The last day of Spring Break, I got sick. It figures. Today's the first day back in classes, but I declared a sick day. When I was a younger man, I'd've just skipped out on class and not worried too much about it, but now I feel obliged to send apologetic emails to my professors. I wrote the German prof in German, of course, so maybe she'll give me a little slack. I  guessed wrongly on the proper German sentance, though.

There's a slightly weird thing with self-reference in German, you see. In English, you would say "I am cold." That does literally translate into German: "Ich bin kalt." But saying it that way implies a permanant state, in this case that you are unemotional and unfeeling. To declare that you would be happier if the thermostat went up a little (a transient state), you'd say "Mir ist kalt," which is all kinds of strange: "mir" is the first-person dative pronoun, used when you are the indirect object of a verb. "ist" is the third-person singular form of the copula. So that sentance seems strongly ungrammatical, as it has an indirect object without a direct object. Plus the copula doesn't take indirect or even direct objects. Very strange.

At any rate, I guessed that being sick ("krank") was a transient state and thus should be expressed as "Mir ist krank." I was wrong, it should be "Ich bin krank," which is the literal translation from English. Perhaps in German there is no colloquial meaning with "sick," unlike in English? ("Man, Charles Manson was sick!" Or, for that matter, "That 540 tail-grab was sick, dude!")

Also, the whole permanant state/transient state isn't entirely consistent, either. Saying "Ich bin warm," suggests that you are looking for sex. "Mir ist warm," means you wish there was some A/C. In this case, both forms suggest a transient state. *shrug*

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I've been struck by the similarities between the recent panic over Toyotas running away, and a similar panic in the early 90s or so, then featuring Audis. You can read all about that little event in P.J. O'Rourke's book Parliament of Whores.

Anyway, some links about the current frooh-frah. Megan McArdle has some nice graphs about the reports of runaway vehicles, with the key takeaway being the skewed age of drivers, mostly being the elderly. Car and Driver did a test of the "accelerator versus brake" issue and found that brakes win with multiple models of cars and multiple situations. (The only time the brakes didn't win was with a starting speed of 120mph; in that case the breaks caught fire and couldn't get the car slower than 10mph, which is close enough to stopped for my book.) And finally a columnist at Forbes.com points out the many holes in the most publicized story of a Prius driver, in that he claimed to be doing improbable stuff (e.g. grabbing the gas pedal with one hand while holding the wheel with his other hand and holding his cell phone with his third hand) and that the driver was unwilling to obey the 911 operator advising him to shift gears or turn the car off; once a police car arrived and was watching what the driver did, the car stopped with alacrity.

So, my opinion is, this is one of those stupid media-driven panics that appear every so often, being fueled by people looking to get fifteen minutes of fame or to sue somebody with big pockets, and starring a bunch of grandstanding politicians.

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Fridays, I'm always tired, and I generally take a nap when I get home from class. I was expecting a furniture delivery today, and called them up a few minutes ago, irritated that they didn't show. Yeah, turns out they left a card on the front door. I guess I was sleeping heavily enough that I didn't hear the doorbell. Whoops! I guess I owe them a tip when they come back tomorrow.

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One of my texts has a primary source from the seventeenth century, that makes an offhand reference to Deuteronomy. That line has a footnote. The footnote says, in toto, "Deuteronomy is a book of the Bible." I read that and laughed- who would be reading texts about seventeenth century French politics, and not know that? Then I realized how parochial I am- in my classes, there are several students from Asia. In one seminar, we had a two-hour discussion of the differences between Catholicism, Lutheranism, and Calvinism, with much debate over arcane theological points. In the class was a guy from Taiwan, who spend the lime looking back and forth at the active debaters. He didn't know a damn thing about Christianity, and was lost in the sauce. I can't blame him, either- what the hell do I know about the details seperating various branches of Buddhism or Taoism?

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Here's a disturbing video about how chroma key ("green-screen") has become ubiquitous on modern TV.

via Boing Boing.

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1705 Campus police, Amherst police, and the Buffalo SWAT team are currently evacuating the Lockwood library on campus.

My Facebook feed is about to catch fire from all the updates and rumors. I've got class in an hour two buildings away from the library, but I suspect class is canceled.

1735 The entire campus is now being evacuated. I guess this means I didn't need to do the readings for tonight, eh? Similarly, some of my more irreverent FB friends have created an event "Lockwood Zombie Attack" scheduled for right now. Until we find out if anyone is hurt, I think that's kind of inappropriate.

Word is, there is a person in Lockwood Library with a gun. Whether said gun has been employed is unclear.

1740 The Public Safety "current alerts" page is loading very very slowly; I assume that their server is about to catch fire. The most recent alert is for an on-campus robbery back in early December. Most likely the entire force has turned out, and the dispatcher is too busy to update the page. Still, official confirmation of the campus closure would be nice.

No news on the general "MyUB" campus website either. It is also loading very very slowly.

1742 Got an email from the Office of the University President:

UB Police have evacuated Lockwood Library on the North Campus. Please stay away until further notice.

That's not terribly informative.

1750 While doing a Google News to see if this had hit the wires yet, I turned up an interesting example of academic fraud announced earlier today. I am assuming they are unrelated. Still, it's an interesting news story.

1752 Another official email from the Office of the University President:

UB Police have evacuated Lockwood Library on the North Campus. All classes on the North Campus this evening have been cancelled. Please stay away from the campus until further notice.

Less than a minute later, this email from the account of a Public Safety officer:

University Police has an unsubstantiated report of a person with a weapon in Lockwood Library.  Lockwood Library has been evacuated and all classes on the North Campus been cancelled for the remainder of the day. Until further notice, do not go to Lockwood Library or other buildings on the Academic Spine. 

At least it's officially "unsubstantiated" at this time. That suggests no casualties.

1801 The Buffalo News has a story out. With a photo. This is the reason a night editor stays in the building after the rest of the newspaper staff has gone home.

According to the article I just linked, the police have announced there is security camera footage of someone walking into the library with what might be a rifle. The student paper is reporting eyewitnesses to the gun, but UB's student paper is about as reliable as all such rags.

1807 Some good news: I've got an acquaintance that works in that library; he went home shortly before all this started.

1814 The Buffalo News now has a photo gallery up, or so they claim. The website keeps timing out. Again, I suspect their server is getting beaten into the ground.

1811 Someone has wisely pointed out that there is no shortage of people taking film classes that aren't too bright. Back in the late nineties there was a group of students filming a "shootout" with replica weapons in a parking lot just off campus. They were rather surprised when a horde of police descended upon them. So even if this is not an overreaction to an ambiguous item, it might be a dumb film student.

1822 The fuzz have definatly busted out the AR-15s and M-4s. Some decent photos at the Buffalo News. The cops are not very good at finding cover. I suppose that's good, I'd rather they practice their "community policing" skills rather than tactical skills.

1835 Local news channel:

It includes reports that there are students stuck inside the locked-down library, at least one of which has been texting her mother that she and her friends saw an armed man. Still no reports of weapons fire.

2026 Another email; they've apparently given up on finding a potential gunman.

The University Police have determined that Lockwood Library and the academic spine are safe.  Students can circulate around campus.

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The fourth member of the workout squad showed up for swimming Saturday, and now I know why he bowed out with a feeble excuse the prior week. He's afraid of swimming. He's got a good reason to be afraid, though: he can barely swim.

Three of the four of us are grad students, and I'm almost there, so there is no shortage of teaching enthusiam. I'm the second-worst swimmer, so I let the other two take the lead in technique. By the end of the day, we had taught our inexperienced swimmer a second stroke.

Strangely, the only stroke he knew was the sidestroke. We taught him how to dog paddle, on the principle that every human being should know the doggie paddle. It is beyond me how he learned a more advanced stroke without getting the doggie paddle first.

With too many teachers, there was some discussion over the next step. We seem to have settled on breaststroke next. There are also ominous mutters on making me learn how to do the forward crawl in a way that involves less thrashing.

Downside is, I've got a terrible earache this evening, and I'm wondering if it is an infection. Tomorrow afternoon, if it's not better, I'll head to the campus health clinic. They make me buy insurance, I may as well get something out of it.

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Late last semester, I joined some friends in bewailing the sad state of our unfit bodies, withered away with advancing years.

This semester, we resolved to do something about our advancing decrepitude. We're meeting at the campus athletics building thrice a week. Weekends are lap swimming, but Tuesdays and Thursdays we go to the fitness room: free-weights, cardio machines, and other similar exercise gear.

Of the four of us, I'm the one with recent experience in formal workout leadership, so I've been providing the plan. First day we did the Marine Corps Daily 15, which is a series of calisthenics that take very little room. I had to back the numbers down, doing about a third the reps that I used to. I was good for more, but two of the guys in the group are far behind me in fitness, and I don't want to give poor Jack a heart attack.

The second time we did crunches and POWs; the POW is an upper-body workout of supreme unpleasantness. It got it's name from the impression among the enlisted that no enemy torture could be as bad as this exercise. I kind of like them, in a Stockholm Syndrome way. Then we ran for a while, or rather, I ran while the other guys walked.

It's kind of a problem. I want to work out together, but I'm at a higher fitness level. (Not that my level is all that high, mind you.) My plan is to get them up so we can run together.

Now I've got to head off to our fourth session, and I'm out of new ideas. Maybe we'll just do the Daily 15 again.

UPDATE: We decided to do weightlifting today. I've not done any of that since high school, so the other guys took over the daily operational plan. It worked out well, I'm quite sore. I also went for a run afterwards, which the other guys took a pass on.

I need to dig out my pace-counting beads. My university's arena has a 1/6 mile indoor running track, but I keep losing count when the lap number gets into the teens. A pace-counter, which is kind of like an abacus bracelet, would let me keep track.

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Prepositions have always been the hardest part of foreign languages for me. It was trouble in French, and it's trouble in German. The problem is, prepositions are "overloaded" in that they mean lots of different things, and the useages are not generally obvious. Thus, in English, one is in a building by the shore, on a ship at sea, et cetera. Then the prepositions get extended to non-location uses: on the radio, at play, with child, under great stress, on top of the world, in the lead. Foreign languages have the same sort of issues, except that I learned the English prepositions gradually over the course of many years, while I have just this week to decide if one is auf Arbeit, bei Arbeit, zu Arbeit, um Arbeit, an Arbeit, über Arbeit, or in Arbeit. An excellent German-English dictionary's list of "at {prep}" has all those and more. That's because "at" is overloaded in English with meanings, and the same is true for similar words in German.

For the record, one is bei der Arbeit if you are in the process of doing your job, auf der Arbeit if you are located at the place you work, and in der Arbeit if you are located at the place you work, and that place has restricted access. Those answers may change if you speak a dialect of German, of which there are several.

The existance of the blog post is an admission of my procrastination.

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I have a class on the Early American Republic. Last lecture we were doing the start of the War of 1812. The instructor likes to have a discussion at the end of his lecture, in the class's remaining time.

In the class there is one student from Canada and another from England, so their perspective on the war was eagerly sought. The English guy confessed that the war wasn't even mentioned in his earlier schooling, as it was really a tiny sideshow to the Napoleonic Wars. That was the feeling of the British at the time, too: the British Cabinet was astonished at the American declaration of war, over what they thought were minor legal quibbles.

The Canadian woman said it was covered extensivly in Canadian high schools, but the war was blamed on an American desire to conquer Canada, and the war was cast as "Brave Canadians fight to defend their homeland!" This is a little amusing to my ears, as while there were some people that wanted to aquire Canada, they formed a block of less than 10% of Congress, so it wasn't all that widespread a desire. The main reason for the war was British naval policies (impressment of American sailors, seizure of American shipping, attacking American warships, etc.) As for it being a moment of Canadian pride, almost all of the troops were British, as in 'from the British Isles'. Very few Canadians did any fighting at all.

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