UFR: Downy flakes

I'm beginning to realise that this medium works best when I treat it like a sketchbook: Quick, fresh impressions in the style of watercolours or pencil drawings. Trying to compose longer entries after long gaps just doesn't seem to work as well. However, if you feel dinked out of an entry I promised and never delivered, let me know and I shall seek to make amends.

When I heard "light snow" on the radio, I expected the desultory flurries of a week ago. I certainly didn't anticipating looking out my window at a parkscape blanketed in white. I would've liked to have gotten up early and explored it, but I was sleeping off my last opera night of the season (thanks again, e., for your wonderful companionship) and barely made it to work on time.

Rushing down Argyle, I was struck by how free of snow it was. Just a little slush in the gutter and...big flakes at the intersection with Winthrop? Wait, those aren't flakes, they're...feathers? Chicken feathers. strewn all about. Many seemed to be spilling from a white, pillowcase-sized cloth bag; I didn't want to think about what else might be in there. Near the opposite corner were...a sheet and a blanket? Someone's bedding? Or is this how the transport the live chickens to local restaurants?

Oh, and in front of the corner convenient where drunks and bums tend to hang out, a man standing in front of a boom car suddenly and silently thrust something at me. I immediately recognised it as a campaign button (primary elections in Illinois today) and turned it down without noticing who it was from. Might want to work on your solicitation technique, buddy!

One-minute Arabic lesson

Okay, not to denigrate anyone's responses to the last couple of "terrorism" threads (I'm actually very grateful for so much intelligent feedback), but, before we continue, let's get one thing straight: The name of Bin Laden's organisation.

We've all seen countless spellings of this, a symptom of Arabic dialectal fragmentation and lack of a conventional romanisation standard. (There is a widespread academic standard, but newspapers et al. don't like it because of all the little dots and squiggles.) It's not as bad the Qaddafi crisis, so it shouldn't be as hard to clear up, right?

One thing both these troublesome terms share is an initial q without any following u. Huh? How can this happen? In transcription of Arabic (and many other languages), q is not just another way to write k; it represents a distinct sound called an uvular stop. K is a velar stop, produced by touching the root of the tongue to the velum, or soft palate. To produce an uvular stop, you need to move your tongue-root back a little further until it touches the uvula, the teardrop-shaped dangly bit where your throat begins.

Now you're asking, "So whose big idea was it to use q for this sound in the first place?" The Phoenicians, actually. Restricting q to the combination qu was an Etruscan innovation that the Romans then adopted and now we're stuck with it. To complicate matters, this is its Classical Arabic value; many dialects have replaced this unusual sound with something else, like g (mainly in the Levant) or gh (in North Africa--thus the spelling "Ghaddafi").

Okay, now on to the vowel: The Classical Arabic diphthong, ai, is now usually pronounced like English "ay" as in "gay". Sometimes it's also spelled this way--or "ey" or even "ae". Before yesterday, I'd never seen it spelled "ea". This doubtless stems from a common erroneous tendency to replace unusual vowel sequences, like ae, with common ones, like ea. I've also seen an apostrophe in there, possibly because of the (mistaken?) impression that the word qaida derives from the root QWD "lead, guide". (Cf. Spanish alcaide, from qā'id "leading, leader".) Sometimes in Arabic, a w disappears between two vowels and is replaced by a sound called a glottal stop, often transcribed by an apostrophe.

However, the standard romanisation recommended by Library of Congress, Qaida, suggests that the root is actually QYD "tie, bind". I'm not sure how to get from either of these roots to the purported meaning of "base" or "foundation". ("Thing you tie stuff to"?) But (with the article) "al-Qaida" will remain my preferred spelling for the word unless I find a strong reason to prefer another. I'll probably use "al-Qaeda" a lot, too, since it's in such common use.

Fusion cuisine flavour-of-the-month, or, "Whatevar annoys ze Americains mast be geud!"

Hey, a new reason to hate Shrub! He's been such a big meanie to the French, he's driven them into the arms of the Red Chinese! La Dame belle sans merci, she is planning to hold joint manoeuvres with Mainland China today. (Oh, and by some small coincidence, neighbouring Taiwan is holding a electoral contest this Saturday between a pro-independence president and his KMT challenger. France must've overlooked that, since I'm sure the home of Liberté, égalité, et fraternité wouldn't want any part in intimidating voters in the free and fair elections of a fellow democracy.)

I suppose when you're convinced of the need for a military counterbalance to the USA at any cost, there's no telling whom you'll embrace. So the USA has taken down your client state and now cowardly Germany spurns your advances? Fine, look to the Far East! Of course, an ally without teeth is not worth having, so you'll have to pressure your partners in the EU to end the ban on weapon sales to the world's largest dictatorship. After all, if you can forgive and forget Halabja, what sense does it make to hold a grudge about Tiananmen Square?

What were we thinking, not bending over backwards to patch up relations with la belle France? We've completely forgot "Babette"'s advice on SNL News! Uncle Sam should be saying, "You slut! You whore! Come back to me! Throw away your new Asian boy toy and all is forgiven!"