Fugato

It’s official now. My brother and sis-in-sorta-law, Gunni and Karen, are expecting another … and another!

He called this morning after the first sonogram session: “A bit of news. There’s two.”

Seems hardly fair: lots of couples have trouble conceiving, and then these two just barely need to even think about it and whizbang, the corn starts popping. Now they’re even rolling’em out in pairs.

That’s not their twins on the right. It is a sonogram of twins, just not their twins. Update: I’ve finally put up ultrasound images of the real dynamic duo!

Nice going G&K! Given the cuteness of your first-born Baldur Fróði, I’ll just say the more the merrier … and I pledge to be of more assistance. I suspect you’ll find use for that. :)

Freyr — “it begins with an R” was enough encouragement to send me off on a divine mission to resolve The Freaky Fruit Inquiry.

I spoke this:

“obscure fruit” red

into our Lord and Savior, the recently-publicly-offered Great Oracle Of Geeks, Loiterers, and Everyone, and the fifth result had an inviting little R-word in it.

Here’s almost certainly more than you ever wanted to know about rambutans, including the names of their many varieties, such as “lebakbooloos.” The Malay word “rambut” means hair. Makes sense. More sense than “lebakbooloos” anyway.

Freyr, what store was that? I want one of these!

Yeah. What is this?

Þar sem ég sat yfir hafragrautnum mínum á Menningarnæturmorgun og las yfir Morgunblöð síðustu daga hnaut ég um eina myndasöguna. Já, ég les myndasögur og verður ekki sérstaklega meint af, enda þegar sæmilega staffær. En myndasögurnar eru sá hluti Morgunblaðsins sem líklegastur er til að ná athygli þeirra sem enn eru að berjast við að ná tökum á íslenskri tungu. Ef þau eiga einhvers staðar að geta gengið að áreiðanlegri heimild um þá tungu, þá er það í Morgunblaðinu.

Víkur nú sögunni að Lalla lánlausa, sem um fjallar á síðu 44 í blaði síðasta fimmtudags. Þar er talað um að „klyfra fjall.“

Höfuðið er þarna nagað af skömminni af áfergju og kjamsað á, því að sá sem talar er einmitt grunnskólakennari. Hann bisar við að fá lánlausan nemanda sinn (téðan Lalla) til „að klyfra það fjall sem margföldunartaflan er“. Ef Lalli nemur íslensku hjá sama manni, þá er ekki að furða að honum sækist námið treglega.

Á sömu síðu birtir blaðið „Orð dagsins“ og svo vill til að þau eru:

Ég er góði hirðirinn og þekki mína, og mínir þekkja mig. (Jh.. 10, 14.)

Ég vildi einmitt meina að ég þekkti Morgunblaðið sem betri hirði en þetta. Myndasögurnar eru kannski ekki hámenningarlegasta efni blaðsins, en þar liggur samt allra mest við að beita málinu rétt. Í öðru efni skaða svona axarsköft þó aðeins orðstír blaðsins en ekki brothætta málkennd óreyndra lesenda. Prófarkalestur er varla nokkurs staðar fljótlegri en einmitt í myndasögunum. Því miður sjást stundum dæmi þess að hann farist þar fyrir.

My once-removed cousin Sigurður just visited the Apple dealership in Reykjavík to get Icelandic language support installed on his Mac (bought in the US, where he lives). To get that, they made him buy a full copy of Mac OS X Panther (which he already had on his machine; the box wasn’t even opened to install the language support), for kr. 15,000 (about $210). He was in a hurry, so he just took that beating like a man.

This hardly requires much discussion. I was beginning to consider the prospect of trying out a Mac (now that they finally have an actual operating system) but, nah. I’m not going to deal with these people!

There’s too much to do
And not nearly enough time
To get it all done

— Peter Provost

Ain’t that the truth.

Poets tend to be afflicted with an uncontrollable need to obscure the point they are making. Being direct or clear is not cool, and certainly not artistic. If you write a poem and people understand it right away, you lose. You have to stay ahead of them, maintain the edge, deny them the gratification of “getting it”. You need to keep them forever in the dark, out of the loop, unsatisfied. That’s why the leading cause of death among poets is hunger. (It would be ethanol-induced liver failure if they could afford it)

It is also the reason this haiku had to be written by a software engineer (a field in which the statement of the haiku is particularly apt, incidentally) and not by a poet. The haiku is a simple truth. Peter was talking about moving, but it applies just as well to life in general. Granted, it is still trivial, but being a software engineer Peter enjoys the luxury of low expectations when it comes to poetry.

All of the above is pleasantly beside the point. (I’m being artistically unclear, can you tell?) The point I haven’t been making is that people somehow always assign more value to agreeable façades than forthrightness. I want to try to work that tendency off. I like people who are forthright.

Today I met a piano technician, Kristinn, who turned out to be a friend of several former students of mine. It came up in conversation that I had taught a course in electrical engineering; he asked which one, I told him, and he said something like “Oh, isn’t that supposedly a horribly dry, boring one?”

Somehow my students never got around to telling me that directly! :-)

He did recant a little, saying he wasn’t sure that was the one they mentioned, but hey — it’s an introductory class on the mathematics involved in signal processing and control systems. Does that sound sexy to you? (If it actually does, then you are probably thinking about different types of signals, and possibly a different type of control.) And it has a seriously hefty workload. Most likely he is thinking of the right one.

I have tried to pop it up a little with entertaining sidenotes in lectures, but apparently I need to do more. Do stand-up comedy. Write my lectures as replacement lyrics to Guns N’ Roses songs and karaoke them. Have the graded assignments handed out by “my lovely assistants Lisa and Natasha” (electrical-engineering students being mostly male and overwhelmingly sex-starved). I have to work on this angle. Classes start in a couple of weeks, I’m running out of time! But at least now I know what needs doing. Thanks to Kristinn, who is forthright.

Late last night, we launched the new website we’ve been making, for the bank I work for. We’ve been working on it rather long and rather hard, especially in this last stretch, and we’re damned proud of it, and it looks great, and it’s accessible to the blind and visually impaired, and it’s finally live. We celebrated with beers at a pub (whiskey for me; beer is from the devil) and then straight to bed, beat.

This morning, all kinds of people congratulating us on the new web. Even the hard-to-please graphics artists and web-designer types raving about it in online forums. Relief, minor tweaks and fixes, bliss, relaxation, laughs. Wine-and-cheese baskets delivered to our office. Lunch with the rest of the IT department at the patio outside their offices. Fresh pineapple and melon in the blazing sun; one of the warmest, sunniest days ever recorded in Iceland. (So were the previous several days, but we mostly missed them)

And then my phone rings: my piano has arrived. I’ve been waiting for it all summer. Got it delivered this afternoon. Beautiful tone, beautiful touch. I’ve never fallen as quickly as this; I love it dearly. My neighbors less so, I’m sure. But it has silencing equipment: flip one lever and the hammers don’t hit the strings so there’s no sound other than you tapping the keys — except of course from the headphones. So I get to play it all night if I want.

Dinner on the sidewalk outside a café in the evening sun with family; “supernachos”, sandwich assortment, white wine, pecan pie. My nephew being his cute two-year-old self and enthusing about nearby cars and motorbikes. A huge gob of bird shit sploshed all over the guy on the next table … not me! Centertown astrew with skirt-clad women who are all kinds of beautiful. Harley Davidson folks out in force; when you wait to cross the street, they are the ones who stop for you.

Got back home. Played Albeniz and Bach/Busoni and Shostakovich for as long as my energy lasted. Went out and bought oatmeal. Got back and played some more.

Dayaaamn, this was a good day. If my body would let me get away with it, I’d stay up and make it a double.