Including Scientific Theories!

At the risk of pissing off my readership (such as it is) with even more low-value-added linking to Gawker, I just couldn’t resist drawing everyone’s attention to recently incarcerated racist lunatic Kenneth Eng’s book proposal and resume.  Some highlights:

Chapter 2, Why I Hate Whites - This will be a 30-page doctrine of documented evidence and a few anecdotes that delineates why white people, to put it bluntly, suck. Reasons include the fact that they are obsessed with conformity, their women are sluts, they are physically smaller than Asians, and they take abuse very easily. It will include anecdotes about my fistfights with white students at NYU.

This paragraph speaks for itself, I think.

Chapter 3, Why I Hate Italians - This will be another 30-page section in which I show why Italians are enemies of the Asian race. Reasons include Sofia Coppola, Quentin Tarantino, Jon Favreau, Jay Leno, and a number of other “big name celebrities”. It will also describe why Italians are an inferior race despite their technological achievements, and include personal recollections about my encounters with Italians (I did grow up in an Italian neighborhood).

Yes, for Eng Italians are apparently not white.  I’m also not really sure what “technological achievements” he’s talking about.  Radio?

Chapter 7, Why I Hate Asians And Yes I Am Being Sarcastic - As the title of this chapter implies, I do not really hate Asians. Nonetheless, this chapter will point out the silliness of civil protest and why whites, blacks and Italians should not be treated with any kindness. It will include anecdotes of my attempts to use peaceful protest in NYU.

Note that, as the chapter title indicates and he helpfully reiterates, Eng does not actually hate Asians, which leads me at least to wonder what the hell his article “Why I Hate Asians” (mentioned in his resume) was all about.

Epilogue - This will summarize the fact that I am not a sexist, homophobic lunatic. It will also be a preemptive strike against expected criticisms.

Good to see he’s thinking ahead.  Note, however, that he apparently makes no effort to deny charges of racism.

The “Marketability” section contains more gems:

1. To my knowledge, there is only one existing book about anti-Asian discrimination. This book will be the second, and believe me, it will be more extreme than its predecessor.

Oh, we believe you.

2. You may be thinking this is too controversial and will turn off all white and black audience members. Here are a few words to remember - CHINA. 1 BILLION PEOPLE. 60% ATHEIST.

All of them fluent English speakers, of course, and intensely interested in Eng’s fistfights at NYU.

5. Bill Maher and Ann Coulter are very hated. That does not stop them from being bestselling authors.

Hmmm, he may actually have a point here.  Score one for Eng!

The resume is somewhat less entertaining than the proposal, but the “Notable Attributes” section is worth quoting in full:

Fastest novelist in America (Dragons: Lexicon Triumvirate finished in a month and a week)
Youngest SF novelist in America (contracted at age 20)
Extensive knowledge in quantum physics, metaphysics, mathematics, evolutionary biology and genetic engineering
23 years old
Hardest working guy on the planet
Completed 20 feature-length screenplays and 8 novels (not first drafts, but COMPLETED SCREENPLAYS)

Young, fast, and the hardest working guy on the planet? Sounds like he has a great future ahead of him.  Or would, at least, if he would just stop threatening to kill people and stuff.

I’d Buy It For The Subtitle Alone

If there’s one thing the world needs right now, it’s for Hot Chicks with Douchebags to become a book.

Magna Cum Laude

I guess that thesis was worth doing after all.

I Feel So Useful

Navajo actually has two words for “zero”: adin (literally “nothing”) for the concept and nazbas (literally “circular”) for the symbol.

I Can Sometimes Answer Questions

Quoth Anna Genoese:

I have done a survey, and so far it looks like most people say “a University” instead of “an University” — and they chalk it up as a phonics. I wonder if Thomas Jefferson really said “an University”? I am thinking here about “An act for establishing the University” which says, “And be it enacted, that there shall be established, on the site provided for the said college an University to be called, ‘The University of Virginia’.” I am also wondering about the punctuation in that sentence.

(Earlier today I was wondering about the punctuation in the Declaration of Independence. Ever look at it? Very interesting.)

The punctuation in the Declaration has been noted before; I think the issue there, as in the other Jefferson passage, is mainly just that punctuation wasn’t standardized at the time, but I don’t know much about the orthography of eighteenth-century English.

I don’t know a whole lot about the phonology of eighteenth-century English either, but I do know some things.  One of the main changes going on at the time was the palatalization of [u], where a [y] was inserted before the vowel in an increasing number of contexts.  This is why we pronounce “music” as [myuzIk] and “cue” as [kyu].  (Note that this only affected words with etymological [u] and not words such as “mood” and “cool” where modern [u] comes from long [o:].)  One of the other contexts where this change occurred was in word-initial position, which is why we pronounce words like “university” as though they have an initial [y] and use “a” instead of “an” as the indefinite article with them (because that is the form used before words beginning with consonants, which these now are).  In Jefferson’s day, however, the change had apparently not yet spread that far, so he would have pronounced “university” as a vowel-initial word taking the indefinite article “an.”

One interesting thing about this change is that it went much further in British than in American English (probably because the American Revolution and the subsequent weakening of ties between America and Britain happened while it was going on), which is why British people pronounce “tune” and “new” as [tyun] and [nyu] while we say [tun] and [nu].

Content!

I’m done with my thesis and pretty much everything else, so I should have more time to blog now.  Let’s start off with this fascinating map (via the g).  The east-west divide is really striking; I’ve heard before that New York in particular has a hugely disproportionate number of single women, but I hadn’t realized that the same was the case in most other eastern cities or that the opposite was true for most of California.  The fact that all of the main cities I am looking at for jobs have very favorable ratios is encouraging.

These Better Not Have Been The Best Years Of My Life

I’m done with classes now, and just need to finish up some papers and projects (including my thesis) before I graduate.  On the one hand, it’s a huge relief to be essentially done with school forever, but on the other hand, I’m getting a bit apprehensive about what the future holds.  Career-wise, I’m not too concerned; I’m casting a wide net in my job search, and I’m sure I’ll find something that suits me.  Socially, though, I’m just now realizing that I’ve always used school as a crutch, a time when I’m guaranteed to see people that’s kept me from putting in enough effort to see them regularly outside of class.  Now that there are no more classes and may never be again, I’m worried that I won’t be able to keep up even the pathetic shadow of a social life I’ve had thus far.

This is of particular concern right now because my friends seem to be ignoring me for some reason; I had made plans for people to come over to my place and drink on Friday, but no one showed up (well, one person did, but just for a few minutes, and he didn’t drink anything), and ever since them no one has been responding to my phone calls or e-mails.  I don’t know what’s going on, but I’m feeling very sad and lonely right now, and it’s just killed my motivation to work on my remaining schoolwork.  I’ve scheduled a party for tomorrow night.  I hope people come to it, because otherwise it seems like this kind of social isolation would just be my fate.

I don’t really know what to do about this.  I’ve always had problems socially, and while they seemed to be getting better over the past year or so, suddenly it’s like nothing has changed at all and I’m back where I was in high school.  At least there’s only three weeks left before Commencement.