The professional hazards of a linguist: Chomsky

One of the professional hazards of being a linguist is being asked what you think of Chomsky.* I never have a good answer because we didn’t actually study Chomsky in school. The linguistics department at Rice does what’s called ‘functional linguistics’, and Chomsky is ‘formal linguistics’. The names have to do with having different opinions […]

Adventures in fermentation

A while back I started making kombucha, and this is bascially a bunch of meanderings from my first three months of experience with it (mostly for my reference). I took a class at People’s Co-op given by Dori Oliver of Nourishing Foodways, and I use her recipe and simple 5-step process, and also received a […]

The importance of being afoot

On Sunday I injured my left foot walking off a walkway. It was one of those freak accidents where you just land wrong. The friend whose house I was at told me I sounded remarkably calm when I told her that I thought I had hurt my foot more badly than the routine “Whoops, I […]

Something I don’t like: my laptop

I got my laptop last summer from ZaReason. It’s a Strata Pro 13 that came pre-installed with Ubuntu Linux 10. Although it does basically work, I’ve had a lot of trouble with it. First of all, I dropped it when it was about a day old. That’s not ZaReason’s fault, but once I sent it […]

Fat focus

I went to an event at Metro tonight with Richard Jackson. The event was supposed to be about his work on Retrofitting Suburbia, but if that got discussed it was after I left. Mostly it was about how people are fat and it’s because we aren’t active anymore (and a little about how that’s related […]

Depression management

Some time ago I wrote a post about my experiences with depression (dysthymia) and with therapy and how it had really helped me. At the time I was only six months or so out from the end of regular therapy. The legacy of that work is definitely lasting, but in the years since I’ve also […]

Why I’m an Options Ambassador

PBOT’s Transportation Options division is recruiting for new outreach volunteers — Options Ambassadors — for 2012. A few weeks ago Andrew at PBOT asked me if I would be willing to share why I volunteer with Options as part of their recruitment. I think my response is slated for a brochure or email because I […]