The summer, as usual, is rushing by far too fast.  But I've had a good time so far and though I'd put some jpgs on my website for those who might be interested.

    At the end of May I attended a meeting of the Law and Society Association in Miami Beach.  Below is the hotel (Loew's) and my friend, Larry Solan, who teaches at Brooklyn Law School.  Like me, he is a linguist who also has a law degree.  He and I are writing a book together this summer, tentatively entitled: Language on Trial: Linguistics and the Criminal Law.

[note: I have lowered the size and quality of the photos so they won't take forever to load]

The hotel is right on the beach, but the conference had so many exciting presentations that I never had time to do any exploring of the surroundings, or to sample the many excellent restaurants, have a glass of wine or a caffe latte at a sidewalk cafe, or any of those things that tourists normally do.  I did feel that I should have a photo of the beach, however, so I got the hotel concierge, whom I tipped generously, to take a shot of the silver strand for me to take home.

I really don't mind that I didn't have time to check out the beach personally.  For one thing, the water is too warm to really be refreshing.  I mean, this is what the concierge told me.  Also, people drive on the beach, if you can imagine that.  Moreover, people in Miami leave the most incredible amount of trash on the beach when they leave, making that late afternoon stroll more like walking through a scenic garbage dump.

    Fortunately, I was able to stay in Florida for 2 or 3 days after the conference, so I decided to rent a car and drive to the Everglades.  I was very hot, but also very beautiful.  Can you see the allegator in the picture below?

    I rented a kayak and paddled through a lovely stand of mangrove trees:

I ended up at a lake.  On the way back, I almost ran over an allegator.  Fortunately, there were some other kayakers who yelled at me to watch out.  I don't know how allegators react to being paddled over by a kayak, but I imagine they don't like it too much.

In talking to one of the rangers at the Everglades about snorkeling possibilities in the area, I learned about the Dry Tortugas Islands, a national park around 70 miles from Key West by boat.  And Key West was still 200 miles to the south.  With unlimited mileage on my rental car, I decided to go for it.  The boat left early the next morning with me on it.

As you can see, the island has the ruins of a civil-war era fort on it.  The fort was also used as a prison.  Lack of (drinking) water made it difficult to maintain the fort, and it was abandoned.  Below is a photo of the Tortugas islands, taken from the walls of the fort:

The Tortugas are indeed a great place for some snorkeling.  People say that many of the reefs in Florida have been damaged over the years, but the Tortugas were far enough away and are now protected as a national park.

Around the middle of July I went to Gothenburg, Sweden, to participate in a "disputation" (what we would call a dissertation defense) for Biljana Martinovski, a (former) graduate student at the university there.  At Swedish disputations, there is always an opponent, who first spends around 20-30 minutes summarizing the dissertation, and then another hour or two questioning the doctoral candidate about it (in front of all her colleagues, relatives, and friends). Because her dissertation was on the language of Swedish and Bulgarian court proceedings,  I suggested I was like a prosecutor and Biljana was the defendant, who had to defend herself.  Her committee (3 Swedish professors) constituted the jury, and her supervisor was the judge.  But she defended herself quite effectively and passed the ordeal, as her smile at the party afterwards attests.  I must not have been too mean, because she invited me to the party.

Coincidentally, a friend of mine who teaches at the math department at U.C. Santa Barbara, Bjorn Birnir, was also in Gothenburg at the time to give an intense course on some mathmatical subject.  So I stayed on with him a few days after the disputation.

Gothenburg is not too far from Denmark, so Bjorn and I took the ferry to Frederikshavn to explore an area of Denmark around Skagen.  Below is the town of Skagen, which around the turn of the century was an important artists' colony:

Skagen is on the northern tip of the Jutland peninsula, where the Skagerak and the Kattegat meet.  This is a photo of me at the very tip of the peninsula.  The currents are very strong here, so swimming (the thought of which never entered my head here) is forbidden.  Also, the light is considered very special, which is part of what drew all those artists to this area.  Judge for yourself:

There are also some beautiful beaches in the area.  To be honest, though, this was one of the few moments when it wasn't raining during our brief trip.
 

We returned to Sweden on June 23, which happens to be the day of the midsummer, celebrated in all of Scandinavia.  Swedes erect maypoles and dance around them.

The next day I left and headed for the Netherlands.

THE NETHERLANDS

I didn't take many pictures in the Netherlands--I've been there, done that.  And I only stayed a bit over  a week.  During this time, however, it was football (soccer) mania all over Europe.  The Dutch are usually not all that patriotic and have no trouble poking fun at their wet, sanctimonious, overpopulated little country, sometimes calling it a "kikkerlandje" (little land of the frogs).  But the world cup really got them going.  Below are my nephews, Ben and Tim, with the national color (orange, after the House of Orange, the royal family) all over them:

They're great kids, actually, even if they are a bit hyperactive at times.

In order to get a decent price on my plane ticket, I had to stay 3 days longer than I originally planned (Europe was popular this year, and the date of the disputation in Sweden didn't get settled until fairly late).  This turned out to be nice, because the village in which I was born (Toppenhuzen in Frisian; Oppenhuizen in Dutch) had a reunion to which immigrants from all over the word were invited to return.  I was too young to remember much, but a lot of older people knew who I was and had some great stories about how mischievous I could be.  Fortunately, I've gotten over that stage.

During the reunion, there was a traditional Frisian activity called "ringriden", in which a man and woman in a carriage or buggy--usually in traditional costume--ride past a ring that is attached to a wooden hand attached to a pole.  The woman has to snag the ring with a stick while they ride past:

Anyway, I came back to the US just in time for the 4th of July.
 

BACK HOME

So what was Thea doing all the time that I was away?  Who knows--probably having a blast with me out of the way.  Much of the time, however, she was working on the railroad--at her new job at the local railroad museum, to be exact:

The rest of the summer will be spent writing the book that I mentioned.  It may sound boring, but I actually love have a nice block of time in which to do some serious writing.  And I enjoy the topic, which includes things like whether people understand their Miranda warnings and how a threat is different from a warning or prediction.  When and if the book finally comes out, you'll read about it on this website!

When we have a little free time, Thea and I go kayaking at Goleta Beach or the Santa Barbara harbor.  Or I go riding to the bluffs behind our house on my new mountain bike.

Anyway--back to work on the book.