Things Catching Up

For English 493, I have to buy at least 40 dollars worth of supplies (possibly 60 or 70, Andrew would know). Oh, I have to work on a couple of essays to submit Thursday, and read three longish articles.
For my Honours, I have to update a next-to-final draft of my Honours introduction for Thursday at 1:30 with MacLaine.
And, best of all, when I got an E-mail from Dalhousie telling me that

[w]e received your application form today and tried to process your application, your Credit Card was declined, please reply with another method of payment.

A definition:

"Meep": The sound that small furry animals make, in mixed fear and resignation, when they are cornered by large carnivorous animals with plenty of sharp teeth.

A Proposed RPG Character

Procor is a densely-populated world shaped profoundly by its geography. The planet has flipped, over the past few hundred million years, between periods of intense volcanic activity and periods of quiescence, while the world's rapid rotation (the day is 19 hours long) and occasional asteroidal bombardments (from the Procor planetary system's dense asteroidal and cometary belts) has ensured rapid erosion. In the Northern Hemisphere, there are three continents and a dozen major archipelagoes, with no point being more than two kilometres high, separated by shallow seas. This and a generally temperate climate has helped Lomax become one of the more populous worlds in the RFW--more than 20 billion people live on Procor, including 17 billion in the Northern Hemisphere. With this dense population comes a thriving economy.

( Conditions in the Southern Continent are rather different. )

Money

I got on the phone to Dalhousie's Registrar's Office, and I was able to get the pyament put through. Which means things are no longer a concern: The 40 dollar fee of Memorial is small, I've plenty of margin, and so on.

But. Now I have to buy office supplies for ENG 493, the portfolio. I've just spent 35 dollars at Premium Office supplies for some of the stuff I need.

I'm beginning to undeerstand what it means to be financially straitened.

Oy gevalt.

Languages of Two Oikoumenês

Oikoumenê: Term from the Greek, referring to the sum total of Classical civilization, broadly defined as the area incorporated in the sphere of the Roman Empire. The Oikoumenê is an integrated economic and political space marked by the presence of a common culture. Let's say that early 21st century Earth, Western-dominated as it is, is also an Oikoumenê.

Latin = English

• The dominant languages of the two Oikoumenês. Both languages were originally spoken by populations at the far fringes of the civilized world--Latin in central Italy amid savage Italic-speaking tribes and incorporated at the margins of the Etruscan sphere, English on the island of Britain. The two languages rapidly expanded only as a result of imperial acquisitions, of grand efforts at colonization in their immediate hinterlands (Italy; Ireland) and then by a maritime-driven expansion initially linked to trade then by colonization and assimilation (Iberia, Africa and Gaul; North America and Australasia). From these greatly expanded territories, the future hegemonic languages of the Oikoumenê were then spread throughout the old colonized world by imperial conquest, trade, and migration.

Greek = French, Spanish, German

• These four languages were the old linguae franca of the civilized world, but were marginalized by the rapid expansion of their contemporary linguistic hegemons. Nonetheless, in the areas of the world that they influenced--Latin America, West Africa, the Hellenistic sphere in the east, central Europe, Sicily--they remain languages of note, entirely competitive in their limited domains with the Oikoumenê's dominant language.

Egyptian/Coptic = Italian, Polish, Portuguese

• These four languages might have large numbers of speakers, but for all intents and purposes their are limited exclusively to the lands where these languages originally developed, with perhaps one or two outliers. They are associated with the Oikoumenê's semiperiphery, with labour- and population-exporting areas, and generally politically subordinate to the core.

Yes, it's a bit of an ethnocentric comparison. Still, there's some points of interest.

(Thanks to the various--first James B., then ebeloic and taem.

[Academia] Honours Essay

I had a nice chat with Dr. James Moran today. He's my Canadian History instructor--he taught 101 in the fall Semester,and he's teaching 102 in the winter semester--and he knows me from that class. I'd had a brief talk with him about by Honours English essay. (I'd chosen to talk with him because he's interested in Canadian social history.) I asked him if I could send a copy of my introduction to him, to see if it made sense; he agreed, and volunteered his services to serve as a reader; I might just take him up on that, or figure some way to integrate him.

Demographic Change in Moscow

"Moscow's face is getting darker"
The Moscow Times
Wednesday, January 29, 2003

By Nabi Abdullaev

If existing demographic trends continue, in two generations most Muscovites will have olive skin, dark hair and extended families in the Caucasus and Central Asia, according to a leading institute.

The main reasons for the imminent change to the city's face is that ethnic Russians do not have as many babies as their darker-skinned counterparts and, to lesser extent, the growing number of non-Slavic migrants moving to Moscow, they say.

( According to the calculations of the Institute of General Genetics, the ratio between Moscow residents who traditionally practice Christianity and those who profess Islam was 37 to 1 in 1994. In 2000, the ratio had narrowed to 32 to 1, and by 2025 it is expected to shrink to 6 to 1. )