Sarah Benor and her husband Mark (and big sisters Aliza and Dalia) are thrilled to announce the arrival of Ariella Tamar Bunin Benor, born Wednesday, January 23 at 10:15pm. She weighed in at 6 lbs. 2 oz. and measured 18.5". Sarah and baby are home and doing well. The name Ariella ('Lioness of God') is in memory of Sarah's paternal grandfather, Yehuda Leib Benor (Leon in English) (1897-1984), who moved to Palestine from Cairo at age 17, went to university in London, and spent the rest of his adult life in Jerusalem. He was an activist, an intellectual, fluent in seven languages, and co-founder of several Israeli institutions (including the Scouts, the Union for Progressive Judaism, and Har El, Israel's first progressive congregation). He wrote several articles about Hebrew philology and contemporary Jewish practice, as well as a 700-page book on progressive Judaism. [No pressure, Ariella... -The Sesquipeditor]

Ariella, her sisters, and Sarah, who begat them...

Mary Rose (Ohio State University) is giving a talk about variation and farming at Kenyon College next week. The title: The Language of Farming: Language Variety and Social Change in a Dairying Community.

Joan Bresnan is a keynote speaker at the upcoming 30th Annual Convention of the German Society of Linguistics (DGfS) in Bamburg

Arto Anttila is an invited speaker at this year's GLOW conference, to be held in March at Newcastle University. We notice that Arto has stopped giving the `TBA' talk that he perfected in his UC Santa Cruz lecture last year and has now moved on to the apparently unrelated topic of `TBC'. In spite of the `TBA' debacle, the Sesquipeditor defies anyone to offer a language where this is a meaningful expression... Gillian Ramchand (University of Tromsø/CASTL) is also speaking at GLOW on On Taking Verbs Lightly.

If you yelled for 8 years, 7 months and 6 days you would have produced enough sound energy to heat one cup of coffee. (Hardly seems worth it.)

If you farted consistently for 6 years and 9 months, enough gas is produced to create the energy of an atomic bomb. (Now that's more like it!)

The human heart creates enough pressure when it pumps out to the body to squirt blood 30 feet. (O.M.G.!)

A pig's orgasm lasts 30 minutes. (In my next life, I want to be a pig.)

A cockroach will live nine days without its head before it starves to death. (Creepy; I'm still not over the pig.)

Banging your head against a wall uses 150 calories an hour (Don't try this at home, ... maybe at work)

The male praying mantis cannot copulate while its head is attached to its body. The female initiates sex by ripping the male's head off. (Honey, I'm home. What the...?!)

The flea can jump 350 times its body length. It's like a human jumping the length of a football field. (30 minutes..lucky pig! Can you imagine?)

The catfish has over 27,000 taste buds. (What could be so tasty on the bottom of a pond?)

Some lions mate over 50 times a day. (I still want to be a pig in my next life...quality over quantity.)

Butterflies taste with their feet. (Something I always wanted to know.)

The strongest muscle in the body is the tongue. (Hmmmmmm......)

Right-handed people live, on average, nine years longer than left-handed people. (If you're ambidextrous, do you split the difference?)

Elephants are the only animals that cannot jump. (Okay, so that would be a good thing)

A cat's urine glows under a black light. (I wonder who was paid to figure that out?)

An ostrich's eye is bigger than its brain. (I know some people like that.)

Starfish have no brains (I know some people like that, too.)

Polar bears are left-handed. (If they switch, they'll live a lot longer)

Humans and dolphins are the only species that have sex for pleasure. (What about that pig??)

In Anagrammis Veritas

PRESBYTERIAN: Best in Prayer, Bent...Pray...Rise,

Beer party? Sin!, Priest nearby

DORMITORY: dirty room

ASTRONOMER: moon starer

DESPERATION: a rope ends it

THE EYES: they see

GEORGE BUSH: he bugs Gore

THE MORSE CODE: here come dots

SLOT MACHINES: cash lost in me

ANIMOSITY: is no amity

ELECTION RESULTS: lies - let's recount

SNOOZE ALARMS: alas! no more zs

A DECIMAL POINT: I'm a dot in place

THE EARTHQUAKES: that queer shake

ELEVEN PLUS TWO: twelve plus one

MOTHER-IN-LAW: woman Hitler

For events farther in the future consult the Upcoming Events Page.

• FRIDAY-SUNDAY, 8-10 FEBRUARY

  • Berkeley Linguistics Society Meetings

    The program for BLS 34, held at UC Berkeley, is available HERE.
• MONDAY, 11 FEBRUARY

  • Berkeley Phonetics and Phonology Phorum

    Grant McGuire (Berkeley)
    "The role of experience in the use of phonetic cues"
    12:00-1:00 PM, 46 Dwinelle Hall, UC Berkeley

  • Phonology Workshop

    Uriel Cohen-Priva
    Presentation of duration model results
    3:15 PM, MJH 127

  • UC Berkeley Linguistics Colloquium

    Felicity Meakins (U Manchester)
    "Two to tangle: The origins and structure of Gurindji Kriol, an Australian mixed language"
    4:00 PM, 182 Dwinelle Hall, UC Berkeley
• TUESDAY, 12 FEBRUARY

  • Mathematical Logic Seminar

    Robert May (UC Davis)
    "The Essential Proposition: Frege on Identity Statements"
    4:15pm Bldg. 60:119
    
• WEDNESDAY, 13 FEBRUARY

  • UCSC Linguistics Colloquium

    Matthew Wagers (University of Maryland)
    Creating and navigating structure in real time
    4:00 PM, Humanities One, Room 202, UC Santa Cruz

  • SF Bay ACM Data Mining SIG

    Leslie Spring (CTO and Founder, Cognitive Code Corporation)
    "SILVIA: A Practical Hybrid Approach for Conversational Intelligence"
    6:30pm, SAP LABS, Building D, 3410 Hillview Avenue, Palo Alto, CA
• THURSDAY, 14 FEBRUARY

  • Sociorap

    Ellen Bernard, Curtis Andrus, and Arto Anttila
    "Linking-r in Eastern Massachusetts and Optimality Theory "
    5:00 PM, MJH 126
• FRIDAY, 15 FEBRUARY

  • Speech Lunch

    Yun-Hsuan Sung
    "Hidden Conditional Random Fields for Disfluency Detection"
    12:00, ExL Lab
    

  • Linguistics Department Colloquium

    Adrian Brasoveanu
    "Uniqueness Effects in Correlatives"
    3:30pm, MJH Rm 126

  • Weekly Social!

    5:00, department lounge
    




• UPCOMING EVENTS (always under construction)
• LINGUISTIC DEPARTMENT EVENTS PAGE
• Got broader interests? The New Sesquipedalian recommends reading or even subscribing to the CSLI Calendar, available HERE.
• WHAT'S HAPPENING AT UC SANTA CRUZ?
  
• WHAT'S GOING ON AT UC BERKELEY?
  
• HOW ABOUT MIT? UMass Amherst? U Chicago? Rutgers?

The Stanford Blood Center is reporting a shortage of as well as a shortage of O-, O+, A-, A+, B-, and AB-. For an appointment: http://bloodcenter.stanford.edu/ or call 650-723-7831. It only takes an hour of your time and you get free cookies. The Blood Center is also raising money for a new bloodmobile.

Want to contribute information? Want to be a reporter? Want to see something appear here regularly? Want to be a regular columnist? Want to take over running the entire operation? Write directly to sesquip@gmail.com.