Clothes, Language, and Thought

Got to add this quotation to my collection:

"Language is not a cloak following the contours of thought. Languages are molds into which infant minds are poured." Brown and Lenneberg "A Study in Language and Cognition" (1954)

Queens Tour

(Photo by Wy-dogg)


18 stops in 10 hours:

1. 5 Pointz
2. NY Art Book Fair (Wyeth knew everyone here)
3. Titanic House (videotaping and still photography are permitted)
4. Scrabble Street (though we couldn't find the sign, we found the street)
5. Taste Good Malaysian Cuisine (you may not be allowed to take pictures of their toilet, but they serve the best food I've had in NYC so far this year)
6. Bohack "B" (this was for Wyeth)
7. Bumped into Kevin Walsh leading a Forgotten-NY tour that was also looking at the Bohack "B"
8. Van der Ende-Onderdonk House
(almost stepped in a horse-sized pile of dog shit, the house was uncharacteristically full of people for a special event, our tour guide was upset that he hadn't gotten to meet the Dutch royal family, and they didn't even mention the house's role in the Apollo space program)
9. Arbitration Rock
(the history of moving this rock led Will to make some Wittgenstein-ish "what happens if standard meter bar shrinks or expands" jokes)
10. Archie Bunker's House (neither Will nor Alex had heard of "All in the Family")
11. Detour to Forest Hills because I mistyped the address for Louis Armstrong's house into Google Maps. But when I then mistakenly got into someone else's car and tried to drive away, everyone thought that was really funny.
12. Loew's Valencia/Tabernacle of Prayer (gonna have to go back to this on a Sunday, in order to see the interior)
13. Louis Armstrong's House
(wish I had recorded our tour guide's impression of Louis)
14. The Panorama at the Queens Museum of Art (still planning to throw a party in the elevator here)
15. Unisphere (took some photos for our liner notes)
16. Joseph Cornell's House (this was for Meg)
17. ToyQube Designer Toys
18. Taiwanese Karaoke Gastropub
(there was some serious sense/reference confusion going on when I re-entered this place from another restaurant around the corner, thinking I was going into a different gastropub; this was especially funny because I had just falsely told the host out front that I thought my friends were in the back, which turned out to be true)

Our soundtrack was a homemade CD of songs by jazz artists who lived in Queens, and then a CD each of Run DMC and the Ramones.

I think it is fair to say that I am in the upper echelons of tour guides.

He must then launch the stairs far.

PJ's been going through his old emails, and he came across the following, which I created and sent to him in mid-July 2001:

My proposals are elucidatory in this way: it who understands me finally recognises them as dull.

Now to think of following the use of language: I send it commercial (the commercial shipment). I give a shipment marked 'five lipsticks of mele' to the shopkeeper. The shopkeeper opens the marked drawer 'the apples', tries the word 'the rossetto', and finds colors contrary it; then I, in the eventuality that he knows to memory the word 'the cinq', become the champion by taking an apple of similar colours to the sample out of the drawer.

JFK Conspiracy Books Mentioned in 'Slacker'

Rush to Judgment by Mark Lane
Best Evidence by David Lifton
Six Seconds in Dallas by Josiah Thompson
Forgive My Grief by Penn Jones Jr.

And, of course, the JFK buff mentions his own (fictional) work-in-progress, which will be titled either "Profiles in Cowardice" or "Conspiracy a Go Go".

Soft Landing

There are no roads to Ambunti, so I had to fly on this missionary supply plane in order to get there. There were pretty serious weight restrictions; they actually weighed me before I got on. In the bottom photo, you can see the Ambunti airstrip. It was a surprisingly smooth landing.

Adios 304

After a two year break, I finally made it back into 304 this summer. It was great as always.

I now have five flights and a canoe ride ahead of me, in order to visit some peeps.

Then seven flights and a bus ride in order to have a little color party and CTY reunion.

Greatest Moment this Summer

My favorite moment this summer may well have been when one of my students asked about one of the final shots in "Fast, Cheap, and Out of Control". The shot is of a row of female circus performers balancing precariously on large rolling spheres. My student's initial response to these shots was to think that they were either (a) completely random, introduced only to give the movie the appearance of whimsical fancy, or (b) completely gratuitous, introduced only to depict a number of scantily clad women playing with large balls. However, in the context of our discussion, as we noted various externalist themes running throughout the movie, this shot immediately struck me as central for understanding the precarious nature of feedback loops (or tightly coupled systems more generally). And I immediately thought of more than a few similar shots in the movie that reinforce this same exact point.