Miscellany

THE bridal wreath (a.k.a. Spiraea prunifolia) around here is gangbusters, which is nice since the honeysuckle has already run out of steam. Also, the flags (a.k.a. bearded iris, Iris germanica) are coming into their glory, especially in the courtyard of my building and on the north side of the side street just north of monshu's building.

It occurs to me that, aside from androkles's photoreportage, bitterlawngnome's seasonal portraits, and hausmeister's chopping-and-lopping reports, I don't hear much about what nature is up to around the homes of those on my Friends list. So, spill: What's blooming and leafing where you are?

MY quote for today is "Buy some Valrhona, bitch." Unfortunately, I'm not at liberty to reveal who said it, but some of you should figure it out without too much trouble.

I'M putting together a list of the Highs and Lows of Bear Pride Weekend and I don't want anyone to feel bad if his name's not on it. If I saw you, you contributed something to my enjoyment. Sometimes I feel like I pack months worth of socialisation into three or four days--a sensation I could lessen by at least getting off my ass once and a while and doing something with you local folk. Help me help myself get out more!

READING the Osage grammar is still bringing me much enjoyment. There's a lot of interesting stuff in it I'm tempted to go on about here, but it would bore everyone or look like I was just showing off. Plus, given how poorly I know the language, the chances of making grievous errors would be substantial. Still, I may yet abandon caution to talk about instrumental prefixes, funky phonological processes, and portmanteau morphemes.

Hit me with your rhythm stick!

During the inevitable multilingual pop culture geekery that follows from any meeting between me and aadroma, I baffled everyone with a reference to the inimitable song stylings of albino German sensation Heino.

Trying to clarify by tossing in the word Schlager only made things worse. Eventually, aadroma figured out what I meant, but he said that he'd always seen that word written Schläger. I find this curious, since a Schläger is something for bashing with--a baseball or cricket bat, a tennis racquet, a kind of sabre used by German fraternities--or someone who administers the bashing. Germans, AFAIK, never confuse the two. Does the rest of the world?

I tried to search for instances of Schläger for Schlager online, but couldn't come up with any. Does anyone know how to get Google not to ignore diacritics during a search? Does anyone have pointers to a song site that spells the word with an umlaut?

(BTW, danbearnyc, this picture is not to punish you for that horrible Hasselhoff icon you posted in comments some time ago and it's very petty of you to think so.)

Edit: Speaking of beautiful love songs, here are the complete lyrics to "Rory Rides Me Raw". As you can see, aadroma, I was wrong about the artist: The Vaselines, not Sebadoh. (I think the short-circuit connexion is SubPop.)