Our editor Ivan Sag is in the UK, where he just gave lectures at the University of Essex and the University of Manchester, where he was brilliantly hosted by Andrew Koontz-Garboden, who sends his best regards to all.

Lauren Hall-Lew will be talking this next Monday in Berkeley's Phonetics and Phonology Phorum about Asian Ethnicity and San Francisco English.

Itamar Francez will enlighten his audience about Existentials and possessives: Two cases of second order predication in natural language at the Non-Canonical Predication Workshop 2009 at the University of Western Ontario.

Congratulations to Ida Toivonen and Ash Asudeh on the birth of their fourth progeny: Harald Lillebror Asudeh, born at 13:19 EST on April 17. The New Sesquipedalian hereby awards Ida and Ash the Alumni Productivity Award (They keep producing research, too!)

The contest continues with our fourth mystery spectrogram. If you want candy, e-mail Meghan with the name behind this one:

The Donkey Story

One day a farmer's donkey fell down into a well. The animal cried piteously for hours as the farmer tried to figure out what to do. Finally, he decided the animal was old, and the well needed to be covered up anyway; it just wasn't worth it to retrieve the donkey.

He invited all his neighbors to come over and help him. They all grabbed a shovel and began to shovel dirt into the well. At first, the donkey realized what was happening and cried horribly. Then, to everyone's amazement he quieted down.

A few shovel loads later, the farmer finally looked down the well. He was astonished at what he saw. With each shovel of dirt that hit his back, the donkey was doing something amazing. He would shake it off and take a step up.

As the farmer's neighbors continued to shovel dirt on top of the animal, he would shake it off and take a step up. Pretty soon, everyone was amazed as the donkey stepped up over the edge of the well and happily trotted off!

Life is going to shovel dirt on you, all kinds of dirt. The trick to getting out of the well is to shake it off and take a step up. Each of our troubles is a steppingstone. We can get out of the deepest wells just by not stopping, never giving up! Shake it off and take a step up.

Remember the five simple rules to be happy:

Free your heart from hatred - Forgive..
Free your mind from worries - Most never happen.
Live simply and appreciate what you have.
Give more.
Expect less

NOW ............

Enough of that crap . . . The donkey later came back, and bit the farmer who had tried to bury him. The gash from the bite got infected and the farmer eventually died in agony from septic shock.

MORAL FROM TODAY'S LESSON:

When you do something wrong, and try to cover your ass, it always comes back to bite you.

For events farther in the future consult the Upcoming Events Page.

FRIDAY, 24 APRIL

• Semantics Workshop

  Lucas Champollion (U Penn and PARC)
  A Unified Account of Nominal Distributivity, For-Adverbials, and Measure Phrases
  3:30pm, MJH 126

• Department Social

  5:00pm, lounge

MONDAY, 27 APRIL

• Social Theory Reading Group

  12-1:00pm, MJH 126

• Speech Lunch

  John Chowning (CCRMA)
  The Synthesis of Sung Vowels
  12:00pm, ExL lab

• Workshop on the Amazon Mechanical Turk

  The AMT is a tool for collecting and generating (psycho)linguistic experimental data. Presentations by Tyler Schnoebelen, Rob Munro and Robin Melnick will cover:
  • the design and implementation of web-based experiments using the AMT,
  • generation of annotation corpora via AMT, and
  • comparison of results obtained from AMT workers and traditional populations of participants.
  
  3:45-5:15pm, Building 160 Room 328

• Berkeley Linguistics Colloquium

  Mariam Mithun (UCSB)
  Converging methodologies: Making bigger sense out of the smaller stuff
  4-5:30pm, Dwinelle 182, UC Berkeley

WEDNESDAY, 29 APRIL

• Cognition and Language Workshop

  Michael Ramscar (Stanford Psychology)
  "Language is Uncertain"
  4:15pm, Cordura 100

FRIDAY, 1 MAY

• Department Colloquium

  Fritz Newmeyer (University of Washington)
  What conversational English tells us about the nature of grammar
  3:30pm, MJH 126

• Department Social

  5:00pm, lounge

Mark your calendars! On Saturday, May 9th Stanford will be hosting Trilateral Linguistics Weekend (TREND) 2009, this year combining Syntax and Phonology in one conference. Word has it there will be gripping talks and an outstanding social afterwards.

The 33rd Stanford Child Language Research Forum, on 'Experience and Variation in Learning a First Language' will be held on July 10-12, 2009, as one of the Institute Conferences during the LSA Summer Institute at UC Berkeley. The two invited speakers are William Croft (UNM) and Tom Griffith (UC Berkeley). The Program and general information on lodgings, etc., is available online.

UPCOMING EVENTS (always under construction)

LINGUISTIC DEPARTMENT EVENTS PAGE

Got broader interests? The New Sesquipedalian recommends reading, or even subscribing, to the CSLI Calendar, available HERE.

WHAT'S HAPPENING AT UC SANTA CRUZ?

WHAT'S GOING ON AT UC BERKELEY?

The Stanford Blood Center is reporting a shortage of types O- and A-. For an appointment, visit http://bloodcenter.stanford.edu/ or call 650-723-7831. It only takes an hour of your time and you get free cookies. And the Blood Center recently got a new bloodmobile. Check it out HERE

Want to contribute information? Want to be a reporter? Want to see something appear here regularly? Want to be a regular columnist? Want to take over running the entire operation? Write directly to sesquip@gmail.com.