Month: December 2003

I might could talk Southern

One of the groups I sang with Saturday night was a country and bluegrass group whose leader jokingly told me, “You better speak Southern if you want to sing with us.” I told him, “I might could do that,” in my best Appalachian twang, and got in. Today my Tennessean officemate unconsciously used the same construction, so I started wondering where it came from.

I researched the usage and found the following great article by Tom King about might could:

The use of so-called “double modal” constructions is quite common in the
South and Southwest. I come from Dallas originally, and such
constructions as you have cited are common there in everyday speech, and
they serve a real linguistic purpose: modal forms such as ‘could’ and
‘should’ are ambiguous in Modern English, as they have both an
indicative and a subjunctive sense. For example, “I could come” can mean
either “I was able to come” (past indicative of ‘can’) or “I would be
able to come” (subjunctive). In German, the two forms are distinct:
“ich konnte kommen” vs. “ich koennte kommen”. The use of double modal
constructions with ‘may’ or ‘might’ serves to reintroduce this
distinction. Thus, for a Southerner, “I might could come” or “I may
could come” carry the subjunctive meaning, whereas “I could come” is
only indicative in meaning….

The use of double
modals in Southern American English fills a gap in Standard English
grammar, namely the loss of inflectional distinction in English between
indicative and subjunctive modals. Dialect or regional forms are often
more progressive in gap-filling than is a standard language. Consider
the sad case of ‘you’, which is ambiguous in Standard English between
singular and plural meanings. Here the regional forms have been quite
productive: “y’all” in the South (***only plural!!!!***) or similar
forms elsewhere.

In other words, twang loud and twang proud.

Holiday songs: James Brown, Christmas Collection

james brown christmas collection

Today’s holiday recording is a new one, a serendipitous iTunes Music Store find. Who knew that James Brown had recorded not one, but two holiday albums of original Christmas songs? Fortunately, someone saw fit to reissue the stuff on one disc, the Christmas Collection.

So does the world really need another Christmas album full of holiday chestnuts, even from the Hardest Working Man in Show Business? Fortunately James Brown was too smart to waste an opportunity to write great soul music. Most of the tunes are originals, with such super funk material as “Go Power at Christmas Time,” a Motown-flavored soul number; “Santa Claus Go Straight to the Ghetto,” in which James Brown simultaneously hits the holiday theme while pulling at the social conscience; and the slow jams “Merry Christmas Baby” and “Merry Christmas, I Love You.” Other standouts include “Santa Claus is Definitely Here to Stay,” the fabulous six and a half minute slow burn of “Let’s Make Christmas Mean Something This Year,” and the gorgeous cover of “The Christmas Song.” If the strings get a little strong at times, it just sounds like they got swept up by the excitement along with everyone else. A new favorite antidote to the six thousandth playing of “White Christmas.”

Incidentally, for an example of Christmas music by soul artists that just didn’t work out, check out this twofer collection of Christmas albums by Jackie Wilson and Al Green. Oh boy, what a stanker. Wilson badly wants to be singing opera but succeeds only in singing cheese. And the Reverend Green is in good voice, but is smothered by his early-80s backing band, or rather backing tracks. Yes, it sounds like someone went into Circuit City and grabbed every cheap keyboard and drum machine they could find. Skip it.

Holiday party 2003

I almost forgot: my second annual EMP performance went great. I sang tons of backup, including backing up one of the group managers on “My Girl” (he did it with Motown style—actually having been a performing musician at one time; he and his group even opened for the Righteous Brothers once); also backup on a few newgrass/country songs and a classic rock set including “Tumbling Dice” and “The Weight.” “Little Wing” was solid, though there was a little confusion about the song structure at the beginning leading to a 96 bar intro instead of a 64 bar one. But my vocals were actually OK, and I think I finally exorcised some of the Sting influence, taking it a little bit more in my own style. It was a great evening but too short.

The best part was probably coming home to find, even after four hours, that our dogs had kept each other company and weren’t freaked out by our absence. The joys of puppy parenthood…

New additions to our family

joy and jefferson

I alluded on Friday to something keeping me from blogging. The wraps can now be removed. In the last month, we’ve added two new members to the family: two Bichon Frise puppies.

In early November, we welcomed Joy, who was the runt of her litter at about two pounds when we brought her home at 8 weeks old. We worked through toilet training (she can now go on command and ring a bell when she needs to go outside), bite training, “sit” and “lay down” (well, we’re still working on those), and basic leash behavior.

At the end of all that, we felt we were at a point where we needed something or someone else to keep her occupied. We had always wanted two small dogs—they keep each other from getting bored if we can’t be around them, and that way there’s one for each lap. So we were simultaneously saddened and intrigued when our favorite boy dog from the litter, a pup named Madison, was returned to the breeder on Thanksgiving Day. (The previous owner claimed he made her “allergic”—see what the Bichon club FAQ has to say on that point.) After some soul searching, we finally bit the bullet and brought Madison—whom we promoted one president and who is starting to answer to his new name, Jefferson—home on Thursday.

The two dogs are great together, and like their parents have very distinct personalities. Joy is high energy, mischievous, slightly goofy, and a very restless sleeper, while Jefferson is sweet, calm, loves to sleep, and is frequently found snoring. Draw your own conclusions.

My sleep is starting to return to normal, so we decided it was time for full disclosure about our newest family members. More photos to be added soon, but those in this slide show should give you an idea of how much fun we’ve had.

Holiday Songs: Low’s Christmas

low - christmas

I’m a sentimental fool about Christmas music. Every year I drag out an assortment of discs for the holidays, and each year I rediscover that they span from the sublime to the ridiculous. This year I wanted to put my notes down about the best so that I don’t (and you don’t) make the same mistakes next year.

Today’s disc is Duluth, MN slowcore band Low’s unlikely Christmas EP. You may remember one of the songs, their version of “Little Drummer Boy,” from a Gap Christmas commercial a few years back. But don’t let the commercial association fool you. This is an absolute classic Christmas album of the finest order. From the direct-to-flexi-sounding lo-fi upbeat—nay, downright jangly—original song “Just Like Christmas” that opens the year, to the faithful if slow covers of “Blue Christmas” and “Silent Night,” the disc covers all the expected bases for a holiday album. But the covers subscribe to Low’s uniquely intense, spare vision, and the songs are transformed.

Nowhere is this more evident than in the cover of “Little Drummer Boy.” Here the “rum-pa-pum-pums” are slowed (each verse takes about a minute and a half) and laid over an organ drone, which in turn sounds like it’s laid over about 40db of tape hiss. At that speed, the words (conveyed by the sweet harmonies of Mimi Parker and Alan Sparhawk) stop being trite and start being deeply meaningful.

Add to this the unique originals “If You Were Born Today,” “One Special Gift,” “Long Way Around the Sea,” and “Taking Down the Tree,” which is the only paean to after-holiday-cleanup that I’m aware of, and you have a short but essential holiday classic.

Chuck Vest steps down from MIT presidency

According to email I received from the alumni office this morning, Charles Vest has announced his intention to retire from the presidency of MIT (link to letter).

I didn’t get to see Mr. Vest in action very much in the two years I was in my graduate program, but he certainly presided over a lot of change. It will be interesting to see who follows him in the office; only one other person has served longer as Institute president.

Little Wing

In preparing for this year’s holiday party at the EMP’s Liquid Lounge, we tried to get “Nobody’s Fault” ready but it didn’t quite happen. However, we did find a tune that worked better: Jimi Hendrix’s “Little Wing.” It’s a gorgeous song, with lyrics that, while trippy, don’t get in the way of the beauty of the melody.

I learned the song from Sting’s version on his …Nothing Like the Sun album. His approach to the melody is more sympathetic with my vocal chords, so I’ll end up singing that version while George Bullock and my general manager, Tim Sinclair, do the axework. It should be fun.

I also get to sing backup on some Stones, Springsteen, and other tunes. If I have any vocal cords left by the end of the evening it’ll be a miracle.

All this is by partial apology for the light blogging this week. This has been one of two things keeping me busy. The other? You’ll have to wait another couple of days to find that one out.

BlogShares no more

As pointed out by Tony Pierce (see his “Nooooooo” at the bottom of the entry) and BoingBoing, BlogShares has gone the way of all websites. Seyed Razavi, BlogShares’ creator, says he came to the decision after recent technical difficulties illustrated for him that keeping the service online required an active developer and operator, and that revenues from the site were declining.

I enjoyed playing the game for a while, but recently only checked in on my portfolio once every few months.

Mellow birthday

Thanks to all for the birthday shoutouts, including Esta, Craig, and Tony Pierce.

It’s going to be a pretty mellow birthday. I’m not the same guy I was ten years ago, when I was bemoaning the fact that a stomach ulcer was keeping me from going out for my first adult beverage in a bar upon my legal majority. It’ll be a nice quiet night at home with my wife.

Of course, I’ll be out Saturday at the company Christmas party, and plan to do some singing (as part of the entertainment, not spontaneously) and some dancing (spontaneously, not intentionally as part of the entertainment), but that’s a whole ’nother story…

Update: Thanks also to George and Becky for the CD and the kind thoughts.

Peterson on Jefferson

I finally picked up Merrill Peterson’s biography of Jefferson again after putting it aside for almost a year. I’m glad I waited to start reading it again. The words Peterson wrote about Jefferson and his colleagues in the revolution are even more relevant today:

Jefferson’s progress from Virginia burgess to American revolutionist in seven years followed the main road of the patriot cause, beginning with the protective defense of traditional rights and liberties and ending with the radical ideology that became the birth-right and creed of a new nation. … In the course of asserting their claims within the empire, the colonists became increasingly disenchanted with the home government, distrustful of its designs, and anxious for the security of their own polities. They began to think for themselves and to search out their own identity …

If there are better words out there to describe what is happening in the blogosphere today, I don’t know them.

Happy Birthday, Tim

I’m using my long-neglected status as contributing editor at JHN to jump in and wish my brother an unmitigatedly happy birthday. All the best, Tim; you deserve it. In the words of Ogden Nash:

Year swallows year and licks its lips,
Then down the gullet of next year slips.

Cringely: Spreading FUD about TechNet

Interesting example of the fine art of FUD from pseudonymous columnist Robert X. Cringely. He takes a reader email about a problem searching TechNet, then extrapolates to say that Microsoft is removing value from TechNet to hobble small IT consultants so it can extract more revenue from that part of the market.

Um. Interesting theory, Mr. Cringely. Care to pass the tin foil?

All joking aside, Cringely’s fundamental argument stems from a badly constructed straw man. He claims that “TechNet appears to be broken.” What he actually says is that TechNet returns no results for a particular search string: "1010"+"perfctrs.dll"+"perflib". What he does not say is that if you search without the quotation marks or the pluses, the search returns some very relevant results, namely articles in the Knowledge Base at support.microsoft.com about the relevant events in the error log.

There is also a factual error. Cringely implies that we just recently changed the search engine behind TechNet, and that this was a move intended to “hobble TechNet and in so doing hurt its small to medium sized customers.” In fact, the new search engine has been in place since July, and provides search results for all of Microsoft.com.

The confusion about the search is forgiveable. We used to expose the big seams in our corporate web site by scoping searches by default, so that if you searched for something in a site (say the Windows site), you only got results if the content lived in the Windows site. TechNet’s scope happened to extend to the Knowledge Base, hence the customer’s statement that we used to return results. The big change from the customer perspective is that if you search anywhere on the site, you get results from everywhere on the site by default, broken down into categories. But we don’t interpret quotation marks and plus signs the same way Google does, so if you use the same search string in both search engines, you get different results.

But taking this misunderstanding about search functionality and blowing it up to say we’re out to screw our customers is fearmongering, at best.

Here are a few tips for searching Microsoft.com effectively so that you don’t fall prey to the same problems that Cringely had:

  • Provide more words than just the name of the product about which you have a question.
  • Try to avoid using extra punctuation, particularly extra quotes and plus signs.
  • Search results are returned in categories. If you’re looking for a download, it will be right at the top of the list, followed by troubleshooting info, product info, resources for technologists and developers, training and book info, resources for partners and other business professionals, information from our product newsgroups, and information about Microsoft the corporation. If any of the categories found more than three results for your search query, you can click to see the full list of results for that category.
  • If all else fails, the Advanced Search allows you to pick more explicit search options, including excluding words, focusing in on only one search category, or looking only at a specific site. There’s also help available.

Finally, if all else fails, it’s possible we don’t have the content—but one of our partners does. In that case, you could do worse than to use the Microsoft-focused search at Google.

NPR, phonecams, and Jones Turkey Soda

A whole bunch of memes collided on NPR the day before Thanksgiving. Xeni Jardin of BoingBoing and Wired was on talking about phonecams and Jones Turkey and Gravy Soda, among other things. On the show, NPR plugged the SENT exhibit of phonecam art, and announced a challenge to submit your favorite phonecam pix. Needless to say, I couldn’t resist sending in a slew of my own, including some from the Museum of Glass, the iPod Autopsy, and fall in Kirkland.

Regarding the Jones Turkey and Gravy Soda, I am sorry to report that I was too slow on the draw to actually find said soda before it disappeared from the store shelves, both on line and locally. Maybe next year, if they repeat the promotion. Judging from the prices of the soda on eBay, they definitely should.