nicholas latkovic

“I’m very well. Have you been well?”

“Oh, I am always well. But I am getting old. I detect signs of age now.”

“I can’t believe it.”

“Yes. Do you want to know one? It is easier for me to talk Italian. I discipline myself but I find when I am tired that it is so much easier to talk Italian. So I know I must be getting old.”

“We could talk Italian. I am a little tired, too.”

“Oh, but when you are tired it will be easier for you to talk English.”

“American.”

“Yes. American. You will please talk American. It is a delightful language.”

Hemingway, Ernest. A Farewell to Arms. New York: Scribner’s, 1929.

A short film with gibberish dialogue shows what the English language sounds like to non-speakers.

Featured music:

Dietrich, Marlene. “Cherche la Rose”. Columbia, 1962.

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A wealthy couple segregates their three teenage children from all knowledge of the outside world, rendering them docile slaves to their parents’ many perverse caprices. Home schooling includes learning a twisted vocabulary: a salt shaker is called a “telephone,” and a small yellow flower is called a “zombie.” Sex has a unique place in this artificial domain, and sex will ultimately plant the seeds of curiosity and rebellion. Directed by Yorgos Lanthimos.

Sonia Manzano and Emilio Delgado are credited with introducing Latin culture and language to millions of American kids on Sesame Street since both joined the cast in 1971 as Maria and Luis. Long-time familiar faces, it wasn’t until 1984 with “Hola Means Hello” that the couple entered America’s hearts.

Manzano said when writing this sketch, she tried to think of the coolest thing she saw on TV when she was a child. She immediately thought of Top Hat (1935) — the screwball comedy musical featuring Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers — which much of the “Hola” routine imitates.

Chemistry between Delgado and Manzano came easily on the set, and their characters were presented with such sincerity the public often mistook them for a real-life couple. Manzano recounts one of many conversations with fans:

Fan: “Oh, it’s so nice that you two are showing my children real love on television…”
Manzano: “Oh, actually, we aren’t really married.”
Fan: “Oh…well… that’s okay. As long as you really love each other.”

“Hola” scored such high ratings with test audiences that it was decided to finally write a romance between the two. After nearly 20 years of living on the Street, Maria and Luis were married in a memorable and much-publicized 1988 episode. Their union introduced a new cast member two years later, daughter Gabriella, who was played by Manzano’s real-life daughter for the first few years.

Both Delgado and Manzano continue to appear on Sesame Street. Delgado easily claims the longest running part for a Mexican-American actor in a continuing television series. His portrayal of Luis has garnered him universal acclaim and has charmed and inspired viewers for four decades.

After joining the cast with Delgado, Manzano shortly began writing scrips for the series. Currently, she holds 15 Emmy Awards for her outstanding contributions, and shares the same acclaim with Delgado and a few others senior residents who’ve decided they like the street on which they live.

Detecting Sadness in 140 Characters:
Sentiment Analysis and Mourning Michael Jackson on Twitter

By Elsa Kim and Sam Gilbert
with Michael J. Edwards and Erhardt Graeff

Excerpt:

“On June 25, 2009, news reports announced the death of Michael Jackson, leading to a flood of reactions on Twitter. From 9pm—10pm EDT alone, there were over 279,000 tweets about Michael Jackson, or roughly 78 tweets per second. What can be said about this massive body of tweets? What sorts of emotions did people express about Michael Jackson’s death?

Michael Jackson’s death provided occasion for a large wave of digital mourning—that is, the expression of grief online, usually coordinated via a common method or localized to a particular webpage. The latter type of mourning has become popular practice on social networking sites such as MySpace and Facebook, where the profile of the individual who has died is transformed into a digital memorial onto which friends and family leave last goodbyes and testaments.

After Michael Jackson’s death, common digital mourning practices emerged on a variety of platforms. Testimonials and goodbyes poured into Michael Jackson’s Myspace page, Facebook saw a similar influx of grievers on Jackson’s main fan page and in newly created groups. The outpouring of tweets about Michael Jackson contains many similar expressions of grief, but as of yet there has been no research about digital mourning on Twitter.

The body of tweets about Michael Jackson’s death also offers an opportunity to explore strategies for sentiment analysis—the process of determining the attitude of a speaker or speakers towards a particular topic in a large corpus of text. Because of its 140 character limit on messages and the social mores of the platform, Twitter offers challenges to the natural language processing and statistics-based techniques typically used to analyze sentiment.

This report represents a step towards understanding digital mourning and analyzing sentiment on Twitter. After describing our data, this report presents the results of an analysis of sentiment words in that data and findings from hand-coding tweets about Michael Jackson. This closer look at tweets about Jackson’s death provides insights into digital mourning practices on Twitter, assesses the validity of our first attempt at sentiment analysis by zeroing in on a word important to that analysis, and gauges the feasibility of doing larger scale sentiment studies in the future.”

View the complete report here.

“Episode 0862″. Sesame Street. CTW, New York City. 2 Mar. 1976.

Michael Johnson’s experimental typeface for the Katakana language (Japan) is constructed by embedding phonetic pronunciations in each form so non-natives can absorb the language easier.

From boredom to frustration, these children freely express themselves without any fear of judgement. Granted, they’re in privacy, but it demonstrates our journey to adulthood is achieved with a trade-in. Many of our feelings are not received by others through raw expressions, but through carefully composed words — either stated or written.

It’s a bittersweet commencement for a child, opening up new world that pushes us to be better thinkers. At the same time, it opens up a new era of frustration. The first instance I recall was the inevitable book report, which was handed to me in fourth grade:

Describe how the ending made you feel. What did you like? What did you dislike?

You mean we’re going to talk about the book? Don’t we just get that sticker on our chart that says I finished the book? No? Double-spaced? What’s Wite-Out®?

It’s still continuing in my life today, through correspondence between colleagues and clients. How many times have we sat down with determined to write that perfect email hitting all the objectives: providing feedback; explaining one’s thought process; suggesting steps moving forward; a note of praise, something that can be improved, a note of praise.

Sincerely. Thank You. Best. Oh, this is good. Then I sit back and realize it has no emotion whatsoever. They have no idea how frustrated I am over their unwillingness to experiment. They have no idea how tired I am from working past seven o’clock. They have no idea how grateful I am to be going through all this because the project means that much to me.

If only I could send them an expression from one of the kids in the above video, one that says so much with so little. I cannot, however, because somewhere along the line, I traded my crayon box for a thesaurus. And, as much as I leaf through it to find a different color, I know my confusions and concerns can never be expressed better than those seen in the above piece.

Why we accept the loss of that authenticity is bewildering, because it’s what makes us so different and colorful from other living things. Children are the subject of many studies because they possess the full spectrum of human emotion, and exhibit it without the filter we later learn to run each through. A customization we’re predestined for, the screws on that filter tighten with age until they are stripped and the part cannot be removed.

Much of the behavior that entertains us and makes us laugh in this video will gradually be replaced with a kind more composed, more restrained. It reiterates just how precious that brief period in our lives is, when we are truly ourselves.

- Nicholas