The New York Times recently printed an article reviewing a number of American chain restaurants, including the Outback Steakhouse (apparently in some way related to Australia), Olive Grove and TGI Fridays (which I believe we also have in Australia). It is an interesting enough review, although a few bloggerscriticise it, quite unfairly I think, for being elitist.

These type of restaurants also exist in Australia and they always struck me as over-priced and under-quality. You can get much better food a local restaurants for less money. I don’t think it is elitist per se to crticise these chain restaurants; I am not sure why people to go to them, but it is not because they are too poor to go anywhere else.

Anyway, the confusing thing in the article is that they only ever seem to order an ‘appetizer’ and an entree. This I found confusing, firstly that the restaurants would have ‘appetizers’ (I always understood to be a small bite size piece of food severed before the entree), and secondly that the reviewer would not have a main course. Then of course I realised that the American usage of entree must be different.

The American Dictionary.com defines entree as:

1.        a dish served as the main course of a meal.
2.        Older Use. a dish served at dinner between the principal courses.
3.        the privilege of entering; access.
4.        a means of obtaining entry: His friendship with an actor’s son was his entree into the theatrical world.
5.        the act of entering; entrance.

So the Americans refer to the main as an entree, although acknowledging that it once had a different (and in my view, more proper) meaning.

Another one for Language Log.

Update: as per the comment below I have touched up the post.

These imagines of a storm over a volcano in Southern America are quite amazing:

http://megagalerias.terra.cl/galerias/index.cfm?id_galeria=30734 http://megagalerias.terra.cl/galerias/index.cfm?id_galeria=30734

I think I can safely predict that some Science Fiction movie director is going to pick up on those images and we will see invading alien spaceships that look surprisingly similar to those lightening infested dust clouds.

It has been a while since 9/11, and being outside the United States it can be e bit hard to kind of consider how the events of that day must have impacted on the American Psych. A “comic” started on around that time, Get Your War On, always struck me as capturing the impact of the moment. I don’t know anything about the author, other than he or she apparently used clip art to compose the comics. They an expression anger combined with a kind of ironic horror of those very same forces.

Here are just a couple to give you a sense:

In the budget ruminations of the Age, there was this article:

They might have promised us the world but, divined through the 32 glossy pages of the Working Families Support Package, the working family encompasses anyone who has ever been a member of a family in which someone, at some time, happened to work.

It is, in a nutshell, a meaningless phrase turned into an economic shibboleth, which might account for why Rudd and Swan have recently been backpedalling from anything but the fuzziest feel-good definition of Australis familias.

It just struck me as confusing, and I realised that I didn?t really understand what ?shibboleth? means, particularly in this instance. People I spoke to today also didn?t know the meaning, although one person pointed out that it was an old Hebrew word used to identify members of the tribe (apparently non-members couldn?t pronounce it properly). Still that does not explain this particular usage.

Wikipedia gives a modern usage (based on this older meaning):

Today, in the English language, a shibboleth has also a wider meaning, referring to any “in-crowd” word or phrase that can be used to distinguish members of a group from outsiders – even when not used by a hostile other group. The word is also sometimes used in a broader sense to mean jargon, the proper use of which identifies speakers as members of a particular group or subculture

Thus it is an “in” word, the knowledge of which identifies you as a member of a group. An economic shibboleth? Maybe The Non-Accelerating Inflation Rate of Unemployment (NAIRU)? But I don’t think Working Families is a shibboleth. Economist and economic commentators have not used it, it is Kevin Rudd and his colleagues who have repeated it constantly. I think we need to call Language Log in on this one.

Club Troppo praise the website 3 Quarks Daily, and I can only second that motion and advise you to visit the site.

Crashing in a airplane can be bad, but sometimes it can even be worse, This article:

?It was soon discovered, however, that the rear underfloor cargo hold door and six passenger seats (still holding passengers) had landed in a turnip field near the town of St Pathus, approximately 15 kilometres south of the main crash site.?

I was accidentally watching this ABC Science show on TV (Sleek Geeks), and I saw an interesting article on Deja Vu, which gave a different cause than the one I have assumed for a long time.

On the show they described the sense of Deja Vu to be dues to the interaction of certain memory paths in the brain. The feed to your brain from your eyes gets fed to the cerebral cortex at the back of the skull, and due to the length of time taken to get there, a lower quality feed of what you eyes are seeing is fed to the front of the brain, just in case you need to undertake any emergency action (eg jump out from the front of a car). This second fed is usually almost immediately discarded if not used, however if you do use it, then you will also see the full colour back-of-the-skull feed straight afterwards, giving you the sense of Deja Vu.

Personally I like my theory, although I cannot remember where it came from (or did I make it up). When the brain records visual images processes them it looks in your memory for previous version (I remember being here before). Like any pattern matching process, it is liable to the occasional error, so that you come up as having a match when there really wasn?t one. On these occasions, you can?t actually remember a prior memory (there is one) but you feel as if you have been there before.

There is a trailer out for a new documentary out about the renowned composer Philip Glass: Glass a Portrait of Philip in 12 Parts.

Philip Glass has a long career as a composer, and very distinctive style of work, aspects of which are appropriate for film. He has actually done a lot of film scores, including the Truman Show, Kundun, Notes on a Scandal, The Illusionist and Koyaanisqatsi. Two I really enjoy are Mishima and The Hours.

His non-film work is better though, try looking at Glassworks (piano) and Glassworks (full orchestra) and Train/spaceship.

Although I think the Kronos Quartet do a beautiful rendering of his work. For example here is Company (with some interesting, but unrelated animation).

The news has been reporting recently about the shortages of food occurring in certain locations around the world as the price increases. Most of the reporting has been on the impact in developing countries, but it has been interesting to note some of the reactions in the US. This blog post reports:

People are stockpiling rice — perhaps on the advice of the Wall Street Journal — in sufficient quantities that Costco and Sam’s Club are limiting purchases. I sure hope this panic over staple foods among heartland citizens is unjustified.

Maybe I am reading too much into it But it seems kind telling that the focus in some parts of the US is the impact (probably non-existant) on their own consumption, rather than the more serious issue for other countries.

I know it is nitpicking but I found it a bit annoying when the NSW Water Police Chief said on the radio the other morning that the injuries to the survivors of the recent tragic boat crash in Sydney: “range from serious to non-serious”. I always had the feeling that “range” meant at least a few possible options, eg, none, light, medium, heavy, very heavy. But when you have classified all possible categories into either “serious” or “not serious” then it is a bit pointless to talk of the “ranging” from one to the other. It would be just simpler to say “some injuries were serious and some non-serious”. Thus endeth the sermon.

The new trailer for the movie Ironman is out. Watching the trailer, you don?t so much get a sense that they are giving you hints and teases of the movie, but rather that they are giving you a complete and succinct summary of the entire film, from the opening sequences to the final battle scene. Matthew Yglesias repeated a joke about this: “Wildly Popular Iron Man Trailer To Be Adapted Into Full-Length Film.”

This new form of movie trailer is so exasperating. You get to see (and if you are sitting in a cinema its whether you like it or not) the entire plot fold out, leaving very little left for you to actually enjoying during the film. Christopher Orr at The New Republic also finds this annoying and decided to review a movie solely on the basis of the trailer before seeing the movie. His review is here. I won’t be surprising anyone to say that he gets it pretty right.

I can only assume that the blockbuster movie genre is becoming so generic that the plots in all these films are familiar to the public and that the studios think they are giving nothing away by revealing the plots. The reason that the public want to see the film is for the special effects and individual scenes and so by covering the entire scope of the film’s plot they get to show off all the juicy bits of the key scenes in the trailer.

In some ways this makes a lot of sense for the action films, which at their essence are a few minutes of multi-millions dollar computer generated special effects, with some poorly written linking scenes to drag it out to the need 80 minute film. I have always thought that there is an opportunity to for someone to create condensed versions of these films. A bit like the Reader’s Digest condensed novel, you could have a condensed film with just the 20 minutes of special effects, maybe with cut screens with the text “And then the fell in love and then the aliens landed” to bridge the missing parts.

As report at Pink Tentacle japanese researchers have developed a Human Area Network (HAN). This goes nice along with the Local Area Network (LAN), the network all the computers in your building at work, and the Wide Area Network (WAN) that links all the LANs that your company has.

The HAN is smaller than those, it is based on a small device that you drop in your pocket that puts out a weak electric field that extends across your skin, so that you can make a network connection with anything you touch.

This is so cool, if the device was installed in something that you routinely carry you (say a mobile phone) then you could synch it just by touching your computer while it is you pocket. I want one!