TR: Triplets of Belleville

Seeing that the Seattle International Film Festival had a showing of the Triplets of Belleville scheduled at Juanita Beach Park at 9pm on Saturday, I decided this was a good time to see this movie, which everyone seems to love. Since Juanita Beach Park is located on the shores of Lake Washington, I decided biking there would be easy and fun. I tried to entice my friends S., A., F., or M. to join me, but they all gave excuses ranging in seriousness from "It looks like it'll rain" through "I have to leave to Eugene tomorrow morning", "I'm still recovering from my broken leg so can't bike, and I've seen the movie already" all the way to "I'm flying out to Chicago before the movie starts". Pfft, whatever, I decided I would go anyway.

I started out from my house in Ballard and headed for the Burke Gilman trail. About 5 miles in, I reached the University. Here I had to make a choice: either continue on the trail to loop around the north side of the lake, or take the bus across the bridge. Even though I was making decent time, seeing as there was just over an hour left until the start of the movie, I elected to go the second route, which is significantly shorter. The SR520 bridge across Lake Washington is closed to bicycles. However, to accomodate those who want to get on the other side, out-of-service buses will pick up bikers at the stop on one side and drop them off on the other, as I learnt from an ex-schoolmate of mine. I took advantage of this deal, and it was sweet to get on an out of service bus, seeing as another guy waiting at the bus stop told me "what are you doing, it's out of service!" as I prepared to get on. I sure showed him! The bus driver was a very nice guy and offered to drop me off at the Yarrow Point stop, one stop further down than usual. Thus, my approach to Juanita Beach was made even shorter. What this route lacked in length, however, I realised that it made up in tricky routefinding.

Initially I attempted to reach the lake, thinking that there was probably a trail along the water. I succeeded in getting to Yarrow Point itself, which contained some historical plaques and lake access, which was however, beset on all sides by private property. Climbing back up from the water, I made an interesting discovery: my bike's rear shifter cable has gotten so old and loose that reaching low gears is actually impossible. Going to and from the University on the Burke-Gilman on basically flat terrain, I saw the cable was getting looser, but never realised it had gotten that bad. I am ashamed to admit I walked back up the hill to the first turn off parallel to the direction of the lake. I took this road, which at first looked like it was going in the right direction, but soon took two strange turns and ended up in a dead-end with a gravel path between two very stately houses and a public park. Following this path, I finally ended up on a wide, straight road. But just when I thought my troubles were over, I realised that this was the same road I started on, and I was in fact back at the bus stop. Before despairing completely or recrossing the highway, I decided to follow a hilly street that said "Dead End. No Turnaround". Turns out, this was just the place to go (why oh why are there no "fietsen uitgezonderd" signs in Seattle?). I made it through to Lake Washington Boulevard and was on my way to Kirkland. Just two things about Kirkland: one, it's much less like a giant Costco than I imagined, and two, there was a street where there was an official yellow-and-black street sign that said "Deaf Child". On the one hand, being deaf would be awful. On the other, having a street sign dedicated to you is pretty cool. But what will happen when the child grows up? "Deaf Adolescent"?

Soon enough I was in Juanita, where I noticed there was a Juanita Bay Park. Thinking that this probably is not the same thing as Juanita Beach Park, I continued onward. Soon the road began to climb and I realised something was amiss. I resolved to ask the next person I saw. However, since the street had no sidewalks or crossstreets for some time, I went a couple miles before this happened. The man I ran into told me to go right back where I came from (in a nice way!). The beach was apparently down that road and he told me "you can't possibly miss it. It's impossible". I didn't have the guts to admit I did just that a few minutes back. Then he told me that it's "all kinds of fucked" right now because of construction, so I might not want to go there anyway. Undeterred, I sped back down to the beach (which I noticed this time. And it's true, you'd have to be an idiot to miss it. Well, guess what? Check!). My watch said 9:01. I was only late by one minute! However, there was no outdoor screen or crowd of moviewatchers anywhere around. After about a quarter hour of unsuccessful searching, deeply disappointed and now in the dark, I began the return journey. I stopped at Kidd Valley for fries, which were very delicious. The atmosphere of listening to Sweet Caroline while being all alone in a large, bizarrely coloured fast food building in the middle of the darkness was somewhat surreal, though. I dropped by my lab to pick up shifter cable I had stashed there, only to find an unknown man sitting in my chair. And at 10:30 on a Saturday! He turned out to be the husband of one of the undergrads who works in the lab. I told J. not to work so hard, felt guilty for slackery, and left with the shifter cables. Next, I stopped by a Fred Meyer, and enticed by the prices, bought way more than I could reasonably carry. And so it was that, with a bottle of detergent under my toque and a cereal box stuffed down my shirt, I stood around picking groceries off the ground on the corner of 22nd and Market. The almost preternaturally nice people of Ballard didn't say anything. A bike that was dressed up to look like a shark, followed by one made to look like a police car rode by (the latter made siren-like noises). And then, just like that, I was home. Checking the SIFF website, I saw that the Triplets of Belleville screening had been cancelled.

Total distance biked: 40k

Total time: just over 4 hours

Total triplets seen: 0

French Lit Bike Advocacy Blogging

My sister once bought me a French bestseller, "La première gorgée de bière" by Philippe Delerm. A collection of essays on the "minuscule pleasures of life" such as that first [this is where I realise to my surprise that English doesn't have a word for gorgée. Neither gulp nor sip nor swig are quite right. Russian, though, has an almost direct translation - глоток.] gulp of beer. I mention it because, surprisingly, it has a message about biking that I want to talk about.

This is a book which is bad in general and good specifically. The mawkish nostalgic sentimentality of it all can make you roll your eyes (my sister and I jokingly looked for the part of each essay where Delerm talks about how the subject thing/action reminds him of youth - and indeed, everything from carrying a pocket knife to ordering port to shelling peas does get that mention). On the other hand, the book is rife with tiny mundane observations that you've never made but that strike you as exactly right when you read them. And the language is perfectly crisp and precise in a way even I, whose French is quite bad, can appreciate. It's a trifling book, written terrifically well.

The book, sez Google, has been translated into English as "The Small Pleasures of Life", or "We Could Almost Eat Outside". You can check out a couple chapters on google books. It seems to lack some of the charm and the crispness in English. Also, somehow the "you" pronoun just doesn't seem right.

The second to last essay in the collection is called "La bicyclette et le vélo". I couldn't find online in English so here it is in the original French. I would translate it "The Cycle and the Bike", but I see the actual translator called it "Cycle or Bicycle?" I would encourage you to read it, but the point I want to make is this: Delerm talks about two kinds of people who ride bicycles: "cycle people" and "bike people". For the former, biking is about lightness. For the latter, it's about heaviness. It's a good classification. Kind of an Unbearable Lightness of Biking, if you will.

The kind of people who bike in Seattle are predominantly "cycle people". They wear spandex and have clip-in pedals. Their bikes are good and they ride fast. (and yes, hipsters on fixies are "cycle people" too, just a different breed). These people are the people who care most about biking, so they are most involved in bike advocacy. They take the exercise and/or hobby aspects of biking quite seriously. In this I agree with them, but they are not good authorities on what to do in terms of bicycle policy if you want to get more people to bicycle. Seattle has very few "bike people". Where are they all?

Most people aren't gay: a quasi-defense of George Rekers

Sorry for the political interludes, I promise to revert to Russian accents soon!

As you may/may not know, George Rekers was a founder of the Family Research Council, National Association for Research and Therapy of Homosexuality, and general purveyor of anti-gay views. providing court testimony that gays should be excluded from the Boy Scouts, not allowed to adopt children, and that homosexuality is destructive and, also, curable. If you knew all that, chances are you also knew that the Miami New Times (their local version of the Seattle Weekly) discovered that he was caught having hired a "rentboy" - a gay escort, basically.

The desire to engage in schadenfreude is very high and very understandable. And, as my least favourite New York Times opinion writer points out, it's richly deserved. Rekers' actions caused misery for many people. Before I learnt that he was gay, I would unhesitatingly be in favour of all sorts of Rekers-bashing (of course, at that point, I had no idea who he was, so this is kinda theoretical). But now that it turns out he is gay, I am a lot more sympathetic. Think about a person who believes that homosexuality is wrong, and yet has this intense homosexual desire. He would universalise his plight. He could come to believe that this is a trial of the will that everyone must face. He will come to believe that heterosexuals around him have conquered these trials, and are simply stronger-willed than the homosexuals he sees. I think, given the high number of gay scandals like Larry Craig's or Ted Haggard's, there is something to this interpretation. Though to the other gays what he said seemed like a denial of the reality of their lives, from his perspective, maybe Rekers was saying "be stronger! We all know what it's like". Doesn't that seem forgiveable?

Of course, that whole part where he is now claiming to not be gay totally destroys my sympathies for Rekers. He is so wedded to his reputation he wants to pretend to not be gay and go on hurting other gays. What a jackass. But I believe that there are other people in his situation. So here's my point to the putative future Rekerses: I'm willing to bet a great majority of people don't want to engage in gay sex. It's not that outwardly heterosexual people mostly have homosexual desires but have the will to fight through them. It's just that some people are gay, but most aren't.

Bike to Work Day

This Friday was Bike to Work Day here in Seattle. And as someone who wishes for more bike-friendliness in Seattle, I seriously hope it was abysmally ineffective at getting people who normally don't bike to work to do so this Friday. Because if you had decided to bike to work on this day of all days, you'd likely think twice about doing it again: sun in the morning changing to wind, pouring rain and a thunderstorm in the afternoon will do that. I bike to work relatively often, and it certainly made me reconsider doing so on days when I have to bring my laptop with me!

However, luckily in this one specific case but unfortunately in general, I do think Bike to Work Day isn't a very good tool for getting people into biking to work. For most people, biking to work isn't something they can do semi-regularly without some investment of time and money and expertise. Unless that changes, offering a one-time set of goodies for people to bike to work will at most entice them to do it once. Ultimately, Bike to Work Day ends up being about as effective at increasing bicycle commute levels as Take your Kids to Work Day is at increasing child labour.

Bike to Work Day did get me thinking, however, about the difference between a place like the Netherlands, where a lot of people bike commute, and the US, where they don't. What do I mean "a lot of people"? Take a look at this video (you don't need to watch all of it - nothing any more or less exciting happens towards the end than at the beginning):

The point is, that is unimaginable here in Seattle. Part of that is that Seattle is annoyingly hilly. All in all, I'd rather live in a hilly city next to a place like Mt. Rainier than in a pleasantly flat city if that means that there aren't any mountains in your entire country. But there's more to it.

Another big difference that isn't up to us is perception. To undercut my point from earlier in the post, which I confess was mostly made cause I liked the joke it led up to, if you try commuting by bicycle, you may realise that it's actually a way better idea than you anticipated. This has certainly been true for me: I started bike commuting in the Netherlands, because that's what everyone did. And having seen its benefits, I continue to do so in Seattle, whereas in Vancouver, I think I biked to UBC a total of about three times (even though Vancouver is way less hilly than Seattle). So the way to get more people to bike commute is to make it the norm. huh? That's not that realistic, but it would be the reason for having things like Bike to Work Day.

Which brings us back to this Friday, when the Seattle Times ran a front page headline in alarming red font "DANGER ZONES!" What happened? Well, as you may have guessed, it was Bike to Work Day, and the Seattle Times was doing its part by listing which places in the city are not safe for biking. The article is much better than a cursory look at the front page suggested, but here's the thing: a normal, rational person should look at the title and think: "maybe this biking to work thing isn't such a great idea! It's just not safe!" In addition to promoting bike safety, the Seattle Times are actually promoting not biking.

The big problem here is that the best way to improve bike safety is to promote biking. The more people bike, the more drivers are aware of bikers. The more people bike, the more bikers are aware of each other. The more people bike, the easier it is to find bike-friendly routes to places. The more people bike, the more cities have to devote infrastructure to concerns of biker safety (..., the more people bike... it's a positive feedback loop!).

I'm not saying lie and pretend biking is safer than it is. But devoting probably the only front page on bicycles in the year to how unsafe biking in certain places is, and then writing as if you're doing it to somehow benefit the biking community is either misguided or dishonest. The thing is, even in the Netherlands, biking is not totally safe. Every time I biked down van Woustraat in Amsterdam, I had the distinct impression I was about to get killed. The only time I was anywhere near as frightened biking in North America, I had been awake for 24 hours straight and biking on Highway 17 in Nanaimo and there were trucks going past me at 90 km/h (I WAS AN IDIOT! DON'T EVER DO THAT!!!). You're never going to make everywhere safe for bicycles (or otherwise, for that matter). But the best way to make more places more safe for biking is to increase the amount of bikers out there. Part of that is not being a bike safety alarmist.

How to have a Russian accent - Rule 9

Here we go, another instalment in the (incredibly drawn out) series on faking a Russian accent convincingly.

Rule 9. Avoid proper names.

Much as the pronunciation of Russian names in English evolved from uninformed reading of names transcribed according to general rules
(so that the USSR leader whose name should be read /xrʊˈɕɕof/ is usually pronounced [ˈkʰɹus.tʃɛv])
so the pronunciation of foreign names in Russian evolved from reading of names transcribed by uninformed people according to general rules
(so that the US leader whose name should be read /ˈɹoʊzəˌvɛlt/ is usually pronounced [ˈruzvʲɪlʲt]).
Arguably the Russian side has asymmetric blameworthiness here, because people who are doing the transcribing should really have at least a clue of what they are doing, whereas pronunciation is everyone's prerogative. On the other hand, no russification of names are as badly screwed up as Khrushchev's anglicization is (although the Russian transcription of the name Heather is pretty close).

What all this boils down to is that the pronunciation of proper names is screwed up. And if since you've been a kid you've been taught that the physicist's name is [ɛjnˈʂtɛjn], you have no reason to suspect that in English it's [ˈaɪnstaɪn]! So this screwiness would show up in a real accent. But on the other hand, the rules are not much help here. Proper names are pronounced in bizarre ways you are not going to be able to recreate - you'll just have to either know it, or avoid saying that name.

The exceptions here: Moscow, St. Petersburg, Russia, USSR, Ukraine, Soviet Union, etc. For things like this refer back to Rule 0. These are the some of the first things you learn in English if you're a Russian, and you're not gonna mock yourself by pronouncing them in a way that is deliberately, caricaturishly wrong in English (never, never say Moskva or Rossiya in a Russian accent!).

How to have a Russian Accent - Rule 8

Part 8 in the (endless) series on how to have a Russian accent (if you don't). One thing I realised is that it's sort of useful to think about this stuff if you do have one, too. These rules are basically the things you're doing wrong.

Rule 8. Devoice final consonants. This is perhaps the easiest thing to do that a lot of people won't. In fact, many people go the other way and voice things that aren't even voiced in normal English! But this is how it should work

-v --> -f
"I love Ivanov" becomes [ajlafivɐ'nof] roughly reanglicized as "I luff Ivanoff"
-d --> -t
"spilled blood" "" [spʲillt'blat] "" "speelt blutt"
-z --> -s
"France's balls" "" [frɛnsəs'bols] "" "frenciss bollss"
-b --> -p
"grab grub!" "" [grɛp'grap] "" "grepp grapp!"
-g --> -k
"A big gong" "" [ɛbʲik'gonk] "" "a bik gonnk"
-d͡ʒ --> -tʂ
"dodge that fridge!" "" [dotʂzət'frʲitʂ] "" "dotsh zet freetsh"

This rule applies not only to the word-final consonants, but also ones that are in the middle of a word that are followed by a non-voiced consonant. And, by using the "devoice final consonants" and "devoice consonants before devoiced consonants" rules together, you can see that many final clusters are devoiced, so that "bugs" and "bucks" for instance, sound the same.

The rule is pretty pervasive. The only exceptions to devoicing I can think of right now are that "is" is pronounced [iz] (or /ɪz/) and is never devoiced (which probably means other one-syllable -z words like "peas" nad "Liz" aren't either), and the -v of "of" is not necessarily devoiced if it is found before another vowel.

The bottom line
phrase: "one finds contrived examples on blogs"
"normal" Am. E.: /wʌnfaɪnzkʌŋˌtɹaɪvdɪg'zæmplzɑn''blɔːgz/
russ. acc. E.: [wanfaɪnskəntrɐɪftəkzemplsən'bloks]

How to have a Russian Accent - Rule 7

Part of the series on how to develop a fake Russian accent for fun and profit (1. develop Russian accent 2. ... 3. Profit!)

Rule 7. Palatalize! (except where you would normally). It's not as important to palatalize when speaking Russian-accented English as it is when speaking Russian. However, that's like saying it's not as important to pass in basketball as it is in ultimate frisbee. It just means that palatalizing properly is really important when speaking Russian. Not doing so is the distinguishing characteristic of a bad accent for anglophone-accented Russian. Okay, you say, palatalize. Got it. What's palatalize, again? Well, for instance it's the distinction in the "m" in "mew" /mʲuː/ (palatalized) and "moo" /muː/ (not). Now you may find yourself thinking: there's no distinction in the "m"! It's just that in one case it's followed by a "you" and in the other by an "oo". This actually may be true depending on your specific pronunciation, but many English speakers perceive it to be true even when it's not. That, however, just won't do. Try to maintain the distinction without pronouncing the vowel part. Just the "m". You should be left with just /mʲ/ and /m/. The former should sound "softer" than the latter. The actual mechanism for producing palatalized consonants is to raise the middle of your tongue until it touches the roof of your mouth and then pronounce the consonant, pulling your tongue back at the end. Uh, something like that, anyway.

Most English speakers that I've talked to have difficulty palatalizing, or hearing the difference between a palatalized consonant and one that has a "j" added afterwards. To make it clear, I will borrow Natalie's example of English palatalization: the word "can". The normal, (very lightly) palatalized variant can be seen as this sequence: /kʲæn/. It should now be obvious that this is very different from its unpalatalized partner [kæn] (sort of like the French town Caen, but not nasal, or like a Spanish que (but more open) followed by an n). It is also clearly different from [kjæn] ("k'yan", maybe?). And [tʃæn] ("chan") is also very different. This, then, is palatalization.

So now that you know what palatalization is, where should you use it in your Russian accented English? Well, not in "can"! (A Russian will pronounce it [kæn]). Loosely, you should use palatalization
-when Consonant-j-Vowel occurs. /CjV/ is usually read as [CʲjV] and sometimes [CʲV]
("few" /fju/ --> [fʲju]); ("music" /mjuzɪk/ --> [mʲuzʲək])
-when you have an unstressed /Ci/ or /Cɪ/. It usually becomes [Cʲə]
("military" /ˈmɪlɪt(ə)ɹi/ --> [ˈmilʲətərʲə])
-Often when you have unstressed /Cə/.
("college" /kɔlləd͡ʒ/ --> [kollʲətʂ]
-Whenever you have /Cʉː/ it becomes [Cʲu].The sound is pretty rare in Am.E., (but I disagree with wikipedia, and claim it exists).
("threw" /θɹʉː/ --> [srʲu)]

Last, in connection with the title of this rule, here's a video of Tom Lehrer's song "Lobachevsky". The connection? I like to imagine "Palatalize!" mispronounced in such a way as to make it fit this song's chorus ("plagiarize! let no one else's work evade your eyes!") Enjoy, but take note! Tom Lehrer does a Russian accent here, but his accent is by no means very good. See if you can spot some of the problems...