New words. New vocabulary encountered reading online

Try your hand. Give it a go. 

I do very well with all the word things. My family likes to play games while I do not. Nevertheless to be with them I play these games such as scrabble. One evening we were playing with the wife of my younger brother's best friend. She kept questioning my entries. She kept looking them up. I entered EDILE, she looked it up. I told her what it means. She asked me how I know such a word. I told her how I know it. My mother said, "We learned to just trust him." 

I think that is so sweet.

They went through that. They looked up every weird thing that I entered too. But that's the thing; I don't know what is weird and what is ordinary anymore. 

Another time my family from the east coast was visiting. They were all at my parent's house assembled to do something. Dad was doing a crossword at the breakfast table and he kept asking me questions of the filler sort. I said, "Come on, Dad, ask us some hard ones." 

The two adjoining rooms were filled with people, all at once they each said, "N-o-o-o-o-o." 

I did not know they were listening. I thought they were each doing their own thing. But they were listening and they wanted easy questions, not hard ones. ALL my relatives wanted easy questions. I didn't even know they were trying. I thought that whole thing was between Dad and me. What a bunch of intruders.

Still, everyday, there are quite a lot of words encountered that I do not know. I'm telling you, sometimes I think people pull words out of their butt. Especially all those fer'ner words. 

These are the new ones since the last time I did this elsewhere. It's getting to be a big pile, and this pile gets added to the previous pile that's been going on like this for years, decades actually, through three laptop computers. 

Here goes:

* abseil: To rappel. (Mountaineering) a descent of a vertical cliff or wall made by using a doubled rope that is fixed to a higher point and wrapped around the body. Lower oneself with a rope coiled around the body from a mountainside.

It's a dream gig for anyone with a distaste for staid office jobs, as well as an excellent grasp of plantsmanship and the ability to abseil the battlements of a castle.

* affiant: someone who makes a sworn statement. US term for the person who makes a voluntary declaration of facts in a written statement and signs it under oath. The equivalent UK term is deponent. See also affidavit. 

“I was not the affiant,” Rosenstein protested to a questioner in a congressional committee.

* aggress: To make an attack; commit the first act of hostility or offense; begin a quarrel or controversy; hence, to act on the offensive. To encroach; to intrude; be or become intrusive.

The Sage of Scranton: "Is It Too Late to Aggress Climate Change?"

* allopathic: Allopathic medicine, or allopathy, refers to science-based, modern medicine, such as the use of medications or surgery to treat or suppress symptoms or the ill effect of disease. 

Allopathic Vs Osteopathic 

Osteopaths treat conditions with medical treatments as well as manipulation and massage of muscles, bones, and joints. In the United States osteopathic doctors are licensed physicians and surgeons. 

Ostopathic doctors must pass the same national board exams that all physicians do. They have the same residency training programs as other doctors. Osteopathic doctors have the title DO instead of MD 

She is best known for her integrative approach using complementary, functional and allopathic medicine, creating a unique treatment plan for each individual patient.

* autarky: A policy of national self-sufficiency and non-reliance on imports or economic aid. A self-sufficient region or country. Economic independence as a national policy.

In American terms, Trump’s supposedly quixotic effort to decouple key industries from China will no longer be the stuff of bemused scorn, but the new orthodoxy, with obvious advantages for the United States in terms of autonomy and autarky of life-sustaining goods—not to mention U.S. jobs.

That' it for the A's. 

Aquarium babies

Neon tetras are not particularly difficult to breed so long as a few basic requirements are met regarding softness of water and its associated pH. Soft, soft, soft, filtered, filtered, filtered, reverse osmosis, whatever.

I have a 10-stage tower type water filter in the kitchen used for the aquarium and for the garden and the neon tetras frolic and play. 

The thing is, this happened before in an aquarium with r/o water and the bright blue line on the body of the tiny little baby in the grass stuck out like a ... like a ... neon light. Poor thing. Gave itself away trying to hide.

While these babies do not shine like that. 

Their distressing lack of shine has me disbelieving these are actual neon tetras. 



I had to turn up the camera's ISO in order to get pictures. This particular camera requires higher ISO and this particular lens requires higher ISO, so double whammy there, plus it is very dim and the aquarium light should do it, but it doesn't, so very high ISO it is. 

This is what happens with high ISO. It's like film with high speed grain. The sensitivity is turned up so each tiny sensor gets information from its neighbors. Information leakage all over the place. This is 1:1, right here to show how indistinct the image due to this sharing. This is what high ISO does to an image. See? Photography education right here.





Okay, so how can you even form a sharp picture of a fish with all those scrambled dots all over the place? 





This tank is extremely active, the groups settle down to sleep while individuals remain active. It is the most active community that I've ever had. And I've had some great communities. But this one is like NYC. It's driving me a bit nuts watching them. Especially the Boesemani rainbows are particularly sexually active. In groups. The two large ones are gay. The smaller younger ones are working it out. They intermingle. The old gays come out of character and intermingle with the young straights and then return to their flirting and posing and mating rituals. 

The tank is trying to be like sunken ancient Alexandria Egypt. But it is too overrun with statues and with plants and with fish. Both statues and plants must be thinned. It has too many Chia Pet rams pretending to be Egyptian ram sphinxes. They are too close together. With everything else piled up in between and now with plants obscuring everything, it's more like a dumped pile of Egyptian ceramic artifacts. Those orange things are Chia Pet rams and the dark thing leaning against one of the Chias is the back of Horus falcon. Nothing can be seen because everything is obscured by plants that cannot be seen for being covered with algae. That gets rubbed off but grows back. More slowly each time. Like the tank is balancing over time. It started out everything brand new to prevent snail infestation, including plants from tissue samples, and this is the price that I am paying for that.

Along the way babies are born. Neons. The touchy precious little things. 

I am very very glad that my neon tetras are breeding in my community tank. While the other fish are sexing it up even more than they are but so far to no production. 

Pumped Up Kicks

This kid is so cool I can't stand it. It's the way he uses his finger-gun. This is facile use of a common sign extending its usual function to fit this song. I really enjoyed watching his interpretation. Very serious. Focused. Tight. On point. On time. On the beat. Then his older brother barges in and totally messes him up, reveals the situation of zero privacy in family situation, then boyish playing and goofs and bloopers that blow the whole original seriousness but not its original coolness.

And I am taken back in time to my own family and my own brothers and sisters totally messing me up while also providing my entire nurturing environment that allowed me to pursue outside interests to my heart's contentment. Thank you, family, for all that you gave me.

About that gun.

All the other kids with their pumped up kicks, you better run, better run, outrun my gun.

All the other kids with their pumped up kicks, you better run, better run faster than my bullet.

Pumped up kicks is improved sneakers. They had best run faster than a bullet. 


We must see all the other kids with improved sneakers. And we must see "better run," in a race, faster than his gun. Then repeat, the second time faster than a bullet. I need to see "better" and I need to see a race between the improved sneakers people first between a gun and then between a bullet. But I do not see all those things. All of it. Not just the main part of it. This refrain is repeated. 

We see "gun" and we see something move past the gun and that's it. Very abbreviated. 

Do you see a "rolled cigarette" or just a regular cigarette?

The sign used here for "kid" means to joke or tease. The sign for kid like a child is one of those unusual signs that moves outside the customary space, the hand moves to the side of the body and indicates the top of the head of an invisible little kid standing there. You can indicate the supposed age by the height or the level of your hand.  So, he says, "cowboy-jest" not "cowboy-boy." But he did say "kid" in sign. See how that works? It messes you up. His sign for "kid" fits the concept-cloud for joke, tease, jest in that language, but he is using it from his English concept-cloud that includes child, boy, girl, lad, lass, tot. It's a clash of the concept-clouds involving the word "kid." The interpreter will have to do "cowboy hat - child," and stand there momentarily embodying that persona and the two concepts ring through -- the Cowboy Kid.

For Korean pop dance level of excellence the interpreter will have to show everything in the lyrics, show the phrase the moment it is spoken, have key words hit on point, but this student does not. However, he does indicate what the song is about and he keeps up phrase for phrase, and does very well graphically. I like the coolness of this boy quite a lot.

Tents in the city

Denver Colorado. Democrat governor, Jared Polis, Democrat mayor, Michael Hancock.

The middle of July a friend and I took Lyft to the Woods restaurant in RiNo, a tasteful outdoor thing going on at the edge of town looking back onto the town and outwardly to the mountains. It's neato-mosquito and all the super cool kids go. You get out of their goofy elevators and walk a l-o-n-g hallway lined with kegs stacked on thick heavy keg-holders. You get the impression that they serve an awful lot of various beer. 

     "I bet you ten dollars they're empty."

Tap tap tap. Hollow. 

On the way back we took stock of damage of protests, not that bad really, but right before we get to my apartment we must pass by Civic Park and the other park on the other side of Broadway and Lincoln to the capitol all completely covered with tents. 

This is a first for us lifelong Denver residents. 

Think about your tent. Using it in the city. They are doing this.

We discussed this so far as possible in a cab two blocks from my home. Too bad. So sad. So much to think. So much to say. So much to analyze. So much to prioritize. So very much to sort.

Then within the next two days they were gone. 

Entirely.

From the capitol parks. 

It's a really cool area. Very well taken care of. Site of very many civic activities through the summer, all seasons actually, all held up now because of Covid-19 and because of political upheaval, and these tents. 

Within the next two days all the tents had been cleared out.

Just like that.

Within the next few days the tent-people moved two blocks south and set up on the thin strip of grass that line the sidewalks to the Denver Art Museum. I suppose they did this in other directions as well.

This thin strip of grass is the spot in the area where dog owners throughout walk their pets. To poop. I can guarantee that every single square inch of grass was at one time topped with dog poo. Now the tents are covering all the dog poop spots. 

See, the Covid thing is a health hazard. Presumably. The Tent-people are creating another health hazard on top of that. Definitely. On top of the dogs, and adding their own.

And Denver takes care of its indigent and its homeless. We are extremely liberal people. We take care of one another with impressive kindness and understanding. We talk about this kind of crap all the time. All the time. Constantly. Food drives. Clothing drives. Coat drives. Canned goods drive. Stupid shit you have in your pantry drives, Mistakes you made that you'd like to inflict on others drive. Ski equipment drives, hang glider drives, mountain climbing equipment drives. We are insanely good-hearted people. Interested in your wellbeing.

Pages

Blog Archive