Saturday, December 09, 2006

Saturday AM

November is a bad month, with deadlines for SIGMOD, STOC, PODS, WWW, EC and other conferences, straddling Thanksgiving and spilling over to December. I finished the last of these deadlines yesterday. I am in

... Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun;
Pour away the ocean and sweep up the wood ....

mood, wrapping up the year. Alas, travel, reimbursements, holiday shopping and other chores loom. But for now I can take an AM off, read, lounge or be silly. I managed to read all of an article in the New Yorker on the growing community of Somalis in Lewiston, Maine, a fascinating account of somalis finding a new life ("secondary migration" in technical parlance, the primary migration is when the federal govertment settles them, in Atlanta, in this case, and then the population flows elsewhere), discovering the lines that separate them from the local people and rediscovering the lines that separate them among themselves, along their clan lines and away from the Bantus with their legacy of slavery.

... I thought that "this break" would last forever: I was wrong

I must get back to work and life I suppose. Just one more pointer: Shouts and Murmurs, in NYer, discusses Excessive Article Disorder, the tendency of many (me too) to put "the" wherever. the dance, the work, the Google, ...

2 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

That would be:

...and sweep up the woods...

In the original Scottish is "wood" but in eh-marie-kan English the word that preserves the intended meaning, while not mangling the rhyme too much is "woods".

1:00 PM  
Blogger metoo said...

I wanted smthg to rhyme with the "mood", sigh. :)

1:14 PM  

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