On a completely different subject, I’ve always liked Victor Buono as a character actor. But the Pfft is wrong. There is no way in hell he is younger than me.
chigau (...---...)says
I just read in pffft that octopuses are “honorary vertebrates” in the UK.
chigau (...---...)says
The Sailor
Are you sitting down?
Victor Buono is… well, he’s … dead.
Sorry.
I’ve been largely nonpresent recently, owing to the fact that FTB is blocked at work and it’s been election season at home, so probably I wasn’t missed… but I’m just checking in to say “howdy” after 2 weeks without internet (or TV or phone… and the first 8 days without power) after the freak winter storm that put 90+% of Connecticut (and FSM knows how much of the rest of New England) out of commission.
I dislike referring to civilian spaces as a “war zone,” because I fear it minimizes the experience of actual war… but in this case, I can’t think of a better metaphor: The sporadic sharp cracks of breaking trees combined with the flashes of arcing power lines looked and sounded like nothing so much as flurries of gunfire, and while the “rubble” was broken trees instead of broken bricks, mortar, and steel, in the morning my yard — and my whole street — evoked nothing more than it did a battlefield.
With all that, though, the family is all safe and our material losses are small: Some spoiled food, a dented hood and cracked windshield on one car, and some minor cosmetic damage to our vinyl siding, all covered by insurance. Plus which, I had a good excuse to buy a chainsaw!
I did, however, miss 2 weeks of Rachel Maddow podcasts (unlike other podcasts, it seems only the most recent episode is available for download), and that truly sucks!
I hope all the other Pharynguloids who were in the path of the storm are safe and secure.
ahs ॐ i am so all-american i'd sell you suicidesays
I wanted this to be more novel or infuriating than it was.
*sigh*
Anyway. Language? I’m against it.
ahs ॐ i am so all-american i'd sell you suicidesays
Bill:
I’ve been largely nonpresent recently, owing to the fact that FTB is blocked at work
Would you get in trouble at work for circumventing their filters? I’m sure the geeks of TET can find a solution.
If teh xtians can wait 2000 years for an imaginary god, I can wait an extra fortnight for The Real Goddess ™.
@ Randall Munroe
My favourite map projection is along the lines of this one … World map linky. What does this say?
…………
[Strunk and White]
Real drug culture references here. “White” is obvious. “Strunk” is when one is SToned and dRUNK at the same time. (Dutch: “Stronken”). Don’t try this at home kids.
Many slang terms survive in this variety, for instance testa “shard” which became replaced the very common word caput “head” in Gaul.
This is very interesting/confusing to me. Das es caput = This is broken (in my very limited archaic german vocabulary)
changeable monikersays
“When economic interest is seen behind the political clauses of the Constitution, then the document becomes not simply the work of wise men trying to establish a decent and orderly society, but the work of certain groups trying to maintain their privileges, while giving just enough rights and liberties to enough of the people to ensure popular support.”
Zinn, A People’s History of the United States
Would you get in trouble at work for circumventing their filters? I’m sure the geeks of TET can find a solution.
Any active attempt to circumvent site blocking probably would get me in trouble (I don’t know how effective it is, but my employer takes computer security pretty seriously, and not without reason); in any case, my previous level of Pharyngula activity probably skated right up to the edge of our acceptable-use policies anyway. I could always justify it to myself — I tried to read and post mostly while other processes were running; I’ve put in years of uncompensated overtime during my career (such is life of the salaried non-exempt employee); the occasional mental “break” actually improves my productivity — but I’m not sure everyone at work would’ve agreed.
Eventually I’ll rearrange my home life to incorporate more Pharyngula time (not to mention my own blog[s]!), but… well, I love this place like a second home, but commenting on a blog would be a pretty stupid thing to lose my job over.
ahs ॐ i am so all-american i'd sell you suicidesays
Bill:
I did, however, miss 2 weeks of Rachel Maddow podcasts (unlike other podcasts, it seems only the most recent episode is available for download)
Nah, there’s more. Looking in the current xml file for the podcast, we see a distinctive bit of filename: “11-11-2011-200712” (that’s 20h 07m 12s, the time the file was uploaded to MSNBC’s servers, rather unpredictable).
the occasional mental “break” actually improves my productivity — but I’m not sure everyone at work would’ve agreed.
In my experience this is perfectly true. I go out of my way to break up my chain of thought. To break up the effect of “harping on one string”. How many hours can one really “be creative” in any given day. Its not like working on a magneto line. Sadly, too few people seem to acknowledge this.
(Bertrand Russell wrote for two hours a day. I understand that code programmers can work effectively for about four hours a day. Check out the “Paretto Principle”: Linky to Pffft. Although it relates to wealth distribution, a similar principle seems to appear with individual work efficiency. Only a small part of your day will add the bulk of the value.)
Carliesays
Ooo, a Marjanović and a Dauphin in the same day! Double happy dance. And hugs. (and I’m really sorry about the house damage)
cicely, Inadvertent Phytocidal Maniacsays
DDMFM! *hugs & chocolate*
And some for Bill Dauphin, as well! :)
–
My favourite map projection is along the lines of this one … World map linky. What does this say?
It says that your world is decidedly mature across the hips.
–
Do I know you? I suspect I’ve missed some nym-drift over the last few months. Anyway, thanks for the links, but I should’ve been clearer: I subscribe to the audio podcast of TRMS (actually, I’ve been listening to Rachel via podcast since the old Air America radio show, before she hooked up with MSNBC), and listen to it on my iPod nano (which I’ve just learned is being recalled, so I can get a new [prolly factory refurbed] one for free) at work. It’s the audio version that I haven’t been able to find archives for. I could probably figure out how to strip out the audio from video archives, but the truth is I have a hard enough time keeping up with the daily flow of podcasts I listen to, let alone working off a 2 week backlog.
****
Tethys:
Yah, I’m happy Anya won. Perhaps her stuff is a bit one-note, but another way of saying that is “focused,” and I found her aesthetic quite beautiful. So what if she’s not the greatest at sewing or the “engineering” of making clothes work? Someone with a true design sense — which I always thought Anya had — can always hire people to make her designs work.
As for the other finalists, I thought Josh besmirched that noble name, and his design sense was all over the place (I couldn’t believe any of the judges actually liked those lace-up bicycle shorts!). Kimberly’s stuff was sometimes fun to look at, but always seemed a bit down-market from what the judges usually like: It struck me as what you’d see as the “high-fashion” choice at a discount chain like Target or Kmart… which is not a bad thing, of course, but not what PR is usually looking for.
The biggest shock to me was that Viktor didn’t make the final runway. I’d had him pegged as the one to beat for most of the season, but he just lost it at the end.
ahs ॐ i am so all-american i'd sell you suicidesays
Do I know you? I suspect I’ve missed some nym-drift over the last few months.
Grammar RWA / strange gods before me / ad hominum salvator
The ॐ is supposed to be the giveaway, if your computer displays it.
Therrinsays
So I’m guessing the spam filter has been disabled. o.o
ahs ॐ i am so all-american i'd sell you suicidesays
Anyway, thanks for the links, but I should’ve been clearer: I subscribe to the audio podcast of TRMS
The solution is basically the same.
MSNBC-MADDOW-NETCAST-MP3.xml gives “11-11-2011-191950”, google finds
Don’t worry, it’s not bad. A branch fell on the power and cable wires that run from the street to the house, and in the process of ripping down the conduit that ran down the outside of the house to the meter box, took a couple silver-dollar sized chunks out of the siding. It’s mostly cosmetic, and insurance will pay for it (after deductible, of course).
Two houses on my street were actually hit by falling trees (though even they were relatively lucky, compared to what could’ve happened), and two other families lost their above-ground pools, so I actually fee quite fortunate.
But at least nobody on my street gassed themselves to death by using a charcoal grill indoors to keep the house warm… which several people in CT did.
Did y’all get any of the storm? Because I had no internet or TV in the aftermath, and most of the coverage in the local papers was… well, local… I don’t have a real sense of how the rest of the northeast fared.
So, now Newt Gingrich is leading in the Republican polls. I’m getting kind of tired of this. When are they just going to settle for Romney?
Tethyssays
Bill Dauphin
I was surprised and pleased that Anya won. I find the fact that she can make such amazing clothes with very little sewing experience to be nothing short of phenomenal. It may be on the one note side, but all of it was clothes women would actually wear.
I don’t really care for Kimberly’s design aesthetic. Her pants are amazing, but all those metallics and loud color combinations look very cheap to me.
Josh wins for the most annoying, passive aggressive contestant. Those shorts were hideous, and few women would want to wear his clothes. When he did design something wearable like the hand painted circle skirt or the jacket in his final collection, it was a variation on a classic.
Victor was my favorite to win. But his final collection had schizophrenia. There were some great pieces, and then there were the all black, see-through pieces. Career woman by day, vampire prostitute by night? His tailoring skills were the best, but his idea of what women wear was way off base.
Father Ogvorbis, OM: Delightfully Machiavelliansays
When are they just going to settle for Romney?
When either of two things happens: either all the other GOP candidates invalidate themselves through self-inflicted wounds or Romney converts to some form of evangelical Christianity, abandoning his Mormonism. I know people, evangelicals, who think that Romney’s policies (what he advocates now, not his Mass governor policies) are the bee’s knees, but refuse to even consider someone who is part of a mind-control cult.
Yes, they say things like that without cracking up in peals of laughter. Their irony metre was obliterated years ago.
Jacsays
Or here is a much (much) better version of Hugh Laurie’s Protest Song. (there are a few about) I love it.
Tethyssays
When are they just going to settle for Romney
When they pull their heads out of their asses? Running Romney means they have no viable excuse to oppose Obama’s heathcare plan.
It’s a lovely predicament. :evil uninsured laugh;
Mattirsays
So my wonderful homeowners association today announced that the board of directors would exercise sole and unchallengable discretion over who gets to use the community building, based on whether they view the member who wants to use it, and the function, as “divisive.” An effort to change the bylaws of our homeowners association to specify that paid up members be allowed to rent the common space for “any lawful purpose” failed, even after I made a quite impassioned (and loud) speech about how the HOA is effectively a quasi-governmental organization and that whether or not they recognize it, what they are doing is censoring speech.
The good news is that I live on a county road and thus the organization has no legal way to force me to pay dues, even though I have out of civic-mindedness. (The folks who live on private roads have to pay dues, or at least reach a financial accommodation with the HOA when they refinance their mortgage or sell their homes, or the HOA can refuse to write a letter guaranteeing right of access via said private roads.)
And yes, this issue arose because the board announced that it would not permit a legal use of the property by a group of homeowners because another group of homeowners disapproved of the first group of homeowners’ decision to coordinate a managed deer hunt. (We have more than TEN TIMES the deer population that ecologists say would be healthy for this ecosystem. Whole species of understory wildflowers have vanished in the last 30 years as a result.) It was truly touching to see the anti-hunt members dressing up their bullying behavior as “consensus” and “process” and “community building” and not addressing my concerns at all.
Why yes, I’m figuring out ways to piss them off furthercause more trouble, why do you ask?
Well, Romney has the best chance against Obama. So maybe I should just hope that the Republicans lose their collective shit and pick Perry or Bachmann.
I’m not a huge fan of everything Obama has done/ not done, but I’m pretty sure he’s better than letting Republicans control the House and the white house. I don’t even want to begin to imagine what trouble they’ll get up to without the threat of veto.
So, now Newt Gingrich is leading in the Republican polls. I’m getting kind of tired of this. When are they just going to settle for Romney?
The longer it takes, the better I like it. The nominee is going to be Romney, of course, because every other candidate is [even more] fatally flawed… but the longer it takes for them to rally ’round him, the weaker he’ll be in the general election.
Romney actually scares me, in two different ways: First, I think he’d be the hardest to beat, just because he’s not screamingly, obviously batshit insane or transparently sleazy like all the other contenders (i.e., all the things Republicans hate about him make him more palatable to centrists and conservative Dems). Second, because he’s fundamentally an empty suit, he’s the least likely to stand up to the far-right Congress that would certainly come with an Republican win in the presidential race.
Any scenario that has any Republican winning the White House puts us — perhaps irrevocably — on the fast track to a patriarchal, sex-negative, anti-choice (maybe all three of those are fundamentally the same, eh?), fuck-the-poor neo-theocracy. If we don’t vigorously support Dems — even imperfect ones — up and down the ballot in 2012, I seriously wonder if we’ll ever get another chance to. If that sounds melodramatic to you, just consider the undisguised voter suppression efforts being carried out under the color of law by Republican-dominated state legislatures all across the country. People are fighting back through recalls and protests, but if the whole federal government (including SCOTUS, after a few years) were under right-wing control, most routes of redress could be shut down.
I fervently hope this is just me hyperventilating a bit, but I keep thinking of Heinlein’s If This Goes On….
Rey Foxsays
but the longer it takes for them to rally ’round him, the weaker he’ll be in the general election.
I’m hoping for Romney to be this year’s John Kerry in that exact way.
(Of course, Kerry arguably won that election.)
Algernonsays
Actually to me Huntsman is the most centrist of the GOP candidates.
chigau (...---...)says
Mattir
I didn’t understand any of that but good luck with the creeping facism.
And yes, this issue arose because the board announced that it would not permit a legal use of the property by a group of homeowners because another group of homeowners disapproved of the first group of homeowners’ decision to coordinate a managed deer hunt. (We have more than TEN TIMES the deer population that ecologists say would be healthy for this ecosystem. Whole species of understory wildflowers have vanished in the last 30 years as a result.) It was truly touching to see the anti-hunt members dressing up their bullying behavior as “consensus” and “process” and “community building” and not addressing my concerns at all.
And oddly enough, they probably think their anti-hunt stance is good environmentalism. We moved into their habitat, we displaced and extinguished all their natural predators, and having too many deer around too many cars isn’t good for anyone, but oh no! We mustn’t interfere with Mother Nature!
Is that their position, just about?
cicely, Inadvertent Phytocidal Maniacsays
I fervently hope this is just me hyperventilating a bit, but I keep thinking of Heinlein’s If This Goes On….
You and me both, Bill.
–
Dr. Audley Z. Darkheart OM, liar and scoundrelsays
theophontes:
If teh xtians can wait 2000 years for an imaginary god, I can wait an extra fortnight for The Real Goddess ™.
Hans Gruber?
:P
Josh is just torturing you, isn’t he? I’ve already gotten half a dozen loaves of bread out of Hans Gruber (née Phoenicia) and I’m making more later this week!
Cooking question! I’m going to be making chili for Mr Darkheart’s family this coming Sunday. Naturally, half of them don’t eat red meat and half of them don’t eat poultry. *sigh* Anyway, I’m making one batch with ground turkey– should I treat it any differently than ground beef or can I just directly substitute one for the other?
Algernonsays
Either one is a Morman though, but the Republicans will vote for Romney if it comes down to it. Which could make him a threat.
Any scenario that has any Republican winning the White House puts us — perhaps irrevocably — on the fast track to a patriarchal, sex-negative, anti-choice (maybe all three of those are fundamentally the same, eh?), fuck-the-poor neo-theocracy.
Don’t forget homophobia!
Rev. BigDumbChimpsays
Actually to me Huntsman is the most centrist of the GOP candidates.
Me too, which means he stands zero chance
Algernonsays
Oh God! I refuse to buy a house with an HOA. This is part of the reason I live where I do. I am totally ok with the trade-off.
Is that legal? While I grok that the community building is private property, isn’t each dues-paying HOA member in effect a co-owner? By what right do the other co-owners deny a member’s access to hir own property?
Of course, you’ve got literally infinitely more lawyers in your family than I have in mine, so I’m sure you’ve thought of these angles. And maybe it’s just not worth fighting through the courts over. Still, I can see how this would really frost your cookies.
Interestingly, until I got to your third paragraph, I was sure this was going to be a dispute over some atheist/skeptical gathering; I never would’ve guess it would be anti-hunters leading the charge. It just goes to show you, it’s always somethin’!
and in most written languages, the same is true of the vast majority of dialects.
The language v. dialect debate is fought much more fiercely by laypeople (it ultimately being a political question) than linguists. To linguist any language variety can be studied in its own right.
In German today, that’s ficken. If the most likely hypothesis on its origin is true (namely that it’s cognate with the English one), we’d expect it to be fücken; apparently the word died out in just those (few!) dialects that have – like Standard German – kept ö and ü instead of turning them into e and i and has entered today’s arguably standard language from a dialect that has undergone this sound change. May be impossible to test due to lack of written attestations either from dialects with the sound change before they had undergone the sound change or from dialects without the sound change before they lost the word.
What about Irish (?) feck. Though looking at Wiki, that seems from a different root. There are some words in Standard German that have come from other German dialects, though I can mainly think of Low German ones right now, like Lippe v. Lefze.
I can’t resist explaining the details! :-) One of the Old High German words for war was werra. I gather the Latin word bellum died out because the western Roman Empire had such a long period of peace before the invasions of Germanic peoples that brought the word werra with them. By that time, Latin had already turned [w] into [v], so the closest thing to the foreign [w] was [gʷ] (spelled gu, and changed into [g] in later French).
Other examples being guèpe “wasp”, guarde (cp. German “Warte”) etc.
About the bolded part: where did you hear that? That is extremely unlikely. A word like that doesn’t fall out of existence because of 200 years of relative peace (Pax Romana wasn’t exactly devoid of any kind of war). People would still remember past wars, and the concept of war, and also metaphorically, so that’s really not a tenable scenario. The usual hypothesis is that due to morphological simplification, the word “bellum” had become confounded with “bellus” ‘beautiful’, originally a diminuitive of bonus “good” (both becoming “bellu” > “bello”). (A similar idea can be said of equus “horse” that had become homophonous with aequus “equal, same”, though I imagine slang terms for horses can always arise independently).
Or the people of Baden and Württemberg. Not that they (probably) ever hated each other that much, but the subtle dialect boundary between them only formed when their, uh, provinces (within Germany!) were merged in the 20th century.
Not the same thing as Serbs and Croats (or Hindi and Urdu, or Bokmål and Nynorsk, though this is a bit different as Nynorsk was pretty much a planned variety). I was specifically talking about consciously making your speech varieties more dissimilar. The case of Swabian and Badic (Badian, whatever the English term is, though it’s a geographic term anyways, as the linguistic term is Low Alemannic) is different, they both belong to Alemannic, just as Alsatian and Swiss German do. Back in the day when people were less mobile, it was a normal process of dialects growing further and further apart with time. Dialect boundaries are also constantly changing, with a lot of isoglosses to take into account, so I’m pretty sure there were isoglosses setting Swabian apart prior to the 20th century.
But let’s just take the major sound change: Are you saying that Swabian dipthongised MHG û, î, unlike all other Alemannic dialects which retain them as monophthongs, only in the 20th century?
E.g.
“house”: Sw Haus, AP Huus
“ice”: Sw Eis, AP Iis
“time”: Sw Zwid, AP Ziit
This is cited as one reason Swabian is often set apart from “Alemannic proper”.
So David, what’s the reason Good Friday is a public holiday for non-Catholics only in Austria, or to be more precise, for members of certain denominations, excluding the RCC (or so sez the Pfft)?
– how do RCC members get to take off on Good Friday? Are they really disadvantaged here?
– do atheists get off on that day?
*)which reminds me: welcome back John, too!
Rev. BigDumbChimpsays
HOAs annoy me. I think I spoke about the head of the HOA and the alligators and marshmallows
chigau (...---...)says
Don’t cook the turkey as long as you would beef.
And use thighs and drumsticks, if possible.
Actually to me Huntsman is the most centrist of the GOP candidates.
Probably so, and his resume is at least as strong as Romney’s (both former goobers, so it comes down to Ambassador versus Olympics)… but for whatever reason, Romney is a Legitimate Candidate™ and Huntsman is not. Thus, Romney is the sanest/most centrist Republican who actually stands a chance of getting the nomination… and therefore, the most dangerous candidate in the race (IMHO, of course).
I tend to think of patriarchalism, sex negativity, misogyny, and homophobia and “of a kind.” They’re distinct social phenomena, of course, but, I think, all expressions of fundamentally the same deep-seated meanness and hatefulness of spirit. Each, in its own way, is about suppression of personhood.
Dr. Audley Z. Darkheart OM, liar and scoundrelsays
chigau:
I’m not grinding the meat myself– I’m just grabbing whatever ground turkey they have at the supermarket.
But otherwise, thank you! I’ll keep a closer eye on the turkey pot. :)
Mattirsays
@Alison Meirs:
Yep, that’s about it. Those of us who participate in the hunt are bloodthirsty sadists who get off on killing animals and who are particularly welcoming towards beer drinking men with guns. Basically I live among the crunchy green types who are so scathingly described in David Barron’s great book about mountain lions in Colorado, The Beast in the Garden.
The amusing thing is that the people who are so violently opposed to the community hunt are specifically angry about the organized nature of it. They acknowledge that hunting is legal, that gun hunting is legal, and that landowners can invite any old fool they want to hunt on their land. I have no idea exactly what the issue with the community hunt is, since we use only certified and safety-screened/background checked hunters, the same group of hunters that local parks authorities use for their managed hunts on park lands. These guys are WAY safer and more competent than the stereotyped beer-drinking bozo. And we keep very careful records about the health and condition of the deer killed, report that information to state biologists, donate virtually all of the meat to the local food bank in the form of hamburger, and compost all of the field-dressing waste at a local CSA amid several metric fucktons of leaves, to provide carbon to balance all that nitrogen… It would be quite difficult to do it in a MORE responsible fashion.
I’m contemplating reserving the space for a local/slow-food learn-to-butcher-your-own-sheep workshop, arranging with a local farmer to show up with humanely dispatched sheep… Not a halal thing – the only domestic animals I’ve ever butchered have been shot at very close range in the head by people who know how to do such things, and the death is instantaneous and generally occurs while eating something particularly delicious to the critter being killed. The people who are anti-hunt have no problem showing up at local farm-education nonprofit events and eating domestic animals that they’d petted and which were slaughtered at the farm the day before.
Do word substitutions count as offerings to Tpyos?
Mattirsays
This HOA is a 70 year old version thereof, not the newer silly what-color-paint-is-your-door type, and so far, at least in the time I’ve lived here (i.e. 46 years) most of its activity has been advocating for the community with regard to traffic, suburban sprawl, police/crime problems, groundwater, persuading the utilities to upgrade the electrical or telecommunications infrastructure, etc. Useful stuff, in other words. But these crunchy green fools are going to drive me to eat a bowl of ice cream or something.
I have no idea exactly what the issue with the community hunt is, since we use only certified and safety-screened/background checked hunters, the same group of hunters that local parks authorities use for their managed hunts on park lands. These guys are WAY safer and more competent than the stereotyped beer-drinking bozo. And we keep very careful records about the health and condition of the deer killed, report that information to state biologists, donate virtually all of the meat to the local food bank in the form of hamburger, and compost all of the field-dressing waste at a local CSA amid several metric fucktons of leaves, to provide carbon to balance all that nitrogen… It would be quite difficult to do it in a MORE responsible fashion.
Perhaps they just get all shocked and appalled at the thought of people actually planning to go out and shoot those poor, sweet, adorable deer. (And I wonder how they feel when they crash their cars on the side of the road to avoid hitting the animals during rutting season?) I guess they wouldn’t approve of my new humanist novel; it’s full of crunchy-green sensibility, but they DO hunt deer. Oh, yes they do. They go out to the woods and shoot the critters.
Tethyssays
A little piece of protest song history from Woody Guthrie Jolly Banker
reeddlhsays
BILL – Long live the yellow dogs. I never used to approve of being so totally partisan as I am now, but I see no other way to keep all kinds of science fiction and other literary examples of horrible ways to commit political suicide from happening to all of us. And think of the children!
More: He was doing a ride-along for his courses. Hiz mentors iz doing it wrong.
IRT chest pain:
My ex-GF ended up having heartburn. I ended up in a cardiac ECU. No evidence of stroke, but BP of 2something/1something & lots of meds.
PZ has had heart surgery after recognizing symptoms. Another similarly aged friend had a mild stroke and waited until the next day. It turned out OK.
I had to explain to the wannabe the difference between stroke and myocardial infarction.
First Approximationsays
Holy shit, Herman Cain on Libya. It’s about as bad as Rick Perry and which three departments he wanted to eliminate.
This is very interesting/confusing to me. Das es caput = This is broken (in my very limited archaic german vocabulary)
kaputt is actually not from caput. Apparently it was borrowed during the 30 Years’ War from French soldiers playing card games, with
être capot
, or
faire capot
which means “not to get any trick during a round” (French definition: “se dit, aux cartes, du joueur qui n’a pas fait de levée”). Again we run into the common problem about the unclear origin of slang terms, in French it is also unclear where this ultimately came from, though not from caput which was lost very early on, as said.
Talking about military slang (allegedly) borrowed from French into German, one of my favourites is “Fisimatenten”, which means “excuses, fuss, nonsense”. One hypothesis goes it comes from French soldiers up to no good in German territory, telling German women to “visite ma tente”. But that is only one hypothesis, which seems to be a case of folk etymology, as apparently these explanations came up in the 19th century during the Napoleonic occupation, while the word is attested much earlier.
If you’ve studied Latin in school, keep in mind that Vulgar Latin was quite different from the Classical Latin usually taught in school. Omission of the “h”, monophthongisation of “au” to “o”, and the omission of final “m”, ultimately leading to the break down of the declension system (most nouns reflect the accusative form). They also liked to add diminutive endings to nouns like the Dutch, Swiss and Swabians like to do, which is why you get French oreille and Spanish oreja, even though Classical Latin has auris, aurem, for “ear”. Vulgar Latin used “auricula(m)”
I just assume that everything Herman Cain does/says at this point is bad.
David Marjanović, OMsays
Yeah, that’s what I thought, but renumbering and more goddam glitches has taken it to 680.
WTF is going on here?
Nothing. I just offered 700 as the average length of a subthread.
…which takes about 3 minutes to just load.
Das es caput = This is broken (in my very limited archaic german vocabulary)
Das ist* kaputt, stress on the last syllable.
* Does anyone still pronounce that t?
About the bolded part: where did you hear that?
I thought it up myself…
Pax Romana wasn’t exactly devoid of any kind of war
It was in Gaul, wasn’t it? War became a thing of the distant past or distant places till the Vandals et al. came through and made themselves proverbial.
The usual hypothesis is that due to morphological simplification, the word “bellum” had become confounded with “bellus” ‘beautiful’, originally a diminuitive of bonus “good” (both becoming “bellu” > “bello”).
Oh. That makes at least as much sense. :-)
(A similar idea can be said of equus “horse” that had become homophonous with aequus “equal, same”, though I imagine slang terms for horses can always arise independently).
The female version, equa “mare”, survived into Old French as ive, and there’s Spanish yegua, IIRC.
I was specifically talking about consciously making your speech varieties more dissimilar.
I’ve read this in some popular source that I don’t remember. It featured a dialectologist who has been surveying that area since before the political change and says “people acquired the habit of speaking in ‘their dialect'” – various features (well, probably mostly words) came to be perceived as more strongly associated with one side of the border than the other, and then people more or less consciously adopted them or removed them from their usage.
Are you saying that Swabian dipthongised MHG û, î, unlike all other Alemannic dialects which retain them as monophthongs, only in the 20th century?
No. Not to my hardly existent knowledge.
So David, what’s the reason Good Friday is a public holiday for non-Catholics only in Austria, or to be more precise, for members of certain denominations, excluding the RCC (or so sez the Pfft)?
o_O
It is a holiday? I had no idea. I’m not going to do the research at 6:10 in the morning.
– how do RCC members get to take off on Good Friday? Are they really disadvantaged here?
– do atheists get off on that day?
No idea.
Good Friday is in the middle of the school/university Easter holidays, so I haven’t experienced this firsthand anyway.
ahs ॐ i am so all-american i'd sell you suicidesays
Aesthetically, Herman Cain is brilliant. He really knows how to sell, sell, sell. I understand this is a skill he’s honed nearly to perfection in the last decade as a motivational speaker.
I loved his answer to the abortion question on Fox. (I won’t get this quite right, so please, correct my recollection, but) he basically said: abortion should not be legal, the decision should be left up to families, and it’s not the purview of the president.
Blatantly self-contradictory nonsense, but if you turn off your logic and just listen with your conservative aesthetic sense, he said all the right things.
ahs ॐ i am so all-american i'd sell you suicidesays
I’d say it makes more sense, because as I said it is quite unlikely that the concept of war would be forgotten in a mere 200 years. Though the problem with bellus “beautiful” of course is that not all Romance languages use that now, but it might have been more widespread earlier, I don’t know.
The female version, equa “mare”, survived into Old French as ive, and there’s Spanish yegua, IIRC.
Yeah, I forgot about those. caballus only replaced the masculine form. Ultimately these things are tendencies only that make replacement more likely. Another one would be “not enough phonological material”, which is often used as an argument why vir “man” was supplanted by homo/homine(m), or vi(m) by fortia(m) for “force”.
Das ist* kaputt, stress on the last syllable. * Does anyone still pronounce that t?
AFAIK only in formal speech.
I’ve read this in some popular source that I don’t remember. It featured a dialectologist who has been surveying that area since before the political change and says “people acquired the habit of speaking in ‘their dialect’” – various features (well, probably mostly words) came to be perceived as more strongly associated with one side of the border than the other, and then people more or less consciously adopted them or removed them from their usage.
Well that’s something else. Words can be used as dialect markers too, but usually you use shared sound changes. The scenario you describe seems like that Swabian and Low Alemannic had already split up, there were some convergence effects influenced by administrative borders. Alemannic as a whole, after all, has been described as a dialect continuum, so this is a distinct possibility.
Good Friday in Austria:
In Österreich und Luxemburg ist der Karfreitag kein gesetzlicher Feiertag für die Allgemeinheit, nur evangelische Christen, Altkatholiken und Methodisten haben in Österreich an diesem Tag arbeitsfrei.
I came across this because I was looking into religious privileges in Austria. Since Austria is majority Catholic, I was confused why Catholics would NOT be granted a holiday on GF while others would.
My knowledge of archaic Swabian comes from my Donauschwab Grandfather, who spoke it as his first language. I have no idea how to spell it, but kaputt did mean that something was broken/finished/at an end.
It was interesting to see the testa=shard replaced by caput=head example.
If you have any idea what shishkibibbel (phonetic spelling) might actually translate to I would love to know. In usage it means “stuff and nonsense”.
I am familiar with the Swabian diminutive ending el added to nouns. It was a characteristic that was very useful in tracing my genealogy for that particular branch of the family.
I’ve never studied Latin, though I have picked up quite a few words from botanical nomenclature. It is useful arcane knowledge.
Thanks for the language lesson. I find it fascinating.
kaputt is actually a very commonly used word in standard German too, and it means what you say, or also “exhausted” when referring to people, “Ich bin total kaputt”.
No idea what shishkibibbel means, it might be from Hungarian, who knows..
If you have Donauschwab heritage, have you heard of the most famous Donauschwab in Germany today? The former foreign minister and co-founder of the Green Party, Joschka Fischer, he’s led quite an interesting life, I think there was a movie released recently. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joschka_Fischer
Yep, that’s about it. Those of us who participate in the hunt are bloodthirsty sadists who get off on killing animals and who are particularly welcoming towards beer drinking men with guns. Basically I live among the crunchy green types who are so scathingly described in David Barron’s great book about mountain lions in Colorado, The Beast in the Garden.
it kinda pisses me off that what we and the crunchy green types want is kind of the same thing- a healthy ecosystem with healthy and diverse populations.
There are some real sadists among hunters, and there are those who are clearly in it just for the thrill of the kill. Me personally, I’m in it primarily because it’s the same cycle that’s been going on pretty much since life began, and that’s what makes the most sense to me to do with my life, but that’s beside the point.
It’s not easy to kill something for food, especially the first few times. It’s not easy for a person who respects life to end it, and I can understand that there are those who can’t do it and don’t want to see it, but killing something cleanly and humanely for food is so vastly different from sadism it’s not even in the same league, and the stereotype always pisses me off.
Rey Foxsays
“Cockney”, not “Cockeny”
Oi be’ieve i’s “Co’ny”, guvner. I’s no’ing but glo’al stops, innit?
1. “I’ve already gotten half a dozen loaves of bread” (OUCH!)
2. out of Hans Gruber (HOWL!)
3. (née Phoenicia) (YELP! Oh the Heresy…)
4. and I’m making more later this week! (GULP!)
That was soooo mean…. *sobs*
turkey
*googles “turkey”*
Mmmh. doesn’t look so big in the picture. Probably prepare it like “drunk pigeon” here in Hong Kong. Pluck and clean, leave overnight to soak in Moutai rice spirits. Roast slowly until succulent. (It tastes a lot like Moutai soaked liver … not an experience your family are ever likely to forget.)
The Laughing Coyote (Papio Cynocephalus)says
I’ve been meaning to add pigeon to my diet, if I can find some farm people willing to let me do some biological pest control on their barns and properties.
Beatricesays
David Marjanović, somewhere in the former incarnation of TET:
For instance two closely related ethnic groups do not like each other, and consciously try to make their languages be more apart
Serbs and Croats.
And we’re taking it to ridiculous lengths. For example, throwing an “i” anywhere and everywhere it doesn’t belong, just so we would have “ije” instead of “je” or “e” (characteristic for Serbian) everywhere. That forms some really ugly words that have nothing to do with our language. Disclaimer: I’m not a linguist, but I remember my grammar pretty well, and I notice some rules about word changes are suddenly being forced out of use. It’s noticeable in the media, and it looks more like a political change than anything else.
John Moralessays
The Laughing Coyote, what is your proposed biological agent of control?
Pigeon is delicious (in spite of my description). Usually roasted, sometimes stuffed with rice (my favourite, Sudanese style).
Apparently Toulouse-Lautrec used to say “They shall not be dining on wild pigeon and olives.” To denote someone with poor taste.
Young Wild Pigeon with Olives
Serves 4
Ingredients
4 wood pigeons from D’Artagnan (or Cornish hens or poussin)
8 oz ground beef (lightly sautéed)
8 oz French Garlic Sausage from D’Artagnan (lightly sautéed, if it is not pre-cooked) or a mild pork/veal sausage
¼ t of nutmeg
1 t fresh marjoram and thyme (optional)
2 T Truffle butter from D’Artagnan or regular butter
2 Qt chicken stock
¼ c armagnac or cognac
3 oz butter
½ oz truffles (optional)
3 shallots
1 onion
3 strips of smoky bacon, chopped
Bouquet garni
10 oz green pitted olives
1 t molasses
Take 4 pigeons and put a stuffing of sausage and meats and truffles (if you don’t have them use truffle butter or oil) seasoned with nutmeg, herbs and salt and pepper inside the little cavity. Put the truffle butter under the skins of the bird… take care for the skin is very fragile. Salt and pepper the birds.
Tie them up and let the pigeons brown in a heavy, shallow pan… mostly the bottom of the bird. Remove them and put the bacon, shallots and onion into a saucepan and sauté.
Add salt, pepper, a bouquet garni. Put in the pigeons back in the pan, and let them simmer gently for ½ an hour with the saucepan covered. Add some pitted green olives that have been well de-salted (I put them in a pan of water and boiled them, then let them sit in fresh water) and add the armagnac/cognac and cook for 10 more minutes.
Heat the broiler.
Let the birds braise well in the sauce and then remove the birds. Reduce the sauce. Take the molasses and a few tablespoons of the sauce and brush on the birds. Stick the birds under the broiler to brown for a few moments to give some color to the skin.
Serve the birds on a dish surrounded by the olives and the strained sauce that ought to be rich and thick.
PS Wild rice with truffle butter is amazing with this dish!
I’m extremely frustrated. I can read and write here when on my work computer. My home computer doesn’t show anything on FtB later than Saturday morning and shows no comments nor offers any way to post comments. Does anyone have any suggestions?
Tethys
I can offer you my regional explenation for “bibbele/bibbelsche”. The word comes from “Bub”, boy, and is the diminutive. Means something like little boy or more often just something small. No idea if that’s the same “im Ländle”.
Talking about the origin of “ficken”, the word, around here you can still be “fickerig” without being horny.
Mattir
Let me guess, the “no hunt please” people do also think that their meat grows in the supermarket…
And we’re taking it to ridiculous lengths. For example, throwing an “i” anywhere and everywhere it doesn’t belong, just so we would have “ije” instead of “je” or “e” (characteristic for Serbian) everywhere. That forms some really ugly words that have nothing to do with our language. Disclaimer: I’m not a linguist, but I remember my grammar pretty well, and I notice some rules about word changes are suddenly being forced out of use. It’s noticeable in the media, and it looks more like a political change than anything else.
Most language change happens in an unconscious way. Speakers don’t think, let’s drop our R’s and teach that to our children. What I called conscious changes is much rarer than the normal cases of unconscious changes, and it usually is connected to identity, either external or internal.
But there are parts of a linguistic system that are much more subject to planned and conscious changes, and they usually only apply to a minority languages worldwide, namely those with a status as national languages.
Dialects mostly change in an unconscious way, but the respective national languages of course do have an influence on them, and some dialect speakers switch, teaching the national language to their kids to the detriment of their dialects.
1. Writing system: this has always been subject to meddling by committee (English orthography being one notable exception. There’s no official body governing English orthography, quite an anomaly). Since writing is a skill people have to acquire in school, they become vested in the way the language is written. (Compare the spelling reform debate in Germany, or in the Netherlands, or consider the Spelling Bees in the English speaking world, and the dictations in France) The question what script to use is even more important than spelling rules, and can be a powerful marker of identity.
Anecdote: my aunt left Yugoslavia 40 years ago, and to me emigrants like her have been one of the “places” where Yugoslavia lives on, but when she was taking her written exam for the driver’s licence, probably 15-20 years ago, she had the right to take the exam in her native language. When she saw it was Latin script though, she refused to take it, though presumably she would have understood it without problem (also given the fact that in Serbocroat times the command of both alphabets had been standard, and she had been living in a country with a Latin-based script for decades).
2. Standard language: a standard language is by definition a planned speech variety, and a somewhat recent phenomenon. Historically, most languages have been clusters of gradually different dialects, also known as dialect continua. The diversity found in terms of grammatical and lexical features across dialects can be staggering, and you need some personality, or even some committee (not everything that comes out of committees is necessarily bad) to bridge those differences and achieve a widespread acceptance of the new standard. Usually a prestigious dialect is chosen, more often than not from the geographic centre of the linguistic area, sometimes a new standard dialect is created based on several features from different dialects. For German, Martin Luther is credited, and for BCS Vuk Karadžić (of course the story is always more complicated and goes beyond one person). BCS from the beginning was planned as a pluricentric language (nowadays, German has followed English and evolved into a pluricentric model too), that is, it was understood that there wouldn’t be only one standard, but at least two or three standards. This would extend to grammatical features such as the infinitive or other morphological issues, and the phonological feature raised by you.
A standard language has to be learnt by all speakers, because you don’t acquire the formal language needed for certain situations as a child. But often, especially if you’re from the urban middle classes, your mother tongue WILL be pretty close to the standard language, and acquiring the formal bits won’t be as hard as if you were starting from a different dialect.
BUT, if a committee decides to change certain rules all the time, alienation will occur, to the adults who already went through the trouble. So one of the reasons a standard language shouldn’t be tinkered with too much, and allow for some flexibility.
3. terminology: could also be subsumed under 2., but an important aspect of language planning is terminology. You need accepted ways of dealing with new terminology in science and technology, unless your language is English, whose status as a global language allows it to operate without linguistic committees; most innovations in science and technology are proposed in English after all). Traditionally, Croatian has been more resistant to borrowings than Serbian in favour of calques, that’s not a value judgement, only an observation. For instance, the names of the months, lipanj v. juni, or sveučilište v. universiteit.
Technical terms can be easily changed around by committee, but there are also more common terms that just have preserved western and eastern dialect differences, and thus become markers of identity, such as tko v. ko “who”, suh v. suv “dry”. If you changed those words, the alienation effects would probably be much greater.
Coming back to the ije/e issue, I’d like to expand on that. Basically in old Slavic there was a sound represented by a letter called jat, and this has given rise to consistent reflexes in the various dialects:
ekavian dialects have e: dete “child”, mleko “milk”. Most areas of Serbia. ijekavian dialects have ije: dijete “child”, mlijeko “milk”. Montenegro, most areas of Croatia, Bosnia-Herzogovina, and western Serbia. ikavian dialects have i: dite “child”, mliko “milk”
some parts of Bosnia-Herzogovina, some parts of Croatia, esp. along the Adriatic coast, northern Serbia (though I understand these are ethnic Croats). (Question: the language maps don’t seem to indicate where northern Croatia belong to, it doesn’t show up in either of the three variants. Why could that be?)
The Serbian standard as E, the Croatian and Bosnian standards have IJE, and I think there is no standard that has I. An ijekavian dialect speaker from west Serbia still has to learn the E variant, and an ikavian dialect speaker from the Dalmatic coast still has to learn the IJE variant.
Your discomfort with the IJE variants could be due to a dialectal difference, general alienation effects (you might have grown up in Yugoslav times and been exposed to more ekavian forms than in later times).
And it’s entirely possible that language planners fell victim to what’s known as hypercorrection (a common gripe by linguists is that politicians don’t consult them even for language policy matters).
Presumably, IJE should only appear for historic jat’, but this can get overgeneralised, i.e. that E sounds that don’t reflect it get substituted too. This is why JFK said Cubar. He had been told by advisers that his vocalised Rs didn’t fly too well with a national audience, so he tried to remember his R’s, but of course his native dialect didn’t have them (“I pahked my cah on Hahvahd Yahd”), so sometimes he oversubstituted.
Final note:
from a linguistic perspective, BCS is probably one language with different dialects, just like Continental Northern Germanic (aka “Scandinavian”), but linguists have known better than to tell speakers whether their speech variety is a dialect or a language. In doublespeak, one is called the “linguistic definition” and the other as “political definition”.
(I’m sure there are much more detailed works in BCS, but the one I was looking at was
Bosnian, Croatian, Serbian – A grammar with sociolinguistic commentary. Ronelle Alexander. 2006. UW Press.)
uncle frogysays
PZ thanks for the link to Makana, he is a real gem I listened to some of his other stuff his slack key guitar work is really good and the traditional songs are well done from the video posted I was surprised to hear his wonderful falsetto.
I will be looking out for him. the song “we are the many” hit me.
We have been all privileged to hear the analysis of these “occupy wall street” protests how there is no leaders nor plans or demands.
That is true and I think that is the most amazing thing of all. It is a spontaneous event not unlike the “Arab spring”. It is not astro-turf like the tea baggers.
All governments govern by the consent of the governed not by the will of some god or because of the “truth” of some ideology.
It looks to me like the the governed are beginning to seriously consider there consent to be governed. It has been a long time since the people of the united states really questioned what was happening and did they really approve. The ass holes wanted to let the market decide things and it did the way it has often done it in the past with an economic collapse now the “99%” want to know why it has to be like this?
The people in many of the other countries of the world know that they are not in control but we the citizens of the united states were mostly content to just argue about the details and fight over the scraps as long as it looked like we were “makin it” but it now is plain for everyone to see that we are clearly not and no one is really interested in helping us very much they just want us to let them keep running things in the same way they have up till now. The thing is if no buddy started it I do not think any one can stop it, at least for long. when you aint got nothin you got nothin to lose
I also think that if the republicans win the coming election and force through their ideological plans we will really see the shit fly. I do not mean riots in the streets either I mean it would not be long until the other countries of the world would put pressure on us to grow our market and improve our economy by other means then just closing down government. They depend on our market to buy there stuff.
because it has been the same conservative policies of the last 35 years that has brought us to this point.
Strange. I haven’t had any problems with FtB at all, except for the times when it was down.. It’s not loading slowly or anything…
Carliesays
Central New York dialect has a pronounced glottal stop. I was startled the first time I heard my kids using it, but I’ve noticed that it’s crept into my speech as well, although I tried to resist it.
Mattir – enjoy the days of solitude! And blech on the homeowner’s association.
Any Czech culture enthusiasts here? Even if not, the amount of programming in this flash site is amazing. Jamara It’s a compilation of pretty much everything ever created about Jára Cimrman, made to look like a file cabinet. When you change certain things (such as the play of interest), it changes all of the cabinets to match information based on that particular play. It’s pretty slick.
Oi be’ieve i’s “Co’ny”, guvner. I’s no’ing but glo’al stops, innit?
Back when I took that English as a global language course I was taught that T was the one sound that was substituted with a glottal stop. So it wouldn’t be “Co’ny”. *checks the Pfft*. Yep, seems that way.
Central New York dialect has a pronounced glottal stop. I was startled the first time I heard my kids using it, but I’ve noticed that it’s crept into my speech as well, although I tried to resist it.
By this do you a T glottalisation like in Cockney or a glottalisation of initial vowels like in German? I.e. /Ost/ [ʔost]
No but I read a book once about the “Czech Orthography Wars” which I enjoyed immensely.
setar, too lazy to log in on his blackberrysays
Last night’s events at Occupy Wall Street were sickening, and yet for some reason I suspect that many still will continue to handwave at the notion that North America is becoming a kleptocratic police state…
setar, too lazy to log in on his blackberrysays
And now apparently CNN is sympathizing with NYPD. As the good trustworthy pig leads…-groan- please please please let humanity not be this stupid
Mr. Bloomberg had struggled with how to respond. He repeatedly made clear that he does not support the demonstrators’ arguments or their tactics, but he has also defended their right to protest and in recent days and weeks has sounded increasingly exasperated, especially in the wake of growing complaints from neighbors about how the protest has disrupted the neighborhood and hurt local businesses.
Mr. Bloomberg met daily with several deputies and commissioners, and as more business owners complained and editorials lampooned him as gutless, his patience wore thin.
Not sure if the NY Times editorial page was part of this though…
setar, too lazy to log in on his blackberrysays
That sounds totally not biased against the protest and like it was written by someone who has actually been there and talked to relevant people rather than simply rephrase press releases from City Hall and the NYPD. It is totally NOT the epitome of corporate editorial slanting, the same way that Ron Paul is not a racist.
[After the abuse scandal, the] bishops are struggling to reclaim the role they played in the 1980s and into the ’90s as a nationally recognized voice on the moral dimension of public policy issues like economic inequality, workers’ rights, immigration and nuclear weapons proliferation. Since then, however, they have reordered their priorities, with abortion and homosexuality eclipsing poverty and economic injustice.
the New York Times newsroom and Editorial section are two different section altogether. You can’t see the stance of the Editorial people from the general news reporting. Maybe they will have an editorial on yesterday’s events soon, I didn’t see one when I checked just now.
Beatricesays
pelamun,
I love how you responded with such a detailed explanation to a short offhand remark/rant. It was very interesting to read, and very informative.
About northern Croatia not appearing on language maps : No idea why, but it should probably belong into both ekavian and ijekavian category.
Your suggestion of hypercorrection is probably the right explanation for the problem I’m noticing. I remember learning about the reflex of jat (obviously not in as much detail as you probably have). I have always taken care to learn and use proper standard Croatian and avoid the mangling of words that is characteristic for the capital (so called purgerski which I would characterise as standard with a heavy influene od kajkavski dialect as well as dialects from all over Croatia). So, even though I have been exposed to more ekavian forms (I also speak Slovenian, if that adds any information), I have always made sure the follow the rules of standard language, therefore I don’t think I’m imagining the sudden change. I mean, I might be. Who knows. Maybe I’m just paranoid.
To make the long story short, a couple of examples of (wrong?) words I have noticed are now very often used by reporters on radio/Tv and journalists : a report, izvješće from which to report, izvijestiti is formed is suddenly getting that ever damned i and becoming izviješće. Then there is white, bijelo and whiter, bjelje which is being turned into bjelije or even bijelije (just to be thorough, I guess). A bit more rare, but it makes my ears bleed: grade, ocjena into ocijena, probably because of to grade, ocijeniti. Those are only a couple that first come to mind.
We’re discussing language, so I feel compelled to apologize for any spelling mistakes I might have made, I don’t have a spellchecker here.
Carliesays
By this do you a T glottalisation like in Cockney
It’s the T, generally only when internal to the word, but not all words (I’m not sure what the “rules” are as to when the T is glottaled(?), maybe only after vowels?, but I know it when I see it). So I “started” to go to the humane society, because I want a “ki’en”.
The last time we did an upgrade, we had the same problem with the host company not updating IP addresses and ensuing worldwide inconsistency in accessing the site. The workaround at that time was for people to edit their “hosts” files and hardcode the ip address of FtB into them.
If you did that before, it will come back and bite you now, because the IP address has changed again. Make sure your hosts file does not contain an entry for FtB — your computer needs to use DNS to find us.
Nerd of Redhead, Dances OM Trollssays
It appears the times on posts have changed last night from UT to US central time (UT -6). Easier for me, less so for our world wide regulars.
I made a delicious macaroni and cheese last night – although I need to make two adjustments next time to make it better, I think: add peppers, don’t overcook the pasta.
Mexican Mac and Cheese
8 oz elbow macaroni
3 tbsp butter
3 tbsp flour
1/2 cup finely chopped jalapeno or habanero peppers
3 cups milk
1 tbsp chili powder
1/2 tbsp cumin
1 large egg
12 oz Colby Jack cheese
salt, fresh black pepper
1 cup crushed tortilla chips
salsa
sour cream
Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Prepare macaroni.
Heat butter over medium heat in a decently sized pot (I use a dutch oven and there’s plenty of room.) When the butter is melted, slowly whisk the flour into the butter. Add the chopped peppers and keep moving for 5 minutes. Add the spices and milk to the pan and simmer for 10 minutes. Temper in the egg. Add 3/4 of the cheese to the pan stirring in a handful at a time. Season and fold in the macaroni.
Pour the mac and cheese into a casserole and cover with the remaining cheese. Add the tortilla chips to the top. Bake for 30 minutes. Rest for 5 minutes.
Serve with salsa and sour cream.
SteveVsays
Test
setar, too lazy to log in on his blackberrysays
And it appears that Micheal Bloomberg has not read the First Amendment. Peaceful assembly is also protected, idiot.
Carliesays
Part of Occupy Wall Street was putting together a reading library for protesters, with people serving as librarians and curating the collection. NYPD threw it all, over 5500 books, straight in the trash:library evicted.
Both Occupy Oakland and Occupy Portland also recently got evicted in the middle of the night. Isn’t it a little strange that three large cities kicked out Occupy protesters the same way at around the same time? I’m looking forward to the NYPD attempting to keep over a thousand people out of this park.
About northern Croatia not appearing on language maps : No idea why, but it should probably belong into both ekavian and ijekavian category.
Ekavian in Croatia? That’s very interesting. Now that I look at it, the area not covered by the language maps are mostly the kajkavian areas.*)
(I don’t know much about Slovene, but I don’t think it has a minority status in Croatia like it does in Austria and Hungary)
I do think hypercorrection is the most likely explanation, because as far as I understand, the ekavian/ijekavian/ikavian differences are not gradual. But we have two forces here at work that could be counteract each other:
– regular sound change: if jat’ is changed to IJE or E, this occurs in all words, as regular as possible.
– diffusion in a dialect chain: the entire BCS area is a dialect continuum. A word can change its form gradually. So a word from an ekavian dialect could spread into an ijekavian dialect.
Another thing to consider: the different lexical strata. Take French for example: it has words that are directly passed on from Vulgar Latin, and they exhibit all the sound changes, like loi from lege(m) etc. But then French has also used Latinate words (also known as mots savants) throughout its history, and depending on the period they haven’t undergone all of these changes, so you get a word like légal next to loyal. A similar thing might have happened on BCS, presumably with Church Slavonic as a source of such mots savants. Might be that some of these forms actually are words created from Church Slavonic, but I wouldn’t know.
Without good historical and dialectal data, this can be impossible to determine.
To make the long story short, a couple of examples of (wrong?) words I have noticed are now very often used by reporters on radio/Tv and journalists : a report, izvješće from which to report, izvijestiti is formed is suddenly getting that ever damned i and becoming izviješće. Then there is white, bijelo and whiter, bjelje which is being turned into bjelije or even bijelije (just to be thorough, I guess). A bit more rare, but it makes my ears bleed: grade, ocjena into ocijena, probably because of to grade, ocijeniti. Those are only a couple that first come to mind.
To determine if these forms are historically “correct”, one would need to check the relevant philological works. But if it has become part of an accepted standard, then it would be correct within the standard, regardless of whether they’re etymologically correct or not. But if your reaction is shared by others, it could mean that this change hasn’t gained widespread acceptance (sometimes standards make it out of committee but fail to gain currency in society). The etymological question would be more like a political issue though.
An interesting story regarding IJE/E I came across in the book I cited: the Serbs of the Republika Srpska, the Bosnian Serbs, speak a western Serbian dialect and thus are ijekavian speakers. In 1994, quite a different and much more infamous Karadžić, as president of said republic, declared the standard variety in the republic to be ekavian, like in Serbia proper. This created a lot of furor, and protests, and in 1998 this was rescinded. It was a political move, but this was an example that there are limits to how language can be manipulated.
*) another note: in BCS dialectology, dialects have been classified according to their word for “what”. Ča, Kaj, Što. The first two are only found in Croatia, with Što being the form found in many parts of Croatia too, and BH, MN and Serbia. The differences are not just the words for “what”, but are also reflected in the accentual system etc.
Apparently the name “Bloomberg” means “full of shit”. Huh, interesting.
Even Bloomberg knows he’s saying a bunch of bullshit. I can see it on his face. He said previously that the protesters would be let back into the park by now. But a convenient court order may or may not have been issued, so no one can go back in yet.
It’s the T, generally only when internal to the word, but not all words (I’m not sure what the “rules” are as to when the T is glottaled(?), maybe only after vowels?, but I know it when I see it). So I “started” to go to the humane society, because I want a “ki’en”.
You’re right with “glottaled”. Because glottalisation if you want to be precise, only refers to secondary articulation, i.e. opening your glottis partially or completely WHILE producing another sound, not replacing it completely (if you do this to a vowel, it becomes “creaky voice”).
Though I personally prefer to say “to be replaced by a glottal stop”, dunno way but “to be glottaled” just doesn’t sound academic enough to me ;)…
setar, too lazy to log in on his blackberrysays
Starstiff #114: And neither of those evictions worked. It’s almost as if they don’t have anything other than the media and the dogs.
Everything. I’ve just spent two hours dismantling the only habitat setup Chas ever knew, thanks to Esme. Of course, Chas taught her how to climb the condo gates to get up on top of it, which was fine, except Esme went from there, down the back, onto the windowsill and onto one of my art tables. About $150 in damage to various brushes, pencils, etc.
It’s not as if she doesn’t know she isn’t allowed on certain things, she does. Esme, much like her owner, gets bored easily and unlike male rats, isn’t into naps all that much…
But about freedom of assembly from a legal perspective, AFAIK democracies around the world impose certain legal restrictions on it, with limitations of how long a protest can take place, and the need to register them etc.
Though I don’t know how this is handled in the United States usually. I dimly recall that the SCOTUS originally recognised freedom of assembly as a secondary right with certain limitations, but IIRC this difference has been made less and less.
Hmm, so the politicians should always do what the many want? Bad news for we atheists, then. Bad news for the queers, the non-whites, the non-christians, the immigrants. We might want to think about this one.
who said that? A democracy is supposed to guarantee rights to all, incl. minorities. That’s also what the First Amendment is about.
The legal justifications cited by the Bloomberg Administration are technically all about safety and health issues, not whether politicians should follow the majority view. (Though I agree with StarStuff and others that El Bloombito is full of shit)
Rev. BigDumbChimpsays
Some Mormon clown responds to Hitchens’ recent Slate article :
A response to Christopher Hitchens after his latest attack on Mormonism
What a pitiful defense.
Joe Smith was right because he didn’t die like Koresh?
Really?
Beatricesays
pelamun,
I’ve found this wiki page (linky), unfortunatelly it has no English translation. It’s about Croatian dialects and it mentiones some more detailed regional specifics.
Also, as a “mixed” Yugoslavian child, I’m annoyed with constant forced distancing of former Yugoslavian nations in every way, shape and from, language just being one part of the package. So I might be more sensitive to these changes than it’s actually warranted.
Tualhasays
Pelamun,
I was responding to the sentiment expressed in the song, not anything anyone here said. tl;dr
Bill: The main reason I’d support Obama over Romney is the question of federal court appointments. Since federal judges have life tenure, the appointment of reactionary troglodytes to the federal bench – which tends to happen when a Republican is in office – can have really long-term repercussions. Given how important federal court judgments are to the protection of civil liberties, that’s an incredibly big deal. In particular, if there were two more Scalia-clones and two fewer moderates on the Supreme Court come 2016, the American legal landscape would come to look very, very different, and not in a good way.
Other than that, I have almost nothing good to say about the Obama administration, from a civil liberties perspective. I’m glad I don’t have a vote; I’d find it physically painful to vote for Obama, given that he’s sold out over and over and over again to the security-industrial complex on issues like immigration, drug enforcement, detention of “terrorists”, the state secrets privilege and so on. But I can understand entirely why people here plan to vote for him, because Romney would be worse (and none of the other Republicans bear thinking about).
More broadly, I just think American politics is a ridiculous farce. As is British politics. I find it hard to get worked up about one candidate over another; party politics seems to be one long unending saga of, as Terry Pratchett might put it, bossa nova, seneci bossi similis.*
As for Cockney, I grew up in Milton Keynes – which is not London, but the accent is similar to North London – and, as I recall, the characteristic feature is the replacement of the “t” in the middle of words with the glottal stop. (So “water” becomes “wa’er”.) I don’t recall glottal stops in any other context.
standard English doesn’t have glottal stops. Unlike German, which actually doesn’t have words starting with a vowel, as a glottal stop is mandatory, precluding liaison effects you might get in English (incl. the “phantom R”, as in “law and rorder”).
this was one of these instances where I’d use Google Translate. So Ronelle Alexander needs to update the maps and the description of the IJE/E/I differences.
Also, as a “mixed” Yugoslavian child, I’m annoyed with constant forced distancing of former Yugoslavian nations in every way, shape and from, language just being one part of the package. So I might be more sensitive to these changes than it’s actually warranted.
I think that’s pretty much the vibe I get from my aunt. I think the Scandinavian nations have found a better way of dealing with this, but then they’ve been doing this for a couple of centuries longer..
It is quite shocking to hear about this in ‘Merka , even though we have seen it coming for so long.
I went with a cameraman friend of mine in Durban to see the manic right-winger Eugene Terreblanche (ie: “White Earth” – he was very proud of this). He was shouting at the (heckling) students, “Julle ken mos net van boeke!” = “You know {as a matter of fact} only about books!”
To RWA, there is nothing but lies and subversion to be gained by reading (apart from teh babble and their own literature.) Truth comes from the podium and from the direct experiences of the faithful. (I am sure this is a direct function of their own ignorance and lack of education.)
The more books you destroy, the safer Jeebus can sleep at night.
The Discworld ones are among the better examples tho.
Also funny
Scientists, when naming new species, will often name them after famous scientists or political figures, though instead of “us,” they often add “-i” (for the genitive case) instead. This gets really silly when the person being honored is named “Ishii”. An example that makes Aussies’ skin crawl – a species of land snail now known by the scientific name Crikey steveirwini.
A newly discovered species of mushroom has been named Spongiforma squarepantsii in homage to SpongeBob SquarePants. Now I’m no Latin expert, but I highly doubt there is such a word as squarepantsii.
(Puts me in mind of the passage in Jingo in which Vimes thinks “…he’d be damned if he wouldn’t be Sir Samuel to someone who pronounced years as “hyahs”.”)
(Puts me in mind of the passage in Jingo in which Vimes thinks “…he’d be damned if he wouldn’t be Sir Samuel to someone who pronounced years as “hyahs”.”)
(…about Ankh-Morpork aristocrat and incompetent general Lord Rust, that is.)
Crudely Wrottsays
From the link that rorschach provides in # 116 comes this comment to the article:
m.g. scott | 8:04 a.m. Nov. 14, 2011
LAYTON, UT
A very good article and I too have liked and admired Mr. Hitchens and much of his political insight. I think his vitriolic anti-religion tirades are the product of some deep seeded feelings from past experiences. What they are, who knows. In any case, it is obvious that religion and reason don’t mix in Mr. Hitchens world. His testimony that there is no god and religion is just a myth, is just as strong as the testimony of Joseph Smith, or any latter day prophet, that indeed Jesus Christ lives, and He leads a Church. The powerful testimonies of Apostles and Prophets come from men of great character and honesty. Not men who get rich from the church. Many people, as the author stated, have sacrificed career and money for church service. I’ll take my chances with people who have that kind of testimony rather than the “prove a negative” testimony of Mr. Hitchens.
[emphasis mine]
I leave it to the reader to parse this sentence. If anyone can do so, please inform me as I am at a loss as how to do so.
The only meaning I can discover is that this is an unconscious slip of the tongue revealing that M. G. Scott is fully aware of the bogosity of Mormon dogma. It can’t be that he really meant to phrase his defense of his church in such terms, can it?
Also, “deep seeded feelings” might prove to be a useful phrase when referring to the depth of illusion with respect to the acceptance of indefensible assumptions characteristic of all revelatory “truth”.
(I still don’t think I’ve beaten Sally Strange’s homage to Tpyos, though. May His holy wrod never be spellchecked.)
Crudely Wrottsays
The main reason I’d support Obama over Romney is the question of federal court appointments. Since federal judges have life tenure, the appointment of reactionary troglodytes to the federal bench – which tends to happen when a Republican is in office – can have really long-term repercussions.
Well, Dear Walton, let us hope that Perry continues his rearward march in the polls. From this morning’s news from MSNBC, this:
Both in his book Fed Up and in a recent interview with the editorial board of the New Hampshire Union Leader, Perry has advocated for term limits for members of the judiciary, even those in the Supreme Court.
I wonder how long the suggested limits would be. Perhaps two years? Six months? In Perry’s world the President would be able to shuffle judges in and out of the court system? What could possibly go wrong with that?
given how complicated it is to change the constitution, Perry would never be able to get term limits introduced…
But you know in other countries it’s perfectly possible to have term limits for supreme court judges.
Germany, for instance, appoints them for 12 years, by a 2/3 supermajority of parliament. That way,
– even if a judge turns out to be a bad apple, the damage is minimised
– the major parties have to find a way to compromise
Crudely Wrottsays
pelanum,
Points taken. Still, the notion that a candidate for president could advance such a plank and that plank be welcomed by a large part of the electorate sends shivers up my spine.
Carliesays
Scientists, when naming new species, will often name them after famous scientists or political figures, though instead of “us,” they often add “-i” (for the genitive case) instead.
60.7. When changes in spelling by authors who adopt personal, geographic, or vernacular names in nomenclature are intentional latinizations, they are to be preserved, except when they concern (a) only the termination of epithets to which Art. 60.11 applies, or (b) changes to personal names involving (1) omission of a final vowel or final consonant or (2) conversion of a final vowel to a different vowel, for which the final letter of the name is to be restored.
Ex. 11. Clutia L. (1753), Gleditsia L. (1753), and Valantia L. (1753), commemorating Cluyt, Gleditsch, and Vaillant, respectively, are not to be altered to”Cluytia”, “Gleditschia”, and”Vaillantia”; Linnaeus latinized the names of these botanists deliberately as Clutius, Gleditsius, and Valantius.
Ex. 12. Abies alcoquiana Veitch ex Lindl. (1861), commemorating �Rutherford Alcock Esq.�, implies an intentional latinization of that name to Alcoquius. In transferring the epithet to Picea, Carri�re (1867) deliberately changed the spelling to �alcockiana�. The resulting combination is nevertheless correctly cited as P. alcoquiana (Veitch ex Lindl.) Carri�re (see Art. 61.4).
Ex. 13. Abutilon glaziovii K. Schum. (1891), Desmodium bigelovii A. Gray (1843), and Rhododendron bureavii Franch. (1887), commemorating A. F. M. Glaziou, J. Bigelow, and L. E. Bureau, respectively, are not to be changed to A. “glazioui”, D. “bigelowii”, or R. “bureaui”. In these three cases, the implicit latinizations Glaziovius, Bigelovius, and Bureavius result from conversion of a final consonant and do not affect merely the termination of the names.
Ex. 14. Arnica chamissonis Less. (1831) and Tragus berteronianus Schult. (1824), commemorating L. K. A. von Chamisso and C. L. G. Bertero, are not to be changed to A. �chamissoi� or T. �berteroanus�. The derivation of these epithets from the third declension genitive, a practice not now recommended in most cases (see Rec. 60C.2), involves the addition of letters to the personal name and does not affect merely the termination.
Ex. 15. Acacia �brandegeana�, Blandfordia “backhousii”, Cephalotaxus “fortuni”, Chenopodium “loureirei”, Convolvulus “loureiri”, Glochidion “melvilliorum”,Hypericum �buckleii�, Solanum �rantonnei�, and Zygophyllum “billardierii” were published to commemorate T. S. Brandegee, J. Backhouse, R. Fortune, J. de Loureiro, R. Melville and E. F. Melville, S. B. Buckley, V. Rantonnet, and J. J. H. de Labillardi�re (de la Billardi�re). The implicit latinizations are Brandegeus, Backhousius, Fortunus, Loureireus or Loureirus, Melvillius, Buckleius, Rantonneus, and Billardierius, but these are not acceptable under Art. 60.7. The names are correctly cited as A. brandegeeana I. M. Johnst. (1925), B. backhousei Gunn & Lindl. (1845), Cephalotaxus fortunei Hook. (1850), Chenopodium loureiroi Steud. (1840), Convolvulus loureiroi G. Don (1836), G. melvilleorum Airy Shaw (1971), H. buckleyi M. A. Curtis (1843), S. rantonnetii Carri�re (1859), and Z. billardierei DC. (1824).
Note 2. The provisions of Art. 60.7, 60.11, and Rec. 60C deal with the latinization of names through their modification. This latinization is different from translation of names (e.g. Tabernaemontanus from Bergzabern) and from the use of an adjective indirectly derived from a personal name, which are thus not subject to modification under Art. 60.7 or 60.11.
Ex. 16. In Wollemia nobilis W. G. Jones & al. (1995), the use of the adjective nobilis is indirectly derived from the name of the discoverer David Noble. Cladonia abbatiana S. Steenroose (1991) honours the French lichenologist H. des Abbayes. In both cases the adjective is indirectly derived from a personal name. Since no typographical or orthographical error is present, the original spelling of those names may not be altered.
(bold mine)
Carliesays
Walton – wow, I always thought that was an affectation to stereotype the upper class. I honestly didn’t realize it was a real accent.
Crudely Wrottsays
Apologies for nym assault, pelamun. I really should know by now.
>winces with embarrassment<
you might compare it to Bush’s support of the Marriage Amendment. Something that would never pass but would play to his base.
But I do think that lifelong appointments of federal judges are a big risk factor in American politics. The 2012 Presidential elections will shape the legal landscape for decades to come, it’s quite frightening…
It’s not like the Latin genitive here makes that much sense… especially for some names, just adding an “i” indeed is dog Latin of the worst sort, why not use “a(b)” or “de”. We could then treat the name as indeclinable, which would make more sense for foreign names.
Lifetime appointments for the federal judiciary are a risk, it’s true. But they’re also one of the few redeeming institutional features of the US political system. If you want a judiciary that is actually independent of the executive and the legislature, and that can actually protect the civil liberties of minorities against the will of the majority, then you have to have an appointed judiciary with security of tenure. In England, this principle has been recognized since the seventeenth century – one of the conditions of the 1688 Glorious Revolution was that judges should have security of tenure and should not be removed from office arbitrarily by the King, and the Act of Settlement 1701 confirmed that judges hold office quamdiu se bene gesserint, i.e. they can only be removed from office for serious misconduct – and it’s fundamental to the constitutional system of any free society.
In many state judicial systems, judges are directly elected for a fixed term. More often than not, this is an absolute fucking disaster.
The ubiquitous US practice of directly electing state prosecutors is also extremely problematic. Prosecutors have a huge amount of discretionary power in the criminal justice system (they decide whether to proceed with a case, whether to agree to a plea-bargain, and what sentence to seek), and the prosecution system in the US is very heavily politicized, with a strong impetus to appear “tough on crime” at the expense of civil liberties and due process. At the federal level, the prosecution system isn’t much better; federal prosecutors (US Attorneys) are appointed by the President and work for the Department of Justice, under the direction of the Attorney General, who is a political appointee. (Bush’s eccentric conservative Christian A-G, John Ashcroft, did a lot of damage to the Department of Justice during his tenure in office. This is true in immigration law too; the Immigration Judges and the Board of Immigration Appeals, who make most decisions in immigration cases, are not independent federal judges, but “Article I judges”. They’re employees of the Department of Justice who are appointed by the Attorney General, and they don’t have the same security of tenure or full institutional independence that actual federal judges do.)
And now I really must stop wasting time and get on with the huge pile of work I need to do today…
agreed. The election of judges is never a good idea.
But I still think 12 years, no reappointments, is a good compromise.
Maybe the bigger problem is that the Senate confirms the juridical nominees with a simple majority (or 60 if you take cloture into account, but it’s always under threat of being changed to a simple majority). Maybe a supermajority would be in order here.
Ditto for prosecutors. Though the AG is the equivalent to a justice minister in many other countries, no objections to having them appointed. Law enforcement is part of the executive after all.
Immigration proceedings in many countries are administrative matters rather than judicial ones. I wouldn’t have objections as long as independent legal oversight is guaranteed.
illuminatasays
This is one of those days where, as my nagyanya would say, one “needs a hug and a bowl of hot soup”.
Okay, so we’re continuing our discussion of mormonism, Mitt Romney, and various persons writing swill and not-swill about both mormonism and Mitt Romneyism.
One thing Christopher Hitchens and Yale professor Harold Bloom both got wrong in their critical looks at Mitt Romney was the number of mormons worldwide. Both authors accepted the LD$ Church’s propaganda about the number of members. 14 million is usually the number bandied about.
For a long time, ex-mormons have known that the number was inflated. Missionaries especially told tales of baptizing people just to meet the pressure from their supervisors, only to have said baptized persons never show up again. They’re all still counted on the church’s membership roles.
Even in Utah and Idaho there are huge numbers of inactive mormons who are still counted as members even though they haven’t contributed tithing for more than two decades.
Nevertheless, the real truth is even worse. The membership picture is even sneakier, even more false than you might have imagined.
How the church (does not) removes your record after you resign
I used to to work in the records department of the COB [Church Office Building] so I know how this works. When you resign your record is marked for deletion, they just never run the update that actually remove you from their database. It is like they put your records in a permanent recycle bin. (For windows users) This allows the church to legally say your records have been removed, while they still have access to them and count them in membership totals.
So says “Demon of Kolob” an ex-mormon
Just to be clear, other ex-mormons asked the COB worker, “Wait a minute! Are you saying that an exmo who has RESIGNED is still counted as a member?!”
Demon of Kolob answers:
Yes and No. When you resign your member record is marked as deleted this removes as you as an active member. However since the church never actually purges the “deleted records” the “exmo” records are still in the database. When they do a membership count they count all records in the database even the “deleted ones”. So even resigned members still count toward membership totals. This is just another way for the church to inflate it’s membership numbers.
Demon of Kolob worked as a records clerk in the COB in the 1990s. His information is, however, also current because he knows the current records clerk. Demon says, “I still recommend people to resign, it gets you off the records on the local level and sends a message to the COB. Resigning removes the records from the local ward and stake. This is a big deal, it takes you off the radar of the local leaders. Some of these leaders are nuts, I have had bad experiences with local bishops before I resigned. When I resigned the bishop tried to get me fired.
Conclusion: “14 million, my ass.”
More details, and more proof of the fact that mormons keep former members, even excommunicated members, on their roles forever: http://exmormon.org/phorum/read.php?2,341577 (Scroll down to read details of an excommunicated member finding that her mormon membership number still existed in the church’s database.) There’s also insider knowledge about the number of people actually leaving LD$ Inc.
even the RCC does this, to a certain extent. For instance if you leave the church in Germany in order to get out of paying the church tax, there are divergent opinions if your quitting the church constitutes in a schism that should result in an excommunication. Indeed sometimes the RCC still counts people who left as members. (but the situation seems to be complicated, as it seems to be also a matter of canonical law not just a case of a cult trying to inflate its membership figures)
Minnie The Finn, avec de cèpes de Bordeauxsays
Illuminata @155:
Now would that by any chance be thick smoky bacon & pea soup?
If peas are still verboten in TET, I could settle for creamy bolete mushroom soup. Or clam chowder. Actually, any kind of soup if it comes with a good hug.
but re Romney: his base flattens out about 25% of the Republican base, right? Seems that the one best thing Romney could do to boost his campaign is to become an evangelical Christian…
For mormons, never purging resigned or excommunicated members from their roles seems to be a deliberate policy. They never enabled a function in their database that would prevent resigned members from being counted in the grand total of active members.
I can sort of understand, though not condone, their keeping the records of resigned members. I mean, who knows, some of the resigned or excommunicated members may return to the fold for family or financial reasons. After a big show of ass-kissing, and the payment of tithing, they would be accepted back into the church.
But continuing to count people who have formally resigned (or who have been excommunicated) as members when the Church feeds statistics to the public is an especially egregious example of lying in the name of God.
It’s a lie that helps to keep members who are still active in the church paying tithes. It’s also a politically useful lie. Numbers equal power.
It is a friggin’ lie, and they are using that lie knowingly to fool the public and to keep their members in line.
When real, live mormons eventually die, they are also not taken off the membership roles until, according to the database, they are 110 years old. If I understand the system correctly, when the database sees the person would be 110 years old, then that person is removed from the count of total active members.
So the software is capable of removing members over 110 years old, but not capable of removing members who have resigned.
I think they count necrodunkings separately. I will do some more research on that.
When dancing, avoid full body contact with your partner. Do not use positions or moves that are suggestive of sexual behavior. Plan and attend dances where dress, grooming, lighting, lyrics, and music contribute to a wholesome atmosphere where the Spirit of the Lord may be present.
opposablethumbs, que le pouce enragé mette les poucessays
Apologies if this has already been mentioned, but just in case it amuses – the robots of the future will be cephalopodan (cephalopodoid???), not humanoid.
Mormons have an official index of proxy baptisms, and that index is separate from membership roles.
This author was among the first genealogists to discover the names of thousands of Jewish Holocaust victims in the International Genealogical Index (the “IGI”) 1, the official Mormon index of proxy baptisms for the dead, and quickly exposed this misguided practice.
“But continuing to count people who have formally resigned”
Finnish political parties do the same, since they get government grants calculated on their membership. In my wild youth, I joined a party, and I’m still officially a member, even though I sent my first (of many) notes of resignation in the mid-80’s.
Also, necrodunking made my day =)
Albacoresays
Long-time lurker here with a question for Lynna, OM.
I live in the UK, my sister (a widow) lives in Australia and has been a mormon for years. She knows I think the whole religion thing is nonsense, and with the distance between us it is easy to avoid the subject. She does visit from time to time, but never comes alone – once with a daughter and son in law, twice with a friend (not the same one). She always makes out the friend just wants to tag along as she has not travelled before, but I now doubt this. The latest friend was definitely calling the shots on where to go, which attraction to visit etc. So I want to ask, is it likely the accompanying friend is really more of a minder, to “protect” her from us godless folk? I know you wouldn’t be familiar with the Australian mormon church but I can’t imagine it can be that different, so I’d appreciate your opinion. Thanks
After all, if you can convert to LDS and get married after you’re dead, you must still be an active member of the church.
And if you are a woman, you can still have babies after you are dead. Spirit babies. But who can tell the difference? Spirit babies are precursors of actual babies born on earth. Before the spirit babies are born into a good mormon home, I’m not sure what they are doing in the Celestial Kingdom, but I envision a sort of as-far-as-the-eye-can-see nursery of babies stuck in the pooping, squalling, suckling mode. But probably very good looking babies. With mostly blond hair. Possibly dimples. Babies of different colors are scattered thinly among the infant horde in order to comply with Celestial Correctness.
If you are worthy man of maximum mormonness, you can still have sex. With lots of women. Some of whom may be assigned to you by God. Some of whom may have had the great misfortune to be single on planet earth in these latter days.
If you are an infidel when you die, you can accept the offers of mormon missionaries who are proselytizing in the Outer Darkness, trolling for souls like yours. You can then go to mormon heaven and become active.
cicely, Inadvertent Phytocidal Maniacsays
About $150 in damage to various brushes, pencils, etc.
:(
–
If peas are still verboten in TET, I could settle for creamy bolete mushroom soup.
The pea does not change its shorts; i.e., they remain anathema, now and forever, world without end, raw men.
I can give you a *hug*, though. :)
(Mushroom and bacon soup? Mushroom, cheese and bacon soup?)
–
Silisays
Why yes, I’m figuring out ways to piss them off furthercause more trouble, why do you ask?
Heads in beds seem to be the standard response.
And it sounds like you’ll have plenty to take from.
Lynna
Oh. My. Goodness.
So, Mormon souls are made in the Celestial by dead Mormons and then stuffed into live Mormon babies.
This would make an interesting graphic novel.
cicely, Inadvertent Phytocidal Maniacsays
Caine, about 6 years back, I did an Arts & Sciences entry for an SCA event, in the documentation for which I had occasion to call bullshit! on the notion that cats are strictly carnivorous, since I had empirical evidence that they will also quite happily eat the heads of paintbrushes, especially the hard-to-find (at least, locally) super-spotters. One project, 3 20/0 brushes; and yet, amazingly, all three cats lived to tell the tale. :D
–
@theophontes, Dangerous Chemical-Welding Waterbearer:
Albacore @168, as far as I know the only mormons with assigned “companions” are missionaries. Missionaries each have a companion, an arrangement designed to keep 19 year old males out of trouble, and, hopefully, to cut down on the demon scourge of masturbation.
Sounds to me like your sister from Australia has redefined “unacceptable, out of wedlock relationship” to be “traveling companion.” If your sister is a MTBM (Mega True Believing Mormon — term I just invented, taking the usual TBM one step further), if your sister is in that category, then she has developed over a lifetime prodigious powers of self-deception.
Her brain will have been wired by repetition of bogus “I know” statements, and by positive reinforcement for bad habits, including self-deception, community-wide deception, and faulty logic.
Her mormon “minder” is probably just a TBM that is respected at one level higher in the covert hierarchy of the church. From that, the minder’s power derives.
cicely, Inadvertent Phytocidal Maniacsays
Minnie, you can have my share of the rye bread. :)
A nice, crusty French bread, on the other hand….
–
The principal then told the student, who was accompanied by another member of staff at the time:
“Guys do this kind of thing, you have to get used to it.”
According to the report, when the girl’s mother called the principal to discuss her comments, the principal told her that her daughter “should concentrate on her studies” and “to stop focusing on these trivialities”.
(More crappy hold music)
/End Trigger Warning
ChasCPetersonsays
I had occasion to call bullshit! on the notion that cats are strictly carnivorous, since I had empirical evidence that they will also quite happily eat the heads of paintbrushes, especially the hard-to-find (at least, locally) super-spotters.
natural or synthetic bristles?
I think the natural ones count as ‘carnivorous’.
Oh. My. Goodness.
So, Mormon souls are made in the Celestial by dead Mormons and then stuffed into live Mormon babies.
This would make an interesting graphic novel.
LOL. Hadn’t thought of that. But, yes, good idea. Our darkest fiction fails when compared to theology.
For your graphic novel, you also need to consider the fact that God makes spirit babies too. In fact, I think he might be the busiest spirit-baby-maker of all.
There’s a website where mormon mommies go to discuss raising their babies. They frequently discuss the idea that their new babies can still see “beyond the veil” or “through the veil” — so the transition must retain two-way communication of some sort between the Celestial Kingdom and the baby rooms on earth that are decorated with portraits of Joe Smith.
community.babycenter.com
My son used to giggle and reach for someone I couldn’t see, and I believe that it was DD, because once she was born he stopped doing that. They are very close, and I could feel how desperately she wanted to join our family. That’s why she was born one year and two weeks after DS. Also, when someone made the comment that they looked like twins, I heard a whisper in my head say, “they would have been twins, but your body wasn’t capable. This is why she is here so soon.”
I totally believe that babies are visited by loved ones.
“DD” means Dear Daughter. Mormons use abbreviations like this a lot. “DH” means Dear Husband.
Of course it is possible for you to see an angel, but it could also be the spirit of a child you haven’t had yet, or one of your ancestors hoping you’ll recognize his picture as you are doing family history work and do his work for him.
Small children are definitely more apt to seeing angels or the spirits of loved ones passed on because their little spirits are so close to the veil still.
have seen very brief gliimpses of some of our kids before they were even conceived.
(Management would like to apologize, Katherine has lost all mental faculty for proper speech due to the sheer anger at that article. She should be fine after a quick reboot. Maintenance has been notified.)
chigau (む)says
Get that Kat a kitten to hug! Stat!
cicely, Inadvertent Phytocidal Maniacsays
“You file a police report if you want, although this is not a prioritized case as no serious crime has been committed.”
*facepalmheaddesk*; lather, rinse and repeat.
–
natural or synthetic bristles?
I think the natural ones count as ‘carnivorous’.
Synthetic. Almost all of my brushes are synthetic.
I suppose it could just be considered a sort of feline equivalent to “tofurkey”. “Synthbuggy”?
–
Hey, at least she didn’t puncture/eat about 3 dozen tubes of paint like one of my cats did one time. :D
Back when we were both working with high gloss enamel sign paints one of our cats got into them and managed to drink blue paint after knocking several cans from a table. We found out because she then managed to vomit blue oil enamel on almost everything while running for shelter with her red oil enamel soaked paws.
We thought she would be poisoned, but she is still alive and healthy albeit very old now.
Cleaning and detoxing the cat was no fun for anyone though.
okay, I quit the world. Anyone down for buying up some farmland and making Pharyngutopia?
Jamiesays
Hi everyone,
I wanted to ask for some cooking suggestions or links to sites that would have good cooking advice. (I think there was also an eternal thread with some recipes, but I don’t really remember which it was, so if someone remembers that I could use that too.) I’ve done google searches, but there’s just so much info it’s overwhelming.
Last year I made green bean casserole, baked zuccini, mashed potatoes, stuffing and roasted a turkey. My family doesn’t exactly have any kind of tradition for this holiday, so I wanted to know what other people usually have with their turkey. (My employer is providing me a turkey, so we’re definitely having turkey.) I’m open to ideas for cooking turkey and side dishes, though using reasonably obtainable ingredients.
Thank you,
Jamie
ahs ॐsays
If you want a judiciary that is actually independent of the executive and the legislature, and that can actually protect the civil liberties of minorities against the will of the majority, then you have to have an appointed judiciary with security of tenure.
I agree, but this can be arranged other ways than lifetime appointments (and you didn’t suggest otherwise, so I’m just riffing).
For instance, if judges have fixed terms and can never be reappointed or reelected, their degree of independence is the same.
I would like to see fixed terms which are some odd number of years long. 11, 15, 19 years? Anything longer than 19 terrifies me.
Additionally, I would like age limits; a judge cannot begin their term unless they are younger than 65-X years, where X is the term length. Judicial age limits are in place in some states already, and for me constitute a crude but better-than-nothing method of favoring liberalism.
Ingsays
Something doesn’t add up here. There is no way in hell any principal AND witnessing teacher would play down rape allegations in this manner. I am guessing the infraction described to the principal was not a rape but something else. Must be more to the story. Otherwise, our society is in real trouble.
I envy the naive
Tethyssays
okay, I quit the world. Anyone down for buying up some farmland and making Pharyngutopia?
*raises tentacle*
I’m enjoying imagining what Pharyngutopia would look like. I see an amazing creation that combines green construction, sustainable agriculture, cutting edge tech, and much grog. The libraries alone are making me drool a bit.
ahs ॐsays
Lynna,
For your graphic novel, you also need to consider the fact that God makes spirit babies too. In fact, I think he might be the busiest spirit-baby-maker of all.
God is Adam, do I have that right? Does he make them by fucking Eve and his other wives?
Ingsays
@Ahs
God is NOT Adam…for some reason that bothers them. They’re very firm on that stance
Richard Austinsays
ahs:
For instance, if judges have fixed terms and can never be reappointed or reelected, their degree of independence is the same.
Actually, they’re then just more likely to spin cases in favor of people who can/will employ them after they’re no longer allowed to be judges.
This is the exact issue with term limits, and is the same problem: you shift from the payoffs being before serving to after serving.
I think a lifetime appointment is reasonable so long as there’s a process of impeachment that can be instituted from multiple directions but requires some threshold to trigger the actual “trial”. Being successfully impeached should then prohibit someone from ever being a appointed again, and the judge in question should be recused from all cases from the moment the impeachment process has started (Whether that be submission of a signed petition or action by the legislature).
Yes, it needs to be thought out more, but plain old term limits are as bad as elections from a corruption standpoint.
A very good essay by Jane Leavy on the Penn State situation in the context of child sexual abuse in general (my apologies if this has been linked before).
Ingsays
Ahs
It makes sense from their mythology but for some reason they hate the idea. Apparently that tiny little bit is the exact mark of “too far” from orthodoxy.
Cannabinaceaesays
Of cats and carnivory:
Cats will also eat tinsel from the christmas tree. All if it they can reach. Denuding the lower branches of their glittering strands. Yes, it does come out the other end of the cat, although its stomacic retention time seems a bit longer than with food.
At least one puppy named “Toby” will not have access to tinsel this christmas, although if evidence is any guide, she will need to be watched carefully to prevent her from eating anythingeverything else.
Fortunately, she seems to learn quickly what she’s not supposed to eat. Unfortunately, she’s learned that if she distracts us or lulls us into a false sense of security, she can return to any suspended forbidden eating projects for a while. Since we know, and act, on this secondary knowledge, I suspect she will soon begin employing third-order strategies to maintain her access.
Yes, I know, “welcome to the world of a new puppy!”. This is our second time around.
Silisays
Now I’m no Latin expert, but I highly doubt there is such a word as squarepantsii
Yeah. It should be squarepantsi with one i. I have no clue why the Internet thinks tow i’s is necessary to Latiner than thou (cf. virii, penii).
'Tis Himself, OMsays
Okay, thanks to PZ, I’ve been able to get here, I can read comments and even make posts. Thank you John Morales and PZ Myers for ending my frustration.
ahs @198, (and following posts of both ahs and Ing), the Adam/God doctrine is just one of many slippery bits of mormon theology that modern mormons would love to deny or explain away.
Their problem is that historical documents exist that will continue to follow them down the dark corridors of all their days. Their only defense is to build stronger mormon brain filters so that the questions are rebuffed before they can be considered by the frontal lobes.
The typical ‘current Mormon’ stance towards the Adam-God doctrine is that Brigham Young did not teach any ‘false doctrines,’ but rather was simply misheard and misquoted by his scribes. The excuse given is that on the day Young gave a particular sermon outdoors, it was raining and thundering and the scribe thought Young said “Adam-God,” when Young actually said “Elohim-God.” That silly apologetic was propagated by the late Joseph Fielding Smith, and continues to be perpetuated by such naive LDS apologists as Woody Brison…
Personally, I like this explanation. There’s drama, and it would look good reenacted on film. I was planning to use the thunder excuse for any time that I am misquoted, but then realized that I would have to give all my talks outdoors during thunderstorms.
Of course, the truth is that Young could not possibly have been misquoted on that one occasion, because he taught the same concepts throughout his 25-year presidency, and his teachings incited lots of controversy and dissent, including that of Orson Pratt… LDS apologists… who continue to repeat the “misquoted” defense are in denial of the facts.
In a private letter to BYU professor Eugene England, the late Bruce R. McConkie admitted that Young taught the Adam-God doctrine; that Young was wrong on many points; and that Young would have to answer to God for his misguided teachings. McConkie’s letter is on-line at http://www.myplanet.net/mike/LDS/McConkie_England_letter.html
McConkie died in 1985, so referencing him brings us almost into present-day mormonism, and is proof that modern-day apostles of the LDS Church knew full well that Brigham Young was a purveyor of bullshit.
…Young himself claimed that Joseph Smith had taught him the Adam-God doctrine. It’s likely that Smith did, because Adam-God fits in with Smith’s other concepts which are still accepted in LDS theology, such as eternal progression, the premortal “spirit world,” plural and celestial marriage, Elohim having literal sex with Mary to conceive the “half-God” Jesus, etc.
So, in light of that, why was the Adam-God doctrine disavowed? To understand that, one must first realize that 19th-century Mormon leaders taught and believed that Christ would return in about 1890, to usher in the “millenium,” wherein the “Kingdom of God” would rule the whole world. Because the Mormons had built their “mountain kingdom” in Utah, and were, so they thought, safe from criticism or substantial opposition to their unorthodox teachings and practices, men like Brigham Young felt no compunction to “hold back” on expounding on the “meatiest” of Mormon doctrines like Adam-God when preaching to their flock. IOW, Young had no perception that the world, and the LDS Church, would continue into the 20th century, in their then-current incarnations. But when Young died in 1877—and Christ failed to return in 1890—and LDS leaders were forced to give up such practices as polygamy, as part of “the Great Accomodation” in the 1890’s—-then LDS leaders realized that if their church was going to survive into the 20th century, what with statehood and “Gentiles” upsetting their “kingdom,” that they would have to downplay or disavow such unorthodox, highly criticized teachings as Adam-God.
…Adam-God teachings began to slowly disappear from church-published literature and the temple ceremony. After a couple of generations had passed away, so few mainstream Mormons were even aware of the doctrine…
Modern LDS leaders want their church to appear more like other orthodox protestant relgions, so they can attract more converts.
And so that they can elect a mormon President … or at the very least, have lots of mormon politicians succeed in high office.
… LDS leaders have stuck with the tactics of either denying that Adam-God was ever taught, or that the teachings were merely misquotes. What leaders ideally want is for Adam-God to never be mentioned, because they know that the more rank-and-file Mormons learn the facts, the more of them will apostasize for the reason you alluded to—if leaders cannot be relied upon on Adam-God, then why rely on them for anything else? ….
cicely, Inadvertent Phytocidal Maniacsays
Cats will also eat tinsel from the christmas tree. All if it they can reach. Denuding the lower branches of their glittering strands. Yes, it does come out the other end of the cat, although its stomacic retention time seems a bit longer than with food.
Yes, indeed! Give the ol’ litter box a festive air this Christmas!
–
Ingsays
Really? Jesus and Satan are pouch mates but they for some reason think Adam God makes them look weird? Not to mention the magic underoos?
'Tis Himself, OMsays
It’s not a good idea to have cats eat tinsel. It can cause intestinal blockage, requiring surgery to remove.
More on the Adam/God doctrine and how it was taught by Brigham Young, and on how present-day mormons can deal with that doctrine:
…the only valid “Mormon answer” to the BY/Adam-God issue is that Young taught it, it was correct, that modern church leaders who disavow it are wrong, and the fundamentalists like Art Bulla who continue to propagate A/G are more honest than the mainstream Mormons … who deny or disavow it.
Or, If you don’t want to become a Mormon fundamentalist, you can choose the option I chose—Young taught the doctrine, it was wrong, it made him a false prophet, and all of Mormonism is wrong along with Young. In my opinion, that is the only intellectually honest option to take. The choice you have is whether you want to be intellectually honest with yourself.
And here is a link to a site on which LDS Apologists wriggle and squirm their way through the controversy: http://fairmormon.org/Mormonism_and_doctrine/Repudiated_concepts/Adam-God_theory
There’s a fuckton of blather on that site, but it boils down to these claims:
“…Brigham was speaking of Adam in the context of him being the presiding priesthood holder over all the human family, and therefore “our Father and our God”…”
or
“… perhaps Brigham Young was speaking of at least two Adams, but that he was intentionally veiling what he was talking about, and left it up to individuals to get revelation on the true interpretation. This would be similar to the Lord’s use of parables. …”
or
“…Adam is the generic name that can be used to refer to each male of the species. And that the name Adam symbolically refers to a continuum of progress in degrees along man’s journey from pre-existence all the way to Godhood. But this rejects the multiple mortality theories in some interpretations of Adam-God, where Adam falls from an exaltation into another mortality. Each male person that is eventually exalted is both an “Adam Jr.” and an “Adam Sr.” along different parts of his path of progression. Once he is exalted, he takes on the status of an “Adam Sr.” Therefore, Michael becomes a symbol of all men along the path to exaltation, and Elohim becomes a symbol of all men who have reached exaltation. So, in this view, while Adam-God to some degree is about Michael the Archangel and his Father, it is also about each man’s journey and eternal progression.”
I have a headache.
One last salvo is the “We don’t know” version:
“Yet another way in which anti-Mormon critics often misrepresent LDS doctrine is in the presentation of anomalies as though they were the doctrine of the Church. Anomalies occur in every field of human endeavor, even in science. An anomaly is something unexpected that cannot be explained by the existing laws or theories, but which does not constitute evidence for changing the laws and theories. An anomaly is a glitch…. A classic example of an anomaly in the LDS tradition is the so-called “Adam-God theory.” During the latter half of the nineteenth century Brigham Young made some remarks about the relationship between Adam and God that the Latter-day Saints have never been able to understand….”
“Only further revelation from the Lord’s anointed would be able to clear up many points surrounding that doctrine.”
Silisays
My parents’ cat when I was a wee baby played with the decorations as well, so my bought some wooden ones to put on the lower branches. We used them ever since.
–o–
Faux Latin?
Lecti lesculitorum, femiverum.
Browniansays
It’s not a good idea to have cats eat tinsel.
Of course not. Who has their cat eat tinsel?
Cats eat tinsel all on their own.
cicely, Inadvertent Phytocidal Maniacsays
It’s not a good idea to have cats eat tinsel. It can cause intestinal blockage, requiring surgery to remove.
I know, and I probably should have put some kind of “exaggeration” tag on my post. We got lucky; no kitty had to see the vet while we were learning that we just can’t have tinsel. Ever.
–
illuminatasays
On the subject of cats: other owners out there, I have questions.
I’m a relative newbie cat owner. I adopted him a year ago, but only ever had boring pets (i.e. goldfish, hamsters, etc.) before, when I was a child. So, some things he does amuses and confuses me.
1) Must he deliberately push everything he can off of tables? I’m forever picking up things that, for some reason, he felt the need to look at, push off the table and then watch hit the ground.
2) How much is enough food?. The rescue group I got him from (which included a vet) told me to ignore the feeding instructions on the pet food packaging – as it was way too much – and instead feed according to their guidelines. In this case it’s 1/4 can of wet food + 1/4 cup of dry food twice daily.
But, he acts like he’s freaking starving a lot of the time. How do you know if you’re not feeding them enough? Or is he just being spoiled because he knows I’ll give in?
3) Hairballs. HOLY SHIT THE HAIRBALLS. He’s a Persian/Maine Coon mix and holy fuck is he furry. 10x furrier than any other cat I’ve ever seen. And, even though I feed in the “hairball control” food, I’m still cleaning up puke puddles every couple of weeks. Is there a better way to deal with this? It seems like its upsetting and painful for him when he hacks them up.
Really? Jesus and Satan are pouch mates but they for some reason think Adam God makes them look weird? Not to mention the magic underoos?
That’s the least of it.
Mormons actually believe that Mitt Romney’s candidacy will be a great thing for mormonism. Because, they reason, even if Romney doesn’t win, the more people learn about mormonism the better.
Mormon publications like Deseret News are chock full of this attitude. They think that scrutiny is a good thing. Bring it on, they’re saying. People will find out how cool and normal and ethical mormons are.
Cheese and Rice!
I am, of course, happy to give them the scrutiny they think they want.
The people most likely to be surprised by what is found under the carpet are mormon sheeple themselves. Top leaders are probably buying new magic underwear daily, or are perhaps scared shitless. The regular flock are, meanwhile, distressingly gullible and naive. It’s painful to see them dutifully repeating the lies they’ve been told as they comment below every news article that comes out.
Eventually, even the most well-established lies, like the “14 million members,” will be stripped of their cover.
The NY supreme court has ruled to reject the earlier court order that said protesters have to be let back into the park. This means that the Occupy protesters do not need to be let back into the park.
Further revelation from the Lord’s anointed will never be able to clear up the muck stirred up by Romney’s presidential campaign.
A few people might be moved by all the fresh attention to mormonism to attend LDS Church services. And, if nothing else has raised their eyebrows, that will.
Wowbagger, Madman of Insleyfarnesays
And, even though I feed in the “hairball control” food, I’m still cleaning up puke puddles every couple of weeks.
And this is one of the most significant reasons I’m not a pet owner. No matter what positives you get from it, having to clean up after the animal is just something I couldn’t handle.
Browniansays
Illuminata:
I don’t know that cats must push things off of tables, just that they do.
We feed ours 3/4 cups of dry food a day. We’re trying to keep him from ballooning outward. And yes, you’d think we were torturing him to hear him carry on.
As for hairballs, ours is a medium-hair and he hardly seems to shed at all, nor has he ever coughed up a hairball. I can recommend the Furminator brush/comb thing: we use it once or twice a week, and we take off an entire extra cat. It’s an expensive brush ($40 up here in Canuckistan), but it really seems to work.
1) Must he deliberately push everything he can off of tables? I’m forever picking up things that, for some reason, he felt the need to look at, push off the table and then watch hit the ground.
Yes.
Moving things are fascinating. He’s making his own entertainment. That fragile piece of bric-a-brac was so boring, just sitting there.
2) How much is enough food?. The rescue group I got him from (which included a vet) told me to ignore the feeding instructions on the pet food packaging – as it was way too much – and instead feed according to their guidelines. In this case it’s 1/4 can of wet food + 1/4 cup of dry food twice daily.
I don’t have a bug on the wall at Purina, but their job is to sell you as much cat food as possible, so their bottom line experts are hardly disinterested parties. I’d go with what the vet says; if Kitteh isn’t maintaining a healthy weight on that, you could bump it up some. If that doesn’t help, talk to the vet again.
But, he acts like he’s freaking starving a lot of the time.
Of course.
I suspect, with no firm basis for the suspicion, that cats sometimes eat out of boredom; or maybe I’m just anthropomorphising the fuzzy little suckers.
How do you know if you’re not feeding them enough?
Watch his weight.
Or is he just being spoiled because he knows I’ll give in?
Probably. Cats are famous for their “pampered pets” rep, and they didn’t get it by hiring a public relations firm. :)
3) Hairballs.[…] Is there a better way to deal with this?
*ignoring the host of bad jokes clamoring for voice*
Not that I’m aware of.
–
More scrutiny of Moments of Mormon Madness — the following is from the present-day Young Women’s manual. It illustrates the glorious heights to which mormon guilt-inducing skills can rise. Jewish mother stereotypes are no match for this stuff when it comes to ladening on the guilt.
“A few years ago a young couple who lived in northern Utah came to Salt Lake City for their marriage. They did not want to bother with a temple marriage, or perhaps they did not feel worthy. At any rate, they had a civil marriage. After the marriage they got into their automobile and drove north to their home for a wedding reception. On their way home they had an accident, and when the wreckage was cleared, there was a dead man and a dead young woman. They had been married only an hour or two. Their marriage was ended. They thought they loved each other. They wanted to live together forever, but they did not live the commandments that would make that possible. So death came in and closed that career. They may have been good young people; I don’t know. But they will be angels in heaven if they are. They will not be gods and goddesses and priests and priestesses because they did not fulfill the commandments and do the things that were required at their hands.
“Sometimes we have people who say, ‘Oh, someday I will go to the temple. But I am not quite ready yet. And if I die, somebody can do the work for me in the temple.’ And that should be made very clear to all of us. The temples are for the living and for the dead only when the work could not have been done. Do you think that the Lord will be mocked and give to this young couple who ignored him, give them the blessings? The Lord said, ‘For all contracts that are not made unto this end have an end when men are dead.’ (D&C 132:7)” (in Conference Report, Japan Area Conference 1975, pp. 61–62).
Everyone says to brush him, but he will not allow it. I’ve been working on clicker training him – he comes when you call him and sits on command – but I’m still working on acclimating him to the brush. He just attacks it, and I don’t want my fingers to accidentally be in the way.
And he is totally an asshole. An adorable fuzzy lover-lover, who follows me everywhere, but totally an asshole. LOL
@Pelamun in 132, I think you mean Laura Norder :) You wouldn’t ever say “law and rorder” because there’s a consonant D before the vowel start of Order. The phantom R comes between 2 vowels. (Law and Lore are homonyms in my non-rhotic speech, rhyming with awe.)
Laura Norder is, of course, a friend of Emma Chizzit, as featured in an old book by Afferbeck Lauder called Let Stalk Strine.
Diannesays
@224: Clearly, the moral here is that one shouldn’t get married because getting married leads to death. If they’d simply moved in together and didn’t make a fuss over it, they wouldn’t have been on their way to a reception and wouldn’t have died. Conclusion: marriage is bad.
cicely, Inadvertent Phytocidal Maniacsays
Daily brushing doesn’t necessarily work. Pixel-cat sheds enough every day to knit a whole new cat, despite being a shorthair, and no amount of combing/brushing seems to help.
Light, drifty stuff, too. Many’s the time I’ve watched a loosely-bundled aggregation of Pixel-fluff lazily circle under the ceiling fan at about eyeball height.
–
I’m not sure what this means. I’m sure, however, that we DHs aren’t going to be flattered by the results of that particular search. m-)
Algernonsays
3) Hairballs. HOLY SHIT THE HAIRBALLS. He’s a Persian/Maine Coon mix and holy fuck is he furry. 10x furrier than any other cat I’ve ever seen. And, even though I feed in the “hairball control” food, I’m still cleaning up puke puddles every couple of weeks. Is there a better way to deal with this? It seems like its upsetting and painful for him when he hacks them up.
I have two medium haired cats with thick undercoats. One used to vomit a lot. Brush him lots, but also consider playing with the brands of food. Ours eats this ridiculously expensive high meat content dried food and regular wet food. This and brushing has reduced the hairballs to a very rare thing. Honestly, my cat pukes less than once a month.
Everyone says to brush him, but he will not allow it.
Do it when he’s sleeping. That’s the only way I can clip my cat’s nails. If I try to do it when he’s awake, he screams at me and tries to claw my eyes out.
Algernonsays
TBH, I don’t know about other people here but I think the “no hairball” food is kind of a crock. With long haired cats (the one that ate the paint was a long haired cat) I find that brushing and finding the food that works best for them goes farther. Finding the right brush is good, because they have different tolerances for brushing.
I try to make a light brushing an every day thing. Also, clean up cat hair on surfaces regularly. Some of them will eat it when they find it, so if they have hair piled on a chair they’ll actually lick it up.
Diannesays
@184: I’ve seen other people use the “DX” abbreviation. It annoys me excessively for some reason. Possibly because it sounds so Stepfordish. Or insecure. Do I really have to emphasize that my partner or child is dear to me?
Algernonsays
There is a trick to getting cats to let you brush them. It takes time and patience and learning the cat’s tricks. SOme just love it, and some have to be uh… lovingly dominated.
Browniansays
That’s a good point about entertaining themselves, cicely. Cats are like lovers: they like toys they can use by themselves when no-one’s around as well as toys that you can play with together. (Unlike lovers, they prefer things covered in sisal to things to be inserted in orifices.)
As for the spoiled thing: rather than feeding your cat twice daily, measure out his or her daily amount and give a little each time s/he complains. It’ll stop the binging without increasing the daily food intake. S/he’ll still complain, but you won’t have to have a three-hour battle of wills because s/he gorged on dinner at five and is famished by eight.
We fill one of those little tiny tupperware containers with 3/4 cup of kibble and leave it by the food bowl on top of the stove: B.B. gets an eighth of a cup whenever his complaining reaches annoying levels.
(He’s fond of chewing plastic; especially if said plastic is surrounding baked goods. One day, I tossed him a corner of the slice I was eating to see if he actually ate the bread he was so fond of spoiling. He looked at the bread, met my gaze, looked at the top of the stove where he knows his food is stored, and back at me. So, his fetish is for destroying loaves, rather than eating them.)
And he is totally an asshole. An adorable fuzzy lover-lover, who follows me everywhere, but totally an asshole. LOL
Yes, we understood the part about him being a cat. Why the redundancy?
Sometimes B.B.’s in no mood for brushing or clipping, and sometimes he likes to think of himself as charitable to his annoying humans and their clippy brushy things. On those latter occasions, I’ve been rewarding him with kibble treats if he lets me do at least two paws.
Tethyssays
On cats who do not appreciate brushes:
They make cat grooming gloves with rubber pads that work nicely.
I deal with the hairballs by taking the cats outside to eat grass and keeping them in the yard until the grass comes back up.
Hairballs are the worst during the big spring and fall sheds.
Algernonsays
Hmmm… I have been fortunate with the binges. I’ve always been able to leave dried food in a bowl next to the water. Once they realize it is *always* there it isn’t exciting so they tend to nibble. Plus they really look forward to the wet food.
They are insidious. They will try to fake you out by waking you up early, then trying to wake you up again later after you go back to sleep.
If your cat sheds a lot AND has dry skin check into getting more oily foods like wet food with fish oil. The awful cat had really flaky dry skin with extra shedding when she was dumped on me. That much has gotten better about her though.
ahs ॐsays
Thanks, Lynna!
“Only further revelation from the Lord’s anointed would be able to clear up many points surrounding that doctrine.”
From a recruiting standpoint, this seems like their safest bet, no matter what the issue. I wonder why the Mormon hierarchy doesn’t always get th—oh, right, because they actually take these questions seriously.
A few people might be moved by all the fresh attention to mormonism to attend LDS Church services. And, if nothing else has raised their eyebrows, that will.
That reminds me. Is it bad form to show up at an LDS church unannounced on Sunday morning, like I was just in the area and needed to go to a church, any church?
Wowbagger, Madman of Insleyfarnesays
Brownian wrote:
Cats are like lovers.
That makes sense; I’m not all that good with those either…
I think I’m going to learn how to crochet. Does anyone here do that?
Algernonsays
I think I’m going to learn how to crochet.
Not since I was a child. I wish I remembered how to do it though! My grandmother used to make the most lovely crochet things.
What I’d like to do at some point is learn to make hair art.
My sister’s best friend owned cats who ate tinsel, which would only be discovered when said cats began trailing poop-covered tinsel strands behind them wherever they went. On two occasions my sister assisted her friend in restraining the cats and slowly pulling the tinsel out while the cats made the most disturbing noises imaginable. After the second episode of shinyphagy, tinsel was never again hung, but the psychic damage was done; from that day forward, my sister has kept an unbroken vow to never own cats.
Browniansays
Trilobites and Tegopelte were both also way cooler than cats.
Were you a latchkey kid or something? Left alone too long in the orphanarium? Is there a reason behind your passive-aggressiveness when people aren’t talking about exactly what you want to talk about?
Tethyssays
@Chas
Thanks! It seems rather arbitrary to call them arachnomorphs. They aren’t spider-like at all. Haeckels art is always appreciated. Arachnomorpha
The wiki article does suggest that this is a point of contention.
Wowbagger, Madman of Insleyfarnesays
I still want to get pet tarantula. I’m fairly sure they don’t throw up.
The Laughing Coyote (Papio Cynocephalus)says
TBH, I don’t know about other people here but I think the “no hairball” food is kind of a crock.
I’m not a cat owner and never have been. But aren’t hairballs a direct result of a cat’s grooming behavior? How the hell would a food prevent that? Does it somehow dissolve hair in the stomach? Or does it somehow stop the cat from grooming itself? I don’t get how a ‘no hairball’ cat food would work.
ChasCPetersonsays
Were you a latchkey kid or something?
No.
Not that there’s anything wrong with that.
Is there a reason behind your passive-aggressiveness when people aren’t talking about exactly what you want to talk about?
um
No, not really.
Independent incidents of real-time annoyance, is all.
Happy to jettison the ‘passive’ if you’d prefer:
The fucking Cure sucks eggs. If you think they’re any good at all, at anything, you’re a fucking moron.
And please shut the fuck up about your goddamn cats. There is nothing on the whole fucking Internet that’s more boring than a bunch of fucking cat-fanciers enabling each others’ fucking cat-fancying thing with more precious and/or disgusting anthropomorphic anecdotes about their little furry fucking cat-friends.
Variations of hyperbolic space can be found in nature (the wavy edges of sea kelp, for example), but mathematicians scratched their heads trying to find a simple way to fabricate a physical model. Finally, in 1997, mathematician Daina Taimina realized that the crochet stitch that women have used for centuries to create ruffled garments represents this complex geometry.
The Laughing Coyote (Papio Cynocephalus)says
Chas: So I take it you won’t be attending the Pharyngula Cat Fashion Show?
You’re missing out, I heard they were gonna dress up Snickerdoodle and Mewmewkins in the CUTEST little sailor outfits.
They make cat grooming gloves with rubber pads that work nicely.
Genius!
Damnit, why didn’t i ask you kids sooner?
ow the hell would a food prevent that? Does it somehow dissolve hair in the stomach? Or does it somehow stop the cat from grooming itself? I don’t get how a ‘no hairball’ cat food would work.
According to the packaging, it contains a laxative element that helps “push” the food through, as it were. Probably a crock, but a desperate cat owner is a cash cow.
much to the chagrin of the avant-garde artiste known as illuminata’s cat
his name is Cleo. Don’t ask me – he picked it.
StarStuff – re: crochet – Slightly. I’m a knitter, and frankly crochet scares me. Too hard! (and were I crocheter, I’d say the exact same thing in reverse).
illuminatasays
The Laughing Coyote @ 258 wins the thread. Do you have a Ghey Sects Queue too? I want in!
Wowbagger, Madman of Insleyfarnesays
…a desperate cat owner is a cash cow…
FIFY – at least if what my assorted cat-owning friends tell me is true. Especially if they get injured or sick. Though they also assure me they don’t mind, given how important their pets are to them.
Rey Foxsays
The excuse given is that on the day Young gave a particular sermon outdoors, it was raining and thundering and the scribe thought Young said “Adam-God,” when Young actually said “Elohim-God.”
Ha. “Klaatu, barata, ni-*COUGH COUGH*”
Cheese and Rice!
Frank, this silt just got real!
I think I’m going to learn how to crochet. Does anyone here do that?
Are you kidding? Weaving textiles and this group are like oil and water. Bleah. Crocheting, knitting, spinning, that stuff’s for theists, man. Prairie Muffins. No, nobody does that here.
ChasCPetersonsays
Actually, I like cats just fine.
Cats are kind of like Walton. I don’t mind having them around, even enjoy their company on occasion, but what I can’t stand is people talking about them all the time.
Speaking of cat fashions, though, did you see the vid that Coyne posted about the cat with turtle envy?
Wowbagger – “I still want to get pet tarantula. I’m fairly sure they don’t throw up.”
Anecdatum, my friend who had one scared his to death by tapping on the terrarium. I don’t think they’re very robust in captivity.
Since I have arachnophobia I can’t stand them. I can’t even stand to watch other people allowing them to crawl on them.
I haz a rule, if I don’t let you in my house, I reserve the right to kill you.
+++++++++++++++
Just like “oh, that’s Sailor, he thinks he’s funny”, “oh, that’s ChasC, he’s just being an asshole.”
I’m an asshole at times and ChasC is funny at times.
It gets complicated. e.g. My research would be a lot easier if it wasn’t for human variability. (But since we research human retinas it’s a given.)
ChasCPetersonsays
AE: see? See? It was better the other way, where I could merely imply that I had strong feelings about The *urk* (sorry) Cure, without having to come right out and state them forthrightly and get all sulked at and shit.
Yep, back to passive-aggressive; if other people want to get all ‘honest’ and ‘candid’ and ‘direct’ then I guess that’s fine for them. You know. Those people.
changeable monikersays
Um, Brownian, that’s going to turn into a Googlewhack. To here …
That reminds me. Is it bad form to show up at an LDS church unannounced on Sunday morning, like I was just in the area and needed to go to a church, any church?
You can’t go into the super duper special temples, but visitors can drop in at any of the churches. It’s likely you will be looked at askance, and then love-bombed, assigned at least two missionaries, and harassed by phone and personal visits for the rest of your life.
You might try giving out a fake name, address and phone number when asked.
The Sunday services are 3 hours long.
Women seldom wear pants — dresses being required. Dress or skirt should cover your knees.
Men seldom wear colored dress shirts, white being required. Ties also required. Wear a light blue shirt and a days growth of beard if you want to be pegged as a troublemaker.
Flip flop shoes are not allowed.
More than one earring per ear for women is frowned on.
Have fun.
Oh, wait, fun is not allowed. At least not during Sunday morning services. Some fun can occasionally be had at Ward parties, or other church-sponsored activities.
Tethyssays
Tarantulas don’t throw-up, but they do throw hairs.
Caine, ‘Gytha’ Googling would seem to activate The Walton, but what the hell did you mean?
Esme is named after Esmerelda Weathwax, who is lifelong friends with Gytha Ogg. If Mister brings home two more girls instead of one, we’ll have a Magrat too.
Rey Foxsays
Yes, no more talking about cats.
How about kings?
Zugswangsays
Come now, what could be more enjoyable and enlightening than an indefinitely extended conversation about vomiting cats?
Other than being waterboarded, of course.
Vomitboarding?
ahs ॐsays
You might try giving out a fake name, address and phone number when asked.
Oh, good idea. Then I can get up and walk out after 45 minutes.
Better park several streets over, too.
Ingsays
I swear I hate every fucking human being on this planet.
Ing, anything I can do to help?
+++++++++++++++++++
I’m currently watching “The Story of Will Rogers”, starring Will Rogers Jr.
It doesn’t suck.
illuminatasays
at least if what my assorted cat-owning friends tell me is true. Especially if they get injured or sick. Though they also assure me they don’t mind, given how important their pets are to them.
On the injured and sick side, yes, I’d agree.
Though since that asshole enjoys knocking things off the counter more than he’s ever liked any toy, I don’t fall for that shit. Anymore.
A. Rsays
I’m assuming that everyone on TET knows that OWS was evicted from Zuccotti park?
Yes. I even blogged about it. It’s utter bullshit.
Ingsays
@Rey
especially you.
My grandmother is going into surgery for breast cancer this friday and I am sick up to my eyes with dealing with face book. Don’t know why I try to bother with people, I hate just about all of my friends friends. Because nothing proves a point that I’m rude for insulting people about their ignorance on issues like starting to throw slurs at my SO and myself.
John Moralessays
A. R, if you are unsure as to your assumption, how are we supposed to know?
Ing, I’m sorry your grandmother’s dealing with breast cancer. All tentacles crossed for her, I hope the surgery goes well.
Rey Foxsays
If it will redeem me in your eyes at all, I’m sorry for what you’re going through.
'Tis Himself, OMsays
Yes, no more talking about cats.
The time has come, the Walrus said,
To talk of many things:
Of shoes—and ships—and sealing-wax—
Of cabbages—and kings—
And why the sea is boiling hot—
And whether pigs have wings.
Crudely Wrottsays
1) Must he deliberately push everything he can off of tables? I’m forever picking up things that, for some reason, he felt the need to look at, push off the table and then watch hit the ground.
I don’t know about an adopted adult cat but here is my solution for the little kidduns.
As soon as they are starting to jump up on tables I begin a program of negative enforcement. The materials are simple and inexpensive. Old fashioned mouse traps and normal typing paper.
Set the mousetraps and place them on tables, counters, etc. in what you figure would be the kiddun’s approximate landing zone. Cover the trap with a couple sheets of paper. Walk away whistling nonchalantly.
Along comes the dear furball who jumps up, lands on paper and trap. Trap springs making a loud and unexpected noise. (The paper is sufficient to keep the trap from snagging paws and tails.) Kiddun leaps off. One or two times has always been enough for my lil’ guys.
In order to make it easier for the cat and so as to not cause neurosis by denying its instinct to jump/climb up, I make sure that they are welcome to get up on soft and comfy places, not hard and smooth places. It’s always worked for me and my kidduns and, no, they have never been hurt by the traps, only startled.
Again, I don’t know how a grown cat would react since I’ve never done the experiment. Even so, I think it would be effective simply because cats don’t like sudden, loud noises. Of course, you may have to put up with sullen, vaguely threatening, sideways glances from your furball. ;^>
Ingsays
If it will redeem me in your eyes at all, I’m sorry for what you’re going through.
You realize that if a Personhood measure passes, the various races to put a human being into space by private enterprises will have a whole new parameter, right?
“Our lives shall not be sweated
From birth until life closes….”
Carliesays
I sort of want to crochet because granny squares, and they are easily portable in a way that knitting is not, but then again, it’s fucking crochet. My grandmother taught me when I was a wee lass and I’ve never quite recovered. Stupid crochet.
illuminata:
1. Don’t let him on the table in the first place. We never had trouble with tables with ours, but trained her off of windowsills (we were in an apartment where they were dangerously easy to knock the screens out of) by putting a thin line of liquid dish soap on the sill for a week or so. They hate jumping up and getting their paws soapy.
2. Not sure – we just left food out all the time, and ours never ate much. I understand this is a very bad idea for some cats, though.
3. Maine coon? HAHAHAHAHAHAHAh… oh, sorry. I mean, you have to brush a lot.
A friend of mine trained his cat to get vacuumed, I swear.
KGsays
And why the sea is boiling hot— ‘Tis Himself
Hadn’t you heard? Science can’t answer “why” questions!
Carliesays
Ing – I’m sorry for what you’re dealing with. Have a brownie soaked in scotch and topped with some ice cream? It’s good, I swear. Here, I’ll shove it through the internet cable.
Ariaflamesays
I can knit, crochet granny squares, and I am just learning to sew on my great grandmother’s hand turned singer sewing machine.
I am also a physicist, learning Scottish gaelic for fun, and read SF for preference. Oh, and an atheist.
Carliesays
Hi, Ariaflame! Speaking of learning languages for fun, I’ve been feeling so stupid. When I was in high school I remember picking up Spanish fairly easily, but this year I’ve been trying to learn Slovak and I’m getting nowhere fast. It’s like I have no brain any more.
pelamun, sorry for the delay in replying: I’ve been horrendously busy with work all day.
Ditto for prosecutors. Though the AG is the equivalent to a justice minister in many other countries, no objections to having them appointed. Law enforcement is part of the executive after all.
True, but my point was that prosecutors in many other countries are not political appointees. In England and Wales, for example, the Director of Public Prosecutions, an independent civil servant, is responsible for criminal prosecutions. The office of DPP is separate from that of the Attorney General, who is a political appointee. The same is true in Australia (at both the federal and state levels) and Ireland. This has the advantage of giving prosecutors institutional independence from the government of the day, so that decisions about prosecution are not influenced by political factors (something which has long been a serious problem in the US system).
There are other common-law jurisdictions besides the US where the A-G is directly responsible for prosecutions – Israel and Singapore, for instance – but in those countries, the lack of institutional independence is something that is often criticized.
As a tangential nitpick: you’re right that the Attorney General in the US is equivalent to a justice minister in other countries and heads the Department of Justice, but this is not always the case in other common-law jurisdictions. In England and Wales*, for instance, the office of Attorney-General (note hyphen) is entirely separate from that of the Secretary of State for Justice. The A-G is the chief legal advisor to the government, whereas the Justice Secretary is responsible for areas like prisons, probation, legal aid, and the administration of the court system. (The office of Justice Secretary didn’t even exist until a few years ago; before this, these responsibilities were split between the Home Secretary, who is responsible for policing and internal security, and the Lord Chancellor, who was both a Cabinet minister and the head of the judiciary. The office of Lord Chancellor in its traditional form has now been scrapped, because it directly infringed the principle of the separation of powers.)
(*Scotland has a separate legal system with different terminology; in Scotland, the Lord Advocate is the approximate equivalent of the Attorney General.)
A. Rsays
If anyone is interested, there’s a godbot over on the “Oh agony!” thread who seems a bit “goats on fire!”/ Dr. Bronner’s soap bottle.
New discovery: Some shrimp spin silk from holes in their legs and use it to build nests! –tonight’s Daily Planet BBC Story
The shrimp Crassicorophium bonellii produces fibres that combine barnacle cement biology with spider silk production techniques. The animal’s “specialist secretory legs” produce the sticky, fibrous material. The resulting “gossamer threads” are sticky and resistant to salt water. The shrimp uses them to create a house from sand grains or other particles. [Edited]
The time has come, the Walrus said,
To talk of many things:
Of shoes—and ships—and sealing-wax—
Of cabbages—and kings—
And why the sea is boiling hot—
And whether pigs have wings.
Oh, this particular excerpt from The Walrus and the Carpenter will always have a special place in my heart. Because I did not have a copy of Alice to hand at the time, and had to rely on an online version, I misquoted it as “And Cabbages, and Kings” when naming my (now more-or-less dormant) blog. By the time the error was pointed out to me, I’d already registered the domain name.
Don’t let childhood experiences ruin it for you. I’m actually enjoying it so far.
I’m just practicing the basic stitching by making a scarf, but I’ll probably do a granny square next. But I should probably stop messing with the yarn and get back to my lab report.
Jessasays
Hi, Carlie! *waves*
I learned knitting first, then crochet much later. I still think that knitting is more difficult, mostly because it took me ages to learn how to knit with even tension.
Algernonsays
When I was in high school I remember picking up Spanish fairly easily, but this year I’ve been trying to learn Slovak and I’m getting nowhere fast. It’s like I have no brain any more.
I’ve been trying to pick up some French, and I intend to learn Spanish. I think there is a big difference there though. These languages seem much easier to me, as did German when I was in school. I think they are close enough, we have enough shared word or word roots, enough exposure to the language. All of this makes it easier I think.
I was actually just doing a setup for some stuff for our company in Slovakia. Looking at the Slovak words was pretty humbling. So different…
Algernonsays
I don’t know much about the language at all. I guess it’s easier than learning Finnish. But I’d say that Slovak actually looks objectively harder to learn than Spanish.
Algernonsays
I keep thinking my mind is ruined and I’ll never amount to anything anyway. Of course the fact that feeling like that and some unfortunate things have pretty much destroyed my life several times, I know that this overwhelming sensation of worthlessness and complete inability to do anything is just a mental illness. I’ll be damned if I can shut it off though.
At the moment I’m trying to decide whether to buy an old house or not. Why this is so depressing I don’t know. It’s a great deal.
I’m not sure what I’ve done, but my scarf has gone horribly wrong. It’s a small triangle now D:
Algernonsays
AHS, is that true about math? Almost everything I learned about math or programming has occurred after adolescence. Wow, it would have to be that way for programming. Considering all the changes in the last ten years even. There wouldn’t be any programmers over 20 if it weren’t so!
Jessasays
In a rare bit of reversal in my household: the spouse had been rendered bed-ridden by food poisoning of some sort (I’m usually the unlucky one). He’s so ill that he has no interest in the Duke – Michigan State basketball game.
Jessasays
I’m not sure what I’ve done, but my scarf has gone horribly wrong. It’s a small triangle now D:
Have you been putting more than one stitch into the row below?
Algernonsays
Actually I would love to learn Spanish. It’s really beautiful. I even like the Tex-Mex Spanish most people speak here. People say the Spanish accent from Texas is as harsh as the English Texas accent.
I don’t know. I think I’m going to have to watch the tutorial again.
ahs ॐsays
I keep thinking my mind is ruined
Not yet, Algernon. I’m still pretty sharp, I’ll grant the same to anyone who can keep up with me, and you’ve done better than that, exploding my mind on occasion. I’ll let you know when you’re ruined! :)
Jessasays
@StarStuff:
Crochet has very definite spacing for placing stitches on the next row, but they can be really hard to see on the first few rows, where the fabric tends to curl up. Check to make sure you’re putting your hook through the correct place (over/under the correct number of yarn strands) when you’re drawing up loops.
ahs ॐsays
AHS, is that true about math?
So far as I can tell. I’m winging it here, but we do know there’s a crucial period for learning language, and we know why. Similarly there may be a crucial period for learning arithmetic and spacial transformations, but why would there be such a period for calculus? The latter is an anomalous construct of very recent human history; there’s no reason for it to ever be easy at any age, thus it should remain of similar difficulty throughout life.
In my spare time I’ve taken up studying certain maths again just to win arguments at Pharyngula (final boss: First Approximation), and it’s just as hard as it ever was, but no harder.
Tethyssays
Starstuff
The hardest part of crochet for me is keeping the tension consistent with the hand holding the yarn. It takes practice to get the proper feel. Luckily its easy to pull the string and undo any mistakes.
I figured out what I did wrong. I was putting the hook through the wrong hole; I skipped a hole when I shouldn’t have. So, I’ve started over. This time is going better, I think.
Nerd of Redhead, Dances OM Trollssays
Crochet can make great scarves. The Redhead, as one of her first crochet projects, made me a “double crochet” scarf after we were first married. That scarf could hold up to dah Yoo Pee Winters, even requiring me to open the overcoat for cooling on warmer (+20 ℉) days. I never got cold through the neck, even in -20 ℉ temperatures and 30 mph head winds. It’s still in the coat closet for use if required. It added 30 ℉ to the coats rating.
SallyStrange, Spawn of Cthulhusays
Jay Smooth does it again. Here he is talking about how we talk about race, at the latest TedX. Love this guy. Love love love him.
Ms. Daisy Cuttersays
Josh, #125, last thread: Thanks for having the courage to talk about the rape, and for the solidarity with other victims. I fortunately have not been raped, but numerous friends of mine can’t say the same for themselves.
Father Ogvorbis, #509, last thread: A long time ago, I had a housemate whose mother was very pleasant but, well, rather sheltered in that particular “heartland” fundie way. She went into a supermarket looking for almonds for a recipe, and she asked some teenage boy who was up on a ladder, “Excuse me, sir, but could you tell me where your nuts are?” The poor kid nearly fell off the ladder.
Pelamun, #514, last thread: Great comment; I love language discussions. I must nitpick, however. Testa meant a cooking pot, which is much more comparable to a human head than a potshard is.
ahs, #522, last thread: I thought for sure everybody in Britain said “John Thomas” and “minge.”
aladegorrion, #547, last thread: Certain sex acts that appear in Urban Dictionary have never been performed IRL. If you don’t believe me, and you have a really strong stomach, search on the term “munging.”
Rey Fox, #606, last thread: If you really want to make a mockery of the crucifixion, you dredge up the hoary old, “Peter… Peter… I can see your house from here…”
Tethys, #10 and Pelamun, #64 above: I used to know someone who had studied German who claimed that Kaput got its meaning because the Teutons watched Romans behead their comrades, and every time a head rolled, a soldier would announce, “Caput.” Folk-etymology, I’m sure, but amusing.
Cannabinaceae, #204: ‘Tis beat me to the warning. The aforementioned ex-housemate once lost a cat to intestinal blockage after she (the cat, not the housemate) ate tinsel.
Illuminata, #215: “Must he deliberately push everything he can off of tables?” Yes. The first week I had my cat, I lost a clock that I really liked. You have to consider them as akin to permanent toddlers and arrange your house accordingly. And, to echo Cicely and Brownian, you also have to make sure they have plenty of entertainment available — toys to play with, windows to look out of, safe objects to climb — because a bored cat is a destructive cat. And an unhappy one, too.
As for hairballs, other people are correct that grooming helps a lot. The furrier your cat is, the more he needs grooming. A friend of mine seconds Brownian’s rec for the Furminator. I second Tethys’ glove suggestion. Or, if you can afford to, you can take your cat more often to the groomer’s.
The food question, I’m going to leave to your vet, but yowling for ever more food is also a common cat behavior. A strategy I haven’t seen mentioned here yet is a feeder that runs on a timer. The cat gets used to the fact that you won’t feed him directly but that the feeder will dispense food at a certain time.
Algernon, #240: I leave out 2 bowls of dry food if I’m going to be gone for a couple of days. Once in a while, my dumbass cat will gorge herself on one of them and barf right next to the bowl. This behavior is why I never feed her wet food anymore… unless she needs to ingest some hydrated oats or mashed pumpkin or other roughage designed to help her express her anal glands. (Note to Illuminata : Drippy cat ass is one of THE worst things you may ever have to deal with. The smell is… indescribable.)
Ing, #290: Aw, shit, I’m sorry. {hugs} I just lost my favorite aunt to breast cancer this month. She’d been fighting cancer in some form or another for 22 years, and she was well cared for and her pain controlled, but I still grieve. I hope your grandmother’s surgery is a success and she heals quickly. As for Assbook, I avoid it, so I have no useful suggestions for dealing with assholes there.
Carlie and Algernon: English is, at base, a Germanic language, but French and Spanish are easier for many native English speakers to learn than German is because there aren’t as many grammatical cases; prepositions do the work of inflected nouns, as in English. Slavic languages such as Slovak are even more highly inflected than German is, so, yeah, they’d be even more difficult than German.
Jessasays
Nerd @328:
Redheads are awesome, aren’t they?
Jessasays
Aw shit, I skipped to the end earlier and just now read up:
*hugs* to Ing.
Nerd of Redhead, Dances OM Trollssays
Redheads are awesome, aren’t they?
Been married 35+ years. Aggravating and awesome. Talking about turkey pasties for T-day. Awesome.
Jessasays
Aggravating and awesome
My spouse would probably describe it that way, being married to a redhead. Our 2-year anniversary is in six days.
A. Rsays
Nerd: Thank you for the best idea I’ve heard this week.
Turkey + pasties –> happy people
Ms. Daisy Cuttersays
Nerd, even though I knew what you meant, I immediately visualized a barnyard turkey wearing these.
Ray, rude-ass yankeesays
pelamun@135, That’s some funny stuff! I want to affix this to my toolbox where I work “Si non confectus, non reficiat.”
(The Vetinari family motto – If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it)
ahs ॐ paging John Moralessays
By the way, John Morales, thank you very much for your efforts in honoring my request. It was decent of you. I think I no longer need the embargo. I’ll beg again if I change my mind.
Nerd of Redhead, Dances OM Trollssays
Nerd, even though I knew what you meant, I immediately visualized a barnyard turkey wearing these.
Understandable, as those who haven’t had the privilege of eating dah Yoo Pee or Cornish version of the meat pie, leaving the burlesque meaning.
The Redhead tries to keep some bought locally in the freezer for “instant” meals, but they aren’t as good as the local versions when we lived in Dah Yoo Pee.
David Marjanović, OMsays
I see the upgrade didn’t do anything about the problem that long threads are impossible to write in. I’m writing this in an e-mail again.
Does anyone still pronounce that t?
Does a glottal stop count?
It would, but word-final glottal stops don’t occur in German, and German never turns /t/ into [ʔ]. Both of these are very, very English things.
(…And pelamun is of course right that the t is still pronounced, as [t], in formal speech as long as the speakers pay attention.)
I’d say it makes more sense, because as I said it is quite unlikely that the concept of war would be forgotten in a mere 200 years.
I’m sorry if I gave the impression I thought it would be forgotten. It would just vanish from active vocabulary and become a word encountered only in books and tales from afar.
Since Austria is majority Catholic, I was confused why Catholics would NOT be granted a holiday on GF while others would.
A strong emphasis on Good Friday is a Lutheran thing (or more likely a generally Protestant one, but almost all Protestants in Austria are Lutherans). Catholic service on Good Friday, as on the day before and the day after, consists only of a short, uh, mass-without-eucharist in the afternoon.
I’m surprised anyone gets it off in Austria… does that mean your employers need to know your denomination…? :-S
I’m also surprised Old Catholics (those few who reject the First Vatican Council) celebrate it that much.
the testa=shard replaced by caput=head example
The other way around. The Classical Latin word for “head”, indeed cognate with head, was caput; it was replaced by testa, which originally meant “shard” or presumably “bowl” or “pot” or something but has given Italian testa “head” and French tête “head”.
Probably prepare it like “drunk pigeon” here in Hong Kong. Pluck and clean, leave overnight to soak in Moutai rice spirits. Roast slowly until succulent. (It tastes a lot like Moutai soaked liver … not an experience your family are ever likely to forget.)
How to prepare a giant carcass? Ask people who deal with the remains of giant carcasses for a living: the SV-POW!sketeers.
Usually a prestigious dialect is chosen, more often than not from the geographic centre of the linguistic area
Fun exception: Standard Macedonian is a dialect from the southwestern corner of the area. That’s because it’s maximally different from both Bulgarian (east) and BCS (north), making it as difficult as possible for nationalist Bulgarians and Serbs to claim the Macedonians as their own. I don’t think that dialect had any other prestige; Skopje (the capital) is in the center, and Macedonian as a whole had, well, no prestige till then.
BCS from the beginning was planned as a pluricentric language […], that is, it was understood that there wouldn’t be only one standard, but at least two or three standards.
This is thoroughly ruined by the fact that all three standards are based on the same dialect from eastern Hercegovina. The dialect of Zagreb (capital of Croatia) is very different from Standard Croatian.
The recent attempt to create a Standard Montenegrin (we’ll see where it leads) is based on a dialect very close (geographically and linguistically) to the one the other standards are based on…
nowadays, German has followed English and evolved into a pluricentric model too
I don’t think it was ever more unified than it is now. This begins with the fact that Standard German isn’t based on a single dialect (though of course more on some than on most others).
This would extend to grammatical features such as the infinitive or other morphological issues,
The thing about the infinitive is fascinating enough that I have to explain it: Serbian avoids the infinitive whenever possible, because the languages to its east and south (all the way to Greek, which may have started the trend) have largely lost the infinitive altogether. Instead of saying “I want to buy”, they say “I want that I buy”.
But often, especially if you’re from the urban middle classes, your mother tongue WILL be pretty close to the standard language, and acquiring the formal bits won’t be as hard as if you were starting from a different dialect.
Acquiring those last few different bits, however, will often be difficult because you’ll have trouble noticing they’re even there. In such cases it can actually help to have a more different native dialect.
Indeed, that’s the reason why the Standard German pronunciation of people from Hanover used to be so prestigious in Germany. (The argumentation fails for other reasons, but never mind.)
sveučilište
How old is that one? Since independence, various ultranationalists have coined tons of new terms, based on native roots, to replace borrowings. There’s even one for “mathematics”. I don’t know how well accepted any of them are.
But you’re right that Croatian uses old Slavic month names* while Serbian uses international (Latin) ones.
* Not that their meanings necessarily line up with those of Polish or Czech, har har.
universiteit
That’s Dutch. You’re aiming at univerzitet.
Basically in old Slavic there was a sound represented by a letter called jat’
That’s it’s Russian name. The sound was probably something like English a in apple.
(Question: the language maps don’t seem to indicate where northern Croatia belong to, it doesn’t show up in either of the three variants. Why could that be?)
Get a better map. I don’t know of an online one, but there has to be one… maybe look in Google Scholar. – Anyway, “e” is restricted to Serbia*, and IIRC the dialect of Zagreb has “i”, which indeed doesn’t occur in any standard.
* …oh. Beatrice’s link says the Slavonian dialect (eastern Croatia) has a mixture of i-, e-, and “half-jekavian”.
The Serbian standard [h]as E
Theoretically, “ije” is standard, too. Practice is different, because so few people in Serbia use “ije” and the Bosnian Serbs tend to be ignored, too…
Back when I took that English as a global language course I was taught that T was the one sound that was substituted with a glottal stop. So it wouldn’t be “Co’ny”. *checks the Pfft*. Yep, seems that way.
I’ve read it happens to /k/, too, occasionally.
Walton, among other Britons I heard this year, makes word-final /k/ ejective. Blew my mind… sort of, because unaspirated /p t k/ are already coarticulated with [ʔ] to such an extent in British English that Britons are hard to understand on bad mi<long pause>rophones.
No but I read a book once about the “Czech Orthography Wars” which I enjoyed immensely.
Alas, the Poles rejected not only Jan Hus’s heresy, but also his anonymously authored orthography, and now they still need on average two letters for every consonant…
So I “started” to go to the humane society, because I want a “ki’en”.
Gloʔʔalization in front of [n] is widespread in the US, though.
NYPD threw it all, over 5500 books, straight in the trash
*snarl* That’s it. On the barricades!!!
A similar thing might have happened on BCS, presumably with Church Slavonic as a source of such mots savants.
Incidentally, that’s very common in Russian. Can hardly happen in Croatian, though – they’re not Orthodox. :-)
An interesting story regarding IJE/E I came across in the book I cited: the Serbs of the Republika Srpska, the Bosnian Serbs, speak a western Serbian dialect and thus are ijekavian speakers. In 1994, quite a different and much more infamous Karadžić, as president of said republic, declared the standard variety in the republic to be ekavian, like in Serbia proper. This created a lot of furor, and protests, and in 1998 this was rescinded. It was a political move, but this was an example that there are limits to how language can be manipulated.
The radio speakers of the Republika Srpska reportedly fumbled and stumbled and made all sorts of apparently hilarious mistakes, so they gave up very quickly.
The historical definition of “Serb” is “Orthodox”, and that of “Croat” is “Catholic”. Wherever Serbs and Croats lived together, they spoke exactly the same dialect.
Što being the form found in many parts of Croatia too, and BH, MN and Serbia
It’s actually šta in most, maybe all, of those places. (No idea what form that historically is – the plural?)
Apparently the name “Bloomberg” means “full of shit”. Huh, interesting.
How about “flower mountain”?
About $150 in damage to various brushes, pencils, etc.
Ouch.
Joe Smith was right because he didn’t die like Koresh?
Really?
He’s right because he’s not a martyr? That’s decidedly a new one.
bossa nova
ROTFL!!!
seneci bossi similis
That’s actually perfect grammar, assuming a sufficiently consonantic boss.
German, which actually doesn’t have words starting with a vowel, as a glottal stop is mandatory,
BZZZT! Wrong twice over.
In northern & central Germany, or so, people put [ʔ] in front of every stressed syllable that would otherwise begin with a vowel. Words have nothing to do with it. As heard on TV, Asteroiden und Kometen, stressed on the [i] and to a lesser extent on the [a], got [ʔ] in front of those two vowels; there was no [ʔ] in front of und.
Down Up south, [ʔ] is only inserted in front of utterances that would otherwise begin with a vowel, in other words, it only occurs after pauses. Full disclosure: it cracks me up when Northerners pronounce Naomi as Na – Omi!!! (“Now – Granny!!!”).
precluding liaison effects you might get in English (incl. the “phantom R”, as in “law and rorder”).
Not “law rand order”?
Linking R is common in Bavarian-Austrian dialects (happens to be absent from mine), and there are even cases of intrusive R, which is the same happening to vowel clusters inside a word (obligatory in my dialect in Zweier, because an [aɐ] cluster is… just… too much). Intrusive R is rampant in some Englishes; Claire Bowern, who publishes and blogs about Aboriginal Australian languages and speaks several of them, spent two years in the US before she noticed that she had an intrusive R in drawing.
I think the Scandinavian nations have found a better way of dealing with this
Though… let’s not get into the Norwegian schizoglossia (as it has been called). :-]
Crikey steveirwini
ROTFL! It had to happen, it was only a question of when.
The only meaning I can discover is that this is an unconscious slip of the tongue revealing that M. G. Scott is fully aware of the bogosity of Mormon dogma. It can’t be that he really meant to phrase his defense of his church in such terms, can it?
Extreme postmodernism is the only defense he has left. And in lucid moments, he knows it.
“deep seeded feelings”
A beautiful eggcorn! American /t/ flapping at work.
Moar rulz, in particular those that apply to the snail Crikey:
31.1. Species-group names formed from personal names. A species-group name formed from a personal name may be either a noun in the genitive case, or a noun in apposition (in the nominative case), or an adjective or participle [Art. 11.9.1].
31.1.1. A species-group name, if a noun in the genitive case formed from a personal name that is Latin, or from a modern personal name that is or has been latinized, is to be formed in accordance with the rules of Latin grammar.
Examples. Margaret, if latinized to Margarita or Margaretha, gives the genitives margaritae or margarethae; similarly Nicolaus Poda, even though the name of a man, if accepted as a Latin name, gives podae; Victor and Hercules, if accepted as Latin names, give victoris and herculis; the name of Plinius, a Roman, even though anglicized to Pliny, gives plinii; Fabricius and Sartorius, if treated as Latin names, give fabricii and sartorii, but if treated as modern names give fabriciusi and sartoriusi; Cuvier, if latinized to Cuvierius, gives cuvierii.
31.1.2. A species-group name, if a noun in the genitive case (see Article 11.9.1.3) formed directly from a modern personal name, is to be formed by adding to the stem of that name -i if the personal name is that of a man, –orum if of men or of man (men) and woman (women) together, –ae if of a woman, and –arum if of women; the stem of such a name is determined by the action of the original author when forming the genitive.
Example. Under this provision, the species-group names podai from Poda, victori from Victor, and cuvieri from Cuvier are admissible. The names puckridgei and puckridgi may be formed from Puckridge.
31.1.3. The original spelling of a name formed under Articles 31.1.1 and 31.1.2 is to be preserved [Art. 32.2] unless it is incorrect [Arts. 32.3 , 32.4] (for treatment of incorrect subsequent spellings of such species-group names see Articles 33.3 and 33.4).
Example. The species-group names cuvierii and cuvieri are admissible under Arts. 31.1.1 and 31.1.2 respectively, and, if available, are preserved as distinct and correct original spellings. (For homonymy between such names when combined with the same generic name, see Article 58.14).
Recommendation 31A. Avoidance of personal names as nouns in apposition. An author who establishes a new species-group name based on a personal name should preferably form the name in the genitive case and not as a noun in apposition, in order to avoid the appearance that the species-group name is a citation of the authorship of the generic name.
Examples. Gould (1841) established the specific name geoffroii in the genus Dasyurus Geoffroy, 1796. Had he proposed geoffroy as a noun in apposition, the combination Dasyurus geoffroy would have been confusing and misleading. Names such as Picumnus castelnau and Acestrura mulsant, in which the specific names are identical to personal names, are also confusing (and especially so when the specific name is wrongly given an upper case initial letter [Art. 28]).
Boldface mine, all italics and all brackets in the original.
In spite of Rec. 31A, we’re stuck with the tiger shark being Galeocerdo cuvier.
well rules can be changed.
Hah. Sure they can, but imagine the flamewar…
It’s not like the Latin genitive here makes that much sense… especially for some names, just adding an “i” indeed is dog Latin of the worst sort, why not use “a(b)” or “de”. We could then treat the name as indeclinable, which would make more sense for foreign names.
That would make too many words. The binomen is sacred. It was the great innovation Linnaei !! If it’s good enough for L-Dot, it’s good enough for us !!
nagyanya
… :-o
…Grandmother? Literally?
If so, I’m very proud of myself.
And so, to bed – I’ve only caught up half, but this comment is really long already, and it’s well past 4 am. Hugs and a huge bowl of very warm soup for illuminata.
John Moralessays
ahs ॐ, good.
Thank you.
David Marjanović, OMsays
Oh fuck. An 18-screener, and the ICZN quote is much shorter than I imagined ( < 3 screens).
Walton, among other Britons I heard this year, makes word-final /k/ ejective.
Whilst visiting the Ashmolean Museum* in Oxford recently, I saw a Walton-type** eruditely (and didactically) expounding on the ethos of Greek boxing to some friends companions, when standing in front of a decorated vase exhibit.
This attempt is going much better. I have about four rows now.
The Laughing Coyote (Papio Cynocephalus)says
Does anyone remember me talking about a camping trip when I first started showing up on pharyngula, at the end of this last summer?
And I got really drunk and went out on stave lake at dusk in a crappy little plastic kayak determined to catch a giant fish knowing full well I can’t swim and am terrified of deep water?
I’m starting to wonder if I didn’t mess up my brain a little by doing that. Sometimes, especially at night, I think about it and I just get terrified. More terrified than when I was actually out there. It’s my own fault of course for nearly becoming a dumbassed statistic even though I knew better, but it’s really starting to bug me sometimes.
I think about it, and freak myself out, and then I have to find a way to make myself stop thinking about it, which usually involves ‘lighting another one’.
I’m not sure where I’m going with this. I guess I wonder if there’s an easier way to get rid of these heebie-jeebies? Is it possible I traumatized my own brain just a tiny bit?
cicely, Inadvertent Phytocidal Maniacsays
We used to have a cat who liked to bite paper; not actually eat it, just hole-punch it. Big problem in a household with lots and lots and lots of printed materials. He’s been dead about six years now, and we still find new places where he’s left his mark.
And his extra-planar storage facility still intermittently leaks bottle caps.
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They make cat grooming gloves with rubber pads that work nicely.
Not all cats are equally thrilled with them, however. Pixel loves being stroked with the glove, but Bitsy won’t tolerate it. Dunno why.
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Trilobites are cool ‘n all, but cats are fuzzy and cuddly and they purr…and they are not extinct. That’s important, when you’re choosing a pet.
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Cats are kind of like Walton.
Staunch monarchists? I guess you could argue that they feel royal, but I think they appreciate their own Divinity too much to go slumming, that way. And I’ve pretty sure that most cats have no opinion whatsoever about immigrants’ rights, the evils of the Justice Legal System, and similar trivia. And what’s holding up delivery on their portion of Fancy Feast, monkey-boy? Get those thumbs a’crackin’; that’s why they even keep us around, you know….
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Speaking of, we are going to go ahead and get a Gytha for Esme. She needs a partner in crime who can keep up with her.
Yay! And a second partner in crime would beeeeee…..Magrat.
:)
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The Laughing Coyote (Papio Cynocephalus)says
Trilobites are cool ‘n all, but cats are fuzzy and cuddly and they purr…and they are not extinct. That’s important, when you’re choosing a pet.
Good thing too, because if they were in any way available I’d literally go to any legal or illegal length to get myself a pet Tyrannosaur. I’d name her Sue and take her camping with me.
I was talking about the AG in the US, since we were discussing the American system. Terminology differs across countries. In Germany, the chief of prosecution has a title akin to that of AG, Generalbundesanwalt, to be precise, and they’re under the supervision of the justice minister. In Germany, the mixing of federal and state bureaucracies (basically state governments execute federal laws, the federal level does not have a fully fledged bureaucracy) has ensured political independence, because even though prosecutors do fall under the political patronage system, the state governments are politically diverse so that everybody is interested in judicial independence. That said, in some states where one party has held into power for decades (say Bavaria), the issue of political meddling from the state’s justice ministry has become an issue in the past.
Alethea
oopsie, sorry, I misplaced the R…
Ms. Daisy Cutter testa
Oh yeah, it does mean pot too, and that makes more sense I think, but according to my dictionary, it also means “earthenware fragment”.
caput
The earliest borrowings from Roman times are well-known and kaputt is not among them, which is attested for the 17th century. Many words beginning with Pf, incl. Pferd “horse”, or Pforte “gate”. Especially fascinating I find the story of caupo “innkeeper; wine merchant”, from which kaufen “buy” was borrowed. It even made it all the way to Finland, even though no Roman soldier ever set foot upon it, in the form of kaupunki “city”, and kauppa “shop”
Spanish
I disagree. While Spanish nominal morphology might be easier, its verbal morphology is more complex than any Western Germanic language. I think it is easier for English speakers to learn Spanish because English is a Germanic language that has borrowed a lot of French and Latinate vocabulary, more than any other Germanic language. Slavic languages have a lot of vocabulary that is not found in either Germanic or Romance languages (or at least the connection is obscured).
I have a long-haired cat, which I suspect is part Maine Coon. She didn’t like having her hair brushed and would growl and scratch. Then I found that she adored being brushed with one of those plastic brushes with stiff, knobby spikes about 1 cm apart. I can hold up the brush and she comes running. I visualize her, not as a cranky cat, but as a little girl saying, ‘Don’t pull my hair!”
It’s interesting that testa means shard. I thought it meant block, which makes sense because it was Latin slang for “head,” e,g, “Hey, blockhead!” Now I don’t know how to explain it, but ‘tests” for protective shells on animals makes sense.
Holy crap, Abbie is losing it even more. Now she’s attacking Jen at BlagHag. First this and today, this.
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MagRAT! Perfect, love it. It must happen!
Coyote, I think the main thing is not to dwell on it. So you did a dumb thing when drunk, like probably half of everyone else in the world. Luckily, there was no harm done. Take the lesson, whatever it is for you – maybe to be more careful when drunk, or ask a friend to be minder, or maybe even don’t drink ever again. Your call. And then let it go.
Meditation can be good if your mind is just too damn distressingly insistent on revisiting stuff – “rumination”, in psych terms. You can usually get CDs for guided meditation in bookshops, or failing that, from newage crystal-crap shops. Pretty well any sort of meditation except TM is OK, but the ones labelled “mindfulness” have the least risk of stupid woo. I like yoga nidras myself but YMMV.
Also, perhaps you should just learn to swim, and that would at least remove the actually sensible part of the fear. My local pool offers adult learn-to-swim lessons.
cicely, Inadvertent Phytocidal Maniacsays
And I should have figured I wouldn’t be the first to notice that. Now I has a sad. :(
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Vomitboarding?
o-O
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I swear I hate every fucking human being on this planet.
*big, sad eyes; a single tear slowly rolls down cheek…*
Does that mean you don’t want my *hugs* of sympathy?
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Hi, Ariaflame; are you new? If so, welcome in!
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The Laughing Coyote (Papio Cynocephalus)says
Alethea: I’ve had swimming lessons as a kid. I even passed them. I might even be able to swim, I dunno, I’m scared to ever try. That would have been a moot point though, because I had a heavy blade (what, you expect me to hunt a lake monster without a sword?) and heavy boots and probably would have panicked and went straight down.
This is actually the first time I’ve aknowledged to myself or anyone else that I’m still freaked out by that water despite being safely miles away and on dry land. So maybe that’s all I needed, I dunno.
As for meditation, I developed my own ways years ago before I even knew what meditation really was, and I think I might try your suggestion.
I also feel bad. I know that at least one nym on pharyngula does some sort of SaR work, and I can feel his strong disapproval even as I type.
John Moralessays
TLC:
I think about it, and freak myself out, and then I have to find a way to make myself stop thinking about it, which usually involves ‘lighting another one’.
1. How do you know you can’t swim?
(My dog didn’t know he couldn’t swim, so he did)
2. The disinhibitory effects of drunkenness are no less (and probably more) cultural than physiological — i.e. it’s mostly just an excuse. IMO.
3. You claim to have a phobia about a memory? PTSD?
Hm. That’s irrational, so I can’t help you there, other than to point that out.
Rey Foxsays
Does that mean you don’t want my *hugs* of sympathy?
“PTSD” would be laying it on just a tiny bit thick, wouldn’t it John Morales?
I dunno if you’d call it a ‘phobia’. I just think about that bottomless dark water, the failing sunlight, and the endless pull on my fishing line, and I get all scared and shit. Is that what ‘PTSD’ is? It’s not like I’m waking up screaming in a cold sweat or anything. And it would seem a little insulting to actual sufferers of PTSD to compare my (self inflicted) situation to theirs.
Hm. That’s irrational, so I can’t help you there, other than to point that out.
Primate brains are always rational now?
Tethyssays
TLC
I sometimes get into similar obsessive self-critical thought patterns. Just acknowledge that it was a foolish drunken human thing to do and resolve to wear a life vest in future. Then firmly dismiss the thought and force yourself to focus on something more pleasant.
I’m sorry if I gave the impression I thought it would be forgotten. It would just vanish from active vocabulary and become a word encountered only in books and tales from afar.
And I’ve been trying to tell you how unrealistic this is. Warfare is a such a human concept it won’t vanish from active vocabulary. There is oral history, and in the case of Rome, even written history that talks of past Roman glory in war, and as I said Pax Romana was a relative concept, legionaries were moved around the empire, so they did see some action even during that time.
A strong emphasis on Good Friday is a Lutheran thing (or more likely a generally Protestant one, but almost all Protestants in Austria are Lutherans). Catholic service on Good Friday, as on the day before and the day after, consists only of a short, uh, mass-without-eucharist in the afternoon.
I’m surprised anyone gets it off in Austria… does that mean your employers need to know your denomination…? :-S
I’m also surprised Old Catholics (those few who reject the First Vatican Council) celebrate it that much.
Hm, that’s odd. My impression was that Easter Week was very very important to Catholics, and taking the entire week more important to Catholics, but probably Easter Sunday is the most important day
Though… let’s not get into the Norwegian schizoglossia (as it has been called). :-]
I understand though that over the past decades, Nynorsk and Bokmål have gradually become more similar to each other.
Fun exception: Standard Macedonian is a dialect from the southwestern corner of the area. That’s because it’s maximally different from both Bulgarian (east) and BCS (north), making it as difficult as possible for nationalist Bulgarians and Serbs to claim the Macedonians as their own. I don’t think that dialect had any other prestige; Skopje (the capital) is in the center, and Macedonian as a whole had, well, no prestige till then.
It’s actually not an exception. Dialect purity can be a prestige factor. Some national languages have been proposed based on that. Nynorsk is an example of this too.
Pluricentric languages
This doesn’t mean that the standards are based on different dialects. More that the basis of the standard is the same, but regional differences are codified in the respective standards, like the Austriacisms in Austrian German, and certain pronunciation differences. If you based it on different dialects, you’d get a situation like in Luxembourg.
I don’t think it was ever more unified than it is now. This begins with the fact that Standard German isn’t based on a single dialect (though of course more on some than on most others).
Well the mass media age has done that, that’s true. But it wasn’t truly pluricentric. In my opinion, pluricentrism entails that all different standards are accepted as equally valid, i.e. American English v. British English. Or German German v. Austrian German.
The thing about the infinitive is fascinating enough that I have to explain it: Serbian avoids the infinitive whenever possible, because the languages to its east and south (all the way to Greek, which may have started the trend) have largely lost the infinitive altogether. Instead of saying “I want to buy”, they say “I want that I buy”.
The keyword for people more interested in this topic is Balkan Sprachbund
Acquiring those last few different bits, however, will often be difficult because you’ll have trouble noticing they’re even there. In such cases it can actually help to have a more different native dialect.
Indeed, that’s the reason why the Standard German pronunciation of people from Hanover used to be so prestigious in Germany. (The argumentation fails for other reasons, but never mind.)
Well, High register language is acquired in school and university, the more educated you are, the more command of it you will have. A non-dialect speaker has had a headstart here. AFAIK, in the German South on the countryside, they spend the first year in elementary school to get the kids to start speaking standard German.
How old is that one? Since independence, various ultranationalists have coined tons of new terms, based on native roots, to replace borrowings. There’s even one for “mathematics”. I don’t know how well accepted any of them are.
But you’re right that Croatian uses old Slavic month names* while Serbian uses international (Latin) ones.
* Not that their meanings necessarily line up with those of Polish or Czech, har har.
Yeah, it’s interesting that the calquing of learned vocabulary took such different routes in the various Slavic languages, I think even Polish and Czech can be quite different here. But you get a relative unity of the Germanic languages (English and Icelandic excepted) only because Dutch and the Scandinavian languages were influenced by German efforts in that area. When reading Henning Mankell, all these words and phrases jump out at me, that bear witness to the calquing (first based on Low German, later on High German). Compare this to Icelandic which went its own route in calquing terminology.
That’s it’s Russian name. The sound was probably something like English a in apple.
Get a better map. I don’t know of an online one, but there has to be one… maybe look in Google Scholar. – Anyway, “e” is restricted to Serbia*, and IIRC the dialect of Zagreb has “i”, which indeed doesn’t occur in any standard.
These are both based on Alexander’s book. Presumably jat’ is the designation used by Slavicists.
Alas, the Poles rejected not only Jan Hus’s heresy, but also his anonymously authored orthography, and now they still need on average two letters for every consonant…
Well the Orthography War was mainly about how to write international words like “university” and “course”, i.e. universitet, or univerzitet, and kurs or kurz.
Incidentally, that’s very common in Russian. Can hardly happen in Croatian, though – they’re not Orthodox. :-)
Church Slavonic is associated with the Orthodox Church, but it is also regarded as an older variety of Slavic among Slavicists. Whenever you’re trying to create new terminology, like happened during modernisation/industrialisation/renaissance etc. you often reach out to more archaic parts of your vocabulary or a proto-form of your language (or other prestigious languages from your language’s past, like Sanskrit in SE Asia and Chinese in E Asia). But I don’t know enough about Croatian to tell where these neologisms come from.
BZZZT! Wrong twice over.
That depends on your phonological model. Since it is a phonologically conditioned rule, you can argue that it’s not phonemic. It’s true that in unstressed position, glottal stops are elided (or do not occur, based on your viewpoint). und is a function word, and function words in Western Germanic tend to get phonologically reduced a great deal. und is often just pronounced as [n].
(also I was talking about standard German here)
That would make too many words. The binomen is sacred. It was the great innovation Linnaei !! If it’s good enough for L-Dot, it’s good enough for us !!
But you can’t eat your cake and have it. If you impose Latin gentives upon these names, then you have to at least Latinise them, like the Latvians do to foreign names, so Bill Clinton becomes Bils Klintons, or even better, his successor, Džordžs V. Bušs.
Ray, rude-ass yankeesays
Caine, Fleur du Mal@172,
Hey, at least she didn’t puncture/eat about 3 dozen tubes of paint like one of my cats did one time. :D
Technicolor poop?
cicely@170, All we are saying, is “give peas a chance”.
illuminata@193,
okay, I quit the world. Anyone down for buying up some farmland and making Pharyngutopia?
I’m in!
Tethys@197,
I’m enjoying imagining what Pharyngutopia would look like. I see an amazing creation that combines green construction, sustainable agriculture, cutting edge tech, and much grog. The libraries alone are making me drool a bit.
Not to mention the spanking parlors.
The Laughing Coyote@345, My brain won’t let go of some of the (admittedly) stupid stuff I’ve done. A bit obsessive, I guess, and it comes back to smack me at the oddest times. No help, but I can empathize.
StarStuff!@358, Go StarStuff!
Ugh. Work tomorrow. I have to renew my self imposed TET abstention for another work week. If I don’t, I don’t get much done except reading comments here. I’m still reading all the other posts and most comments though (and once in a while commenting myself).
See y’all next week!
G’night!
The Laughing Coyote (Papio Cynocephalus)says
John Morales: I’m sorry if I gave the impression I was dismissing your opinion. I’m most certainly not, I just found it somewhat surprising.
If severity is not the determinant, then what can I say? Sounds like you might be right. So you’re suggesting I went and gave myself a bit of PTSD in pursuit of a stupid fish that probably wouldn’t have tasted super great anyways?
Damn.
Pteryxxsays
TLC: One characteristic of PTSD is that it’s intrusive… “have to find a way to stop myself thinking about it” you said. Also, PTSD, like phobias, can be self-reinforcing – being triggered by a thing can make it more likely to be triggering the next time.
Whether or not it’s diagnostically PTSD, if it’s starting to disturb you, that’s enough to look into circumventing it lest it get worse over time. Meditation could help, or visualization, thought-stopping or similar.
It’s late. I’ve got to stop playing with yarn now and go to bed. Goodnight all.
ahs ॐsays
The disinhibitory effects of drunkenness are no less (and probably more) cultural than physiological
I recall not trying hard to keep my balance because it wouldn’t hurt to fall. Behavioral evidence suggests I underestimate risk more often. Are these physiological effects?
The Laughing Coyote (Papio Cynocephalus)says
The alcohol definitely made me underestimate the risk. But the real problem was that it would probably make me even less coordinated should I have upset the crappy plastic kayak.
The water, at least, was completely mirror smooth. There was that at least.
What if I had actually pulled up that fish instead of losing it? Trying to land that fucker in that little piece of crap would have tipped me for sure. Damn. THAT gives me the willies.
Staying away from water for life isn’t an option, I will probably boat again (in something less shitty) in the future if I get the chance, though I will be taking safety precautions and abstaining from alcohol while and if I do.
I think I’ll be able to ‘get over it’ though. Talking about it here helped. As can be expected, despite my quest to enlighten myself and everything I still have a bit of that stupid instinct that warns against ever admitting to weakness and stuff, so it’s just now I’m admitting to myself that this freaked me out a bit more than I at first thought.
Thanks for all the advice and understanding, Pharyngulites
John Moralessays
TLC,
So you’re suggesting I went and gave myself a bit of PTSD in pursuit of a stupid fish that probably wouldn’t have tasted super great anyways?
Well, more like you had a moment of madness, and it bugs you that you did, and you’re finding it hard to get over that.
PS I find it interesting that you don’t dispute my opinion that your booziness was more an excuse than an extenuating circumstance.
—
ahs,
Are these physiological effects?
Sure, if they depend on alcohol intake. :)
(How you cope with those effects and how you thereby act, however, are not independent of your acculturation — and that is to what I referred)
The Laughing Coyote (Papio Cynocephalus)says
well of course there’s an acculturation element to it John. I felt like I had to prove my balls to my camping companions- even as they were urging me to stay at the fire and leave the fishing for tomorrow and all that. A moment of madness is a good way of putting it.
Still, the alcohol provides a tangible increase to the risk factor- loss of coordination, impaired judgement, etc. Usually I’m good at keeping my head when drinking, but I really wanted that fish for some reason.
hotshoesays
Alethea: I’ve had swimming lessons as a kid. I even passed them. I might even be able to swim, I dunno, I’m scared to ever try. That would have been a moot point though, because I had a heavy blade (what, you expect me to hunt a lake monster without a sword?) and heavy boots and probably would have panicked and went straight down.
The podunk town I live in doesn’t have a “public swimming pool”, but there is a pool at the highschool which is open for public swimming a few hours a week. And there’s a private gym with a nice heated pool which does stay open (under a glass roof) year round; guests can use it for a reasonable daily fee.
If I were you, Coyote, I’d look around for a pool where you can get in the shallow end and verify to yourself that you can swim. If your town is even more podunk than mine, it might be worth figuring out how far you have to travel to get to the next town with a pool.
After you’re sure you remember how to swim in ordinary swim trunks, you can talk to the staff about doing a drown-proofing test. You’ll jump in the deep end, clothed in jeans, sweatshirt, and shoes, and rescue yourself – same as you would if you were actually out on the lake and fell in from a boat. It’s wonderfully reassuring. Yeah, it’s harder to deal with a dunking when you aren’t expecting it – but having the physical memory of surviving such a dunking at least once before really helps.
I’ve been wearing winter clothes and fallen into the ocean kayaking – brrr, that’s a horrid shock – I had a legitimate fear that I would die of hypothermia, but at least I knew I wouldn’t drown just from falling in with my heavy clothes on. Not so sure about carrying the heavy blade, though … might have to let that one sink to the bottom, no matter how precious …
hotshoesays
It’s late. I’ve got to stop playing with yarn now and go to bed. Goodnight all.
Well done, you! Congrats on your new skill.
The Laughing Coyote (Papio Cynocephalus)says
Public pools yuck me out. Every time I get a rash.
However my ex is part mermaid (not really, she just loves water) and she might possibly be able to help me out in lake conditions (The beach at cultus lake, though crowded and kinda yicky, has a wonderfully SAFE grade from shallow to deep). It’d probably be kinda fun that way. The baby loves water too, so it’d be nice not to be totally uselessly afraid of it.
chigau (む)says
*sigh*
Y’all have such fun when I’m off in meatspace.
only one comment,
David Marjanović
not 18 screens, rather 27.
chigau (む)says
TLC
Swimming ability is not relevant.
If you go in a boat, wear a PFD.
If you are an Olympic-medal swimmer and you go in a boat, wear a PFD.
If you are just going a little way in a boat, wear a PFD.
——
If that ain’t your style, just think of how much easier it will be for Rescue Service to recover your body.
—
PFD = personal floatation device
≠life jacket
The Laughing Coyote (Papio Cynocephalus)says
TLC
Swimming ability is not relevant.
If you go in a boat, wear a PFD.
If you are an Olympic-medal swimmer and you go in a boat, wear a PFD.
If you are just going a little way in a boat, wear a PFD.
wear a PFD.
Of course.
Josh, Official SpokesGaysays
Quick check-in:
Hi y’all, love ya (except those of you whom I don’t love and those who don’t wish to be loved).
1. Theo – Phoenicia in Stasis is really truly on her way to your corner of the world via the USPS. And with illustrated instructions.
2. Ing – I’m very sorry to hear about grandma. Keep us posted, OK?
3. I want a rat.
4. And a turtle.
5. Jaime – for Thanksgiving you must make scalloped corn. White trash food. Basically 1 part cans of creamed corn to 1 part eggs (plus one for the dish), minced onion, enough milk, sufficient amount of crushed saltine crackers to thicken it up, and butter dotted on top of a layer of crackers on the top of the casserole. Bake at 375 for at least 45 minutes or until it puffs up and a knife poked in the center comes out clean.
6. I must find a better upgraded console for my Constitution-class cruiser in Star Trek online. She turns too slowly and it’s affecting my ability to keep a strong shield facing.
/Geek
Beatricesays
Što being the form found in many parts of Croatia too, and BH, MN and Serbia
It’s actually šta in most, maybe all, of those places. (No idea what form that historically is – the plural?)
Šta is used in Croatia, especially in the south, but it’s sometimes frowned upon as being a Serbian word. Insert rolleye.
In the study, 148 undergraduate students were split into two groups, half told they were getting a vodka tonic and the others told they were getting only tonic water. In reality, all were getting plain tonic.
“We found people who thought they were intoxicated were more suggestible and made worse eyewitnesses in comparison to those who thought they were sober. In fact the ‘vodka and tonic’ students acted drunk, some even showing physical signs of intoxication,” Assefi said. “When students were told the true nature of the experiment at the completion of the study, many were amazed that they had only received plain tonic, insisting that they had felt drunk at the time.”
The Laughing Coyote (Papio Cynocephalus)says
Rorschach: I thought he meant cultural as in the sorta subconcious pressure to do stupid dangerous stuff while intoxicated.
if the disinhibitory effects of alcohol were largely cultural, I somehow doubt society would have half the problems related to alcohol that it does.
Oh, good nothing else happened then while I was gone. Not that PZ called Abbie Smith an asshole because she is one, or that the whole internet had another meltdown or something. Good to know…:-)
The Laughing Coyote (Papio Cynocephalus)says
FA: I don’t think I quite buy that the disinhibitory effects of alcohol can be called ‘largely’ cultural. Yeah, there’s that cultural pressure that pairs drunkenness with expected bravado, but that study seems more to me like behavior typical of people who have little experience with alcohol and/or drunkenness.
I’m not the college type and probably never will be, so I’ll admit right here that I don’t exactly have the clearest concept of what an ‘Undergraduate’ is, exactly, but don’t they tend to be kind of young?
It seems to me that if the disinhibitory effects were ‘largely’ cultural, drunk driving would in theory be safe as long as you ‘kept your head’ or someshit.
Yeah, there’s that cultural pressure that pairs drunkenness with expected bravado, but that study seems more to me like behavior typical of people who have little experience with alcohol and/or drunkenness.
People drink. Drinking causes frontal cortex disinhibition. A drunk Spaniard will sing sad songs, a drunk Aussie will beat up a stranger, a drunk American will watch Nascar, I dont know. I think what’s cultural is the way frontal disinhibition will be expressed, but for any of that to happen, it takes alcohol first.
When I drink, I just become a teddybear who cries watching Titanic and who posts too many music vids on the internet. I seem to entirely lack the ability to feel that someone needs to be beat up, or develop any other feelings of violence. I can get potty-mouthed and verbally aggressive if certain triggers are hit, sure, but all in all I’m a bore even when drunk. And since I don’t do any drugs, I’m forever destined to be boring I guess.
Birger Johanssonsays
Drinking and decision-making… Wan’t that how the indian territories got “bought” from the tribes?
— — — — — — —
Inappropriate??? http://satwcomic.com/ Naah, that’s a real `Merkun [TM] flag.
setar, too lazy to log in on his blackberrysays
Tomorrow is a meet and greet event with candidates for mayor and city council. I intend to talk to the mayoral candidates and in particular highlight the recent UK Treasury Select Committee findings on public-private partnerships/private finance initiatives. Anything specific I should prepare for or bring up?
Birger Johanssonsays
In regard to divine entities… I believe Kate Bush actually exists! New album to be released Nov.23, after having been silent for years.
The link provides the opportunity to listen to some of the music before the release (alas, annoying ten-second advertising segment at the beginning) http://www.dn.se/webbtv/film-ljud/lyssna-pa-kate-bush-nya-album-tara/
— — — —
“I’m a bore even when drunk”
I get tired when drunk. I can emulate that effect simply through my ordinary insomnia, free of charge.
— — —
BTW if the claims about metallic hydrogen stands up to scrutiny, the next phase is to see if it will be metastable at ambient pressures. It is expected to remain superconductiong at high temperatures.
Yes!!! Good news. One is not a True Phoenician ™ without the One And Only Phoenicia (PBUH) ever expanding in one’s fridge.(& Dr Audley has been teasing me upthread for my lack of loaves leaving the kitchen. That is all about to change … )
@ TLC
I can actually identify really well with your paddling incident. I have been through several really dangerous situations and I sometimes get these shudders (fear, panic?) of what might have happened. (One involved hopping into an inner tube and floating down the flooded uMngeni River. Those stoppers!)
Don Quijotesays
rorschach @382
“A drunk Spaniard will sing sad songs.”
You mean like “Spanish eyes”? Now there’s a fucking sad song.:)
Carliesays
I keep reading about how Slovak is the most basic and unadorned of the Slavic languages, so I thought it shouldn’t be so hard (and if I could get that, I’d be halfway to understanding the other languages in the group). I did take a semester of Latin and I can see those influences on the language and grammar, so that at least helps a tiny bit. But still.
For knitting, Knitting Help is a great resource. They have really nice videos for just about everything, and do it in both Continental and American styles. I used it a lot when I was making one of these baby squid hats. I just found a trilobite on a rock pattern, so I’m kind of itching to try it.
Carliesays
Just read Alethea’s links – wow. Abbie seems to be getting more and more immature every month. Is she Benjamin Buttons or something?
I keep reading about how Slovak is the most basic and unadorned of the Slavic languages
Who keeps saying/writing that? Frankly, it sounds like Czech propaganda to me, after most of the history of the Slovak language, especially since the Catholic Church helped start a Slovak written language in the 18th century, has been marked by a struggle against Czech cultural dominance.
Now I can’t find it, but I did read it somewhere. One of my biggest problems is just the cadence; I’m used to Spanish where the accented syllables are in the middle, and with Slovak the first syllable is the accented one.
illuminatasays
I’m not sure what I’ve done, but my scarf has gone horribly wrong. It’s a small triangle now D:
You’re either dropping of accidentally adding a stitch. It will be a pain in the ass, but while you’re learning, try counting every stitch in each row as you go. You’ll be able to identify where you’ve gone wrong and correct.
with Slovak the first syllable is the accented one.
This is actually quite fascinating. Proto-Slavic probably had a pitch accent, which is still found in BCS and some Slovenian dialects. Also Russian and Bulgarian have a lost the pitch accent but still have a stress accent reflecting this.
In the other languages, stress has become fixed, like Polish in the penultimate and Macedonian in the antepenultimate. Initial stress is a Germanic feature, and all Slavic languages that have this feature have been in close contact with German: Czech, Slovak, and Sorbian. Actually, Eastern Slovak dialects, the furthest away from German contact, have penultimate stress, just like Polish.
Don Quijotesays
Carlie @396
El acento;
Words in Spanish can be esdrújulas, llanas y agudas.
Esdrújulas: Words with the stress on the antepenultimate syllable. These words are always accentuated.
Example. método, cámara, lámpara.
Llanas: Words with the stress on the penultimate syllable and these words are accentuated except when they finish in N, S or vowels.
Example: Camino, libro, perro, vacaciones, árbol álbum
Agudas: Words with the stress on the ultimate syllable and these words are accentuated when thay finish in N, S or vowels.
Example: león, francés, Canadá, cristal, comedor, compás.
Don Quijote, I thought the rules were
a) if a word is accentuated, the stress is on that syllable
b) if a word ends in a vowel, n or s, it is stressed on the penultimate syllable
c) if none of the above applies, the word is stressed on the ultimate syllable
unless it’s a loanword, where often the original pronunciation and stress applies.
====
I’m still waiting for Cousteau.
The “Thanksgiving” company pot-luck is now starting at my office.
I’m preparing my self for extreme food snobbery and disgust.
Yes I’m an asshole.
But I know it.
cicely, Inadvertent Phytocidal Maniacsays
Good thing too, because if they were in any way available I’d literally go to any legal or illegal length to get myself a pet Tyrannosaur. I’d name her Sue and take her camping with me.
I believe that I would name mine….Fluffy. Just because.
–
(what, you expect me to hunt a lake monster without a sword?)
Well, I personally hunt them with a flamethrower.
It turns out that hunting sea dragons from one of a flotilla of ships with dragon-headed prows is more confusing than might seem obvious. At least, this was true in my dream last night. Opening “fire” on someone else’s wooden ship goes over spectacularly poorly with its passengers.
–
Ray@361, All we are saying, is “give peas a chance”.
According to this official, in several recent conference calls and briefings, local police agencies were advised to seek a legal reason to evict residents of tent cities, focusing on zoning laws and existing curfew rules. Agencies were also advised to demonstrate a massive show of police force, including large numbers in riot gear. In particular, the FBI reportedly advised on press relations, with one presentation suggesting that any moves to evict protesters be coordinated for a time when the press was the least likely to be present.
[…]
++++++++++++++
All over the country people are hearing that the Occupiers are animals who are masturbating in public and shitting in the streets. The local news is luridly portraying the protests as hotbeds of crime infested with lunatics and drug addicts.
That stuff isn’t disseminated just for kicks. It’s done to poison the minds of the public before they have a chance to identify with the protesters.
I can eat peas – they’re not on my list of foods I will not eat ever – but I’ve never really liked them, and tend to avoid them where possible.
====
There’s nothing remotely funny about that shitstain [DC].
Oh, I’m certainly no fan. In my own field, the ConDem government has been an utter disaster: legal aid is being slashed, making it harder for plenty of people who desperately need legal advice to get it (immigrants facing deportation, tenants being evicted from their homes, women needing divorces from their abusive husbands, and so on). The Refugee Council’s funding has also been slashed, including a total elimination of funding for refugee integration services. And the new restrictions on immigration are utterly stupid and a transparent attempt to play to the public’s ignorant xenophobia. (How I feel on the subject of immigration restrictions is very much a matter of record around here.) And I won’t even begin to address the stupidity of the government in other departments, such as IDS’ benefit “reforms” which seem to be inspired by a neo-Victorian impulse to punish the “undeserving poor”. Of course, on the rare occasions when the government actually tries to do something good – like, say, reforming criminal sentencing and reducing the number of people in prison – they get attacked by the Labour opposition, the tabloid press, and their own backbenchers. This is why I hate British party politics and have given up on it completely.
But… surely that’s all the more reason to laugh at politicians when they do ridiculous things in public? :-)
A group which is opposed to abortion in all circumstances and favours an abstinence-based approach to sex education has been appointed to advise the government on sexual health.
The Life organisation has been invited to join a new sexual health forum set up to replace the Independent Advisory Group on Sexual Health and HIV.
Stuart Cowie, Life’s head of education, said: “We are delighted to be invited into the group, representing views that have not always been around on similar tables in the past.”
In contrast, the British Pregnancy Advisory Service (BPAS) has been omitted from the forum despite its long-term position on the previous advisory group and 40-year track record in providing pregnancy counselling nationwide.
*headdesk*
Rey Foxsays
Stuart Cowie, Life’s head of education, said: “We are delighted to be invited into the group, representing views that have not always been around on similar tables in the past.”
Your views held sway for hundreds of years. They’re dead now. Fuck you.
The first ever GAO(Government Accountability Office) audit of the Federal Reserve was carried out in the past few months due to the Ron Paul, Alan Grayson Amendment to the Dodd-Frank bill, which passed last year. Jim DeMint, a Republican Senator, and Bernie Sanders, an independent Senator, led the charge for a Federal Reserve audit in the Senate, but watered down the original language of the house bill(HR1207), so that a complete audit would not be carried out. Ben Bernanke(pictured to the left), Alan Greenspan, and various other bankers vehemently opposed the audit and lied to Congress about the effects an audit would have on markets. Nevertheless, the results of the first audit in the Federal Reserve’s nearly 100 year history were posted on Senator Sander’s webpage earlier this morning: http://sanders.senate.gov/newsroom/news/?id=9e2a4ea8-6e73-4be2-a753-62060dcbb3c3
What was revealed in the audit was startling: $16,000,000,000,000.00 had been secretly given out to US banks and corporations and foreign banks everywhere from France to Scotland. From the period between December 2007 and June 2010, the Federal Reserve had secretly bailed out many of the world’s banks, corporations, and governments. The Federal Reserve likes to refer to these secret bailouts as an all-inclusive loan program, but virtually none of the money has been returned and it was loaned out at 0% interest. Why the Federal Reserve had never been public about this or even informed the United States Congress about the $16 trillion dollar bailout is obvious — the American public would have been outraged to find out that the Federal Reserve bailed out foreign banks while Americans were struggling to find jobs.
Rev. BigDumbChimpsays
hit submit too soon.
Tis (where ever you may be) do you have any commentary on this, or if this commentary on the GAO report is on target?
Jim DeMint, a Republican Senator, and Bernie Sanders, an independent Senator, led the charge for a Federal Reserve audit in the Senate,
Now that’s an unusual alliance.
Rev. BigDumbChimpsays
Yeah I cringe at the mention of DeMint. He’s one of “my” senators.
Ingsays
Thanks for supportness. I’ve been having depression or similar symptoms for a while now on top of everything, probably due to work stress, but have put off seeing anyone about it largely because of comments I’ve seen here and on other sites about the lack of efficacy in any treatment. Can anyone point to a skeptic take down of the issue or anything helpful there?
Carliesays
I liked peas, until I heard that you are supposed to eat them by smashing them onto the back of your fork.
I have never heard of such a thing. Smashed peas are only good for pea soup.
I kind of like spearing one pea onto each fork tine so I have four little peas lined up in a row, but I get weird looks when I eat them that way.
My phone got shut off because I haven’t paid my bill D: I had to ask my mother for money to pay it because I’m so broke. She can’t give me anything until tomorrow, so they shut it off today.
But Sprint can suck it! I’m still using my phone to text. I connected to the campus wifi and I’m using Google Voice now. Muahahahaha! But being poor sucks :(
ChasCPetersonsays
I eat my peas with honey.
I’ve done it all my life.
It makes the peas taste funny,
But it keeps them on my knife.
Laughing Coyote, the SO could swim from the Red Cross Society lessons, but was afraid of deep water. He engaged a personal coach and learned to swim well–it was expensive, but boy was it worth it! He enjoys swimming and can swim hundreds of metres without batting an eyelash. And I shoehorned myself in on the lessons — if it’s worth it to him, it’s worth it to me. I was always a weak swimmer who could bobble around indefinitely but couldn’t actually swim and breathe at the same time. (That’s a lot of people’s problem, I think.) So I learned too, and it’s great.
cicely, Inadvertent Phytocidal Maniacsays
I eat my peas with honey.
I’ve done it all my life.
It makes the peas taste funny,
But it keeps them on my knife.
-not original
I cast peas in acrylic—
They look their best that way.
They’re better as a paperweight
Than as a food, I say.
-original
–
But being poor sucks :(
Word. If Skepticon wasn’t free and local, I wouldn’t be going.
–
Richard Austinsays
Rev BDC:
Why the Federal Reserve had never been public about this or even informed the United States Congress about the $16 trillion dollar bailout is obvious — the American public would have been outraged to find out that the Federal Reserve bailed out foreign banks while Americans were struggling to find jobs.
… Okay, maybe it’s just the circles I travel in, but I thought this was common knowledge?
The fact that the US spent trillions (mainly) bailing out the EU and keeping their economy afloat is something we were talking about before the 2010 election. The amount of money sent to our own banks was almost trivial compared to what we spent on Europe – and bear in mind the situation they’re in right now. If we hadn’t opened up the coffers, they would have collapsed already instead of “merely” tetering on the edge.
Maybe I should bring up this second thing that we talk about but I haven’t heard elsewhere: the residential real estate bubble burst (hard) and caused the collapse, but the retail/corporate real estate market doesn’t seem to have corrected yet – and it’s at least as big a problem as the residential problem. The main target there (IIRC) was Walmart, since they’ve been buying up land and expanding all over the place.
I don’t have any links for this – it’s just conversation at the bar – but if people are finding out about the first and getting hard facts supporting it, I wonder if we’re going to start hearing about the second.
ahs ॐsays
Walton: the most famous left critique of the Federal Reserve that I know of is Secrets of the Temple: How the Federal Reserve Runs the Country by William Greider.
ahs ॐsays
Ing
have put off seeing anyone about it largely because of comments I’ve seen here and on other sites about the lack of efficacy in any treatment.
Most of the comments I recall have been against inpatient. I was under the impression that everyone here would say some sort of outpatient therapy was worth trying. SC has an argument against antidepressant drugs, citing The Emperor’s New Drugs by Irving Kirsch. If you were to find this book worrisome, outpatient talk therapy would still be worth trying.
Dhorvath, OMsays
Did someone mention peas? Everyone get behind me, I will fight rearguard while you lot make good your escape.
Richard Austinsays
Regarding a potential commercial real estate crash…
My understanding is that the “time bomb” is still ticking.
cicely, Inadvertent Phytocidal Maniacsays
Dorvath, I’ll reload for you. *starts charging up extra fuel cylinders*
After all, there’s no way in hell I can hope to outrun ’em. Victory, or fry trying!
–
Moggiesays
cicely:
After all, there’s no way in hell I can hope to outrun ‘em.
You don’t need to outrun them, you just need to outrun Dhorvath.
Hmm, I’ve got half an hour to kill. Skyrim, or Disgaea 4?
cicely, Inadvertent Phytocidal Maniacsays
Sorry; Dhorvath.
Chalk it up to agitation in the face of the enemy.
–
Dhorvath, OMsays
Moggie,
Based on past conversations I suspect the odds are stacked in my favour.
_
cicely,
Thanks kindly and keep ’em coming, we can stem the rising green tide with enough fire.
Moggiesays
Based on past conversations I suspect the odds are stacked in my favour.
Oh shit, that was clumsy of me. Sorry, cicely.
cicely, Inadvertent Phytocidal Maniacsays
Moggie, unless Dhorvath’s feet are nailed to the floor, he surely can outrun me. Though possibly, in the event that our position is over-run, I could do a sort of backward-facing wheelchair-skiing by tying off a rope to his belt. Whatdaya think, Dhorvath? You haul our asses outta there, while I burn ’em down in our wake? As a last resort, I mean; I may be lacking in knees, but I am not lacking in courage. Not where the Green Peril is concerned.
–
Suddenly I imagine cicely as Jeff Goldblum/Ian Malcolm: “Must go faster.”
Dhorvath, OMsays
I think that would be totally awesome.
cicely, Inadvertent Phytocidal Maniacsays
After all, if you flee from melee, the monster gets a freebie shot at your back. I think we can counteract that disadvantage.
–
Hey, no problem, Moggie! I don’t assume that everybody has been reading with bated eyeballs to Knee-FAIL 2011.
:)
–
First Approximationsays
I don’t think I quite buy that the disinhibitory effects of alcohol can be called ‘largely’ cultural.
Me neither, but I cited that experiment to show that the effects aren’t purely physiological. Some people showed signs of drunkenness off placebo alcohol. Their memory was worse than people who knew they were just drinking tonic water. From my personal experience, people tend to exaggerate their drunkenness and that experiment seems to support the idea.
I have no idea if the fact that subjects were undergraduates was a significant factor. Psychological experiments tend to use them due their proximity and willingness to be guinea pigs for money (or extra credit). Sometimes I wonder whether these experiments are studying the human mind or just the undergraduate one, :P. However, one would expect many undergrads to have some at least some experience with alcohol.
consciousness razorsays
I had peas just the other day. They were pretty tasty.
First Approximationsays
Benjamin “∀ herp ∃ derp : herp derp” Geiger
heh. Here’s a sign you might be a mathematician from Spiked Math Comics:
FA: There definitely is a cultural element. Newbie drinkers especially tend to exaggerate their drunkenness. And I agree, the experiment does seem to support that. Interesting to see a scientific backing to the old ‘Give that high school student a lemonade and tell him it’s spiked with Vodka’ game, actually.
In the case of boating accidents though, I think that it’s pretty safe to say that alcohol definitely and tangibly increases the risks. I’m no expert, but I’m pretty sure it’s a large part of the statistics. Perhaps someone else has more concrete information on the subject?
The Laughing Coyote (Papio Cynocephalus)says
regarding peas: Stews and meat pies I make just don’t taste right until I add peas. I can’t say I like peas just on their own, but in a soup or pie they add a wonderful sweetness. And they’re probably good for me too.
Though I have the body of an omnivorous primate, my mind is that of an obligate carnivore. So sometimes I have to ‘trick’ myself into eating more vegetables, and peas in a stew are a delightful way to do it.
Algernonsays
Every once in a while I have some negative effects from alcohol that I’m perfectly certain are *not* cultural. Drinking is a mixed bag for me, but I tend to do it more when I’m feeling good/upbeat. It is dangerous for me to start drinking when it may exacerbate a depressed state. Sadly, this is when I really want to do anything to make my mind’s cruel machinations stop hurting me and making it impossible to tell what to make of reality.
Algernonsays
To be honest though, pretty much EVERYTHING is potentially dangerous to a depressed person because… um… depression is dangerous.
The Laughing Coyote (Papio Cynocephalus)says
Algernon: I tend to do OK with drinking, provided I drink alone. Or the people I’m around are relatively sober. When drinking, other drunk people tend to piss me off. Especially if they’re the loud “Talk over everyone and hold the metaphorical mic for as long as humanly possible” type of drunk. And ESPECIALLY especially the belligerent drunks.
And I can’t stand being pressured to drink more once I already feel I’ve ‘had enough’. No really, get the fuck out of my face unless you want that bottle up your ass and shattered.
So yeah, drinking alone is ‘healthier’ for me.
BTW, I love your nick. Most people I meet just give me a blank stare when I ask them if they’ve ever read ‘Flowers for Algernon’.
Being male is a high risk factor, as is being drunk.
Now I’m trying to find the stat for “drowning while peeing from the boat and falling in”. I’ve heard that a lot of recovered bodies had their zippers down.
Dhorvath, OMsays
It’s not like I am loquacious and gregarious sober or anything, not me, meek and quiet like a sleeping cat am I. However, I do find talking that much easier once the libations flow, so it might be best if I don’t share a pint or two with you TLC. Just so I don’t step on any toes, you know.
Nerd of Redhead, Dances OM Trollssays
Now I’m trying to find the stat for “drowning while peeing from the boat and falling in”. I’ve heard that a lot of recovered bodies had their zippers down.
I can see that. You are relieving yourself off the deck and well buzzed, and you start tipping forward. You reach out your hand forward to steady yourself and find no wall. OOPS. Splash.
The Laughing Coyote (Papio Cynocephalus)says
Dhorvath: Conversation is wonderful and fun. I just can’t stand the REALLY talky ones, who go on and on and on and on and take fifteen minutes to tell a two minute story because all they really want is to be the center of attention all night.
I should also point out, up till now, my experiences drinking with other people have been mostly with a pretty bad crowd… people who still act like teenagers at 25 and take pride in drinking until they puke. The guys who inevitably get tossed out of any public drinking establishment. The swaggering ass-puckers who always have to prove themselves to their fellow primates and want to turn everything into a pointless contest for ‘man points’.
I currently have very few IRL friends for a reason. I’ve had to stop hanging with pretty much everyone I used to know. Particularly that former friend of mine I used to bring up all the time.
So who knows, maybe drinking with actual ‘grown ups’ would be a whole different experience for me.
‘I never could stand a drunk man when I was sober or a sober man when I was drunk’ paraphrased from Sam Clemens.
Dhorvath, OMsays
TLC,
I dunno if I am a grown up, but I don’t think I would fit in with your former friends either. I do talk, that much is true.
The Laughing Coyote (Papio Cynocephalus)says
Dhorvath: Well, I’m gonna assume you’re a woman due to your nick and style (please correct if wrong), in which case, no, you definitely wouldn’t. Women virtually NEVER wanted to hang with my former crowd, for some strange unfathomable reason. ;)
changeable monikersays
Rev BDC, the numbers in the article seem technically correct, but designed to mislead. On the “zero percent” currency swaps:
At the conclusion of the [swap], the foreign central bank pays interest, at a market-based rate, to the Federal Reserve. […] The foreign central bank bears the credit risk associated with the loans it makes […] Central bank liquidity swaps have maturities ranging from overnight to three months.
[And if it was spent lent, I note in passing the number of US military bases in the UK and Europe. You’re getting the money back.]
The liquidity provision is similarly unclear. Imagine the Fed lends a million to bank A, who use it to pay bank B, who use it to repay the Fed for its prior loan (i.e., it’s Bagehot’s lender-of-last-resort in a system where the banks don’t trust each other). Do this a million times (which is not unreasonable*) and by the method in the GAO report you get a trillion “lent”, even though it has all been repaid.
So you can get some big scary numbers out of what are actually relatively safe interventions. Of course you can also get some big scary problems from the broader economy, too.
(Of course money’s only imaginary anyway. If you’re skint, that may be scant consolation, though. Sorry. I’m skint too.)
—
“Secrets of the Temple”: This scares me. Scary-Fed sentiment is a staple of the anti-semitic conspiracist movement. And Ron Paul.
—
*Not a moral judgement, just a statement of reality.
Dhorvath, OMsays
I am a male and for some reason I don’t set off manly man detection systems, part super spy I guess, but I find the traditional male role oppressive and a fair bit distressing.
Umm, TLC, lots of people wouldn’t like your (former) friends. It doesn’t have much to do with gender.
The Laughing Coyote (Papio Cynocephalus)says
Dhorvath: Ah, apologies. You definitely don’t set off my ‘manly man detection systems’, obviously, but in this context I think it’s kind of a good thing.
Also, the thing about conversation, drunk or sober, is that it’s pretty much the opposite of what the talky drunks I speak of do.
The Sailor: True, but women definitely seemed more ‘conspicuously absent’ whenever we’d hang out.
Btw thanks for your link about boating safety statistics. Most illuminating. I knew about alcohol as a risk factor, but maleness too? That’s weird but makes sense.
changeable monikersays
This was funny though: “everywhere from France to Scotland”. Paris to Edinburgh is a quarter of the distance from NY to LA. ;)
Dhorvath, OMsays
cm,
Was it traveling south east or north west?
KGsays
Most people I meet just give me a blank stare when I ask them if they’ve ever read ‘Flowers for Algernon’. – TLC
One of the saddest stories I’ve ever read. Brilliantly written, though.
changeable monikersays
Heh. You checked it? South east. North west would be 1100km which is obviously incompatible with US units.
How two British atheists convinced a crowd of New Yorkers that the world would be better off without faith at last night’s Slate/Intelligence Squared U.S. debate.
Dated November 16, 2011.
Excerpts:
Far from making us behave better, religion often complicates and distorts morality. By any reasonable standards, hacking bits off your wife is far worse than her squeezing your enemy’s nuts.
The audience voted electronically either for the motion, against it, or undecided, before the debate and afterward. In the end, Chapman and Grayling’s side won because they attracted the most new supporters post-debate. Before the debate, 52 percent voted for the motion, 26 percent were against, and 22 percent were undecided. Afterwards, 59 percent voted for the motion, 31 percent against, and 10 percent undecided.
See. Ridicule, when well done, works.
Even if Judaism did construct the moral code of the West, those ethics haven’t stuck, Chapman said. “If religion made people behave better, markers of social dysfunction, drug addiction, ignorance, teen pregnancies, violent crime would be much lower in highly religious societies,” Chapman said. “In fact, the opposite is true.” Ninety percent of Americans say they believe in God, he claimed. “But we have by far the largest prison population on earth. Drug addiction is widespread. Gun violence is grotesque. Our education system produces kids whose math and science skills are far lower than in secular countries while our rate of teen pregnancy is far higher. And in a country so rich and Christian, it’s amazing how many people live in abject poverty.”
Science, on the other hand, has cured the sick, reduced infant mortality, and increased life expectancies. “All this progress, all this beautiful knowledge, all this alleviation of human suffering in 100 years,” said Chapman. “Religion has had thousands of years to prove its supernatural effectiveness. It hasn’t.”
ahs ॐsays
“Secrets of the Temple”: This scares me. Scary-Fed sentiment is a staple of the anti-semitic conspiracist movement. And Ron Paul.
It can be that, but this one is blurbed by Ted Kennedy, David Stockman, Robert(s) Heilbroner and Caro.
“This book was probably one of the dullest books I ever read. I thought it was gonna have some like juicy secrets but it was almost written like from a banker’s perspective. It was mostly about Volker keeping interest rates too high in the 80’s.”
KGsays
The amount of money sent to our own banks was almost trivial compared to what we spent on Europe – Richard Austin@428
Tables 8 and 9 of the report (pages 131-2) don’t appear to bear out your claim that the $16tn was loaned mainly to Europe. The largest single borrower was Bank of America Corporation. Pages 133-5 further explain that most of the loans to foreign institutions were to US subsidiaries of foreign banks, which had lost heavily on bad loans to US borrowers. The figure of $16tn, as far as I can make out, refers to the total amount loaned, most of which has been paid back.
changeable monikersays
OK, that’s a relief, if not a ringing endorsement.
In the case of boating accidents though, I think that it’s pretty safe to say that alcohol definitely and tangibly increases the risks.
Agreed.
even after late adolescence you can still learn new mathematics without unusual difficulty.
It’s often said that mathematics is a young man’s person’s game. That if you haven’t made it big before 30, you never will. I’m not sure that’s true, or even if it was true once, I’m not sure it holds anymore. Andrew Wiles proved Fermat’s last theorem when he was about 40. Many Field Medalist (the Field Medal is the mathematical equivalent of a Nobel Prize) are middle-aged. It may be true that when you’re younger your mind is more malleable and creative, which may help to prove novel results. However, to get to the point where you can prove something everyone else has missed you have to study topics very intelligent people have been working on for a long time, sometimes even centuries*. That can take several years.
In any case, that’s just about making it big in math. Even if it’s true that you have to be young (which doesn’t seem to be the case) it doesn’t necessarily hold for just learning about certain mathematical topics. People far older than adolescents seem to be able to do it.
* Often times in math and physics concepts are presented to students in their final, polished-up form, without explaining the history how they were developed and why they are used. These frequently appear like something someone pulled out of their ass. As a student, you’re often left wondering why the fuck would someone make such an odd definition and why is it all relevant? From the professor’s perspective, I guess, there’s barely enough time in a semester to teach topic X, let alone also a full history of topic X (filled with dead ends or tangents) and applications of topic X. Some professor at least are courteous enough to answer the students’ why’s with ‘A lot of very intelligent people thought for a very long time and, though it’s not obvious, they have found this idea quite useful’.
In my spare time I’ve taken up studying certain maths again just to win arguments at Pharyngula (final boss: First Approximation)
If you haven’t already, you might want to try to Good Math, Bad Math (or here at the old site). Mark CC has a gift for explaining difficult mathematical concepts so that the layperson can understand it. Might speed up the process from killing rats in a basement to defeating me.
I’m not a mathematician, but I get it. :-P
A lot of those also double as ‘You might be a computer science geek if…’.
Weed Monkeysays
Oh, silly, silly me! I spent some time troubleshooting why I still couldn’t access anything but the zombie site (with newest post at 12th 1:05 with no comments whatsoever) without using some unspeakable voodoo and proxies, until I read PZ’s #105.
Thou shall not manually do what the machine is meant to do even if it seems like a minor detail at the time, for the human is forgetful.
“I stopped believing in Santa Claus when I was six. Mother took me to see him in a department store and he asked for my autograph.” – Shirley Temple
+++++++++++++++++++++++
TLC, causation != causality. Males pee over the side, males are the largest portion of boaters.
(It still hang out with immature people, I just don’t follow their advice.)
+++++++++++++++++++++++
The weirdest thing I ever recorded as a sound engineer was a guy playing at Caesars Palace showroom who juggled chain saws. It makes sense, you can’t actually mic them live;-)
Carliesays
Most people I meet just give me a blank stare when I ask them if they’ve ever read ‘Flowers for Algernon’. – TLC
Oh, that’s so sad. That’s one I think that should be required reading. I’ve never seen the movie that was made of it and don’t want to; to me one of the most agonizing parts is watching the grammar and spelling deteriorate near the end, and there’s no way to adequately capture that on film.
Well, stopped at KT’s today, and no ratties. We have an order in for two girls, but who knows when that will happen. Eventually, there will be a Gytha & Magrat for Esme and Chas. Probably just as well, as I’m still dealing with a severe reaction to PPD from dying my [feminist] hair last week. No more feminist hair for me. :(
Weed Monkeysays
Well, Ash had one for his right arm and it turned relatively OK for him. YMMV.
Weed Monkeysays
armhand
Ms. Daisy Cuttersays
Pelamun, #348 – You’ve got a point about Spanish verbs. I took French throughout high school and figured that the semester of Spanish I had to take in college would be a snap. The lists of verb endings that all looked alike to me proved otherwise.
As for testa, I wonder if the “pot” meaning came first and “shard” was an example of synecdoche in semantic drift, if I’m getting the terms correct.
Rey Foxsays
Caine: What exactly is feminist hair?
The Laughing Coyote (Papio Cynocephalus)says
TLC, that sounds sinister.
No, nothing sinister. I’d only use it to terrify my enemies, make lineups move faster, and scare people into giving me free stuff.
Weed Monkeysays
Rey Fox, perhaps this. Just go clicking “next” from there, Sinfest has been quite awesome recently.
Weed Monkeysays
And there certainly are strips between the one I linked to and the newest one that aren’t related to the Sisterhood-storyline, but it still seems to be slowly coming together.
Katrinasays
I’m still working on acclimating him to the brush. He just attacks it, and I don’t want my fingers to accidentally be in the way.
Get a second brush. While he’s “killing” one, you can be brushing with the other.
As for the amount you’re feeding. I would switch to dry only and feed whatever amount your vet recommended. But you don’t have to do it all at once. You can divide it up throughout the day, so when he seems like he’s about to die of neglect and starvation, you can put some food down for him.
I dunno, I was always partial to the mechano arm Anakin got after that fight with Count Dooku. Although Ash did have the advantage of being able to swap out the chainsaw for an actual replacement hand when needed, IIRC.
—————————————-
I can’t wait for Thanksgiving. Aside from having lots of company over this year, that weekend I’ll be going to a Festival of Lights display with my family.
Oh wait…I have to sit through a Mass if I want to see the lights. Dammit! Well, as long as it’s not one of those seemingly-endless masses, I guess I can bear it. I’ll just have to sin with myself the next day in bed to make up for however long I spend in the pew. I’d prefer sinning with J, however.
—————————————–
How I end up acting when buzzed depends on my mood while drinking. If I’m in a good mood, I’m one of those silly, happy drunks. Sad mood…drink makes it worse. I once polished off half a bottle of champagne by myself. I can be brought out of this state if someone makes a good joke or I read something funny.
Ingsays
Regarding chainsaws, one of my fondest dreams has always been to have a chainsaw for a left hand.
I had one for a while but got rid of it after it impacted dating too much. Handjobs got dicey.
Ugh. It’s too hard to keep up. Used to be you had to stop dying your hair to have feminist hair. Now you have to dye it. When will these feminists just publish their fashion manifesto so that we all know how to dress? How can they hope to achieve anything when they can’t even make up their minds about their hair!?
Algernonsays
I tried to get my hair to think about feminism though, so I envy Watson. My hair wouldn’t listen. It says it’s Buddhist and that I’m not thinking “universally” but every once in a while I stick it with a piping hot iron so we’re even.
Ugh. It’s too hard to keep up. Used to be you had to stop dying your hair to have feminist hair. Now you have to dye it. When will these feminists just publish their fashion manifesto so that we all know how to dress? How can they hope to achieve anything when they can’t even make up their minds about their hair!?
Dying your hair the way men want: patriarchal hair.
Dying your hair the way you want: feminist hair.
Seriously, the feminist hair thing was weird. I’m guessing the “thinking” goes something like this:
* The purpose of women is to please men.
* No True Man™ could be attracted to a woman whose hair is an unnatural colour.
* Therefore, a woman with such hair is deliberately flouting the rules.
On a completely different subject, I’ve always liked Victor Buono as a character actor. But the Pfft is wrong. There is no way in hell he is younger than me.
I just read in pffft that octopuses are “honorary vertebrates” in the UK.
The Sailor
Are you sitting down?
Victor Buono is… well, he’s … dead.
Sorry.
I’ve been largely nonpresent recently, owing to the fact that FTB is blocked at work and it’s been election season at home, so probably I wasn’t missed… but I’m just checking in to say “howdy” after 2 weeks without internet (or TV or phone… and the first 8 days without power) after the freak winter storm that put 90+% of Connecticut (and FSM knows how much of the rest of New England) out of commission.
I dislike referring to civilian spaces as a “war zone,” because I fear it minimizes the experience of actual war… but in this case, I can’t think of a better metaphor: The sporadic sharp cracks of breaking trees combined with the flashes of arcing power lines looked and sounded like nothing so much as flurries of gunfire, and while the “rubble” was broken trees instead of broken bricks, mortar, and steel, in the morning my yard — and my whole street — evoked nothing more than it did a battlefield.
With all that, though, the family is all safe and our material losses are small: Some spoiled food, a dented hood and cracked windshield on one car, and some minor cosmetic damage to our vinyl siding, all covered by insurance. Plus which, I had a good excuse to buy a chainsaw!
I did, however, miss 2 weeks of Rachel Maddow podcasts (unlike other podcasts, it seems only the most recent episode is available for download), and that truly sucks!
I hope all the other Pharynguloids who were in the path of the storm are safe and secure.
I wanted this to be more novel or infuriating than it was.
*sigh*
Anyway. Language? I’m against it.
Bill:
Would you get in trouble at work for circumventing their filters? I’m sure the geeks of TET can find a solution.
@ Josh
If teh xtians can wait 2000 years for an imaginary god, I can wait an extra fortnight for The Real Goddess ™.
@ Randall Munroe
My favourite map projection is along the lines of this one … World map linky. What does this say?
…………
Real drug culture references here. “White” is obvious. “Strunk” is when one is SToned and dRUNK at the same time. (Dutch: “Stronken”). Don’t try this at home kids.
I was more likely to be DRONED when I combined those intoxicants.
Medeski, Martin & Wood à Jazz à la Villette
Ouch…I’ve been portcullised.
From previous thread;
This is very interesting/confusing to me. Das es caput = This is broken (in my very limited archaic german vocabulary)
“When economic interest is seen behind the political clauses of the Constitution, then the document becomes not simply the work of wise men trying to establish a decent and orderly society, but the work of certain groups trying to maintain their privileges, while giving just enough rights and liberties to enough of the people to ensure popular support.”
Zinn, A People’s History of the United States
Any active attempt to circumvent site blocking probably would get me in trouble (I don’t know how effective it is, but my employer takes computer security pretty seriously, and not without reason); in any case, my previous level of Pharyngula activity probably skated right up to the edge of our acceptable-use policies anyway. I could always justify it to myself — I tried to read and post mostly while other processes were running; I’ve put in years of uncompensated overtime during my career (such is life of the salaried non-exempt employee); the occasional mental “break” actually improves my productivity — but I’m not sure everyone at work would’ve agreed.
Eventually I’ll rearrange my home life to incorporate more Pharyngula time (not to mention my own blog[s]!), but… well, I love this place like a second home, but commenting on a blog would be a pretty stupid thing to lose my job over.
Bill:
Nah, there’s more. Looking in the current xml file for the podcast, we see a distinctive bit of filename: “11-11-2011-200712” (that’s 20h 07m 12s, the time the file was uploaded to MSNBC’s servers, rather unpredictable).
Google finds other sites indexing that file. One of them is “castroller”. They note other filenames. One of those is “11-10-2011-202704”.
(Excuse me for a moment; I’m wary about how many links I can put in one comment.)
Damn, the google link was supposed to be: https://encrypted.google.com/search?q=%2211-11-2011-200712%22
Okay, so here’s the result of plugging “11-10-2011-202704” into MSNBC’s generic filename.
Click it!
http://msnbcpod.vo.llnwd.net/content/video/podcast/pdv_maddow_netcast_m4v-11-10-2011-202704.m4v
Bill Dauphin
I’m so happy to hear you are ok. I’ve had nobody to discuss project runway and Anya with here, and I was wondering where you were hiding.
I’m liking this song. It’s got the 60’s protest sound down pat.
And then playing with that distinctive bit of filename should offer other sources, like gopodder, which seems to be pretty extensive.
I’ll dare to try two links. This one’s good: https://gpodder.net/podcast/msnbc-rachel-maddow-video
@ Bill Dauphin, avec fromage
In my experience this is perfectly true. I go out of my way to break up my chain of thought. To break up the effect of “harping on one string”. How many hours can one really “be creative” in any given day. Its not like working on a magneto line. Sadly, too few people seem to acknowledge this.
(Bertrand Russell wrote for two hours a day. I understand that code programmers can work effectively for about four hours a day. Check out the “Paretto Principle”: Linky to Pffft. Although it relates to wealth distribution, a similar principle seems to appear with individual work efficiency. Only a small part of your day will add the bulk of the value.)
Ooo, a Marjanović and a Dauphin in the same day! Double happy dance. And hugs. (and I’m really sorry about the house damage)
DDMFM! *hugs & chocolate*
And some for Bill Dauphin, as well! :)
–
It says that your world is decidedly mature across the hips.
–
ahs:
Do I know you? I suspect I’ve missed some nym-drift over the last few months. Anyway, thanks for the links, but I should’ve been clearer: I subscribe to the audio podcast of TRMS (actually, I’ve been listening to Rachel via podcast since the old Air America radio show, before she hooked up with MSNBC), and listen to it on my iPod nano (which I’ve just learned is being recalled, so I can get a new [prolly factory refurbed] one for free) at work. It’s the audio version that I haven’t been able to find archives for. I could probably figure out how to strip out the audio from video archives, but the truth is I have a hard enough time keeping up with the daily flow of podcasts I listen to, let alone working off a 2 week backlog.
****
Tethys:
Yah, I’m happy Anya won. Perhaps her stuff is a bit one-note, but another way of saying that is “focused,” and I found her aesthetic quite beautiful. So what if she’s not the greatest at sewing or the “engineering” of making clothes work? Someone with a true design sense — which I always thought Anya had — can always hire people to make her designs work.
As for the other finalists, I thought Josh besmirched that noble name, and his design sense was all over the place (I couldn’t believe any of the judges actually liked those lace-up bicycle shorts!). Kimberly’s stuff was sometimes fun to look at, but always seemed a bit down-market from what the judges usually like: It struck me as what you’d see as the “high-fashion” choice at a discount chain like Target or Kmart… which is not a bad thing, of course, but not what PR is usually looking for.
The biggest shock to me was that Viktor didn’t make the final runway. I’d had him pegged as the one to beat for most of the season, but he just lost it at the end.
Grammar RWA / strange gods before me / ad hominum salvator
The ॐ is supposed to be the giveaway, if your computer displays it.
So I’m guessing the spam filter has been disabled. o.o
The solution is basically the same.
MSNBC-MADDOW-NETCAST-MP3.xml gives “11-11-2011-191950”, google finds
http://tunein.com/radio/The-Rachel-Maddow-Show-p54878/
which gives “11-10-2011-193942”, thus:
http://msnbcpod.vo.llnwd.net/content/audio/podcast/pd_maddow_mp3-11-10-2011-193942.mp3
Carlie:
Don’t worry, it’s not bad. A branch fell on the power and cable wires that run from the street to the house, and in the process of ripping down the conduit that ran down the outside of the house to the meter box, took a couple silver-dollar sized chunks out of the siding. It’s mostly cosmetic, and insurance will pay for it (after deductible, of course).
Two houses on my street were actually hit by falling trees (though even they were relatively lucky, compared to what could’ve happened), and two other families lost their above-ground pools, so I actually fee quite fortunate.
But at least nobody on my street gassed themselves to death by using a charcoal grill indoors to keep the house warm… which several people in CT did.
Did y’all get any of the storm? Because I had no internet or TV in the aftermath, and most of the coverage in the local papers was… well, local… I don’t have a real sense of how the rest of the northeast fared.
It was: That’s what prompted me to ask.
So, now Newt Gingrich is leading in the Republican polls. I’m getting kind of tired of this. When are they just going to settle for Romney?
Bill Dauphin
I was surprised and pleased that Anya won. I find the fact that she can make such amazing clothes with very little sewing experience to be nothing short of phenomenal. It may be on the one note side, but all of it was clothes women would actually wear.
I don’t really care for Kimberly’s design aesthetic. Her pants are amazing, but all those metallics and loud color combinations look very cheap to me.
Josh wins for the most annoying, passive aggressive contestant. Those shorts were hideous, and few women would want to wear his clothes. When he did design something wearable like the hand painted circle skirt or the jacket in his final collection, it was a variation on a classic.
Victor was my favorite to win. But his final collection had schizophrenia. There were some great pieces, and then there were the all black, see-through pieces. Career woman by day, vampire prostitute by night? His tailoring skills were the best, but his idea of what women wear was way off base.
Nah. Hugh Laurie has the Occupy Wall Street anthem covered. In fact he did it years ago: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ivLMbrNzbWE
When either of two things happens: either all the other GOP candidates invalidate themselves through self-inflicted wounds or Romney converts to some form of evangelical Christianity, abandoning his Mormonism. I know people, evangelicals, who think that Romney’s policies (what he advocates now, not his Mass governor policies) are the bee’s knees, but refuse to even consider someone who is part of a mind-control cult.
Yes, they say things like that without cracking up in peals of laughter. Their irony metre was obliterated years ago.
Or here is a much (much) better version of Hugh Laurie’s Protest Song. (there are a few about) I love it.
When they pull their heads out of their asses? Running Romney means they have no viable excuse to oppose Obama’s heathcare plan.
It’s a lovely predicament. :evil uninsured laugh;
So my wonderful homeowners association today announced that the board of directors would exercise sole and unchallengable discretion over who gets to use the community building, based on whether they view the member who wants to use it, and the function, as “divisive.” An effort to change the bylaws of our homeowners association to specify that paid up members be allowed to rent the common space for “any lawful purpose” failed, even after I made a quite impassioned (and loud) speech about how the HOA is effectively a quasi-governmental organization and that whether or not they recognize it, what they are doing is censoring speech.
The good news is that I live on a county road and thus the organization has no legal way to force me to pay dues, even though I have out of civic-mindedness. (The folks who live on private roads have to pay dues, or at least reach a financial accommodation with the HOA when they refinance their mortgage or sell their homes, or the HOA can refuse to write a letter guaranteeing right of access via said private roads.)
And yes, this issue arose because the board announced that it would not permit a legal use of the property by a group of homeowners because another group of homeowners disapproved of the first group of homeowners’ decision to coordinate a managed deer hunt. (We have more than TEN TIMES the deer population that ecologists say would be healthy for this ecosystem. Whole species of understory wildflowers have vanished in the last 30 years as a result.) It was truly touching to see the anti-hunt members dressing up their bullying behavior as “consensus” and “process” and “community building” and not addressing my concerns at all.
Why yes, I’m figuring out ways to
piss them off furthercause more trouble, why do you ask?/rant
Now back to read the rest of the earlier thread.
Well, Romney has the best chance against Obama. So maybe I should just hope that the Republicans lose their collective shit and pick Perry or Bachmann.
I’m not a huge fan of everything Obama has done/ not done, but I’m pretty sure he’s better than letting Republicans control the House and the white house. I don’t even want to begin to imagine what trouble they’ll get up to without the threat of veto.
@31, how is it that I never heard that song before? It’s surprisingly clever in its inarticulacy.
Besides, as answers go to the question of what to do, playing the harmonica is not bad.
Starstuff:
The longer it takes, the better I like it. The nominee is going to be Romney, of course, because every other candidate is [even more] fatally flawed… but the longer it takes for them to rally ’round him, the weaker he’ll be in the general election.
Romney actually scares me, in two different ways: First, I think he’d be the hardest to beat, just because he’s not screamingly, obviously batshit insane or transparently sleazy like all the other contenders (i.e., all the things Republicans hate about him make him more palatable to centrists and conservative Dems). Second, because he’s fundamentally an empty suit, he’s the least likely to stand up to the far-right Congress that would certainly come with an Republican win in the presidential race.
Any scenario that has any Republican winning the White House puts us — perhaps irrevocably — on the fast track to a patriarchal, sex-negative, anti-choice (maybe all three of those are fundamentally the same, eh?), fuck-the-poor neo-theocracy. If we don’t vigorously support Dems — even imperfect ones — up and down the ballot in 2012, I seriously wonder if we’ll ever get another chance to. If that sounds melodramatic to you, just consider the undisguised voter suppression efforts being carried out under the color of law by Republican-dominated state legislatures all across the country. People are fighting back through recalls and protests, but if the whole federal government (including SCOTUS, after a few years) were under right-wing control, most routes of redress could be shut down.
I fervently hope this is just me hyperventilating a bit, but I keep thinking of Heinlein’s If This Goes On….
I’m hoping for Romney to be this year’s John Kerry in that exact way.
(Of course, Kerry arguably won that election.)
Actually to me Huntsman is the most centrist of the GOP candidates.
Mattir
I didn’t understand any of that but good luck with the creeping facism.
And yes, this issue arose because the board announced that it would not permit a legal use of the property by a group of homeowners because another group of homeowners disapproved of the first group of homeowners’ decision to coordinate a managed deer hunt. (We have more than TEN TIMES the deer population that ecologists say would be healthy for this ecosystem. Whole species of understory wildflowers have vanished in the last 30 years as a result.) It was truly touching to see the anti-hunt members dressing up their bullying behavior as “consensus” and “process” and “community building” and not addressing my concerns at all.
And oddly enough, they probably think their anti-hunt stance is good environmentalism. We moved into their habitat, we displaced and extinguished all their natural predators, and having too many deer around too many cars isn’t good for anyone, but oh no! We mustn’t interfere with Mother Nature!
Is that their position, just about?
You and me both, Bill.
–
theophontes:
Hans Gruber?
:P
Josh is just torturing you, isn’t he? I’ve already gotten half a dozen loaves of bread out of Hans Gruber (née Phoenicia) and I’m making more later this week!
Cooking question! I’m going to be making chili for Mr Darkheart’s family this coming Sunday. Naturally, half of them don’t eat red meat and half of them don’t eat poultry. *sigh* Anyway, I’m making one batch with ground turkey– should I treat it any differently than ground beef or can I just directly substitute one for the other?
Either one is a Morman though, but the Republicans will vote for Romney if it comes down to it. Which could make him a threat.
Don’t forget homophobia!
Me too, which means he stands zero chance
Oh God! I refuse to buy a house with an HOA. This is part of the reason I live where I do. I am totally ok with the trade-off.
Yup!
Mattir:
Is that legal? While I grok that the community building is private property, isn’t each dues-paying HOA member in effect a co-owner? By what right do the other co-owners deny a member’s access to hir own property?
Of course, you’ve got literally infinitely more lawyers in your family than I have in mine, so I’m sure you’ve thought of these angles. And maybe it’s just not worth fighting through the courts over. Still, I can see how this would really frost your cookies.
Interestingly, until I got to your third paragraph, I was sure this was going to be a dispute over some atheist/skeptical gathering; I never would’ve guess it would be anti-hunters leading the charge. It just goes to show you, it’s always somethin’!
David M,
welcome back*)!
The language v. dialect debate is fought much more fiercely by laypeople (it ultimately being a political question) than linguists. To linguist any language variety can be studied in its own right.
What about Irish (?) feck. Though looking at Wiki, that seems from a different root. There are some words in Standard German that have come from other German dialects, though I can mainly think of Low German ones right now, like Lippe v. Lefze.
Other examples being guèpe “wasp”, guarde (cp. German “Warte”) etc.
About the bolded part: where did you hear that? That is extremely unlikely. A word like that doesn’t fall out of existence because of 200 years of relative peace (Pax Romana wasn’t exactly devoid of any kind of war). People would still remember past wars, and the concept of war, and also metaphorically, so that’s really not a tenable scenario. The usual hypothesis is that due to morphological simplification, the word “bellum” had become confounded with “bellus” ‘beautiful’, originally a diminuitive of bonus “good” (both becoming “bellu” > “bello”). (A similar idea can be said of equus “horse” that had become homophonous with aequus “equal, same”, though I imagine slang terms for horses can always arise independently).
Not the same thing as Serbs and Croats (or Hindi and Urdu, or Bokmål and Nynorsk, though this is a bit different as Nynorsk was pretty much a planned variety). I was specifically talking about consciously making your speech varieties more dissimilar. The case of Swabian and Badic (Badian, whatever the English term is, though it’s a geographic term anyways, as the linguistic term is Low Alemannic) is different, they both belong to Alemannic, just as Alsatian and Swiss German do. Back in the day when people were less mobile, it was a normal process of dialects growing further and further apart with time. Dialect boundaries are also constantly changing, with a lot of isoglosses to take into account, so I’m pretty sure there were isoglosses setting Swabian apart prior to the 20th century.
But let’s just take the major sound change: Are you saying that Swabian dipthongised MHG û, î, unlike all other Alemannic dialects which retain them as monophthongs, only in the 20th century?
E.g.
“house”: Sw Haus, AP Huus
“ice”: Sw Eis, AP Iis
“time”: Sw Zwid, AP Ziit
This is cited as one reason Swabian is often set apart from “Alemannic proper”.
So David, what’s the reason Good Friday is a public holiday for non-Catholics only in Austria, or to be more precise, for members of certain denominations, excluding the RCC (or so sez the Pfft)?
– how do RCC members get to take off on Good Friday? Are they really disadvantaged here?
– do atheists get off on that day?
*)which reminds me: welcome back John, too!
HOAs annoy me. I think I spoke about the head of the HOA and the alligators and marshmallows
Don’t cook the turkey as long as you would beef.
And use thighs and drumsticks, if possible.
Try this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ntIATooB1DQ&feature=player_detailpage#t=931s
Lyrics of “Rassemblons Nous” (with translation) can be found here: http://www.christophertin.com/callingalldawns.html
Algernon:
Probably so, and his resume is at least as strong as Romney’s (both former goobers, so it comes down to Ambassador versus Olympics)… but for whatever reason, Romney is a Legitimate Candidate™ and Huntsman is not. Thus, Romney is the sanest/most centrist Republican who actually stands a chance of getting the nomination… and therefore, the most dangerous candidate in the race (IMHO, of course).
Good point. My list of Things To Be Afraid of If Republicans Win© was by no means exhaustive; that would be too difficult a task.
I tend to think of patriarchalism, sex negativity, misogyny, and homophobia and “of a kind.” They’re distinct social phenomena, of course, but, I think, all expressions of fundamentally the same deep-seated meanness and hatefulness of spirit. Each, in its own way, is about suppression of personhood.
chigau:
I’m not grinding the meat myself– I’m just grabbing whatever ground turkey they have at the supermarket.
But otherwise, thank you! I’ll keep a closer eye on the turkey pot. :)
@Alison Meirs:
Yep, that’s about it. Those of us who participate in the hunt are bloodthirsty sadists who get off on killing animals and who are particularly welcoming towards beer drinking men with guns. Basically I live among the crunchy green types who are so scathingly described in David Barron’s great book about mountain lions in Colorado, The Beast in the Garden.
The amusing thing is that the people who are so violently opposed to the community hunt are specifically angry about the organized nature of it. They acknowledge that hunting is legal, that gun hunting is legal, and that landowners can invite any old fool they want to hunt on their land. I have no idea exactly what the issue with the community hunt is, since we use only certified and safety-screened/background checked hunters, the same group of hunters that local parks authorities use for their managed hunts on park lands. These guys are WAY safer and more competent than the stereotyped beer-drinking bozo. And we keep very careful records about the health and condition of the deer killed, report that information to state biologists, donate virtually all of the meat to the local food bank in the form of hamburger, and compost all of the field-dressing waste at a local CSA amid several metric fucktons of leaves, to provide carbon to balance all that nitrogen… It would be quite difficult to do it in a MORE responsible fashion.
I’m contemplating reserving the space for a local/slow-food learn-to-butcher-your-own-sheep workshop, arranging with a local farmer to show up with humanely dispatched sheep… Not a halal thing – the only domestic animals I’ve ever butchered have been shot at very close range in the head by people who know how to do such things, and the death is instantaneous and generally occurs while eating something particularly delicious to the critter being killed. The people who are anti-hunt have no problem showing up at local farm-education nonprofit events and eating domestic animals that they’d petted and which were slaughtered at the farm the day before.
me@52:
…and “of a kind.” should be …as “of a kind.”
Do word substitutions count as offerings to Tpyos?
This HOA is a 70 year old version thereof, not the newer silly what-color-paint-is-your-door type, and so far, at least in the time I’ve lived here (i.e. 46 years) most of its activity has been advocating for the community with regard to traffic, suburban sprawl, police/crime problems, groundwater, persuading the utilities to upgrade the electrical or telecommunications infrastructure, etc. Useful stuff, in other words. But these crunchy green fools are going to drive me to eat a bowl of ice cream or something.
I have to admit, I was spring loaded to the pissed off position and my trigger guard was up when I awoke today.*
I have not made any new friends today, but I haven’t lost any, AFAIK.
I did not like having a EMT wannabe telling me how he ignored an old guy who had heartburn, but still took him to the hospital.
I asked him “Did you follow it up?”
‘No’
‘The how do you know?’
[crickets]
“I hope you will never be an EMT, and I’m sure you’ll never be a doctor. You won’t even play one on TV.”
“Yes I have!”
“Prove it. There are a dozen people here with smart phones, name the episode.”
[crickets as he walks away.]
There may have been alcohol involved.
(* it’s an aviation reference.)
Mattir @54
I have no idea exactly what the issue with the community hunt is, since we use only certified and safety-screened/background checked hunters, the same group of hunters that local parks authorities use for their managed hunts on park lands. These guys are WAY safer and more competent than the stereotyped beer-drinking bozo. And we keep very careful records about the health and condition of the deer killed, report that information to state biologists, donate virtually all of the meat to the local food bank in the form of hamburger, and compost all of the field-dressing waste at a local CSA amid several metric fucktons of leaves, to provide carbon to balance all that nitrogen… It would be quite difficult to do it in a MORE responsible fashion.
Perhaps they just get all shocked and appalled at the thought of people actually planning to go out and shoot those poor, sweet, adorable deer. (And I wonder how they feel when they crash their cars on the side of the road to avoid hitting the animals during rutting season?) I guess they wouldn’t approve of my new humanist novel; it’s full of crunchy-green sensibility, but they DO hunt deer. Oh, yes they do. They go out to the woods and shoot the critters.
A little piece of protest song history from Woody Guthrie
Jolly Banker
BILL – Long live the yellow dogs. I never used to approve of being so totally partisan as I am now, but I see no other way to keep all kinds of science fiction and other literary examples of horrible ways to commit political suicide from happening to all of us. And think of the children!
Today’s (tomorrow’s?) QC: Daaaaaang. (Also, Elliot’s gonna kick Marten’s ass.)
More: He was doing a ride-along for his courses. Hiz mentors iz doing it wrong.
IRT chest pain:
My ex-GF ended up having heartburn. I ended up in a cardiac ECU. No evidence of stroke, but BP of 2something/1something & lots of meds.
PZ has had heart surgery after recognizing symptoms. Another similarly aged friend had a mild stroke and waited until the next day. It turned out OK.
I had to explain to the wannabe the difference between stroke and myocardial infarction.
Holy shit, Herman Cain on Libya. It’s about as bad as Rick Perry and which three departments he wanted to eliminate.
kaputt is actually not from caput. Apparently it was borrowed during the 30 Years’ War from French soldiers playing card games, with
, or
which means “not to get any trick during a round” (French definition: “se dit, aux cartes, du joueur qui n’a pas fait de levée”). Again we run into the common problem about the unclear origin of slang terms, in French it is also unclear where this ultimately came from, though not from caput which was lost very early on, as said.
Talking about military slang (allegedly) borrowed from French into German, one of my favourites is “Fisimatenten”, which means “excuses, fuss, nonsense”. One hypothesis goes it comes from French soldiers up to no good in German territory, telling German women to “visite ma tente”. But that is only one hypothesis, which seems to be a case of folk etymology, as apparently these explanations came up in the 19th century during the Napoleonic occupation, while the word is attested much earlier.
If you’ve studied Latin in school, keep in mind that Vulgar Latin was quite different from the Classical Latin usually taught in school. Omission of the “h”, monophthongisation of “au” to “o”, and the omission of final “m”, ultimately leading to the break down of the declension system (most nouns reflect the accusative form). They also liked to add diminutive endings to nouns like the Dutch, Swiss and Swabians like to do, which is why you get French oreille and Spanish oreja, even though Classical Latin has auris, aurem, for “ear”. Vulgar Latin used “auricula(m)”
oops, kinda messed up the code, shoulda been “i” instead of “blockquote”…
@ First Approximation
I just assume that everything Herman Cain does/says at this point is bad.
Nothing. I just offered 700 as the average length of a subthread.
…which takes about 3 minutes to just load.
Das ist* kaputt, stress on the last syllable.
* Does anyone still pronounce that t?
I thought it up myself…
Pax Romana wasn’t exactly devoid of any kind of war
It was in Gaul, wasn’t it? War became a thing of the distant past or distant places till the Vandals et al. came through and made themselves proverbial.
Oh. That makes at least as much sense. :-)
The female version, equa “mare”, survived into Old French as ive, and there’s Spanish yegua, IIRC.
I’ve read this in some popular source that I don’t remember. It featured a dialectologist who has been surveying that area since before the political change and says “people acquired the habit of speaking in ‘their dialect'” – various features (well, probably mostly words) came to be perceived as more strongly associated with one side of the border than the other, and then people more or less consciously adopted them or removed them from their usage.
No. Not to my hardly existent knowledge.
o_O
It is a holiday? I had no idea. I’m not going to do the research at 6:10 in the morning.
No idea.
Good Friday is in the middle of the school/university Easter holidays, so I haven’t experienced this firsthand anyway.
Aesthetically, Herman Cain is brilliant. He really knows how to sell, sell, sell. I understand this is a skill he’s honed nearly to perfection in the last decade as a motivational speaker.
I loved his answer to the abortion question on Fox. (I won’t get this quite right, so please, correct my recollection, but) he basically said: abortion should not be legal, the decision should be left up to families, and it’s not the purview of the president.
Blatantly self-contradictory nonsense, but if you turn off your logic and just listen with your conservative aesthetic sense, he said all the right things.
Does a glottal stop count?
I’d say it makes more sense, because as I said it is quite unlikely that the concept of war would be forgotten in a mere 200 years. Though the problem with bellus “beautiful” of course is that not all Romance languages use that now, but it might have been more widespread earlier, I don’t know.
Yeah, I forgot about those. caballus only replaced the masculine form. Ultimately these things are tendencies only that make replacement more likely. Another one would be “not enough phonological material”, which is often used as an argument why vir “man” was supplanted by homo/homine(m), or vi(m) by fortia(m) for “force”.
AFAIK only in formal speech.
Well that’s something else. Words can be used as dialect markers too, but usually you use shared sound changes. The scenario you describe seems like that Swabian and Low Alemannic had already split up, there were some convergence effects influenced by administrative borders. Alemannic as a whole, after all, has been described as a dialect continuum, so this is a distinct possibility.
Good Friday in Austria:
I came across this because I was looking into religious privileges in Austria. Since Austria is majority Catholic, I was confused why Catholics would NOT be granted a holiday on GF while others would.
I don’t think a glottal stop in that position would be too likely, but my Cockeny’s been rus’y…
gah
“Cockney”, not “Cockeny”
Pelamun
My knowledge of archaic Swabian comes from my Donauschwab Grandfather, who spoke it as his first language. I have no idea how to spell it, but kaputt did mean that something was broken/finished/at an end.
It was interesting to see the testa=shard replaced by caput=head example.
If you have any idea what shishkibibbel (phonetic spelling) might actually translate to I would love to know. In usage it means “stuff and nonsense”.
I am familiar with the Swabian diminutive ending el added to nouns. It was a characteristic that was very useful in tracing my genealogy for that particular branch of the family.
I’ve never studied Latin, though I have picked up quite a few words from botanical nomenclature. It is useful arcane knowledge.
Thanks for the language lesson. I find it fascinating.
Tethys,
kaputt is actually a very commonly used word in standard German too, and it means what you say, or also “exhausted” when referring to people, “Ich bin total kaputt”.
No idea what shishkibibbel means, it might be from Hungarian, who knows..
If you have Donauschwab heritage, have you heard of the most famous Donauschwab in Germany today? The former foreign minister and co-founder of the Green Party, Joschka Fischer, he’s led quite an interesting life, I think there was a movie released recently.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joschka_Fischer
Is PZ awake?
Does he have a troll-alarm on his computer.
We need a clean-up here.
http://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2011/11/09/why-i-am-an-atheist-anonymous/comment-page-1/#comment-163177
it kinda pisses me off that what we and the crunchy green types want is kind of the same thing- a healthy ecosystem with healthy and diverse populations.
There are some real sadists among hunters, and there are those who are clearly in it just for the thrill of the kill. Me personally, I’m in it primarily because it’s the same cycle that’s been going on pretty much since life began, and that’s what makes the most sense to me to do with my life, but that’s beside the point.
It’s not easy to kill something for food, especially the first few times. It’s not easy for a person who respects life to end it, and I can understand that there are those who can’t do it and don’t want to see it, but killing something cleanly and humanely for food is so vastly different from sadism it’s not even in the same league, and the stereotype always pisses me off.
Oi be’ieve i’s “Co’ny”, guvner. I’s no’ing but glo’al stops, innit?
@ Dr Audley Z. Darkheart OM, liar and scoundrel
Lawdy, it sounds like you are too:
1. “I’ve already gotten half a dozen loaves of bread” (OUCH!)
2. out of Hans Gruber (HOWL!)
3. (née Phoenicia) (YELP! Oh the Heresy…)
4. and I’m making more later this week! (GULP!)
That was soooo mean…. *sobs*
*googles “turkey”*
Mmmh. doesn’t look so big in the picture. Probably prepare it like “drunk pigeon” here in Hong Kong. Pluck and clean, leave overnight to soak in Moutai rice spirits. Roast slowly until succulent. (It tastes a lot like Moutai soaked liver … not an experience your family are ever likely to forget.)
I’ve been meaning to add pigeon to my diet, if I can find some farm people willing to let me do some biological pest control on their barns and properties.
David Marjanović, somewhere in the former incarnation of TET:
And we’re taking it to ridiculous lengths. For example, throwing an “i” anywhere and everywhere it doesn’t belong, just so we would have “ije” instead of “je” or “e” (characteristic for Serbian) everywhere. That forms some really ugly words that have nothing to do with our language. Disclaimer: I’m not a linguist, but I remember my grammar pretty well, and I notice some rules about word changes are suddenly being forced out of use. It’s noticeable in the media, and it looks more like a political change than anything else.
The Laughing Coyote, what is your proposed biological agent of control?
@ TLC
Pigeon is delicious (in spite of my description). Usually roasted, sometimes stuffed with rice (my favourite, Sudanese style).
Apparently Toulouse-Lautrec used to say “They shall not be dining on wild pigeon and olives.” To denote someone with poor taste.
SauceSource: Toulouse Lautrec’s Recipe for Wild Pigeon and Olives.John Morales:
A highly intelligent, highly selective, agile, quick thinking (and quite handsome) midsize mammalian predator, of course.
TLC, biological pest control.
Are you planning to use a tamed hunting raptor? ;)
I wish, John Morales. That would be awesome.
I can think of hundreds of less cheesy songs than that one. For instance:
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F3aniiKuxL8?rel=0&w=420&h=315%5D
I’m extremely frustrated. I can read and write here when on my work computer. My home computer doesn’t show anything on FtB later than Saturday morning and shows no comments nor offers any way to post comments. Does anyone have any suggestions?
Hi there
Tethys
I can offer you my regional explenation for “bibbele/bibbelsche”. The word comes from “Bub”, boy, and is the diminutive. Means something like little boy or more often just something small. No idea if that’s the same “im Ländle”.
Talking about the origin of “ficken”, the word, around here you can still be “fickerig” without being horny.
Mattir
Let me guess, the “no hunt please” people do also think that their meat grows in the supermarket…
‘Tis
Speaking as a “mousepusher”: Have you tried deleting our cookies and cache? Hard reboot of the site?
Himself, if you’re using FireFox try restarting it in safe mode (via the help menu) then force refreshing the page with Ctrl-F5.
If that doesn’t work, you’re looking at the wrong host.
Beatrice,
Most language change happens in an unconscious way. Speakers don’t think, let’s drop our R’s and teach that to our children. What I called conscious changes is much rarer than the normal cases of unconscious changes, and it usually is connected to identity, either external or internal.
But there are parts of a linguistic system that are much more subject to planned and conscious changes, and they usually only apply to a minority languages worldwide, namely those with a status as national languages.
Dialects mostly change in an unconscious way, but the respective national languages of course do have an influence on them, and some dialect speakers switch, teaching the national language to their kids to the detriment of their dialects.
1. Writing system: this has always been subject to meddling by committee (English orthography being one notable exception. There’s no official body governing English orthography, quite an anomaly). Since writing is a skill people have to acquire in school, they become vested in the way the language is written. (Compare the spelling reform debate in Germany, or in the Netherlands, or consider the Spelling Bees in the English speaking world, and the dictations in France) The question what script to use is even more important than spelling rules, and can be a powerful marker of identity.
Anecdote: my aunt left Yugoslavia 40 years ago, and to me emigrants like her have been one of the “places” where Yugoslavia lives on, but when she was taking her written exam for the driver’s licence, probably 15-20 years ago, she had the right to take the exam in her native language. When she saw it was Latin script though, she refused to take it, though presumably she would have understood it without problem (also given the fact that in Serbocroat times the command of both alphabets had been standard, and she had been living in a country with a Latin-based script for decades).
2. Standard language: a standard language is by definition a planned speech variety, and a somewhat recent phenomenon. Historically, most languages have been clusters of gradually different dialects, also known as dialect continua. The diversity found in terms of grammatical and lexical features across dialects can be staggering, and you need some personality, or even some committee (not everything that comes out of committees is necessarily bad) to bridge those differences and achieve a widespread acceptance of the new standard. Usually a prestigious dialect is chosen, more often than not from the geographic centre of the linguistic area, sometimes a new standard dialect is created based on several features from different dialects. For German, Martin Luther is credited, and for BCS Vuk Karadžić (of course the story is always more complicated and goes beyond one person). BCS from the beginning was planned as a pluricentric language (nowadays, German has followed English and evolved into a pluricentric model too), that is, it was understood that there wouldn’t be only one standard, but at least two or three standards. This would extend to grammatical features such as the infinitive or other morphological issues, and the phonological feature raised by you.
A standard language has to be learnt by all speakers, because you don’t acquire the formal language needed for certain situations as a child. But often, especially if you’re from the urban middle classes, your mother tongue WILL be pretty close to the standard language, and acquiring the formal bits won’t be as hard as if you were starting from a different dialect.
BUT, if a committee decides to change certain rules all the time, alienation will occur, to the adults who already went through the trouble. So one of the reasons a standard language shouldn’t be tinkered with too much, and allow for some flexibility.
3. terminology: could also be subsumed under 2., but an important aspect of language planning is terminology. You need accepted ways of dealing with new terminology in science and technology, unless your language is English, whose status as a global language allows it to operate without linguistic committees; most innovations in science and technology are proposed in English after all). Traditionally, Croatian has been more resistant to borrowings than Serbian in favour of calques, that’s not a value judgement, only an observation. For instance, the names of the months, lipanj v. juni, or sveučilište v. universiteit.
Technical terms can be easily changed around by committee, but there are also more common terms that just have preserved western and eastern dialect differences, and thus become markers of identity, such as tko v. ko “who”, suh v. suv “dry”. If you changed those words, the alienation effects would probably be much greater.
Coming back to the ije/e issue, I’d like to expand on that. Basically in old Slavic there was a sound represented by a letter called jat, and this has given rise to consistent reflexes in the various dialects:
ekavian dialects have e: dete “child”, mleko “milk”. Most areas of Serbia.
ijekavian dialects have ije: dijete “child”, mlijeko “milk”. Montenegro, most areas of Croatia, Bosnia-Herzogovina, and western Serbia.
ikavian dialects have i: dite “child”, mliko “milk”
some parts of Bosnia-Herzogovina, some parts of Croatia, esp. along the Adriatic coast, northern Serbia (though I understand these are ethnic Croats). (Question: the language maps don’t seem to indicate where northern Croatia belong to, it doesn’t show up in either of the three variants. Why could that be?)
The Serbian standard as E, the Croatian and Bosnian standards have IJE, and I think there is no standard that has I. An ijekavian dialect speaker from west Serbia still has to learn the E variant, and an ikavian dialect speaker from the Dalmatic coast still has to learn the IJE variant.
Your discomfort with the IJE variants could be due to a dialectal difference, general alienation effects (you might have grown up in Yugoslav times and been exposed to more ekavian forms than in later times).
And it’s entirely possible that language planners fell victim to what’s known as hypercorrection (a common gripe by linguists is that politicians don’t consult them even for language policy matters).
Presumably, IJE should only appear for historic jat’, but this can get overgeneralised, i.e. that E sounds that don’t reflect it get substituted too. This is why JFK said Cubar. He had been told by advisers that his vocalised Rs didn’t fly too well with a national audience, so he tried to remember his R’s, but of course his native dialect didn’t have them (“I pahked my cah on Hahvahd Yahd”), so sometimes he oversubstituted.
Final note:
from a linguistic perspective, BCS is probably one language with different dialects, just like Continental Northern Germanic (aka “Scandinavian”), but linguists have known better than to tell speakers whether their speech variety is a dialect or a language. In doublespeak, one is called the “linguistic definition” and the other as “political definition”.
(I’m sure there are much more detailed works in BCS, but the one I was looking at was
Bosnian, Croatian, Serbian – A grammar with sociolinguistic commentary. Ronelle Alexander. 2006. UW Press.)
PZ thanks for the link to Makana, he is a real gem I listened to some of his other stuff his slack key guitar work is really good and the traditional songs are well done from the video posted I was surprised to hear his wonderful falsetto.
I will be looking out for him. the song “we are the many” hit me.
We have been all privileged to hear the analysis of these “occupy wall street” protests how there is no leaders nor plans or demands.
That is true and I think that is the most amazing thing of all. It is a spontaneous event not unlike the “Arab spring”. It is not astro-turf like the tea baggers.
All governments govern by the consent of the governed not by the will of some god or because of the “truth” of some ideology.
It looks to me like the the governed are beginning to seriously consider there consent to be governed. It has been a long time since the people of the united states really questioned what was happening and did they really approve. The ass holes wanted to let the market decide things and it did the way it has often done it in the past with an economic collapse now the “99%” want to know why it has to be like this?
The people in many of the other countries of the world know that they are not in control but we the citizens of the united states were mostly content to just argue about the details and fight over the scraps as long as it looked like we were “makin it” but it now is plain for everyone to see that we are clearly not and no one is really interested in helping us very much they just want us to let them keep running things in the same way they have up till now. The thing is if no buddy started it I do not think any one can stop it, at least for long. when you aint got nothin you got nothin to lose
I also think that if the republicans win the coming election and force through their ideological plans we will really see the shit fly. I do not mean riots in the streets either I mean it would not be long until the other countries of the world would put pressure on us to grow our market and improve our economy by other means then just closing down government. They depend on our market to buy there stuff.
because it has been the same conservative policies of the last 35 years that has brought us to this point.
uncle frogy
Strange. I haven’t had any problems with FtB at all, except for the times when it was down.. It’s not loading slowly or anything…
Central New York dialect has a pronounced glottal stop. I was startled the first time I heard my kids using it, but I’ve noticed that it’s crept into my speech as well, although I tried to resist it.
Mattir – enjoy the days of solitude! And blech on the homeowner’s association.
Any Czech culture enthusiasts here? Even if not, the amount of programming in this flash site is amazing. Jamara It’s a compilation of pretty much everything ever created about Jára Cimrman, made to look like a file cabinet. When you change certain things (such as the play of interest), it changes all of the cabinets to match information based on that particular play. It’s pretty slick.
Cockney
Back when I took that English as a global language course I was taught that T was the one sound that was substituted with a glottal stop. So it wouldn’t be “Co’ny”. *checks the Pfft*. Yep, seems that way.
By this do you a T glottalisation like in Cockney or a glottalisation of initial vowels like in German? I.e. /Ost/ [ʔost]
No but I read a book once about the “Czech Orthography Wars” which I enjoyed immensely.
Last night’s events at Occupy Wall Street were sickening, and yet for some reason I suspect that many still will continue to handwave at the notion that North America is becoming a kleptocratic police state…
And now apparently CNN is sympathizing with NYPD. As the good trustworthy pig leads…-groan- please please please let humanity not be this stupid
well, this is the NY Times’ take on it
Not sure if the NY Times editorial page was part of this though…
That sounds totally not biased against the protest and like it was written by someone who has actually been there and talked to relevant people rather than simply rephrase press releases from City Hall and the NYPD. It is totally NOT the epitome of corporate editorial slanting, the same way that Ron Paul is not a racist.
In other news, the American RCC is trying to frame its discriminatory ideology as a position for “religious liberty”
setar,
the New York Times newsroom and Editorial section are two different section altogether. You can’t see the stance of the Editorial people from the general news reporting. Maybe they will have an editorial on yesterday’s events soon, I didn’t see one when I checked just now.
pelamun,
I love how you responded with such a detailed explanation to a short offhand remark/rant. It was very interesting to read, and very informative.
About northern Croatia not appearing on language maps : No idea why, but it should probably belong into both ekavian and ijekavian category.
Your suggestion of hypercorrection is probably the right explanation for the problem I’m noticing. I remember learning about the reflex of jat (obviously not in as much detail as you probably have). I have always taken care to learn and use proper standard Croatian and avoid the mangling of words that is characteristic for the capital (so called purgerski which I would characterise as standard with a heavy influene od kajkavski dialect as well as dialects from all over Croatia). So, even though I have been exposed to more ekavian forms (I also speak Slovenian, if that adds any information), I have always made sure the follow the rules of standard language, therefore I don’t think I’m imagining the sudden change. I mean, I might be. Who knows. Maybe I’m just paranoid.
To make the long story short, a couple of examples of (wrong?) words I have noticed are now very often used by reporters on radio/Tv and journalists : a report, izvješće from which to report, izvijestiti is formed is suddenly getting that ever damned i and becoming izviješće. Then there is white, bijelo and whiter, bjelje which is being turned into bjelije or even bijelije (just to be thorough, I guess). A bit more rare, but it makes my ears bleed: grade, ocjena into ocijena, probably because of to grade, ocijeniti. Those are only a couple that first come to mind.
We’re discussing language, so I feel compelled to apologize for any spelling mistakes I might have made, I don’t have a spellchecker here.
It’s the T, generally only when internal to the word, but not all words (I’m not sure what the “rules” are as to when the T is glottaled(?), maybe only after vowels?, but I know it when I see it). So I “started” to go to the humane society, because I want a “ki’en”.
The last time we did an upgrade, we had the same problem with the host company not updating IP addresses and ensuing worldwide inconsistency in accessing the site. The workaround at that time was for people to edit their “hosts” files and hardcode the ip address of FtB into them.
If you did that before, it will come back and bite you now, because the IP address has changed again. Make sure your hosts file does not contain an entry for FtB — your computer needs to use DNS to find us.
It appears the times on posts have changed last night from UT to US central time (UT -6). Easier for me, less so for our world wide regulars.
When it comes to rats, males: easy peasy. Females: serious trouble. Esme. Oy.
Caine – what’s she up to?
Today’s Shortpacked! raises a valid point.
I made a delicious macaroni and cheese last night – although I need to make two adjustments next time to make it better, I think: add peppers, don’t overcook the pasta.
Mexican Mac and Cheese
8 oz elbow macaroni
3 tbsp butter
3 tbsp flour
1/2 cup finely chopped jalapeno or habanero peppers
3 cups milk
1 tbsp chili powder
1/2 tbsp cumin
1 large egg
12 oz Colby Jack cheese
salt, fresh black pepper
1 cup crushed tortilla chips
salsa
sour cream
Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Prepare macaroni.
Heat butter over medium heat in a decently sized pot (I use a dutch oven and there’s plenty of room.) When the butter is melted, slowly whisk the flour into the butter. Add the chopped peppers and keep moving for 5 minutes. Add the spices and milk to the pan and simmer for 10 minutes. Temper in the egg. Add 3/4 of the cheese to the pan stirring in a handful at a time. Season and fold in the macaroni.
Pour the mac and cheese into a casserole and cover with the remaining cheese. Add the tortilla chips to the top. Bake for 30 minutes. Rest for 5 minutes.
Serve with salsa and sour cream.
Test
And it appears that Micheal Bloomberg has not read the First Amendment. Peaceful assembly is also protected, idiot.
Part of Occupy Wall Street was putting together a reading library for protesters, with people serving as librarians and curating the collection. NYPD threw it all, over 5500 books, straight in the trash:library evicted.
Don’t want no people doin’ no book learnin’.
Both Occupy Oakland and Occupy Portland also recently got evicted in the middle of the night. Isn’t it a little strange that three large cities kicked out Occupy protesters the same way at around the same time? I’m looking forward to the NYPD attempting to keep over a thousand people out of this park.
I always thought that this was a pretty good anthem for the 99%: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B1NyWbhCxZE
Some Mormon clown responds to Hitchens’ recent Slate article :
A response to Christopher Hitchens after his latest attack on Mormonism
Beatrice,
Ekavian in Croatia? That’s very interesting. Now that I look at it, the area not covered by the language maps are mostly the kajkavian areas.*)
(I don’t know much about Slovene, but I don’t think it has a minority status in Croatia like it does in Austria and Hungary)
I do think hypercorrection is the most likely explanation, because as far as I understand, the ekavian/ijekavian/ikavian differences are not gradual. But we have two forces here at work that could be counteract each other:
– regular sound change: if jat’ is changed to IJE or E, this occurs in all words, as regular as possible.
– diffusion in a dialect chain: the entire BCS area is a dialect continuum. A word can change its form gradually. So a word from an ekavian dialect could spread into an ijekavian dialect.
Another thing to consider: the different lexical strata. Take French for example: it has words that are directly passed on from Vulgar Latin, and they exhibit all the sound changes, like loi from lege(m) etc. But then French has also used Latinate words (also known as mots savants) throughout its history, and depending on the period they haven’t undergone all of these changes, so you get a word like légal next to loyal. A similar thing might have happened on BCS, presumably with Church Slavonic as a source of such mots savants. Might be that some of these forms actually are words created from Church Slavonic, but I wouldn’t know.
Without good historical and dialectal data, this can be impossible to determine.
To determine if these forms are historically “correct”, one would need to check the relevant philological works. But if it has become part of an accepted standard, then it would be correct within the standard, regardless of whether they’re etymologically correct or not. But if your reaction is shared by others, it could mean that this change hasn’t gained widespread acceptance (sometimes standards make it out of committee but fail to gain currency in society). The etymological question would be more like a political issue though.
An interesting story regarding IJE/E I came across in the book I cited: the Serbs of the Republika Srpska, the Bosnian Serbs, speak a western Serbian dialect and thus are ijekavian speakers. In 1994, quite a different and much more infamous Karadžić, as president of said republic, declared the standard variety in the republic to be ekavian, like in Serbia proper. This created a lot of furor, and protests, and in 1998 this was rescinded. It was a political move, but this was an example that there are limits to how language can be manipulated.
*) another note: in BCS dialectology, dialects have been classified according to their word for “what”. Ča, Kaj, Što. The first two are only found in Croatia, with Što being the form found in many parts of Croatia too, and BH, MN and Serbia. The differences are not just the words for “what”, but are also reflected in the accentual system etc.
Apparently the name “Bloomberg” means “full of shit”. Huh, interesting.
Even Bloomberg knows he’s saying a bunch of bullshit. I can see it on his face. He said previously that the protesters would be let back into the park by now. But a convenient court order may or may not have been issued, so no one can go back in yet.
Carlie,
It’s the T, generally only when internal to the word, but not all words (I’m not sure what the “rules” are as to when the T is glottaled(?), maybe only after vowels?, but I know it when I see it). So I “started” to go to the humane society, because I want a “ki’en”.
You’re right with “glottaled”. Because glottalisation if you want to be precise, only refers to secondary articulation, i.e. opening your glottis partially or completely WHILE producing another sound, not replacing it completely (if you do this to a vowel, it becomes “creaky voice”).
Though I personally prefer to say “to be replaced by a glottal stop”, dunno way but “to be glottaled” just doesn’t sound academic enough to me ;)…
Starstiff #114: And neither of those evictions worked. It’s almost as if they don’t have anything other than the media and the dogs.
Carlie:
Everything. I’ve just spent two hours dismantling the only habitat setup Chas ever knew, thanks to Esme. Of course, Chas taught her how to climb the condo gates to get up on top of it, which was fine, except Esme went from there, down the back, onto the windowsill and onto one of my art tables. About $150 in damage to various brushes, pencils, etc.
It’s not as if she doesn’t know she isn’t allowed on certain things, she does. Esme, much like her owner, gets bored easily and unlike male rats, isn’t into naps all that much…
But about freedom of assembly from a legal perspective, AFAIK democracies around the world impose certain legal restrictions on it, with limitations of how long a protest can take place, and the need to register them etc.
Though I don’t know how this is handled in the United States usually. I dimly recall that the SCOTUS originally recognised freedom of assembly as a secondary right with certain limitations, but IIRC this difference has been made less and less.
oops, blockquote failure in 119. Sorry.
Hmm, so the politicians should always do what the many want? Bad news for we atheists, then. Bad news for the queers, the non-whites, the non-christians, the immigrants. We might want to think about this one.
Tualha,
who said that? A democracy is supposed to guarantee rights to all, incl. minorities. That’s also what the First Amendment is about.
The legal justifications cited by the Bloomberg Administration are technically all about safety and health issues, not whether politicians should follow the majority view. (Though I agree with StarStuff and others that El Bloombito is full of shit)
What a pitiful defense.
Joe Smith was right because he didn’t die like Koresh?
Really?
pelamun,
I’ve found this wiki page (linky), unfortunatelly it has no English translation. It’s about Croatian dialects and it mentiones some more detailed regional specifics.
Also, as a “mixed” Yugoslavian child, I’m annoyed with constant forced distancing of former Yugoslavian nations in every way, shape and from, language just being one part of the package. So I might be more sensitive to these changes than it’s actually warranted.
Pelamun,
I was responding to the sentiment expressed in the song, not anything anyone here said. tl;dr
Bill: The main reason I’d support Obama over Romney is the question of federal court appointments. Since federal judges have life tenure, the appointment of reactionary troglodytes to the federal bench – which tends to happen when a Republican is in office – can have really long-term repercussions. Given how important federal court judgments are to the protection of civil liberties, that’s an incredibly big deal. In particular, if there were two more Scalia-clones and two fewer moderates on the Supreme Court come 2016, the American legal landscape would come to look very, very different, and not in a good way.
Other than that, I have almost nothing good to say about the Obama administration, from a civil liberties perspective. I’m glad I don’t have a vote; I’d find it physically painful to vote for Obama, given that he’s sold out over and over and over again to the security-industrial complex on issues like immigration, drug enforcement, detention of “terrorists”, the state secrets privilege and so on. But I can understand entirely why people here plan to vote for him, because Romney would be worse (and none of the other Republicans bear thinking about).
More broadly, I just think American politics is a ridiculous farce. As is British politics. I find it hard to get worked up about one candidate over another; party politics seems to be one long unending saga of, as Terry Pratchett might put it, bossa nova, seneci bossi similis.*
(*Yes, I know this isn’t real Latin.)
As for Cockney, I grew up in Milton Keynes – which is not London, but the accent is similar to North London – and, as I recall, the characteristic feature is the replacement of the “t” in the middle of words with the glottal stop. (So “water” becomes “wa’er”.) I don’t recall glottal stops in any other context.
Yes, yes and yes.
Walton,
standard English doesn’t have glottal stops. Unlike German, which actually doesn’t have words starting with a vowel, as a glottal stop is mandatory, precluding liaison effects you might get in English (incl. the “phantom R”, as in “law and rorder”).
Beatrice,
this was one of these instances where I’d use Google Translate. So Ronelle Alexander needs to update the maps and the description of the IJE/E/I differences.
I think that’s pretty much the vibe I get from my aunt. I think the Scandinavian nations have found a better way of dealing with this, but then they’ve been doing this for a couple of centuries longer..
@ Carlie
It is quite shocking to hear about this in ‘Merka , even though we have seen it coming for so long.
I went with a cameraman friend of mine in Durban to see the manic right-winger Eugene Terreblanche (ie: “White Earth” – he was very proud of this). He was shouting at the (heckling) students, “Julle ken mos net van boeke!” = “You know {as a matter of fact} only about books!”
To RWA, there is nothing but lies and subversion to be gained by reading (apart from teh babble and their own literature.) Truth comes from the podium and from the direct experiences of the faithful. (I am sure this is a direct function of their own ignorance and lack of education.)
The more books you destroy, the safer Jeebus can sleep at night.
I think Discworld almost counts as classic canon.
If you’ve had Latin in school you’ll enjoy or cringe at the following page:
http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/CanisLatinicus
The Discworld ones are among the better examples tho.
Also funny
Pelamun: I think my favourite is Ab hoc possum videre domum tuum.
Or perhaps Fabricati Diem, Pvnc.
Walton, my two faves are the ones I have stamped on my silver rings: non temetis messor and nihil privatus.
Regarding the accents discussion: If you want an archetypal example of Received Pronounciation (i.e. upper-class English), just listen to this clip of Tory MP and Old Etonian Jacob Rees-Mogg talking about the Crown Estate in a parliamentary debate. Poshness overload.
(Puts me in mind of the passage in Jingo in which Vimes thinks “…he’d be damned if he wouldn’t be Sir Samuel to someone who pronounced years as “hyahs”.”)
(…about Ankh-Morpork aristocrat and incompetent general Lord Rust, that is.)
From the link that rorschach provides in # 116 comes this comment to the article:
[emphasis mine]
I leave it to the reader to parse this sentence. If anyone can do so, please inform me as I am at a loss as how to do so.
The only meaning I can discover is that this is an unconscious slip of the tongue revealing that M. G. Scott is fully aware of the bogosity of Mormon dogma. It can’t be that he really meant to phrase his defense of his church in such terms, can it?
Also, “deep seeded feelings” might prove to be a useful phrase when referring to the depth of illusion with respect to the acceptance of indefensible assumptions characteristic of all revelatory “truth”.
Gah. Sorry for the offering to Tpyos.
(I still don’t think I’ve beaten Sally Strange’s homage to Tpyos, though. May His holy wrod never be spellchecked.)
Well, Dear Walton, let us hope that Perry continues his rearward march in the polls. From this morning’s news from MSNBC, this:
I wonder how long the suggested limits would be. Perhaps two years? Six months? In Perry’s world the President would be able to shuffle judges in and out of the court system? What could possibly go wrong with that?
Crudely Wott,
given how complicated it is to change the constitution, Perry would never be able to get term limits introduced…
But you know in other countries it’s perfectly possible to have term limits for supreme court judges.
Germany, for instance, appoints them for 12 years, by a 2/3 supermajority of parliament. That way,
– even if a judge turns out to be a bad apple, the damage is minimised
– the major parties have to find a way to compromise
pelanum,
Points taken. Still, the notion that a candidate for president could advance such a plank and that plank be welcomed by a large part of the electorate sends shivers up my spine.
That’s because there are rules! [/pedant]
(bold mine)
Walton – wow, I always thought that was an affectation to stereotype the upper class. I honestly didn’t realize it was a real accent.
Apologies for nym assault, pelamun. I really should know by now.
>winces with embarrassment<
Crudely Wrott,
you might compare it to Bush’s support of the Marriage Amendment. Something that would never pass but would play to his base.
But I do think that lifelong appointments of federal judges are a big risk factor in American politics. The 2012 Presidential elections will shape the legal landscape for decades to come, it’s quite frightening…
Sorry myself, I forgot an “r” in an earlier post…
Carlie,
well rules can be changed.
It’s not like the Latin genitive here makes that much sense… especially for some names, just adding an “i” indeed is dog Latin of the worst sort, why not use “a(b)” or “de”. We could then treat the name as indeclinable, which would make more sense for foreign names.
Lifetime appointments for the federal judiciary are a risk, it’s true. But they’re also one of the few redeeming institutional features of the US political system. If you want a judiciary that is actually independent of the executive and the legislature, and that can actually protect the civil liberties of minorities against the will of the majority, then you have to have an appointed judiciary with security of tenure. In England, this principle has been recognized since the seventeenth century – one of the conditions of the 1688 Glorious Revolution was that judges should have security of tenure and should not be removed from office arbitrarily by the King, and the Act of Settlement 1701 confirmed that judges hold office quamdiu se bene gesserint, i.e. they can only be removed from office for serious misconduct – and it’s fundamental to the constitutional system of any free society.
In many state judicial systems, judges are directly elected for a fixed term. More often than not, this is an absolute fucking disaster.
The ubiquitous US practice of directly electing state prosecutors is also extremely problematic. Prosecutors have a huge amount of discretionary power in the criminal justice system (they decide whether to proceed with a case, whether to agree to a plea-bargain, and what sentence to seek), and the prosecution system in the US is very heavily politicized, with a strong impetus to appear “tough on crime” at the expense of civil liberties and due process. At the federal level, the prosecution system isn’t much better; federal prosecutors (US Attorneys) are appointed by the President and work for the Department of Justice, under the direction of the Attorney General, who is a political appointee. (Bush’s eccentric conservative Christian A-G, John Ashcroft, did a lot of damage to the Department of Justice during his tenure in office. This is true in immigration law too; the Immigration Judges and the Board of Immigration Appeals, who make most decisions in immigration cases, are not independent federal judges, but “Article I judges”. They’re employees of the Department of Justice who are appointed by the Attorney General, and they don’t have the same security of tenure or full institutional independence that actual federal judges do.)
And now I really must stop wasting time and get on with the huge pile of work I need to do today…
pelamun:
Say wott?
>chortle<
Walton,
agreed. The election of judges is never a good idea.
But I still think 12 years, no reappointments, is a good compromise.
Maybe the bigger problem is that the Senate confirms the juridical nominees with a simple majority (or 60 if you take cloture into account, but it’s always under threat of being changed to a simple majority). Maybe a supermajority would be in order here.
Ditto for prosecutors. Though the AG is the equivalent to a justice minister in many other countries, no objections to having them appointed. Law enforcement is part of the executive after all.
Immigration proceedings in many countries are administrative matters rather than judicial ones. I wouldn’t have objections as long as independent legal oversight is guaranteed.
This is one of those days where, as my nagyanya would say, one “needs a hug and a bowl of hot soup”.
Okay, so we’re continuing our discussion of mormonism, Mitt Romney, and various persons writing swill and not-swill about both mormonism and Mitt Romneyism.
One thing Christopher Hitchens and Yale professor Harold Bloom both got wrong in their critical looks at Mitt Romney was the number of mormons worldwide. Both authors accepted the LD$ Church’s propaganda about the number of members. 14 million is usually the number bandied about.
For a long time, ex-mormons have known that the number was inflated. Missionaries especially told tales of baptizing people just to meet the pressure from their supervisors, only to have said baptized persons never show up again. They’re all still counted on the church’s membership roles.
Even in Utah and Idaho there are huge numbers of inactive mormons who are still counted as members even though they haven’t contributed tithing for more than two decades.
Nevertheless, the real truth is even worse. The membership picture is even sneakier, even more false than you might have imagined.
So says “Demon of Kolob” an ex-mormon
Just to be clear, other ex-mormons asked the COB worker, “Wait a minute! Are you saying that an exmo who has RESIGNED is still counted as a member?!”
Demon of Kolob answers:
Demon of Kolob worked as a records clerk in the COB in the 1990s. His information is, however, also current because he knows the current records clerk. Demon says, “I still recommend people to resign, it gets you off the records on the local level and sends a message to the COB. Resigning removes the records from the local ward and stake. This is a big deal, it takes you off the radar of the local leaders. Some of these leaders are nuts, I have had bad experiences with local bishops before I resigned. When I resigned the bishop tried to get me fired.
Conclusion: “14 million, my ass.”
More details, and more proof of the fact that mormons keep former members, even excommunicated members, on their roles forever: http://exmormon.org/phorum/read.php?2,341577 (Scroll down to read details of an excommunicated member finding that her mormon membership number still existed in the church’s database.) There’s also insider knowledge about the number of people actually leaving LD$ Inc.
Lynna
Are dead people included?
Lynna,
even the RCC does this, to a certain extent. For instance if you leave the church in Germany in order to get out of paying the church tax, there are divergent opinions if your quitting the church constitutes in a schism that should result in an excommunication. Indeed sometimes the RCC still counts people who left as members. (but the situation seems to be complicated, as it seems to be also a matter of canonical law not just a case of a cult trying to inflate its membership figures)
Illuminata @155:
Now would that by any chance be thick smoky bacon & pea soup?
If peas are still verboten in TET, I could settle for creamy bolete mushroom soup. Or clam chowder. Actually, any kind of soup if it comes with a good hug.
but re Romney: his base flattens out about 25% of the Republican base, right? Seems that the one best thing Romney could do to boost his campaign is to become an evangelical Christian…
For mormons, never purging resigned or excommunicated members from their roles seems to be a deliberate policy. They never enabled a function in their database that would prevent resigned members from being counted in the grand total of active members.
I can sort of understand, though not condone, their keeping the records of resigned members. I mean, who knows, some of the resigned or excommunicated members may return to the fold for family or financial reasons. After a big show of ass-kissing, and the payment of tithing, they would be accepted back into the church.
But continuing to count people who have formally resigned (or who have been excommunicated) as members when the Church feeds statistics to the public is an especially egregious example of lying in the name of God.
It’s a lie that helps to keep members who are still active in the church paying tithes. It’s also a politically useful lie. Numbers equal power.
It is a friggin’ lie, and they are using that lie knowingly to fool the public and to keep their members in line.
When real, live mormons eventually die, they are also not taken off the membership roles until, according to the database, they are 110 years old. If I understand the system correctly, when the database sees the person would be 110 years old, then that person is removed from the count of total active members.
So the software is capable of removing members over 110 years old, but not capable of removing members who have resigned.
I think they count necrodunkings separately. I will do some more research on that.
LDS instructions to “the youth” concerning music and dancing:
http://lds.org/manual/for-the-strength-of-youth-fulfilling-our-duty-to-god/music-and-dancing?lang=eng
Excerpt:
Apologies if this has already been mentioned, but just in case it amuses – the robots of the future will be cephalopodan (cephalopodoid???), not humanoid.
http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg21228382.100-squishybots-soft-bendy-and-smarter-than-ever.html?full=true
Lynna
It sorta makes sense™.
After all, if you can convert to LDS and get married after you’re dead, you must still be an active member of the church.
Mormons have an official index of proxy baptisms, and that index is separate from membership roles.
More here: http://www.jewishgen.org/infofiles/ldsagree.html
Lynna:
“But continuing to count people who have formally resigned”
Finnish political parties do the same, since they get government grants calculated on their membership. In my wild youth, I joined a party, and I’m still officially a member, even though I sent my first (of many) notes of resignation in the mid-80’s.
Also, necrodunking made my day =)
Long-time lurker here with a question for Lynna, OM.
I live in the UK, my sister (a widow) lives in Australia and has been a mormon for years. She knows I think the whole religion thing is nonsense, and with the distance between us it is easy to avoid the subject. She does visit from time to time, but never comes alone – once with a daughter and son in law, twice with a friend (not the same one). She always makes out the friend just wants to tag along as she has not travelled before, but I now doubt this. The latest friend was definitely calling the shots on where to go, which attraction to visit etc. So I want to ask, is it likely the accompanying friend is really more of a minder, to “protect” her from us godless folk? I know you wouldn’t be familiar with the Australian mormon church but I can’t imagine it can be that different, so I’d appreciate your opinion. Thanks
And if you are a woman, you can still have babies after you are dead. Spirit babies. But who can tell the difference? Spirit babies are precursors of actual babies born on earth. Before the spirit babies are born into a good mormon home, I’m not sure what they are doing in the Celestial Kingdom, but I envision a sort of as-far-as-the-eye-can-see nursery of babies stuck in the pooping, squalling, suckling mode. But probably very good looking babies. With mostly blond hair. Possibly dimples. Babies of different colors are scattered thinly among the infant horde in order to comply with Celestial Correctness.
If you are worthy man of maximum mormonness, you can still have sex. With lots of women. Some of whom may be assigned to you by God. Some of whom may have had the great misfortune to be single on planet earth in these latter days.
If you are an infidel when you die, you can accept the offers of mormon missionaries who are proselytizing in the Outer Darkness, trolling for souls like yours. You can then go to mormon heaven and become active.
:(
–
The pea does not change its shorts; i.e., they remain anathema, now and forever, world without end, raw men.
I can give you a *hug*, though. :)
(Mushroom and bacon soup? Mushroom, cheese and bacon soup?)
–
Heads in beds seem to be the standard response.
And it sounds like you’ll have plenty to take from.
Cicely:
Hey, at least she didn’t puncture/eat about 3 dozen tubes of paint like one of my cats did one time. :D
@ Lynna, OM
I am almost scared to ask why: “110 years old”?
@ cicely, Inadvertent Phytocidal Maniac
Snert! (Deep Rifts, Deeep Rifts…)
Lynna
Oh. My. Goodness.
So, Mormon souls are made in the Celestial by dead Mormons and then stuffed into live Mormon babies.
This would make an interesting graphic novel.
Caine, about 6 years back, I did an Arts & Sciences entry for an SCA event, in the documentation for which I had occasion to call bullshit! on the notion that cats are strictly carnivorous, since I had empirical evidence that they will also quite happily eat the heads of paintbrushes, especially the hard-to-find (at least, locally) super-spotters. One project, 3 20/0 brushes; and yet, amazingly, all three cats lived to tell the tale. :D
–
@theophontes, Dangerous Chemical-Welding Waterbearer:
Anathema! Anaaaaaaaathema!!!
*sign of aversion*
–
Just read the Barna article Loftus mentioned in one of his posts. (Link: http://www.barna.org/teens-next-gen-articles/528-six-reasons-young-christians-leave-church). If this type of research was being done/used by an atheist organization, we could utilize it to target a huge demographic for deconversion.
Cicely: hugs right back at you, and yes, mushroom, cheese and bacon soup sounds so good it has to be criminal in at least half of the states.
May I timidly suggest toasted Scandinavian full rye bread to go with it? I know dark rye is an acquired taste so it’s OK if you pass on it.
theophontes
re turkey
The last turkey we cooked was about 5kg, gutted, plucked, etc.
And that was a small one.
Albacore @168, as far as I know the only mormons with assigned “companions” are missionaries. Missionaries each have a companion, an arrangement designed to keep 19 year old males out of trouble, and, hopefully, to cut down on the demon scourge of masturbation.
Sounds to me like your sister from Australia has redefined “unacceptable, out of wedlock relationship” to be “traveling companion.” If your sister is a MTBM (Mega True Believing Mormon — term I just invented, taking the usual TBM one step further), if your sister is in that category, then she has developed over a lifetime prodigious powers of self-deception.
Her brain will have been wired by repetition of bogus “I know” statements, and by positive reinforcement for bad habits, including self-deception, community-wide deception, and faulty logic.
Her mormon “minder” is probably just a TBM that is respected at one level higher in the covert hierarchy of the church. From that, the minder’s power derives.
Minnie, you can have my share of the rye bread. :)
A nice, crusty French bread, on the other hand….
–
Cicely:
I can corroborate this. I’ve always gotten ones who are quite fond of certain shades of watercolours as well.
At least rats mostly stick to the other end of paintbrushes. Mostly.
Trigger Warning:
(Insert crappy version of “Girl from Ipanema” here, skip the rest as needed)
School head on rape claim: ‘boys will be boys’
(More crappy hold music)
/End Trigger Warning
natural or synthetic bristles?
I think the natural ones count as ‘carnivorous’.
LOL. Hadn’t thought of that. But, yes, good idea. Our darkest fiction fails when compared to theology.
For your graphic novel, you also need to consider the fact that God makes spirit babies too. In fact, I think he might be the busiest spirit-baby-maker of all.
There’s a website where mormon mommies go to discuss raising their babies. They frequently discuss the idea that their new babies can still see “beyond the veil” or “through the veil” — so the transition must retain two-way communication of some sort between the Celestial Kingdom and the baby rooms on earth that are decorated with portraits of Joe Smith.
community.babycenter.com
“DD” means Dear Daughter. Mormons use abbreviations like this a lot. “DH” means Dear Husband.
Chas:
Hmmm, it’s always been natural brushes which have been eaten at Chez Caine.
@Richard Austin:
AFDFGDBADSASFBADKSAHFGADFKASGHDFASLKDGALDFA!
(Management would like to apologize, Katherine has lost all mental faculty for proper speech due to the sheer anger at that article. She should be fine after a quick reboot. Maintenance has been notified.)
Get that Kat a kitten to hug! Stat!
*facepalmheaddesk*; lather, rinse and repeat.
–
Synthetic. Almost all of my brushes are synthetic.
I suppose it could just be considered a sort of feline equivalent to “tofurkey”. “Synthbuggy”?
–
@Katherine:
Reboot sequence initiated. Code word: piggy
(though now I read that it’s not actually a pig)
Back when we were both working with high gloss enamel sign paints one of our cats got into them and managed to drink blue paint after knocking several cans from a table. We found out because she then managed to vomit blue oil enamel on almost everything while running for shelter with her red oil enamel soaked paws.
We thought she would be poisoned, but she is still alive and healthy albeit very old now.
Cleaning and detoxing the cat was no fun for anyone though.
@Richard Austin:
Eeeeee!! Cute :3
Pig or not, it worked just the same.
@Chigau:
Kittens are useful rebooting tools.
RE: “no serious crime was committed”
About rape.
okay, I quit the world. Anyone down for buying up some farmland and making Pharyngutopia?
Hi everyone,
I wanted to ask for some cooking suggestions or links to sites that would have good cooking advice. (I think there was also an eternal thread with some recipes, but I don’t really remember which it was, so if someone remembers that I could use that too.) I’ve done google searches, but there’s just so much info it’s overwhelming.
Last year I made green bean casserole, baked zuccini, mashed potatoes, stuffing and roasted a turkey. My family doesn’t exactly have any kind of tradition for this holiday, so I wanted to know what other people usually have with their turkey. (My employer is providing me a turkey, so we’re definitely having turkey.) I’m open to ideas for cooking turkey and side dishes, though using reasonably obtainable ingredients.
Thank you,
Jamie
I agree, but this can be arranged other ways than lifetime appointments (and you didn’t suggest otherwise, so I’m just riffing).
For instance, if judges have fixed terms and can never be reappointed or reelected, their degree of independence is the same.
I would like to see fixed terms which are some odd number of years long. 11, 15, 19 years? Anything longer than 19 terrifies me.
Additionally, I would like age limits; a judge cannot begin their term unless they are younger than 65-X years, where X is the term length. Judicial age limits are in place in some states already, and for me constitute a crude but better-than-nothing method of favoring liberalism.
I envy the naive
*raises tentacle*
I’m enjoying imagining what Pharyngutopia would look like. I see an amazing creation that combines green construction, sustainable agriculture, cutting edge tech, and much grog. The libraries alone are making me drool a bit.
Lynna,
God is Adam, do I have that right? Does he make them by fucking Eve and his other wives?
@Ahs
God is NOT Adam…for some reason that bothers them. They’re very firm on that stance
ahs:
Actually, they’re then just more likely to spin cases in favor of people who can/will employ them after they’re no longer allowed to be judges.
This is the exact issue with term limits, and is the same problem: you shift from the payoffs being before serving to after serving.
I think a lifetime appointment is reasonable so long as there’s a process of impeachment that can be instituted from multiple directions but requires some threshold to trigger the actual “trial”. Being successfully impeached should then prohibit someone from ever being a appointed again, and the judge in question should be recused from all cases from the moment the impeachment process has started (Whether that be submission of a signed petition or action by the legislature).
Yes, it needs to be thought out more, but plain old term limits are as bad as elections from a corruption standpoint.
oh.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adam%E2%80%93God_doctrine
Somehow I had figured it was mainstream.
A very good essay by Jane Leavy on the Penn State situation in the context of child sexual abuse in general (my apologies if this has been linked before).
Ahs
It makes sense from their mythology but for some reason they hate the idea. Apparently that tiny little bit is the exact mark of “too far” from orthodoxy.
Of cats and carnivory:
Cats will also eat tinsel from the christmas tree. All if it they can reach. Denuding the lower branches of their glittering strands. Yes, it does come out the other end of the cat, although its stomacic retention time seems a bit longer than with food.
At least one puppy named “Toby” will not have access to tinsel this christmas, although if evidence is any guide, she will need to be watched carefully to prevent her from eating
anythingeverything else.Fortunately, she seems to learn quickly what she’s not supposed to eat. Unfortunately, she’s learned that if she distracts us or lulls us into a false sense of security, she can return to any suspended forbidden eating projects for a while. Since we know, and act, on this secondary knowledge, I suspect she will soon begin employing third-order strategies to maintain her access.
Yes, I know, “welcome to the world of a new puppy!”. This is our second time around.
Yeah. It should be squarepantsi with one i. I have no clue why the Internet thinks tow i’s is necessary to Latiner than thou (cf. virii, penii).
Okay, thanks to PZ, I’ve been able to get here, I can read comments and even make posts. Thank you John Morales and PZ Myers for ending my frustration.
ahs @198, (and following posts of both ahs and Ing), the Adam/God doctrine is just one of many slippery bits of mormon theology that modern mormons would love to deny or explain away.
Their problem is that historical documents exist that will continue to follow them down the dark corridors of all their days. Their only defense is to build stronger mormon brain filters so that the questions are rebuffed before they can be considered by the frontal lobes.
Personally, I like this explanation. There’s drama, and it would look good reenacted on film. I was planning to use the thunder excuse for any time that I am misquoted, but then realized that I would have to give all my talks outdoors during thunderstorms.
McConkie died in 1985, so referencing him brings us almost into present-day mormonism, and is proof that modern-day apostles of the LDS Church knew full well that Brigham Young was a purveyor of bullshit.
And so that they can elect a mormon President … or at the very least, have lots of mormon politicians succeed in high office.
Yes, indeed! Give the ol’ litter box a festive air this Christmas!
–
Really? Jesus and Satan are pouch mates but they for some reason think Adam God makes them look weird? Not to mention the magic underoos?
It’s not a good idea to have cats eat tinsel. It can cause intestinal blockage, requiring surgery to remove.
More on the Adam/God doctrine and how it was taught by Brigham Young, and on how present-day mormons can deal with that doctrine:
Link I forgot to include in previous email about Adam/God doctrine:
http://www.exmormon.org/mormon/mormon132.htm
The author is an ex-mormon named “Randy J.”
And here is a link to a site on which LDS Apologists wriggle and squirm their way through the controversy: http://fairmormon.org/Mormonism_and_doctrine/Repudiated_concepts/Adam-God_theory
There’s a fuckton of blather on that site, but it boils down to these claims:
“…Brigham was speaking of Adam in the context of him being the presiding priesthood holder over all the human family, and therefore “our Father and our God”…”
or
“… perhaps Brigham Young was speaking of at least two Adams, but that he was intentionally veiling what he was talking about, and left it up to individuals to get revelation on the true interpretation. This would be similar to the Lord’s use of parables. …”
or
“…Adam is the generic name that can be used to refer to each male of the species. And that the name Adam symbolically refers to a continuum of progress in degrees along man’s journey from pre-existence all the way to Godhood. But this rejects the multiple mortality theories in some interpretations of Adam-God, where Adam falls from an exaltation into another mortality. Each male person that is eventually exalted is both an “Adam Jr.” and an “Adam Sr.” along different parts of his path of progression. Once he is exalted, he takes on the status of an “Adam Sr.” Therefore, Michael becomes a symbol of all men along the path to exaltation, and Elohim becomes a symbol of all men who have reached exaltation. So, in this view, while Adam-God to some degree is about Michael the Archangel and his Father, it is also about each man’s journey and eternal progression.”
I have a headache.
One last salvo is the “We don’t know” version:
“Yet another way in which anti-Mormon critics often misrepresent LDS doctrine is in the presentation of anomalies as though they were the doctrine of the Church. Anomalies occur in every field of human endeavor, even in science. An anomaly is something unexpected that cannot be explained by the existing laws or theories, but which does not constitute evidence for changing the laws and theories. An anomaly is a glitch…. A classic example of an anomaly in the LDS tradition is the so-called “Adam-God theory.” During the latter half of the nineteenth century Brigham Young made some remarks about the relationship between Adam and God that the Latter-day Saints have never been able to understand….”
“Only further revelation from the Lord’s anointed would be able to clear up many points surrounding that doctrine.”
My parents’ cat when I was a wee baby played with the decorations as well, so my bought some wooden ones to put on the lower branches. We used them ever since.
–o–
Faux Latin?
Lecti lesculitorum, femiverum.
Of course not. Who has their cat eat tinsel?
Cats eat tinsel all on their own.
I know, and I probably should have put some kind of “exaggeration” tag on my post. We got lucky; no kitty had to see the vet while we were learning that we just can’t have tinsel. Ever.
–
On the subject of cats: other owners out there, I have questions.
I’m a relative newbie cat owner. I adopted him a year ago, but only ever had boring pets (i.e. goldfish, hamsters, etc.) before, when I was a child. So, some things he does amuses and confuses me.
1) Must he deliberately push everything he can off of tables? I’m forever picking up things that, for some reason, he felt the need to look at, push off the table and then watch hit the ground.
2) How much is enough food?. The rescue group I got him from (which included a vet) told me to ignore the feeding instructions on the pet food packaging – as it was way too much – and instead feed according to their guidelines. In this case it’s 1/4 can of wet food + 1/4 cup of dry food twice daily.
But, he acts like he’s freaking starving a lot of the time. How do you know if you’re not feeding them enough? Or is he just being spoiled because he knows I’ll give in?
3) Hairballs. HOLY SHIT THE HAIRBALLS. He’s a Persian/Maine Coon mix and holy fuck is he furry. 10x furrier than any other cat I’ve ever seen. And, even though I feed in the “hairball control” food, I’m still cleaning up puke puddles every couple of weeks. Is there a better way to deal with this? It seems like its upsetting and painful for him when he hacks them up.
That’s the least of it.
Mormons actually believe that Mitt Romney’s candidacy will be a great thing for mormonism. Because, they reason, even if Romney doesn’t win, the more people learn about mormonism the better.
Mormon publications like Deseret News are chock full of this attitude. They think that scrutiny is a good thing. Bring it on, they’re saying. People will find out how cool and normal and ethical mormons are.
Cheese and Rice!
I am, of course, happy to give them the scrutiny they think they want.
The people most likely to be surprised by what is found under the carpet are mormon sheeple themselves. Top leaders are probably buying new magic underwear daily, or are perhaps scared shitless. The regular flock are, meanwhile, distressingly gullible and naive. It’s painful to see them dutifully repeating the lies they’ve been told as they comment below every news article that comes out.
Eventually, even the most well-established lies, like the “14 million members,” will be stripped of their cover.
@ illuminata
You have to know something about cats: they’re all assholes. Mine knock things over all the time and they’ve destroyed my blinds
As for the hairballs thing, you could groom him more. Brushing him frequently with a shedding comb will reduce the amount of fur he eats.
The NY supreme court has ruled to reject the earlier court order that said protesters have to be let back into the park. This means that the Occupy protesters do not need to be let back into the park.
Further revelation from the Lord’s anointed will never be able to clear up the muck stirred up by Romney’s presidential campaign.
A few people might be moved by all the fresh attention to mormonism to attend LDS Church services. And, if nothing else has raised their eyebrows, that will.
And this is one of the most significant reasons I’m not a pet owner. No matter what positives you get from it, having to clean up after the animal is just something I couldn’t handle.
Illuminata:
I don’t know that cats must push things off of tables, just that they do.
We feed ours 3/4 cups of dry food a day. We’re trying to keep him from ballooning outward. And yes, you’d think we were torturing him to hear him carry on.
As for hairballs, ours is a medium-hair and he hardly seems to shed at all, nor has he ever coughed up a hairball. I can recommend the Furminator brush/comb thing: we use it once or twice a week, and we take off an entire extra cat. It’s an expensive brush ($40 up here in Canuckistan), but it really seems to work.
of course there is
Yes.
Moving things are fascinating. He’s making his own entertainment. That fragile piece of bric-a-brac was so boring, just sitting there.
I don’t have a bug on the wall at Purina, but their job is to sell you as much cat food as possible, so their
bottom lineexperts are hardly disinterested parties. I’d go with what the vet says; if Kitteh isn’t maintaining a healthy weight on that, you could bump it up some. If that doesn’t help, talk to the vet again.Of course.
I suspect, with no firm basis for the suspicion, that cats sometimes eat out of boredom; or maybe I’m just anthropomorphising the fuzzy little suckers.
Watch his weight.
Probably. Cats are famous for their “pampered pets” rep, and they didn’t get it by hiring a public relations firm. :)
*ignoring the host of bad jokes clamoring for voice*
Not that I’m aware of.
–
More scrutiny of Moments of Mormon Madness — the following is from the present-day Young Women’s manual. It illustrates the glorious heights to which mormon guilt-inducing skills can rise. Jewish mother stereotypes are no match for this stuff when it comes to ladening on the guilt.
More Young Women’s Manual gems: http://lds.org/manual/young-women-manual-2/lesson-15-temple-marriage?lang=eng
LOL @the shaved cat.
Everyone says to brush him, but he will not allow it. I’ve been working on clicker training him – he comes when you call him and sits on command – but I’m still working on acclimating him to the brush. He just attacks it, and I don’t want my fingers to accidentally be in the way.
And he is totally an asshole. An adorable fuzzy lover-lover, who follows me everywhere, but totally an asshole. LOL
@Pelamun in 132, I think you mean Laura Norder :) You wouldn’t ever say “law and rorder” because there’s a consonant D before the vowel start of Order. The phantom R comes between 2 vowels. (Law and Lore are homonyms in my non-rhotic speech, rhyming with awe.)
Laura Norder is, of course, a friend of Emma Chizzit, as featured in an old book by Afferbeck Lauder called Let Stalk Strine.
@224: Clearly, the moral here is that one shouldn’t get married because getting married leads to death. If they’d simply moved in together and didn’t make a fuss over it, they wouldn’t have been on their way to a reception and wouldn’t have died. Conclusion: marriage is bad.
Daily brushing doesn’t necessarily work. Pixel-cat sheds enough every day to knit a whole new cat, despite being a shorthair, and no amount of combing/brushing seems to help.
Light, drifty stuff, too. Many’s the time I’ve watched a loosely-bundled aggregation of Pixel-fluff lazily circle under the ceiling fan at about eyeball height.
–
Fossil trackways from the Burgess Shale.
Tegopelte gigas
Included as in past tense and is now recognized as a separate animal, or included as in they are both arthropods?
Stupid paywalls. /whine
Lynna @#184: “Mormons use abbreviations like this a lot.” It’s also extremely common on Mumsnet:
http://www.google.co.uk/search?q=site%3Awww.mumsnet.com+DH
I’m not sure what this means. I’m sure, however, that we DHs aren’t going to be flattered by the results of that particular search. m-)
I have two medium haired cats with thick undercoats. One used to vomit a lot. Brush him lots, but also consider playing with the brands of food. Ours eats this ridiculously expensive high meat content dried food and regular wet food. This and brushing has reduced the hairballs to a very rare thing. Honestly, my cat pukes less than once a month.
Do it when he’s sleeping. That’s the only way I can clip my cat’s nails. If I try to do it when he’s awake, he screams at me and tries to claw my eyes out.
TBH, I don’t know about other people here but I think the “no hairball” food is kind of a crock. With long haired cats (the one that ate the paint was a long haired cat) I find that brushing and finding the food that works best for them goes farther. Finding the right brush is good, because they have different tolerances for brushing.
I try to make a light brushing an every day thing. Also, clean up cat hair on surfaces regularly. Some of them will eat it when they find it, so if they have hair piled on a chair they’ll actually lick it up.
@184: I’ve seen other people use the “DX” abbreviation. It annoys me excessively for some reason. Possibly because it sounds so Stepfordish. Or insecure. Do I really have to emphasize that my partner or child is dear to me?
There is a trick to getting cats to let you brush them. It takes time and patience and learning the cat’s tricks. SOme just love it, and some have to be uh… lovingly dominated.
That’s a good point about entertaining themselves, cicely. Cats are like lovers: they like toys they can use by themselves when no-one’s around as well as toys that you can play with together. (Unlike lovers, they prefer things covered in sisal to things to be inserted in orifices.)
As for the spoiled thing: rather than feeding your cat twice daily, measure out his or her daily amount and give a little each time s/he complains. It’ll stop the binging without increasing the daily food intake. S/he’ll still complain, but you won’t have to have a three-hour battle of wills because s/he gorged on dinner at five and is famished by eight.
We fill one of those little tiny tupperware containers with 3/4 cup of kibble and leave it by the food bowl on top of the stove: B.B. gets an eighth of a cup whenever his complaining reaches annoying levels.
(He’s fond of chewing plastic; especially if said plastic is surrounding baked goods. One day, I tossed him a corner of the slice I was eating to see if he actually ate the bread he was so fond of spoiling. He looked at the bread, met my gaze, looked at the top of the stove where he knows his food is stored, and back at me. So, his fetish is for destroying loaves, rather than eating them.)
Trilobites and Tegopelte were both members of a large but now completely extinct arthropod clade. Here’s one phylogeny (from the awesome trilobite site):
http://www.trilobites.info/trilobite_clade.gif
Yes, we understood the part about him being a cat. Why the redundancy?
Sometimes B.B.’s in no mood for brushing or clipping, and sometimes he likes to think of himself as charitable to his annoying humans and their clippy brushy things. On those latter occasions, I’ve been rewarding him with kibble treats if he lets me do at least two paws.
On cats who do not appreciate brushes:
They make cat grooming gloves with rubber pads that work nicely.
I deal with the hairballs by taking the cats outside to eat grass and keeping them in the yard until the grass comes back up.
Hairballs are the worst during the big spring and fall sheds.
Hmmm… I have been fortunate with the binges. I’ve always been able to leave dried food in a bowl next to the water. Once they realize it is *always* there it isn’t exciting so they tend to nibble. Plus they really look forward to the wet food.
They are insidious. They will try to fake you out by waking you up early, then trying to wake you up again later after you go back to sleep.
If your cat sheds a lot AND has dry skin check into getting more oily foods like wet food with fish oil. The awful cat had really flaky dry skin with extra shedding when she was dumped on me. That much has gotten better about her though.
Thanks, Lynna!
From a recruiting standpoint, this seems like their safest bet, no matter what the issue. I wonder why the Mormon hierarchy doesn’t always get th—oh, right, because they actually take these questions seriously.
That reminds me. Is it bad form to show up at an LDS church unannounced on Sunday morning, like I was just in the area and needed to go to a church, any church?
Brownian wrote:
That makes sense; I’m not all that good with those either…
I think I’m going to learn how to crochet. Does anyone here do that?
Not since I was a child. I wish I remembered how to do it though! My grandmother used to make the most lovely crochet things.
What I’d like to do at some point is learn to make hair art.
@ Algernon
What’s hair art?
Do you mean ‘be crotchety’? Because I am fucking awesome at that, get-off-my-lawn-you-very-much.
What illuminata keeps cleaning up, much to the chagrin of the avant-garde artiste known as illuminata’s cat.
Trilobites and Tegopelte were both also way cooler than cats.
blah blah cats blah cats blah blah
see, now we’re talkin’
Like this:
http://books.google.com/books?id=BNATAAAAYAAJ&printsec=frontcover&dq=self-instructor+hair+work#v=onepage&q&f=false
Oh, before anyone mentions it, I’m not sure it’s self-censorship either:
http://www.google.co.uk/search?q=site:www.mumsnet.com+%22stupid+fucker%22
My sister’s best friend owned cats who ate tinsel, which would only be discovered when said cats began trailing poop-covered tinsel strands behind them wherever they went. On two occasions my sister assisted her friend in restraining the cats and slowly pulling the tinsel out while the cats made the most disturbing noises imaginable. After the second episode of shinyphagy, tinsel was never again hung, but the psychic damage was done; from that day forward, my sister has kept an unbroken vow to never own cats.
Yes, yes, we know. And you can’t stand The Cure either.
Were you a latchkey kid or something? Left alone too long in the orphanarium? Is there a reason behind your passive-aggressiveness when people aren’t talking about exactly what you want to talk about?
@Chas
Thanks! It seems rather arbitrary to call them arachnomorphs. They aren’t spider-like at all. Haeckels art is always appreciated.
Arachnomorpha
The wiki article does suggest that this is a point of contention.
I still want to get pet tarantula. I’m fairly sure they don’t throw up.
I’m not a cat owner and never have been. But aren’t hairballs a direct result of a cat’s grooming behavior? How the hell would a food prevent that? Does it somehow dissolve hair in the stomach? Or does it somehow stop the cat from grooming itself? I don’t get how a ‘no hairball’ cat food would work.
No.
Not that there’s anything wrong with that.
um
No, not really.
Independent incidents of real-time annoyance, is all.
Happy to jettison the ‘passive’ if you’d prefer:
The fucking Cure sucks eggs. If you think they’re any good at all, at anything, you’re a fucking moron.
And please shut the fuck up about your goddamn cats. There is nothing on the whole fucking Internet that’s more boring than a bunch of fucking cat-fanciers enabling each others’ fucking cat-fancying thing with more precious and/or disgusting anthropomorphic anecdotes about their little furry fucking cat-friends.
is better?
One of the coolest crochet projects ever IMO.
How to crochet a coral reef
Chas: So I take it you won’t be attending the Pharyngula Cat Fashion Show?
You’re missing out, I heard they were gonna dress up Snickerdoodle and Mewmewkins in the CUTEST little sailor outfits.
Arrgh, borked the link.
How to crochet a coral reef
Genius!
Genius!
Damnit, why didn’t i ask you kids sooner?
According to the packaging, it contains a laxative element that helps “push” the food through, as it were. Probably a crock, but a desperate cat owner is a cash cow.
his name is Cleo. Don’t ask me – he picked it.
StarStuff – re: crochet – Slightly. I’m a knitter, and frankly crochet scares me. Too hard! (and were I crocheter, I’d say the exact same thing in reverse).
The Laughing Coyote @ 258 wins the thread. Do you have a Ghey Sects Queue too? I want in!
…a
desperatecat owner is a cash cow…FIFY – at least if what my assorted cat-owning friends tell me is true. Especially if they get injured or sick. Though they also assure me they don’t mind, given how important their pets are to them.
Ha. “Klaatu, barata, ni-*COUGH COUGH*”
Frank, this silt just got real!
Are you kidding? Weaving textiles and this group are like oil and water. Bleah. Crocheting, knitting, spinning, that stuff’s for theists, man. Prairie Muffins. No, nobody does that here.
Actually, I like cats just fine.
Cats are kind of like Walton. I don’t mind having them around, even enjoy their company on occasion, but what I can’t stand is people talking about them all the time.
Speaking of cat fashions, though, did you see the vid that Coyne posted about the cat with turtle envy?
Much. Now I’m more inclined to help you out: Things on the internet other than Pharyngula’s TET
Isn’t honesty refreshing?
I’m off to the store to buy yarn and a crochet hook! This should be fun. Or I could completely fail, but that’ll at least be interesting.
Chas:
I haven’t said a word about my cats. My rats, however…
Speaking of, we are going to go ahead and get a Gytha for Esme. She needs a partner in crime who can keep up with her.
oo, shiny
You just opened a big ol’ can of getting sulked at.
Wowbagger – “I still want to get pet tarantula. I’m fairly sure they don’t throw up.”
Anecdatum, my friend who had one scared his to death by tapping on the terrarium. I don’t think they’re very robust in captivity.
Since I have arachnophobia I can’t stand them. I can’t even stand to watch other people allowing them to crawl on them.
I haz a rule, if I don’t let you in my house, I reserve the right to kill you.
+++++++++++++++
Just like “oh, that’s Sailor, he thinks he’s funny”, “oh, that’s ChasC, he’s just being an asshole.”
I’m an asshole at times and ChasC is funny at times.
It gets complicated. e.g. My research would be a lot easier if it wasn’t for human variability. (But since we research human retinas it’s a given.)
AE: see? See? It was better the other way, where I could merely imply that I had strong feelings about The *urk* (sorry) Cure, without having to come right out and state them forthrightly and get all sulked at and shit.
Yep, back to passive-aggressive; if other people want to get all ‘honest’ and ‘candid’ and ‘direct’ then I guess that’s fine for them. You know. Those people.
Um, Brownian, that’s going to turn into a Googlewhack. To here …
Caine, ‘Gytha’ Googling would seem to activate The Walton, but what the hell did you mean?
ahs @241
You can’t go into the super duper special temples, but visitors can drop in at any of the churches. It’s likely you will be looked at askance, and then love-bombed, assigned at least two missionaries, and harassed by phone and personal visits for the rest of your life.
You might try giving out a fake name, address and phone number when asked.
The Sunday services are 3 hours long.
Women seldom wear pants — dresses being required. Dress or skirt should cover your knees.
Men seldom wear colored dress shirts, white being required. Ties also required. Wear a light blue shirt and a days growth of beard if you want to be pegged as a troublemaker.
Flip flop shoes are not allowed.
More than one earring per ear for women is frowned on.
Have fun.
Oh, wait, fun is not allowed. At least not during Sunday morning services. Some fun can occasionally be had at Ward parties, or other church-sponsored activities.
Tarantulas don’t throw-up, but they do throw hairs.
*Warning – contains spiders and spider parts*
“Cats are like lovers….”
I’ve never had a lover that regularly vomited in my house.
WTF? People are choosing to keep pets that throw up in the house?
Send the damn cats to the barn and let them eat mice. And throw up, if necessary, in the barn.
Come now, what could be more enjoyable and enlightening than an indefinitely extended conversation about vomiting cats?
Other than being waterboarded, of course.
Sailor
Gytha aka Nanny Ogg
The Sailor:
Esme is named after Esmerelda Weathwax, who is lifelong friends with Gytha Ogg. If Mister brings home two more girls instead of one, we’ll have a Magrat too.
Yes, no more talking about cats.
How about kings?
Vomitboarding?
Oh, good idea. Then I can get up and walk out after 45 minutes.
Better park several streets over, too.
I swear I hate every fucking human being on this planet.
Ing: Even me? *sniffle*
Everything? O_O
I Hate Everything
Ing, anything I can do to help?
+++++++++++++++++++
I’m currently watching “The Story of Will Rogers”, starring Will Rogers Jr.
It doesn’t suck.
On the injured and sick side, yes, I’d agree.
Though since that asshole enjoys knocking things off the counter more than he’s ever liked any toy, I don’t fall for that shit. Anymore.
I’m assuming that everyone on TET knows that OWS was evicted from Zuccotti park?
@ A.R
Yes. I even blogged about it. It’s utter bullshit.
@Rey
especially you.
My grandmother is going into surgery for breast cancer this friday and I am sick up to my eyes with dealing with face book. Don’t know why I try to bother with people, I hate just about all of my friends friends. Because nothing proves a point that I’m rude for insulting people about their ignorance on issues like starting to throw slurs at my SO and myself.
A. R, if you are unsure as to your assumption, how are we supposed to know?
Ing, I’m sorry your grandmother’s dealing with breast cancer. All tentacles crossed for her, I hope the surgery goes well.
If it will redeem me in your eyes at all, I’m sorry for what you’re going through.
The time has come, the Walrus said,
To talk of many things:
Of shoes—and ships—and sealing-wax—
Of cabbages—and kings—
And why the sea is boiling hot—
And whether pigs have wings.
I don’t know about an adopted adult cat but here is my solution for the little kidduns.
As soon as they are starting to jump up on tables I begin a program of negative enforcement. The materials are simple and inexpensive. Old fashioned mouse traps and normal typing paper.
Set the mousetraps and place them on tables, counters, etc. in what you figure would be the kiddun’s approximate landing zone. Cover the trap with a couple sheets of paper. Walk away whistling nonchalantly.
Along comes the dear furball who jumps up, lands on paper and trap. Trap springs making a loud and unexpected noise. (The paper is sufficient to keep the trap from snagging paws and tails.) Kiddun leaps off. One or two times has always been enough for my lil’ guys.
In order to make it easier for the cat and so as to not cause neurosis by denying its instinct to jump/climb up, I make sure that they are welcome to get up on soft and comfy places, not hard and smooth places. It’s always worked for me and my kidduns and, no, they have never been hurt by the traps, only startled.
Again, I don’t know how a grown cat would react since I’ve never done the experiment. Even so, I think it would be effective simply because cats don’t like sudden, loud noises. Of course, you may have to put up with sullen, vaguely threatening, sideways glances from your furball. ;^>
Go to hell damnit!
((kidding if you can’t tell))
I’m crocheting! And I’m not awful at it.
Yay, StarStuff!
The Japanese Space agency is using large helium balloons to send specially designed cameras to the edge of space. –tonight’s Daily Planet.
You realize that if a Personhood measure passes, the various races to put a human being into space by private enterprises will have a whole new parameter, right?
Anthem–what’s wrong with Bread and Roses?
“Our lives shall not be sweated
From birth until life closes….”
I sort of want to crochet because granny squares, and they are easily portable in a way that knitting is not, but then again, it’s fucking crochet. My grandmother taught me when I was a wee lass and I’ve never quite recovered. Stupid crochet.
illuminata:
1. Don’t let him on the table in the first place. We never had trouble with tables with ours, but trained her off of windowsills (we were in an apartment where they were dangerously easy to knock the screens out of) by putting a thin line of liquid dish soap on the sill for a week or so. They hate jumping up and getting their paws soapy.
2. Not sure – we just left food out all the time, and ours never ate much. I understand this is a very bad idea for some cats, though.
3. Maine coon? HAHAHAHAHAHAHAh… oh, sorry. I mean, you have to brush a lot.
A friend of mine trained his cat to get vacuumed, I swear.
Hadn’t you heard? Science can’t answer “why” questions!
Ing – I’m sorry for what you’re dealing with. Have a brownie soaked in scotch and topped with some ice cream? It’s good, I swear. Here, I’ll shove it through the internet cable.
I can knit, crochet granny squares, and I am just learning to sew on my great grandmother’s hand turned singer sewing machine.
I am also a physicist, learning Scottish gaelic for fun, and read SF for preference. Oh, and an atheist.
Hi, Ariaflame! Speaking of learning languages for fun, I’ve been feeling so stupid. When I was in high school I remember picking up Spanish fairly easily, but this year I’ve been trying to learn Slovak and I’m getting nowhere fast. It’s like I have no brain any more.
pelamun, sorry for the delay in replying: I’ve been horrendously busy with work all day.
True, but my point was that prosecutors in many other countries are not political appointees. In England and Wales, for example, the Director of Public Prosecutions, an independent civil servant, is responsible for criminal prosecutions. The office of DPP is separate from that of the Attorney General, who is a political appointee. The same is true in Australia (at both the federal and state levels) and Ireland. This has the advantage of giving prosecutors institutional independence from the government of the day, so that decisions about prosecution are not influenced by political factors (something which has long been a serious problem in the US system).
There are other common-law jurisdictions besides the US where the A-G is directly responsible for prosecutions – Israel and Singapore, for instance – but in those countries, the lack of institutional independence is something that is often criticized.
As a tangential nitpick: you’re right that the Attorney General in the US is equivalent to a justice minister in other countries and heads the Department of Justice, but this is not always the case in other common-law jurisdictions. In England and Wales*, for instance, the office of Attorney-General (note hyphen) is entirely separate from that of the Secretary of State for Justice. The A-G is the chief legal advisor to the government, whereas the Justice Secretary is responsible for areas like prisons, probation, legal aid, and the administration of the court system. (The office of Justice Secretary didn’t even exist until a few years ago; before this, these responsibilities were split between the Home Secretary, who is responsible for policing and internal security, and the Lord Chancellor, who was both a Cabinet minister and the head of the judiciary. The office of Lord Chancellor in its traditional form has now been scrapped, because it directly infringed the principle of the separation of powers.)
(*Scotland has a separate legal system with different terminology; in Scotland, the Lord Advocate is the approximate equivalent of the Attorney General.)
If anyone is interested, there’s a godbot over on the “Oh agony!” thread who seems a bit “goats on fire!”/ Dr. Bronner’s soap bottle.
New discovery: Some shrimp spin silk from holes in their legs and use it to build nests! –tonight’s Daily Planet BBC Story
Oh, this particular excerpt from The Walrus and the Carpenter will always have a special place in my heart. Because I did not have a copy of Alice to hand at the time, and had to rely on an online version, I misquoted it as “And Cabbages, and Kings” when naming my (now more-or-less dormant) blog. By the time the error was pointed out to me, I’d already registered the domain name.
Ing, *hugs* if you want them.
======
And with that, I must end my brief foray into the thread and get back to work.
A consolation, Carlie: even after late adolescence you can still learn new mathematics without unusual difficulty.
Or computer programming, if pure maths aren’t your thing.
@ Carlie
Don’t let childhood experiences ruin it for you. I’m actually enjoying it so far.
I’m just practicing the basic stitching by making a scarf, but I’ll probably do a granny square next. But I should probably stop messing with the yarn and get back to my lab report.
Hi, Carlie! *waves*
I learned knitting first, then crochet much later. I still think that knitting is more difficult, mostly because it took me ages to learn how to knit with even tension.
I’ve been trying to pick up some French, and I intend to learn Spanish. I think there is a big difference there though. These languages seem much easier to me, as did German when I was in school. I think they are close enough, we have enough shared word or word roots, enough exposure to the language. All of this makes it easier I think.
I was actually just doing a setup for some stuff for our company in Slovakia. Looking at the Slovak words was pretty humbling. So different…
I don’t know much about the language at all. I guess it’s easier than learning Finnish. But I’d say that Slovak actually looks objectively harder to learn than Spanish.
I keep thinking my mind is ruined and I’ll never amount to anything anyway. Of course the fact that feeling like that and some unfortunate things have pretty much destroyed my life several times, I know that this overwhelming sensation of worthlessness and complete inability to do anything is just a mental illness. I’ll be damned if I can shut it off though.
At the moment I’m trying to decide whether to buy an old house or not. Why this is so depressing I don’t know. It’s a great deal.
I’m not sure what I’ve done, but my scarf has gone horribly wrong. It’s a small triangle now D:
AHS, is that true about math? Almost everything I learned about math or programming has occurred after adolescence. Wow, it would have to be that way for programming. Considering all the changes in the last ten years even. There wouldn’t be any programmers over 20 if it weren’t so!
In a rare bit of reversal in my household: the spouse had been rendered bed-ridden by food poisoning of some sort (I’m usually the unlucky one). He’s so ill that he has no interest in the Duke – Michigan State basketball game.
Have you been putting more than one stitch into the row below?
Actually I would love to learn Spanish. It’s really beautiful. I even like the Tex-Mex Spanish most people speak here. People say the Spanish accent from Texas is as harsh as the English Texas accent.
@ Jessa
I don’t know. I think I’m going to have to watch the tutorial again.
Not yet, Algernon. I’m still pretty sharp, I’ll grant the same to anyone who can keep up with me, and you’ve done better than that, exploding my mind on occasion. I’ll let you know when you’re ruined! :)
@StarStuff:
Crochet has very definite spacing for placing stitches on the next row, but they can be really hard to see on the first few rows, where the fabric tends to curl up. Check to make sure you’re putting your hook through the correct place (over/under the correct number of yarn strands) when you’re drawing up loops.
So far as I can tell. I’m winging it here, but we do know there’s a crucial period for learning language, and we know why. Similarly there may be a crucial period for learning arithmetic and spacial transformations, but why would there be such a period for calculus? The latter is an anomalous construct of very recent human history; there’s no reason for it to ever be easy at any age, thus it should remain of similar difficulty throughout life.
In my spare time I’ve taken up studying certain maths again just to win arguments at Pharyngula (final boss: First Approximation), and it’s just as hard as it ever was, but no harder.
Starstuff
The hardest part of crochet for me is keeping the tension consistent with the hand holding the yarn. It takes practice to get the proper feel. Luckily its easy to pull the string and undo any mistakes.
I figured out what I did wrong. I was putting the hook through the wrong hole; I skipped a hole when I shouldn’t have. So, I’ve started over. This time is going better, I think.
Crochet can make great scarves. The Redhead, as one of her first crochet projects, made me a “double crochet” scarf after we were first married. That scarf could hold up to dah Yoo Pee Winters, even requiring me to open the overcoat for cooling on warmer (+20 ℉) days. I never got cold through the neck, even in -20 ℉ temperatures and 30 mph head winds. It’s still in the coat closet for use if required. It added 30 ℉ to the coats rating.
Jay Smooth does it again. Here he is talking about how we talk about race, at the latest TedX. Love this guy. Love love love him.
Josh, #125, last thread: Thanks for having the courage to talk about the rape, and for the solidarity with other victims. I fortunately have not been raped, but numerous friends of mine can’t say the same for themselves.
Father Ogvorbis, #509, last thread: A long time ago, I had a housemate whose mother was very pleasant but, well, rather sheltered in that particular “heartland” fundie way. She went into a supermarket looking for almonds for a recipe, and she asked some teenage boy who was up on a ladder, “Excuse me, sir, but could you tell me where your nuts are?” The poor kid nearly fell off the ladder.
Pelamun, #514, last thread: Great comment; I love language discussions. I must nitpick, however. Testa meant a cooking pot, which is much more comparable to a human head than a potshard is.
ahs, #522, last thread: I thought for sure everybody in Britain said “John Thomas” and “minge.”
aladegorrion, #547, last thread: Certain sex acts that appear in Urban Dictionary have never been performed IRL. If you don’t believe me, and you have a really strong stomach, search on the term “munging.”
Rey Fox, #606, last thread: If you really want to make a mockery of the crucifixion, you dredge up the hoary old, “Peter… Peter… I can see your house from here…”
Tethys, #10 and Pelamun, #64 above: I used to know someone who had studied German who claimed that Kaput got its meaning because the Teutons watched Romans behead their comrades, and every time a head rolled, a soldier would announce, “Caput.” Folk-etymology, I’m sure, but amusing.
Cannabinaceae, #204: ‘Tis beat me to the warning. The aforementioned ex-housemate once lost a cat to intestinal blockage after she (the cat, not the housemate) ate tinsel.
Illuminata, #215: “Must he deliberately push everything he can off of tables?” Yes. The first week I had my cat, I lost a clock that I really liked. You have to consider them as akin to permanent toddlers and arrange your house accordingly. And, to echo Cicely and Brownian, you also have to make sure they have plenty of entertainment available — toys to play with, windows to look out of, safe objects to climb — because a bored cat is a destructive cat. And an unhappy one, too.
As for hairballs, other people are correct that grooming helps a lot. The furrier your cat is, the more he needs grooming. A friend of mine seconds Brownian’s rec for the Furminator. I second Tethys’ glove suggestion. Or, if you can afford to, you can take your cat more often to the groomer’s.
The food question, I’m going to leave to your vet, but yowling for ever more food is also a common cat behavior. A strategy I haven’t seen mentioned here yet is a feeder that runs on a timer. The cat gets used to the fact that you won’t feed him directly but that the feeder will dispense food at a certain time.
Algernon, #240: I leave out 2 bowls of dry food if I’m going to be gone for a couple of days. Once in a while, my dumbass cat will gorge herself on one of them and barf right next to the bowl. This behavior is why I never feed her wet food anymore… unless she needs to ingest some hydrated oats or mashed pumpkin or other roughage designed to help her express her anal glands. (Note to Illuminata : Drippy cat ass is one of THE worst things you may ever have to deal with. The smell is… indescribable.)
Ing, #290: Aw, shit, I’m sorry. {hugs} I just lost my favorite aunt to breast cancer this month. She’d been fighting cancer in some form or another for 22 years, and she was well cared for and her pain controlled, but I still grieve. I hope your grandmother’s surgery is a success and she heals quickly. As for Assbook, I avoid it, so I have no useful suggestions for dealing with assholes there.
Carlie and Algernon: English is, at base, a Germanic language, but French and Spanish are easier for many native English speakers to learn than German is because there aren’t as many grammatical cases; prepositions do the work of inflected nouns, as in English. Slavic languages such as Slovak are even more highly inflected than German is, so, yeah, they’d be even more difficult than German.
Nerd @328:
Redheads are awesome, aren’t they?
Aw shit, I skipped to the end earlier and just now read up:
*hugs* to Ing.
Been married 35+ years. Aggravating and awesome. Talking about turkey pasties for T-day. Awesome.
My spouse would probably describe it that way, being married to a redhead. Our 2-year anniversary is in six days.
Nerd: Thank you for the best idea I’ve heard this week.
Turkey + pasties –> happy people
Nerd, even though I knew what you meant, I immediately visualized a barnyard turkey wearing these.
pelamun@135, That’s some funny stuff! I want to affix this to my toolbox where I work “Si non confectus, non reficiat.”
(The Vetinari family motto – If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it)
By the way, John Morales, thank you very much for your efforts in honoring my request. It was decent of you. I think I no longer need the embargo. I’ll beg again if I change my mind.
Understandable, as those who haven’t had the privilege of eating dah Yoo Pee or Cornish version of the meat pie, leaving the burlesque meaning.
The Redhead tries to keep some bought locally in the freezer for “instant” meals, but they aren’t as good as the local versions when we lived in Dah Yoo Pee.
I see the upgrade didn’t do anything about the problem that long threads are impossible to write in. I’m writing this in an e-mail again.
It would, but word-final glottal stops don’t occur in German, and German never turns /t/ into [ʔ]. Both of these are very, very English things.
(…And pelamun is of course right that the t is still pronounced, as [t], in formal speech as long as the speakers pay attention.)
I’m sorry if I gave the impression I thought it would be forgotten. It would just vanish from active vocabulary and become a word encountered only in books and tales from afar.
A strong emphasis on Good Friday is a Lutheran thing (or more likely a generally Protestant one, but almost all Protestants in Austria are Lutherans). Catholic service on Good Friday, as on the day before and the day after, consists only of a short, uh, mass-without-eucharist in the afternoon.
I’m surprised anyone gets it off in Austria… does that mean your employers need to know your denomination…? :-S
I’m also surprised Old Catholics (those few who reject the First Vatican Council) celebrate it that much.
The other way around. The Classical Latin word for “head”, indeed cognate with head, was caput; it was replaced by testa, which originally meant “shard” or presumably “bowl” or “pot” or something but has given Italian testa “head” and French tête “head”.
How to prepare a giant carcass? Ask people who deal with the remains of giant carcasses for a living: the SV-POW!sketeers.
Grilling your Thanksgiving dinosaur: live-blogging the bird
Disclaimer: I wasn’t invited.
Fun exception: Standard Macedonian is a dialect from the southwestern corner of the area. That’s because it’s maximally different from both Bulgarian (east) and BCS (north), making it as difficult as possible for nationalist Bulgarians and Serbs to claim the Macedonians as their own. I don’t think that dialect had any other prestige; Skopje (the capital) is in the center, and Macedonian as a whole had, well, no prestige till then.
This is thoroughly ruined by the fact that all three standards are based on the same dialect from eastern Hercegovina. The dialect of Zagreb (capital of Croatia) is very different from Standard Croatian.
The recent attempt to create a Standard Montenegrin (we’ll see where it leads) is based on a dialect very close (geographically and linguistically) to the one the other standards are based on…
I don’t think it was ever more unified than it is now. This begins with the fact that Standard German isn’t based on a single dialect (though of course more on some than on most others).
The thing about the infinitive is fascinating enough that I have to explain it: Serbian avoids the infinitive whenever possible, because the languages to its east and south (all the way to Greek, which may have started the trend) have largely lost the infinitive altogether. Instead of saying “I want to buy”, they say “I want that I buy”.
Acquiring those last few different bits, however, will often be difficult because you’ll have trouble noticing they’re even there. In such cases it can actually help to have a more different native dialect.
Indeed, that’s the reason why the Standard German pronunciation of people from Hanover used to be so prestigious in Germany. (The argumentation fails for other reasons, but never mind.)
How old is that one? Since independence, various ultranationalists have coined tons of new terms, based on native roots, to replace borrowings. There’s even one for “mathematics”. I don’t know how well accepted any of them are.
But you’re right that Croatian uses old Slavic month names* while Serbian uses international (Latin) ones.
* Not that their meanings necessarily line up with those of Polish or Czech, har har.
That’s Dutch. You’re aiming at univerzitet.
That’s it’s Russian name. The sound was probably something like English a in apple.
Get a better map. I don’t know of an online one, but there has to be one… maybe look in Google Scholar. – Anyway, “e” is restricted to Serbia*, and IIRC the dialect of Zagreb has “i”, which indeed doesn’t occur in any standard.
* …oh. Beatrice’s link says the Slavonian dialect (eastern Croatia) has a mixture of i-, e-, and “half-jekavian”.
Theoretically, “ije” is standard, too. Practice is different, because so few people in Serbia use “ije” and the Bosnian Serbs tend to be ignored, too…
I’ve read it happens to /k/, too, occasionally.
Walton, among other Britons I heard this year, makes word-final /k/ ejective. Blew my mind… sort of, because unaspirated /p t k/ are already coarticulated with [ʔ] to such an extent in British English that Britons are hard to understand on bad mi<long pause>rophones.
Alas, the Poles rejected not only Jan Hus’s heresy, but also his anonymously authored orthography, and now they still need on average two letters for every consonant…
Gloʔʔalization in front of [n] is widespread in the US, though.
*snarl* That’s it. On the barricades!!!
Incidentally, that’s very common in Russian. Can hardly happen in Croatian, though – they’re not Orthodox. :-)
The radio speakers of the Republika Srpska reportedly fumbled and stumbled and made all sorts of apparently hilarious mistakes, so they gave up very quickly.
The historical definition of “Serb” is “Orthodox”, and that of “Croat” is “Catholic”. Wherever Serbs and Croats lived together, they spoke exactly the same dialect.
It’s actually šta in most, maybe all, of those places. (No idea what form that historically is – the plural?)
How about “flower mountain”?
Ouch.
He’s right because he’s not a martyr? That’s decidedly a new one.
ROTFL!!!
That’s actually perfect grammar, assuming a sufficiently consonantic boss.
BZZZT! Wrong twice over.
In northern & central Germany, or so, people put [ʔ] in front of every stressed syllable that would otherwise begin with a vowel. Words have nothing to do with it. As heard on TV, Asteroiden und Kometen, stressed on the [i] and to a lesser extent on the [a], got [ʔ] in front of those two vowels; there was no [ʔ] in front of und.
DownUp south, [ʔ] is only inserted in front of utterances that would otherwise begin with a vowel, in other words, it only occurs after pauses. Full disclosure: it cracks me up when Northerners pronounce Naomi as Na – Omi!!! (“Now – Granny!!!”).Not “law rand order”?
Linking R is common in Bavarian-Austrian dialects (happens to be absent from mine), and there are even cases of intrusive R, which is the same happening to vowel clusters inside a word (obligatory in my dialect in Zweier, because an [aɐ] cluster is… just… too much). Intrusive R is rampant in some Englishes; Claire Bowern, who publishes and blogs about Aboriginal Australian languages and speaks several of them, spent two years in the US before she noticed that she had an intrusive R in drawing.
Though… let’s not get into the Norwegian schizoglossia (as it has been called). :-]
ROTFL! It had to happen, it was only a question of when.
Extreme postmodernism is the only defense he has left. And in lucid moments, he knows it.
A beautiful eggcorn! American /t/ flapping at work.
Moar rulz, in particular those that apply to the snail Crikey:
Boldface mine, all italics and all brackets in the original.
In spite of Rec. 31A, we’re stuck with the tiger shark being Galeocerdo cuvier.
Hah. Sure they can, but imagine the flamewar…
That would make too many words. The binomen is sacred. It was the great innovation Linnaei !! If it’s good enough for L-Dot, it’s good enough for us !!
… :-o
…Grandmother? Literally?
If so, I’m very proud of myself.
And so, to bed – I’ve only caught up half, but this comment is really long already, and it’s well past 4 am. Hugs and a huge bowl of very warm soup for illuminata.
ahs ॐ, good.
Thank you.
Oh fuck. An 18-screener, and the ICZN quote is much shorter than I imagined ( < 3 screens).
Forgot the link.
[anecdote]
Whilst visiting the Ashmolean Museum* in Oxford recently, I saw a Walton-type** eruditely (and didactically) expounding on the ethos of Greek boxing to some
friendscompanions, when standing in front of a decorated vase exhibit.(I eavesdropped and kept my smile to myself)
—
* Most impressive (and free!)
** A nearly-beardless youth.
This attempt is going much better. I have about four rows now.
Does anyone remember me talking about a camping trip when I first started showing up on pharyngula, at the end of this last summer?
And I got really drunk and went out on stave lake at dusk in a crappy little plastic kayak determined to catch a giant fish knowing full well I can’t swim and am terrified of deep water?
I’m starting to wonder if I didn’t mess up my brain a little by doing that. Sometimes, especially at night, I think about it and I just get terrified. More terrified than when I was actually out there. It’s my own fault of course for nearly becoming a dumbassed statistic even though I knew better, but it’s really starting to bug me sometimes.
I think about it, and freak myself out, and then I have to find a way to make myself stop thinking about it, which usually involves ‘lighting another one’.
I’m not sure where I’m going with this. I guess I wonder if there’s an easier way to get rid of these heebie-jeebies? Is it possible I traumatized my own brain just a tiny bit?
We used to have a cat who liked to bite paper; not actually eat it, just hole-punch it. Big problem in a household with lots and lots and lots of printed materials. He’s been dead about six years now, and we still find new places where he’s left his mark.
And his extra-planar storage facility still intermittently leaks bottle caps.
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Not all cats are equally thrilled with them, however. Pixel loves being stroked with the glove, but Bitsy won’t tolerate it. Dunno why.
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Trilobites are cool ‘n all, but cats are fuzzy and cuddly and they purr…and they are not extinct. That’s important, when you’re choosing a pet.
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Staunch monarchists? I guess you could argue that they feel royal, but I think they appreciate their own Divinity too much to go slumming, that way. And I’ve pretty sure that most cats have no opinion whatsoever about immigrants’ rights, the evils of the
JusticeLegal System, and similar trivia. And what’s holding up delivery on their portion of Fancy Feast, monkey-boy? Get those thumbs a’crackin’; that’s why they even keep us around, you know….–
Yay! And a second partner in crime would beeeeee…..Magrat.
:)
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Good thing too, because if they were in any way available I’d literally go to any legal or illegal length to get myself a pet Tyrannosaur. I’d name her Sue and take her camping with me.
Walton
I was talking about the AG in the US, since we were discussing the American system. Terminology differs across countries. In Germany, the chief of prosecution has a title akin to that of AG, Generalbundesanwalt, to be precise, and they’re under the supervision of the justice minister. In Germany, the mixing of federal and state bureaucracies (basically state governments execute federal laws, the federal level does not have a fully fledged bureaucracy) has ensured political independence, because even though prosecutors do fall under the political patronage system, the state governments are politically diverse so that everybody is interested in judicial independence. That said, in some states where one party has held into power for decades (say Bavaria), the issue of political meddling from the state’s justice ministry has become an issue in the past.
Alethea
oopsie, sorry, I misplaced the R…
Ms. Daisy Cutter
testa
Oh yeah, it does mean pot too, and that makes more sense I think, but according to my dictionary, it also means “earthenware fragment”.
caput
The earliest borrowings from Roman times are well-known and kaputt is not among them, which is attested for the 17th century. Many words beginning with Pf, incl. Pferd “horse”, or Pforte “gate”. Especially fascinating I find the story of caupo “innkeeper; wine merchant”, from which kaufen “buy” was borrowed. It even made it all the way to Finland, even though no Roman soldier ever set foot upon it, in the form of kaupunki “city”, and kauppa “shop”
Spanish
I disagree. While Spanish nominal morphology might be easier, its verbal morphology is more complex than any Western Germanic language. I think it is easier for English speakers to learn Spanish because English is a Germanic language that has borrowed a lot of French and Latinate vocabulary, more than any other Germanic language. Slavic languages have a lot of vocabulary that is not found in either Germanic or Romance languages (or at least the connection is obscured).
I have a long-haired cat, which I suspect is part Maine Coon. She didn’t like having her hair brushed and would growl and scratch. Then I found that she adored being brushed with one of those plastic brushes with stiff, knobby spikes about 1 cm apart. I can hold up the brush and she comes running. I visualize her, not as a cranky cat, but as a little girl saying, ‘Don’t pull my hair!”
It’s interesting that testa means shard. I thought it meant block, which makes sense because it was Latin slang for “head,” e,g, “Hey, blockhead!” Now I don’t know how to explain it, but ‘tests” for protective shells on animals makes sense.
Holy crap, Abbie is losing it even more. Now she’s attacking Jen at BlagHag.
First this and today, this.
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MagRAT! Perfect, love it. It must happen!
Coyote, I think the main thing is not to dwell on it. So you did a dumb thing when drunk, like probably half of everyone else in the world. Luckily, there was no harm done. Take the lesson, whatever it is for you – maybe to be more careful when drunk, or ask a friend to be minder, or maybe even don’t drink ever again. Your call. And then let it go.
Meditation can be good if your mind is just too damn distressingly insistent on revisiting stuff – “rumination”, in psych terms. You can usually get CDs for guided meditation in bookshops, or failing that, from newage crystal-crap shops. Pretty well any sort of meditation except TM is OK, but the ones labelled “mindfulness” have the least risk of stupid woo. I like yoga nidras myself but YMMV.
Also, perhaps you should just learn to swim, and that would at least remove the actually sensible part of the fear. My local pool offers adult learn-to-swim lessons.
And I should have figured I wouldn’t be the first to notice that. Now I has a sad. :(
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o-O
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*big, sad eyes; a single tear slowly rolls down cheek…*
Does that mean you don’t want my *hugs* of sympathy?
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Hi, Ariaflame; are you new? If so, welcome in!
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Alethea: I’ve had swimming lessons as a kid. I even passed them. I might even be able to swim, I dunno, I’m scared to ever try. That would have been a moot point though, because I had a heavy blade (what, you expect me to hunt a lake monster without a sword?) and heavy boots and probably would have panicked and went straight down.
This is actually the first time I’ve aknowledged to myself or anyone else that I’m still freaked out by that water despite being safely miles away and on dry land. So maybe that’s all I needed, I dunno.
As for meditation, I developed my own ways years ago before I even knew what meditation really was, and I think I might try your suggestion.
I also feel bad. I know that at least one nym on pharyngula does some sort of SaR work, and I can feel his strong disapproval even as I type.
TLC:
1. How do you know you can’t swim?
(My dog didn’t know he couldn’t swim, so he did)
2. The disinhibitory effects of drunkenness are no less (and probably more) cultural than physiological — i.e. it’s mostly just an excuse. IMO.
3. You claim to have a phobia about a memory? PTSD?
Hm. That’s irrational, so I can’t help you there, other than to point that out.
Ha, look where that got me.
(yes, also kidding)
“PTSD” would be laying it on just a tiny bit thick, wouldn’t it John Morales?
I dunno if you’d call it a ‘phobia’. I just think about that bottomless dark water, the failing sunlight, and the endless pull on my fishing line, and I get all scared and shit. Is that what ‘PTSD’ is? It’s not like I’m waking up screaming in a cold sweat or anything. And it would seem a little insulting to actual sufferers of PTSD to compare my (self inflicted) situation to theirs.
Primate brains are always rational now?
TLC
I sometimes get into similar obsessive self-critical thought patterns. Just acknowledge that it was a foolish drunken human thing to do and resolve to wear a life vest in future. Then firmly dismiss the thought and force yourself to focus on something more pleasant.
No need to beat yourself up over it.
I’m getting pretty good at crocheting. I’ve got about a 4 by 4 inch square now.
TLC, perhaps it ain’t PTSD, but it sure sounds like it to me; don’t be dismissing it on the basis that it ain’t severe.
No, but you “think about it, and freak myself out, and then I have to find a way to make myself stop thinking about it”.
As I said, severity is not the determinant here.
Heh. Primate brains can effect communication with other primate brains, even via such an epiphenomenominogical medium as the internet.
You’re getting a (mediated by you) independent opinion; dismiss it or not, it’s independent of your own biases.
And I’ve been trying to tell you how unrealistic this is. Warfare is a such a human concept it won’t vanish from active vocabulary. There is oral history, and in the case of Rome, even written history that talks of past Roman glory in war, and as I said Pax Romana was a relative concept, legionaries were moved around the empire, so they did see some action even during that time.
Hm, that’s odd. My impression was that Easter Week was very very important to Catholics, and taking the entire week more important to Catholics, but probably Easter Sunday is the most important day
I understand though that over the past decades, Nynorsk and Bokmål have gradually become more similar to each other.
It’s actually not an exception. Dialect purity can be a prestige factor. Some national languages have been proposed based on that. Nynorsk is an example of this too.
Pluricentric languages
This doesn’t mean that the standards are based on different dialects. More that the basis of the standard is the same, but regional differences are codified in the respective standards, like the Austriacisms in Austrian German, and certain pronunciation differences. If you based it on different dialects, you’d get a situation like in Luxembourg.
Well the mass media age has done that, that’s true. But it wasn’t truly pluricentric. In my opinion, pluricentrism entails that all different standards are accepted as equally valid, i.e. American English v. British English. Or German German v. Austrian German.
The keyword for people more interested in this topic is Balkan Sprachbund
Well, High register language is acquired in school and university, the more educated you are, the more command of it you will have. A non-dialect speaker has had a headstart here. AFAIK, in the German South on the countryside, they spend the first year in elementary school to get the kids to start speaking standard German.
Yeah, it’s interesting that the calquing of learned vocabulary took such different routes in the various Slavic languages, I think even Polish and Czech can be quite different here. But you get a relative unity of the Germanic languages (English and Icelandic excepted) only because Dutch and the Scandinavian languages were influenced by German efforts in that area. When reading Henning Mankell, all these words and phrases jump out at me, that bear witness to the calquing (first based on Low German, later on High German). Compare this to Icelandic which went its own route in calquing terminology.
These are both based on Alexander’s book. Presumably jat’ is the designation used by Slavicists.
Well the Orthography War was mainly about how to write international words like “university” and “course”, i.e. universitet, or univerzitet, and kurs or kurz.
Church Slavonic is associated with the Orthodox Church, but it is also regarded as an older variety of Slavic among Slavicists. Whenever you’re trying to create new terminology, like happened during modernisation/industrialisation/renaissance etc. you often reach out to more archaic parts of your vocabulary or a proto-form of your language (or other prestigious languages from your language’s past, like Sanskrit in SE Asia and Chinese in E Asia). But I don’t know enough about Croatian to tell where these neologisms come from.
That depends on your phonological model. Since it is a phonologically conditioned rule, you can argue that it’s not phonemic. It’s true that in unstressed position, glottal stops are elided (or do not occur, based on your viewpoint). und is a function word, and function words in Western Germanic tend to get phonologically reduced a great deal. und is often just pronounced as [n].
(also I was talking about standard German here)
But you can’t eat your cake and have it. If you impose Latin gentives upon these names, then you have to at least Latinise them, like the Latvians do to foreign names, so Bill Clinton becomes Bils Klintons, or even better, his successor, Džordžs V. Bušs.
Caine, Fleur du Mal@172,
Technicolor poop?
cicely@170, All we are saying, is “give peas a chance”.
illuminata@193,
I’m in!
Tethys@197,
Not to mention the spanking parlors.
The Laughing Coyote@345, My brain won’t let go of some of the (admittedly) stupid stuff I’ve done. A bit obsessive, I guess, and it comes back to smack me at the oddest times. No help, but I can empathize.
StarStuff!@358, Go StarStuff!
Ugh. Work tomorrow. I have to renew my self imposed TET abstention for another work week. If I don’t, I don’t get much done except reading comments here. I’m still reading all the other posts and most comments though (and once in a while commenting myself).
See y’all next week!
G’night!
John Morales: I’m sorry if I gave the impression I was dismissing your opinion. I’m most certainly not, I just found it somewhat surprising.
If severity is not the determinant, then what can I say? Sounds like you might be right. So you’re suggesting I went and gave myself a bit of PTSD in pursuit of a stupid fish that probably wouldn’t have tasted super great anyways?
Damn.
TLC: One characteristic of PTSD is that it’s intrusive… “have to find a way to stop myself thinking about it” you said. Also, PTSD, like phobias, can be self-reinforcing – being triggered by a thing can make it more likely to be triggering the next time.
Whether or not it’s diagnostically PTSD, if it’s starting to disturb you, that’s enough to look into circumventing it lest it get worse over time. Meditation could help, or visualization, thought-stopping or similar.
It’s late. I’ve got to stop playing with yarn now and go to bed. Goodnight all.
I recall not trying hard to keep my balance because it wouldn’t hurt to fall. Behavioral evidence suggests I underestimate risk more often. Are these physiological effects?
The alcohol definitely made me underestimate the risk. But the real problem was that it would probably make me even less coordinated should I have upset the crappy plastic kayak.
The water, at least, was completely mirror smooth. There was that at least.
What if I had actually pulled up that fish instead of losing it? Trying to land that fucker in that little piece of crap would have tipped me for sure. Damn. THAT gives me the willies.
Staying away from water for life isn’t an option, I will probably boat again (in something less shitty) in the future if I get the chance, though I will be taking safety precautions and abstaining from alcohol while and if I do.
I think I’ll be able to ‘get over it’ though. Talking about it here helped. As can be expected, despite my quest to enlighten myself and everything I still have a bit of that stupid instinct that warns against ever admitting to weakness and stuff, so it’s just now I’m admitting to myself that this freaked me out a bit more than I at first thought.
Thanks for all the advice and understanding, Pharyngulites
TLC,
Well, more like you had a moment of madness, and it bugs you that you did, and you’re finding it hard to get over that.
PS I find it interesting that you don’t dispute my opinion that your booziness was more an excuse than an extenuating circumstance.
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ahs,
Sure, if they depend on alcohol intake. :)
(How you cope with those effects and how you thereby act, however, are not independent of your acculturation — and that is to what I referred)
well of course there’s an acculturation element to it John. I felt like I had to prove my balls to my camping companions- even as they were urging me to stay at the fire and leave the fishing for tomorrow and all that. A moment of madness is a good way of putting it.
Still, the alcohol provides a tangible increase to the risk factor- loss of coordination, impaired judgement, etc. Usually I’m good at keeping my head when drinking, but I really wanted that fish for some reason.
The podunk town I live in doesn’t have a “public swimming pool”, but there is a pool at the highschool which is open for public swimming a few hours a week. And there’s a private gym with a nice heated pool which does stay open (under a glass roof) year round; guests can use it for a reasonable daily fee.
If I were you, Coyote, I’d look around for a pool where you can get in the shallow end and verify to yourself that you can swim. If your town is even more podunk than mine, it might be worth figuring out how far you have to travel to get to the next town with a pool.
After you’re sure you remember how to swim in ordinary swim trunks, you can talk to the staff about doing a drown-proofing test. You’ll jump in the deep end, clothed in jeans, sweatshirt, and shoes, and rescue yourself – same as you would if you were actually out on the lake and fell in from a boat. It’s wonderfully reassuring. Yeah, it’s harder to deal with a dunking when you aren’t expecting it – but having the physical memory of surviving such a dunking at least once before really helps.
I’ve been wearing winter clothes and fallen into the ocean kayaking – brrr, that’s a horrid shock – I had a legitimate fear that I would die of hypothermia, but at least I knew I wouldn’t drown just from falling in with my heavy clothes on. Not so sure about carrying the heavy blade, though … might have to let that one sink to the bottom, no matter how precious …
Well done, you! Congrats on your new skill.
Public pools yuck me out. Every time I get a rash.
However my ex is part mermaid (not really, she just loves water) and she might possibly be able to help me out in lake conditions (The beach at cultus lake, though crowded and kinda yicky, has a wonderfully SAFE grade from shallow to deep). It’d probably be kinda fun that way. The baby loves water too, so it’d be nice not to be totally uselessly afraid of it.
*sigh*
Y’all have such fun when I’m off in meatspace.
only one comment,
David Marjanović
not 18 screens, rather 27.
TLC
Swimming ability is not relevant.
If you go in a boat, wear a PFD.
If you are an Olympic-medal swimmer and you go in a boat, wear a PFD.
If you are just going a little way in a boat, wear a PFD.
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If that ain’t your style, just think of how much easier it will be for Rescue Service to recover your body.
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PFD = personal floatation device
≠life jacket
Of course.
Quick check-in:
Hi y’all, love ya (except those of you whom I don’t love and those who don’t wish to be loved).
1. Theo – Phoenicia in Stasis is really truly on her way to your corner of the world via the USPS. And with illustrated instructions.
2. Ing – I’m very sorry to hear about grandma. Keep us posted, OK?
3. I want a rat.
4. And a turtle.
5. Jaime – for Thanksgiving you must make scalloped corn. White trash food. Basically 1 part cans of creamed corn to 1 part eggs (plus one for the dish), minced onion, enough milk, sufficient amount of crushed saltine crackers to thicken it up, and butter dotted on top of a layer of crackers on the top of the casserole. Bake at 375 for at least 45 minutes or until it puffs up and a knife poked in the center comes out clean.
6. I must find a better upgraded console for my Constitution-class cruiser in Star Trek online. She turns too slowly and it’s affecting my ability to keep a strong shield facing.
/Geek
Šta is used in Croatia, especially in the south, but it’s sometimes frowned upon as being a Serbian word. Insert rolleye.
I just got home. Apparently 2 inmates at a Tasmanian prison took two guards hostage to demand…seafood pizza and a crayfish each. Fair enough.
Did anything else happen ?
If by “cultural” whoever said that meant “genetic”, then maybe. Otherwise, I think that’s nonsense.
Study Finds that Alcohol Placebo Impairs Memory
Rorschach: I thought he meant cultural as in the sorta subconcious pressure to do stupid dangerous stuff while intoxicated.
if the disinhibitory effects of alcohol were largely cultural, I somehow doubt society would have half the problems related to alcohol that it does.
Oh, good nothing else happened then while I was gone. Not that PZ called Abbie Smith an asshole because she is one, or that the whole internet had another meltdown or something. Good to know…:-)
FA: I don’t think I quite buy that the disinhibitory effects of alcohol can be called ‘largely’ cultural. Yeah, there’s that cultural pressure that pairs drunkenness with expected bravado, but that study seems more to me like behavior typical of people who have little experience with alcohol and/or drunkenness.
I’m not the college type and probably never will be, so I’ll admit right here that I don’t exactly have the clearest concept of what an ‘Undergraduate’ is, exactly, but don’t they tend to be kind of young?
It seems to me that if the disinhibitory effects were ‘largely’ cultural, drunk driving would in theory be safe as long as you ‘kept your head’ or someshit.
People drink. Drinking causes frontal cortex disinhibition. A drunk Spaniard will sing sad songs, a drunk Aussie will beat up a stranger, a drunk American will watch Nascar, I dont know. I think what’s cultural is the way frontal disinhibition will be expressed, but for any of that to happen, it takes alcohol first.
That makes sense, rorschach.
Actually, I think I agree with John M’s premise now. No more blog posts for me tonight.
Social and Cultural Aspects of Drinking
When I drink, I just become a teddybear who cries watching Titanic and who posts too many music vids on the internet. I seem to entirely lack the ability to feel that someone needs to be beat up, or develop any other feelings of violence. I can get potty-mouthed and verbally aggressive if certain triggers are hit, sure, but all in all I’m a bore even when drunk. And since I don’t do any drugs, I’m forever destined to be boring I guess.
Drinking and decision-making… Wan’t that how the indian territories got “bought” from the tribes?
— — — — — — —
Inappropriate??? http://satwcomic.com/ Naah, that’s a real `Merkun [TM] flag.
Tomorrow is a meet and greet event with candidates for mayor and city council. I intend to talk to the mayoral candidates and in particular highlight the recent UK Treasury Select Committee findings on public-private partnerships/private finance initiatives. Anything specific I should prepare for or bring up?
In regard to divine entities… I believe Kate Bush actually exists! New album to be released Nov.23, after having been silent for years.
The link provides the opportunity to listen to some of the music before the release (alas, annoying ten-second advertising segment at the beginning) http://www.dn.se/webbtv/film-ljud/lyssna-pa-kate-bush-nya-album-tara/
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“I’m a bore even when drunk”
I get tired when drunk. I can emulate that effect simply through my ordinary insomnia, free of charge.
— — —
BTW if the claims about metallic hydrogen stands up to scrutiny, the next phase is to see if it will be metastable at ambient pressures. It is expected to remain superconductiong at high temperatures.
@ Josh
Squeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!!!
Yes!!! Good news. One is not a True Phoenician ™ without the One And Only Phoenicia (PBUH) ever expanding in one’s fridge.(& Dr Audley has been teasing me upthread for my lack of loaves leaving the kitchen. That is all about to change … )
@ TLC
I can actually identify really well with your paddling incident. I have been through several really dangerous situations and I sometimes get these shudders (fear, panic?) of what might have happened. (One involved hopping into an inner tube and floating down the flooded uMngeni River. Those stoppers!)
rorschach @382
“A drunk Spaniard will sing sad songs.”
You mean like “Spanish eyes”? Now there’s a fucking sad song.:)
I keep reading about how Slovak is the most basic and unadorned of the Slavic languages, so I thought it shouldn’t be so hard (and if I could get that, I’d be halfway to understanding the other languages in the group). I did take a semester of Latin and I can see those influences on the language and grammar, so that at least helps a tiny bit. But still.
For knitting, Knitting Help is a great resource. They have really nice videos for just about everything, and do it in both Continental and American styles. I used it a lot when I was making one of these baby squid hats. I just found a trilobite on a rock pattern, so I’m kind of itching to try it.
Just read Alethea’s links – wow. Abbie seems to be getting more and more immature every month. Is she Benjamin Buttons or something?
Who keeps saying/writing that? Frankly, it sounds like Czech propaganda to me, after most of the history of the Slovak language, especially since the Catholic Church helped start a Slovak written language in the 18th century, has been marked by a struggle against Czech cultural dominance.
“after all“
Now I can’t find it, but I did read it somewhere. One of my biggest problems is just the cadence; I’m used to Spanish where the accented syllables are in the middle, and with Slovak the first syllable is the accented one.
You’re either dropping of accidentally adding a stitch. It will be a pain in the ass, but while you’re learning, try counting every stitch in each row as you go. You’ll be able to identify where you’ve gone wrong and correct.
In which David Cameron tries to mimic an Australian accent, and fails miserably. The Aussies here may find this funny.
This is actually quite fascinating. Proto-Slavic probably had a pitch accent, which is still found in BCS and some Slovenian dialects. Also Russian and Bulgarian have a lost the pitch accent but still have a stress accent reflecting this.
In the other languages, stress has become fixed, like Polish in the penultimate and Macedonian in the antepenultimate. Initial stress is a Germanic feature, and all Slavic languages that have this feature have been in close contact with German: Czech, Slovak, and Sorbian. Actually, Eastern Slovak dialects, the furthest away from German contact, have penultimate stress, just like Polish.
Carlie @396
El acento;
Words in Spanish can be esdrújulas, llanas y agudas.
Esdrújulas: Words with the stress on the antepenultimate syllable. These words are always accentuated.
Example. método, cámara, lámpara.
Llanas: Words with the stress on the penultimate syllable and these words are accentuated except when they finish in N, S or vowels.
Example: Camino, libro, perro, vacaciones, árbol álbum
Agudas: Words with the stress on the ultimate syllable and these words are accentuated when thay finish in N, S or vowels.
Example: león, francés, Canadá, cristal, comedor, compás.
Don Quijote, I thought the rules were
a) if a word is accentuated, the stress is on that syllable
b) if a word ends in a vowel, n or s, it is stressed on the penultimate syllable
c) if none of the above applies, the word is stressed on the ultimate syllable
unless it’s a loanword, where often the original pronunciation and stress applies.
====
I’m still waiting for Cousteau.
Kate Bush!
Kate Bush!
Kate Bush!
SQB,
you have just stated the rules in a different way, there’s no contradiction to what Don Quijote said.
John Morales
Thank you for linking to that drinking article.
I read it a few years ago but lost the link.
These people are crazy.
The “Thanksgiving” company pot-luck is now starting at my office.
I’m preparing my self for extreme food snobbery and disgust.
Yes I’m an asshole.
But I know it.
I believe that I would name mine….Fluffy. Just because.
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Well, I personally hunt them with a flamethrower.
It turns out that hunting sea dragons from one of a flotilla of ships with dragon-headed prows is more confusing than might seem obvious. At least, this was true in my dream last night. Opening “fire” on someone else’s wooden ship goes over spectacularly poorly with its passengers.
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Ray@361, All we are saying, is “give peas a chance”.
“No God. No peas.”
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Oh, Japan.
I liked peas, until I heard that you are supposed to eat them by smashing them onto the back of your fork. That’s horrible.
I like peas with onions, stir fried. I like them fresh too. Oh peas! So good.
PS: I still eat peas with a spoon. Some rules are for idiots.
…or chopsticks. Peas are like rice and noodles to me which are all things that are easier to eat with chopsticks.
Walton:
There’s nothing remotely funny about that shitstain.
FYI, there are peas at the potluck
And not good peas. These are the over cooked sitting in the cooking water should be bright green but are more a light olive drab camouflage peas.
I love peas, but i avoided these like, well, over cooked peas.
The other food is as was expected. Bland, boring, traditional but not very well prepared thanksgiving faire.
The only bright spot was me skipping the “blessing”.
Sounds about right to me.
I can eat peas – they’re not on my list of foods I will not eat ever – but I’ve never really liked them, and tend to avoid them where possible.
====
Oh, I’m certainly no fan. In my own field, the ConDem government has been an utter disaster: legal aid is being slashed, making it harder for plenty of people who desperately need legal advice to get it (immigrants facing deportation, tenants being evicted from their homes, women needing divorces from their abusive husbands, and so on). The Refugee Council’s funding has also been slashed, including a total elimination of funding for refugee integration services. And the new restrictions on immigration are utterly stupid and a transparent attempt to play to the public’s ignorant xenophobia. (How I feel on the subject of immigration restrictions is very much a matter of record around here.) And I won’t even begin to address the stupidity of the government in other departments, such as IDS’ benefit “reforms” which seem to be inspired by a neo-Victorian impulse to punish the “undeserving poor”. Of course, on the rare occasions when the government actually tries to do something good – like, say, reforming criminal sentencing and reducing the number of people in prison – they get attacked by the Labour opposition, the tabloid press, and their own backbenchers. This is why I hate British party politics and have given up on it completely.
But… surely that’s all the more reason to laugh at politicians when they do ridiculous things in public? :-)
And, while we’re on the subject of government stupidity:
*headdesk*
Your views held sway for hundreds of years. They’re dead now. Fuck you.
http://www.unelected.org/audit-of-the-federal-reserve-reveals-16-trillion-in-secret-bailouts
hit submit too soon.
Tis (where ever you may be) do you have any commentary on this, or if this commentary on the GAO report is on target?
Now that’s an unusual alliance.
Yeah I cringe at the mention of DeMint. He’s one of “my” senators.
Thanks for supportness. I’ve been having depression or similar symptoms for a while now on top of everything, probably due to work stress, but have put off seeing anyone about it largely because of comments I’ve seen here and on other sites about the lack of efficacy in any treatment. Can anyone point to a skeptic take down of the issue or anything helpful there?
I have never heard of such a thing. Smashed peas are only good for pea soup.
I kind of like spearing one pea onto each fork tine so I have four little peas lined up in a row, but I get weird looks when I eat them that way.
My phone got shut off because I haven’t paid my bill D: I had to ask my mother for money to pay it because I’m so broke. She can’t give me anything until tomorrow, so they shut it off today.
But Sprint can suck it! I’m still using my phone to text. I connected to the campus wifi and I’m using Google Voice now. Muahahahaha! But being poor sucks :(
I eat my peas with honey.
I’ve done it all my life.
It makes the peas taste funny,
But it keeps them on my knife.
-not original
Laughing Coyote, the SO could swim from the Red Cross Society lessons, but was afraid of deep water. He engaged a personal coach and learned to swim well–it was expensive, but boy was it worth it! He enjoys swimming and can swim hundreds of metres without batting an eyelash. And I shoehorned myself in on the lessons — if it’s worth it to him, it’s worth it to me. I was always a weak swimmer who could bobble around indefinitely but couldn’t actually swim and breathe at the same time. (That’s a lot of people’s problem, I think.) So I learned too, and it’s great.
I cast peas in acrylic—
They look their best that way.
They’re better as a paperweight
Than as a food, I say.
-original
–
Word. If Skepticon wasn’t free and local, I wouldn’t be going.
–
Rev BDC:
… Okay, maybe it’s just the circles I travel in, but I thought this was common knowledge?
The fact that the US spent trillions (mainly) bailing out the EU and keeping their economy afloat is something we were talking about before the 2010 election. The amount of money sent to our own banks was almost trivial compared to what we spent on Europe – and bear in mind the situation they’re in right now. If we hadn’t opened up the coffers, they would have collapsed already instead of “merely” tetering on the edge.
Maybe I should bring up this second thing that we talk about but I haven’t heard elsewhere: the residential real estate bubble burst (hard) and caused the collapse, but the retail/corporate real estate market doesn’t seem to have corrected yet – and it’s at least as big a problem as the residential problem. The main target there (IIRC) was Walmart, since they’ve been buying up land and expanding all over the place.
I don’t have any links for this – it’s just conversation at the bar – but if people are finding out about the first and getting hard facts supporting it, I wonder if we’re going to start hearing about the second.
Walton: the most famous left critique of the Federal Reserve that I know of is Secrets of the Temple: How the Federal Reserve Runs the Country by William Greider.
Ing
Most of the comments I recall have been against inpatient. I was under the impression that everyone here would say some sort of outpatient therapy was worth trying. SC has an argument against antidepressant drugs, citing The Emperor’s New Drugs by Irving Kirsch. If you were to find this book worrisome, outpatient talk therapy would still be worth trying.
Did someone mention peas? Everyone get behind me, I will fight rearguard while you lot make good your escape.
Regarding a potential commercial real estate crash…
This is from 2009:
Wells’ Commercial Real Estate “Ticking Time Bomb” And Coming CRE Woes
This is from June of last year:
Wasn’t commercial real estate supposed to crash?
My understanding is that the “time bomb” is still ticking.
Dorvath, I’ll reload for you.
*starts charging up extra fuel cylinders*
After all, there’s no way in hell I can hope to outrun ’em. Victory, or fry trying!
–
cicely:
You don’t need to outrun them, you just need to outrun Dhorvath.
Hmm, I’ve got half an hour to kill. Skyrim, or Disgaea 4?
Sorry; Dhorvath.
Chalk it up to agitation in the face of the enemy.
–
Moggie,
Based on past conversations I suspect the odds are stacked in my favour.
_
cicely,
Thanks kindly and keep ’em coming, we can stem the rising green tide with enough fire.
Oh shit, that was clumsy of me. Sorry, cicely.
Moggie, unless Dhorvath’s feet are nailed to the floor, he surely can outrun me. Though possibly, in the event that our position is over-run, I could do a sort of backward-facing wheelchair-skiing by tying off a rope to his belt. Whatdaya think, Dhorvath? You haul our asses outta there, while I burn ’em down in our wake? As a last resort, I mean; I may be lacking in knees, but I am not lacking in courage. Not where the Green Peril is concerned.
–
Suddenly I imagine cicely as Jeff Goldblum/Ian Malcolm: “Must go faster.”
I think that would be totally awesome.
After all, if you flee from melee, the monster gets a freebie shot at your back. I think we can counteract that disadvantage.
–
Hey, no problem, Moggie! I don’t assume that everybody has been reading with bated eyeballs to Knee-FAIL 2011.
:)
–
Me neither, but I cited that experiment to show that the effects aren’t purely physiological. Some people showed signs of drunkenness off placebo alcohol. Their memory was worse than people who knew they were just drinking tonic water. From my personal experience, people tend to exaggerate their drunkenness and that experiment seems to support the idea.
I have no idea if the fact that subjects were undergraduates was a significant factor. Psychological experiments tend to use them due their proximity and willingness to be guinea pigs for money (or extra credit). Sometimes I wonder whether these experiments are studying the human mind or just the undergraduate one, :P. However, one would expect many undergrads to have some at least some experience with alcohol.
I had peas just the other day. They were pretty tasty.
heh. Here’s a sign you might be a mathematician from Spiked Math Comics:
First Approximation:
I’m not a mathematician, but I get it. :-P
FA: There definitely is a cultural element. Newbie drinkers especially tend to exaggerate their drunkenness. And I agree, the experiment does seem to support that. Interesting to see a scientific backing to the old ‘Give that high school student a lemonade and tell him it’s spiked with Vodka’ game, actually.
In the case of boating accidents though, I think that it’s pretty safe to say that alcohol definitely and tangibly increases the risks. I’m no expert, but I’m pretty sure it’s a large part of the statistics. Perhaps someone else has more concrete information on the subject?
regarding peas: Stews and meat pies I make just don’t taste right until I add peas. I can’t say I like peas just on their own, but in a soup or pie they add a wonderful sweetness. And they’re probably good for me too.
Though I have the body of an omnivorous primate, my mind is that of an obligate carnivore. So sometimes I have to ‘trick’ myself into eating more vegetables, and peas in a stew are a delightful way to do it.
Every once in a while I have some negative effects from alcohol that I’m perfectly certain are *not* cultural. Drinking is a mixed bag for me, but I tend to do it more when I’m feeling good/upbeat. It is dangerous for me to start drinking when it may exacerbate a depressed state. Sadly, this is when I really want to do anything to make my mind’s cruel machinations stop hurting me and making it impossible to tell what to make of reality.
To be honest though, pretty much EVERYTHING is potentially dangerous to a depressed person because… um… depression is dangerous.
Algernon: I tend to do OK with drinking, provided I drink alone. Or the people I’m around are relatively sober. When drinking, other drunk people tend to piss me off. Especially if they’re the loud “Talk over everyone and hold the metaphorical mic for as long as humanly possible” type of drunk. And ESPECIALLY especially the belligerent drunks.
And I can’t stand being pressured to drink more once I already feel I’ve ‘had enough’. No really, get the fuck out of my face unless you want that bottle up your ass and shattered.
So yeah, drinking alone is ‘healthier’ for me.
BTW, I love your nick. Most people I meet just give me a blank stare when I ask them if they’ve ever read ‘Flowers for Algernon’.
TLC: http://www.cdc.gov/homeandrecreationalsafety/water-safety/waterinjuries-factsheet.html
Being male is a high risk factor, as is being drunk.
Now I’m trying to find the stat for “drowning while peeing from the boat and falling in”. I’ve heard that a lot of recovered bodies had their zippers down.
It’s not like I am loquacious and gregarious sober or anything, not me, meek and quiet like a sleeping cat am I. However, I do find talking that much easier once the libations flow, so it might be best if I don’t share a pint or two with you TLC. Just so I don’t step on any toes, you know.
I can see that. You are relieving yourself off the deck and well buzzed, and you start tipping forward. You reach out your hand forward to steady yourself and find no wall. OOPS. Splash.
Dhorvath: Conversation is wonderful and fun. I just can’t stand the REALLY talky ones, who go on and on and on and on and take fifteen minutes to tell a two minute story because all they really want is to be the center of attention all night.
I should also point out, up till now, my experiences drinking with other people have been mostly with a pretty bad crowd… people who still act like teenagers at 25 and take pride in drinking until they puke. The guys who inevitably get tossed out of any public drinking establishment. The swaggering ass-puckers who always have to prove themselves to their fellow primates and want to turn everything into a pointless contest for ‘man points’.
I currently have very few IRL friends for a reason. I’ve had to stop hanging with pretty much everyone I used to know. Particularly that former friend of mine I used to bring up all the time.
So who knows, maybe drinking with actual ‘grown ups’ would be a whole different experience for me.
‘I never could stand a drunk man when I was sober or a sober man when I was drunk’ paraphrased from Sam Clemens.
TLC,
I dunno if I am a grown up, but I don’t think I would fit in with your former friends either. I do talk, that much is true.
Dhorvath: Well, I’m gonna assume you’re a woman due to your nick and style (please correct if wrong), in which case, no, you definitely wouldn’t. Women virtually NEVER wanted to hang with my former crowd, for some strange unfathomable reason. ;)
Rev BDC, the numbers in the article seem technically correct, but designed to mislead. On the “zero percent” currency swaps:
[And if it was
spentlent, I note in passing the number of US military bases in the UK and Europe. You’re getting the money back.]The liquidity provision is similarly unclear. Imagine the Fed lends a million to bank A, who use it to pay bank B, who use it to repay the Fed for its prior loan (i.e., it’s Bagehot’s lender-of-last-resort in a system where the banks don’t trust each other). Do this a million times (which is not unreasonable*) and by the method in the GAO report you get a trillion “lent”, even though it has all been repaid.
So you can get some big scary numbers out of what are actually relatively safe interventions. Of course you can also get some big scary problems from the broader economy, too.
(Of course money’s only imaginary anyway. If you’re skint, that may be scant consolation, though. Sorry. I’m skint too.)
—
“Secrets of the Temple”: This scares me. Scary-Fed sentiment is a staple of the anti-semitic conspiracist movement. And Ron Paul.
—
*Not a moral judgement, just a statement of reality.
I am a male and for some reason I don’t set off manly man detection systems, part super spy I guess, but I find the traditional male role oppressive and a fair bit distressing.
Umm, TLC, lots of people wouldn’t like your (former) friends. It doesn’t have much to do with gender.
Dhorvath: Ah, apologies. You definitely don’t set off my ‘manly man detection systems’, obviously, but in this context I think it’s kind of a good thing.
Also, the thing about conversation, drunk or sober, is that it’s pretty much the opposite of what the talky drunks I speak of do.
The Sailor: True, but women definitely seemed more ‘conspicuously absent’ whenever we’d hang out.
Btw thanks for your link about boating safety statistics. Most illuminating. I knew about alcohol as a risk factor, but maleness too? That’s weird but makes sense.
This was funny though: “everywhere from France to Scotland”. Paris to Edinburgh is a quarter of the distance from NY to LA. ;)
cm,
Was it traveling south east or north west?
One of the saddest stories I’ve ever read. Brilliantly written, though.
Heh. You checked it? South east. North west would be 1100km which is obviously incompatible with US units.
—
On the radio now:
http://answermethis.wordpress.com/2011/11/08/divinyls/
Another way to get mathematicians laughing (apparently):
“Let ε be a large negative number.”
Nice article in Slate, “Let’s Abolish Religion.
Dated November 16, 2011.
Excerpts:
See. Ridicule, when well done, works.
It can be that, but this one is blurbed by Ted Kennedy, David Stockman, Robert(s) Heilbroner and Caro.
And here is a review:
“This book was probably one of the dullest books I ever read. I thought it was gonna have some like juicy secrets but it was almost written like from a banker’s perspective. It was mostly about Volker keeping interest rates too high in the 80’s.”
Tables 8 and 9 of the report (pages 131-2) don’t appear to bear out your claim that the $16tn was loaned mainly to Europe. The largest single borrower was Bank of America Corporation. Pages 133-5 further explain that most of the loans to foreign institutions were to US subsidiaries of foreign banks, which had lost heavily on bad loans to US borrowers. The figure of $16tn, as far as I can make out, refers to the total amount loaned, most of which has been paid back.
OK, that’s a relief, if not a ringing endorsement.
Where Citations Come From:
http://xkcd.com/978/
Agreed.
It’s often said that mathematics is a young
man’sperson’s game. That if you haven’t made it big before 30, you never will. I’m not sure that’s true, or even if it was true once, I’m not sure it holds anymore. Andrew Wiles proved Fermat’s last theorem when he was about 40. Many Field Medalist (the Field Medal is the mathematical equivalent of a Nobel Prize) are middle-aged. It may be true that when you’re younger your mind is more malleable and creative, which may help to prove novel results. However, to get to the point where you can prove something everyone else has missed you have to study topics very intelligent people have been working on for a long time, sometimes even centuries*. That can take several years.In any case, that’s just about making it big in math. Even if it’s true that you have to be young (which doesn’t seem to be the case) it doesn’t necessarily hold for just learning about certain mathematical topics. People far older than adolescents seem to be able to do it.
* Often times in math and physics concepts are presented to students in their final, polished-up form, without explaining the history how they were developed and why they are used. These frequently appear like something someone pulled out of their ass. As a student, you’re often left wondering why the fuck would someone make such an odd definition and why is it all relevant? From the professor’s perspective, I guess, there’s barely enough time in a semester to teach topic X, let alone also a full history of topic X (filled with dead ends or tangents) and applications of topic X. Some professor at least are courteous enough to answer the students’ why’s with ‘A lot of very intelligent people thought for a very long time and, though it’s not obvious, they have found this idea quite useful’.
If you haven’t already, you might want to try to Good Math, Bad Math (or here at the old site). Mark CC has a gift for explaining difficult mathematical concepts so that the layperson can understand it. Might speed up the process from killing rats in a basement to defeating me.
A lot of those also double as ‘You might be a computer science geek if…’.
Oh, silly, silly me! I spent some time troubleshooting why I still couldn’t access anything but the zombie site (with newest post at 12th 1:05 with no comments whatsoever) without using some unspeakable voodoo and proxies, until I read PZ’s #105.
Thou shall not manually do what the machine is meant to do even if it seems like a minor detail at the time, for the human is forgetful.
“I stopped believing in Santa Claus when I was six. Mother took me to see him in a department store and he asked for my autograph.” – Shirley Temple
+++++++++++++++++++++++
TLC, causation != causality. Males pee over the side, males are the largest portion of boaters.
(It still hang out with immature people, I just don’t follow their advice.)
+++++++++++++++++++++++
The weirdest thing I ever recorded as a sound engineer was a guy playing at Caesars Palace showroom who juggled chain saws. It makes sense, you can’t actually mic them live;-)
Oh, that’s so sad. That’s one I think that should be required reading. I’ve never seen the movie that was made of it and don’t want to; to me one of the most agonizing parts is watching the grammar and spelling deteriorate near the end, and there’s no way to adequately capture that on film.
The Sailor, a chain saw can be quite a blunt instrument:
Maukka Perusjätkä – Säpinää
:)
Regarding chainsaws, one of my fondest dreams has always been to have a chainsaw for a left hand.
That is all.
TLC, Ash Williams has been there and done that.
(Just not as sinister as what you propose)
TLC, that sounds sinister.
Well, stopped at KT’s today, and no ratties. We have an order in for two girls, but who knows when that will happen. Eventually, there will be a Gytha & Magrat for Esme and Chas. Probably just as well, as I’m still dealing with a severe reaction to PPD from dying my [feminist] hair last week. No more feminist hair for me. :(
Well, Ash had one for his right arm and it turned relatively OK for him. YMMV.
armhandPelamun, #348 – You’ve got a point about Spanish verbs. I took French throughout high school and figured that the semester of Spanish I had to take in college would be a snap. The lists of verb endings that all looked alike to me proved otherwise.
As for testa, I wonder if the “pot” meaning came first and “shard” was an example of synecdoche in semantic drift, if I’m getting the terms correct.
Caine: What exactly is feminist hair?
No, nothing sinister. I’d only use it to terrify my enemies, make lineups move faster, and scare people into giving me free stuff.
Rey Fox, perhaps this. Just go clicking “next” from there, Sinfest has been quite awesome recently.
And there certainly are strips between the one I linked to and the newest one that aren’t related to the Sisterhood-storyline, but it still seems to be slowly coming together.
Get a second brush. While he’s “killing” one, you can be brushing with the other.
As for the amount you’re feeding. I would switch to dry only and feed whatever amount your vet recommended. But you don’t have to do it all at once. You can divide it up throughout the day, so when he seems like he’s about to die of neglect and starvation, you can put some food down for him.
I dunno, I was always partial to the mechano arm Anakin got after that fight with Count Dooku. Although Ash did have the advantage of being able to swap out the chainsaw for an actual replacement hand when needed, IIRC.
—————————————-
I can’t wait for Thanksgiving. Aside from having lots of company over this year, that weekend I’ll be going to a Festival of Lights display with my family.
Oh wait…I have to sit through a Mass if I want to see the lights. Dammit! Well, as long as it’s not one of those seemingly-endless masses, I guess I can bear it. I’ll just have to sin with myself the next day in bed to make up for however long I spend in the pew. I’d prefer sinning with J, however.
—————————————–
How I end up acting when buzzed depends on my mood while drinking. If I’m in a good mood, I’m one of those silly, happy drunks. Sad mood…drink makes it worse. I once polished off half a bottle of champagne by myself. I can be brought out of this state if someone makes a good joke or I read something funny.
I had one for a while but got rid of it after it impacted dating too much. Handjobs got dicey.
Rey:
Dyed hair, apparently. Syggyx, the idiot troll, made a nasty remark about Rebecca Watson in the Pharyngula sells out! thread.
I ♥ chainsaws.
They save me hours of swede-sawing.
‘course I won’t touch the damned thing.
Power tools are the SO’s job.
I hope y’all are having fun elsewhere.
I hate Internet Explorer with a white-hot, incandescent passion.
What is the bestest version of Firefox?
Forget FireFox.
Ugh. It’s too hard to keep up. Used to be you had to stop dying your hair to have feminist hair. Now you have to dye it. When will these feminists just publish their fashion manifesto so that we all know how to dress? How can they hope to achieve anything when they can’t even make up their minds about their hair!?
I tried to get my hair to think about feminism though, so I envy Watson. My hair wouldn’t listen. It says it’s Buddhist and that I’m not thinking “universally” but every once in a while I stick it with a piping hot iron so we’re even.
TLC:
A little joke by the cognoscenti*: sinister.
—
* You’re hereby elevated to that select group, in this regard.
(Look at the etymology, if you’re still confused)
If anyone’s a bug fan, this article on the New Zealand Weta is for you.
Algernon:
Dying your hair the way men want: patriarchal hair.
Dying your hair the way you want: feminist hair.
Seriously, the feminist hair thing was weird. I’m guessing the “thinking” goes something like this:
* The purpose of women is to please men.
* No True Man™ could be attracted to a woman whose hair is an unnatural colour.
* Therefore, a woman with such hair is deliberately flouting the rules.
But I (a man) want you to dye (or not dye) your hair the way you want.
Now what? :)
SQB, no True Man™ would want that, so you don’t count.