Isn't this the way it always goes? For weeks, when you don't need it, your copy of Orchesographie keeps popping up in front of you like it's stalking you from room to room in a manner unbefitting an inanimate object, and then the night when you want to look something up and quote from one of the early chapters, it's nowhere to be found, as though it had popped out of the house to go hit an all-night diner or something, which is even less fitting behaviour for a book than stalking you around the house is. Am I right? Isn't this how it always seems to be? Or is it just the English translation that plays such games?
(Which reminds me ... have I mentioned the Belle Qui rule? That is: if you're going to write something as stalkerish as:
Pretty woman,walking down the str...with the bewitching eyes
When you smiled at me you stole my heart
So now you have to kiss me or I'll die.
Why do you run away whenever I get close? ....[*]
it's best to write it in French. And even better to write it four or five hundred years ago so it seems even more romantic, if you have access to a time machine. Much less creepy in Middle French.)
In other news, I just discovered that there are dozen or two (depending on whether we include covers) Beatles songs I don't know! (Out of a list of 292 songs.) This is startling and confusing and and and and wrong, and I must find them and get to know them in order to remedy this! (And why/where have I heard "You Know My Name (Look Up the Number)" enough times for it to be so very familiar, if it's only listed as being on three albums I've never owned, only one of which I can recall listening to a couple times. Have I heard it that many times just on the radio?)
Also, I think I've solved The Case Of The Mysteriously Vanishing Disk Space on the Mac. Dynamic swapfile(s). I figured out it was probably growing the swapfile (after hunting and hunting for leftover temp files and out-of-control log files, and finding neither), but figured the OS or one of the apps I used must have a memory leak. SingTFW for "OS X memory leak" led me to this:
"The one thing I've never understood with OS X is why it doesn't use true dynamic swap. OS X grows its swap files in a rigid, stepwise manner, and only removes unused swap space upon reboot."
and that led me to discovering where OS X keeps its swap
space (/var/vm), where sure enough, a bunch of 64MB files get
created when I overfeed ImageMagick or ask ffmpeg to do
the chores knit something together. So it's more of a
swap space leak than properly a memory leak. I try to
stitch a panorama, assemble a bunch of jpegs into an mpeg, or edit
too large an audio recording, or just (as usual) do way too many
things at once, and the swap directory grows to the peak size I
consume, eats a bunch of disk space in the process, and stays
that size until I reboot. Being the kind of user who doesn't
like to reboot much, I'd better clear off more space on this
here drive (like by editing the piles of photos I've copied
here to work on, so I can post 'em, archive 'em, and get them
off this machine). I've gotten the "you're running
with sciss... dangerously low on disk space
on your boot volume" message several times and crashed the
machine twice. The author of the comment I quoted also
mentioned something called "dynamic pager monitor" which may
help as well.
Now to try to figure out whether the clue I think I've found to the POST parameter I need to add to my IJ/DJ/DW/LJ posting client to be able to post backdated entries even when a later-dated entry already exists ... is a Proper Clue or a wild goose. Or better yet, leave that window on top so I'll be reminded when i wake up, and try to fall asleep now.
[*] Now that I've ruined "Belle Qui Tiens Ma Vie" for you, I'll go ahead and confess that that's not really a completely fair translation of the lyrics (for one thing, I snuck a line from a different verse into the end of the first verse). But I still think of it as "16th Century 'Pretty Woman'". A fairer translation would start:
Beautiful woman who holds my life
Captive in your eyes,
Who ravishes my soul
With a graceful smile,
Come quickly and rescue me
Or I must die.
Why do you run away
When I am close to you?
When I see your eyes
I lose myself in them
Because your perfection
Changes my actions.
[...]
Someday I should get around to writing an English translation that rhymes and fits the original melody, though it'll always be prettier in French. There are still some phrases in later verses I have trouble with, and as it turns out (Quelle surprise!), feeding Middle French to Babelfish, with vocabulary changes and spelling changes between Middle and Modern French, a fair bit doesn't get translated. (And all I know of Middle French myself is what I've figured out from song lyrics close enough to the bits of Modern French I remember to understand.) But eventually I'll manage it. I've seen somebody else's English translation published, but I didn't really like it all that much. I think I can eventually do better. Or one of my friends will do so first.
"Every calling is great when greatly pursued." -- Oliver Wendell Holmes (b. 1809-08-29, d. 1894-10-07)
"At noon in the desert a panting lizard
waited for history, its elbows tense,
watching the curve of a particular road
as if something might happen."
-- William Stafford
[If anyone's wondering what connects these two quotations, they're not connected to each other, just to the date.]
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