:TESTO:I mentioned this in passing before, but felt I ought to elaborate: Digital Harbor High School's team name is "the Rams". This is a pun, subtle yet effective in inducing a smile upon double-take. Better than "Ankle-Byters", or "Fighting IT Staff", or "Athletic Team Interface", or "The Dell Team", or even "the Digital Harbor Seals"*, RAMs allows an athletically "valid" (tough-sounding) animal mascot while gently honoring the theme of tech.

And I added a side-bar link to the news-page of my friend Erik, for those interested in daring yet clean-lined web page layout (he succeeds with a color scheme that normally only a laundry detergent would love) as well as for those who know Erik and seek connection to his life.

That is all.

...

*Digital Harbor-seals of Approval?
:ENDTESTO:

:TESTO:Here's a story with more details on my bike-gang adventures, and here's a link to the gang's movie trailer. The trailer is in Windows Media format, which means many of my viewers will have to soil their otherwise Microsoft-free systems with something that can handle it, if they want to see a very good representation of what the great gang bike-ride is like.

School starts Monday. I'm teaching Networking. I'd write more about it, but I'm significantly whelmed by everything. Fortunately, I found a good text for the first level of the class - much more accessible than the college-level texts that make up the bulk of the classroom-set library, most of the latter donated or granted to the school during its massive founding-funding rush. The second level is supposed to start the Cisco CCNA certification training, and the book and the test are both dense. We'll see.

This post is not cohesive. I'll end moreso:
Yohoho! Puzzle Pirates is a game that I've enjoyed of late, a social online game thing where things happen (ships are sailed, duels are fought, rum is distilled) by way of tetris-type puzzles, making game skill a function of how good a puzzler you are, instead of how many monsters you've killed or how long you've played. You are a cartoon pirate, rendered with a Lego level of detail, and can spend your money on fancy pirate clothes, swords, ships, such. There are high-level politics, as warring flags blockade and capture islands, and play governor with taxes and commodity trading and housing permits and such.  As a part-time player, those latter aspects remain unpursued, and I simply enjoy the chance to have a meaningful swordfight with far-away people, and to dress up like a pirate. Should you find yourself aboard (the game is in Java, and therefore Available For Everyone), look for "Anhaga" (of the crew "Kiss Me Mate") or "Sorenson" (no crew yet) in the Midnight Ocean, both pirates are me. I expect I'll be playing less from now on, with school upon me, but the trial period is 30 non-consecutive days, so I can stretch it out for a while. Yarr...

Vikings: 7, Pirates: 2.
:ENDTESTO:

:TESTO:

Mr. and Mrs. Beowulf - When Good Epics Go Bad. fortunately, this is neither the movie being released at the Toronto Film Festival in September nor the Gaiman-Zemecki performance-capture piece, but a whimsical parody of movie-news, highlighting the story-mangling that Hollywood does so well, and that the movie media does even better.

...and my bicycle's name is Toothgnasher, or Tanngnjóstr in the Norse. I went with Thor's magic goats after all, as the bike is stubborn and squirrely, and it's got the schwoopy-horn handlebars, and Digital Harbor (my new teaching placement) has a rammish-goatish thing as a mascot (almost certainly a ram, but close enough for my books). Most appropriately, I've already brought him back to life twice - once upon purchase, when the tires were replaced and a cracked gear made whole, and again when the front brake cable gave. Skin and bones, rubber and steel.

:ENDTESTO:

:TESTO:A volcano nearly fits the bill - dust and ash, arising, falling, and returning. Hot tunnel walls, searing dark rock with coursing lava. A shifting lake of magma, black earth beneath and open sky above...

...but the answer is not a volcano. When does a volcano "enter the fire"? Either the fire enters it, or we're anthropizing the lava, in which case it is the fire. No good. The riddle's speaker must come from the earth, enter fire and dance on a liquid surface, and burn as it passes. Hm.

"arise once more in my season?" Sounds green to me. A vegetable?
We can cook vegetables, there's our fire. The lake becomes oil in an iron skillet, black as night beneath and clear sky (or perhaps the poofy white cloud of some chef's toque) above. And the dark, seared walls, the plains it passes over? Our throats and tongueses, precious. It burns, it burns... nasty elf food.

It dwells under dust, until it meets sauté in oil, spicy delicious all the way down.
...and out the other end, to return to the earth in your compost, to feed the roots of the next season's crop. Toss a bit of ash onto the compost (nitrogen is good, and lye isn't stinky), and the riddle is solved.

But what is it?

I suppose any spicy plant would do, but as per yesterday's hint, the thing has a head you can split. The answer, therefore, is...


...


...


...


Garlic!


Some may contend that it's not spicy enough to justify the heavy use of  fire-language, but I like my garlic rare, and in bulk. And it's the vegetable I associate most with Twin Oaks, by way of garden-labor and kitchen-eating, though I'm not sure whether anybody but me knew that.

So there it is, my sister-spin on the famous one-eyed garlic-peddler riddle (#86) of the Exeter Book, happily translated and probably slightly too convoluted to be approachable. I had fun, I hope those of you following along at home did, too.


Stay tuned for The Wonderful World of the High-Tech High-School, and other alliterative episodes in public pedagoguery.
:ENDTESTO:

:TESTO:

Rising from dust, I enter the fire. I dance upon a moving lake, sky above and night below. I travel burning through dark places, Searing the walls and the plains of my passage. In my time I return to the dust, strengthened with ashes, and arise once more in my season. What is my name?
Æfter	Be-foran
From duste risende, Ic in-gange fyrum Frice on laguliðum, rodor a-bufan ond niht bi-niðan Fere onfyr þurh sceadustowes Weallas byrnest ond feranfeldum fortendeþ æfter sum fæc acerre to duste, æsc gestrange,   arise ane ma in minum tide. Hwæt is min naman?	Fram dust gerisan, Ic fyr entran Jig on lagusciftum, heaofon above ond niht below Fera onfyr ofer sceadustratum Byrnan walles ond foldes of minum feran þurh sum fæc to dust returnan, æsc gestrange, aris an mare in minum tide. Hwæt is min naman?

Interesting changes:

• entran and stratum and returnan were unconscious Latin borrowings, and have been appropriately amended. 
• Jig was a playful, unbased guess for "dance", and Frice is a frisky replacement.
  
• sciftum means "dividing" (and is the parent of "shifting", but not as directly as I had thought), which (unintentionally) worked with the second half of that line. liðum, however, means "moving" or "sliding" (and gives us "lithe"), which is more what I had in mind, and improves alliteration to boot.
• on-fyr is a home-grown compound word that seems quite plausible, and I like it. byrende is the literal alternative.
• The "burning walls" line was heavily reworked, gaining proper word-order (verbs as the second part of a phrase), and better alliteration. fortendeþ means "sear".
• I put most of the riddle, except one line ("passage-walls burn, journey-plains sear"), in the first person.

I'm happy with the word-work, and await a solution to the riddle.
Your final hint, before next post's resolution, is this:

I met him today, and I split his head, and I sent him on his journey.

Stay tuned to the home of the world-famous Anglo Saxon Pasta Jig for further fun with fallen tongues!
:ENDTESTO:

:TESTO:Yesterday, Milo the Dog and I were out walking, down by the water.
We happened past policemen
stopping traffic for a Duck Boat.

"Gee, Milo! I wonder why they've cleared Thames Street for this Duck Boat?"
"Let's walk by and see."
Following Milo's suggestion, we found ourselves
stepping onto the sidewalk next to the Boat,
when somebody further down shouted "Roll 'em!"

Thus Milo and I found ourselves in the middle of a film shoot.

Not wanting to disturb Things, we kept walking,
as neutral and pleasant a pedestrian as I could be.

We were just past the camera (in the road) when we heard "Cut!"
We walked a bit further, then looped back around to head home.
(the camera (facing west) sat about three blocks directly south of our house)

Coming back by the film crew, Milo asked, "what's being filmed?"
The director replied (Milo didn't know who he had been addressing)
that the film was a thirty-something Sarah Jessica Parker flick
entitled Failure to Launch (see the Internet Movie Database entry).

"Oh. Okay. Thanks!" We bounced back down the street, heading home again.
Behind us - running. "Hey!" somebody calls. "Wanna be in a movie?"

Apparently the director thought that we looked like "real" extras, contrasted with the actor-wannabes who had signed up for the shoot. Synthetic though they may have been, after the shoot they nearly universally stopped to congratulate Milo and I, to pat us on our heads and acknowledge our stardom. I'll even get paid... I'd have done it for free.  

...

So it was that Milo The Affable Dog and David the Bouncy Pedestrian
were filmed for a major motion picture,
as background-extras alongside a Duck Boat.


Look for us in 2006!


:ENDTESTO:

:TESTO:Today is my sister's birthday, sometimes she is called Phoenix.
Our little riddle was meant to suggest that bit of rebirth-legend in her honor, to be a reflection, a tip of the hat toward my sister's life and nature.

I based my riddle upon those collected in the Exeter book, and these four give a nice feel for the tricksiness of their solutions.  The comments on that site are more or less correct deductions. In the same way that my riddle suggests my sister the Phoenix, two of the riddles linked above suggest a man's dangly bits, but ultimately conceal much tamer truths. The solution to my phoenix-themed sister-riddle is neither the firebird nor a phallus.

So here's your hints:
The answer is not celestial (as per 2 of the 3 guesses recorded so far),
The answer is not my sister,
The answer is not naughty.

There may be some who say that the first and third hints make the second one redundant, but it is not a brother's place to do so.

Carry on!
:ENDTESTO:

:TESTO:Rising from dust, I enter the fire.
I dance upon a moving lake, sky above and night below.
I travel burning through dark places,
Searing the walls and the plains of my passage.
In my time I return to the dust,
strengthened with ashes,
and arise once more
in my season.

What is my name?


Fram dust gerisan,  Ic fyr entran
Jig on lagusciftum,  heaofon above ond niht below
Fera onfyr ofer sceadustratum
Byrnan walles ond foldes of minum feran
þurh sum fæc to dust returnan,
æsc gestrange,  aris an mare
in minum tide.

Hwæt is min naman?

...
You'll get an answer soon, and hopefully a better translation into OE.
The riddle is my own, and the Anglo-Saxon translation is quite probably awful.
I didn't use any reference, I used my head and made up the rest.

Tonight and tomorrow I'll grab a dictionary and find a conjugation/declension guide,
and I intend to let y'all see the changes and sticking points, for the fun of observing transition.

The first person to guess the riddle, and post it as a comment, will receive a big hug and a kiss on the forehead. :ENDTESTO:

:TESTO:Here's a fella reading Anglo Saxon. Each Old English verse has a recording, linked by clicking on the fancy capital letter which heads it.

He does a very good job of it, better than most of my stuff. Although slightly dispassionate, his pronunciation and rhythm are solid and clear.
The Funeral of Scyld Scefing is from Beowulf, lines 26 to 63, and is read by Rafe in our back-and-forth recording. Something about the text reminds me of a later section (lines 790-836,the end of the fight with Grendel) which I recorded several times over before I was halfway satisfied with it.

Over the past week, I've talked to relatively few humans. When I have talked to people, I've noticed my voice as very quiet, and unsure, as I only use it for 5 to 10 minutes a day. Before school starts, I have to get back into solid voice territory, which means practice. Maybe I'll clean up some of my parts of the Beowulf recording, or (perhaps with Rafe's assistance) plunge ahead into the daunting second part. It might be nice to have re-read the whole thing by the time Neil Gaiman and Roger Zemecki's animated full-story Beowulf happens in 2007, and a nice way to do that would be to read it out loud.

Most Beowulf dramatizations focus on the first half of the story, Beowulf's daring defeat of the small-time terrorist Grendel and the more melancholy murder of the monster's mother (like Beowulf and Grendel, the premiering-in-September at the Toronto-film-festival Icelandic production, due in Theaters sometime after that), so I'm excited to see the whole story get its due, dragon and old man and all, especially with such a strong writer behind the screenplay. Gaiman is a fantastic storyteller, and I very much dug his cyberpunk short-story adaptation of the Beowulf vs Grendel legend, which is set on a drug-lord's flesh-beach and features Larry Talbot as the Bay-wolf, our immortal wer-wolf hero, hunting toxic-waste-spawned monsters in the briney deep.

Or maybe I'll just talk to the dog.

...

I need a name for my new (old) bicycle,
which is a brick-red road bike with rams-horn handlebars.
I'm leaning toward Skoll, the wolf who chases the sun, but I'm not sure, yet.
I don't really feel that Odin's 8-legged horse Sleipnir is appropriate,
and Thor's chariot-goats are inpronounceable.
Non - norse names are also appropriate, I just haven't thought of any.
:ENDTESTO:

:TESTO:The links in the sidebar deserve explanation.

• I was in a biker gang when I went to Boston. Look for "Cabbage" in the MegaSethDay mission, that's me. "Famine" was the bike I rode. Kayle ("Collard Greens") rode on "War", with a spinny rainbow pinwheel on the front.

• I like reading aloud, and I like Anglo-Saxon. So does Rafe, so we did both at once, and I'm quite proud of the result. Listening to this kept me sane after the winter bound me to Baltimore last Christmas eve. It may be neat to listen to these tracks while reading along in Seamus Heaney's bilingual edition of Beowulf. The linked site is hosted on my desk-bound laptop, which may occasionally be asleep.
  

• The remaining two links point to the web logs of my sister and my father, and are both very worth reading.

:ENDTESTO:

:TESTO:Bæcere, hwam fremaþ oþþe hwæþer we butan þe magon lif adreogan?

Ge magon þurh sum fæc butan na lancge ne to wel:
soþlice butan cræfte minon ælc beod æmtig byþ gesewen,
ond buton hlafe ælc mete to wlættan byþ gehwyrfed.
Ic heortan mannes gestrangie, ic mægen wera
ond furþon litlincgas nellaþ forbigean me.


Baker, can we endure life without you?

You might for a time, but neither long nor well:
Without my skill, everything would seem empty,
and without bread, all food would turn to yuck.
I strengthen the heart of man, men and even children
are unwilling to despise me.

from Ælfric's Colloquy

---

I like my new home-place.

Monday is Sourdough,
Thursday (and probably Sunday) mornings are Cinnamon Rolls.
A small part of most weekday afternoons have smelled like ham and cheese,
but I suspect my non-bakery neighbors for that.

Evenings (and non-ham daytime hours) are generally white or whole wheat.
I haven't yet picked up a talent for distinguishing gluten content by nose.

Always yeasty, and ever so nice to come home to.

Anglo-Saxons 3, Ninjas 0.
:ENDTESTO:

:TESTO:Dare I so frequently update? I tell myself it's just a phase, but we'll see. Perhaps I'm just keeping pace with Dad's two-in-a-row posting frenzy, although with nothing so heavy-weight.

Yesterday I cooked dinner (pasta sauce (carrots, tofu, orange juice, maple syrup, mushrooms, garlic, za'tar (which is not unlike oregano), tomatos, basil, black pepper, cumin, cayenne-vinegar, olive oil and ginger, in no particular order) over rotini) for two friends from the gullible-enough-to-teach-in-Baltimore crowd (rather, one and her boyfriend). It's the First Pasta of the new house, which is an event of great significance. We played Settlers of Catan afterward, their first time doing so. The game ran for over two hours, and they had a blast. I happened to have some mead on hand, and I offered it (also their first time). They didn't like it (and drink less than I do) so I had 1 and two-half glasses of the stuff, which is about my buzz-level.

A third teacher, friend of one of the others, was invited, but she could not come. Which is a pity, on many levels, including the one at which I note that this friend is pleasant, attractive, and (I think) unattached. Further activities that address this level shall be pursued, says I.

I do like cooking, and haven't gotten to as much, as Liz and Nat are always off having dinner with the Nat-family orbiting group, and a) I feel like an asocial schmuck if I don't join them at least some of those times (and I enjoy a large part of that company, and it comprises most of my social scene, which is unfortunate for reasons beyond its content) and b) I don't enjoy cooking just for myself as much. I can't justify big messes and long preparations as easily for one scrawny boy's dinner.

Nevertheless, I had made a Pound Cake for myself, from scratch, with a hand-blender, before I invited these folks to dinner. It was a hoot and a half to do, and the doing was just for me, and the friend-visit gave me a nice way not to eat it all.

Today was a day of mislaid bureaucracy, and has restored my mistrust of woodpulp in the hands of the masses. I shall say no more.

Unrelatedly and to keep my dog-Saxon quota filled, I was pointed to these fragments of an episode of Star Trek, in Old English. Very Beowulf, in the same way that most of my babbles tend to echo the Wanderer. I find myself wanting to have access to more OE texts, in original and translation, besides Beowulf and The Wanderer. I had a very nice textbook once, but it belonged to the Library. To have the whole of the Exeter Book would be nice, perhaps with anglo saxon on the left and blank pages on the right, so I can jot notes and make my own translations. It would be a fun game, perhaps I should join an Antarctic mission as chef (or on-site teacher, like they often have at military bases) and spend my evenings translating Old English on the icerim edge of the world.

This semi-public babbling is hard to stop.
At least you, O reader, are under no obligation to read all the way through, or to respond.

Then again, I may scour the IP logs of the site-tracker, and pick out YOU,
then hunt you down and hound you for acknowledgement of my keyboard's drivel.
But I won't.
:ENDTESTO:

:TESTO:I don't intend to update regularly, but I might write things here occasionally.
I've got a new house, and I can walk everywhere I want to go.

Except home.

So wrote the exile, waiting
hoping for help from on high
to prettify his prose
as he ploughed his pen
through the bit-lanes of his web log.

No friends will find this page,
all are gone, forgotten songs
will not be wind-borne over waves
to his forsaken harbor.

His fate is sealed,
Words be fully read.


Ha! Melancholy dead anglo-saxons,  eat your frost-rimed hearts out!

I'm not really homesick, although it's true that I can't walk to Cincinnati or Virginia, where my family lives, or to Oberlin or Boston or Ithaca, where many friends are.

I hesitate to tell all those folks about this web log, as I might feel obligated to update it at least as often as my father updates his.


I baked a cake, and slept with a puppy. :ENDTESTO: