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    « November 2007 | Main | January 2008 »

    December 30, 2007

    All I Can Say Is...

    Please go to the NYTimes.com to read about a very controversial African_American blogger, whose frail health killed him a age 42. There is a great article about him in Tom Watson's blog.

    The most important lesson I learned from it is how different our personas on the Net can be from our selves in a daily routine. I am quite familiar with Harlem, especially with 144th Street and 125th, where I got my Social Security card, sitting on a folding chair, mesmerized with a tiny cockroach traveling on a Chinese man's leather jacket. That was in the days I though NYC was the greatest place where I could possibly live, 1981.

    There are friends in NYC I should call, but I am too weak today.  We are getting around to equipping the home for my new condition and voice-recognition software in on order. Soon it'll be 2008, spring and
    annus horribilis will be over.

    Peace to all, maybe tomorrow? Why not?Central_park Spring in Central Park, 2001.©

    Posted at 08:04 PM in Blogging | | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

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    links for 2007-12-30

    Posted at 12:18 AM | | TrackBack (0)

    December 29, 2007

    My Sisters At Google: I Really Am NOT Dead, yet

    Everytime I open "Anarchic_Universe" on Google, my friend, I find a notice I am shutting down the blog.  That is not true. That was a fleeting idea born out of desperation with my keyboarding problemas. Soon they will be resolved. I will go back to where I started in the computer realm, a PC.

    My master's thesis is trapped in a black screen AT&T computer. It was written in LaTeX way back in 1987. It was on Paulo Freire's educational methodology, kinda en vogue at TESOL 1996. TESOL is a great  organization to belong to, its convention a dazzling event getting together teachers of English as a second or other language from all over the world.

    That said, I need not say I was not Ph.D. material at the time and later we had to choose who would pile it higher and deeper. I went for my graduate course in education and he continued his long pursuit for his Ph.D. We both did things the wrong way. I have a multi-colored blog, with blogrolls, he had no one to understand his ideas. His first advisor went to live on a boat on the Seine, the second had no tenure and the third guy did take pleasure in not signing my husband's card until he re-wrote it to this guy's satisfaction, a day before graduation.

    We never depended on recommendation letters. I walked into the school where I worked in L.A. and got the job hands-down. In SMMUSD, the principal knocked at my door for me to give her the data to take it to the board. The idiot who wanted to stall my husband is still at his samo-lamo job. I retired, but listen, my sisters at Google, Hillary supporters like me, I am not dead, yet.

    What you'll see is intense use of Firefox and Vista, with no vista and no view, a line from "White Men Can't Jump." Unfortunately, I will be using Vista so I can use voice-recognition programs for Portuguese and for English.

    Soon I'll be on a PC (a horrible thought) but that is the way the Apple bounced. They really meant it when they removed computers from Apple, Inc.

    I would like to thank André Marmota, Gabriela Zago,at new URL,
    Seth A. or swanksalot  at Flickr and Tom Watson, in true alphabetical order in Brazil, first name prevails. You've been really good friends, making this network quite especial.

    Have a wonderful end of the year if I am not back here tomorrow. I think I wlll.The_brain_picture Willpower is a great weapon for survival.



    Posted at 09:01 PM in humor not really | | Comments (2) | TrackBack (0)

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    links for 2007-12-29

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    December 27, 2007

    I'm not Dead Yeat

    Tatiana, the tiger, at the San Francisco Zoo, threw more than a hissy fit getting out of her outdoor enclosure for tigers.

    I, Tina Oiticica, am not dead yet. My Kitty Carslyle likes enclosures and actually stays in them without harming anyone.
    Dsc00001

    Posted at 06:21 PM in Current Affairs | | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

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    links for 2007-12-27

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    December 26, 2007

    links for 2007-12-26

    Posted at 12:18 AM | | TrackBack (0)

    December 25, 2007

    links for 2007-12-25

    Posted at 12:18 AM | | TrackBack (0)

    December 24, 2007

    links for 2007-12-24

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    December 23, 2007

    links for 2007-12-23

    Posted at 12:18 AM | | TrackBack (0)

    December 22, 2007

    Taking a Shot at Spanish Learnig -- Easy!

    When teaching English abroad, I specialized in listening comprehension. Generally students complain about our "Bad" accent of English.  We do drop the [ng] for the [n] as in dancin' .
    We slur, we speak very differently from the UK speakers. Royal English comes with pedigree. It's hilarious English people can tell dialectal differences from 'hood to 'hood.  Foreigners believe we all speak like John Wayne. Oh, well.

    •When conducting my study of the "El Graduado" tape, I used my son as the informer, the one whose reactions help me teach the tape.  He dislikes Spanish, loves his daddy's French, and knows Portuguese, a little bit. My mother is Brazilian. Garrulous Oiticica, she lived with us till mid-October of last year.

    • First play went up to 1:00.  "I didn't understand anything." Not true. I pronounced the words, the cognates, followed the gestures of the actors. Until 02:16 he got 100% , consistently.

    • Between 01:15 and 02:16  ?  He had already guessed Mrs. Robinson's baaaad/bed intentions. Blame it on the times.

    • We chatted a bit, resumed the test and stopped it at 06:07.
    remember, it can be tiring to play, rewind, play the tape.

    • When choosing a tape remember many peoples feel awkward about sex and  religion. So, use plenty of vaseline to introduce the second tongue. A little tenderness goes a long ways.

    Oops? What did I say? Check "El Graduado" using these tips, please. More on TPR, affective filter, accents, the fascinating world of Second Language Teaching soon. (reposting.)

    Posted at 06:37 PM in Education | | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

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    links for 2007-12-22


    Posted at 12:17 AM | | TrackBack (0)

    December 21, 2007

    From Neurology to EconoAir to Amazon.com

    Some of this news is old news. In June-August I was hospitalized and the diagnostic by a team of specialists was medication intoxication, by "default." I changed medication, went back to Saint John's UnHealth Hospital on emergency on September 7.

    Now, I am not doing well at all. I have had an MRI which shows my brain shrank prematurely and a deposit of liquid under the lower lobs. To get my medical staff to send the paperwork to my two insurance companies is like pulling crocodile teeth in the Mississippi.

    Now to our North Pole status for a week. EconoAir shows the aptitude for customer service of a bunch of illiterate and rude sloths who cannot communicate. There is one guy I must be thankful for, Ryan, a recent hire, the technician who just set heat back in this house, a freezing health hazard.

    Amazon.com promised a delivery by December 22. Today that date has been pushed all the way to January whenever. By that time we have no use for the Santa toy for my niece will be back in Brazil.

    It was simply a grueling week with phone calling and trying to convince the neuro nurse to fax in the specifications to my insurances today before the end of the day today.

    I regret to inform you I will be off the Net, except to post my Anarchic_Universe del.icio.us links, culled from Portuguese, Spanish, French and Anglophone cyber info sites. The difficulty for me to key in is too much for me to find blogging pleasant. How can I comment on my favorite blogs?

    I wish I had found some  of my links sooner. Such is life. wish in one hand, piss in the other, see which fills faster.

    As soon as dokterrrs find out what my neurological problem is, I will have a better idea about what will happen. Even if I die, I'll make sure to let you know when that happens.

    Blogging has been a saving grace for me, especially after I became homebound.  There were some creeps in the Lusophone blogosphere. In the Anglophone all  I found was helping hands. Same as in the French-Canadian and French.

    See you soon, best wishes to all!


    Lara_nol_04

    Posted at 01:58 PM in Journal_Blogging | | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

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    December 20, 2007

    links for 2007-12-20

    Posted at 12:18 AM | | TrackBack (0)

    December 19, 2007

    Company Is Like Fish; After Three Days...

    I'll take advantage of a spurt of energy to write an entry for my favorite blog. We have been cooped in the dining-kitchen area, all of us: Nic, GHR_ my son,  my sister and her daughter, the cat and the dog and I.  It's been colder than a witch's tit, as my professor from Ohio used to say. Our heating system went kaput for a week now. The service of Econair makes you feel you are going mad.
    Needless to add my sister and daughter misunderestimated (click, please) the cold outside and my sister caught a cold. They deserve the bushism for being stubbornly unwise.

    Other than being confined to one area of the house, thanks Econoair,  we know how vital rain is for California and are thankful for the future water in our pipes. However, Southern California is ill-equipped for rain. The sewers clog, umbrellas make a disappearing act, rain jackets become scarce.
    I remember a time I flipped when my husband and I were stuck west of downtown, somewhere like Alvarado by Silver Lake, trying to cross a street absolutely flooded.

    Yes, I have seen worse. Rio floods. My father went to work for USAID, where he was the Rio-based  radio-operator, with water up to his knees. Our street has a river flowing under it and above it in flood times.

    Here we are used to "Every day is a sunny day in Southern California." In Rio people endure tropical storms with finesse, even.

    So, taking a break from the warmth of the kitchen area, I tell you: inefficiency in service in the USA matches easily the gerundism of  telemarketers and customer service phone operators in Brazil. The trend is to say "I will be + Verb+ ing .  This is an alien construction in Portuguese. In Portuguese one would simply say, "I will + Verb" or "I won't + Verb". Maybe it's an Anglicism.

    Y'all know how smart we are in the United States. Okay is said to be an expression derived from the military intelligence's Oll Korect, abbreviated to O.K. And you know military intelligence is a "contradiction in terms" as in "oxymoron."

    When did you suspect there was something fishy about the Iraq war? Since the underlying theme of this hello to my readers is "fish", here is a song by Milton Nascimento, "Milagre dos Peixes" played with Wayne Shorter, Herbie Hancock, and other great jazz musicians. Enjoy.

    Posted at 01:40 PM in Journal_Blogging | | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

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    links for 2007-12-19

    Posted at 12:19 AM | | TrackBack (0)

    December 18, 2007

    links for 2007-12-18

    • The Messianic Democrats
      I can't stand the USA as a theocracy. Religion an dpolitics should be as distant here as in France. However, green Illinois junior senator Obama relies now on the prowess of one of the richest entertainers in the world to proclaim he is the one. Oh, reall
      (tags: Obama Oprah "The One?")

    Posted at 12:19 AM | | TrackBack (0)

    December 17, 2007

    From Dr. Stephen Krashen's website

    This is a free publication. I would advise all teachers of English as a second or foreign language to subscribe to Dr. Krashen's site, at the bottom of my blogroll. A prolific writer, Dr. Krashen keeps a lively website, fighting the stupidity that reigns in N.C.L.B. and other cookie-cutter approaches to language acquisition.
    He was my professor in 1985-1987 and time has not dulled his wit or insight.
    Unfortunately a lot of teachers heard about whole language and other methodologies and threw out the baby with the bath water. They never really read his works or those of James Asher, in Total Physical Response, and so on and so forth.

    So, I will offer you an opportunity to fish , and not just a fish to eat today and have nothing tomorrow.

    With you an e-mail from the rich site of Dr. Stephen D. Krashen.


    NOW AVAILABLE AT IJFLT.com, for FREE

    International Journal of Foreign Language Teaching,
    Fall, 2007. Vol 3(2).

    1. Macfield, Grace. What is Structured English
    Immersion? Variations on a Theme

    2. Krashen, Stephen. Extensive Reading in English as
    Foreign Language by Adolescents and Young Adults: A
    Meta-Analysis

    3. Wang, Fei-yu and Lee, Sy-ying, Storytelling is the
    Bridge

    4. Ponniah, R. Joseph. A Note on the Application of
    Rules of Grammar

    5. Sternfeld, Stephen. The Cross-Language Interview/
    Interrogation: Dramatizing Students’ Lives in the
    Second Language Classroom

    6. Shuhui Hong Extensive Reading: A Case Study of
    French Language Learning

    7. Gilbert, John. I+J: How the Butler Can Do It.


    Posted at 02:54 AM in Education | | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

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    links for 2007-12-17

    • Sinatra on Love Letters
      A beautiful reproduction of Sinatra on a stamp and a well-crafted story on the legend, written by Robert Stein. Link to Stein's blog, which seems to be quite informative on the presidential race.
      (tags: Sinatra stamp)

    Posted at 12:20 AM | | TrackBack (0)

    December 16, 2007

    Don't Throw Away Your Spam - Insults

    I nearly always read my mail. Sometimes the temptation to mark all as read is big. But I never learned how to do that. In these heated days of mud-slinging primaries, I though these pearls of insults would be priceless. Following are quotes from some of the smartest people who ever lived.

    "He has all the virtues I dislike and none of the vices I admire."
    -- Winston Churchill

    "A modest little person, with much to be modest about."
    -- Winston Churchill

    "I have never killed a man, but I have read many obituaries with
    great pleasure."
    -- Clarence Darrow

    "He has never been known to use a word that might send a reader to
    the dictionary."
    -- William Faulkner (about Ernest Hemingway)

    "Poor Faulkner, Does he really think big emotions come from big
    words?"
    -- Ernest Hemingway (about William Faulkner)

    "Thank you for sending me a copy of your book; I'll waste no time
    reading it."
    -- Moses Hadas

    "He can compress the most words into the smallest idea of any man I
    know."
    -- Abraham Lincoln

    "I've had a perfectly wonderful evening. But this wasn't it."
    -- Groucho Marx

    "I didn't attend the funeral, but I sent a nice letter saying I
    approved of it."
    -- Mark Twain

    "He has no enemies, but is intensely disliked by his friends."
    -- Oscar Wilde

    "I am enclosing two tickets to the first night of my new play; bring
    a friend . . if you have one."
    -- George Bernard Shaw to Winston Churchill

    "Cannot possibly attend first night, will attend second . . . if
    there is one."
    -- Winston Churchill, in response

    "I feel so miserable without you; it's almost like having you here."
    -- Stephen Bishop

    "He is a self-made man and worships his creator."
    -- John Bright

    "I've just learned about his illness. Let's hope it's nothing
    trivial."
    -- Irvin S. Cobb

    "He is not only dull himself; he is the cause of dullness in others."
    -- Samuel Johnson

    "He is simply a shiver looking for a spine to run up."
    -- Paul Keating

    "He had delusions of adequacy."
    -- Walter Kerr

    "There's nothing wrong with you that reincarnation won't cure."
    -- Jack E. Leonard

    "He has the attention span of a lightning bolt."
    -- Robert Redford

    "They never open their mouths without subtracting from the sum of
    human knowledge."
    -- Thomas Brackett Reed

    "He inherited some good instincts from his Quaker forebears but by
    diligent hard work, he overcame them."
    -- James Reston (about Richard Nixon)

    "In order to avoid being called a flirt, she always yielded easily."
    -- Charles, Count Talleyrand

    "He loves nature in spite of what it did to him."
    -- Forrest Tucker

    "Why do you sit there looking like an envelope without any address
    on it?"
    -- Mark Twain

    "His mother should have thrown him away and kept the stork."
    -- Mae West

    "Some cause happiness wherever they go; others, whenever they go."
    -- Oscar Wilde

    "He uses statistics as a drunken man uses lamp-posts .. for support
    rather than illumination."
    -- Andrew Lang (1844-1912)

    "He has Van Gogh's ear for music."
    -- Billy Wilder

    Posted at 04:22 PM in Humor | | Comments (1) | TrackBack (0)

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    December 15, 2007

    An Entertaining Production About "Stuff"

    Last I read, and I must confess that was a while ago, the world meting to review standards regarding our environment and climate change arrived at an impasse.

    Maybe the Commander-in-Chief could watch this presentation. It's a tip from the knitting circle, aka SAMOHI-Pals.

    It's a blend of animation and real people. Just click here for the full shebang.

    Posted at 06:21 AM in Environment | | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

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    links for 2007-12-15

    Posted at 12:18 AM | | TrackBack (0)

    December 14, 2007

    links for 2007-12-14

    • Nova casa: Verbeat
      Gabriela Zago, um dos componentes do Gang of Four aqui mudou de URL. As assinaturas via Feedburner permanecem as mesmas. Mude já-já seu blogroll para estar na última das últimas das modas na blogosfera.
      (tags: Gabriela Zago URL_novo Verbeat)

    Posted at 12:18 AM | | TrackBack (0)

    December 13, 2007

    Don't Blame Your Reduplication on Me

    Reduplication is a device found in all languages, seemingly, in which there is a repetition of a syllable. I learned about this with Doug Pulleyblank, my phonology professor at USC in 1986, whose passion for reduplication took him to Africa, so I hear. And there went my friend Uschi, for the same purpose. So, I learned that the future is formed in Tagalog, one of the languages in the Philipines, by repeating the first syllable. Thus, "sulat" means write and susulat means will write.

    Brazilians are quite xenophobic. A study somewhere in the links of this blog shows this.; The Native-Brazilians live far and isolated. Brazilians adopt the term bizarre for anything they feel is alien to their culture.

    So, the Tagalog example was considered bizarre. A little bit of research showed that it's present in English, as in willy-nilly, flegma-shmegma, hokey-pokey, Freaky Deaky; English must be a civilized language although its spelling is bizarre to me. However, had we changed our spelling, how many works in English would have become out of our reach today?

    I found a great video of a Portuguese band playing Noel Rosa's "Gago Apaixonado." Theirs is a great chorinho played wtih Portuguese instruments, sung with a Portuguese from Portugal accent.

    A gago  is a stutterer. Get ahold of your favorite Brazilianist and have him/her check out the lyrics for you.

    Posted at 04:38 PM in Brazil, Education, Humor, Languages, Music | | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

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    links for 2007-12-13

    Posted at 12:19 AM | | TrackBack (0)

    December 12, 2007

    Alive, But Not Kicking

    I've been shamefully away from Anarchic_Universe. All I can say so far is that "The rumors of my death have been greatly exaggerated." (Mark Twain) Click for a really, really cool website on Mark Twain.

    So, for more regulars readers, you may remember I was hospitalized in July. The diagnosis was intoxication by default.

    Unfortunately, it didn't occur to any of the several top-notch specialists who saw me to run an M.R.I. that would be more specific about my "intoxication" problemas. Now I know they were not due to intoxication. I am considerably worse, not better. It is painful to work at the computer, to type is a snail's job, so slow and so full of errors.

    I will let you know, dead or alive (Good joke) what I have as soon as the problema is properly diagnosed. It's been a flurry of idiotic and exasperating calls from Saint John's Medical Center's Billing Department. Lorraine called me twice, and my connection to Blue Cross fell thru.  My husband already went there and went to Medical Records, too. I don't work for Saint John's. But, Lawdie, these folks do seem to be very unmotivated. Lorraine complained my case had fallen on her lap. I told her to get off her seat and take my case where it should be.  This was a second call in half an hour when I asked her