Month: June 2021

Family - Life :) - Music - Other sports - Poker

Need to escape this slump

June 26, 2021 plutomanby 0 Comments

I’ve been feeling down the last couple of days. No mental energy. No drive to do anything. The crazily hot weather hasn’t helped – I’ve been struggling to sleep. The reduction in my hours hasn’t been much fun either – work gives me energy to do other things as well as somebody to talk to. People have been going away, to Turkey, to Bulgaria, to attend weddings and baptisms and whatever else – events that didn’t happen in 2020. I could really do with getting away too, and will try to escape in the second half of July. My plan is to stay in Romania (it’s plenty big enough, especially if you travel by train) and visit the northern Moldova region, or Bucovina. I’m feeling cabin fever now.

My parents now have a buyer for their place in Geraldine. Dad is already talking about extending and renovating and gutting the new place. I wonder where the energy to even think about that kind of stuff comes from. They got six figures, only just missing out on a seventh (again, the mind boggles here), although it hasn’t yet gone unconditional. This is all excellent news obviously because their place had been on the market a while and they can now hopefully get on with the rest of their lives. This morning my student gave me two contacts in the real estate business; I’ll hit them up next week and hopefully get the ball rolling. I’m clueless there at the best of times, and now I’m adding a foreign language and totally alien systems and processes into the mix. I’m really fumbling in the dark.

New Zealand are inaugural World Test champions, when it looked for all the world that the English rain would have the final say. That’s a pretty big deal. Way bigger than, say, the America’s Cup. It’s NZ’s finest moment in the game, that’s for sure. They’re a brilliant team of cricketers and a great bunch of guys to boot. Good on ’em, that’s all I can say. World beaters at Covid, and now cricket. I wonder what’s next?

No Simona Halep at Wimbledon. That’s a shame.

Mum has just sent me an email with a picture of her plus three other women (combined age close to 300) holding aloft a big silver plate. It’s obviously a golf trophy of some sort. I’ll probably get all the details of that at the weekend.

Unusually, my weekend will be completely free of lessons. Tomorrow’s temperatures are forecast to be tolerable – a max of “only” 31 – so I’ll pop to the market and if I’m lucky I might find a second-hand bike.

My student told me all about the nai, or Romanian pan flute. A famous of exponent of this instrument is Gheorghe Zamfir; this is him playing Păstorul Singuratic, or The Lonely Shepherd. It’s quite lovely.

I’ve blanked my last nine poker tournaments; my bankroll has dipped to $718.

Language learning

Romanian Commentary 18 — Pronouns: the peculiar, pernicious ‘pe’

June 22, 2021 plutomanby 0 Comments

Today is a public holiday in Romania. It’s Rusalii, or Pentecost.

Pe. Two little letters. A mountain of complications. Outside any consideration of pronouns, pe is a preposition, which is usually equivalent to on (pe masă = on the table; although there are exceptions, such as pe cer = in the sky). Pe mâine means until tomorrow or see you tomorrow.

Pe is also used with direct object (accusative) pronouns, for emphasis. To give extra weight, you use both the unstressed accusative pronoun and the emphatic pronoun. In my previous post in the series, I said that te iubesc meant I love you. If you extend this to te iubesc pe tine, it means I love you, only you, and nobody else but you.

Here are the full set of emphatic accusative pronouns, with examples:

(Tu) m-ai sunat pe mine?: Did you call me?
(Eu) te-am chemat pe tine: I called you
(Eu) l-am întrebat pe el: I asked him
(El) a văzut-o pe ea: He saw her
(Voi) ne vedeți pe noi?: Can you see us?
(Noi) nu vă vedem pe voi: We can’t see you
(Eu) îi urăsc pe ei: I hate them (males or a mixture)
(Ea) le-a cerut pe ele: She asked them (to do something; a request) (females only)

This is actually fairly straightforward; the emphatic pronouns are the same as the stressed accusative pronouns, but with the addition of pe. You just have to be careful to never use them with the dative pronouns which I’ll talk about in my next post.

We’ve so far dealt with the case where pe is optional, but often it’s mandatory. When you talk about specific people, you must use the same constructions as in the list above, with the unstressed accusative pronoun and an emphatic-style pronoun with pe, except that instead of pe el or pe ea, you say pe Dan or pe Maria or whatever the case may be. It’s not just named people that you have to do this with. Mum and the policeman and the kids and nobody all trigger pe. Animals and plants and inanimate objects don’t, however. Here are some examples:

Ai văzut-o pe Simona?: Have you seen Simona?
Nu îi am pe copiii mei: I haven’t got my children
L-am cerut pe medic: I asked the doctor
Le-ai sunat pe fete?: Did you call the girls?
Încerc să-i învăț pe băieți: I’m trying to teach the boys

The last example uses the verb a învăța, which can mean both to learn and to teach. Similarly, a împrumuta means both to borrow and to lend. The fact that each of these Romanian verbs maps to two English verbs, one for each direction, causes a headache for my students.

When you want to say somebody, anybody, everybody or nobody, you no longer use the unstressed accusative pronoun, but you still need pe.

Cunoașteți pe cineva care poate să …?: Do you know somebody who can …?
Poți să chemi pe oricine: You can call anybody
Nu poți mulțumi pe toată lumea: You can’t please everybody
Nu am pe nimeni: I don’t have anybody (In Romanian, you say I don’t have nobody)

With non-people, it’s much easier: no pronouns, no pe:

Am văzut câinele: I’ve seen the dog
Citești cartea asta?: Are you reading this book?

Now we come to another important use of pe. To say the book you read or the boy you hit, you need pe care, which is a bit like of which in English, along with the unstressed accusative pronoun. (This is counterintuitive to me; with pe care, it feels like you shouldn’t need that pronoun as well, but you do.) What’s more, pe is used here whether you’re talking about people or not. Some examples:

Cartea pe care ai citit-o: The book (that) you read
Băiatul pe care l-am învățat: The boy (who) I taught
Mășinile pe care le vindem: The cars (that) we sell
Banii pe care îi câștigi: The money (that) you earn (Money is plural in Romanian)

This is all vital stuff for me. So often I find myself drowning. Next time I’ll try and deal with the dative (indirect object) pronouns, which are another ball game entirely.

Coronavirus - Life :) - Poker - Tennis

A dizzyingly hot week in store

June 21, 2021 plutomanby 0 Comments

It’s hot, and in the coming week we’re forecast to hit dizzying, hellish 37s, 38s and 39s. If you deal in Fahrenheit, that means we’ll be heading into triple digits. In California and Nevada they know all about triple digits at the moment. It sounds horrendous there. (When I lived in the UK it was common to talk in Fahrenheit when things got a bit balmy. Eighty-something just sounded hot. I don’t know if they still do that.) Here are some of the two dozen pungent lime trees outside my block of flats.

My aunt called me yesterday. It was the first time we’d spoken in a while: she’d been through a depressive spell of not picking up the phone. We chatted for half an hour; I have more in common with her than I realised. Her world has continued to shrink, sadly. I later spoke to my brother who said she never ventures beyond Earith and St Ives these days, not even to Cambridge which is 12 miles away. (She used to go there regularly, to shop until she dropped.) She was amazed to learn that the majority of Romanians are, and are likely to remain, unjabbed.

I had more anti-vax crap yesterday. I don’t mention vaccines anymore, but my student did, saying that they’re basically useless but his work had pretty much forced him to have them. He seemed a sensible guy.

Tennis was a bit awkward last night. I waited for my near-neighbour to appear, so we could walk to the courts, but he never did. When I got there alone, there were only the staunch anti-vax guy and his daughter. We played a set of two-on-one, then he made me play a set of singles with his daughter so he could spend the whole time on his phone. I then played singles with him, and was up 6-1 5-1 when we ran out of time. He had paid for the courts, and at the end I realised I didn’t have enough money to pay him back (because there were unexpectedly only three of us, I had to pay more), so I gave him what I had, promising to give him the remaining few lei tonight. He then went into a spiel: “we’re just here to enjoy ourselves”, as if I’d done something to prevent that. Something to do with the money? I’m guessing it was that. Or maybe it was our one-sided game? It wasn’t the first time he’d said that to me, but this time his daughter also joined in. Sometimes I don’t get people.

Some Romanians, like the woman who stopped lessons with me three weeks ago, are straight out of the series of books I read about Naples. Everything is about their emotions, how this or that utterance makes a person feel, and everyone is entangled in a cruel and exhausting game where they’re trying to outwit each other with their feelings. Practical considerations, like whether to protect yourself and others against a deadly virus, go out the window in that world.

No luck at the poker tables today. Not much skill either, perhaps. I made a particularly bad fold this morning in a single draw tournament against a maniacal player; I didn’t realise quite how maniacal. That game is extremely player-dependent. My bankroll sits at $737.

Coronavirus - Life :) - Poker

Their first shots

June 18, 2021 plutomanby 0 Comments

I was delighted to hear yesterday that my parents had just received their first dose of Pfizer. They didn’t expect it until the end of July, but Dad had to see the doctor in Timaru for something, and they offered both of them their jabs on the spot. That was great news. (I’m lucky to have parents who are so sensible and practical.)

This week Dominic Cummings leaked a bunch of Covid-related text messages from spring 2020, written by him, the prime minister and Matt Hancock. You’re not exactly innocent here either, Dom, but what a joke it would be if it wasn’t so deadly serious. They were worse than clueless. Those damn whiteboard brainstorms reminded me of that blue-sky 360 vision bullshit which might have been OK in the business-as-usual running of an insurance company but not when you’re a running a country in the grip of a deadly disease. It was all “how do we sell this”, as if they were tweaking income tax bands, and 15 months later they still haven’t moved on from that. The political system in the UK (and the US) is hopeless in a situation like this, because it provides all the wrong incentives. Massively restricting travel into the UK was so obviously the right thing to do, but no, it might frighten the horses for a few days.

At this time of year, Timișoara smells. The air is filled with the sweet scent of lime trees in full bloom, the markets are pungent with the smell of strawberries, and the sheer heat provides a certain aroma, even late at night. We’re forecast to reach 32 this afternoon; in the middle of next week we could hit an oppressive 37.

Poker. I tried to make a video of a tournament last night, with limited success. I’ve had some small cashes since I last wrote, and my bankroll is now $746.

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Romanian Commentary 17 — Pronouns: this is where it gets confusing

June 18, 2021 plutomanby 0 Comments

Last time I touched on the nominative (subject pronouns) and the stressed version of the accusative (direct object pronouns). These are used in sentences like She works for me and I played with her, and work pretty much the same as in English.

Now I’m going to deal with the unstressed accusative pronouns. These are used in sentences like she saw him and we took it and, famously, I love you.

Here are the unstressed accusative pronouns in Romanian:
mă: me
te: you (singular)
îl: him
o: her
ne: us
vă: you (plural)
îi: them (all male, or a mix of genders)
le: them (all female)

All of these are different to the stressed versions, but just like with the stressed versions, the he/she and them pronouns are gendered. (That’s important, because the unstressed dative pronouns, which I’ll discuss later, aren’t gendered; that confuses me.) In a usual affirmative sentence, these pronouns normally go before the verb. Here are examples of all these pronouns in the present tense, including I love you:
(Tu) mă crezi: you believe me
(Eu) te iubesc: I love you
(Noi) îl găsim: we find him
(Eu) o sun: I call her
(Tu) ne părăsești: you leave us
(Noi) vă mulțumim: (we) thank you
(Ea) îi ia: she takes them
(El) le pune: he puts them

Now, sometimes these pronouns change when they interact with other words, such as the auxiliary verb of the compound past tense, which is the everyday tense used to talk about the past in Romanian. Here are the same sentences above, but in the past tense:
(Tu) m-ai crezut: you believed me
(Eu) te-am iubit: I loved you
(Noi) l-am găsit: we found him
(Eu) am sunat-o: I called her
(Tu) ne-ai părăsit: you left us
(Noi) v-am mulțumit: we thanked you
(Ea) i-a luat: she took them
(El) le-a pus: he put them

You can see that in the past tense, hyphens appear, some of the pronouns are contracted, and o (her) moves to after the verb. Here are some examples with other tenses:

Îl voi da bomboanele: I’ll give him the sweets
O vei găsi?: Will you find her/it?
N-o făceam: We didn’t do it
Nu-l vedeau: They didn’t see him/it

In less formal situations, the negative nu causes vowels to be elided; nu o becomes n-o and nu îl becomes nu-l. This happens outside the world of pronouns too – nu am becomes n-am, for instance.

Another common situation occurs with the imperative, when you tell someone to do something. The pronoun always goes after the verb in this case. Here are some examples of this:

Sună-mă: Call me
Las-o: Leave/let her/it (somebody or something feminine)
Fă-o: Do it
Întreabă-l: Ask him
Ascultați-ne: Listen to us (when you’re telling multiple people; for a single person it’s ascultă-ne)
Mănâncă-i: Eat them (carrots, for example, because they’re masculine)
Ia-le: Take them (books, for example, because they’re feminine)

The imperative form of leave or let is normally lasă, but the final ă is elided when it comes up against the o. I heard las-o recently on the tennis court. A young girl hit a ball that was clearly going out, but one of her male opponents hit it before it bounced, to be “nice”. She then said las-o să cadă, or let it bounce (literally let it fall). I sympathised; she was far too good to need that sort of help. Ball in Romanian is minge, which is feminine.

Next time I’ll deal with the tricky little word pe.

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Romanian Commentary 16 — Pronouns: the not so damn hard stuff

June 17, 2021 plutomanby 0 Comments

This morning I wondered why men who run market stalls in Romania, and probably elsewhere, have such huge hands. Being able to pick up great handfuls of strawberries gives you a competitive advantage over those who can’t? Seriously, two men in a row today had absolutely enormous grubby mitts.

It’s one of life’s mysteries, just like Romanian pronouns. Today I’ll tackle some of the less horrendous aspects, and then go from there.

The nominative (or subject) pronouns are the easy ones. In English, these are I, you, he, she, it, we and they, and here are the Romanian equivalents:
eu: I
tu: you (singular)
el: he
ea: she
noi: we
voi: you (plural)
ei: they (either all male or a mixture of male or female; Romanian is sexist)
ele: they (all female)

There’s also dumneavoastră, the formal you, but let’s not go there. I discussed that monstrous pronoun a month ago here.

Notice that there’s no it in the above list. That’s because in Romanian, everything has a gender. A wall is masculine, a table is feminine, and a chair is masculine when you have one but mysteriously changes sex when it teams up with other chairs. My students sometimes struggle with the idea of things being genderless, and refer to inanimate objects as he or she in English.

Another thing to note is that Romanian is “pro-drop”, meaning that you don’t need to use the subject (i.e. the nominative pronoun) with a verb. If I want to say I serve, I can say eu servesc or just servesc. (I can also say servesc eu; in Romanian it’s OK to stick the subject after the verb.) The subject is mostly unused, but it is used for emphasis. For instance, I might say Eu servesc? or Servesc eu? on the tennis court, to ask if it’s really my turn to serve. Note as well that, unlike in English, questions in Romanian are formed in the same way as statements. That aspect of the Romanian language is therefore considerably easier than its English counterpart; my students have ongoing battles with the do and does and did and is and are and have and has and had of English questions. Another reason you might use the subject with a verb is that for most verbs, and most tenses, two of the persons have the same form. In my serve example, servesc could mean both I serve and they serve. Mănâncă can mean either he/she eats or they eat. Am jucat can mean either I played or we played. So if it isn’t clear, adding the subject can avoid confusion.

So far, so good. Now we move to the accusative (or direct object) pronouns. In English, these are me, you, him, her, it, us and them. The accusative pronouns come in two flavours in Romanian, stressed and unstressed. They’re both common, and I’ll deal with the easier stressed variety, which is used after verbs, first:
mine: me
tine: you (singular)
el: him
ea: her
noi: us
voi: you (plural)
ei: them (all male, or a mix of genders)
ele: them (all female)

Guess what. With the exception of me and the singular you, these are identical to the nominative pronouns. Here are some example sentences:
(Eu) vin cu tine: I’m coming with you.
(Tu) vii cu mine?: Are you coming with me?
(Noi) mergem fără el: We’re going without him.
(El) merge fără noi: He’s going without us.

With this post I’ve eased into Romanian pronouns, and next time I’ll deal with the (harder) unstressed accusative pronouns, which are used before verbs.

Language learning

Romanian Commentary 15 — Why Romanian pronouns are so damn hard for me

June 15, 2021 plutomanby 0 Comments

Before I even came to Romania, I had a chat with a friend about the language. What’s it similar to? Is it hard? What makes it hard? I immediately answered that what makes Romanian hard are the pronouns. A pronoun-free sentence like “The church was destroyed in the war” shouldn’t present me too many problems, I thought, whereas “She told me to give this to you” would leave me in a right muddle. Almost five years on, I can get by OK in Romanian, but those damn pronouns are still a jumble in my mind.

Why are they so hard, at least for me? Lots of reasons.

1. They’re mostly short, shapeless words. For the same reason that I struggled to remember the three-letter Scrabble words, much more so than the longer words, these short pronouns are an indistinct blur.

2. Romanian has cases. These are a hold-over from Latin that other Romance languages have ditched but Romanian hasn’t. This means that the words for him in “I called him on the phone” and “I gave him some chocolates” aren’t the same. In “I called him”, calling is what you’re directly doing to him, and this requires the accusative case, while in “I gave him”, you’re not giving him, you’re giving something to him, and that requires the dative case. Although I conceptually get this, it’s hard to get right because of what we do (or don’t do) in English. (If you substitute “the boy” for “him” in the examples above, you again need two different words, but I find those longer nouns, rather than pronouns, a lot easier.)

3. Some verbs that work indirectly in English are direct in Romanian. For instance, you just listen the radio in Romanian, without the equivalent of to. You say “don’t lie me”, again without to.

4. Romanian uses an absolute ton of reflexive, which is like myself or herself in English. Some of my students tell me that they need to “prepare themselves” for job interviews, or that they like to “relax themselves” at weekends, because that’s what you say in Romanian. Reflexives are used in a lot of situations where a possessive is used in English instead. “I broke my leg” and “he needs to improve his English” are expressed with a reflexive pronoun in Romanian, not a possessive. It’s hard to know whether to use a possessive or a reflexive, and to make matters worse, there are both accusative reflexive and dative reflexive pronouns.

5. When you want to express how you or someone else feels — “I’m hungry”, “you’re hot”, “she’s fed up” — you have to resort to dative pronouns instead of the nice simple adjectives we have in English.

6. Romanian pronouns can change their forms when they interact with other words in a sentence.

7. You use lots of pronouns when you have interdependent relationships with lots of people. I don’t, at least not with people I speak Romanian with, so I don’t. If you’re always talking about other people, perhaps this all becomes second nature.

I’m going to write a series of posts on Romanian pronouns, so I can refer to them later for easy reference, and hopefully I can kill this beast once and for all. At the moment they’re really holding me back.

Family - Life :) - Other sports - Poker - Tennis

Birthday, culture shock, and some games

June 14, 2021 plutomanby 0 Comments

It’s Mum’s 72nd birthday. If we used base 12, which we probably would if we had extra fingers and toes, a 72nd birthday would be a milestone, like a 50th birthday is for us in base-10 world. (As a kid, I would sometimes accompany my grandmother as she visited the record office to do family history. One time she looked through a book of baptisms from 1850-odd, and two babies were recorded – prominently – as having an extra finger, or perhaps two, on each hand. I found this hilarious.) Sometimes I’ve been critical of Mum, even on this blog, but these days we get on very well. The pandemic has helped, funnily enough. We’re in total agreement on just about everything Covid-related. Mum is a young 72. She’s managed to keep remarkably fit and healthy.

Yesterday morning I had a discussion with my student about our university experiences, hers rather more recent than mine. I said that I felt a bigger culture shock when I started uni than I did on my arrival in Romania. In truth it was way bigger. Constantly being surrounded by the same people, never being able to hide or escape, it’s a wonder I survived that first year.

A thrilling finish to the French Open. Djoković (boo!) came from two sets down to beat Tsitsipas in the final. I only saw the first three sets before I played tennis myself. I wanted Tsitsipas, who had played so well, to win. He also has a badass name. Tsitsipas, swarming the net like a tsunami of tsetse flies. (The French sometimes say tagada tsoin-tsoin and I don’t really know what it means, if indeed it means anything.) I wonder if Djoković is the first player ever to win a grand slam coming from two sets down in two separate matches. And by the way, the third set of his semi-final against Nadal was mad mad mad stuff for 95 minutes. Way out there, off the planet, it was that good. As for the women, Krejcikova won a tense final against Pavlyuchenkova, then topped it off by winning the doubles too, partnering Siniakova. The men’s doubles final was a cracker, with the local lads (Mahut of stupidly-long-match fame, alongside Herbert) making an improbable fightback to win.

Euro 2020, or 2021, has started. Last night one of the Danish players had a heart attack in the middle of a match with Finland and was resuscitated on the pitch. It must have been nightmarish for everybody. I was amazed that they later restarted the game. The incident reminded me of Fabrice Muamba, who played for Birmingham for a time, then suffered (and survived) a heart attack during a game.

Poker. I had a go at a bounty PLO8 tournament last night and went pretty far but only made a tiny profit. This morning I tried a non-bounty PLO8 but didn’t make the money. Then in the single draw I made a deep run, getting pretty lucky when my opponent made 65432 for a straight against my pat nine, and eventually finishing fourth. I also made the final table in the pot-limit badugi, and my luck quickly ran out when my seven ran into a better seven; I was out in eighth place, but not before scoring some nice bounties. My bankroll is up to $735.

Poker - Tennis

A match to get excited about

June 11, 2021 plutomanby 0 Comments

Tonight I played my usual Thursday night fixed-limit badugi tournament. These are a question of how and when, not if, I fail to make the money. Tonight I got pretty damn close – 22nd place, with the top 20 paying – but the eventual result was the same as it always is. Please excuse the cynicism.

Then I sat back and watched the semi-final between Krejcikova and Sakkari which I’d had one eye on during the poker. As the match entered the deciding set, Sakkari, all muscles, looked the stronger player and more likely winner. She had a match point at 5-3. When Krejcikova hung on to her serve, and then broke in the next game, the drama dial turned way up. Krejcikova then had three match points of her own, but Sakkari swatted them all aside, somehow, and it was 7-7. In the 16th game, after 3¼ hours, Krejcikova was the victim of a brutal, incorrect overrule on her fourth match point, but regrouped impressively to stagger over the line into the final where she’ll meet Pavlyuchenkova. Just imagine if she hadn’t. They really need Hawk-Eye.

Marion Bartoli, one of my favourite players, interviewed Krejcikova on court. The attitude of the eventual winner, who I knew next to nothing about, was excellent; I warmed to her greatly. I also learned that she’d been helped in her development by Jana Novotna, another of my favourites, who died very young of cancer a few years ago.

For me, it made a change to get excited about tennis, or any sport, again. Bugger the Olympics, by the way.

Coronavirus - New Zealand - Romania - Tennis

It’s collapsing all around us

June 10, 2021 plutomanby 0 Comments

The cathedral bells rang out in earnest this morning. What for? It’s the Feast of the Ascension in the Orthodox calendar. As I write, some kind of parade is about to begin on the steps of the cathedral. Someone is testing the microphone: “doi, zece, doi, zece”. Where I come from you go “one, two” and perhaps “three”, but Romanians say “two, ten” instead. No idea why. (Update: A brass band has started up.)

Last time I neglected to mention the role of religion in people’s attitudes to the pandemic and the vaccines. The impact is huge. A prime example here is No-Vax Djoković, a devout adherent to the Serbian Orthodox church, which is very similar to the Romanian version. Both Britain and New Zealand benefit from being increasingly secular countries. (Djoković had a battle on his hands last night against the impressive Matteo Berrettini, but survived a hiccup in the third-set tie-break to edge through in four. They started the match at 8pm local time; the spectators were forced to leave during the fourth set to avoid falling foul of the 11pm curfew. That was bizarre.)

I had a lesson this morning with a woman who caught Covid in early April along with her husband and small son. They’re still all suffering from memory loss, fatigue, and a succession of colds. Scary stuff.

In some sad news, the Bigăr waterfall, which I visited with my parents in 2017, collapsed on Monday evening. It was a popular tourist attraction, enhanced by being slap-bang on the 45th parallel north (the opposite of which might be familiar to certain readers of this blog). The weight of moss and the build-up of limestone caused it to give way.

21st June 2017

I see that Auckland has leapt to the top of the ranking of the world’s most livable cities, with Wellington in fourth place. I’m not quite sure who’s measuring this. Lack of virus obviously comes into it, but last time the I visited Auckland I was sorely disappointed. A soulless city, with house prices beyond livability for most.

On Tuesday I got my first haircut in eleven months. A good job done. My next chop might be ages away.