Happy things thread!

[Linguoboy]

I passed my German exam and admission to the Master's in comparative IE and historical linguistics at Vienna is now a shoe-in.

Gratuliere!

[MacAnDàil]

Congratulations to both of you!

[Travis B.]

I had a nice long conversation with an old friend yesterday, after we hadn't actually spoken in over a year due to her being very overworked, which was really nice - I had been missing talking with her for quite some time.

[Linguoboy]

I'm trying not to buy any books but I ducked into Barnes and Noble to get out of the heat and was surprised to find a pretty decent selection of Spanish fiction. They had a beautiful new paperback edition of Bolaño's Cuentos completos. I picked one from the table of contents and started reading. Within two pages, I laughed out loud three times.

I bought the book. I have no regrets.

[Vijay]

I'm trying not to buy any books but I ducked into Barnes and Noble to get out of the heat and was surprised to find a pretty decent selection of Spanish fiction.

IME both Barnes and Noble and Half-Price Books always have a pretty good selection of Spanish-language literature to the point where I'd be surprised if they didn't.

[Salmoneus]

I strongly suspect that depends on the location. I don't imagine Barnes and Noble shift a lot of Spanish stock in, for example, Houlton, Maine. [OK they probably don't even have a store in Houlton, but you get my point]. Whereas in, say, Austin, Texas, it would seem like madness NOT to have a large Spanish section.

[Linguoboy]

I'm trying not to buy any books but I ducked into Barnes and Noble to get out of the heat and was surprised to find a pretty decent selection of Spanish fiction.

IME both Barnes and Noble and Half-Price Books always have a pretty good selection of Spanish-language literature to the point where I'd be surprised if they didn't.

IME, they generally have a decent selection of Spanish-language books but not necessarily Spanish-language literature, if you get what I mean. But this is a college town, so I imagine they're catering at least a bit to the academic market.

ETA: To test this hypothesis, I tried searching for the same book at other nearby stores. Neither of the two Skokie locations have it in stock (despite the fact that more than 7% of Skokie residents have Spanish as their first language).

[Vijay]

I strongly suspect that depends on the location. I don't imagine Barnes and Noble shift a lot of Spanish stock in, for example, Houlton, Maine. [OK they probably don't even have a store in Houlton, but you get my point]. Whereas in, say, Austin, Texas, it would seem like madness NOT to have a large Spanish section.

Sure, and Chicago is nowhere near the border. It does have a Spanish-speaking population that seems comparable to Austin, though.

IME, they generally have a decent selection of Spanish-language books but not necessarily Spanish-language literature, if you get what I mean.

Well, that sucks. To be honest, I don't visit either store much, and I tend to go to Half-Price Books very early in the year (after people have sold/returned/whatever all the Christmas gifts they didn't want ) and almost never go to Barnes and Noble these days since it's about as expensive as Amazon. That's probably why I ended up buying four books in Spanish that I felt looked too interesting to pass up last time I was at Half-Price Books.

[Linguoboy]

To be honest, I don't visit either store much, and I tend to go to Half-Price Books very early in the year (after people have sold/returned/whatever all the Christmas gifts they didn't want ) and almost never go to Barnes and Noble these days since it's about as expensive as Amazon. That's probably why I ended up buying four books in Spanish that I felt looked too interesting to pass up last time I was at Half-Price Books.

Yeah, I rarely venture in and even more rarely buy anything. If I'd been patient enough to buy the same book from their online site, it would've been a couple dollars less. It was an impulse purchase and a splurge and that felt good.

[Mornche Geddick]

Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliococogauff.

[KathTheDragon]

So close, it's -gogogoch.

[Salmoneus]

Presumably that was the joke.

[KathTheDragon]

There was a joke?

[Linguoboy]

There was a joke?

Coco Gauff is a tennis player. So not so much a joke as a random association.

[Mornche Geddick]

There was a joke?

Coco Gauff is a tennis player.

Who's been doing spectacularly well at Wimbledon, so I thought, why not honour her with a silly pun in the Happy Things thread? She's made me happy.

[Salmoneus]

Although in some respects, the weird thing is why we now see this as spectacular - an indication of how the women's game has changed. Twenty years ago, this was the norm. Well, not 'the norm', but top female tennis players in the 15-16 range used to be a regular thing.

Hingis, for example, won a junior grand slam at 12, entered the top 100 in the world at 14, at 15 reached a grand slam singles quarterfinal and a grand slam singles semifinal and won a grandslam doubles title, and at 16 won three grandslam singles titles and became world #1. And while Hingis may be the one of the most spectacular examples, she was only slightly unusual for her era. Hingis played doubles with Kournikova, for example - inside the top 60 in the world when she was 15 (and reached a grandslam 4th round), and in the top 20 by the time she was 17. Hingis lost two grandslam finals to Capriati, for instance - who reached the semifinals at roland garros a few months after turning 14, and was world #8 when she was still 14. The player who beat her in that semifinal was Seles, who had been a grandslam singles champion at 16, world #1 at 17, and an eight-time grandslam singles champion by the time she turned 20. Indeed, Capriati, Seles and Hingis had the main part of their careers over by the time they were 20, and that wasn't THAT unusual at the time. [when Capriati returned to the upper rankings in her mid-twenties after eight years away, it was regarded as an one of sport's greatest comebacks...]

I don't mean to take anything away from Gauff - I agree her run was very entertaining and very impressive, not just for her tennis but for her behaviour (in particular, a whole bunch of male players in their late teens and twenties could learn something from her...). It's just striking that in twenty years we've gone from that sort of run being impressive but familiar, to the same run being regarded as astonishing and unparalleled.

I think, looking at some of those older players, that some of it is the creation of new tournaments for low-ranked players. Previously, good young women were thrown in at the deep end and played full professional tournaments against the best in the world (Venus Williams' first professional loss was against Arrantxa Sanchez Vicario... (Venus reached a GS final at 17, ASV was a GS champion at 17); Capriati's first two losses were against Gabriela Sabatini, then the world #3, and Navratilova, and she beat two top-10 players) by the time she was 14 (Sabatini reached a GS semifinal at 16, Navratilova made a GS quarterfinal at 16), etc.

These days, on the other hand, players don't usually jump straight from juniors to seniors - they go to the ITF tour, and then to the WTA's subsidiary feeder tour, and THEN to the full WTA, and along the way they're restricted in how many tournaments they can play, to keep their rankings down, making it very hard to earn a spot at a grandslam. So even if a 15 year old is as good as Gauff these days (or even as good as Seles or Hingis), they're intentionally not given the chance to show it. Gauff is unusual only because Wimbledon decided for some reason to give her a wildcard into qualifying, effectively letting her skip a few tiers to compete directly. It obviously paid off, for both her and the tournament.

Unfortunately, this system is rather cruel in how path-dependent it is. The massive points Gauff has accrued her will let her get entries to many other competitions, where she'll be able to rack up more points, to get into more competitions, etc. Other women of similar accomplishments in her age range or slightly above - like Liu and Osuigwe, just to look at 2017 americans - have been unfortunate enough to lose their big grandslam shots against very respectable opposition, and as a result haven't had those points, so haven't been able to get many entries to WTA events (and when they do it's up against seeded players) so have to toil through ITF tournaments, which makes it hard to get points, which makes it hard to play the best and improve, and so on. It seems a little unfair that one good day or one bad day can have such a massive impact on young players' careers.

Of course, I'm not saying the older system was better. It had its flaws. Looking at those young champions, obviously Hingis and Capriati both went on to have personal problems, including drug use, while Kournikova never managed to live up to her teenage potential. The old way was very sink-or-swim, and in many cases even those who swam still ended up sinking.

[MacAnDàil]

It seems it was because of those personal problems that the rules were changed. But people in tennis do criticise the rules: https://edition.cnn.com/2018/08/23/spor ... index.html. There are perhaps other ways to prevent derailing.

[Linguoboy]

• I called my mom yesterday just because I hadn't in a while and had a really nice chat where I got to say a lot of complimentary things to her. Even now, I'm still kind of amazed at the sacrifices she made in order to (as she puts it) "launch you kids into this world". It's not her fault some of his didn't fly farther. She even managed to make me feel a little better about my father's dementia.
• The heat broke on Saturday so I forced myself to go for a walk last night. I was feeling somewhat melancholy about the rut I was in and deliberately took a turn down a street I'd never been before. There were all kinds of things I hadn't known I would find there, like a public park teeming with families and a sports field that was eerily deserted. I love that, despite how long I've lived in this city, there are still pockets of it quite close to where I live that I don't know at all.

[Raphael]

So Tuesday - either today or yesterday, depending on your timezone - was the big day: my Mom "officially" handed over the keys to my family's weekend hut to the new owner. The hut had been in our family since, I think, the 1970s, but recently, it had been nothing but trouble for us: we had neither the time nor the money to keep it properly maintained, so it had fallen into really serious disrepair. Large parts of the roof, at least, will have to be replaced. (And yes, the new owner knows exactly what he's getting himself into.)

I guess I could have posted about this in the Contradictory Feelings Thread, since I have partly grown up in that hut, and it had been one of the last remaining physical connections to my childhood, but right now, I'm just happy that the source of worries is gone, so I'm posting about it here.

[doctor shark]

Good ooze #1: I have a date fixed for my Ph.D. defense: I'll hand in my thesis on 13 September and then defend it on 11 October.

Good ooze #2: I finally got my brother to get off his lazy *&% and apply to renew his passport, so, if he gets it in time, then he'll also be coming for my defense. As much of an interesting relationship as I have with him, I am looking forward to showing him around the area and getting him out of the US for a bit.