2007-04-10

Among items that I've unearthed in my once-a-decade (it seems) scan of my "page-protector file" is a stapled set of "verb charts" from high school.

I know my mom was a great fan of these verb charts, which essentially provide the same information as you'll find in those books that provide insight into hundreds of foreign language verbs, except that you've written them all out. Naturally, at the time, this was considered an unforgivable imposition on my valuable time, but as I got older, I found that writing things out helped me remember them.

The format of these charts is 8-1/2 by 11, landscape orientation. The page is divided into five colums.

At the top of the left-most column one writes the future conjugation of the verb; below that, the conditional tense.

In the second column, the top is devoted to the past imperfect, with the subjunctive below that. The middle column is very busy, featuring (from top to bottom) the passé composé, the pluperfect tense ("I had..."), the future anterior ("I will have..."), the past conditional ("I would have..."), the past subjective ("that I may have..."), and the pluperfect subjunctive ("that I might have...").

The fourth column is fairly simply: the present tense at the top and below that, the three forms of the imperative.

The last column is devoted to the past definite (which in French is mostly a literary tense that's fallen out of use) and the imperfect subjunctive.

It actually beats using those books, come to think of it. (And I can't get over how... irregular my penmanship was at the time.)

Cheers...

My telecon this morning went well, though there were a couple of sentences where the thought "What in the name of Providence did I just say?" popped up in my mind as I finished an utterance. Still, nobody went running out of the room, or anything.

My willingness to take on individual telecons was rewarded - in a sort of overall karmic sense - with an assignment that's going to keep me off of street corners and out of the slammer for the next 10 days. Technically, if I put the pedal to the metal and carry on as if I was traveling at Mach 3 with my hair on fire, I could have this item finished in half the allotted time, but I think I'll just throttle back to 75% power and see where that takes me.

* * *LJ friend

daphnis makes an interesting point about my previous post, asking if perhaps our planetary mania of thinking about The Unthinkable is drawing said Unthinkable into our reality (my interpretation of her words, BTW). This reminds me greatly of a lot of recent hullaballoo about something called The Secret, which is enjoying a great deal of popularity all over the place.

When I get the time, I'd like to do a thorough grilling of The Secret and how it resembles - and where it departs from - previous statements of the same philosophy which, boiled down to its essentials, is: "You bring into your life what you think about."

First of all, there is the following data point: Earl Nightingale, who made his bones back in the 1950s as a broadcasting personality, recorded something called The Strangest Secret back before 95% of us here on LJ were born (yeah, I know, that's an impressive statistic that's essentially meaningless, so... say, back in the 60s or so). The message is pretty much the same: "You become what you think about." The recording, BTW, was the first self-help title to go "gold."

And Nightingale wasn't really propounding anything new, just something that people really don't, deep down, believe. Today's johnny-come-lately, The Secret, mumbles something in the introduction about how attempts have been made for ages to suppress the idea being presented (all the while supporting the message with quotes from well-known persons throughout the years). On one level, this may seem to be good marketing ("Getcha red-hot Forbidden Fruit™, heah! It's selling like hot-cakes! Get yours before it's all gone!"), but it just seems to me that anyone with half a brain will... well... be put off.

Which is a shame, because the underlying message is - basically, once you excise the fluffery - valid.

But I said I'd do a more thorough job later, when I had time, and I intend to. Perhaps it's something that will take many small steps, I don't know.

* * *I'm feeling reasonably accomplished, as I have completed and sent off the loan application for the lot Galina bought in Pagosa, which will sell for a pretty penny once the snow goes away. Other lots in the same shopping center development have been selling well, and there is no reason to think ours will do any worse.

* * *Our accountant has a neat Access application that makes mincemeat of the paper chase; he also says the code is proprietary. It sort of makes me wish he hadn't shown it to me. It does, however, create an interesting Excel spreadsheet; one with pivot tables, which are a complete mystery to me (though I recently saw an entire book on display at the B&N devoted to the use of pivot tables in Excel. Wow!).

* * *And finally, an email note directed at someone at the Locust Valley Library in Nassau, Long Island got me the following "reply":

<jsanto@locustvalleylibrary.org>: host mail.nassaulibrary.org [12.151.123.138] refused to talk to me: 550 4.7.0 symantec.nassaulibrary.org
Sorry, this system does not accept mail from hosts on the Realtime Blackhole List.

Double wow! I'm on a "blackhole list"?

Cheers...

2007-04-10

Verb charts (and memories)...

SFX readers weigh in...

Top sci-fi movies, according to SFX readers

All good things...