The onset of the A.I. Age will render the Homo Sapiens (‘Thinking/Wise Man’) a museum artifact (?)
***
The Absurd Brachyura that got Clasped in the Chelae of Metaphysics
after The false mirror by Rene Magritte (Belgium), 1928 C.E.
for L. Jacobs & E. Rahim
In the very essence, both the prefixes—mono ‘n poly—bear the same in/ex/trinsic value!
Saad Ali (b. 1980 CE in Okara, Pakistan) – bilingual poet-philosopher & literary translator – has been brought up and educated in the UK and Pakistan. He holds a BSc and an MSc in Management from the University of Leicester, UK. His new collection of poems, Owl Of Pines: Sunyata (AuthorHouse, 2021), is an homage to vers libre, prose poem, and ekphrasis. He has translated Lorette C. Luzajic’s ekphrases into Urdu. His poetry and micro/flash fiction appear in The Ekphrastic Review, The Mackinaw, Synchronized Chaos, Lotus-eater, two Anthologies by Kevin Watt (ed.), and two e-Anthologies at TER. He has been nominated for the Best of the Net Anthology. His ekphrases have been showcased at the Bleeding Borders, Art Gallery of Grande Prairie in Alberta, Canada. Some of his influences include: Vyasa, Homer, Attar, Rumi, Nietzsche, Dostoyevsky, Freud, Jung, Kafka, Tagore, Lispector et alia. He enjoys learning different languages, playing chess, travelling by train, and exploring cities/towns on foot. To learn further about his work, please visit: www.facebook.com/owlofpines.
On June 23 2005 a fellow hiker got a request from The Balance Disorders Lab of Oregon Health & Science University (OHSU) to find males from ages 52-73 to join a balance study with the goal of better treatment of Parkinson’s disease. At that time I was a male of age 62, and it sounded interesting to me. I had not had much knowledge of Parkinson’s, but another fellow hiker had died of it. Another fellow hiker joined the study as well.
How bad is Parkinson’s? In American 60,000 are diagnosed a year. Men are 150% as likely as women to get it. More people have it than MS, MD or ALS combined. The annual cost is $52 billion in the U.S.
The response to my request to volunteer:
The purpose of this research is to determine how deep brain stimulation (DBS) and levodopa influence abnormal patterns of walking and balance movements in patients with Parkinson¹s disease. You are invited as an age-matched control.
You will be asked to undergo clinical tests of your balance and walking (e.g., standing with your eyes closed, standing on one foot, walking, turning, etc.). You will also be asked to stand on a movable platform. On some trials you will be asked to simply stand quietly or asked to take a step. On some trials, the platform will move and you will be asked to try to keep your balance without stepping. During all these trials, your body movements will be recorded by small movement sensors that will be attached to your body. Small self-adhesive electrodes will be placed on the skin over selected muscles of the leg, thigh, and trunk to record muscle activity as you move.
Some criteria that would make you not eligible for such a study would be past orthopedic surgery (hip, knee, back) or any sensation loss in your feet.
I found out later that Levodopa is synthesized into dopamine in the body and is a common drug for Parkinson’s because loss of dopamine neurotransmitter is the cause of Parkinson’s disease.
I passed all of the criteria and set up my first appointment for August 22.
The initial study was at the main OHSU facility at “Pill Hill” because of its location on a hill and its medical facility. The proper name is Marquam Hill after some early Oregonian. I have been told that a railroad bought the area before finding that it was a hill, and then donated it knowing that it was not a good place for a railroad line.
My invitation to a mouth motion study:
Wed 7/27/2005 3:23 PM
You
Dear Mr. Hawley, Thank you for interested (sic) in becoming our control… As you might have heard from xxxx about the DBS study for the Parkinson’s patient, we are a part of the study.. We focused on jaw & facial movement… I am working for Dr. xxxx.. This study has been going on for about 8 years or so… We are testing to see whether the Deep Brain Stimulators (DBS) implanted in the Parkinson’s patient is helping them or not. In doing so, we need control subjects that age & gender matched with our Parkinson’s patient to compare the results… The testing should be done within 1 to 1 1/2 hours.. A small piece of magnetic (sic) is placed on the lower jaw with the head frame around the head to dectect (sic) the jaw & facial movement with the electromagnetic field.. We are asking you to perform the basic jaw movements such as open & close your mouth, bite on cotton roll, chew gum, and bite on carrots…These tasks are easy for normal people, but can be very difficult for Parkinson’s patients… If you are interested in becoming a control subject, I would like to schedule you for August 3rd or August 10th (after August 22nd is okay, too)… I am looking forward to hear from you.. I can be reached at (xxx) xxx-xxxx..
The session was much as described. The interesting part was the apparatus attached to my face. I asked for and got a picture of me during the study. I looked like Hannibal “The Cannibal” Lecter when he was imprisoned.
There was another study on “Pill Hill” which tested reaction time with something like a simple computer game on a computer screen. Both hands were tested and unsurprisingly my non-dominant hand (left) was slower to react. Everything else was at the balance lab.
The balance studies were much as indicated:
They pulled the rug out from under me (actually moving a steel plate without warning). I had a harness on, but didn’t need it. I found that my reaction was to step forward with my dominant right leg and go into a semi-kneeling position. That was completely involuntary; there was no time to think. Digression – I had not thought previously about leg dominance. Most are right legged and right handed. You can test leg dominance by testing which leg you would naturally kick a ball with.
I failed miserably at walking in a straight line while blindfolded.
I was fairly good at walking in a circle and ending where I started while blindfolded.
While walking I counted backwards by threes from a number announced as I started. Example – Researcher 88 go. Me 85, 82, 79, … . This was to test multi-tasking which they said was more difficult for a Parkinson’s brain.
Another test of multi-tasking was starting walking and saying names of either males or females in alphabetic order. Example Abe, Bob, Carl, … .
Staring at a wall or a picture showed in one case that I could fall asleep standing up. Their electronics confirmed my impression. I later used that skill in the fiction “Court” about someone listening to a really boring speech.
Besides the electrodes, light reflectors were attached. They could be used for motion capture like films to aid motion analysis.
There was one quiz about physical abilities such as walking across the room. Every they asked was easy to do except opening a foil packet. After the quiz they told me that it was a test on the quiz taker’s honesty. Everyone has difficulty opening one of those foil packets. Digression – in the last years of my mother’s life, I was in charge of opening jars and other containers. Some were very difficult for me, a fairly healthy sixty something at the time. How are old and weak people supposed to deal?
I had to skip one session because of a very painful foot. Another time I kept quiet and suffered though the session. In 2014 after my part was concluded, I had serious foot and knee problems for months, which were helped by what I call bracelets around my knee. None of my foot or knee problems were caused by the study.
Age, height and weight were used to match me with me with a person with Parkinson’s. I believe that my experience with yoga and as a hiker and a park steward probably made me better than average with balance. Those activities require a lot of experience balancing and falling.
Occasionally there were interns who helped and learned. They were from different countries, but all were young and attractive. The Italian was complimentary about my muscle tone and conductivity. I would have been more pleased if it had been a she rather than a he, but still good.
A part of the study took place outside of the lab. For several months my wife and I kept a falls diary. It was for detailing all of my falls and near falls for the time that it was maintained. At first I was very careful not to fall, but I was told to behave normally. With my park stewardship and hiking, I was frequently on vine covered hillsides which could be wet and slippery. As a result, I fell a lot. I inferred that they were looking for falls around the house, so results surprised them. Every time that I reported my many falls, they would ask what drugs I was taking. My most extreme report was on a hot day when I was dehydrated. The terrain was treacherous and I had a very painful foot. I had three falls in half an hour. My reports would have more extreme if I had reported “near falls”.
There was a get together which included both controls and Parkinson’s people. I made the insensitive mistake of introducing myself to a victim of the disease as a “normal” rather than a control subject. The investigators summarized the results of the study. It showed that, despite many benefits of DBS for signs and symptoms of Parkinson’s disease, jaw movements and balance are not improved, and may worsen after surgery.
I missed out on a potential brain study because of scheduling and equipment problems. When I was available, the equipment wasn’t and when the equipment worked, I wasn’t available.
At the end of the study we were treated to review of the results.
After my participation in 2012, I ran into a few people who had Parkinson’s. One was in my high school class. He had stem cell treatment, but died about a year ago. The husband of someone in the same class had DBS. Because he was bald, the implant on his head was easily visible. Both a grade school crush of mine and a neighbor attended specialized Parkinson’s classes at our gym recently.
I’ve done several volunteer things – flower basket hanging, China Camp docent on the San Francisco Bay, wheelchair jockey / unpaid escort / pusher at a local hospital and the aforementioned park stewardship. The balance study was the most entertaining – I never knew what would happen when I showed up – and the best potential for helping mankind.
After all these years my remembrance is a bit fuzzy, but I have consulted all of my correspondence with OHSU and talked to my live in editor.
Since I wrote this OHSU has solicited me to have my head examined in another study. This study asks the question “Do social contacts, particularly conversations help the brain”. I’m probably qualified for this study because I don’t have many close contacts, avoid long conversations, hate phones, and never text. The study involves lots of phone or video conversations, so maybe I’d get a better brain,but I could not schedule all the calls so it didn’t work.
Shukurova Sevinch
Student, Uzbekistan World Language University
sevinchbahodirovna2005@gmail.com
THE CLASSIFICATION OF COMPOSITE SENTENCES AND ITS TYPES
Abstract: Although the sentence is a fundamental unit of syntax, there is no universal definition for it. This article examines the theory of syntactic units, mainly describing the classification of composite sentences like complex and compound types.
Keywords: subject-predicate units, syntax, syntactical unit, independent clauses, semi-composite sentence.
Introduction
Syntax is a part of grammar, which deals with ways of combining words into phases in a language (Biber 2002;460), i.e. combinations of individual lexemes arranged according to certain principles, which determine the length and meaning of the phrase through a proper choice of morphological partners. The most important phrase is a sentence – a relatively complete and independent communicative unit, which usually realizes a speaker’s communicative intentions and contains one or more subject-predicate units, present or implied.
Sentences fall into simple and composite depending on the number of Subject-predicate units in them. A sentence with one Subject-Predicate unit is called a simple sentence, while a sentence with two or more Subject-Predicate units is called a composite sentence. The word “composite” is used by H.Poutsma1 as a common term for both the compound and complex sentence and it may be accepted by those schools that adhere to trichomotic classification of sentences into simple, compound and complex. This classification established in the English prescriptive grammar of the mid-19th century and accepted and developed by the authors of the classical scientific grammar remains the prevalent scheme of the structural classification of sentences in the grammars of all types in the modern period. A very important syntactic unit, containing a subject and a predicate.
A clause in a composite sentence is similar in its structure to a simple sentence though it acts as a part of a bigger syntactical unit. There are two main ways of linking clauses in a composite sentence: coordination and subordination.
Coordination is a way of linking grammatical elements making them equal in rank.
Subordination is a way of linking grammatical elements makes one of them dependent upon the other (or they are mutually dependent). (Kobrina 2006;421)
There are three types of composite sentences in Modern English:
1.The compound sentence contains two or more independent clauses with no dependent one.
2.The complex sentence contains one or more independent clauses. The latter usually tells something about the main clause and is used as a part of speech or as a part of sentence.
3.The semi-composite sentence combines the two previous types. The compound-complex sentences are those which have at least two independent clauses and at least one dependent (subordinate) clause in its structure: Blair found herself smiling at him and she took the letter he held out to her.
In terms of compound sentence, it actually consists of two or more clauses of equal rank, which form one syntactical whole in meaning and intonation. Clauses in a compound sentence are joined by means of coordination, so they are called coordinate. There are two ways of linking clauses in a compound sentence: syndetic and asyndetic. When clauses are joined with a help of a connector, such as and, but, or, etc., the linking is called syndetic:
The cloud parted and the increase of light made her look up.o
He wants her to live in the towns, but she only cares for woods.
Do you want to leave now or would you rather set off later?
I heard a noise so I got out of bed and turned the light on.
When clauses are joined without a connector, by means of a comma or semicolon, etc. – asyndetic:
Man wants to love mankind; woman wants to love one man.
The church lay up by the railway, the farm was down by the water meadows.
Rickie had warned her; now she began to warn him.
Her attention was drawn to the other messy areas in the bedroom; to the left was a closet with louvered doors open and clothing spilling out
Syndetic coordination is realized by a number of connectors – conjuctions, such as and, but, or, nor, etc., or by conjuctive adverbs, such as moreover, besides, however, yet, still, otherwise, therefore, etc. In speaking coordinate clauses are separated by pauses, while in writing they may be marked off by a comma, a semicolon, a colon or occasionally a dash.
Lets move on the other type of composite sentence – complex sentence, which consist of an independent clause ( also called a main or principal clause) and at least one dependent ( or subordinate) clause:
All good things come to those (2) that wait.
Dependent clauses can be joined to the main clause asyndetically, i.e. without linking elements (She says she loves me), or syndetically, i.e. by means of subordinators.
The class of subordinators includes subordinating conjuctions (as if, because, although, unless, whether, since, etc.) and connectives, i.e. conjuctive pronouns ( who, whom, whose, which, what, whoever, whatever) and conjunctive adverbs (how, when, where, why). Subordinating conjuctions have the sole function of joining clauses together, whereas connectives not only join clauses together, but also have a syntactic function of their own within the clauses they introduce:
I didn’t know whether they had rented that house. (a conjunction)
I didn’t know who had rented that house (a connective, serving as a subject to had rented)
The components of some conjunctions are spaced apart, with one component found in the main clause and the other, in the subordinate clause: no sooner … than, barely … when, the … the. Subordinating conjunctions introduce subordinate clauses. Since 1965 or so, the term “complementiser” has been used in one of the major theories of syntax not just for subordinating conjunctions introducing complement clauses but for all subordinating conjunctions.
The semi-composite sentence is to be defined as a sentence with more than one predicate lines which are expressed in fusion. The semi-composite sentence displays an intermediary syntactic character between the composite sentence and the simple sentence.
Semi composite sentences can be of two types:
' - Semi-compound (e.g. He looked at me and went away.)
- Semi-complex (e.g. The man stood silent.)
One of the representatives of structural linguists Ch. Fries considers two kinds of composite sentences: sequence and included sentence. Example:
1.The government has set up an agency called Future builders.
2. It has a certain amount of funds to make loans to social enterprises.
These two sentences are connected with each other. The first sentence is a situation sentence and the second one is a sequence sentence since it develops the idea of the situation sentence. The most significant difference between these function words as signals of “inclusion” and the forms given above as signals of sequence lies in the fact that these function words of inclusion at the beginning of a sentence look forward to a coming sentence unit, while the signals of sequence look backward to the preceding sentence unit.
Conclusion it is difficult to find an opinion which is shared by the majority of linguists. We must clearly understand that the composite sentence as such is part and parcel of the general syntactic system of language, and its use is an inalienable feature of any normal expression of human thought in intercourse.
References :
1. Gerda M, Valerija N, Jurgita T. English Syntax: The Composite Sentence. The mood. Vilnius, 2010.
2. Iriskulov A.T. Theoretical Grammar of English. Tashkent, 2006
3. Старостина Ю.С. The Composite Sentence. Самара, 2005
4. Ubaydullayeva D. R. The Theory of Composite Sentences and Complex Sentences in Modern Linguistics. International conference on advance research in humanities, New York, USA. 2022
5. Jim Miller. An Introduction to English Syntax. Edinburgh University Press. 2002
6. https://studfile.net
Absence of Justice
If justice is kicked out of a society
If the social class, offends
And escapes justice
If money transforms to gum and seals the mouths
Of the jurists and law enforcers
If the judicial system is sick
Bad deeds, spread quick quick
Suffering ravages commoners
Great nations of the world
Are places of no nonsense
Where wrong doers
Receive full wrath of the law
Regardless of their social status
Saboteurs are caged.
That's why they are great
No nation can be great If corrupt elements,
Are bigger than the law
Evils spread fast, when evil doers aren't punished
Unemployed, Dating, Self-Esteem Issues
I wish I was naked with you,
but when I am naked with you
I wish I was invisible.
But you might find me by touch,
so I wish I were room temperature.
But you might find me by smell
so I wish I was sleeping in your bed for a week beforehand.
But you might find me by sound
so I wish to hold my breath for as long as it takes
for you to fall asleep waiting for me to come back
from wherever you think I vanished to.
But when I reappear, I would have no present
and you would think I had gone somewhere and returned empty-handed
and that empty-handed sheepishness
is why my self-esteem is so low.
That is why I am not answering your phone calls.
Disney women of the 1980s
The women of Disney’s Saturday morning cartoons were not princesses.
They lived serious lives and were empowered, but somehow we have forgotten them. We should remember three: Gadget Hackwrench, Rebecca Cunningham, Sunni Gummi.
Gadget Hackwrench was a S.T.E.M. gearhead who maintained an airship. She soldered spy equipment. She could drive, off-road, every vehicle that fit a mouse. She dressed in mechanic’s coveralls and was the only Rescue Ranger who wasn’t obsessed with their own image.
Rebecca Cunningham was a single parent who ran a shipping company. She owned a plane. She masterminded supply chain management, international trade regulations, and her daughter’s PTA. Her main employee was a man who starred in a movie without a single female protagonist and she was uncompromisingly his boss. And she did all of these things on screen.
Sunni Gummi infiltrated human castles and posed as a princess, boy crazy and a bit servile to a blonde rich girl until she learned some Hawthornian lessons about life. She became a talented squire, and devised plans on behalf of teenage girls that outwitted politicians, patricians, and her own favoured brothers. She was a savant flute player. She fought with monsters, bare-fisted.She fought with men, naively, but unflinchingly, a pawn played by an older human princess to deflect the violence of Machiavels.
But she represented more than a throwaway piece because no mere pawn could do these things in an urbane world and return home to a rustic family of druids and Gnostic secrets with dignity.
They are not prissy movie princesses. The role model women of Disney were everyday women of Saturday morning.
Let’s talk about working class breakfast cereal and break the chains of royal popcorn. Let’s ask where these women vanished to when we went to college.
Why did we stay silent about their absences when they were replaced in the 1990s by shows named after men like Squarepants, Doug, and other Nickelodeon disappointments?
Why did we let our fascination transfix us on the vapid Disney instead of the empowering one?
Two Magics
Your fairy godmother has a spell to give you an enchanted pizza topping in your suburban driveway. She throws sparkles over a semper vivum.
It stretches and inflates into an egg on a stem. Voila Bipitty bopitty artichoke. A prince steps out of his Range Rover with a Vessi in his handcasting chill.
Netflix looks around.
Terry Trowbridge has appeared in Synchronized Chaos before. He has some grant funding from the Ontario Arts Council and hopes that more poets can benefit from their programs in the next cycle (and Terry votes).
Sure, they stepped into the line of fire for a moment
but, at the sound of the bang,
they fell away,
left you exposed,
just the way you wanted it.
In the end,
you were so sore and tired and pain-wrecked,
you picked up that revolver yourself,
fired away until a bullet found its mark.
Come morning,
they found you in your bed.
Dead of old age was the conclusion.
But dead of what it takes to die
was the truth.
PAWN
He didn’t wake up one morning
and say to himself, “Yeah that’s me.
I’m the runt of the chessboard.”
He’d been small and powerless as a baby
The years hadn’t changed the situation.
He had his own house — more of a crib
really – with a mortgage looking over it.
And a wife and two kids to share
in his lowly status:
Plus extended family — a hierarchy
that forever doomed him to a bottom rung.
And a job that shunted him this way,
that way — atypical pawn – of limited
movement, potential, disposal,
and no chance of being a king.
The city with its. roads, its traffic signs,
its cops, its bankers,
only existed so as to tell him what to do.
He attended church to confirm his insignificance.
And played cards with his buddies
though even the winners didn’t really win.
Alcohol found him an easy mark.
So did reality TV.
And then-the doctor’s found
cancer in his brain —
inoperable and in charge.
THE SUN’S PROXY
So little of the sun’s rays
make it to the attic window
and the subsequent shine
does no more than
illuminate some flies,
living and dead.
The past lives here
so it’s only right
that brightness look elsewhere
for its truth
and that a pervading dimness
tends to the fully-packed cardboard boxes,
the over-stuffed metal trunk.
I come up here with a flashlight,
so that I control memory’s narrative,
glossy up an ancient photograph
yet leave a wedding dress in shadow,
glimmer off a bronze baby shoe
but let sleeping love-letters lie.
In this cramped space,
I am the sun,
uncaring of a jigsaw puzzle
but stopping to polish up
a favorite model MG sports car,
shunning school report cards
while bringing out the colors
in a far-too-small-for-me
hand-painted psychedelic shirt.
The true sun
must concern itself
with the limited world of insects.
In low-ceilinged storage space,
the life I’ve lived
revolves around me.
TO BE WHAT THEY’RE LOOKING FOR
A beautiful beach day,
perfect for the tan that will give me
that G Q look just in time
for Miss Right – the phantom lady.
Sea breeze is blowing,
my air’s full of sand
and smells like salt –
hope that doesn’t chase away this woman
who’s not about to show up anyhow.
I tried hawking myself
in the nighttime,
but neon always focused
on my worst side
and shadows had their own dark things
to say about my character.
I’m a compendium
of fidgeting theories,
in constant search for that holy grail –
my best aspect.
What if that special someone prefers
natural off-white to bronze?
And I’m not so muscular.
Is my bathing suit just being honest
or is it asking for trouble?
I could dress in a suit
and look as square as six Salvation Army generals.
Or shop where the kids shop
and come off as a survivor of a time-machine crackup.
Some things they say should be left to chemistry.
So ultra violet rays contribute to oxidative stress,
melanocytes produce eumelanin.
Really, I’m doing all I can.
John Grey is an Australian poet, US resident, recently published in New World Writing, North Dakota Quarterly and Tenth Muse. Latest books, ”Between Two Fires”, “Covert” and “Memory Outside The Head” are available through Amazon. Work upcoming in Haight-Ashbury Literary Journal, Birmingham Arts Journal, La Presa and Shot Glass Journal.
