Internet Exile

I am currently without a charger for my computer and without easy access to internet. 

I have a couple blog posts that I intend to finish up and publish soon, but right now I wanna make the most of my few days here in Winnipeg.

I'm leaving on Thursday. Today is Sunday. I haven't fully understood that I'm leaving.

I've found good people here. I've been in many places, I've met lots of people. I can tell when I meet people that I fully...  like. So I feel sad about leaving them. Because I know how far between it can be between them.

In Swedish we say that people can click with each other. I've clicked with them. 

I like Winnipeg, it's a nice city. I don't agree with the natives of this town who always question why I chose to come here. I like it here, a lot. I like the department of Linguistics at University of Manitoba, a lot. 

I feel sad about leaving. I don't want to think about it. I wanna stay longer. I also feel sad about how hard it is to express sincerity about these things... it all sounds so cliché and polite. I really, really like this city and the people I've met here. I hope they can understand that. I feel powerless when it comes to expressing feelings with language.

So.. since I'm in Internet Exile I'll put up a few photos of what I've been up to in the IRL-world. 

Me and Kristine at Brandens house outside of Winnipeg. Right before we went out quading in the dark plains of Manitoba. Not the first but the second meaning of the term "quading" as listed by urban dictionary..

1. having sex with a quadriplegic

2. 4Wheeling

 I posed like Rosie the Riveter and bleached my hair. Or rather, Branden bleached my hair ^^!

Went to the zoo with Meera, Sean, Kristina and Branden. Saw pretty birds and cute pandas and a huge construction site for the new polar bear exhibit they're building.

I found Yifan Liu and discovered how much fun she is to party with! 

 I found out that shared not only taste in beer with Jesse but also 

opinions about the left movements in North America. Good stuffs.

 Skated at the forks :)

 I drew a picture for Branden. It took a couple of days but I'm quite satisfied ^^!

 Went walking in the sunset

 Had poutine.

 Went to derby scrimmage 

Went to a quiet fashion show.

Hung out with wonderful pretty Sean.

Bye bye for now, talk soon.

Winnipeg: Orange Jell-o

Orange Jello-O

Movie still from My Winnipeg

In the fictional movie My Winnipeg (Guy Maddin 2008) there is a period know as the "Orange Jello-O-days". During that period decadence ruled and at The Bay on Portage there was a restaurant called the Paddlewheel where they held Man-pageants. Women watching men parading, showing of their bodies. The citys Mayor selected the winner - The Golden Boy. The Paddlewheel sold orange - golden - jello as dessert. Everything was wonderful and sinful.

There was actually a mayor called Mayor Cornish, just like in the movie. But he was mayor in the late 1800's.. so. Yeah no.

On Sebastians birthday, the 24th of February, we went to a restaurant on Edmonton St here in Winnipeg called Affinitiy garden. It was really good and all (the Seitan and the noodles were very veryyy good), but what was most exciting was the Tea Jelly! It was orange and tasted of vanilla, much like Crème Brûlée. Here are two very short clips of us and the jelly. I have no idea if they know anything about the movie and the connotations of the orange jello - I doubt it.

Point being:
very exciting to have had orange jell-o in Winnipeg in presence of a hot guy.

Here are some more stills from the movie:

Isn't it just wonderful? It's a kinda hard movie to watch, you have to be in the right mood. It's very slow in the beginning and the narrative is broken into many pieces. Once you get into it though it's a great, great movie. It's hysterically funny, especially if you know Winnipeg.

North American Cuisine
They're crazy about their jello-o over here, really.  I found this awful recipe of Jell-o fruit salad. I mean, come on.. you... you just.. CAN'T DO THAT!!

North americans don't care about what is appropriate in the "old" world, it's like the parents are gone and the kids have the house to themselves. They come up with the weirdest combinations of foods, many things that would be considered very vulgar and barbaric in europe. Like mayonnaise on sushi.. (I know you like it Sean and it's okay ^^).

Not to mention the culture of being able to specialize your order like kah-razy. "White Mocha Non-Fat Frappucino with Caramel"... I feel like the mum in Goodbye Lenin: I want there to be only one option!!

I don't think it's all bad, they are being more creative and they think outside the box... it's just... I'm a poor little european and I feel it's WRONG. And then there's the architecture, they just go bananas!! They have lots of space here on the prairies and no shortage of concrete. I like that though, I reeaaally like that. It's fun with all the weird designs they come up with, even the ugly ones. At least they're doing something new!

I've never felt so european as I do here, not swedish but european. I find my self missing London, Paris and Leipzig. I'm not even from there!!

I like it that "european" here means... loose morals (or plain erotic), experimental, snobby, pretentious, superior and interesting. I understand it's no fun getting stereotyped but... but I enjoy this stereotype ^^

Bye bye!

P.s. This boy is called Branden (->) and his favorite expression when he likes something is "golden" ^^.  I like how Winnipeg has the "Golden Boy"on the legislative building and that the jello is golden orange. My theme for my farewell party was "Gold and Canada" and everybody that it was really strange. Looks like I was on to something!! HA! Look who's laughing now!!

Branden told me that Winnipeg is the Slurpie (kinda like Slush Puppies) Capital of the world. This needs to be investigated!

Absurd Animations

I am a big fan surreal and absurd animations (or art in general). A big fan. Animation is such a playful media, you can do so much!
I wanted to share with you four of my favorite surreal animations. If you like this kinda stuff I recommend subscribing to Channel Frederator on the tubes. They have a short weekly show were they discuss and recommend new up and coming animations.

Who I am and What I want
"I want to me a part of the interal workings and crushed within them"
Brilliant animation by David Shrigley. 

Absolutely brilliant. Stunningly brilliant and awesome. Period.

Thank you Raoul for showing it to me the first time.

David Shrigley has also made a music video for Blur's song
"Good song". It is also epicly good.

Sleeping and Dreaming of Food
by awesome artist Kolbeinn Karlsson and animator Eva-Marie Elg.

 I'm sorry it's only a trailer. You can see some more stills and stuff on their website. Kolbeinn is from Uppsala just like me but we became friends in Stockholm through Galago-parties.
Kolbeinn is an awesome artist and a wonderful person. He has left Mälardalen for Malmö though.  (WHY MUST ALL AWESOME PEOPLE MOVE TO MALMÖ?!?! Don't tell me, I know why.. it's an very nice place, less stressful and people are more..
close, making spontaneity easier.)

 

Fuck the humans
"They don't fucking have fur!"
By Brad Neely

I don't know anything about the creator of this song or animation.
But I love it!

DOCTOR BREAKFAAST

"Looks like you're giving that naked man a bath"

by Stephen P Neary

A beautiful story of real friendship!
I love it so much! Especially the voice actors

Greetings from the rainy prairies!

It's pouring down outside so I'm inside having beer and burgers. Hope you're all alright.

Reese, Cely and gifs of Men

Let's take a minute away from the seriousness of science and other serious issues. Let's talk about men and chocolate.

I love Reese. I really REALLY love Reese. I've found someone who also loves Reese as much as I do. She is awesome and her name is Cely. Her blog is about all kinds of things that interested her, like REESES(!!), cute dogs and sexy men. And also running [sic].


I love to eat Reese’s cups, like LOVE them so much I can eat 10 at once. In comes the “running off” part. I run to eat. period. the end. I love Reese’s cups so now I have to like running.

That's the most inspiring thing I've ever heard, when it comes to motivating people to start running. I mean it, I've never heard a better argument in my life. I seriously have to rethink my position on running now.


Gifs of men
.gif is a fileformat for pictures and is most often used for a very short series of pictures shown after each other and is looped, see below. Gifs were very, very popular in the beginning of when the internets became a public space.
On mondays this Cely girl posts a lot of gifs and static pictures of hot men.

In case you're having a bad day or something, here is something to lighten your day: some my favorites gifs of hot guys.

Just thought you'd be interested ;)

Under the skin pt 2.5 - blowing instruments

This is a smaller post, more of a side-note to the previous one on the speech aparatus. If you wanna read the first part on BRAINS and illusions of body ownership go here.

I was surfing around the internets looking for interesting x-rays when I found videos of people using their speech apparatus for other things than speech - blowing instruments! I just wanted to share them with you. Aren't they marvelous :)?

I think they're really interesting because they show the function that the pulmonic pressure (pressure from the lungs) and the shape of the lips play. Sometimes the note changes but we see no/little change in the upper parts of the vocal tract, and that's because of stuff going on further down or because of the lips.

Now let's enjoy some sweet sweet jazz.

And some "sexy" saxophone
(quite impressive what he can do lying down actually)

and why not the great meme of 'sax rolling' while were at it :)?

Bye bye!

P.s. Here's another great clip of x-ray blowing!

Under the skin pt 2 - Speech apparatus

We continue to look under the skin. If you wanna see the previous post on BRAINS and illusions of body ownership go here. This post is about the speech apparatus and contains a short introduction to phonetic symbols. If you wanna see some x-rays of trumpet blowing go here.

"I want a doctor to take a picture so
I can look at you from inside aswell"

- The Vapors  - Turning japanese (cover with Kirsten Dunst!)

The Speech Apparatus

Female subject saying ''både'' (eng: both)
Pictures from Christine Ericsdotter's website

Female subject exploring her vocal tract
Pictures from Christine Ericsdotter's website

Male subject saying ''pion''[piun]
Pictures from Christine Ericsdotter's website

 These images are from Christine Ericsdotter's website, go there to learn more about the project! I believe they have been modified slightly to accentuate lines separating different "soft parts".

Christine Ericsdotter

Christine Ericsdotter was one of my teachers in my first years of linguistics. She was a wonderful teacher and I wish I could take courses with her again. She is a phonetician which means that she is interested in speech communication - aspects of production and perception of speech, how humans create and register different language sounds and speech.
 
The study behind the images above
Christine and many others from the phonetics section of the department of linguistics at Stockholm university have been involved in a study that took place at the Danderyd hospital. They did x-rays of people when the spoke. The aim was to learn more about dental and retroflexive stops (different types of consonants) and their variation in different vowel contexts.

The subjects were subjected to as little radiation as possible, all appropriate safety requirements were met. The radiation dose was smaller than that of a typical visit to the dentist.

She's uploaded a few pictures from this study on her website. I love looking at them, suddenly everything I've learned about the vocal tract becomes so much more concrete. Please read more about the project here.

The vocal tract

 When we articulate we make all kinds of complex movements with our vocal tracts. We do not only make use of the tongue, as you can see from the images above. We make use of the velum (the thing in the back that closes the passage to the nose in the third image above), the lips, the vocal folds (way low in the throat) and much more.

It is not an easy task to master all of these tiny little muscles and produce the right sounds, yet it takes us so little time to acquire! Wonders of the mind and body. Take a look at the images above again- they represent one word per picture. We do that everyday, all the time - and way faster than that. Isn't it fascinating?


The IPA
The International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) is an attempt to represent the sounds we make. Those representations will always be averages, means and estimations. Each speaker has a distinct acoustic environment and will sound different. When we want to modify a sound to fit a sound in a certain language in greater detail there is an range of different small extra symbols we can add to further specify the sound.

The IPA is not a collection of arbitrary sounds, there is a system to it. If you studied the IPA-chart and learned the logic behind it it would make way more sense. Unfortunately teachers in most schools just give out a list of crazy symbols and poor explanations of how it all hangs together. This often results in a quite useless exercise to try and remember weird symbols and their pronunciation without a understanding of how sounds of languages work.

English alphabet ≠ IPA 
Please keep in mind that even though IPA uses latin script this does not mean that the symbols are pronounced the same way that the letters of the english, swedish, french, etc alpabeth. Never forget that!
For example:

<through> - [θɹu]
<kidney> - [ˈkɪdni]

<scruffy> - [ˈskɹʌ.fi]
<diving> - [ˈdaɪvɪŋ]

Also, there is great variation between individuals and groups of individuals (dialects etc). A certain sound may be produced different by different speakers. A phonetic transcription aims to capture this in great detail. A phonological transcription does not represent this variation but uses one symbol (phoneme) to represent a group of sounds (phones) that are used in exactly the same context.
An example would be the many different ways of producing an "r"-sound in Swedish. In a phonetic transcription they would all be different but in a phonological they would be represented with the same symbol.

International Phonetic Alpabeth-guide in swedish
If you are Swedish and you wanna learn more about the International Phonetic Alphabet or just language and sounds in general, then I recommend this folder that I've created. It's a basic introduction to how sounds are treated in linguistics. There are a few minor mistakes in it, I'm sorry about that.


Vowel chart
The folder and the IPA-chart contains a vowel chart. The vowel chart is meant to be used as a representation of how phonetic symbols representing vowels relate to each other.
First of all: image the vowel chart as actually representing the vocal tract like this:

Vowel chart and it's relation to the vocal tract. Cred: Mikael Parkvall

The location of the phonetic symbols represents where the tongue is positioned. If you want to see examples of how place of articulation plays a role than watch these videos of trumpet blowing and pay attention to where the toungue is when the notes are produced.
Then we go on to place out some more characters on our little map like so:

The vowels are arranged in pairs, the right is pronounced with rounded lips and the left with unrounded lips.


One of the things Christine taught me
Christine taught me a little phrase in Swedish that can help one remember how the four front unrounded vowels and the four back rounded are pronounced: "vi ber fem man dra bort vårt bord"

See? Isn't it clever? I think it is terribly clever. 

Bye bye now,

See you around hottie!

References:
Ericsdotter, C. (1999): Modeling lingual coarticulation in coronal stops. Master Thesis in Phonetics, Department of Linguistics, Stockholm University & Deparment of Speech, Music and Hearing, Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm, Spring 1999.

p.s. Om du är grundkursstudent i lingvistik och fann "vi ber fem man dra bort vårt bord" hjälpsamt kan jag också tipsa om en minnesregel för Hocketts 13 designdrag för naturligt mänskligt talat språk: GRÅTT TUSS SUPA.

• Godtycklighet
• Röst-hörsel-kanal
• Åtskildhet (aka diskrethet)
• Tvånivåsystem
• Traditionell överföring

• Total återkoppling
• Utväxlingsbarhet
• Semanticitet
• Specialisering

• Snabbt avtagande
• Utsänd överföring med lokaliserad mottagning
• Produktivitet
• Avlägensenhet (displacement)

Jupp, jag ska bli seriös lingvist jag :)!