'Twas the noche before Navidad

A Spanish/English version of 'Twas the Night Before Christmas from Spanish-Translation-Help.com. They also have some links to traditional villancicos (Spanish Christmas carols) and some English faves sung in Espanol.

‘Twas the night before Christmas y por toda la casa,
Not a creature was stirring-Caramba! Que pasa?

Los niños were tucked away in their camas,
Some in long underwear, some in pijamas,

While hanging the medias with mucho ciudado
In hopes that old Santa would feel obligado

To bring all children, both buenos y malos,
A nice batch of dulces y otros regalos.

Outside in the yard there arose such a grito
That I jumped to my pies like a frightened cabrito.

I ran to the window and looked out afuera,
And who in the world do you think that it era?

Saint Nick in a sleigh and a big red sombrero
Came dashing along like a crazy bombero.

And pulling his sleigh instead of venados
Were eight little burros approaching volados.

I watched as they came and this quaint little hombre
Was shouting and whistling and calling by nombre:

"Ay Pancho, ay Pepe, ay Cuco, ay Berto,
Ay Chato, ay Chopo, Macuco, y Nieto!"

Then standing erect with his hands on his pecho
He flew to the top of our very own techo.

With his round little belly like a bowl of jalea,
He struggled to squeeze down our old chiminea,

Then huffing and puffing at last in our sala,
With soot smeared all over his real suit de gala,

He filled all the medias with lovely regalos-
For none of the niños had been very malos.

Then chuckling aloud, seeming muy contento,
He turned like a flash and was gone como viento.

And I heard him exclaim, and this is verdad,
Merry Christmas to all, y Feliz Navidad!

Change Blindness

Also known as "Inattentional Blindness" is the inability to recognize visual changes that occur in your direct field of perception because you are paying attention to something else. An easy example would be something like not noticing that a street light changed colour even though you are looking right at it because you are listening to your friend talking to you. This is related to our ability to block out extraneous information and focus on specific stimuli. Which is advantageous when you are trying to listen to a single conversation in a noisy room, but not so good when you are called on to be a witness to a crime that happened right in front of you while you were busy. Some people have taught themselves to pay attention to specific stimuli above all else because it holds some special fascination for them. These are people who have a "good memory for faces/details/colours/bones/etc". And some people have trained themselves to be more conscious of changes in their surroundings in general, these are people who are "cops/spies/nosy/etc". Anyway, now that you are forewarned that that is what we're doing, here are a few good videos on the issue. Good times being nerdy!

First, here is one discussing an interesting experiment on the subject:

I know most of you have seen that awareness video with the ball passing and the bear (here). I think that it is a bit of cheating in these types of videos because they are it intentionally telling you to focus on something else to trick you. These types of awareness tests are easy if you ignore the "task" you are given and just watch normally:

But try and do the task AND find the change. It's still hard to do even if you know to be looking for something crazy. It's so hard to focus on two things! This one is a good one because it is just distracting you instead of actively telling you to do something else:

Here is a good one done by the same city of London bike safety guys to do the moonwalking bear mentioned above. These series of ads were to raise awareness of people's lack of awareness of cyclists on the road. McShanty points if you find more than 3 changes (the bear turning into a suit of armor doesn't count because it's too obvious, find a harder one dang it!). This one is tough because even though you know to look for the changes, a lot is happening at once and you don't know where the changes will occur so it is hard to know where focus your attention. FYI there are 21 changes during the course of the video.

p.s. Without looking, did you see a red wagon behind the gorilla on the picture at the top of the post? Did you have to look before you knew the answer?

Borden System Words: British Columbia

BC is a gold mine of good words! Please bare in mind that many of these are probably in the water, especially those with the upper East-West designation (third letter) of V, U, or T. We also still have a few slackers: DQ, EP, EQ, FQ, IV, IU, IT, IS, and IR all have no words and I already used up the words from DP in the Alberta words post. However we still have quite a few:

HU – haut, haul
HT – hits, heth, hats, hath, hate
HS – hiss, hest, hast, hasp, hash
HR – hire, hers, hero, herm, herl, here, herd, herb, hart, harp, harm, harl, hark, hare, hard
GU – glut, glum, glug, glue, geum, gaur, gaud
GT – gits, gets, geta, gats, gate
GS – gist, gest, gast, gasp, gash
GR – girt, giro, girl, gird, germ, gars, garb
FU – flux, flus, flue, flub, feud, faux, faun
FT – fits, fete, feta, fats, fate
FS – fist, fish, fisc, fess, fast
FR – firs, firn, firm, fire, fern, fere, fart, faro, farm, farl, fare, fard
ET – efts, eats
ES – else, east, ease
ER – ecru, ears, earn, earl
DS – diss, disk, dish, disc
DR – dirt, dirk, dire

That's a grand total of 96 potential Borden words! Outstanding! Especially compared to Alberta's abysmal 16 words even after I took out a bunch of the sketchy words that the Scrabble thing churned out and for which I couldn't find any good definitions, like "hets", "hist", "hisn", "hern", "gaun", "fets", and "feus". I also took out a few crazy Scots words like "dirl", "girn", "fash" and "eath"(this is despite certain Diana Gabaldon books that I may or may not have read and from which I learned several of these), and a dialect word or two like "gaum" and "dere". FYI: "heth" is the eighth letter of the Hebrew alphabet, a "herm" is a monument or statue consisting of a four-sided column tapering inward from top to bottom with a bust of Hermes on top, "firn" is granular snow accumulated on high mountains and subsequently compacted into glacial ice (or a field of same). Anyway, BC is good because it has several key dirty (both symbolic and literal) words including "fart" and "germ". Fart is clearly the front runner here so far (much better than Sask/Alberta with "dink". No swears yet though. We'll just see what Manitoba has to say.

Firelight

In my continued blog-warfare based battle to get little cp to give her last MTC post, here is the recent spoof that SNL did of a certain movie. Take that!

p.s. Taylor Swift's opening monologue was pretty funny too.

Borden System Words: Alberta

Continuing in our search for filthiness in the Borden System, we move on to Alberta. There's sure to be some bad words in there! What with all the oil rig workers and such. Unfortunately, 1/4 of the upper borden grids have Qs in them! Lousy Qs!

Turns out that Alberta has significantly fewer BSwords than Saskatchewan (IQ, IP, HQ, HO, GQ, FQ, FP, EQ, and EP had no words at all...slackers). Here they are by upper borden block (keep in mind that, as we learned last time, the lower North-South bordens only go up to l and the lower East-West bordens only go up to x, which means we miss out on some good words like "fool" and "grog" and "goon", but no swears though):

IO – ikon, icon
HP – hips, haps
GP – gips, gaps, gape
GO – glow, glop, glom
FO – flow, flop
EO – egos, ebon
DP – dipt, dips
DO – dhow

Bah! I guess glop is good because its literally dirty, but that wasn't what I was going for. Oh well, I'm 0 for 2 so far, but we'll see next time.

p.s. A "dhow" is a traditional Arabic sailing vessel. Learning is fun!

Mind of Pi (#4)

Schrodinger's cat walks into a bar...

...and doesn't.

Chickens! Concert series (#31): Priestess

You may remember Priestess from previous posts, in which I almost saw them but was trapped in the line that was 1 million kms long. But that injustice was redeemed last night! I must they that I like their first album (Hello Master, 2006) a lot more than the newest album (Prior to the Fire, 2009). I was getting a little worried when they got through almost their entire show without playing any of my favorites songs from Hello Master, but then they did "Lay Down" (some of you may know this song from Guitar Hero 3) and "I am the Night, Colour Me Black" plus "Talk to Her" and I was all happy. The new songs are much heavier and more "progressive" sounding. That's OK, but I wouldn't have liked them as much if their new album was the first I had heard of them. Although their new songs are interesting to listen to, often with twists and turns in the music. The openers were pretty decent too. I liked Trigger Effect's music more, but Early Man had a tighter performance.

This is the setlist from the Ontario concert but it seems like it was the same from what I remember (except I'm sure they played Run Home at the beginning somewhere):
-The Gem (this was like a 10 minute song!)
-Raccoon Eyes
-Two Kids
-It Baffles The Mind
-The Firebird
-Trapped In Space & Time
-Lay Down
-Sideways Attack
-Lunar
-I Am The Night, Colour Me Black
-Lady Killer
Encore:
-Everything That You Are
-Talk To Her
-Communicating Via-Eyes (this one is about werewolves...good times)

Borden System Words: Saskatchewan

The Borden System divides Canada up into chunks based on the lat/long system to provide a handy way of designating unique site names based on the site's location and the order in which it was found (just like the Stonecutters!). It was created by one Charles E. Borden in 1952, while teaching at UBC. Borden is known as the grandfather of BC archaeology. This is despite the mild handicaps of having been employed in the German Department (although he was made a lecturer in archaeology after his first 10 years there) and being an American citizen. See a good bio from the CAA here, also American Antiquity printed an obituary for him. His contributions to BC archaeology (and archaeology in general) were numerous. Among other things, he excavated many important sites, was instrumetal in the pressuring of provincial government to pass the 1960 Archaeological an Historic Sites Protection Act, and of course developed the Borden Grid System which all Canadian archaeologists know and enjoy today.

Let's look at how it works shall we? Say we have the site FfNm-1 (that's South Branch House).

"F" is the Major South-North locator. Each North-South block represents 2 degrees of Latitude going from "A" through "U" (no V through Z). While "f" is the Minor South-North locator (the minor blocks for "F" range from "a" through "l"). For both the North-South and East-West, each minor block within a major block represents 10 minutes of latitude or longitude respectively. from south to north (a-l). "N" is the Major East-West Locator. To the South of 62 degrees, each of these blocks represents 4 degrees of Longitude from east to west (A - W). However, North of 62 degrees each major block represents 8 degrees of longitude. FYI: Because the distance between lines of longitude get smaller with increasing latitude, the Borden System changes at 64 degrees north latitude, from a width of 4 degrees of longitude to a width of 8 degrees in order to keep the area within each designate roughly the same. Lastly, "m" is the Minor East-West Locator, each block represents 10 minutes of Longitude from east to west (a - x). North of 62 degrees each minor block represents 20 minutes of longitude. The full Borden designation, FfNm-1, represents a roughly 16km x 16km area and the 1st site found within that area. Upper Borden grid maps are downloadable at the Canadian Museum of Civilization here.

Now rumour has it that Charles Borden went to great lengths to prevent cussin' via archaeology in his system and hence omitted several key potential Borden designations. That sounded like a challenge to me....

So, Saskatchewan (see the upper Borden grid to the right, click to embiggen) includes these Borden letters:
North/South - D(g-l), E(a-l), F(a-l), G(a-l), H(a-l), I(a-l)
East/West - O(a-l), N(a-x), and M(k-x).

With quick use of a scrabble cheating device (here), I found that the following 51 words can be spelled using the Borden system in Saskatchewan:

dims, dine, ding, dink, dins, dint, diol, elms, fane, fang, fano, fans, fems, fend, fens, feod, find, fine, fink, fino, fins, floc, floe, flog, gamp, gams, gane, gang, gaol, gems, gene, gens, gent, genu, gimp, gink, gins, glob, hams, hand, hang, hank, hant, hemp, hems, hens, hent, hind, hins, hint, idol

I guess "dink" is kinda dirty and "gink" is a slang word for a person or fellow that is often used in a derogatory context. Also, a "gamp" is an umbrella. It's not dirty, I just didn't know that before. Anyway, as it stands Saskatchewan is clean as a bean. You win this round Charles! Nonetheless, I remain undaunted in my task and will continue to scour Canada province by province for giggle worthy words!

p.s. I wonder if french words count if they're in Quebec.

Bohe-muppet Rhapsody

A (late) BD present for those of you who love muppets:

p.s. Is it me or is animal looking a little funky?

You have the right to remain fluffy...

p.s. Where's my Chile post?!