No, Thursday's Out....

Before the pandemic, there was a wonderful website called Is a Train Blocking 11 th ?   This is important trip-planning info for Inner Southeast Portland. If you clicked on it, you got a full screen answer, either YES (white on black) or NO (black on white), plus a little timer showing, if YES, how long the train had been there. (That last was interesting but useless, since it couldn’t predict when it would clear. Sometimes, 11 th was blocked for 45 minutes.) What I liked best was that it was maintained by humans whose office window overlooked the intersection. It wasn’t a sensor, or a traffic cam.  I miss it. Nowadays, I skip 11th entirely, if I am in a rush, and go all the way to Powell on 21 st . Seems like the long way, until it isn’t. My Seattle friend told me there is a similar Washington site called Is The Mountain Out? I went looking, and it seems there are at least three versions:   webcam at https://ismtrainierout.com/ , crowdsourced map at https:/...

Romeo, the 6 year old kid who doesn’t read, but calls himself “a numbers guy,” came in today and grabbed some Pigeon stories off the shelf, as he does every week. I told him I had heard an interview with the author, Mo Willems, this weekend. The first Pigeon book came out 20 years ago, and also, The Pigeon just made his operatic debut.   (Great NPR segment.) The Pigeon is very operatic on the page. He has Feelings.   Big feelings. We started on the first book, and then I stopped and said, “You know, we can read these again. But if you want to, we can read something else. Up to you.” “Let’s ahm-wissle fo it!” said Romeo. (He doesn't do R's.) Took me a minute, but I got it. “We don’t need to arm-wrestle! You can just choose a different book. Or not!” “Let’s ahm-wissle! If I win -- same books! If you win -- new books!” “No,” I said. “You just choose.” He got some new books and sat back down. He said, in a distracted way, “If we do this for seven years, we will be toge...

DRINKAMUGAMILKAMEAL! That’s what the banner by the winking cow on the Milky Way milk trucks says: Drink a mug a milk a meal! There are many Milky Way trucks on I-5. I was behind one for hours recently, silently chanting DRINK a MUG a MILK a MEAL, missing the OF before MILK, wondering if I would have preferred PER meal.  It hailed. It was a crummy drive.   I’m in Phonology this term. I thought it would be an introductory Linguistics class, but Noooooo, that would have been Phonetics. My mistake. I was struggling to keep up, but I stopped. Now the waves wash over me. Sometimes I grasp a concept, and sometimes I just admire one as it flashes past. In DRINKAMUGAMILKAMEAL, those first three A’s are pronounced “UH.” That’s the vowel sound called schwa, the one that looks like an upside down lower-case E.   In your mouth, the schwa vowel is notable for being right in the middle – not high, not low, not front, not back. Easy to reach. The schwa is by definition “unstressed,” ...

My beloved mother-in-law lives in Las Vegas, and we went to see her last week. No, she is neither a gambler nor a show girl.  She is 98. She’s there to be near her daughter and granddaughter, and she likes heat and sunshine.  Me, I’m a native Seattleite, rain in my veins. I feel parched and overexposed in Southern Nevada. I love the geologic wonders of Red Rocks, outside of town, but purely as a beautiful, alien planet, hostile to human life. And the city makes me crabby, self-consciously aware that I’m a stick-in-the-mud, utterly bereft of party-girl spirit. In the long, windowless corridor between the car park and the lobby/casino/Starbucks/liquor store center of our not-cheap hotel, there are numerous attractions that don’t attract me. I don’t want to renew our vows before a photo of Hoover Dam. I don’t want an extra-large sequined bikini with a long, pointy, apron-like attachment hanging down the front, or a caftan proclaiming: BE a Mermaid!, or a dumb poster with an ext...

Consider the pronoun pin, with SHE, HER, HERS, or HE, HIM, HIS, or THEY, THEM, THEIR.  That plural version needs four instances: THEY, THEM, THEIR, THEIRS. The third person plural has four variations, while those singulars cleverly manage four USES with only three FORMS. I am so grateful that I don’t have to learn English as a second language. I’ve always thought that listing even three forms on those pins was overexplaining. It should probably be enough to have just HER, for instance, and people could infer the SHE, and the HERS, from that. Anyone who wanted to switch gender and number for every usage would be asking a lot: SHE, HIM, OUR, THEIRS.   It would be tough on one’s friends. Ooh! One's friends!! ONE, ONE, ONE’S. Interesting. ONE manages four uses with only TWO forms. Talk about clever. When I first saw pronoun pins, I wanted one that said I, ME, MINE, in tribute to George Harrison, my favorite Beatle when I was a preteen, because I wanted to be “different...

I got some fun pushback to "They're All Read Words."  One beleagured parent protested that he had to keep his daughters from using words wrong, or no one would ever understand them. My friend Keith patiently explained to me that "mansplain" is suboptimal,  while "personsplain" is better. (Well played, Keith.) My friend Mark threatened to send a 12,000 word correction.  And Faithful Reader Glaven sent in a response worthy of guest editorial status. So I'm bumping it, and sharing the limelight: Glaven wrote:  The problem with descriptivism, as DFW pointed out in his essay, is: how many times do "the people" have to use a word to mean something other than what the dictionary says it means before you accept it as vaild? Peggy Hill, on "King of the Hill", fancied herself fluent in Spanish, and when someone defied or stood up to her, she would say, in an outraged voice, "Eschuca me?!" Which does NOT mean "Excuse me....

I volunteer on Wednesdays with two little boys who are beginning  readers. Both of them lost their two front teeth this winter, so the cuteness factor is high..  My first stint is with Tex, and my second with Romeo (not their real names, but you would approve of these as pseudonyms if you met them).  Our assignment is just to make reading fun. The first day, I tried some of the getting-to-know-you questions with Tex, but he would have none of it. “What’s your favorite animal?” He made no sound, but silently mouthed, “I don’t know.”   “Okay, well, do you have any pets?”   Silently, “I don’t know.” I said, “Come on, you know whether you have a pet or not!” He sat me out. He’d resist torture, as a POW. I went on to the traditional beginning question: “Do you want me to read to you, or do you want to read to me?” He pointed to me. Second week, same thing. Info on a need-to-know   basis only. But I had brought him a card, in an envelope. He couldn’...