. Given that this sort of thing makes the language more regular, we’d actually be protorting it, rather than contorting it, so we should see this as a conblem. In fact, it’s prosiderate to convide such words.

Anyway, though… below are three tables. The first is the list of words (from the Unix ‘cracklib’ file) where the same ending forms legitimate words with both pro- and con- at the beginning (though not necessarily as prefixes modifying a root). The second and third list nonsense words made from swapping the letters ‘con’ and ‘pro’ at the beginnings of real words. And then, just for completeness, the code I wrote to generate the lists.

If you find the tables interesting reading… well, congratulations. You’re a geek.
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Another somewhat belated reflection, which has been lingering in my mind.

During Barack Obama’s acceptance speech at the Democratic National Convention, he said, “For while Senator McCain was turning his sights to Iraq just days after 9/11, I stood up and opposed this war, knowing that it would distract us from the real threats we face.” No surprise there; nor when, shortly thereafter, he called the Iraq war “misguided”.

“We are the party of Roosevelt,” he continued, though of course the Republicans are the party of Roosevelt, too (between the two, I vastly prefer Teddy). “We are the party of Kennedy. So don’t tell me that Democrats won’t defend this country. Don’t tell me that Democrats won’t keep us safe.”

The party of Kennedy… huh. Perhaps Obama was just citing the name of a president who is recalled favorably by most, but the first thought that came to mind was, “He thinks starting the Vietnam War was a good idea?” One could certainly hold that going to war in Vietnam was good, while starting the present war in Iraq was bad, but I’d be surprised to hear Obama take up that position. It’d surprise me even more to hear the crowd at the DNC cheer for it.
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My family and I are often in Manhattan, these days. Every day while we’re there, I take Johannes (who is now almost 19 months old) to a series of playgrounds. I spend a lot of time spotting him on the monkey-bars, and other challenging apparatus, which I like a lot. Of course, he also wants to interact with other kids, so I get to watch him take part in the constant negotiations of the playground. This is less enjoyable, mostly because one is always obliged to assess the other parents and their expectations, but it is often interesting.

Toys are the currency of the playground. Kids want them — particularly new ones, which invariably belong to someone else — and parents try to keep the kids from doing socially unacceptable things to get them. I suspect that if by some agreement nobody brought any toys at all, most parents would be much happier. But as there will be toys there, most of us bring along some bauble to try to keep junior’s attention off of everyone elses’, or, failing that, at least give him something to share in exchange.

Back in early August, Johannes, a small, silver H2 Hummer, and I crossed 1st Avenue and headed to the first park on our route. There were a good number of kids there, and Johannes immediately took off and left me with the Hummer. Read more »

So, I’ve been back for almost two months.

Things were very busy when I returned; and when they got less busy, it was easy to avoid finishing what I’d started in writing about this. Writing is work, after all. The net seems to be full of people with a daily passion for it, but I’m certainly not one of them; as I heard Antonin Scalia say, “I like having written.” Interesting things happen or occur to me, I decide they’d be good to write about, and then I go on to other interesting things.

But, writing about writing isn’t usually interesting at all… so to the point: we got our butts kicked.
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