Camestros Felapton

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Susan’s Salon: 2021 July 25/26

😷📈💉🦠🦘🌏

Please use the comment section to just chat about whatever you want. Susan’s Salon is posted early Monday (Australian Eastern Standard Time, which is still Sunday in most other countries). It’s fine to be sad, worried, vaccinated, unvaccinated-yet, angry or maybe even happy (or all of those things at once).

Please feel free to post what you like (either troubling news or pleasant distractions) in the comments for this open thread. [However, no cranky conflicts between each other in the comments.] Links, videos, cat pictures 🐈 etc are fine! Whatever you like and be nice to one another 😇

camestrosfelapton

63 responses to “Susan’s Salon: 2021 July 25/26”

  1. It’s going to be hot (above 100, or 37 for all y’all non-muricans) here from the next ten days. Also the delta variant is surging, because so many Arkansawyers are anti-vaxers. My plan is to stay inside and read.

    Also my partner and I have just finished watching Rake, and he has a question for Camestros: is that what Australia is actually like, and if so can we move there please?

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  2. We caught our adopted stray yesterday and delivered her to the vet. While she remembered the pressure-trap cage we first caught her in for spay/neuter and never got in again, she seems comfortable re-entering a pet carry cage if there’s food at the back. However listening to her plaintive meows for two hours was dismaying — next year we’ll try for an early appointment.
    On the plus side she’s in good shape, though a little overweight.
    Watched the 1951 thing, the John Carpenter remake and the 2011 prequel that tries to combine the two. Love the first one, like the Carpenter but the prequel lacks the talents of either director.
    Read Zen Cho’s Black Water Sister. I enjoyed it but not as much as her Regency fantasies.
    Also read “Jetpack Dreams” by Mac Montandon. While I love the topic — in my youth, jetpacks were as inevitable as lunar colonies seemed to be — Montandon spends far too much time talking about himself, his family’s activities at a jetpack convention, his trips to meet jetpack tinkerers, etc. and not enough on the supposed topic. So thumbs down.

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  3. I tried to watch the BDP-Long nom Eurovision Song Contest: The Story of Fire Saga. Got 45 minutes in, figuratively threw my Fire TV against the wall, and shut it off. I thought it was stupid.

    To begin with, there weren’t any SFF elements, as far as I could see. Three little Hobbit-inspired “elf” houses, with no actual elves coming out of them, don’t count in my book.

    Also, the characters, particularly the female lead Sigrit, made no sense. The first scenes take place in 1974, when the young Lars (the male lead) is watching ABBA sing in Eurovision and insists he’ll make it there someday as well. This kid is about 6-7 years old. In the background, a 3-4 year old Sigrit is shown dancing. Then we switch to now and a long-haired Lars is shown. He would be fifty-something, which Will Farrell (the actor) looks to be. Unfortunately, Sigrit, who should chronologically be only two or three years younger than Lars, is a thin blondish twenty-something white woman.

    I mean, I want whatever anti-aging serum she’s taking! I thought that insulted the audience’s intelligence.

    Maybe this is meant to be a satire of the whole Eurovision thing. Either way, no matter what it is, it’s not getting a vote from me.

    Liked by 2 people

    • The Elfs are not seen in the film but take an action in it and there is a ghost. That are the genereelements.
      At the moment finishing best novel, for me The City we Became is the one to beat (one book started but not finished still has a chance)

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    • Eurovision, much like the UK government, is so utterly terrible in every conceivable way as to be impossible to satirise. Also Will Ferrell renders pretty much everything he’s in absolutely unwatchable.

      Liked by 1 person

  4. My efforts to make it easier to study Spanish vocabulary are moving into a new phase. I’m wondering if the effort I’m putting into the software will actually pay itself back, but it’s fun in a weird sort of way, so maybe that’s okay.

    The immediate problem is finding root words, mostly for verbs. To recap, I felt I wasn’t progressing in Spanish because when I read books, I find myself looking up the same words over and over. I tried marking all the words I had to look up, but when I came back to make flash cards, there were far too many of them, and few of them looked like anything common enough to be worth adding.

    Since Kindle saves a “Clipping” file with all the things you highlighted, I decided I’d keep highlighting anything I looked up and I’d eventually write a Perl script that would find the words I looked up the most often, with added weight for ones that appeared in more than one book.

    And, after a few years of doing this, I finally did write that program, almost a year ago now. It’s been very helpful in picking out the words I most need to study, and I’ve been adding 10 words, twice a week, to a deck of Anki flashcards, which I drill once a day. This has made a huge difference in my reading ability.

    One drawback, though, is that a verb like hablar has 64 different forms it might appear in. E.g. hablo is “I speak” hablaba is “I used to speak” hablaré is “I will speak,” etc. A relatively rare word might appear in three different works in three different tenses, but I want to count them as the same word. Ideally, I’d have code that just looked at a form and reduced it to the infinitive, but that’s a very hard problem. Instead, I just look at the first five letters. In the example I just gave, it folds three of the four into one. Then when I examine the most frequent “roots,” I show all the actual forms, so I don’t end up thinking sobresalir and sobrecoger are the same word.

    I’ve got a few kludges to make this work better, but I’ve decided to finally bite the bullet and write code to take a word and find the infinitive. There are lots of patterns to Spanish verbs that make this easier, and I actually learned a lot about those patterns in the course of writing this. I ended up developing a context-free grammar to express inflection rules. I’m in the process of using a package to let me turn my grammar into a parser. Considering that it took half a day just to figure out how to install the package, the total time investment is probably best not thought about. 🙂 (Never mind two months of studying references on verb forms.)

    In the next couple of days, I’ll actually fire up the parser, feed it my grammar and my preliminary list of verbs. With any luck, in the next month I’ll get to see how well it works. It helps that it doesn’t have to work perfectly–it just has to be better than looking at the first five letters–but, of course, I want it to work as well as possible.

    Liked by 1 person

    • I know one person who used an interesting approach going “the other way” )not at ALL sure how applicable this would be to your problem domain, a CFG of some sort actually seems to be the right tool here), which was to turn Swedish word-bending forms into numbered schemas, then provide a base dictionary with those. All to be used for spelling-correction purposes (IIRC). There should be a paper published somewhere, as (again IIRC) I think it was his Master’s Thesis (and, TBH, quite a while ago).

      Happy to go dig, if you think it might be useful.

      I also managed to do something half-baked in CLOS for Latin verbs, one, maybe two, decades ago. Didn’t quite get to the point where I handled all of the verb classes and never got around to dealing with irregular verbs.

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      • Didn’t quite get to the point where I handled all of the verb classes and never got around to dealing with irregular verbs.

        I looked online, but I didn’t find anything that quite did what I wanted. One project on GitHub came close, but they abandoned it before finishing it. I think the key to making this tractable is to have the right computational model for the verbs, and I haven’t yet seen a reference book where the authors really thought about the problem that way.

        In Spanish, irregular verbs fall into three groups. The first is the ones that follow the three-stem pattern. That is, regular verbs are fully determined by the infinitive stem, but these verbs are fully determined by that plus the present participle and the “LL” forms. (1st, 2nd, and 3rd singular plus 3rd plural of the Present indicative and subjunctive. If you circle them on a chart, it looks like two capital “L”s.) The gerund gives you the 1st and 2nd person plural present subjunctive, both 3rd person preterite forms and all imperfect subjunctive forms, and the infinitive gives you everything else. (This looks a lot cleaner on a color-coded chart.) It’s amazing how many verbs follow this pattern. There are phonosyntactic reasons behind it, of course, but knowing those doesn’t help generate the forms.

        The second is things that aren’t irregular in sound, but they have spelling changes that look irregular. There are about a dozen classes of this form, and they’re utterly predictable. It’s a little tedious to enumerate them all, but all reference books go into great detail about them, so it’s not hard to be sure I’ve got them all.

        The third is just 20 verbs (plus their compounds) that are truly irregular. No other verbs have irregular endings (just irregular stems). These 20 verbs account for about half the lines in the specification, since each one is irregular in its own unique way.

        I’m actually very proud of the specification language. For the most part, it lets me specify the minimum detail necessary for each class of verbs. Of course I still have to finish the code that turns it from an idea into a working reality. That’s my big project for this week.

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      • [ looks like the limited reply nesting bites again ]

        On the surface, that seems similar to how STAVA works. And looking into it, it was not a thesis project, it was porting the software from TOPS-10 to Unix that the person I was thinking of did. The base dictionary was (essentially) “base, number” and said number related to the schema used to generate other forms,

        Since this also worked with nouns and adjectives, it was a little bit more complicated than just verbs, but from a cursory reading, it seems similar.

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        • The base dictionary was (essentially) “base, number” and said number related to the schema used to generate other forms,

          Since this also worked with nouns and adjectives, it was a little bit more complicated than just verbs, but from a cursory reading, it seems similar.

          There are actually three parts that work together. The first is a map which says how to fill in missing stems. For example, this line:

          PS.1S PS.2S PS.3S PS.3P: PI.1S PIL IN

          says that four of the preset subjunctive forms are taken from either the first-person present indicative (if explicitly specified), from the “LL” term I mentioned earlier (If that is set), and from the infinitive (if all else fails). This map is hugely useful in terms of reducing the size of the tables required.

          The second is the inflection operation, which combines two tables–one of endings and the other of stems. For first-conjugation verbs, I don’t need any more than that, but for others I need infix tables too. Amazingly, this works beautifully with the same map. Here’s a short sample:

          std_infix = {
          IN !
          PP i
          GD i
          PT i
          PT.1S í
          }

          reg_er = std_infix -> base_er;

          The top part defines the std_infix table, which pretty much just adds ‘i’ in a particular way to the base table for second-conjugation verbs. (aka “er verbs”). The bottom line says create the table for regular er verbs by treating std_infix as the stem and base_er as the endings.

          The third part of the system applies these tables to different verbs. Once this is set up, to add a new verb, I simply add it to the appropriate list, together with any information about irregularities. This is the table for verbs that end with ger.

          /(.*)ger/ {
          coger,
          escoger,
          proteger,
          recoger
          } -> {IN \1g; PI.1S \1j} -> reg_er

          This implements the rule that these the ‘g’ turns to a ‘j’ in seven different forms. The key thing, though, is that I don’t have numeric codes for different patterns of inflection; I simply build them up by applying tables. For example, the last line could have been:

          } -> {IN \1g; PI.1S \1j} -> std_infix -> base_er

          This ability to chain inflections together, possibly adding specific exceptions at any stage, is what makes this so powerful. And, of course, there’s nothing that limits it to verbs. It’s just that for Spanish, nothing else really has interesting inflected forms.

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  5. Sir Scrittles has destroyed his second leash. His nemesis, the evil bengal cat, also went into his cottage when he was away, leading to a call for VENGEANCE and the villains narrow escape. Nevyn missed the whole drama, being focused on hunting down the butterflies.

    Still reading bad chinese xianxia novels. Think I’ll have to quit soon.

    Liked by 3 people

      • I usually fasten his leash to a concrete block. Sometimes he manages to tip the block over the handle or he sets off at full speed getting suddenly stopped with a jerk. This takes a toll on the handle, causing it to split in two after a while.

        No idea who the bengal belongs to. It is very well groomed and only appears every other week or so.

        Liked by 2 people

  6. It’s already Monday in my timezone, which means it’s two months since Fern died. Today will be challenging.

    Been doing a lot of comfort reading & watching. At the weekend I finished a rewatch of “Avatar: The Last Airbender” (now available on Netflix), and alongside, reading Twitterer @uzbadyubi’s livetweet of them watching Avatar for the first time. I can highly recommend the experience. https://twitter.com/uzbadyubi/status/1205232467726262272

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  7. Another busy day at work, followed by uh, panic, when I realized that my month of stress eating due to a breakup had taken my weight from “just barely able to fit into my fancy clothes, but if I start eating smartly for about two weeks I’ll be fine” to “Nope, no way in hell”….two weeks before I’m flying to my cousin’s kid’s bat mitzvah party. So there was some panic shopping/tailoring, although not as much as I feared, since I had some stuff in my parents’ closet from when I was heavier. Good times!

    On the book front, four more books and a novella this week, and I should finish another book tonight. Three of the books were really notable: The Dark of the Sea by Imam Baksh is a YA novel from an author from Guyana, dealing with a mermaid/led city under the sea and a lovecraftian threat…as well as issues of poverty and suicide, which was really well done. Then there was Cassandra Khaw’s upcoming The All-Consuming World, which is one of those rare books where I didn’t love the author’s prose, but found her scifi world tremendous (though confusing) and her story dealing heavily with an abusive relationship riveting and hard not to keep ploughing through. Then finally yesterday I read Zoraida Córdova’s upcoming The Inheritance of Orquídia Divina, a story that verges on horror at times, as a family returns to their seemingly magical but reclusive Ecuadorian Grandmother’s house at her summons (claiming she’s dying) in a story that really hits hard on the importance of family bonds and mutual care.

    All very good and recommended.

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  8. Not much to report here. I went on a drive through the countryside this afternoon, which was nice.

    I also started a “Rumtopf” (rum pot), a German specialty where summer fruits are preserved in high-proof brown rum and sugar for several weeks/months and then served with waffles or ice cream. You need a special clay pot to make Rumtopf and my parents have had one for ages they never use. So I borrowed it, bought a bottle of rum and some sugar, got myself some fruit and got started. So far, my Rumtopf contains strawberres, blackberries, raspberries, red currants and cherries. Blueberries are next. It’s a fun project, especially if you have lots of berries.

    I’m also still writing a short story every day for the whole month of July. For some reason, my mind generates lots of gloomy stories – horror, dark fantasy and the like – this year. On the plus side, I seem to have finally figured out how to write horror. You can follow my progress with brief descriptions of the stories, the inspiration and the wordcount and genre, here: http://corabuhlert.com/2021/07/04/the-2021-july-short-story-challenge-day-by-day/

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    • Rum, check, sugar, check, fruit, check, special pot… nope.

      No Rumtopf for me.

      What a simple name for a simple recipe. So you just throw random fruit in till winter and it becomes a compote-y thing?

      Reminds me of my mom’s fruitcakes, which she’d make when Halloween was over and then they’d be wrapped in cheesecloth soaked with rum, which was regularly re-soaked. They’re the only fruitcakes people were glad to get.

      I wonder if some other kind of non-porous container would work?

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  9. Still locked down here. Luckily spouse’s quarantine is counted from exposure date, not notification date, so he should be finished that at the same time we all get out of lockdown.

    The weather over the last few days has been shocking. We had our coldest day in thirty years on Thursday, thunder, lightning and hail on Saturday morning. Probably a good week to be shut up in the house. Except I had to go out on Thurs to get my second vaccination. Lots of people warned me beforehand that the second dose of Pfizer is worse than the first, and it was, but only a little (I had a pretty robust reaction to the first shot).

    I just finished The Galaxy and the Ground Within. It was very good – a return to the form of the first book in the series I thought. Also reading The End of Everything , a popular astrophysics book by Katie Mack. The title tickles me because, when my eldest was a toddler and making a huge fuss about something trivial (as toddlers are prone to do), we would try and calm her down by saying ‘don’t worry, it’s not the end of the world’, to which she took to responding ‘yes it is, it’s the end of everything’.

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    • I agree that TGATGW was back to the excellence of the first book. I’d found the 2nd (esp.) and 3rd somewhat disappointing, so having the series finish strong was a relief. I teared up.

      I had about a day of total collapse with my first shot of Pfizer, so I was worried about the second. I only had a sore arm and a need for a nap the second time. There’s really no telling.

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      • My first shot gave me a sore arm for about a day and – which was more annoying – shortness of breath and fatigue for several days. On the first day after the shot, during my regular daily 3 kilometre walk, I suddenly felt very faint after approx. 800 metres and had to find a bench to sit down. I sat there for ten minutes and then turned around and very slowly went back. The next few days, I could make the whole walk, but only when sitting down several times en route.

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      • Urban legend says your reaction to the shot mirrors the symptoms you’d have if you caught it, so if that’s true, you and I did the right thing for our systems by getting vaccinated! I’d be bedridden and you’d be unable to breathe.

        Liked by 1 person

      • First time round I had a splitting headache for a day; second time same but with a lead in of fever and chills. Not sure what that suggests about my outcomes with actual COVID

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  10. EGG is hungry and whiny. We are sitting on the couch and surfing the net.

    I am enjoying watching dancing horsies on the Olympics while Mr. LT dozes off. We are not sports people, but once every 4 (or 5) years I watch equestrian events and we both got hooked on curling during some Olympics this century, when Mr. LT was out of work for the month they happened and they were shown here in the afternoon. Not for us the marquee sports, nope, we’re up in the “that’s a channel we get?” range.

    I had to laugh yesterday when one of the horsies’ hats, rather than being plain and matched to its color, was blue with some red and white stripes and a bunch of stars. U!S!A! I worry about the heat and humidity for the horsies (who are Extremely Very Good Boys and Girls) and the riders who have to wear all those layers of clothes.

    Weather has been quite clement here, but next week comes the nationwide Heat Dome and since we don’t have A/C, there will be misery. And probably fire.

    Liked by 2 people

  11. Well — I have had a *very* exciting week here, in a complicated way. I don’t want to put too many details about it out on the internet, but due to a paperwork error it turns out that I have control of money from my father’s estate that someone else was supposed to have control of. Which I knew nothing about until this past Monday. Much consultation with financial advisors has ensued, and much headspace has been occupied with complicated decision making.

    In more normal news — I purchased a month’s subscription to Sling TV (only $10 for the first month) so I could watch some of the Olympics, especially the equestrian events. I’ve watched some of the dressage so far, but I missed the American flag hat! I’ll be watching more of that (recorded) tonight, so maybe I’ll see him later. I’ve liked the Sling service so far, though it’s only been a couple of days.

    In other watching:

    I forgot to mention last week that I watched The Lion King by accident — somehow when I clicked on Mary Poppins the first time, The Lion King started playing instead, and I just went with it. I’d seen this one before, but only once, and decades ago. I was a little offended by just how blatant the “divine right of kings” and “Only the True Monarchy Can Save Us” schtick was, but there are certainly sweet and moving moments. And James Earl Jones! And Jeremy Irons!

    I also watched Effie Gray, which it turned out is a dour, stagnant historical about a woman trapped in a bad marriage to the Victorian literary and artistic figure John Ruskin. It’s “based on a true story”, with a screenplay written by Emma Thompson, and the real story was scandalous at the time because Gray had the marriage annulled on a charge of impotence — she had to prove by doctor’s exam that she was still a virgin after six years of marriage. I can’t recommend the movie. But at least in real life Effie Gray’s second marriage, to artist John Everett Millais, was apparently very happy and fruitful (she had eight children with him).

    I also watched the last episodes of The Letter for the King. Andy Serkis’s daughter did a good job, and I did not see the big twist coming. And I was happy to see the gay couple kiss on screen. But then I was very annoyed when one half of the gay couple got fridged soon thereafter. Seriously, is it too much to ask to allow LGBTs to lead happy lives? I don’t know how closely the series hewed to the book.

    I also watched the first couple of episodes of Godless, which it turns out is a completely non-sff Western series. I had thought it would be paranormal, but nooooo. Jeff Daniels plays a very evil outlaw, and Sam Waterston is a marshal in the first episode but perhaps not appearing in any others — dunno yet. The kid who played the David Spade-like character in Queen’s Gambit has a prominent secondary role as a young deputy. Grim and gritty.

    And finally I watched How to Train Your Dragon 2. Again sweet and funny, and after seeing the design of the “alpha” dragons I was not at all surprised to see a special acknowledgment for Guillermo del Toro at the end. And I still just adore all the different dragon designs.

    In reading:

    First I read The Last Wish by Andrzej Sapkowski, the first Witcher book. See my review here. Short version: I liked it.

    Then I started Sword of Destiny, book 2 in the series. I liked the beginning, and one story in particular was a comedy of errors involving a shapeshifter that really entertained me. But after the character of Ciri was introduced and my brain got discombobulated by the news I mentioned up top, I lost interest. I’ll go back to it before long.

    So now I’m resting my brain with some historical romance. Nothing terribly notable — two Grace Burrowes books so far. She is not as good as Loretta Chase, but she’s usually acceptable for relaxing with, and her books are usually narrated by James Langton, whom I always enjoy listening to.

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    • We get NBC Sports on our satellite, which is where all the horsies are. Flag hat boi made it through the prelims into the finals of dressage, so hopefully you can see him.

      Horsies are usually followed by ping pong, go figure.

      I paid a guy to deal with my parents’ estate. He probably cheated me some, but I don’t care. I didn’t have the spoons.

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  12. For some reason YouTube’s algorithm fed me a blatant piece of climate denialism (confusing weather with climate, and I presume some cherry picking) from Sky News Australia.

    Liked by 1 person

      • My ire was directed at Murdock and Google, not Australia (an innocent victim?). The impression I got was of a show that was Tucker Carlson, but on climate. I don’t pay much attention to SKY UK, but I had the impression that it was a decentish enough channel (at least the right saw a need to invent GB News as the UK version of Fox). I don’t know what I’d done to provoke YouTube into offering me that video, but having watched that one (the bait and switch headline was about record low temperatures, and I find extreme weather event moderately interesting) they now offered me a video which I guess to trying to convince people that Biden is senile. So YouTube has successfully convinced me that Sky News Australia is a far right channel.

        Perhaps it’s time to purge my YouTube history again.

        Liked by 1 person

        • In Australia, Sky News is fine for actual news (not that I watch it much but that’s the impression) but it tries to do the Fox News rightwing pundit thing as well

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    • I purge my YouTube history semi-regularly and also click on the thumbs down NOT INTERESTED on the suggestions.

      If I have to go to possibly-unsavory territory, I use Incognito mode so it doesn’t muck up my profile.

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  13. I just read How to Mars by David Ebenbach. Great synopsis, poor execution. What is it with men writing women astronauts and having them get pregnant??? Is that really the only kind of “adventure” they can manage to come up with for a woman astronaut? Oh, and shitty science and astronauting all over the place, there was obviously no consultation with scientists or astronauts. 😞

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    • I am very jealous of your peaches.

      I have two peach trees. I’ve had one for years, and I bought the other one last year.

      The first one blooms profusely every year — and then gets all its blooms frozen by late freezes because it blooms too early. I think I may have eaten one peach off that tree in the years since I got it.

      The second one has peaches this year — which I’ve been staring at for WEEKS now. WEEKS and WEEKS. I didn’t realize this was a late peach.

      Sigh. I hate patience.

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  15. I am very jealous of your peaches.

    I have two peach trees. I’ve had one for years, and I bought the other one last year.

    The first one blooms profusely every year — and then gets all its blooms frozen by late freezes because it blooms too early. I think I may have eaten one peach off that tree in the years since I got it.

    The second one has peaches this year — which I’ve been staring at for WEEKS now. WEEKS and WEEKS. I didn’t realize this was a late peach. Sigh. I hate patience.

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    • I don’t remember how many years it took for ours to give us peaches. I have a photo of its brand new self next to our kitty who died in 2000, so it took… a while.

      This is its best year so far. Last year we had one or two. Probably next year we won’t have many.

      It’s still only about 2 feet high so there is a very hard limit to how many we get. And they’re all tiny, and they all ripen in the same week or 2 so we stuff ourselves for that time and then have 50-51 weeks without.

      They should just be getting ripe in the middle of next month instead of all being over. Even so, they look all peachy for ages before they’re ready to eat.

      Now to wait weeks and weeks, like a couple months for the apples. It was established when we moved here, so it tends to do better. Sometimes too well and we have to process madly and give them away.

      Liked by 1 person

  17. One of my brand new fillings fell out yesterday.

    Luckily, I got it replaced today at no charge since it was new. Also apologies.

    At least it was only mildly annoying for 24 hours and didn’t hurt.

    Liked by 1 person

  18. Ursula Le Guin stamps are out in the US! Unfortunately they’re 95 cents, and I don’t think I ever use 95 cent stamps for anything. I might just get a few and look at them happily. Oh, how things have changed!

    Liked by 1 person

    • I’m going to buy some anyway.

      Maybe you could mail something to someone that’s more than a letter; Ursula will get something weighing 3 ounces anywhere domestically.

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