Okay, the word got out a while ago, and I’m being drowned in emails tonight, so let’s get this done. By the power of contractual obligation, I am appearing at the San Diego Comic-Con 2009 under the exclusive aegis of Sony, Madhouse and Marvel Anime. I am in San Diego for something less than 36 hours. This is my only appearance at San Diego. Here’s the press release.

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Marvel Entertainment Inc. and Madhouse Present an Exclusive Sneak Peek at the Re-imagining of Marvel’s Legendary Super Heroes

MARVEL ANIME TV SERIES

AT COMIC-CON

Get an Exciting First-Look at the All New Anime Iron Man and Wolverine

At the Marvel Animation Panel on Friday, July 24 at 4:30 PM

Culver City, CA (7/15/09) – Marvel Entertainment Inc., has partnered with renowned Japanese animation studio Madhouse (Paprika, Tokyo Godfathers) to create four all new anime versions of classic Marvel Super Heroes. Get an exciting first glimpse of two of the planned four series at this year’s Comic-Con International, the country’s leading comics and popular arts convention. The Marvel Animation Panel will be held on Friday, July 24, and will include an exclusive first look at official teaser trailers for two of these new series, hosted by writer and multiple-Eagle Award winner Warren Ellis, who will appear to discuss writing the all new adventures of these re-imagined Super Heroes.

These Marvel Anime TV series are being created as a way of merging the beloved Marvel Super Heroes of western culture with the bold animation tradition of Japan. The resulting product will be four visually groundbreaking anime series featuring popular Super Heroes redesigned and repurposed as emerging from the fabric of Japanese culture. The series is expected to begin appearing on the Animax channel in Japan in spring of 2010.

The Marvel Animation Panel with run from 4:30 to 5:30 p.m. on Friday, July 24, at the San Diego Convention Center. A one-hour autograph signing with Ellis will follow the panel at Marvel’s Comic-Con booth #2429.

Madhouse, Inc., established in 1972 with offices in Tokyo, Los Angeles and Beijing, is one of the top animation studios in the world working exclusively with some of Japan’s top anime directors. They have created many well-known titles such as worldwide hits Ninja Scroll, Vampire Hunter D, Trigun, Tokyo Godfathers, and Metropolis, Japanese successful TV series such as “Death Note” and “Nana”, as well as Paprika (an Official Selection at the 2006 Venice Film Festival) and The Girl Who Leapt Through Time (2007 Japanese Academy Award for Best Film – Animation)

Marvel Entertainment, Inc. is one of the world’s most prominent character-based entertainment companies, built on a proven library of over 5,000 characters featured in a variety of media over seventy years. Marvel utilizes its character franchises in licensing, entertainment (via Marvel Studios and Marvel Animation) and publishing (via Marvel Comics). Marvel’s strategy is to leverage its franchises in a growing array of opportunities around the world, including feature films, consumer products, toys, video games, animated television, direct-to-DVD and online.

Contacts:

Mac McLean

Click Communications

818.392.8863

mac@click-comm.com

Ann Hinshaw

Dan Klores Communications

212.981.5160

As a coda to the previous post, Jamais Cascio notes how the touchscreen generation interacts with a Kindle:

They try to "turn the page" by flicking a finger across the screen. But the Kindle doesn’t have a touch screen….Which means that the second thing that people checking out my Kindle do is get a funny confused look — why doesn’t it work?…

I did exactly the same thing the first time I handled one, funnily enough. I’m not iPhone-entrained, I’m Palm-entrained…

My poor ancient Archos Jukebox FM Receiver is old and suffering now, and is being retired from the field and given pride of place as desktop storage. Which put me in the market for a new mp3 player.

Amazingly, I find myself once again in possession of a Sony Walkman.

Of all the things to once again possess. I’ve just written something for The Wire music magazine about personal soundtracks, and the Sony Walkman is what started it. I don’t think, holding my original tape-playing Walkman in my hands, it even occurred to me that such a thing could or should hold a library of music and a day’s worth of TV shows. When I showed this tiny, heavy thing to Lili, I’m wondering now if she was thinking, "yeah, it plays music, but what else does it do?" She didn’t ask, but, knowing her, I wonder if that was going through her head. Whether that’s what goes through the heads of her Western generation, the third (?) internet generation. Where’s the controller? What else does it do?

Having only had the thing a few hours, I fat-fingered the slightly awkward mp3 slider bar while playing her a piece of music on it, watching her fingers twitching. A one-second slip, and she was in there, "give me that, old man," tapping the touchscreen (that she’s never used before). She’s the generation that listens to music on YouTube — and I was about to comment that she’s of the generation entirely used to overcompressed music, until I realised that I grew up listening to toppy medium-wave radio, where people specifically recorded for its quirks. Bass almost completely disappears in pop music until 1988, when it becomes a club and rave experience again. The Associates rigged an entire drum kit with nothing but snares so the sound popped on radio. The only real difference between YouTube and BBC Radio 1 is that she gets to search and choose exactly what she wants to listen to, circling outwards to associated links to find similar and new things. Control.

Clay Shirky’s line about how anything that ships without a mouse is broken — that’s her generation. (I still think he was just one foot behind the time — I understand he was working from an anecdote, but I can’t help thinking the word he should have used is "touchscreen.")

I found Lili crosslegged on her bed earlier, her guitar in her hands, earbuds in, watching something on her open laptop. I suspect it was either a guitar lesson, some tabs she’s been looking for, or listening to Theory Of A Dead Man and trying to detune her guitar to C-sharp to capture their tone. That’s how she treats the laptop — what else does it do? And the very conjuring of all those elements in the first line illustrates that her generation do not live with their heads in a laptop or a DS Lite or whatever. Less so, even, than the previous generation. It’s a fully integrated part of their lives, a Swiss army knife for the world. What else does it do?

If I tell her I have a YouTube app on the Sony Walkman I’ll never get the bloody thing back.

(I’m sure I was going to write about something else, but then I got off on a ramble. Oh well. File it under Brainjuice and move on.)

(Did I mention Lili won a Young Engineers award last week? She came home today with some weird mathematics award I don’t quite understand. I’m slightly afraid she’s going to operate on me in the night and I’ll wake up as a cyborg slave.)

http://www.qwantz.com/index.php?comic=1510

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July 15th, 2009: You know who hasn't linked to Bellen? ME. This is something that I'm fixing right now! And here's a recent favourite. Enjoy! – Ryan

Editor's Note

http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=1579

The discussion following my original post ("A Little Primer of Xinjiang Proper Nouns", 7/13/2009) has proven quite edifying, at least to me.  One thing that I realized from the lively comments is that I forgot to give an indication of how the name Xinjiang itself should be pronounced.  There's also the question of what sort of "pronouncers" or "respellings" to provide for speakers of American English who need to pronounce these names but cannot be expected to render them exactly the way a native speaker of Uyghur would.

I must preface the following remarks by stating that I'm probably not the best person to offer standard American English readings of these names because I'm a fluent speaker of Mandarin and know a bit of Uyghur. Consequently, when I want to say these words as an American would, I'm afraid that my Mandarin and my Uyghur get in the way. Still, I will make an honest effort to separate the three modes and offer useful guides for speakers of American English.

Xin1jiang1 新疆 The Uyghur pronunciation of this Mandarin term is Shinjang شىنجاڭ.   I think that it's all right for an American simply to say the name Xinjiang about the way the Uyghurs do: SHIN-jahng (I put the "h" in there to lengthen the "a"). Being acculturated to Mandarin, I find it hard to avoid saying something like SHIN-jeeahng, even when I'm trying to speak as an American.

Recordings of Xinjiang:

1. Mandarin   

2. American English

a. unmodified

b. modified

"Sinkiang", the Postal Map Romanization of the name, represents a time / place / dialect (Shanghai, 1906) before the palatalization of the velars (compare Peking and Beijing).

As for how the Uyghurs themselves refer to Xinjiang (Eastern Central Asia to me), depending upon what part of it they come from or the circumstances in which they are speaking, they will call it variously Uyghur Eli (country of the Uyghurs), Uyghur Diyari (Uyghur land), Uyghur Rayoni (Uyghur Region), Sherki Türkistan (Eastern Türkistan), or Uyghuristan, and so forth.

American English pronunciations of Uyghur:

a. unmodified:  or

b. modified: 
Finally, the name of the capital of the region, Urumchi (and numerous other spellings), has a broadly accepted pronunciation in English as oo-ROOM-chee. Again, when I'm in the presence of cognoscenti, I'll put umlauts on the "u's".

a. unmodified: 

b. modified: 

To sum up, for the standard American renderings of these three names, I recommend the unmodified pronunciations: SHIN-jahng, WEE-gur or WEE-goor / wee-GOOR (emphasis on the first syllable is preferred), and oo-ROOM-chee.

I recently took delivery of another crate of beer from the magnificent Brew Dog. This beer is called Zeitgeist, and it’s a black lager. I think the womb creatures I live with are going to finish the crate before I get anymore: its handfuls of berries, malt and hops have been greeted with unanimous praise at Ellis Castle, and one of them proclaimed it their new favourite. I frankly love it, and have a bottle open right now.

BUT! yesterday I got an email from Brew Dog themselves, and in the interests of saving me a fuckload of typing, I present it below. Short version: they’ve given me a discount code to give to you. I will help you get excellent beer at a stupidly cheap price. Because I love you. And also: they want you to blog with them.

…we have recently set up a new brand and website called Zeitgeist. The military line up of characters in sheep masks was designed by a local student.

Our zeitgeist website is now up and running. www.zeitgeistbeer.com

There is a very unusual hook behind the Zeitgeist website. The blog will not be updated by us, but by the customer!

We want to give up ownership of the blog, website and brand to the people who drink the beer. The idea is to create a whole alternative community online on the Zeitgeist site. People can blog on www.zeitgeistbeer.com about anything: beer, art, film, culture. They can upload movies, pictures and say anything they want. The idea would be that the discussion has an alternative vibe which ties in with the non-conforming message of the beer. This is a brand controlled by the people not a brand which controls them.

All someone has to do to be able to blog is to buy some beer from our online shop.

The idea of having an open blog, updated by the consumer is a new and radical approach and is going to need a bit of a push to get the awareness going on it. This is where you can maybe help a little!

I have a 70% discount code - SHEEP - all set up for you to give to your readers on your website so not only do they get some great black lager at an unbelievable price but they also get to be one of the first people to update the Zeitgeist blog!

Basically: go to the site, order a shitload of fantastic beer for pennies, join an insane groupblog of very clever drunks. Who loses? No-one. Except maybe the rest of the world.

http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=1578

A couple of days ago, I compared the rate of first-person-singular pronoun use in Sarah Palin's July 3 resignation speech to the rates in some other historical speeches, including Richard Nixon's 1962 speech conceding the California governor's race to Pat Brown ("I again", 7/13/2009). That 1962 news conference is  widely known as the "You won't have Nixon to kick around any more" speech, and I referred to it that way. But I also linked to an mp3 file of the speech, and in a comment, Tim pointed out that Nixon actually says "You don't have Nixon to kick around any more".

On the web, Google has won't ahead of don't 915 to 393 — Bing scores it 297 to 27. (Either way, Arnold Zwicky's 7/27/2007 LL post on "Illeism and its relatives" is one of those that get it right).

This is not the only mistake in the New York Times' version ("Transcript of Nixon's News Conference on His Defeat by Brown in Race for Governor", NYT, 11/8/1962, p. 18), which describes itself as "the transcript of Richard M. Nixon's news conference yesterday in Los Angeles, as recorded by The New York Times through th efacilities of the A.B.C. radio network". Aside from normal editing, there's another interesting mistake in the same passage:

The audio, and my transcription:

Last point.
I leave you gentlemen now
and uh you will now write it, you will interpret it, that's your right.
but as I leave you
uh I want you to know
just think how much you're going to be missing
you don't have Nixon to kick around any more
because gentlemen this is my last press conference

The NYT transcription (image of passage as printed):

The last play. I leave you gentlemen now and you will now write it. You will interpret it. That's your right. But as I leave you I want you to know- just think how much you're going to be missing.

You won't have Nixon to kick around any more, because, gentlemen, this is my last press conference

[Let me note again, in passing, President Nixon's tendency to end phrases on a rising pitch. More on this in a later post…]

The two omitted uh's are normal editing, and the choices about punctuation and paragraphing are reasonable ones. But turning "The last point" into "the last play" is a more interesting and meaningful emendation. Play is more dramatic than point, and it might have been a better choice for Nixon to make, especially because it follows three other passages that he similarly introduces as "One last thing":

This was a man who was finding it hard to leave the stage.

But there's another, larger, difference between the archival audio and the NYT transcript, one that I find much harder to understand. Here's how the NYT starts out (click for image of passage as printed):

Good morning, gentlemen. Now that Mr. Klein has made his statement, and now that all the members of the press are so delighted that I have lost, I'd like to make a statement of my own.

I appreciate the press coverage in this campaign. I think each of you covered it the way you saw it. You had to write it in the way according to your belief on how it would go. I don't believe publishers should tell reporters to write one way or another. I want them all to be free. I don't believe the F.C.C. [Federal Communications Commission] or anybody else should silence [word lost in transmission].

I have no complaints about the press coverage. I think each of you was writing it as you believed it.

I congratulate Governor Brown, as Herb Klein has already indicated, for his victory.

Compare the audio and my transcript, from the beginning of the mp3 version at American Rhetoric:

I have no complaints about the press coverage
I will never complain about it
I think that each of you were- was writing it as you believed it
and uh I want that always to be the case in America.
Now.
The other thing I want to say is this. I-
I congratulate Governor Brown,
as uh Herb Klein has already indicated, for his victory

[There are those final rises again…]

Here's a side-by-side comparison:

Before the phrase "I have no complaints about the press coverage", a passage is apparently missing from the audio recording — this is too bad, but it's a plausible thing to happen. But of the next seven breath-groups in the recording, numbers one, three, and seven are rendered more-or-less normally in the NYT transcript, while two, four, five, and six are entirely missing.

Did the stenographer drop her pencil? Has the recording at American Rhetoric been edited to interpolate passages from another speech? I'm genuinely puzzled.

Except for the strangeness at the start, the quality of this 1962 transcript is better than what I'm used to seeing in the newspapers recently. And nothing very important depends on the details of this case. But perhaps someone familiar with the methods used to create transcripts in the news business, a half a century ago, can suggest a solution.

[One last thing :-)…

President Nixon closes with a pathetic plea:

unlike some people
I have never cancelled a subscription to a paper
and also
I never will
I believe in reading
what my opponents say
and I hope that
what I have said today
will at least
make television, radio, the press
first
recognize the great responsibility they have
to report all the news
and second
recognize
that they have a right and a responsibility if they're against a candidate
to give him the shaft
but also recognize if they give him the shaft
to put one lonely reporter on the campaign
who will report what the candidate says now and then

So here, 47 years later, is my transcript of his news conference — or at least the only part of it for which I could find a recording. I'm sure that there are some mistakes, since I did it in a hurry, but still, Dick, I tried.]

This is Warren Ellis dot com.

(Matt Jones)