A couple more images from my recent Ashmolean visit. I can't resist the surreal and comic justapositions that happen in places like the gallery of plaster casts of classical sculpture, once you have freed your eye from what you are supposed to be looking at. The one at the top is positively Dali-esque.
They make an interesting combination with this bit of shadow-play, seen in the Hall of Armour in Schloss Ambras, near Innsbruck, in the summer:
Which in turn chimes nicely with this one, also from Innsbruck, but this time from the Tiroler Volkskunstmuseum:
As I have become rather too fond of saying, wherever you go, there you are. Put that end-to-end with various other favourite sayings -- "to a man with a hammer everything looks like a nail" and "there are two kinds of people, those who think there are two kinds of people and those who don't" suggest themselves -- and you have come depressingly close to summing up the contents of my mind after 60 years on the planet. There are probably a couple more nostrums in there somewhere, but I can't think what they are just now. Ah well, any wisdom that can't be summarised onto one side of A4 is not worth knowing (ah, there goes another one!).
From a technical point of view, I think these pictures demonstrate pretty conclusively the superior low-light performance of the Fuji X-E1 (top two) over the Panasonic G3 (bottom two). I had to work quite hard to get usable files from the Panasonic, including generous application of Noise Ninja, but the Fuji files have barely been tweaked. Impressive.
13 comments:
Shouldn't that be, "there is a couple of nostra"?
Zouk,
Pedantry, up with which I will not put...
Mike
Joke, obviously -- but leaving aside the Latin plural (Is it "referendums" or "referenda"? -- let's have a show of hands), it's worth noting that "there are", as I'm sure you're aware from the language blogs (if not your ear), is generally dying out (even on the BBC), so "there is" might be preferred anyway -- not because "a couple" is singular, but because the new universal way of making assertions of existence/non-existence or presence/absence in English is "theres" [my apostrophe-drop].
And why not? Cf French: il y a ("it has there"); German: es gibt ("it gives"); Arabic: fee/mafeesh ("in/not in"). Doesn't really matter how you say it, as long as it's understood.
PS This is not supposed to be negative criticism of your use of English. Just saying, that's all.
Zouk,
Yes, these things is/are tricky. I rely mainly on my ear -- "There are a couple of things" sounds right, "There is a couple of things" sounds wrong, to me. But "There is a pair of shoes" sounds right, whereas "There are a pair of shoes" sounds wrong(ish). I could come up with a pseudo-grammatical justification based on "expressions of number", but...
On plurals, the general advice is to use the conventions of the language in question, not those of the source language of a "loan word" or a coinage i.e. "nostrums", "encyclopaedias", etc.
The one that *really* irritates me is the genteel avoidance of "and me" as if it were vulgar, as in "If you have a problem, take it up with Zouk and I"... Grrr.
Mike
And then there is the ubiquitous "Me and my friend Mike..."
Kent,
Actually, that sounds fine to me, but my native language is Estuary English shading into East Anglian, so I don't hold my pair of ears up as an authority (authorities?) on anything...
Mike
You obviously don't live with a Catholic School trained grammar Nazi.
Kent,
Ha! True on so many levels! My partner can't even spell...
Mike
The general advice? Who(m) from (off of?!) ?
There's loads of people like you and me who now say, "There's loads of people etc" and who I'm sure would have [of!?] said, "There are loads etc" a few years ago (or their predecessors would).
It always amuses me how Jamaican patois seems to reverse the case usage of "I" and "me", eg (ahem) "me no 'ave no ganja - y'ave ting fe I [and, possibly, I]?"*
Having "it's an irritant to people like you and I" grate is the burden of a grammar school education I fear; it's annoying when you understand the complex type of case system of which "I" and "me" are amongst the last, fading vestiges in English, but for most people "you and I" is "proper" while "you and me" is what they probably mostly use with intimates, regardless of grammatical case (except Kent and the like, of course).
What are you like with "number" and "amount"? "Less" and "fewer"? (Jeremy Hardy joke: Waitrose has a "ten items or fewer" till).
Btw, going back to some banter in an earlier post**, I'm pretty sure (without bothering Google) that it wasn't any Marx who first said "Time flies like an arrow; fruit flies like a banana", but Noam Chomsky (something to do with Deep Structure. Or summink.)
*Apologies to any Jamaicans who may be reading (yeah, right), for any misrepresentation of their vernacular. And stereotyping.
** Is it possible to do a free text search on a Blogger blog?
Zouk,
Suddenly, despite the early hour, I feel very tired... This "Eats Shoots & Leaves" stuff doesn't really turn me on.
I'm going to send you for Xmas a copy of "Guardian Style" (3rd ed.) by David Marsh (or possibly his "For Who The Bell Tolls") via a mutual friend. You'll have hours of fun!
N.B. "Time flies..." is definitely Groucho Marx; you're probably thinking of Chomsky's "Colorless green ideas sleep furiously", see here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colorless_green_ideas_sleep_furiously
Maybe I'll go back to bed... Ah, the luxury.
Mike
Mike
Oh, yeah! Could have sworn I read that sentence in Psycholinguistics (in which case it would have to have been somewhere near the beginning). I definitely read "colourless green ideas [etc]" there.
However, consulting the font of all knowledge reveals that it wasn't Groucho's original either:
http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_flies_like_an_arrow;_fruit_flies_like_a_banana
Course, we won't know for sure till the Grauniad pronounces on the matter. (Does it say "typos complusory" in their style guide, btw?)
I always feel sorry for retired people whose body clock won't adjust to the luxury of a lie-in; I got up "early" today (decorator in) but even so, while you were writing your reply I was still in bed enjoying my wakeup fag*.
PS Can you send me Eats Bamboo Shoots and Leaves instead, as I haven't read it. And I used to tell that joke before it was a book.
*Note for US readers: it's a cigarette, ok?
Zouk,
If you're a very good boy (and assuming you and our mutual friend are still talking) I might send you both, then you can compare and contrast.
Mike
http://allthingslinguistic.com/post/102044869718/now-thin-fruit-flies-like-thunderstorms-and-thin
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