Tired beyond measure, typical Sunday Night exhaustion. A good day, though. We made it to church and the singing was good. 'Twas a gorgeous morn, already about 75 degrees by 9:30am, heating up to 87 later in the aft. It's Summer in February. Weird but also normal for us in the age of climate change.
I watched the Super Bowl at Pearl's, and like everybody else I expected Brady to work his magic one more time, and just like in most of the other Super Bowls involving the Pats, the game came down to the final two minutes. That is usually Brady Time, and I must admit that this time I was rooting for him to pull off one more miracle. Now that's weird. After all, I have been the Ultimate Brady Hater since Super Sunday 2001, when - as a 23 year old kid - he pulled off the very first of his patented Super Bowl comebacks and beat Kurt Warner and my beloved Rams. That was Tom Brady's first turn in the spotlight, the game that made him famous, and I had "hated" him, in a sports way, ever since.
But over the years, even though I still hated him as recently as last year, he wore me down and I had to admit that he probably was, and is, the greatest QB of all time. My hero Warner, who is now an announcer, says as much. Kurt calls Tom the GOAT, so if Brady is good enough for Kurt, he's good enough for me.
And because I've watched him do his thing for so many years, I have to admit that I was sort of hoping he'd pull it off again. Part of it was the Eagles. I am no big Eagles fan, though I must admit that their guy Foles played one hell of a game.
Well anyway, good for Philly and their fans. Next year, the Rams will beat Brady in the Super Bowl and I can go back to hating him again. Sorry, Tom.
And with that.........enough about sports!
I am thinking about Lime Bikes. Have you got Lime Bikes in your city, in your neighborhood? Elizabeth, do they have Lime Bikes in Chicago? If they don't have 'em yet, they will have 'em soon. Just before Spring Semester began at CSUN three weeks ago, I was out on my walk one night and I saw this bicycle parked on it's kickstand in the middle of a CSUN walkway. It was painted green and yellow and had a logo identifying it as a Lime Bike. I gathered that it was owned by a company, and my first thought was "bike-sharing" like they do in China, where you just grab a parked bike, ride it to wherever you are going, and then leave it for the next person to ride. And that's exactly what Lime Bikes have turned out to be! After seeing that first bike at CSUN, on subsequent nights I saw more and more. I Googled "Lime Bikes" and saw what the deal was : you have to have a Smart Phone, and then you scan the pattern on the bike's "licence plate" (those patterns that look like ink blots that are replacing bar codes, I don't know what they're called cause I don't use apps or have a Smart Phone), but yeah, so you scan the "ink blot" with your phone, and then you start riding. It costs a mere Dollar Per Hour.
And all of a sudden, three weeks after seeing my first Lime Bike, I see students riding them all over town. There is one parked here at my apartment building, and I have seen them as far as a half mile off campus. There seem to be at least a hundred centered at CSUN. What I especially love is the idea that they are right out in the open, and you can't steal 'em because they are chipped, or have sensors, or GPS or whatever, so you'd be tracked down if you pedaled away with one. So you see them parked everywhere, most often right in the middle of a sidewalk, with nobody around them. They just sit there, like "here's a bike if you wanna ride it".
I like the concept, and the Lime Bikes themselves look cool, and the young people seem to be riding them all over the place, so hooray for Lime Bikes! Look for them in your town soon in they aren't there already. :)
I also watched two more episodes of "Manhunt : Unabomber" after the Super Bowl, and I am fascinated and intrigued with the methods that were developed by the character played by Sam Worthington, as described last night. Most FBI crime solving is based on "hard science" forensics, like DNA and fingerprints and stuff you can see and identify. But when they can't catch someone, they turn to their Profilers, who use psychology and intuition - and psychic powers - to bring bad guys to justice.
And in the Unabomber case, the Profiler played by Worthington used linguistics to try and identify a suspect. In this case it was comparative linguistics, and Elizabeth, if you are still reading, that made me think of you because you were a linguistics major when I met you. :)
This stuff - what they do in the movie - absolutely fascinates me. I won't describe it, just watch for yourself because it's a great miniseries, but it involves, in this case, the intense and close scrutiny of the choice of words and idiosyncratic spelling and sentence structure and other language forms that might escape the layman, but which were in this case used by the Profiler to ultimately nail down the then-anonymous Unabomber as a PhD candidate, which ultimately led to the arrest of Kacsynski. It is mindboggling to watch the fine points of how they figured out what kind of person he was, based only on his writings.
I am especially interested in this aspect, because I have in my possession an anonymous letter received by myself in May 1994, right when my memories of 1989 were beginning to bloom. And I have used the same techniques in trying to identify the author of that letter, which alluded to my drug use at the time, and more subtly, to knowledge of the events of 1989. The writer was trying to get me to repent, to "ask God for forgivness" in his or her words, for using speed.
I always wondered, from the day I received the letter, why someone who was so interested in my welfare would contact me anonymously. But of course the real issue was not my drug use (at that time), but the fact that my amnesia was breaking and my memories of 1989 were coming back to me.
That was why the Anonymous Letter Writer sent the letter to me, because they were scared. Scared about what I was remembering.
But to get back to the Unabomber investigation, I am very interested in the linguistics approach, because it is the same approach that I, as an amateur, used in analysing the Anonymous Letter back in 2009/2010.
I got a book on handwriting analysis and went over the brief letter with a fine toothed comb. I looked at the structure of the individual letters, the way an "E" was made, or a "T" was crossed. I spent a month on this effort, and wrote a long article about it on Myspace at the time.
I had no background in linguistics, and I know there are many branches of that discipline, including mainly the study of languages via the spoken word and it's breakdown into the physical mechanics of how the tongue and throat convey words in different cultures. My interest was merely in trying to interpret and then get a general identification of the author of my anonymous letter of May 1994. I used his or her writing as the basis of my effort.
I came to believe, to a point of certainty, that my author was elderly and of European heritage, based on my month long study of the unique handwriting characteristics in the letter, and their corresponding identifiers in the book called "The Handwriting Analyst", that I was using as my guide.
I love forensics, and I love intuition, and I had to use my intuition, as well as hours of study, to learn about handwriting and linguistics. So when I saw the same techniques being used in the Unabomber case, in the movie, I was very impressed.
Sometimes all you can say is "Wow"!, and I said that tonight on FB after the ballgame, and now I will repeat it for the Unabomber series. It's a hell of a story and I highly recommend watching it.
That's all for tonight. See you in the morn. xoxoxoxoxoxoxoxo :):)
No comments:
Post a Comment