(no subject)

tuesday night i had chorus rehearsal for the first time in about a month and a half. we watched excerpts from a video of mlada, which was pretty entertaining. those wacky russians... yesterday i went to see noam chomsky in his second of two talks at zellerbach. i think people who went the day before must have been scared off, because i doubt the place was even half full, this after the free tickets were gone pretty much instantly. after the talk i understood though, cuz man is he a dull speaker. barely inflected, unanimated, meandering... he was pretty good in the question/answer though, so i decided to go to the special secret linguistics dept seminar today on the theory that he might do better with a smaller group. and yes, he did do better, but not a whole lot. he was poorly mic'ed and barely audible; however, his talk was more intelligible. he was speaking mostly extemporaneously from some notes he rarely looked at. not unexpectedly, he didn't do any better with the meandering. and when he finished and took some questions, boy howdy did he tangent nonstop. when george lakoff asked a question, he starting making faces after chomsky had gone off for like 10 minutes on things that had very little if anything to do with his question, but eventually chomsky came back to the original point, amazingly enough. he was fairly amusing to listen to i thought. seems to like to hear himself speak and likes to drop all sorts of references from other disciplines, but not in an obnoxious way. (obnoxious like searle, for example.) even when chomsky is telling you that something is self-evident and you are a fool if you don't see that, somehow it doesn't really seem overly condescending. at least in my limited exposure today.

i was thinking of trying to make it to kristie's noon yoga class tomorrow, but at this rate i don't think it's going to happen. maybe i will just go stuff things at the burning man office some more. although what i really need to be doing is washing the mounds of dishes piling up in my kitchen and going through my mail and other useful stuff like that. maybe i will take this saturday off and not go out and spend the evening in taking care of business...

oh, apparently i placed 5th in my division in the art song category at the nats thing. out of how many, i have no clue.

going to the chomsky seminar today actually made me vaguely motivated to try to work on the paper i'm supposed to someday turn in for my incomplete in ling220. and hey, i've got lots of free time and am in need of goal-oriented activities... stranger things have happened, i'm sure.

02:21