The Desert Mermaid

HAHAHAHAHA I KNEW IT

*checks off "Quenya" box*

*hopes someone will actually sing it this way*

*has absolutely no shame*

Aw, yea, have acquired the Frozen DVD/Blu-Ray combo pack. I will now watch Frozen and "Get A Horse" nonstop for roughly the next couple of years.

And why, yes, I am translating Frozen's "Let It Go" into my own conlangs. To, uh, test them out. Yeah, that's it.

Okay, actually, this isn't really new--I've been doing Disney dubs and writing my own lyrics to songs since I was in junior high. And because I am totally fascinated by multilingual Disney songs. I can get lost for hours watching one song in multiple languages,* and I want in on that action! But this is a first for a couple of my newer languages, and I'm having a blast. Can't decide if I prefer the crazy polysynthetic Sprite Language Mark II version or the Modern OGYAFEse fossilized triconsonantal roots** with their esoteric rhymes, but they're both terribly fun to mess with.

Yeah, I know, I'm a nerd. But hey, we nerds know what we like, and there's nothing wrong with that!


*It is an eternal bummer to me that there are no official Swahili dubs. There's a Zulu dub of The Lion King, but that's as close as we get.

**Well, not quite triconsonantal roots, but rather overdone semantic derivations with the same sort of consonant radicals and ... yeah, you stopped caring, didn't you? Having a phenomenally boring hobby is a terrible burden.

EEEEK!

Look what Disney put up on YouTube!



I still say y'all ought to go check out the full movie, but if you don't see the entirety of Frozen, this is the best part. I kind of can't stop listening to it. (I want to sing along with it, but I came down with the post-travel crud, and I just can't in good conscience sing "The cold never bothered me, anyway" when I am CLEARLY being bothered by a cold. I'll just let Idina do it for now. She's more impressive, anyway.)

What I Learned Since The Winter Solstice

• Dyslexia can cause difficulty in word retrieval in speech as well as in writing.


• The original edition of The Hobbit mentioned policemen. For some reason, I find this far weirder than the business I already knew about the Riddles in the Dark scene being so much less awesome at first.


• Lisa Frank is still around, but she's gotten rather weird.


• Retired AG items are on eBay for reasonable prices, and apparently inside I am still ten years old and WANTING them.


• Yuri Gagarin's flight into space was even more awesome than I thought, because it turns out his reentry strategy was basically to jump back to Earth.


• Fi, from Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword, apparently does have real arms under her wings/cape.


• Netting requires its own special knots.


• The history of matches is long and crazy, and features poison, disintegrating jaws, and explosions. Which is kind of awesome.


• I don't have astigmatism; I just have myopia. This means I do not have football-shaped eyeballs; they are simply oblate spheroids.


• It is possible to get completely absorbed just classifying the hell out of images of distant galaxies. For SCIENCE!


• Snow can smash up your roof pretty impressively.


• You can totally make yourself a fluffernutter on the International Space Station.


• Prescription sunglasses are the bomb.


• MRI chambers act as Faraday cages to keep out external radio forces.


• Speaking of MRIs, apparently dybbuks show up on them.


• Oswald the Lucky Rabbit is the most adorable plushie ever made.


• The term for delicious potato chips and cream puffs and other such things is "supernormal releaser," which is a fancy way of saying "too much of a good thing," since back in Ye Olden Times it was really difficult to come across fat and salt and sugar, so your body is still convinced it should stuff them into your face whenever you come across them. That I knew, but I didn't know the term for them.


• Writing on a deadline, even a self-imposed one, is rough.


• Horror movies in theaters are a very different experience from horror movies alone in your room in the dark.


• Maurice Ravel's Piano Concerto for the Left Hand in D major is an impressive bit of music to watch being performed.*


• Cats and toy trains are natural enemies.


• My confusion regarding a certain specific idiom in Irish accents is a direct result of David Eddings' confusion regarding the same.  When I learned that the phrase "I'm after [verb]ing" meant "I've just been [verb]ing," I thought for some reason it was counter-intuitive--it seemed like it should mean "I'm gonna [verb]"--but I didn't know why.  It's only after rereading The Belgariad and Malloreon that I realized that it's because Eddings uses the expression in his "Wacite brogue" accent, where it does mean "I'm gonna [verb]."  I picked up that meaning in junior high and it stuck with me after I'd forgotten the source.**


• In Tolkien's mythos, Fëanor was the one who came up with the Tengwar. Yet another addition to the list of atrocities he perpetrated on the Firstborn of Ilúvatar.


• Popes can retire.


• Mister Rogers answered every single letter he got. Which is a gargantuan task, because by god he was MISTER ROGERS.

*I've always rather wanted to see that one. It gets mentioned on an episode of M*A*S*H and I was always intrigued by the idea of writing a concerto for someone who had lost their right hand. So when my friend invited me to the symphony, I was not disappointed when they changed the program due to the pianist's having an injury on his right hand because hey, that meant I finally got to hear the left-handed piece.

**Even back then I knew that Eddings had some fanciful ideas about linguistics, but I did not notice that one specifically.

The problem with a musical instrument with a range of about an octave and a half is making the songs fit on it. Normally this isn't a huge issue, since songs mostly tend to stay within that range, but it can be a bit awkward when you're trying to play, say, Frank Mills's "Music Box Dancer" and your ocarina only goes up to F over tenor C.

So I had to move the darn thing to from C-Major to F-Major. Fortunately, figuring out how to do that is one of the few lessons that stuck after seven years' worth of piano and bass lessons. But then, the bass lessons never got near tenor C anyway, so I suppose you can't fault me there.

Anyway, THE POINT IS I'm still playing the ocarina, and it still works as an effective cat-summoner. Perhaps next I'll combine two of my passions and get one of these. Figure out a way to add pens or dolls into the mix, and I will be set forever.

Watchin' Fantasia again. Ah, this brings back memories. For example, the memory that while I was totally cool with the Satanic orgy from Night on Bald Mountain, with the giant demon-mountain casually tormenting his misshapen subjects, I was absolutely terrorized by one shot of the unstoppable broom army from The Sorcerer's Apprentice.

I also remember being absolutely bored senseless by Deems Taylor's intros to each piece, so much so that I always fast-forwarded them.* Which means that I was unaware just how darn uncomfortable Mr. Radio there was in front of a camera. Poor dope has no idea what to do when we can see him.

Anyway, yeah, there was definitely a synesthete working on the Toccata and Fugue in D short. I know there's been some question about whether it was deliberate or not, but good GRIEF, it looks an awful lot like what would happen if you tried to animate the Synesthesia Dimension. I have this image of Disney and Co. struggling to describe what they wanted in the abstract piece, and some synesthetic animator going, "So, just draw what it looks like, then. Gotcha, Diz. I'm on it." Not quite the same level of research put into the dinosaurs in the Rite of Spring,** but as scientifically fascinating in its own way.


*Which took dedication on our old-ass Betamax. We had no remote for it, and you had to actually hold down the fast-forward button. And the button didn't make it go forward any faster, but did distort the screen with interesting lines of static. Those were tough times.

**Yes, they look rather derpy and lumpy now, but hey, this was the 30s and 40s. It was totally SCIENCE! at the time.

I got me some blogger’s block. Know what that means? A bullet entry!

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Went to Ed the Hairbender today so’s he could silly up my hair again! I’ll post pictures at some point, unless I don’t, but I’ll tell you now it’s my usual tortoiseshell swirls with a warmer twist—I look a bit tigerish. It was that or Xmas colors.

While I was waiting for the dye to set another lady saw my book—a juvie fantasy novel—and we started to talk about how awesome fantasy is. After a bit of book comparing (she liked The Name Of The Wind), Ed came back. “Oh,” I said. “Looks like it’s time go get this foil out of my hair and let the aliens hear my thoughts again.”

There was a pause.

“Okay,” the lady said, “maybe you read too much fantasy. “

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She wasn’t quite correct, though. It’s not so much the fantasy as the way I’ve been on a serious Fringe binge. Goddamn, y’all, THIS SHOW. I love every single character and am a total fangirl of Astrid. And as I said earlier, I get a huge kick out of the fact that the pale bald mystery dudes are called Observers. I really hope that’s a sign that some writer was an MST fan.

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So! My Thanksgiving weekend this year still had a few small adventures. First came an abortive trip to the mall on Black Friday (“Are you crazy, Mom?” “Oh, it can’t be that bad!” “I’d better come along. Let me get my old sparring pads and some safety goggles.”) After fifteen minutes we decided that it was too damn much trouble to find a parking space, so we came home and did our shopping online as I had suggested.

That was still a bit of a treasure hunt, though. I even had to go to the internet UK to track some stuff down, and enlist the aid of good buddy and great sport acrossthelake in the actual UK to finish the job.*

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But the good times did not last! That evening Dad came to find me.

DAD: Can you help me? It’s your mom. I was talking to her, and I went to the bathroom, and when I came back she had stopped making sense.

ME: Is she asking herself, “How did I get here?”

DAD: Just get over here. *to Mom* Hey, do you recognize this person?

MOM: … Yeah, I know who that is.

DAD: …
…
…
Who is she?

MOM: That's Amelia. ... I don’t feel good.

ME: What’s the matter?

MOM: Well, my clothes are all sticks and there’s a wax cat on my chest. Also my feet are tennis balls.

ME: Ah. Dad, I see what you mean.

DAD: You’re lucky I’m a doctor.

MOM: Why? Who needs a doctor?


So I spent the evening helping Dad do neurological tests. After some science and detectivery we ruled out “stroke,” “aneurysm,” “flu,” “space rays,” and “Pazuzu,” and decided it was a bad reaction to her new sleep medication. So after we escorted her to the bathroom for the old-fashioned DIY stomach pump, we figured we could let her sleep it off. Though we did keep checking to make sure she was breathing.

And the next day we teased her mercilessly about it. After all, she ddn’t remember, so we certainly had to remind her.

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Ocarina Xmas carols are happening! Which is great, except I am still indirectly allergic to my ocarina, in the sense that every time I play it I suddenly get facehugged by the cat. Either that, or I lock her out of my room—and she tries her damndedst to either batter down the door or crawl under it.

But it’s worth it to be able to play through “Jingle Bells.”

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I also owe y’all the story of Thanksgiving Weekend In Mombasa. I thought I’d written more about it before, but I suppose I hadn’t. It may take me a while to put it together, but I’m working on it!


*Also I got her address, so I can send her the awesome thing I found for her!

What I Learned Since The Summer Solstice:

• The favorite architect I never knew I had is the awesomely named Friedensreich Regentag Dunkelbunt Hundertwasser. This is what the buildings inside my head look like.
• So one of the latest theories on the proliferation of autoimmune disorders is that in a sanitary ablutomaniacal society, there are not enough germs to keep our immune systems occupied, so they start attacking us. That’s right: they think we have allergies because our immune systems are fucking BORED.
• Which means that a (gross) experimental treatment for everything from hayfever to goddamn Crohn’s disease is to infect the sufferer with hookworms.
• There are two main types of sail plans in ships: square rig and fore-and-aft rig.
• Bill Nye the Science Guy is as awesome as I have always heard.*
• Team-building is a scam.
• Those obnoxious self-righteous hippies are right: things do taste better straight from the garden.
• Especially strawberries. I finally understand what all the damn fuss is about.
• Pumpkin vines are really prickly, yo.
• Gourd leaves, however, can be like velvet.
• You should always check the labels on the tomatoes you buy. Or maybe not, since what I grabbed thinking it was a cherry tomato plant turned out to be the most amazingly crazy heirloom tomatoes I’ve ever seen.
• That stupidly accented “Oh, hi, ___” people keep referencing is an impression of Tommy Wiseau in The Room.
• The Room is worse than hyperbolic people are making out to be. AND NOT IN AN ENTERTAINING WAY.
• The Crazy Pit of politics does not appear to have a bottom.
• Great horned owls are surprisingly adorable.
• The X-Files is a really boring show.
• But its not!spinoff, Millennium, is pretty good.
• I am not the only grownup in the world who still fails to see the value of homework.
• Peasant blouses are a blast to make.
• The constellation Aquila is right where my uncle swears it is not.
• Sometimes your gallbladder can act up even if there are no gallstones anywhere near you, because your body hates you.
• Apparently Science can predict whether you will shop in a clockwise or counterclockwise pattern in a store—and it seems to correlate with which side of the road your country’s traffic rules say you drive on.
• The subject of "You're So Vain" is apparently a big old secret.  Seriously, knowing it is apparently worth $50,000.
• Dead laptop screens can actually be replaced!

*Somehow I missed the glorious age of Bill Nye, despite being smack in the middle of it. I was too busy watching Ghostwriter, and dammit with the advent of the information superhighway pretty much everything I learned on that show is now about as useful as knowing how to juggle.

It's impossible to hold onto even the most determined bad mood when you're teaching yourself to play "Rubber Duckie" on an Ocarina of Time.