Bitching about the CTA is like alcohol-free beer

When my new hire told me she intended to come at 9 a.m. rather than 9:30, I figured I'd better shift my schedule, too, so I'd still have that half hour of screwing around before I had to get down to business. It makes me feel better to realise that it wasn't simple laziness that's been keeping me in bed a bit longer, but the general fuckedness of the CTA. I remember it being worse earlier in the rush hour, but whoa nellie!

( Gory details of today's commute, of interest to no one but myself )

For that last little bit, I was able to chat with my morning commute buddy. The Howard train he'd been on also went express from Wilson. I told him about my ill luck last week leaving promptly in order to make a 6 p.m. appointment and getting trapped on a southbound makeshift express to Wilson. In both cases, the announcement was completely garbled so it was only after the doors had shut and the sign had changed to "Express" that people really knew what was up.

It caused me to reflect afresh on how unremittingly hostile the CTA is to newbies. I've always taken a perverse, embittered pride in knowing all the dirty tricks their personnel come up with in order to inconvenience with me which manifests as schadenfreude at the plight of bewildered occasional or first-time riders. But the switching choices are so inexplicable, the scheduled times such a laughingstock, the provision of information so rudimentary, that I find it at little hard to believe it ever gains new riders at all. For me, it's a cantankerous old buddy that I can't live with and can't live without. But you? You're young and fresh! Can't you find a means of commuting that loves you back?

In English and Ohio with subtitles

I was perusing the Reader at lunchtime and came across this curious line in a review of the Chinese film 盲山 (Blind Mountain): "In Mandarin and Shaanxi with subtitles." Curious, because "Shaanxi" is the name of a province, not a language. More curious still because 陝西話 or "Shaanxi talk" is another name for Guanzhong dialect (關中), whose prestige standard is the speech of Xi'an, and Guanzhong dialect is Mandarin. True, some versions of Mandarin are greatly divergent from the Beijing-based standard (Sichuan speakers in particular get singled out for incomprehensibility), but Guanzhonghua isn't one of them. So altogether, it's rather like saying "In English and Ohio with subtitles."

Of course, not everyone in Ohio speaks the same dialect and the same is true of Shaanxi. In the northernmost areas, the local speech varieties are reckoned to the Lüliang (呂梁) dialect of the Jin sublanguage (which, such distinctions being subjective in any case, some linguists consider just another kind of Mandarin). In the mountainous south begins the Southwest Mandarin speech area which stretches thousands of kilometres through Sichuan to the edges of Yunnan and even into northernmost Thailand. This, it turns out, is probably the dialect group intended, as Chinese-language summaries of the film describe it as taking place in the Qinling (秦嶺) range of southern Shaanxi.

But how did the reviewer know this? No mention of "Shaanxi" as a language appears in any other English-language reviews and summaries I've found online, so presumably it's not part of the press packet materials, and it beggars belief to imagine that a reviewer named "Andrea Gronvall" has the technical background to distinguish Chinese speech varieties. My guess is that there must be some reference to dialect differences in the film, which concerns the kidnapping of an "urban university graduate" who is forcibly married to a mountain villager. There may even be something in the subtitles about the coarse, unintelligible "Shaanxi dialect" of the natives.