On Klingon

I'm no Klingonist, but I've been reading more about it the past few days (a used copy of the Klingon Dictionary and an instructional audiobook doesn't break $10). I really like Mark Okrand has a subtle sense of humor. And Klingon has a strangely appealling phonoaesthetic for such a choppy language: it's like a tour of the points of articulation that are difficult for an Anglophone.

Klingon intentionally has a weird phonology. Not in the actual sounds that are used, which are normal human language sounds, but rather the pattern of sounds: it has several prominent holes in its phonology.

For example, Klingon has the velar nasal /ŋ/ and velar fricatives /x/ and /ɣ/ (which sound like sounds from French and German), but it does not have the velar stop /k/. Meanwhile, it has the uvular stop /qʰ/ and uvular affricate /qχ/, but no other uvular sounds. It would be very likely, in a natural language, if this kind of weird gap arose, for either the two series to converge on one point of articulation (for example, shifting /q/ to /k/ and /qχ/ to /kx/), or alternatively for new consonants to spring up to fill out the phonology at each point of articulation (for example adding /k/ and /χ/ as phonemes).

And while Klingon has the affricate /tɬ/ and the affricate /tʃ/, but the only alveolar or postalveolar fricative is the retroflex /ʂ/, which seems like it would merge with either /ɬ/ or /ʃ/.

Similarly, while Klingon contrast the voiceless stop /p/ with the voiced stop /b/, it contrasts the voiceless stop /t/ not with the voiced stop /d/, but rather with the voiced retroflex stop /ɖ/. It's pretty weird, to articulate it as retroflex rather than plain voiced, and it seems likely that Klingon would undergo a sound change: first the retroflex consonant would be in variation with the plain stop /d/, and then it would be dropped in favor of /d/. Of course, any description of a language is just a snapshot of it in time, with changes behind it and changes to come.

Now in practice, these uvular consonants are very difficult consonants for native English speakers to produce, and I think that a great deal of spoken Klingon has speakers using /k/ instead of /q/, or /d/ instead of the retroflex /ɖ/. Marc Okrand seemingly addressed this somewhat in The Klingon Dictionary:

There are a number of dialects of Klingon. Only one of the dialects, that of the current Klingon emperor, is represented in this dictionary. When a Klingon emperor is replaced, for whatever reason, it has historically been the case that the next emperor speaks a different dialect. As a result, the new emperor's dialect becomes the official dialect. Those Klingons who do not speak the official dialect are considered either stupid or subversive, and are usually forced to undertake tasks that speakers of the official standard find distasteful. Most Klingons try to be fluent in several dialects.

Some dialects differ only slightly from the dialect of this dictionary. Differences tend to be in vocabulary (the word for forehead, for example, is different in almost every dialect) and in the pronunciation of a few sounds. On the other hand, some dialects differ significantly from the current official dialect, so much so that speakers of these dialects have a great deal of difficulty communicating with current Klingon officialdom. The student of Klingon is warned to check into the political situation in the Klingon Empire before trying to talk.

There does seem to be a great deal of continuity in spoken Klingon between different eras (as much as in the English of these periods), although some of this might result from the prominence of Colonel Worf (an official of the Klingon Empire who defended Captain Kirk in court) and Lieutenant Worf (a later officer of the USS Enterprise). Interestingly, according to Okrand, English has a position of high prestige in the Klingon Empire, serving as a signal of elite status and a private means of communication among starship officers. If Klingons use English as a signal of social prestige, it doesn't seem implausible that, in Klingon, they would use a somewhat artificial, archaic, and difficult-to-pronounce sociolect as a prestige dialect as well.

Dialect can explain some of the problems with voice acting in Klingon. But it's just too difficult for Anglophones to pronounce. Christopher Plummer's General Chang in "Star Trek VI" is a great character, quoting Shakespeare even more than Kirk does in some of the earlier movies. Except when he's speaking Klingon: the only time he does it, at Kirk's trial, it is a bunch of disconnected syllables that don't display the interesting morphology of the language.

Mark Okrand talks about the creation of the Klingon language in this series of videos (1, 2, 3, 4, 5). Since the Klingon language was created on the set of "Star Trek III", Okrand was able to incorporate the actors' performance errors into the canonical version of the Klingon language. "My sort of 'role model' of what Klingon sounds like is Christopher Lloyd saying it, because he was my first big speaker," Okrand says.

However, Michael Dorn, who played Worf on "Star Trek: The Next Generation" and "Deep Space Nine", as well as three of the movies, has probably spoken more lines of Klingon than any other actor. He's also done a lot of voice work narrating audiobooks on the languageand videogames (such as Star Trek: Klingon), although in the audiobook of Conversational Klingon, Okrand pronounces all the Klingon words and phrases. Dorn is also kind of awesome.

Language on Barsoom

I read the heck out of Edgar Rice Burroughs' Barsoom and Caspak novels when I was a kid. Ten years or more later, I was part of the "generations of 8-year-olds", as Carl Sagan put it, whose perspective was expanded by this fantasy:



So I've been curious about the new movie. It's gotten some bad press, like The New York Times panning the marketing effort in "Ishtar" Lands on Mars...but the NYT is generally a bastion of foolish snobbery against genre fiction, especially science fiction or fantasy. The word-of-mouth is pretty good. Erik Mona praised the movie on FB, James Maliszewski points to the clear influence of Barsoom on Gygax. Michael Chabon, interviewed on io9, loved the books too.

But of course it wasn't until I learned that Paul Frommer worked on the Barsoomian language for the film that I started getting really interested. Clearly the creators cared enough about the source material to treat it better than Star-Warsy gobbledygook. The words in the Barsoom novels are not a language, not even a systematic naming language, so it's great that the filmmakers hired someone to expand that linguistic writing and make it more systematic. The novels are dated, and do tend toward juvenilia, but E.R.B. did a lot of underappreciated work in worldbuilding, including fun little elements like jetan. Perhaps Barsoomian was E.R.B.'s linguistic handwaving, a version of the "universal translator".

Fiat Lingua has an interview by Swedish E.R.B. collector Fredrik Ekman with Paul Frommer (PDF). Frommer explains that his expanded Barsoomian is nearly isolating, with very little inflectional morphology. There's no case marking, and the language instead relies heavily on word order. Barsoomian uses VSO, which is a nice choice to avoid re-lexing English, and is a logical, underappreciated word order in conlangs more generally, IMHO. Possession is as in Indonesian/Malay: the possessor follows the possessed with no special marking. Frommer based the language on the 400+ words pulled from the books, mostly names, interpreted into a coherent system. He made some interesting choices, such as including a voiced velar fricative alongside the rhotic alveolar approximate of American English. The most interesting feature is certainly the pronominal system:

Perhaps the most interesting feature is the pronominal system, where there are distinct cases for subject and object (akin to English I/me, he/him, we/us, etc.). To form the objective case, you take the initial consonant of the pronoun and repeat it at the end of the word. So I = tu, me = tut; he = ki, him = kik. Then to form the plurals of these pronouns, you simply “voice” the unvoiced consonants—in these examples, t becomes d and k become hard g. So we = du and us = dud.

There's also some good discussion of Frommer's method and the training of the actors in "John Carter: Inventing a New Language". Willem Dafoe discussed his experiences playing Tars Tarkas with io9, with a nice video clip of him speaking a line (at about 03:29).

Pagelady has transcribed some phrases from the movie, and links to this lexicon at Langmaker (by Jeffrey Henning), culled from the same source material Frommer used. The Conlanging Librarian also has a number of posts exploring this material.

Some graphic designers at Disney came up with a "Martian alphabet"; it's pretty unsophisticated, a simple substitution cipher. And it's exactly the sort of this a graphic designer might make to look "alien" but no-one would ever use to actually write with: it would be a nightmare trying to write those characters at speed with a pen and paper, or any other tool other than a keyboard and mouse. But they have a "Martian Translator" to cipher texts and a "Martian Decoder" to decipher them; there's also a PDF. How to Count in Barsoomian has an overview of the numerals of this script.

I don't have time to read fiction these days, but Librivox has the first five books available as M4Bs or MP3s:

• A Princess of Mars
• The Gods of Mars
• A Warlord of Mars
• Thuvia, Maid of Mars
• The Chessmen of Mars

& here's the first still that got me hooked. Girallons!

Origami

Today's Google Doodle honors origamist Akira Yoshizawa, who popularized it as an art in the modern era, which is reason enough to admit that I was fascinated with paperfolding as a teenager and love it still. The Google Blog has instructions on making origami letters via Adding an origami doodle to the fold. But the documentary "Between the Folds" is a fascinating portrayal of the artistry and mathematics of paperfolding. I saw it via PBS's Independent Lens and on Netflix.

"Cave of Forgotten Dreams" and atlatls

Werner Herzog's "Cave of Forgotten Dreams" was a great movie. It seemed like the first time that I really got my money's worth for a 3D movie.¹ All these summer action movies that are using 3D favor wide open, expansive shots, perhaps to give it an "epic" feel. But since strong foreground/background contrast is rare, most of the 3D effect manifests itself as brief gimmicky-seeming shots where a spear seems to swing out toward the audience. "Cave", by contrast, depicts an enclosed space, where there is always strong contrast between foreground and background, so the 3D effect is quite pronounced; at times it seems like you're looking into a box.

And it is used to good effect. The Neolithic art in the cave was not painted on a flat surface, but undulating walls, curved stalactites, and rock curtains. The 3D effect provides a lot of useful visual information about how the art fits into the cave. And it's amazing, as light and shadow play over the space: in one scene, we can see a painting of a rhinoceros on the far wall. Nearer to the viewer, a sheet of rock juts out, on which is painted a pair of lions: it looks as if we are witnessing the lions sneak up on the rhinoceros from behind the cover of stone.

In the end, 3D does seem gimmicky, even though it's used well in this film. Film remains a two-dimensional medium, and the 3D effect is a visual trick: by the end of the movie, the effect became so disorienting that I had to take my glasses off and look away for a moment to readjust.

Herzog finds some really wonderfully nerdy people, like the experimental archaeologist and the fragrance expert. I do wish there was more atlatl: they are awesome. An atlatl dart is like a precursor to the bow and arrow, in which the energy stored and released in the flexing bow is instead stored and released in the flexing atlatl missile. IIRC, the atlatl dart in flight has a somewhat lower velocity than an arrow, but a much greater mass, so an atlatl dart can have greater penetration of the target. While atlatl darts may be better against large game, it's easier to carry numerous arrows than the larger darts. Fortunately the World Atlatl Association has some members across the river from Louisville.



MAKE also has a weekend project video on making atlatls, and YouTube has some videos of successful hunts with them of emu, bison, and hog.

1. I also enjoyed "Coraline", but the 3D there also seemed like a more gimmicky use of the effect.

Politics and "Star Wars"

Not this. Ezra Klein directs us to this metaphor from political scientist Jonathan Bernstein:

Remember: if you're reading this blog, odds are good that you're at least in the top 10% of all Americans in political knowledge, and more likely you're in the top 1%. And for those of us in that group, it's hard to imagine just how little the median American knows about the day-to-day events that we pay so much attention to.

...to get a sense of what politics is like for many Americans, I suggest thinking of something that you do encounter in some way all the time, but that you just have zero interest in. Perhaps sports in general -- or, for sports fans, a major sport that you don't pay any attention to. Perhaps it's current pop music, or HBO shows, or celebrities. Me? NASCAR, the NBA, and any games made since Missile Command and Stargate Defender. The idea is that I actually do encounter and, in a way, retain a fair amount of information about those things in the nature of headlines that I see but skip the stories, or references made in other things I do read or watch, or conversations I've had that veer off in that direction. It's not as if I know absolutely nothing. It's just that the stuff I've heard is not organized at all, and I'm sure I've picked up misinformation along the way, since I don't scrutinize any of it.

It makes me think of nothing so much as Star Wars: Retold (by someone who hasn't seen it), in which Joe Nicolowski has his friend Amanda Boone (remarkably accurately, considering) narrate the story of the three "Star Wars" movies, even though she has never actually seen them.

Weird film adaptations

It's strange enough to hear that "What to Expect When You're Expecting" is being adapted to film as a romantic comedy.

But I was really amazed to see a press release announcing that DreamWorks is in negotiations to buy the film rights to View-Master. Yes, that View-Master, the stereoscopic toy. It's supposed to be a "Goonies"-style film from the writers of the new "Transformers" movies. And the press release wasn't dated to April 1.

I can even imagine a film based on "Candyland" or "Battleship". But aren't movies supposed to have conflicts, plots, or at least characters?

Lists of 2009

I enjoy the "best of" lists we get at the end of every year; it's a great time to recharge my DVD queue, at the least. 2009 is several months into the past by now, but at least we're past the "Hurt Locker" v. "Avatar" awards chatter: The Academy Awards were last weekend, but the Pulitzer Prizes for 2010 are coming up (April 12).

LEO's December 30,2009 issue had some top five lists for film and music. Time had a list of lists, as did Nerve, but those are nothing to compare with the exhaustive Lists: 2009 and the recap.

There's also the best cycling blogs of 2009 and even more "best movie" lists of 2009 and the 2000s.

"Avatar"

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"The most beautiful toy in the world"

The Lousy Linguist is amused by this rather breathless profile of Paul R. Frommer, who created the Na'vi language for the film "Avatar".

"In fact, the average second year grad student in linguistics can do it, and typically they do, just for fun," Chris notes. Indeed. But that bar is too high; anyone can "create a language." Many conlangers began when they were children, including some fairly well-known ones; it's just harder to create something that's interesting to other people, or not merely a relexified English when English is the only language you can think in; and people with exposure to more languages can have a broader view of the variety of options.

To be fair, it sounds like much of the story's enthusiasm comes from Frommer, who (it seems) had a blast with this. A U.S.O. interview gives some more detail on the language (ejective consonants, infixing, and tripartite alignment) [EDIT: See also the NYT story Skxawng!, and the NPR interview with Frommer].

There appear to be few or no consonant clusters in the names of the film's Na'vi characters, to judge by IMDB. It sounds like Frommer is interested in further developing and releasing more information on the language, which is a good sign. Marc Okrand's instructional video on how to speak Atlantean on the "Atlantis: The Lost Empire" DVD was great fun.

The comments of this LanguageHat consideration of the most interesting language points us to this lovely quote: "I was fallen in love beyond limites with languages, for, as the renowned Italian Orientalist Alessandro Bausani told, languages are 'the most beautiful toy of the world.'"

Hats

If monkeys could make hats, they could take over the world.

There were many interesting hats in "Conan the Barbarian". Here are some choice examples:

More Continental Drift

Now in video format from here and here.

650 Million Years In 1:20 Min.
Uploaded by xchristox. - Videos of the latest science discoveries and tech.

Iapetus displays similar images on the iPhone.

The End of Life, Saifai, and Everything

To follow up this, Charles Stross asks how habitable Earth is: I want you to imagine that, instead of being a perplexed mostly-hairless primate reading a blog, you're the guiding intelligence of an interstellar robot probe. ...Your first destination planet is the cloud-whorled third planet out from an undistinguished G2 star, orbited by an airless, tidally-locked moon with roughly 1.3% of the planet's own mass.

...However, the Earth is a lot more than 200 kiloyears (Ky) old; the surface formed roughly 4.6 Gy ago (gigayears — 1Gy = 1,000,000,000 years). And we can expect the Earth to persist for about another 3-5 Gy, until the sun leaves the main sequence of the Hertzsprung-Russell diagram and becomes a red giant, presumably swallowing the Earth (or at any rate rendering it too crispy for comfort). So if we're being honest (and not cherry-picking our candidate stellar colony mission targets) we've got a 8-10Gy span to probe.

...The point to take away from this is that, between T minus 4.6 Gy and T minus 0.56 Gy, the Earth's atmosphere was largely free of oxygen. ...Even after the oxygen catastrophe, our space probe isn't going to find a terribly hospitable planet.

Best to find a more habitable planet elsewhere, really.

(Via MR).

Stross also discovers why the later Star Treks are so terrible: former Star Trek writer and creator of the re-imagined Battlestar Galactica Ron Moore revealed the secret formula to writing for Trek. He described how the writers would just insert "tech" into the scripts whenever they needed to resolve a story or plot line, then they'd have consultants fill in the appropriate words (aka technobabble) later.

Which I suppose makes this the appropriate place to linkdump Star Trek Mark Two and Brain Bugs, as well as David Brin's war on "Star Wars" (1, 2, 3). And all the evidence we need that the Weekly Standard would be rooting for the Empire.

"Night of the Living Dead" Farmhouse Map

This is the first floor of the farmhouse from the original "Night of the Living Dead", translated into a 5-foot scale battlemat. Adapting real buildings to a battlemat can require some distortion, but the layout of the map is reasonably faithful to the film.

The farmhouse from the 1990 remake has a similar, but slightly different layout. The rooms are in roughly the same location, but the front door is in the central hallway and the kitchen is much smaller.

The cellar is a single small room with a door that can be barred, in which hide Tom and his girlfriend Judy, Harry and Helen Cooper, and their daughter Karen. The keys to the shed are always in the cellar. We only get a brief glimpse of the upstairs hallway, and the only thing known about the layout of the upstairs is that it's possible to toss Molotov cocktails from a bedroom out in front of the house.

1. The Farmhouse

A. Back Porch.
The easiest entrance to the farmhouse is via the unlocked door on this small roofed porch, which allows ingress to the kitchen.

B. Pantry
Sacks of flour and cans of pickled vegetables line the walls of this small pantry.

C. Kitchen
Counters and cabinets line the walls of the kitchen, and a small table occupies the center of the room. Toolboxes in the kitchen cabinets hold hammers, handaxes, and nails. A sliding door connects to the pantry.

D. Dining Room
A table and setting for four sits at the center of the room, and a sofa and armchairs line the walls.

E. Front Porch
A picnic table offers a place to sit, but the front door itself is locked.

F. Drawing Room
The leering, mouldering heads of mounted animals—a deer, a boar, and the skin of a bobcat—grimace from the walls of this room. A desk, littered with diverse rumpled papers and candlesticks, faces the fireplace.

G. Closet
Materials for maintaining the fire are stored in this closet, including a box of firewood, a clearly labelled bottle of lighter fluid or flammable oil, and a box of matches.

H. Hallway
A trickle of putrid blood is pooling at the base of the stairs.

I. Sitting Room
Armchairs and occasional tables line the room, facing the fireplace.

J. Closet
This small close is mostly filled with fine women's shoes and clothes. A rifle and a box of ammunition is hidden behind the clothes.

EDIT
BTW, and according to Wikipedia, it seems that the original movie was filmed near Evans City, Pennsylvania, about 30 miles from Pittsburgh. The shots of the exterior and lower floor were filmed at a house that was afterwards demolished. Here's some then-and-now photos of the cemetery.

Book Review: "Star Wars: Galactic Phrase Book & Travel Guide," by Ben Burtt

A few weeks ago, while re-watching "Episode I" for no good reason, I turned the subtitles on and realized how much of the dialogue for that film is in Huttese. That stream of utterances emitted by the alien characters was intended to represent a consistent, coherent langurage. With a reasonably large corpus (for a language constructed for a film) and a number of well-known, easily recognizable phrases, could it be made to function as a more full-fledged conlang?

For anyone investigating Huttese as a conlang, the Star Wars Galactic Phrase Book & Travel Guide is an essental reference. It is a relatively small book, published after the release of "The Phantom Menace", and certainly not a complete reference. The book is divided into two parts: a phrase book by the "in-world" persona Ebenn Q3 Baobab, and a reminisce on the sound design for the original trilogy and other films by Ben Burtt.

Ben Burtt was a sound designer for Star Wars, creating special dialogue and sound effects for the original movie and the franchise from then on. He wrote for the cartoon series "Star Wars: Droids", in which the Baobab Merchant Fleet makes its most notable appearance, and made several cameos, including Baobab Merchant Fleet leader and traveler Ebenn Q3 Baobab in "The Phantom Menace". Burtt was thus significantly responsible for much of the alien dialogue in the series.

The phrase book and travel guide is light-hearted and often very funny. The travel guide section is very brief, offering only a glimpse at bars, hotels, saunas, and other facilities in Mos Eisley on (post-Rebellion) Tatooine, as well as more general advice. The phrase book offers guidance on communicating in Bocce, Huttese, Ewok, Shyriiwook, Droidspeak, Jawa, Tusken, Gungan, and Nemoidian, as well as getting a haircut in Sallustan. The longest chapter is Huttese, followed by Ewok and Bocce; the Droidspeak and Gungan chapters are mercifully short. Bocce is briefly mentioned in the first "Star Wars" movie; it is here described as a trade language created by the Baobab Merchant Fleet. This book must be its most significant corpus.

There are some oddities in the languages; "song peetch alay" is a well-known Huttese phrase meaning "it's too late". Elsewhere, it is described as a Jawaese rallying cry (following their battle cry "Utinni!") to the Jawa band to converge upon their hapless victims. It could have easily been borrowed from one language into another, of course.

Burtt's reflections on his sound design work for the franchise is very interesting, and describes the efforts to create Greedo's dialogue and other Huttese, Chewbacca's varied utterances, and R2D2's beeps and whistles, among other sounds. Greedo's dialogue, the first appearance of Huttese, was largely improvised by linguistics gradute student Larry Ward in an imitation of Quecha; Ward later provided the voice of Jabba the Hutt.

Many of the languages of the movies were roughly inspired by the phrases and sounds of existing natural languages, as Quecha influenced early Huttese. Some of the Sallustan dialogue in "Return of the Jedi" was spoken by a Tanzanian in his native Haya language, which was comprehensible to viewers of the film in East Africa.

Burtt is not always the most artful prose stylist in the latter section, but the information he relates is certainly engaging.

The book concludes with "Selected Alien Language Scenes from Star Wars", which includes transcriptions of the Huttese dialogue from "Star Wars", and Ewok dialogue and the Ewok Celebration Song from "Return of the Jedi".

From a philological perspective, there are several important sources of Huttese in the films. "Star Wars" includes Greedo's dialogue as well as dialogue by Jabba in the Special Edition. "Return of the Jedi" includes significant dialogue in Huttese at Jabba's palace. "The Phantom Menace" also includes long passages of Huttese dialogue. "The Empire Strikes Back" offers a single Huttese phrase, uttered by a droid, and "Attack of the Clones" has a single brief dialogue in Huttese between Watto and Anakin. Huttese has also appeared in the many other games, books, and media that portray the Star Wars universe.

This book offers canonical transcriptions of significant examples of Huttese speech: all of the Huttese dialogue from "Star Wars"; isolated Huttese phrases drawn from "Return of the Jedi" and "The Phantom Menace"; and the single Huttese insult in "The Empire Strikes Back".

Much of the Huttese dialogue in the prequel trilogy was written in the script (in Huttese and translation) and is available there. However, the Huttese dialogue in "Return of the Jedi" is largely lacking a canonical transcription or translation. Notable phrases such as "bo shueda" have no translation. Nevertheless, Burtt's book does fill in some of the gaps in the "Return of the Jedi" corpus.

Clearly, Huttese is a language created to have a certain sound, without attention to lexical or grammatical consistency. Such inconsistency may make sense for a creole or patois cobbled together from dozens of alien languages and spoken by villainous scum across the galaxy. Assembling a grammar, or even a dictionary, of the language would be...challenging. But we can know and use at least some of its evocative sayings.

The Galactic Phrase Book & Travel Guide is a fun book for people interested in fictional languages, the speech of Star Wars, or just curious about how Chewbacca's dialogue was made. For those more specifically interested in Huttese linguistics, it is essential, and a source for online resources such as the Huttese language page on Wookiepedia and the Complete Wermo's Guide to Huttese (and other Star Wars languages).

"Twilight" Reviews

I went to go see "Twilight" with my sisters &c. around Christmas. It was really beautifully filmed in the Pacific Northwest. And the premise of the film was delightfully ridiculous.

Not only is it a love story between a human girl and a vampire... The vampire is a sparkle-vampire. Srsly. He can't go in the light because everyone will see that he's a glitter vampire. It's amazing.

Book Review: Twilight (Prettier than Napoleon): Twilight is an evil book. A bad influence. Something that should be kept away from children for reasons of content and prose style. There is, as one Jezebel commenter noted, Harry/Draco fanfic that is better written. ...The problem with this book is it sums up exactly what it is to be a teenage girl, and teenage girls are callow and dumb.

...I haven't even addressed the horrendous sexual dynamics and messages in the book: guys lose control, girls have to monitor their behavior at all times lest they cause a guy to lose it and kill/rape them, and sex = death. I understand it only gets worse in future volumes, as hot-blooded Bella pushes for them to get it on and Edward argues that he can't unleash his sexual feelings without losing control and hurting her (thereby normalizing the idea that being hurt during sex is an unavoidable consequence of intimacy with a man, instead of an example of a guy being a weak-willed, inconsiderate jerk who "can't help" but cede all autonomy to his lizard brain once you take your clothes off).

What Girls Want (The Atlantic): Twilight centers on a boy who loves a girl so much that he refuses to defile her, and on a girl who loves him so dearly that she is desperate for him to do just that, even if the wages of the act are expulsion from her family and from everything she has ever known.

...The erotic relationship between Bella and Edward is what makes this book—and the series—so riveting to its female readers. There is no question about the exact nature of the physical act that looms over them. Either they will do it or they won’t, and afterward everything will change for Bella, although not for Edward. Nor is the act one that might result in an equal giving and receiving of pleasure. If Edward fails—even once—in his great exercise in restraint, he will do what the boys in the old pregnancy-scare books did to their girlfriends: he will ruin her.

And then...

StZA: "Dead Moon Rising"

I just got a broadcast from the owner of the Dead Moon Rising live group that their film is on Netflix now.

It's listed in Netflix, and I tried to add it to my queue, but Netflix will only let me add it to the "Saved Movies" for the present, since it says the release date is unknown.

StZA: An Old Toast: Cholera Song

More often attributed to Bartholomew Dowling (1823–1863), it seems. Google Books makes all things possible.

"The Literary World: A Fortnightly Review of Current Literature." Volume XI, January-December, 1880, p.160.

Revelry in India
by Alfred Domett
(with a biographical sketch of the author)

We reprint this wild and powerful lyric...in a good text, as the common ones have some sad errors...

We meet 'neath the sounding rafter
And the walls around are bare;
As they shout to our peals of laughter,
It seems that the dead are there.
But stand to your glasses, steady!
We drink to our comrades' eyes;
Quaff a cup to the dead already;
And hurra! for the next that dies.

Not here are the goblets glowing;
Not here is the vintage sweet;
'Tis cold, as our hearts are growing,
And dark, as the doom we meet.
But stand to your glasses, steady!
And moon shall our pulses rise.
A cup to the dead already;
Hurra! for the next that dies.

Not a sigh for the lot that darkles,
Not a tear for the friends that sink;
We'll fall, 'mid the wine cup's sparkles,
As mute as the wine we drink.
so stand to your glasses, steady!
'Tis this that the respite buys.
One cup to the dead already;
Hurra! for the next that dies.

Time was when we frowned at others--
We thought we were wiser then;
Ha! ha! let them think of their mothers
Who hope to see them again!
No! stand to your glasses, steady!
The thoughtless are here the wise;
A cup to the dead already;
Hurra! for the next that dies.

There's many a hand that's shaking;
There's many a cheek that's sunk;
But soon, though our hearts are breaking,
They'd burn with the wine we've drunk.
So stand to your glasses, steady;
'Tis here the revival lies;
A cup to the dead already;
Hurra! for the next that dies.

There's a mist on the glass congealing--
'Tis the hurricane's fiery breath;
And thus does the warmth of feeling
Turn ice in the grasp of death.
Ho! stand to your glasses steady!
For a moment the vapor dies.
A cup to the dead already;
Hurra! for the next that dies.

Who dreads to the dust returning?
Who shrinks from the sable shore?--
Where the high and haughty yearning
Of the soul shall sting no more!
No! stand to your glasses, steady!
The world is a world of lies,
A cup to the dead already;
Hurra! for the next that dies.

Cut off from the land that bore us,
Betrayed by the land we find,
Where the brightest have gone before us,
And the dullest remain behind,
Stand! stand to your glasses steady!
'Tis all we have left to prize.
A cup to the dead already;
And hurra! for the next that dies.

...For twenty-five years, or thereabouts, it has been a favorite poem with the newspapers of America. It was written in India, during a season of cholera, and may have appeared first in the St. Helena Magazine, though we do not know that it did. ...[Alfred Domett] is of a Dorsetshire family, studied at Cambridge, read law, and was called to the bar in 1841, but never practiced.

It's probably most familiar to modern folks from it's appearance in the 1931 "Dracula".