Unconfirmed Reports

Australia, the film

I went and saw this at the cinema last night. It totally surpassed my expectations.

I had thought this film might be a bit silly, or somewhat schmaltzy. But in the event it was absolutely dreadful.

Spaz Luhrmann should have his citizenship revoked.

¶ Posted 05 January 2009 † John Mansfield § Normal ‡ Comments (0) °

Conversation is not Information

Over the last couple of weeks or two I have really been noticing a specifically male phenomenon: confusing conversation with information.

Some guys have a habit of constantly interjecting in conversation to air whatever knowledge they have on the topic at hand. It is an almost exclusively male habit - I wonder why? Maybe, like so many social pathologies, it’s simply to do with self-esteem: for males, being a wise and knowledgeable fellow seems to be a key source of self-worth - more so than for females.

On New Year’s Eve, there was one guy at the table who was just airing knowledge all night. Actually I like him, and think him an amiable person - but his conversational exchanges were limited, and made less entertaining, because he wasn’t really interacting so much as venting: I know this, this and this… and on that topic I know this.

I’m interested in what makes for good or bad conversation. I don’t think that intelligence or good-will are enough. There’s something else to do with being responsive, and making comments that have the characteristic of an exchange, rather than a speech. Information obviously has some role in conversation - but it’s usually the basis of short, functional dialogues. I think conversation that you enjoy is more about emotional exchange.

I started noticing this stuff because I think that I used to have the habit myself, of doing too much knowledge-recital in conversation. But I’ve been noticing it more and more in others (always males), and hopefully doing it less myself.

¶ Posted 02 January 2009 † John Mansfield § Normal ‡ Comments (1) °

Our collective descent into nonsense

Exhibit A:
At my workplace, the Health and Safety team recently installed bright yellow signs in our bathroom. The signs are placed just above the hot taps at the sinks, and read: “Warning: HOT WATER”.

Exhibit B:
I was checking out the latest in the Australian job market, and may have just found the most bullshit-laden sentence ever to appear in a job ad:

“Our value commitment to our clients and candidates is high level supportive engagement.”

(The bullshit-artist responsible works for recruitment company Q4 Executive Search. Check their “about us” spiel because in fact it is a masterpiece of corporate nonsense-speak and ludicrous stock photography.)

¶ Posted 28 December 2008 † John Mansfield § Normal ‡ Comments (0) °

Some useful words

To enrich the vocabulary of my readers, I present here a collection of Yiddish-based words beginning with “sch”. (NB - I think at least one of these is actually not Yiddish.)

These are all taken from the New Oxford American Dictionary.

schlemiel (also shlemiel)
• noun, informal: a stupid, awkward, or unlucky person.

schlepper (also shlepper)
• noun, informal: an inept or stupid person.

schlimazel (also schlemazel)
• noun, informal: a consistently unlucky or accident-prone person.

schlockmeister (also shlock-meister)
• noun, informal: a purveyor of cheap or trashy goods.

schlub (also shlub)
• noun, informal: a talentless, unattractive, or boorish person.

schlump (also shlump)
• noun, informal: a slow, slovenly, or inept person.

schmo (also shmo)
• noun (pl. schmoes), informal: a fool or a bore.

schmuck (also shmuck)
• noun, informal: a foolish or contemptible person.

schnook (also shnook)
• noun, informal: a person easily duped; a fool.

schnorrer (also shnorrer)
• noun, informal: a beggar or scrounger; a layabout.

¶ Posted 18 December 2008 † John Mansfield § Normal ‡ Comments (2) °

Oh How Doubly Ironic

I almost missed it, but last week there was another article by the Wall Street Journal’s “Numbers Guy” using some input from my language research activities.

Trends in stock prices are tracked by stock indexes. The Census tracks population trends. But how do we track trends in more amorphous quantities, such as the usage rate of a certain literary device or sensibility?

For a New York Times article evaluating author Joan Didion’s claim that irony was on the wane, Andy Newman used a newspaper database…

[…]

… Mansfield found a 12% decline in frequency of the word “irony” from 2000 to 2002, a 14% fall-off in “ironic” and a 16% drop in “ironically.”

“My guess would be that decreased usage of the word ‘irony’ simply means that it has receded as a general topic for cultural debate,” Mansfield said. “So perhaps the real story here, ironically, is that the New York Times story is about eight years behind the times.”

Read all about it here.

¶ Posted 10 December 2008 † John Mansfield § Normal ‡ Comments (3) °

Frozen Wee-Wee

This morning there was a puddle of frozen wee-wee next to our front gate. That brightened up my day.

¶ Posted 08 December 2008 † John Mansfield § Normal ‡ Comments (0) °

Christmas Cheere (or not)

We are back in deepest winter now, and the Christmas period fully upon us. It is two years now since, one glum winter in London, I began to realise how Christmas traditions are connected with the cold, dark, northern winter.

We haven’t had any snow to speak of, but today the world was comprehensively frozen. I went down to the allotment, and the water in the water butt had a cap of ice three centimetres thick on top. I had a karate-kid like desire to break the thick ice by punching it, and did so, which was satisfying but a bit painful as well. The spider-web cracks I made in the ice were beautiful. I tried to do some actual work in the allotment, but the ground was frozen solid, so there wasn’t any point. Continue Reading »

¶ Posted 07 December 2008 † John Mansfield § Normal ‡ Comments (1) °

Waltz with Bashir

Reading the world news, I am often appalled by the actions of the Israeli armed forces. In fact, I’ve got a firm, recurrent irritation going on… and I sometimes wonder if I could be accused, then, of being anti-Semitic. Of course, I would retort that I am not against Jewish people in general, but more specifically against some particular actions and policies of the State of Israel. Perhaps, though, my accuser would respond that the State of Israel is the ultimate expression of Jewish identity, or Jewish destiny, so that to be against Israel is to be against Jews, and ispo facto anti-Semitic.
Continue Reading »

¶ Posted 23 November 2008 † John Mansfield § Normal ‡ Comments (2) °

Farming practices may decrease rainfall

A pretty amazing finding cropped up in the news today - though it’s all a bit tendentious at present.

drought Australia

The unusual geographic effect of the rabbit-proof fence in Western Australia has revealed to scientists that modern farming practices - apparently - lead to less rainfall on the farmed side of the fence. Maybe we have more to do with the drought than we’d like to accept?

¶ Posted 15 November 2008 † John Mansfield § Normal ‡ Comments (0) °

The Night-thoughts Database

In my dream last night I discovered that all our night-time thoughts and feelings are recorded somewhere as plain-text files in a giant database. If we go to the correct location to access these files in the morning, we can check up on correspondences between our own night-thoughts and those of others, thus establishing the truth of human relationships in our daytime lives.

Fat man singing
This man was not in the dream

So I went to the place for accessing records. It was a large brown office building in the centre of a big city. The foyer was very luxuriant, with a high ceiling, chandalier, and antique wooden floorboards. I waited a while, along with a range of wealthy businessmen. While I was waiting, a television showed the morning news, which featured a government announcement. The government described how they were going to restructure the taxation system, because they need to make it “more flexible”. I knew that the government in this city were notoriously corrupt, so I took this as nothing more than an excuse to do something scandalous. Continue Reading »

¶ Posted 14 November 2008 † John Mansfield § Normal ‡ Comments (1) °