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

loldogs are funny dog pictures!

This semester is defined by waiting. Waiting on grad schools, waiting to hear if my abstract was accepted … it’s getting old.

Marylin Manson performed last weekend in Salt Lake City. Not that this is at all surprising or novel, but he burned a Bible and Book of Mormon on stage. Let me say this: I disapprove of the burning of any book ever written to make a statement against its contents. Burning a Bible to make a statement against Christianity would be like burning Das Kapital to condemn Marxism. The only difference is the former is more likely be considered free speech (which it is), while the latter would be considered a fascist action.

Books, whatever they are, are sources of ideas. Burning them is a simple way of condemning their contents violently, while avoiding confronting them with logic and persuasion. Be a champ. Don’t burn books.

I’m done with today’s dose of moralistic indignation. I just turned in an abstract the the University of Utah linguistics department student conference. It’s amazing how long a 500-word summary of your experiment can take to complete. It underwent more revisions than I can remember, and it’s still far from perfect. I’m posting it in the new documents section of this website for anyone to read. Feel free to comment, though keep in mind that it won’t mean anything now that I’ve submitted it. Also, if anyone is interested in participating in my experiment follow-up (and haven’t already), follow this link and click on ’sign up for experiments.” I need people.

I went in to visit my friend in the Middle East Center, who I have gone far too long without seeing, and we came to the conclusion that I was a miniature analogue of the center’s director: Ibrahim Karawan, who is probably the busiest man in the world. Wow.

Although I am only taking 5 classes, it feels like I added an additional 3 credit hours when I took up a project in the speech lab on campus. It’s a fun project, but it’s one more thing to stay on top of, when I’m already having issues with staying on top of everything else. It’s starting to eat up my Fridays and Saturdays. I can only work on it then, otherwise I will get behind in syntax…the other classes I can catch up quickly.

So, basically what I want to say in conclusion is that if I haven’t seen you in a while, I’m not ignoring you, nor have I forgotten you. Basically, the semester is crazy, and I’m trying to keep afloat.

I’ve been thinking.

Say Hillary Clinton is our next president. That would mean that my entire life up to this point will have been spent under either a Bush or a Clinton (minus the first two, which were the Reagan years still). Let’s assume she gets elected and serves two full terms. See what follows:

Bush 1: 4 years.

Clinton 1: 8 years.

Bush 2: 8 years.

Clinton 2: 8 years.

4+8(3) = 28 frakking years under either a Bush or a Clinton. I’ll be 30.

So, I’ve been way too busy to do anything to entertain you people, but I figured I could take a few minutes away from my very busy schedule to entertain you people and give you another small taste of my wisdom. There are only a few things worth mentioning right now.

First, I wanted to talk about the predicament I found myself in this past week as to what to do regarding next week’s Super-Tuesday primaries, in which both major parties in Utah participate. Despite not being one in reality, on paper I am still a Republican, a remnant of my desire to vote in Utah’s 2004 Republican gubernatorial primaries in this state. The conflict I found myself in this year was whether to maintain that superficial registration courtesy of the county and vote for John McCain, my preferred Republican candidate, and as it stands now, my preferred general candidate, or to go register as a Democrat and vote for my preferred Democratic candidate &emdash Hillary Clinton. Ultimately, I decided to remain a member of the party of the war machine, and vote for the man who I think could be a voice for moderates in the White House. On the flip side, who am I kidding? There is no chance in Hell that anybody but Romney will take this state.

Second, I have been reading a bit in optimality in syntax. Despite my being a user of Optimality Theory in phonology and language acquisition and certainly not being a minimalist, there is at least one major theoretical soft spot in Optimal Syntax: Obligatory Head being a violable constraint. Obligatory head, stated generally, requires that all syntactic phrases have a head, e.g. …wash the clothes, where ‘wash’ is the head of the verb-phrase. The problem is that in every analysis I have seen, it has never actually been violated in a winning candidate. If it was violated, I would imagine it would be a phrase completely unattested in human language.

Finally, the follow-up of my experiment is proceeding. I attended a meeting with the speech-acquisition lab yesterday, and actually feel like a real laboratory phonologist. It’s pretty awesome, indeed. We’ll see how things go.