There are two beginning students, komencantoj, at the Stanford class on conversational Esperanto.  Since they are already polyglots, they are picking the language up quickly.  However, they still have a difficult time following advanced conversation.

Why is this? you might ask. Isn’t Esperanto supposed to be the easiest language in the world to learn?

Yes, and basic Esperanto is a breeze.  ”La ĉielo estas blua.” “Mi malsatas. Ni manĝu.” “Kie estas la necesejo?”  ”La plumo de mia onklino estas sur la tablo.”  ”Mi donis libon al Karlo.”

Very basic.  Very concrete.  And if we were, say, a race of hounds who live only in the moment and only think about things they can see, taste and smell, that would be all that would be required of any language.  But human thought involves so much more than the current moment, concrete nouns and simple verbs.  We think abstractly, hypothetically and subjunctively.  We talk about things we can only infer without actually witnessing.  I have heard it said that without the subjunctive, one can only speak Italian with a limp.  I would say the same about any language.

Once ideas become more complex, the language must accommodate or it’s useless to humans.  With humans, conversations turn abstract with very little prompting, and the komencantoj quickly become lost.  Fortunately, the problem is solved with practice and familiarity.

An example of this is illustrated by the translation of the phrase, describing the Society for Creative Anachronism, “The Middle Ages as they should have been.”

The best I could do was, “La Mezepoko kiel ĝi devintus.”  (There is nothing illegal about the use of the word devintus though many experienced esperantists have warned me about it.  The preferred usage evidently is ” … kiel ĝi estus devinta.” though that sounds awkward to me.  And if you google the word devintus you’ll find it used other places by quite fluent esperantists.  ”It’s not common usage,” some will complain.  But “… should have been” also is not a common phrase.)  We are talking about the conditional past.  How more abstract can you get?  It’s easy to talk about the conditional future, even the conditional present.  But the conditional past? As if the past were a malleable thing? Generally a topic for geeks, eh?  Only a first class language could tackle that.  Is Esperanto, by this definition, a first class language?  You tell me.  For my money, the nunaj komencantoj will be slinging the subjunctive lingo inside six months.  A year tops.

The following article is in Esperanto.  If you don’t know Esperanto, but would like to know what the article says, you can copy and past it at http://traduku.net/ .  Then click the EO ➔ EN button.  It isn’t a perfect translation, but it will let you sus out the meaning. There are three EO ➔ EN buttons, each using a different engine.  Try all three.

Vivas ni dum interesaj tempoj, en la ĉina senco.  Ĉiutage legas mi, ke la tutmonda ekonomio aĉas.   Kial?  Oni povas kulpigi aŭ liberalismon aŭ konservatismon aŭ tutmondan varmigon aŭ la benzinomilitojn ktp.  Tamen, estas memklare ke ni usonanoj daŭras sendi la monon al Ĉinio, tiam prunteprenas ree ĝin por fari militon kontraŭ homoj, kiuj uzas religion (la politigado de fido) por batali nin.

Kial ni sendas la monon al Ĉinio?  Ĉar ni haltis esti nacio de senripozaj produktantoj kaj iĝis nacion de sobraj konsumantoj. Ni obsedas pri la aĉeto de plastaĵaĉoj ĉe Wal-Mark kaj Target kaj Costco.  La nuntempa esenco de ĉi tiu estas spegulita en la debato temante “aŭ iPhone aŭ Droid?”

Ĉu vi kredas vere, ke tiuj uzaĵoj kaŭzus, ke vi estu pliproduktema?   Kial?  Ĉu vi ne nun estas produktema?  Ĉu via nuntempa poŝtelefono ne bone funkcias?  Kial vi postulas novan?  Eble vi kredas, ke por plibonigi la ekonomion, vi devas havi plian ŝuldon.

Ĉu la iPhone kaǔzus, ke vi estu plibona homo?  Ĉu estas aplikaĵo por tio?

Aliflanke, mi aŭdas per la radio reklamojn por pezperdadaj mirakloj, sekretoj por gajni junecon kaj belecon, planoj por rapide gajni riĉecon, metodoj por facile lerni lingvojn, kaj aliaj neeblaĵoj.  Ili vendas nur promesojn, kiuj forvaporiĝos kiel la rideto de politikisto.  Versajnas, ke homoj intencas preni nian monon kaj doni preskaŭ nenion.

Jes, miopinie, la Droid kaj iPhone tre mojosas. Tamen, faru liston.  Dek Metodoj por iĝi Plibonan Homon.  Vetos mi, ke tiu listo ne enhavos la erojn, “Aĉetu ilon Droid” aŭ “plijuniĝu” aŭ “vendu nenion por gajni multe da mono.”  Eble vi skribos, “Plie kultu kruelan, venĝeman, bagatelan kaj  ĵaluzan dion, kaj frakasu la senkredulojn!”  Tamen, tio estas temo por alia artikolo.

La nuntempa tutmonda ekonomio funkcias per fumo kaj speguloj, kaj tio helpas nur malmutle da homoj.  Kio okazos kiam la fumo iras for?

Review: Asylum Improv
Pacifica Spindrift Players
Pacifica, California

I cannot imagine a more challenging social situation than trying to be improvisationally funny. Telling memorized jokes is easy. Reading a comedic script is a snap. Doing a stand-up routine that has been rehearsed and choreographed is a piece of cake compared to what the Asylum Improv does several times a year at the Spindrift Players in Pacifica, California.

It’s because of this that we don’t expect the actors of Asylum, lead by the very brave Roger Genereux, to be as funny as Ryan Stiles and Colin Mochrie, who are comedic geniuses, but they’re already funnier than Drew Carey.

It’s perhaps fortunate for the cast of Asylum that the audience consists primarily of the family and friends, and some die-hard community members, so we aren’t as critical as we could be. Asylum really does try hard to be funny, and one often gets the feeling that they are trying too hard. Sometimes desperately hard, which is evident when the look on an actor’s face plainly says, “Will somebody Please end this scene?” Which is echoed by Roger’s expression which says just as plainly, “Will somebody Please say something funny?”

There are, however, gems which make waiting through the embarrassing moments worthwhile.  We especially liked the efforts of Steve Mattes, Kevin Myer and Lourie (whose last name I couldn’t find, but he’s the bloke with the almost-Irish brogue, softened, I think, by his years in the States).  Lourie can always be counted on for a funny routine involving the alphabet and/or the English language.  Tricia Callero once again wow’d us with her superb vocal skills.  We can’t help but think that if the entertainment industry really was a meritocracy, she’d already be head-lining.

The presentation could be improved if Roger could just relax a little.  We think he’s very smart and talented, but he often comes across as if he believes his entire worth as a human being is riding on the success or failure of the show.  And considering the amount of work he invests at Spindrift, we can’t blame him for feeling that.   But Roger:  We are going to like you anyway.  You have already proven yourself.  So relax.  Also, if you can’t read one of those audience suggestion slips, you should just toss it.  There is no entertainment value in watching you try to decipher somebody’s scribble.  And we know that it’s supposed to be improv, but perhaps a little more structure would help lubricate the show.

And we will be there when you return in March!

The weekend of September 26 and 27, 2009, gave us the 9th Annual Rancho Neblina Traditional Rendezvous.  Sixty-three 3D foam animal targets at unmarked distances on three separate courses set on a 600+ acre cattle ranch near Petaluma, California.  The cows were not pleased with having to share their fields with 200 bipeds. In spite of promises for cooler weather, the temperatures reached 100° F (38° C) on both days, and the heat took its human toll as some archers passed out or dropped from the competition.

You can find pictures of the event here.

I didn’t do well.  This is a major league disappointment after spending all year training for this event, and then to have it all fall apart.  A friend commented, “You can hit all the difficult targets!  What is it with the easy ones?”

Indeed, it seemed like I couldn’t miss the difficult targets, including one I call The Carousel of Doom.

But when it came to getting the easy ones, some madness possessed my arrows and sent them on strange and unexplainable trajectories, without regard to how much I tried to slow down and concentrate on aiming.

Ah well, it’s all practice, eh?

Next year.

Update September 30, 2009 -- I left the competition site before the awards ceremony because allergies were starting to flare, and I had already used my limit of anti-histamines.  I left thinking that I had placed poorly.  A friend sent me a message on Facebook, “You came in second!!” While this certainly made me feel better, my thoughts were, “Okay, other people performed worse than I did.  That doesn’t mean I performed well.”

We are always our own worst critic, aren’t we?

We humans are a wonderful set of contradictions, don’t you think?

I would like to offer as an example my oldest son, Galen.  When he was about three years old, he and I were watching Sesame Street together when he suddenly turned to me and said, “Real frogs can’t talk.”

We lived, at the time, in a rural area where encounters with wild life and livestock were common, and we ourselves had dogs and sheep.  Galen had no trouble at all separating fact from fiction, life from television.  I remember thinking at the time that he had an advantage over a lot of adults I could name.

On the other hand, Galen, like many three or four or five year olds, sometimes had problems with nightmares and worried about monsters in the closet or under his bed.  No amount of rational explanations about non-existent monsters was going to help.  So we made a game of it.  We concocted magic anti-monster juice (tap water), put it in a spray bottle and put an anti-monster spell on it.  When Galen complained of monsters which lay in wait in his closet, we would spray it with the anti-monster juice with drama and flourish, uttering the ancient incantation, “Out, out, damned Spot!”  Galen always slept better afterward.

Don’t get me wrong.  We never encouraged him to believe in magic or monsters or faeries or dragons or ghosts.  He has grown up to be a healthily skeptical young man who smirks at ghost stories.  Even so, he still enjoys a good story or sword and sorcery and talking frogs.  He’s far more active in the Society for Creative Anachronism than I am.

I am not a psychologist or neurologist, so I don’t know the words, but I believe that our consciousness is dominated by different parts of our brains in the light of rational day and the dark of mystical night.  And each state seems totally foreign to us when we are in the demesne of the other.  And though a child may give more voice to their inner fears, adults are not immune.  A good story teller is one who can transport the audience from one state to the other, sitting around the campfire, bidding the listener to abandon incredulity for just a moment in order to more fully appreciate the punch line. Strong relationships are built by sharing our irrational fears.

But come the dawn, it’s time again for the serious working and rational thinking.  Time to harvest, time to build, while we look forward to the next episode.

There seems to be an upturn in public interest in target and field archery lately.  I don’t have any specific numbers to give you, only personal observations.

It used to be that I could be assured of getting a lane at the Golden Gate Park archery range in San Francisco on a weekday, or if I show up early enough on a weekend.  Not anymore.  The attendance of newbies at the Sharp Park range in Pacifica at the Community Outreach Sundays has increased.  One could simply attribute this to Summer, but that would not follow the pattern of previous Summers.

On the other hand, attendance at organized events is down.  What gives?  We are getting more newbies but losing the established cadre?

The economy may be a driving factor in both of these phenomena.  People are starting to look for recreational activities that don’t involve a lot of money and can be done locally.

We all know how expensive archery equipment can be.  But when you compare the price of outfitting an archer to, for instance, the price of outfitting a golfer, we archers have to admit we have the better part of that deal.  Also, I don’t know any golfers who build their own equipment, and I don’t ever remember seeing a golf club (or a golf ball) that could be considered a piece of art.

We all know that there are some very nice golf courses in the Bay Area.  What most people don’t realize is that there are half a dozen very beautiful outdoor archery ranges within an hour’s drive of downtown San Francisco.   These golf courses can charge up to $60 and more even on a weekday.  That’s about the price I pay for my yearly membership to San Francisco Archers, which allows me to use the range at my leisure.

So, why is attendance at the organized events down?  I believe it’s because people are starting to pick and choose which events they want to participate in.  When times are good, we go to all of them.  Or nearly.  When the price of gasoline is high and the value of the US dollar drops, we only go to our favorites. I won’t be attending the Western States Traditional Rendezvous until the venue returns to California, or I start making much more money.  Hmm. I wonder which will happen first?

On August 8th, 2009, the Shire of Cloondara, which is the SCA equivalent of San Francisco, California, hosted its annual Debardchery contest, a combination of archery and bardic contests.  As Archery Mistress, I ran the archery part.  It takes pretty much all year to plan and pull this off.

The Hydra from the Labors of Hercules as a homemade 3D target.

The theme of the even was the 12 Labors of Hercules, and we made our own targets.  Here you can see the Hydra.  The rest of the targets were painted on cardboard.  We used the Stymphalian birds as speed targets – The archer could shoot as many arrows as possible in thirty seconds.  There were six small targets, about six inches across, places between 5 and 10 meters distant.  The archer had to shoot each target once before shooting any target twice.

Debardchery 2009 Stymphalian Birds target

SCA Archery is restricted to traditional archery gear and wooden arrows, however the construction of the equipment is often modern.  After all, it is called “creative anachronism.”  This is due to the fact that “period” archery gear is near impossible to find on the commercial market, and most amateur archers are not comfortable building their own bows.  We’re comfortable making our own period garb, but functional weaponry, not so much.  There is, however, a “period archery” division in inter-kingdom competition. But if we insisted on strictly medieval construction for bows and arrows, we wouldn’t have many archers.  However, if you want to talk about homemade bows, I can publish some posts on that.

We had a record turn out this year.  Thirty-three medieval archers ranging in skill level from “I’ve never held a bow before in my life!” to “Yeah, I practice every day for an hour before work.”  We separated archers as best we could into five separate skill levels.

The distances to the targets ranged from 5 meters to 45 meters.  However, one 12-year old intrepid longbowmen was allowed to shoot from 30 meters max, as his bow was not able to cast 45 meters.

My schedule for the weekend was a simple one: Saturday – Debardchery.  Sunday – the Cupid’s Gate tourney, which is a “mundane” or real world competition.  So of course, I woke up Saturday morning with a fever and a hoarse voice.  One of the Shire heralds was kind enough to be my voice for the day.  However, she couldn’t compete for me in the Cupid’s Gate, so I regretfully did not participate.

About a week ago, the following video appeared on my Facebook page:

There followed dozens of comments about what an incredible catch this was, and didn’t the girl show the guys how it was done!  Nobody on the list doubted that this event occurred.  Everybody wanted to believe it!  We all want to believe that people, especially the unsung heros, are capable of great things.  The video has gone viral several times over.

Okay, so call me a party pooper.

It didn’t take much time with Google to find the following:

“If that ball girl’s catch seems unbelievable well, you’re right it’s not real. It’s a viral video advertisement produced for Gatorade.”  Click here to read the article.

Yes, a major disappointment for those of us who want to believe that we are all, including minor league ball girls, capable of great things.

Well, it turns out that the Gatorade ad was based on an actual 1996 event involving a Seattle Mariners ball girl.  Go here for the video.

It used to be that you could tell the difference between commercials and programs.  It reminds me of the old, old joke, “What’s the difference between a faery tale and a sailor’s story?”  (If by some stretch of the imagination, somebody has not heard the punch line, it’s, “A faery tale starts out, ‘Once upon a time’ and a sailor’s story starts out, ‘No shit! This really happened!’”)

The problem is that people are willing to believe even the most fantastic things.  This is how magicians and email scammers ply their trade.  This is how urban myths start, and this is how political careers are made and broken.  In the United States at least, listening to the Republicans and the Democrats tell outrageous lies about each other and get away with it has become de rigueur.

Yesterday, I received for the upteenth time an email advising me that the planet Mars will make its closest approach to Earth in a lifetime, and will actually appear as large in the sky as the full moon.  It doesn’t take a Ph.D in astronomy to know that this is entirely nonsense.

But, as long as we still willing to believe in faery tales, that ball girls can fly, that congressmen eat babies for breakfast, and that planets can zip around the solar system willy nilly, this crap will still keep coming to us on the internet.

The Colony

Discovery Channel

“Reality TV”

From the network that gave us Mythbusters comes a show that seems to be a fusion of Junkyard Wars and Survivor. The show takes 10 people of varied backgrounds – a physician, a nurse, a handyman, a marine biologist, a couple of engineers – and sets them in a world where most humans have perished from a global virus.   Each episode has started with a head shot of Adam Montella, a “Homeland Security Advisor,”  telling us “We are on the edge of a global catastrophic disaster.”  The background shows a grim picture of Century City in ruins.

The “world” where these 10 survivors spend the next 10 weeks is located in an abandoned warehouse park on the edge of the Los Angeles River.  They are cut off from communication, electricity, and running water.  They must solve the problems of shelter, food and water and even the occasional “marauder” in the archetypal form of a motorcycle gang.

If you read the credits carefully, there is a disclaimer reading, “The participants in ‘The Colony’ experiment are presented with situations that were created by the producers.  They receive support from off-camera experts when their health and safety may be in danger. Viewers should not attempt to engage in the activities depicted in the experiment.”  So, they aren’t really cut off from the world.

I don’t believe this show was envisioned to be an actual show about people surviving.  You know they are going to survive for ten weeks, or they wouldn’t have a show.  There are experts on hand to advise and help the cast with their projects.  However, it does provide a vehicle for inspiring discussion about how people react in extreme conditions.

There are ethical questions to consider:  Is it really okay to steal food from somebody else, knowing that you may have condemned them to death by starvation, just so that you can have another day’s worth of food?  Would it have been better to invite the guys who owned the goats to join them in the Sanctuary?  (Not in the script, though.)  In order to survive for long, they are going to have to reinvent agriculture, a very labor-intensive activity without 21st Century technology to help.  They’re going to need every hand they can get come the harvest.

Questions of desperation: How hungry do you have to be to eat a carp caught in the Los Angeles River?

Questions of personality: Okay, the handyman is probably over-reacting in order to get more air time on the show.  Do you notice that the camera rarely focuses on the quieter, more rational types?  The handyman is an a-hole, but his skills are necessary for the survival of the group.  When does one side of this equation overrule the other?

The show offers a lot of instruction — I didn’t know about the wood gasifyer, but, day-um!  How kewl is that?  I suspect that the little two-stroke engine that they attached it to won’t last long on that fuel, but it’s still a good idea!

I don’t believe this show will offer a lot in the way of plot twists and surprises, but it’s still good fodder for discussion of human nature and survival.

BJMendelson Just got in to Santa Montica, have to do some paperwork and then if I’m feeling brave, walk over and get some photos of the ocean

This tweet came to me over the cell phone today.  I have no idea who BJMendelson is and never requested to follow his Twitter.  I set my the Twitter account so that I have to specifically request to follow people, but the cell phone’s text message In Box fills up every night with tweets from people I never knew existed.  Except for Wil Wheaton – I know who he is.

I have never held the concept of Twitter in any esteem.  There is not a single person on this planet that I want to know moment to moment details of.  My kids are all adults now, and some things they do are frankly none of my business.

And Dearest Heart, if you are reading this, do not take umbrage.  You know that the feeling is reciprocal.  If you knew what I was doing 24/7, you’d start to wonder why you ever married such a boring person.

I changed my mind about getting a Twitter account when a few of us at Fearless Fitness had the idea of creating an extended support group for maintaining a healthy lifestyle.  The idea was that we would all get Twitter accounts, and we would follow each other.  That way, if one of us had an idea for a healthy recipe, or if we needed help staying away from the mid-afternoon munches, we could send a text message, and our compatriots would all get it.

I thought, Okay, this is a good use of Twitter. But I didn’t want the entire world to know when I was struggling with my diet, so I set it up so that only people that I approve could follow me.

So much for good ideas.   I didn’t have that account for five minutes before I had 21 people following me.  TWENTY-ONE!  I had approved NONE of them.  And shortly after that, I found that I was following 18 unknown people and one Wil Wheaton.  I blocked them all, I unfollowed them all.  To no avail.  They were back the very next day.

Some are obviously commercial accounts, and some are selling the World’s Oldest Profession.  Some are news outlets.

So, either A: Some people have been able to hack into the system at Twitter and force their tweets upon innocent people, and thus artificially inflating their following, or B: Some people pay for premium accounts that can’t be blocked.

I should mention that I disliked with a passion Wil Wheaton’s character Wesley Crusher on Star Trek: The Next Generation.  But I was always able to keep Wil and Wesley, the actor and the character, separate in my mind, and assumed that the actor was a nice enough guy who did the best he could with a character that the creative staff of Star Trek really messed up.

But if Mr. Wheaton has used either A or B mentioned above, then he’s worse than the character.

And users cannot even complain to Twitter about this.  The best you can do is post to a User Forum and hope that somebody else has found the solution.

So I cancelled the Twitter account, and my estimation of them has plummeted even further.