I recently had a part in a short film written and directed by my good friend, Arthur Kendrick. The film is titled “The Plumber and the Princess.” If you’ve ever played Mario Brothers, you already know the basic plotline of the film. This is not, however, simply a short version of the game. This is the Italian plumbers as you’ve never seen them before: gritty 1950s detectives. That’s right, this is a film noir version of Mario Brothers.

I play Bowser’s goon, Koopa. I hope you all enjoy it. Please rate it on YouTube, and tell all your friends.

This post is not actually about Smurfs. I will not discuss the language of the Smurfs. (They obviously speak English and Die Schlümpfe speak German.) This post is actually about linguistics. Most of you can feel free to stop reading now. I won’t be offended. Unless you’re my mother, this will probably not interest you.

There is an interesting linguistic feature known as infixes. An infix is a word or morpheme that is placed in the middle of a word. This is practically non-existent in Standard English. It is fairly common in Austronesian and Austroasiatic languages. In Tagalog, for example, <um> is placed inside a verb to make it something like the active voice. For example, the borrowed English word graduate becomes grumaduate to mean “I graduated.”

Although it’s not common in Standard English, it’s often found in Colloquial English. For example, in Snoop Speak, <iz>, <izz>, or <izn> are often used as infixes producing words like hizouse (house), wizzay (way), or shiznit (sh**). A few more great examples are found in The Simpsons, uttered by Homer. For example, in the following dialogue between Homer and baby Lisa:

What do you like Lisa? violamin? tubaba?

Lisa : I want THAT.

Homer : Saxamaphone?

The most common infix in colloquial English I will call the f-word infix (Wikipedia calls it expletive infixation, but I like my term better: take that, linguists). I call it this because the f-word (mostly in its present participial form), and it’s substitutes (freakin’, fraggin’, fudging, etc.) are the most common words used for this type of infix. In Britain, bloody is usually used. The purpose of this infix is to add emphasis to the word. So, we end up with words like absofrigginlutely, and fanbloodytastic. Well, my most common usage of this form is unbe-freaking-lievable. Technically, these aren’t exactly infixes, but rather Tmesis. It’s close enough to being the same thing, though, that I’m going to call them the same thing. Infix is a lot easier word to remember than Tmesis (those crazy Greeks).

Now, what does this have to do with the Smurfs? Well, today I read an article about the Smurfs. The content of the article has nothing to do with this post. But the author used the word “Un-smurfing-believable.”

Well, as soon as I read it, I thought, “That sounds weird. Why didn’t he write ‘Unbe-smurfing-lievable?’ That’s where the stress naturally falls.” Well, I looked up the article on wikipedia about the f-word infix, and it said:

A simple rule is that the insertion occurs at a syllable boundary, usually just before the primary stressed syllable. Thus, one hears abso-fuckin’-lutely rather than *ab-fuckin’-solutely. This rule is insufficient to describe examples such as un-fuckin’-believable (not *unbe-fuckin’-lievable), however, so modifications to this rule are proposed such as morpheme boundaries taking precedence over stress.

This blew my mind. Have I been saying it wrong all my life? Am I the only person who puts the infix inside the believe, rather than before it? I don’t know. Further study is required, but it’s midnight now, and I have to sleep. It will have to wait until the morning.

Last night, I had a strange dream that I felt like sharing. Why do I discuss my dreams on this blog so much, you might ask? I guess my real life is just boring enough that I need to supplement it with my fantasy life. Oh well. On to the dream.

In this dream, I was a deadly assassin. I can’t imagine what made me dream that. The beginning of the dream is a little blurry now. I remember going into an office to get my assignment. The office was small, a little bigger than your average cubicle. The walls were all glass. There was no one in the office, but my assignment was sitting on the desk.

I set out to take out my mark. It all happened pretty quickly. I remember being at some sort of man-made body of water. It was like an artificial pond, in a very urban area. I remember that’s where the hit took place. I was very stealthy: like a ninja. Basically, I walked up to the guy, quickly pulled a blade out of my coat, drew it across his neck, and walked away as he fell into the pool, his blood draining into the crystal clear water.

I had to go meet some friends: two women. I don’t remember the reason. I think it was a double date, and we were meeting the other guy wherever we were going. We were meeting nearby, so I walked to the meeting point. They had no idea what I had just done. Obviously, even my closest friends couldn’t know the secret of my occupation. We met, and were going somewhere else, but I had to quickly report in at work, first. So, we drove by the headquarters so I could report in to my boss. I told them to wait for me outside, and I would be right back.

I went to the same office I was at previously. My boss was there this time. She was a short woman in her late 60′s. She was wrinkly, with gray hair, and not what I would expect from a person who regularly sent people off to kill others. She started complaining about something as soon as I walked in the door. I don’t know what it was because I really didn’t care. I mean, really. I go out and do my job like anybody else, and all she can do is complain. Anyway, she had my file sitting on her desk. I picked it up, and started leafing through it, trying to pretend I actually cared what she said to me. I came across something interesting in my file. It mentioned a new team that I was to head, and had the names and pictures of the three other members.

A couple minutes later, the three members of my new team walk into the office. It’s two girls and a guy. They’re all dressed sort of punk, the guy more goth-punk. I addressed them all by their first names, and shook their hands. The guy is really skinny, has straight, black hair that covers most of his face. As I shake his hand, he just lets out a sigh.

The first girl had long curly, black hair. As I extend my hand, she extends her left hand. I think, “whatever, okay.” So, I extend my left hand, and give her one of those old-fashioned hand-to-wrist handshakes. She seemed pleased.

The second girl was bald, and didn’t have a nose. As I shake her hand, she groan-sighs, “Alright.” I sense something is wrong, and want to get off to a good start with my new team. I also want to establish that I’m not taking crap from them. I sternly ask, “Is something wrong?” Sigh. “This morning … I … my boyfriend …” Then she mumbled something, and stared into space.

I then notice through the glass walls that the girls who were waiting for me outside have entered the building looking for me. They hadn’t quite noticed me yet.

The first girl turns to me and says, about the other girl, “She’s always like that.” Before I can respond, she continues, “I’m really excited to be working with you, Dan Jones. How old are you? ‘Cause I was talking to my girlfriend the other day and she …” I stopped paying attention. This girl is apparently star-struck, and I don’t want to deal with it right now. It seems I’ve got some serious training to do with these three. I can’t imagine why that old hag put me with them.

About this time, the two girls who should have patiently waited for me outside walked into the door. “Dan, are you ready? Oh, hi! I’m Dan’s friend.”

The alarm goes off and my career as an assassin ends.

I use Linux. I don’t like Windows, and I don’t care for Mac OS X. I love Linux, and its software. I especially love the fact that most Linux software is Free Software. I’m not a Nazi about Free Software. I’ll use proprietary software if there’s simply no usable free alternative. Google Earth, Skype, and NVIDIA drivers are a few that come to mind. However, some people feel that free software must be inferior to commercial software because it doesn’t cost anything. Some people are just so comfortable with their proprietary software that they won’t consider using a free equivalent.

One of the best examples of this is Adobe Photoshop and The GIMP. Photoshop is a commercial graphics editor produced by Adobe. GIMP is an open source graphics editor maintained by a group of volunteers under the auspices of The GNU Project. I did a little research to find out what the real differences between the two are. Most of the well-thought-out articles I read said that the most significant feature lacking from GIMP is support for the CMYK color model. This is used extensively in printing. For this reason, GIMP is unsuitable for use in publishing. However, for just about any other use, GIMP is perfectly capable, as long as the user is familiar with the interface and program’s capabilities.

The other complaint against GIMP has nothing to do with GIMP itself. The complaint is that Photoshop is an industry standard not just for publishing, but also web design and graphics design (not entirely true: it’s a de facto standard). When working with a company that requires work to be in Photoshop format, the GIMP simply won’t do. It doesn’t import Photoshop files perfectly, and it doesn’t export Photoshop files perfectly. I will concede to that, however an individual whose work simply needs to be a JPEG, or PNG, or any other common graphics format, is perfectly fine using GIMP, as long as he knows how.

The biggest problem I have when I’m trying to explain this to people is that I, myself, am not very familiar with either Photoshop or GIMP. I haven’t used Photoshop more than a few times in the past five years. And I only use GIMP on occasion. So I’m not able to talk about particular features. So, I’ve set out to change that. I have recently started reading through various GIMP tutorials so that I can familiarize myself with the program and its capabilities. I decided to share with you the results of the first of my forays into learning the GIMP.

I started with the Souping up a Photo tutorial at gimp-tutorials.net. This is an adaptation of a Photoshop tutorial at PSD TUTS.
Rather than using their example image, I figured I’d learn more if I used an image of my own and just adapted the tutorial to my needs. So, I started with this image (on the left) of two of my friends having a swimming race.

Chris and Abinadi racing

Much better

After some editing, I came up with the image on the right. I consider it much stronger than the original, and allows the viewer to focus on the action at hand more easily.

The next step was to see if I could achieve a similar effect without going through the tutorial step by step. So I took another picture, from the same trip, of a chicken fight. The original is on the left, and the modified one is on the right. I did all the modifications without the tutorial at all. I did what I remembered, with a few modifications that I felt improved it. For example, I airbrushed out the ghosts (little orbs of light from the flash reflecting off dust or water droplets in the air).

Lisa and Kasey fighting to the death (well, at least to the water).

Unimportant background details faded out.
Foreground action emphasized.

I think there’s a definite improvement in the pictures here. Most importantly, my GIMP skills have sharpened just a little. If I make any more GIMP masterpieces, I intend to write about them here, as well as post them to my flickr account.

Finally, if any of the subjects of either of these pictures would like a high quality copy of the pictures, just send me an email.