Suboptimist
I’m not quite a pessimist. I’m more of a suboptimist.

I like Halloween. Any holiday designed specifically for the mass consumption of candy is okay in my book. Further, as a holiday that permits children a few days when parents cannot deny them candy is acceptable to me. As a kid, I loved dressing up, running around the neighborhood begging for fattening goodies, and otherwise misbehaving.

There are a few things I have come to hate about Halloween: adults dressing in costume. I don’t so much mind adults dressing up for their own costume parties, but a few things have to go:

· College students attending class in costume. Not cool.

· There are certain costumes, as well as parties based upon similar themes, that are overdone at adult costume parties: slutty takes on Snow White or the Devil, fetishists, pimp/ho couples, and of course the Crow.

I have a tradition in which I use my web space every major election year to make political endorsements. You may say to yourself, “But Rob, you hate politics.” This is true, but I still vote, and my opinion is important. In fact, I expect every last one of my endorsements to swing every important race — I’m that sure of myself.

There are a few things worth mentioning before I proceed. I don’t believe any one party is superior to another. I refuse to associate myself with those who assume that Party X is God’s Truth on Earth while every member of Party Y is a liar/in it for the money/a wimp/a puppy-hater…or vice-versa. Further, many of you know me as a libertarian with a small ‘L.’ This is important, because I will rarely vote for any candidates who call themselves Libertarians with a capital ‘L.’ They’re just too weird for me, and I can do nothing but think about their websites featuring glamor shots of them in cheap suits.

In the 2004 election, I endorsed and voted for four Republicans and two Democrats (only counting the races that matter to me), and voted no on the gay marriage ban (which, of course, passed). This year is looking a little different. Here are my endorsements:

Pete Ashdown (D) for United States Senate

I mentioned in an earlier post that Orrin Hatch’s original campaign slogan was, “What do you call a senator who has been in Washington for 18 years? You call him home.” Orrin Hatch has been in Washington for much longer and has become way too Washington. Call him home.

Jim Matheson (D) for US Representative Districit 2

I don’t always agree with Matheson’s votes, but he has been a rare demonstration of a politician who advocates fiscal responsibility and votes for it.

Dr. Joseph Jarvis (R) for State Senate District 2

I’ll admit it, I work for this campaign. When Scott McCoy replaced Paula Julander upon her resignation (a result of breast cancer), she encouraged delegates to elect her husband to be her replacement. The party chose otherwise, and they chose Scott McCoy. Frankly, I didn’t care. However, McCoy has nothing to show from his term in the Senate. He clearly talks the talk and has a posse of fiercely loyal supporters, but hasn’t done anything. The Democratic Party of Utah, as far as I can tell, only put him in office to be the token gay senator. Finally, given that health care is an important issue in Utah, a physician in the chamber would be a good addition to the system.

Anyway, if you’re interested in a moderate, thinking Republican who doesn’t tow the party line, I encourage you to visit his web site and see for yourself.

Ralph Becker (D) for State Legislative District 24

There isn’t a lot to say here: nobody is running against him, and that isn’t a problem. He has done a good job for the district.

Races that shouldn’t be partisan, and require no explanation

· Sim Gill (D), District Attorney

· Jim Winder (D), County Sherri f

__________ on Proposition 3

Salt Lake County is a mess: constantly gridlocked and crowded. A small raise in the sales tax could go to fund extensions in light-rail and the installation of a commuter rail system between Sandy and Ogden. However, I have to ask myself, “If we build these, will people give up their SUVs to drive to work in favor of the train?”

You decide.

A few observations:

Observation one: I was eating dinner with my father (Bob) a few nights ago, and a few things came up. On the topic of looking past people’s faults, the context of which I will not delve into, he mentioned his early skepticism of the Civil Rights Movement — mind you, my father is from upstate New York, and didn’t see the injustice in the South at the time. In later years, before I was born, he served in the Utah legislature as the Republican representative of the Capitol Hill area of Salt Lake City.

A bill came to the floor calling for the recognition of Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday in Utah. This being Utah, another state relatively isolated from the turbulence of the South, there was of bound to be opposition. A colleague of his, another Republican, came to the floor, recalling his LDS mission to the South. He recalled the injustice experienced by people of color. At that moment, my father has come to a realization that the Civil Rights Movement was necessary. Sure, he was aware of King’s womanizing, plagiarism, and hot temper, but in spite of these faults, he was able to do tremendous good. My father decided to not only vote for the bill, but to become an avid spokesman for it.

His colleagues encouraged him not to. They told him he would lose his base and the election, which he ultimately did. Bob says it was the greatest thing he ever did in the legislature.

Observation two: in the same conversation, Bob noted that Orrin Hatch’s campaign slogan his first election was, ‘What do you call a senator who has served for 18 years? You call him home.” Orrin Hatch has been in office 36 years.

One more thing since the server has been down and I have been given time to make another observation: there are rabbits running around the University of Utah campus. Or, at least, I think there are. Maybe I am hallucinating.

Apparently, inhaling sulfur hexafluoride has the opposite effect of inhaling helium. Xenon would also have the same effect. Both gases, however, are highly dangerous, and such experiments should not be attempted except by trained professionals.

Ihave made the observation, again, that if I don’t care about something, it’s unlikely that I will devote little effort to it. Unfortunately, I didn’t realize that I don’t care about ancient Mesopotamia until one week after the deadline to drop classes. As a result, I am devoting little effort to my anthropology course.

Things I do care about, however, like Masonry, I am willing to devote some time and effort to. Tonight was the first night I felt like I truly assisted the Craft in initiating a new brother. I stumbled, yes, but nobody can perform flawlessly in anything on their first attempt at it. After tonight’s degree, some of the brethren and I went to Village Inn, where I partook of very bad carrot cake, and discussed some of the ugly internal conflict within the Masonic jurisdiction of Utah. It sickens me to think that men who have taken the same obligation could cast aside their convictions and seek power over light in Masonry.

I am going to play prescriptivist for one moment. There are certain words that, when used in written discourse, need to be spelled a certain way if you want to maintain any credibility. The first of these is the word ‘abstinence.’ I see in my web browser as I write this a Facebook campaign-issue group called, “Abolish abstinance [sic] only sex education..” No. If you can’t spell the word, you have no place in the debate. The other word that comes immediately to mind is the word ‘rogue.’ All to often, I see this word misspelled as ‘rouge.’ People, a rogue is a person who knows no law, while rouge is the stuff that French prostitutes wear on their cheeks.

I sat in a lecture given by Karin Ryding the other day. She reiterated the fact that the way we teach Arabic in this country is *&%$ed. It was very interesting.

I have decided that, having gained weight from my junior year of high school, I look much better in my suit.

I want everyone reading this now to know one thing: I don’t want to go out and get smashed/go to a strip club on my 21^st birthday. Stop telling me you want to take me out to do so.

In conclusion, this is one of the most amusing things I have read in some time. God bless feminists.

I know, I know, but I am so busy during the week.

Here is a word that sounds strange to me: disclude. I don’t want to say that it isn’t a word, because it sounds like it could be, but I don’t think I have ever heard it. Online dictionaries have it listed as an entry, and I am seeing it used more and more in World of Warcraft, in the context of something like, I have a full valor set discluding helm. I went and searched a couple of corpora, but only found one citation of one possible form in the British National Corpora:

…my Lord, my Lord er unless I’ve miss understood your Lordship it fits in the sense that if you think that unreasonably or even unfairly disclude someone from the market, you’re are excluding someone who would compete in the market, you’re taking someone out who may of had an impact on the market, may of brought prices down, offer better terms and conditions… [context obscured]

I had an idea of what the word meant, ‘exclude’ is what I would have used. Barbaric, I say. Maybe it is evidence of further development of an Azerothite dialect of English.

The newest episode of South Park featured World of Warcraft. It was funny, but I am predisposed to think so, since I already love South Park. It depicted a character who had played so much that he reached a level where he could kill all new players, preventing anyone from playing. Stan, after losing a fight to him, said, “That is one tough badass.” The camera shot to the player in real life, and he was a fat, pimply guy who clearly had no life. In order to kill ‘that which has no life,’ the South Park boys had to reach a level equal to him, losing their lives in the process.

Let me digress for a second. WoW is mostly harmless, but clearly has the potential to be harmful to a player’s social, work, and school life. Blizzard even warns its customers against playing too much by way of loading-screen text with saying like, “Take all things in moderation, even World of Warcraft,” and, “Invite your friends to visit you in Azeroth, but be sure to venture outside to visit them as well!” Given that Blizzard cooperated with the episode, I think it may be another attempt to discourage players from playing too much.

It’s ironic that Blizzard says that. In WoW PVP (and some higher level PVE scenarios), Blizzard rewards the players that have ‘absolutely no life.’ In order to reach the PVP rank of Field Marshall, an Alliance player must play nearly every minute of every day for X days. With the new PVP system in Burning Crusade, the system changes, dumping the PVP rank system all together, ending the incentive to play endlessly to reach high PVP ranks. However, the epic loot system remains the same, leaving players like me, players with lives, to be marginalized and unable to acquire good raiding gear.

Finally, I attended a friend’s birthday party this evening. It was at the kind of place where people call everyone ’sir’ and ‘ma’am.’ I hate being called ’sir.’ My dad doesn’t even go by ’sir.’ I’m not old enough to be ’sir.’

I’ve been very slow at updating. What is it now? 7, 8 days since I’ve updated last? Sorry. Busy, and all, and not in an posting mood. By the way, congratulations to Lameen for finishing his dissertation.

The University of Utah linguistics department generally keeps one or two experts in residence per given discipline (though sometimes several). There is only one expert phonetician, and she is on sabbatical. The next person who could do it, who is actually a phonologist, is also on sabbatical. With whom does that leave us to teach us phonetics? A semanticist. Perhaps this is the reason I don’t like phonetics, as I don’t have an instructor who is very enthusiastic about the topic either. On the other hand, I enjoy syntax, perhaps because the instructor loves what he does, a feeling which influences his students.

My anthropology class is…underwhelming. It has the potential to be interesting, especially considering it deals with the ancient Near East, which is of particular interest to me. However, after we finished our (very brief) section on language, I find myself wanting to put sticks in my eyes after the first of three hours. Perhaps I have heard that Ishtar’s orgasms were compared to earthquakes too many times, or perhaps hearing a Polish woman talking about Sumer and Akkad for three hours is intrinsically boring. I don’t know.

Anyway, let me show you something that came up on a recent Syntax take-home exam. The exam is turned in, so I imagine it is okay to show you. Basically, the question asked students to argue why C-command is needed for binding, not precedence (or the opposite). Some sample data was given, and this is what I want to bring attention to:

His_i yearbook photo gave Tom_i the creeps.

In this example, ‘His’ is referring to the same thing that ‘Tom’ is. To me, this doesn’t work, nor can I think of an instance where this would work. If ‘Tom’ were not referring to the same thing as ‘His,’ I would have no problem with it. Does anyone else find the sentence odd?

On a different note, this is one of the two worst weekends to drive in downtown Salt Lake City. With LDS General Conference going on, the traffic is horrendous. It took me 30 minutes to drive three miles last night, since I chose (foolishly) to drive home through downtown. There is no room in downtown Salt Lake to build a large parking garage or bridge to keep the roads clear, and even if we could, it would ruin the city. The only solution would be to encourage conference attendees to park in Sandy and take the light rail downtown. Somehow, I doubt that would happen.

In my search to uncover a method to the madness of in-game communication in World of Warcaft and other online game communities, I found another person interested as well.

This specialized leet-speak functions in the very same ways that any other dialect might—it includes and excludes
and it is made to fit its purpose. I’m interested in the why and how of all of this. Who does it include and exclude and why, and what is that purpose and how, exactly does it fit it? And, finally, how has it evolved from basic netspeak to leetspeak, in the context of chatrooms to early MOOs to the MMORPGs it currently takes place in?
Studying all of these things may serve to validate leetspeak as something beyond game-talk. I don’t intend to represent it as its own language in the way that Ebonics is a, more or less, newly recognized language. Instead, I want to argue for it as a dialect within the English speaking Internet world. In this way, I am arguing for the importance of gaming and the gaming community as a reflection of our society.

An anthropologist may also find this interesting. Or not. Maybe I am just wasting my time. I think I will go back to the book I was reading about Akkadian.