Have a look: Nicomachus’s Theorem.

Magic is a slippery word. Does it refer to a trick or a glimpse of something deeper? This simple question has always puzzled me. This little essay is my attempt to nail down why that is. I want to talk about what we mean when we say magic.

But first let me tell a story.

A Wizard’s Story

Once, long ago, there was a bearded sage who dwelled in a faraway land. This man, a wizard in fact, spent his days pondering the restless energy that animates the universe. He filled books with cryptic runes and arcane formulations. After many years he brought forth the Great Runic Tetrad (sometimes called the Fourfold Physick), a sigil so powerful that it would, if studied deeply by an adept, grant secret knowledge of the earth’s hidden forces and permit him thereby to bend them to his will.

The language is exaggerated, but as it happens this story is true. More simply, we may say that the wizard is a Scot named James Clerk Maxwell, and his runes, known as Maxwell’s Equations, are fundamental to our understanding of electricity and magnetism. They are among the great achievements of human thought. Artfully wielded, after an apprenticeship in electrical engineering, they will let you conjure the circuits that move our world.

They’re kind of a big dang deal. Here they are.

I love this story, because you really don’t have to work the story very hard to make it sound like a fairy tale. Maxwell’s Equations ARE runes of fantastic power, granting us, among other things, telepathy (telephones), telekinesis (electromagnetism), and iPads. But once you know it’s the story of a physicist, the magic somehow drains out of it. The magic was right there in the story, and then it went away. Why did it go? And where is it now?

Ordinary Magic
Science, magic, and technology have long been tangled together. Technologists are fond of quoting Arthur C. Clarke: “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” The fondness is understandable; it’s flattering to be considered a magician. But Clarke is making a distinction that is easily missed: if you don’t understand the machine with the blinky lights, then you may well think it’s magic, but it isn’t. Magic is something else again. But this other thing, this technological mirage that looks like magic but isn’t, needs a name. Let’s call it ordinary magic, or techno-magic.

It turns out that most situations in which people use the word “magic” they are referring to this techno-magic. Techno-magic is just faulty or missing knowledge in exactly the sense that Clarke describes. This is the smoke and mirrors we find on stage. It’s a trick that you happen not to understand right now. If, however, you were able to examine the mirror and the wires hanging from the ceiling, you would understand that the lady doesn’t REALLY float. And, if you had an engineering degree and enough time to study the circuitry, you’d see that an iPad doesn’t actually qualify as magic, Steve Jobs notwithstanding.

The magic of fiction and games tends to follow this same path. Harry Potter, that paragon of modern wizarding, is all about techno-magic. The Harry Potter books are filled with wizards who are fumbling bureaucrats, and the Hogwarts potions class is a dreary grind. Harry Potter’s magic, exotic as it appears to us, is simply the technology of his world. So it is with computer games too. In World of Warcraft and a hundred others like it, magic is technology, pure and simple. It is devoid of mystery, being instead a consistent and mechanical means to an end.

Ultimately, ordinary magic, technology, is magic that always works. We can even turn Clarke’s dictum on its head: “Any sufficiently reliable magic is indistinguishable from technology.” It’s mundane trickery and nothing more. But if we reach past the gimcracks, down to the bottom of the bag, there’s something else squirming around.

Magic and Surprise

The dictionary definitions of magic all circle back to the use of the word “supernatural.” Somehow forces are involved that go beyond those considered “natural,” which is to say the world as I currently understand it.

So: magic implies surprise, and surprise implies expectation. Expectation means there is some model of reality, a framework within which the world is expected to operate. Rabbits should not spontaneously spring from empty hats. The magical act is one that breaks the causal link between action and consequence. But this link comes from the model, and the model exists only in the observer’s mind. In short, magic is a subjective art. It happens in the eye of the beholder or not at all. If a rabbit pops out of a hat in the middle of the woods, does it make any magic? This is the key to untangling magic from technology. Technology is something that I do. Magic is something that you see.

Now we are at the heart of the matter: Magic, if it is to be considered in any sense real, must operate outside our frame of understanding. The word magic thus resists definition because it is the thing that by definition resists definition.

Ordinary magic can be dismissed by a better model, or a better framing of the observation. See? the hat has a false bottom where the rabbit hides. But the deeper notion of magic is the fact that no amount of reframing can banish all mystery. The universe, being quite large, will always retain its ability to surprise. The shifting edges of reality resist our embrace.

That’s why we like the small tricks and parlor magic. It reminds us of the truth we all intuit in one way or another: You can’t put the universe in a box.

Rationality and magic are often portrayed as antagonists. Hyper-rationalists and mystics can both be heard fretting that the other side is “winning”. But rationality and magic are simply figure and ground. Will science banish magic? It can’t. That’s the fun of it. Magic is the catnip that leads us into the dark. It led Maxwell to his equations. It is our name for the pregnant void where mind and matter intersect.

You can’t find darkness with a torch. But you can thank darkness for lighting the way.

All this focuses great attention on the Wagah nightly border-closing ceremony. Military ceremonies have always been about theater, and the intense mixture of chauvinism and bitterness in the Punjab have ratcheted the cold war anxiety up to such stratospheric levels that the resulting theater would be laughable if the stakes weren’t so high. My dad recently sent me a link to this video of the border-closing ceremony. I find it simultaneously stirring and hilarious.

Here’s another good (slightly longer) video of the same ceremony. I watch this and I keep reminding myself that farcical military silly-walks theater is better than war. In fact, this video was produced by someone who knows a thing or two about silly walks: former Python troupe member Michael Palin.

And one more thing. I can’t shake the feeling that I’ve seen this kind of preening and strutting somewhere else. Ah yes, that’s it.

But here is a robotic Rubik’s Cube solver built out of Lego Mindstorms components. The guy who built this is a hardcore hobbyist, but still, this is relatively cheap stuff, as robots go. Now watch…

Across the Pond, the Keep Calm and Carry On poster hits all the right notes to make it a cultural phenomenon in the UK. Originally created in 1939 to steel the British public to the stresses of the coming war with Germany, it was rediscovered in 2000 and has been a gold mine of merchandising and parody ever since. Its nostalgic evocation of the steady resolve of bygone days has mated with its easily mocked earnestness to breed a deranged litter of spin-offs.

Via BlogLESS I came across Christina Agapakis’s Meme Tree. She’s a biologist, so as you might expect, she’s built a nice phylogenetic tree. Like her, I’m amused by the evolution from simple transpositions like “Keep Calm and Rock On” to “Drink Lots and Pass Out” to more ironic assertions like “Change Words and Be Hilarious”. From there, it’s a short step to the self-mocking “Run Out of Ideas and Make a Parody” and the meta-self-mockingly abstract “Meme Meme and Memey Meme.”

Why write another astronomy program? Here’s Dan’s answer.

To be useful to most of my students, a simulation program has to be (a) free; (b) delivered through a web browser, with nothing to download or install; (c) easy for beginners to understand; and (d) convenient for showing the motions of the stars and other objects with respect to earth’s horizon.

It’s a lot of fun to play with, and I like how Dan notes that his UI was partially inspired by H.A. Rey’s stargazing books, of which I too was, and remain, a loyal fan.

The Day I Coked the WX Build

by J. Michael Hammond

I don’t think I’ve really accomplished all that much in life. When Mozart was my age, he had been dead for quite a long time, to misquote Tom Lehrer. Now that I’m 44, this fact bothers me a little more than it used to.

But at least I’ve had a wide range of experiences that serve as grist for stories that are, I hope, at least mildly entertaining.

I had already collected a decent number of good stories by my mid-twenties, when I worked with Ned at the MathWorks. He and I would occasionally swap stories. Some of our stories — or at least phrases from them — have stuck with us. For example, Ned introduced me to the concept of scooping mayonnaise, and although I don’t remember the full story, I can see in my mind’s eye (or hear in my mind’s ear?) his story that included the phrases “shake my hand” and “get out of my van.” Ned tells me that several of my stories have stuck with him over the years as well. One of these is the story of the day I “Coked the WX build.” Ned asked me to write up that story, so here it is.

In 1989 I was a lieutenant in the Air Force, working at Air Force Global Weather Central at Offutt Air Force Base in Omaha, Nebraska. Offutt was a big base, including Strategic Air Command headquarters and tens of thousands of personnel. Air Force Global Weather Central was primarily concerned with the production and communication of weather reports and forecasts. It was located in a building inside a building. There were a few old B-52 hangars over on the north side of the base. One hangar had several smaller buildings inside it. These smaller buildings were interconnected with basement-level passages so the distinction between sub-buildings was a little blurry. This complex was large enough to contain a decent-size bowling alley (12 lanes maybe, plus a fast food area) in the basement level. But (as often happens) I digress. The point was that there I was, an Air Force meteorologist, sitting in an office in a building inside a building. I had to get up and walk at least 50 yards, through three or more doors, to see the sky.

I was part of a ten-person group tasked with maintaining a software component called RTWX, pronounced “arr tee wicks” with maybe a slight stress on the “wicks”. This stood for “Real-Time Weather”. The “WX” was the part that stood for “weather” and was always pronounced “wicks”, regardless of the context in which it appeared. The group leader was a captain, there were typically about five other officers (lieutenants and younger captains) who did programming, and there were three or four enlisted guys, including one sergeant who was a decent programmer, one sergeant who took care of the group’s paperwork, and one or two airmen who were nice kids but whose actual job functions were always a mystery to me.

Take a mental journey with me back to 1989 military software development. Are you old enough to remember 1989? My Apple II+ was already a museum piece. IBM was many generations into the PC. Macintoshes were almost usable by then. But due to the huge and slow procurement process of large governmental organizations, AFGWC was operating on UNISYS mainframes. Much of the software was written in UNISYS assembly language. The rest was in FORTRAN. Upgrading FORTRAN V code to FORTRAN 77 was a significant part of what we were doing. In 1989. Yes, that “77″ means that FORTRAN 77 was developed in 1977. Did I mention that part of our operational process involved an airman first class going down a hallway with a double-armload of punch cards? So now you sort of get the picture. Basically, we were a weird throwback to the ’60s and ’70s. I could tell you the story about the time I blew a guy’s mind by writing him an interface that let him manipulate some data directly on his “scope” rather than having to phone down to the computer room to run a batch job and send him up a bunch of fanfold paper with the results. I used to say that I had dragged him, kicking and screaming, into the ’70s, which got a good laugh in 1989. But I digress.

Our software was a fundamental part of a worldwide meteorological communication network. As such, we had to be careful about delivering builds to the live system. “Careful” was kind of a relative term. We didn’t know much about software quality assurance back then. What passed for a “test plan” was to have our administrative sergeant print up a standard two-dozen-page boilerplate test plan (whose only actual test, as far as I could ever tell, was to run an hour’s worth of old live data through the system in the vague hope that it would tickle whatever code we’d changed enough that we could then cross our fingers and say we hadn’t broken the system), print out an extended listing of the changed code, mark up the listing with colored pencils and sticky color tabs in some arcane way that may or may not have been some kind of variable cross-referencing scheme but I never took the time to figure it out, check to make sure he hadn’t left any coffee rings on it anywhere, punch three holes in it, and stick it in a binder on our shelf where old builds go to die.

This looks like a good place to go off on a digression about our group’s coffee ritual. We had a special pitcher that we could fill with clean water from the nearest bubbler – oops, I mean water fountain — or the sink in the nearest bathroom. But the coffeepot itself was too big to fit into either the fountain or the sink. We were also strongly discouraged from washing our coffee mugs out in the water fountain, which was a lot closer to our office than the nearest bathroom. So our administrative sergeant put the big old shell of an old-school percolator on the same table as the coffeepot and we would pour our stale coffee into that. It would take a couple weeks to fill up, at which point someone would go chuck the contents into the toilet and rinse the thing out as best he could. We called the contents “spooge” and labeled the jar the “Spooge Jar”. People would come from other offices to gape in awe and horror at the biologically active muck inside. Once I took a copy of some letterhead and wrote up an official-looking memo about storage of biohazards on military installations, taped it up behind the jar, and got a good laugh.

But this isn’t really a story about the Spooge Jar; this is a story about the WX build.

I mentioned the shelf where old builds went to die. That’s actually my naïve characterization of it. That shelf, and the builds interred thereupon, actually had some kind of mystical (rather than practical) significance to the greater organization. The practical lesson that taught me this fact went as follows. One fine day, I wanted to go look at the listing of some code that I had tweaked for a new build. I did not have a printout handy and did not want to walk down two hallways and a set of stairs to the main room to pick one up. So I grabbed a copy of a recent WX build that was sitting on the table next to the spooge jar, took it to my desk, and flipped it open to my section. Oops! The paper caught some air, flipped farther than I expected, and knocked a half-full twenty-ounce Coke bottle all over my desk, and all over the build. I thought I’d gotten away hugely lucky since I hadn’t splashed any on my uniform. I cleaned up my desk – I had to get into a couple drawers and I actually had to take apart the telephone to clean up some stuff that had somehow gotten inside it. But the build itself had soaked up a good six ounces of the spillage and was a total loss. So I took it out behind our building (by which I mean into the open portion of the enclosing B-52 hangar) and threw it into the paper-recycling dumpster.

Shortly after I got back, a hubbub (or was it a brouhaha? No, it was a hubbub) broke out over by the administrative sergeant’s desk, next to the spooge jar. Evidently we were due to submit a build to the Committee To Which Builds Are Submitted, and it was due in an hour or two. The administrative sergeant had an empty binder on his desk surrounded by some clearly-recently-used colored pencils and sticky color tabs, but no build.

Uh oh.

I guess it’s probably time to bring this story to a speedy conclusion. We were able to get a postponement from the Committee To Which Builds Are Submitted, which was apparently an unprecedented event, with the excuse that “Lieutenant Hammond coked the WX build.” And, given the slow rate of government procurement, and the fact that a lot of the code we were working on in 1989 had been originally authored in 1966 and maintained since then, I would not be surprised if the form on which that line is written is still hanging, next to the hastily reprinted, re-colored-penciled, and re-sticky-tabbed WX Build #258, on the shelf where old builds go to die.

I also recommend the survey by Lu, Khalil, and Collins: Next-generation synthetic gene networks (also PDF). Taken all together, the issue communicates a sense “We’re moving faster and faster” combined with “Jesus this stuff is complicated!” Commercial breakthroughs won’t come quickly, but it’s hard not to be impressed with the progress being made.

For an indication of where things are headed, look at the projects being built by student teams for the International Genetically Engineered Machine (iGEM) competition. Browse through the abstracts here and remind yourself that these things (these organisms) are being built by undergraduates in a matter of months. The team from Valencia is building the Valencia Lighting Cell Display (iLCD):

We are making a “bio-screen” of voltage-activated cells, where every “cellular pixel” produces light. It is just like a bacterial photographic system, but it’s digital. Within seconds, instead of hours, you can get an image formed of living cells.

I recall doing much less impressive things with my college projects.

It’s a professional hazard. Just as Mark Twain could never look at the Mississippi the same way once he became a riverboat captain, Simonson can’t look at the tombstone in a Western without thinking How did Helvetica (1957) and Eurostile (1962) end up on a tombstone in the year 1885?

When it comes to language, regular readers of the Star Chamber will know that frequent contributor Alan Kennedy is the local expert. This week he has a few thoughts to share about actors and accents.

GIMME SOME CAW-FEE! I MEAN COR-FEE….KOE-FEE ?

by Alan Kennedy

Many people whose opinions on film and TV I respect, and generally agree with, have recommended that I check out the series “The Wire”. This was an HBO police drama set in Baltimore which is now available on DVD. Indeed, the series has been acclaimed as one of the best in recent history – and for some, one of the best ever. So, I got the first “Season One” DVD and started watching with great anticipation. And a problem soon emerged. One of the principal characters on this hyper-realistic show, “Jimmy McNulty”, spoke with an accent that could best be described as an accent no one speaks with in real life. And, that, for me, was a problem too distracting to overlook.

I’ve heard of bird watchers who get annoyed if the chirping of a Canadian bird is heard in a film set in Florida, and musicians who fume when a violin is held incorrectly by an actor. My lawyer wife scoffs at legal dramas which depict events, decisions, and dialogue that would never occur in the real legal world (but she can keep watching). In my case, as a language teacher and accent modification coach, some bad accents are literally too distracting to sit through.

My subsequent check on the web revealed that actor Dominic West, who played the McNulty character, is from Yorkshire, in England. I could have foreseen there would be problems when I read in his bio that, to get the part, as he remembers it, “I just did my best DeNiro impression”. This was his preparation to play a Baltimore cop. In another interview, he revealed that he used a “general east coast American accent”. Really? Is that so. So – who were you trying to sound like? Robert DeNiro’s outer-boroughs New Yorker? A John Waters–style working class Baltimorian? A Harvard professor? Well – guess what it ends up sounding like…a guy from Sheffield England, imitating DeNiro in some scenes, remembering what his accent coach told him about Baltimore-speak in others (e.g. “hours” as [æriz]), and generally adding and dropping the post-vocalic [r] sound willy-nilly. I know, I know, some may say “Get over it! He’s a good actor, it’s a good show, accents are hard!” Well, I’ll cop to it. It’s clearly my problem, not Dominic West’s. In my defense, someone took the trouble to point out his dialectal inconsistency on a website, and posted an representative video sample here:

(warning: strong language)

McNulty’s English accent rears its ugly head

We all know that some British TV actors are very good – almost deceptively so, once you learn that they’re British – at convincing American accents. Hugh Laurie (“House”) and Ed Westwick (“Gossip Girl”) are often cited as current examples. In films, I have seen performances by such actors as Kate Winslet, Tilda Swinton, Christian Bale and Gary Oldman where the American accent is indistinguishable (at least its overall effect) from that of American co-actors.

And what is it about Australians that they can so often do convincing American accents? This phenomenon includes a long list which, to my mind, includes Kate Blanchett, Nicole Kidman, Russell Crowe, Guy Pierce, Toni Collette, Rachel Griffiths (“Six Feet Under” & “Brother & Sisters”), Julian McMahon (“Nip/Tuck”), and, of course, the late Heath Ledger. I have heard different explanations for this, ranging from an alleged closeness of Australian English phonology to that of American English (I don’t buy that) to the idea that an Australian actor can’t have a successful career, or come to Hollywood, unless he/she has already demonstrated a convincing American accent in the first place.

APTITUDE FOR ORAL MIMICRY

Linguists and language teachers have long noticed that ability to mimic an accent (or the sounds of a foreign language) is not necessarily a function of “intelligence”. In fact, there is a school of thought out there, supported by research, that some people have a higher “Aptitude for Oral Mimicry” (AOM) than others, and it is quite independent from intelligence or other abilities, including acting talent. I think most of us believe this – it explains the valedictorian who gets an “A” in French but has a terrible accent. It explains the aforementioned Robert DeNiro, who doesn’t seem to be able to – or want to – act in a different accent. We don’t hold that against him, and indeed he’s widely considered one of our country’s best. Nevertheless, we notice those actors who do have this skill, and enjoy it. Many Brits have told me that Gwyneth Paltrow’s British accent is very good (and she keeps getting hired to do it, so the higher-ups must agree). Actors like Meryl Streep and Edward Norton – two of the best at this, in my opinion – can be relied on to perform believably in any sort of accent. 

My curiosity on this topic prompted a tour of the web, just to see what comments people were making – in print, on blogs, wherever – about actors who were especially good or especially bad in performing with an accent not their own. First off I will say that the names Sean Connery, Kevin Costner and Keanu Reeves come up the most often, making this perhaps our Top 3 “Hall of Shame”. Speaking of Sean (common wisdom is “he sounds Scottish in everything”), quite a few pundits out there in the blogosphere have mentioned the 1986 fantasy film “Highlander” as a bad accent connoisseur’s dream. Here we have lead actor Christopher Lambert, a French speaker, trying to speak English with a Scottish accent, and sidekick Sean Connery trying to speak English with a Spanish accent!

NICE TRY, YANK!

In the “Americans trying do British unsuccessfully” category, these particular performances come up a lot: Kevin Costner “Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves”; Don Cheadle in the “Ocean’s 11” films; Carrie Fisher as Princess Leia in “Star Wars” (but only for the first part of the first film, strangely); and – the clear winner –

Dick Van Dyke’s caricature of a Cockney accent in “Mary Poppins”. This is perhaps Hollywood’s most iconic bad accent. NPR Film Critic Beth Accomando maintains that the term “Dick Van Dyke accent” is actually used in England to describe failed attempts by Americans to sound British.

In the “Americans trying for other foreign accents” sphere, these are often mentioned: Brad Pitt trying to do Irish in “The Devil’s Own” and Austrian German in “Seven Years in Tibet”; John Malkovich trying for Russian in “Rounders”; Nicholas Cage going for Italian in “Captain Corelli’s Mandolin”; Rosanna Arquette going for Quebec French in “The Whole 9 Yards”; and Halle Barry going for Swahili (and then abandoning it later ) in “X Men”. I have to admit, I have not actually seen any of these films, but the performances keep coming up on the web as victims of mockery, so perhaps it’s just as well. 

As far as American actors trying to do a regional American accent not their own, a different list of performances predominates. In the category of “going for Southern”, Kevin Costner in “JFK”, Nicolas Cage in “Con Air”, and Meg Ryan in “Courage Under Fire” are often mentioned. People seem divided about Kevin Spacey in “Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil”: some feel his bad accent caused the film to flop; others feel he did O.K. I have noticed that the Boston accent seems particularly hard to nail for many actors, even great ones. No one seems to think that Jack Nicholson’s Boston accent in “The Departed” was consistent or realistic (but many would also argue that he was great anyway). I would add that Alec Bladwin and Leonardo DiCaprio had accent trouble in the same movie, and honestly, after one hour of people talking about whose “faw-thah was a good kaw-up” and whose “faw-thah was a bad kaw-up” I had to turn it off. Yes, I “walked out of “ (TIVO-version) this Oscar-winning Best Picture because of the accents. A recent appearance by Julianne Moore on TV’s “30 Rock” was, to me, a classic example of a very good actor doing a very unconvincing Boston accent. Ditto Laura Linney in “Mystic River”.

YOU CAN’T FOOL ME, FURRINER!

Aside from Dominic West, I have found myself distracted by Joely Richardson (British) on “Nip/Tuck”, whose British vowels and [r]-lessness creep in to her speech every once in a while. I have not seen either New Zealander Anna Paquin in “True Blood” (trying for “Nawlins”) or Scottish actor Ewan McGregor(trying for American Southern) in the film “Big Fish” – but many comments on the web indicate that these performances have grated on the nerves of viewers. I can say that Jude Law’s performance in “Cold Mountain”, playing a Confederate soldier, was distractingly unconvincing (the patriot in me wonders which American actor lost a job opportunity for that hire to happen). According to one humorous blogger, Law’s southern accent was so jarring that after every line she half-expected the character to add “…by order of the his majesty, the KING!”.

IT’S OFFICIAL

I did find two published lists of specific bad movie accents from actual film critics, which I’ll share here:

Top-10 worst according to Empire (UK film magazine) in 2003: 

1. Sean Connery “The Untouchables” (Scottish English trying for Irish English)
2. Dick Van Dyke “Mary Poppins” 
3. Brad Pitt “Seven Year in Tibet” 
4. Charlton Heston “A Touch of Evil” (trying for a Mexican Spanish accent) 
5. Heather Graham “From Hell” (American doing Cockney)
6. Keanu Reeves “Bram Stoker’s Dracula” (trying for British)
7. Julia Roberts “Mary Reilly” (trying for Irish)
8. Laurence Olivier “The Jazz Singer” – 1980 remake (Brit trying for New York Jewish)
9. Pete Postlethwaite “The Usual Suspects” (Brit trying for Pakistani accent) 
10. Meryl Streep “Out of Africa” (trying for a Danish accent)

Top-10 worst according to Beth Accomando (NPR critic & President of San Diego Film Critics Society): 
1. Mickey Rooney “Breakfast at Tiffany’s” (trying for a Japanese accent)
2. Keanu Reeves “Little Buddha”/”Dangerous Liaisons”/”Bram Stoker’s Dracula” (Beth Accomando explicitly named him “the actor who most consistently fails at accents”) 
3. Kevin Costner “Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves” 
4. Demi Moore “Flawless” (trying for British)
5. Dennis Quaid “The Big Easy” (trying for New Orleans)
6. Hilary Swank “The Black Dahlia” (going for what’s described as a “strangely clipped, aristocratic accent which is a complete distraction”).
7. John Wayne “The Conqueror” (trying for some kind of Asian accent playing Mongolian Genghis Kahn) 
8. Dick Van Dyke “Mary Poppins” 
9. Humphrey Bogart “Dark Victory” (trying for Irish)
10. Arnold Schwarzenegger “Raw Deal”(Beth feels that in this early Ah-nold vehicle he seemed to be trying in vain to sound like a native speaker of American English, a tactic he later [wisely] abandoned). 

- I personally cannot agree that Meryl Streep belongs on the top list (or any such list)… I also think that if you fault Schwarzenegger for unsuccessfully trying to tone down his accented English, then you have to add in the likes of Penelope Cruz, Gerard Depardieu, Jackie Chan, Antonio Banderas, and a whole slew of non-native English speakers for whom the gap between “how their English sounds” and “how they want it to sound” is difficult to assess or prove.

So – what do you think? I find that people who like movies and TV usually have an opinion on this.

Please weigh in!

Mr. Groundhog has some good news to share: you made it halfway through the winter. It’s February, and you can actually sink your teeth into the afternoon sunlight. Yum.

People often remark that Thanksgiving is nice because, as holidays go, it’s not overly commercialized. Groundhog Day is humbler still. It’s not commercialized, AND nobody knows it exists. Or remembers it, anyway. Plus, it’s named after a rodent. Good luck with that one, Hallmark.

Happy Groundhog Day!