I Can Eat Glass; It Does Not Hurt Me

Time for another e-mail, this one from Will, who probably needs to cut back on coffee...

Do you know other languages? If so, did you learn the other languages using books on tape? I'm seriously thinking of studying Mandarin using books on tape, but if it's an idea that's fraught with failure, I don't want to waste my time. I have this friend who memorized "hello" in a bunch of different languages so that he could say hello to everyone he met. Do you have a phrase that you memorize in as many languages as possible? Is it something like, "i'm not a spy" or maybe something more subtle like, "i like martinis"?

Um, yeah. I speak English and Russian fluently. I can speak Kyrgyz, Uzbek, Ukranian, a little bit of Tajik, and a lot of what I like to call "Bus Driver Spanish". The State Department uses the Rosetta Stone software for teaching foreign languages, and I hear it works pretty well. There's one big difference between what we do and what the State Department does:

People from the State Department don't hide the fact that they're American.

See, you can become fluent in a language and still sound nothing like a native speaker. Think about the accents in this country. There's a Southern accent and a Midwestern accent and a Boston accent... you can tell where somebody's from by the way they enunciate and pronounce their words. And you can tell if they aren't a native speaker. The same is true of any other language. If you learn Russian here, then head over to Moscow and start speaking, the people there will look at you and think, "Why is he speaking Russian with an American accent?" It's a bit of a dead giveaway.... the sort of thing that gets you a bullet to the head.

In order to sound the part, you need to get immersed, deep, with a native speaker, so you can pick up the accent. You need to learn how to shape the words... Russian is spoken from the back of the mouth (try it), but you also need to learn the slang and the mannerisms and patterns of speech. So the short answer is that we've got a system that works, but it's not feasible nor useful for John Q. Public.

As for memorizing a phrase in every language, I haven't done anything like that. But back in the day some kid at Harvard, who is probably a street mime or something similar now, compiled a list of ways to say "I can eat glass; it does not hurt me" in as many languages as possible. I found a copy of it here, on this website with an atrociously ugly background

So Much For That, Huh?

So, shortly after promising to update this more often, I seemingly abandoned it. But it wasn't entirely my fault.

I have been in Murmansk running errands which are beneath me. For those who don't know, Murmansk really shouldn't exist. It's above the Arctic Circle, so depending on when you go it can be either dark all the time or light all the time (perfect for messing up sleep cycles), and there are no trees. It's also cold... even in August, you are lucky if the temperature rises above 50° Naturally, I spent about two weeks there.

I can't really get into what went on, but suffice to say it wasn't very important. Like I said, a lot of errand running and paperwork that could have been handled by anyone. I don't like to think of myself as superior to others, but there are definitely more important matters I could be attending to. This is their way of easing me back into duty after being grounded.

Oh yes, did I mention I was grounded? Yeah, everyone who was in Bakhchisaray got shelved for a month. We all got to take a whole bunch of wonderful psych tests, which we apparently all passed, but we still got to sit around for another two weeks with nothing to do and everyone walking around on eggshells. Oh, it was great. Just what we needed after having our friend cut up... to sit around on our hands doing nothing. I ended up blowing off work completely for a couple of days... nobody raised an eyebrow. The weather has been nice, so one day I took the bus downtown and just did a walkabout. Ended up watching the new phenom Felix Hernandez at Safeco that night. I picked up the new Madden and played it into the ground. Matty and I had a little tournament over the weekend, Keith and Andy from Tech Ops came over, too... I beat them all soundly, mostly because I had a week head start on the game and because when you control the Seahawks you can prevent Matt Hasselbeck from making stupid mistakes and K-Rob actually catches the ball when it's thrown to him.

We were planning on going to see Hernandez pitch again (walk-up sales are awesome), but that morning, boom, I'm off to Murmansk. I got back on Sunday and have been trying to get reaccustomed to a concept called nighttime.

Someone e-mailed me some questions while I was gone, so I guess I will answer them over the next couple of days.

The Metric System

Folks at work know how much I hate the metric system. It's one of my pet peeves. Imperial measurements were just fine, weren't they? I mean, back in the day, there were things like bushels and feet and pounds and things like that. And these measurements arose from practical situations... a foot is more or less the size of your foot. Naturally people had different size feet, but at some point everyone got together and decided how big the "de facto" foot was going to be, and it was standardized. But things made sense if you knew the history. Then the French had to come along and ruin everything with the metric system. Give them credit: they did it before the industrial revolution came along, otherwise they'd never have gotten away with it. And nowadays, the "metric system" is really the International System of Units, but we still call it the metric system, and it's still derived from the meter. And do you know what a meter is? It's not the distance from a man's hand to his shoulder, or anything useful like that. A meter is defined as the distance traveled by light in a vacuum in 1/299,792,458 of a second. If that's not enough, a second is defined as "the duration of 9,192,631,770 periods of the radiation corresponding to the transition between the two hyperfine levels of the ground state of the cesium-133 atom at 0 °K".

The first question most people have is: why is this a big deal to you? Well, part of it is that we're defining standard in everyday use in a manner such that the average person could never understand them. But that's not my real problem. My problem is that everyone else in the world uses the metric system except the United States. Which means that every damned time I talk about how much someone weighs, or how fast I'm going, I have to convert the damned units in my head. Think about it... if I'm undercover in the Ukraine, and I start talking about feet and miles... isn't that a bit of a dead giveaway? And I'm not even that good at metric conversion. Targets aren't about fifty feet away, they're about sixteen meters away. Of course, no one would be as exact as to guess "about 16 meters", so after the conversion, I have to do another conversion. And forget about Fahrenheit and Celsius. I just say "hot" or "cold" now.

Give me an alias, and I have no trouble responding to it. Give me a backstory, and I have no problem making it my own. Give me a unit of measurement, and I'm completely lost.

Back

I have to confess this: I wasn't going to continue with this journal. I wasn't sure what the point is. First, it doesn't seem like anyone reads it, except for that one random person who posted a comment. Second, it's not like anyone who reads this thinks that it's real. They probably look at it and laugh at what a joke it all is. The guy who e-mailed all of those questions certainly seems to think it is. Does anyone actually think Copithorne is a real guy? Of course not. So it didn't seem like there was much point in continuing.

At the same time, things have been pretty crappy in my life lately, and I really didn't know the proper way to express that in this forum. Sometimes I read other "blogs", and they're full of seventeen year olds whining about how their parents are Nazis, or how some guy they liked blew them off or some other mundane triviality that affects their lives. And I realized that a lot of time, a journal is just therapy. You write about what's going on, and even if you can't express yourself very well (or even in coherent sentences), at least you're getting something off your chest, and somehow it feels better.

I'm going to try to be more diligent in updating this journal, both the good and the bad, the exciting and the mundane. No promises, but that's the hope.

On another note, it's good to see the folks in that submarine were rescued. The water in the PK harbor is pretty cold even in August... I can't imagine the open sea around Kamchatka is any warmer. It's also good to see the U.S. and Japan getting involved in saving Russians. The Japanese and Russians still haven't formally ended World War II, and many Russians still don't trust America, so it's nice that we're all working together even on something as short-term as this.