danajohnhill.org | Hard Times Come Again No More

Though my website fiasco has put me a week behind, you can rest assured that the Tonight Show debacle has me deeply depressed (as much as one can be for a television show).  As you might expect, I came out strongly for Team Coco.  As I wrote back in June, when O’Brien began what I expected to be a long career as the host of the flagship late-night talk show, I have been watching Conan since the mid-1990s, when he, Andy, and Max did the goofiest things on Late Night.  I was sad when Andy left that show to try his hand at sitcom fame.  I was sad again when one show after another was canceled after only a few months, leaving him off TV for years at a time, only to turn up in small roles on other soon-to-be-canceled shows, like Arrested Development.  So, when it was clear that Andy would be rejoining Conan for the Tonight Show, it seemed that all was right in the television world.  And, though the show got off to an awkward start, with Andy spending most of the time behind his podium off screen, by late autumn he was spending most of the show on the chair next to Conan, just like in the old days.  When Conan announced that he wouldn’t be moving the program to 12:05, my first thought was, “Poor Andy, he can’t keep a job for more than six months”.

While my heart wishes that Conan would have just taken the later time slot, I cannot blame him for standing up for his convictions.  The blame for all of this lies with the staggeringly incompetent NBC executives and Jay Leno.  I remember the Leno/Letterman feud back in the early-1990s, and while I certainly preferred Letterman to Leno even then, I felt that Leno did have a valid claim to take over for Johnny Carson.  And, while I recognize that Leno must have been bitter that NBC asked him to step aside in 2004, even as he was the top-rated late night show, that cannot excuse his conduct now.  As David Letterman explained, when the network does you wrong, walk.  If Jay resented losing the Tonight Show, he should have gone somewhere else.  And, when their ten o’clock experiment failed and NBC told him he was canceled, he should have said, “Thanks, guys, but that’s enough.  I’m out of here”.  But no.  He must really, really have been desperate to get back what he once had.  Nothing else can explain why he would have been willing to either a) force all the other late night programs back a half hour, or b) put Conan in the untenable situation of having to decide to go along with it or leave.

Once it was clear that Conan’s days were numbered, the shows became more poignant and even more hilarious.  The audiences were in a frenzy, and Conan was on fire.  It made it that much more heart-breaking when, last Friday, they played a montage of clips from the run of the show, including the fantastic bit that opened his first episode as host, when he ran from New York City to Hollywood.  It ended with the message “To Be Continued…”, but who knows what will happen.  Neil Young playing “Long May You Run”, Tom Hanks, and “Freebird” with an all-star band, ended the show on an epic high.

My greatest hope is that Conan took the forty million dollars, handed it out to his staff including Andy and Max, and told everyone, “Take this money, have an eight month vacation, and meet me in September.   We’re starting a new show”.  But, even if he gets an offer from Fox, I don’t know if Andy and Max will join him.  No matter the time slot, and no matter that Fox is the highest rated network, a new show will never be the Tonight Show.  If he doesn’t get an offer from Fox he’s sunk.  Cable would be an insult.

I was looking forward to spending the next decade watching The Tonight Show with Conan O’Brien.  But last Friday, that dream died.

Filed under: Current Events, Television on January 28th, 2010 | No Comments »

This website will temporarily disappear in the next few days.  After years of putting up with the world’s crappiest website host, I’ve finally had it.  For the last several days, I have been blocked from accessing my own site and I cannot receive my email.  What’s worse, I cannot access my host’s website either to complain.  This has happened before.  Coupled with the long history of outages and absurdly slow access, it’s time for a change.

A new site–with a new look–will appear soon, and you’ll still be able to read all the old content you know and love tolerate.

Hard times come again no more.

Filed under: Website on January 21st, 2010 | No Comments »

[The following was written last August.  I haven't gotten around to publishing it until now.]

Have you ever been unsure whether to use “I” or “me”?  These pronouns, in particular, are frequent targets of hypercorrection.  As children, we were scolded when we asked, “Mommy, can Billy and me go to the park?”  “May Billy and I go to the park”, came the correction.  Consequently, you may often hear people say, “And then the police came and arrested Billy and I”.  By then, however, our mothers are not there to tell us that we should have said “Billy and me”.

People get confused about whether to use “I” or “me” because they often cannot distinguish between a subject and an object.  In my first example above, “Billy and I” are the subjects; in my second example, “the police” is the subject, and “Billy and me” are the objects.  I know this isn’t the National Grammar Rodeo, but I bring it up because my concept of language has completely changed in the last two years.  Some of the change is attributable to my getting a degree in English.  For the most part, however, the change came about because I wanted to learn German.

German does something that English, by and large, does not: it declines.  Declension is a feature of some languages that alters nouns, pronouns, and adjectives to indicate gender, possession, number, and case (that is, direct- or indirect object).  As I showed above, “I” and “me” are merely different versions of the same concept, like “she” and “her”, “he” and “him”, and their possessive equivalents, “hers” and “his”.  Those pronouns are also among the few English words that demonstrate gender.  English also declines by adding an “s” or “es” to the end of most nouns to change their number.  But that is relatively simple, and, for the most part, marks the end of English declension.  German, on the other hand, declines in every way imaginable, and it is a nightmare.

In English, we take for granted that the articles “a” (or “an”) and “the” are all we need to know.  Germans have these articles, too, of course, but, like many languages that distinguish gender, they are different for masculine, feminine, and neuter nouns:  der Baum (the tree) is masculine; die Lilie (the lily) is feminine; and, oddly, das Mädchen (the girl) is neuter.  In German, the gender of a word seems to have little relation to its concept, and aside from the article, no indication of gender is given, unlike Spanish, for instance, where a word ending in “o” is likely masculine, and so on.  With German, you must learn the article with the word.  But, those articles you see above only count when the word is used in the nominative case.  If, for example, “der Baum” is not used as the subject of a sentence, but as the direct object, it becomes “den Baum”.  If the tree is the indirect object, it becomes “dem Baum”.  And the feminine “die Lilie”, when used as an indirect object, becomes “der Lilie”.  In order to know, then, that the lily is a feminine noun and not masculine, you have to understand how the sentence functions.  “Das Mädchen”, which we know is neuter, uses the same article as a masculine noun in the dative case, and becomes “dem Mädchen”.

Should you wish to indicate that you possess something–let’s say a tree–in English, you need only say “my”, no matter how the sentence is structured: “My tree is tall” (subject); “I climbed my tree” (direct object); “I gave some water to my tree” (indirect object).  Even when indicating that the tree possesses something, we still use “my”: “I climbed up to my tree’s highest bough”.  In German, those examples become, in order, “mein Baum”, “meinen Baum”, “meinem Baum”, and “meines Baum”.  All four of those mean “my tree” in English.

In English, “you” is always “you”, whether used as the subject, direct- or indirect object.  In German, “du” is the subject version of “you”: “You are my friend”.  “Dich” is the direct object version of “you”: “I love you” = “Ich liebe dich”.  “Dir” is the dative version of “you” used as an indirect object.

Don’t get me started on the adjective endings.

So, next time you meet a fluent German speaker, congratulate him.  He understands the functions of language way better than you.

Filed under: Musings, School on January 15th, 2010 | No Comments »

I don’t know what to say about the misery wrought by this terrible earthquake in Haiti.  But why must the worst things happen to the poorest people?

Filed under: Current Events, Geography on January 14th, 2010 | No Comments »

First of all, Happy New Year.

I have lived in Gainesville for more than a decade, and in that time I have grown accustomed to temperatures I did not ever experience when living in St. Petersburg.  Granted, Gainesville is less than two hundred miles north of St. Pete, but, still, that makes a substantial difference.  Winter nights in Gainesville regularly dip into the thirties, and once a year, perhaps, we have a day that doesn’t reach fifty degrees.  But, no matter what, after a day or two the temperatures always creep back up, and afternoon highs once again hover around seventy degrees.

In my entire life in Florida I have never experienced a cold spell like this.  It isn’t merely the extreme cold, although it is definitely that: we have had days recently that barely climbed above forty degrees.  Rather, what is so distressing to everyone is the seemingly endless nature of this cold.  For about two weeks now it has been freezing cold.  At home, our heater is running nearly non-stop to keep the house at a comfortable temperature.  I dread turning on the faucet because the water is so frigid it almost feels worse than scalding.  Meanwhile, going outside for anything–even just to run to the car–is a miserable and dreaded chore.  I haven’t dared to ride my bike in almost a week.  School started last Tuesday, and everyone you see on campus is wearing a hooded sweatshirt with his hands tucked into his pockets.

Fortunately, Miriam bought me a windbreaker for Christmas, which has absolutely paid for itself and more over the last two weeks.  Coupled with a pair of gloves my mother sent me, I have managed to protect my skin from frostbite (possibly an exaggeration).

The forecast for tonight is eighteen degrees, and there is no word yet when the cold will end.  Some say Friday, but I feel it may never be warm again.

Filed under: Gainesville, Meteorology on January 10th, 2010 | 3 Comments »