Friday Ephemera
They arrive flat-pack. (h/t, Julia) || In-flight escalation of note. || An unexpected noise. (h/t, Damian) || Welcome to the world of nappy status notifications. || Today’s word is inadvisable. || China’s vertical dramas. || A collection of tiny vases. || Modern headline. || I think this is called ‘going out of your way to be angry’. (h/t, Darleen) || ‘Free’ explained in chart form. (h/t, Dicentra) || It’s a zoetrope, it’s a chocolate cake. || Willy Wonka goes ska. || Airport scenes. || Today’s other words are progressive law enforcement. (h/t, Jeff) || Our betters lead complicated lives. || One for the ladies. || She has furry friends. || It, er, comes with a remote. (h/t, Captain Nemo) || And finally, a reminder that parking is hard.
Seen on the internet:
The caption was “Had trouble surfing today”, which does not explain the boxing gloves, trunks and shoes. 🙂
A drink in honor of Rutger Hauer: Tears in rain: An April Rain martini with drops of seawater. RIP
Cell phone towers:
from: https://mickhartley.typepad.com/blog/2019/07/la-trees.html
There.
Much better than a picture of a bad tempered obese middle-aged naked woman.
I like that guy’s blog, thanks!
Today in stupid, Zodiac Shaming.
Right. Just the thing when you have no other qualifications on the Pyramid of Victimhood. RTWT…
More happy stuff courtesy Dave at Ace of Spades ♠️
Link wouldn’t work but if u go there you’ll find it, it’s the wholesome thread.
Gives new meaning to the phrase chop shop.
Heh:
Via Julia.
@pogonip
Currently 17 days overdue…
And did you know that Motorheads biggest hit was a cover of a track by George Formby?
https://youtu.be/oNqGxddOM5E
Seen on the internet
If that’s not husband material, ladies, I don’t know what is.
In a rare move, apparently due to outside pressure, the twitters cave and un-unperson Lindsay Shepherd. How long that lasts is anyone’s guess as out of the gate she highlights some more of that Yaniv person’s claims – including that he can get pregnant.
Everybody is beautiful
I like that guy’s blog, thanks!
I’m almost certain I found that blog courtesy of David’s Friday links…but don’t thank him too soon: he needs to Feel Our Disapproval for the photo that graces his previous post. (Affixes stern expression to face.)
(Affixes stern expression to face.)
Still not sorry.
Re this charming creature, mentioned by Alice, upthread, a punchline of sorts.
Today in stupid, Zodiac Shaming…Right. Just the thing when you have no other qualifications on the Pyramid of Victimhood. RTWT…
On the other hand, what percentage of people in, say, San Francisco believe that bullshit? There would be difficulties living in a city where a large fraction of the denizens judge others according to such delusions. Just one more reminder to avoid large concentrations of NewAge and other sewage.
Still not sorry.
Oh you will be. You will be. /evil laughter
On the other hand, what percentage of people in, say, San Francisco believe that bullshit?
Probably about as many as people in Japan who believe blood type determines personality.
Probably about as many as people in Japan who believe blood type determines personality.
! I hadn’t heard about that. 😐
So, about what is the percentage?
. . . of NewAge and other sewage.
A friend’s repeated observation is that yes indeed there are the situations of There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, Than are dreamt of in your philosophy., and then while granting those actual instances, there definitely does happen to be . . the newage, yes, which is pronounced exactly like sewage.
A discussion about pizza portions.
Via Protein Wisdom.
Brad, do NOT have kids with that woman.
A discussion about pizza portions.
Out to dinner with wife, sister, and 8 yo nephew many years ago. 40-something waitress taking our order. I ask what is the size of the large vs. medium pizza. Waitress says large is 12 slices, medium is 8. Due to stresses at the time (my father had just passed away) I simply could not control myself in this situation and started laughing. The more I realized how awkward this was, the harder I laughed. And as no one there could understand what I was laughing at, the funnier it was to me. I felt so bad when I finally caught my breath and was able to explain.
“I don’t cut a fucking pizza for a living, Braaaaaad”
That, right there, says as much about a particular mindset as the stupidity itself. It’s the same one that says the Man in Whitehall Knows Best. It’s the one that says there’s a scientific consensus and that’s the end of the discussion. It’s the one, in the end, that has led us down the ruinous path of professional politics. I don’t need to know about that stuff, there are people to do it for me.
Brad, do NOT have kids with that woman.
Agreed! On the other hand, it was cruel for Brad to put that video out for the public to view and ridicule.
A discussion about pizza portions.
That reminds me of a particularly woke individual who insisted that failure in school is entirely due to bad schools and bad teachers. He insisted that he could teach anyone to be a competent engineer.
I doubt he could make me an engineer (though he’s certainly welcome to try, it’s probably very interesting). Heavy-duty math is not my forte. I don’t know if I was born that way or if I was a victim of New Math, or a combination of the two factors. Oddly enough, I used to be able to shoot pool pretty well, even though the game is all mathematical, calculating the angles. I haven’t played in years and wouldn’t be able to try it now as my bad hip would not allow me to bend over the table.
I’m also terrible at card-counting, I always lose count. Which is why I’m hanging around my house in Flyover Land, rather than hanging out in some elegant James Bond-type casino.
(Sorry, David. Even though this is a classy joint, it has not quite reached James Bond levels of sophistication. Maybe if you change the sawdust on the floor more often…)
He insisted that he could teach anyone to be a competent engineer.
Not that he’s right but he’s in good company. IIRC, Einstein and his fellow physicists of the day believed they could teach classical physics to the average bar maid. And wasn’t this the premise of one of Shaw’s plays? Not that I view him with the typical awe. Relative to most of human history, the greatest burden to human advancement was the limitations of resources, especially books and good educators, the limitations of their reach. This was also what drove Carnegie to build libraries in so many out of the way little towns. It is only in the last 100 years or so that we’ve begun to see the limitations of that idea. In the US, the GI bill gave it some degree of credibility as well. While I certainly don’t believe that anything can be taught to anyone, I still believe there is much untapped potential out there.
You can’t just teach anything to anyone in practice, no matter what the theory says.
I can teach trigonometry to pretty much anyone. I’ve had classes of the lowest 5% pass (we have a class for the slowest at my school). But it takes ages to get them there, whereas smart kids learn it in minutes. But the big killer is remembering it — you can’t teach the ability to remember difficult things. You are born with that or you aren’t.
Taking twenty years to get a non-Maths person to engineer levels of Maths is not a useful thing. Nor would it be an enjoyable time for anyone involved. And they’d still be worse than a person with natural flair for Maths.
Peggy Noonan, she of that perfect description of modern public life – “We are patronized by our intellectual inferiors” – on pronoun trouble (heh):
As I’ve always said, pronouns aren’t yours to choose. Your name, yes, if you’re daft enough, but pronouns are everyone else’s. It’s telling, as Noonan suggests, that the political tendency which is always at pains to trumpet its love of consensus and community is the very one which promotes the idea that individuals can control the common language.
Peggy Noonan… on pronoun trouble
Ain’t it just.
You can’t just teach anything to anyone in practice
“I can explain it to you but I cannot understand it for you.” (or words to that effect)
you can’t teach the ability to remember difficult things
True. And here I am willfully not remembering things because I can’t remember All The Things due to today’s exposure to Information Infinity. I need to preserve some brain cells for things like breathing, walking and chewing gum. Although not all at once.
And they’d still be worse than a person with natural flair for Maths.
A demonstrated natural flair for ‘X’ used to be able to determine a successful work role in society. Now natural flair for ‘X’ is defined by how ‘X’ is done by how a programmer thinks it should be done.
On the ‘Yaniv Thing’, Rex Murphy has a good column.
Excerpts:
“It is a very disturbing case — and for more reasons than the harassment of these women. It raises questions not only about the human rights tribunal but about many of the main organs of Canadian journalism.”
Also…
“From my perspective the core of the story is not Yaniv, whom, from what I have read, presents as opportunistic, cruel and delusionally self-entitled, who manipulates the ever-changing fixations of identity and gender politics for (a) notoriety, (b) possible gain, and (c) some delight in pushing and insulting hard-up people, especially Asians and newcomers (see last week’s column) as a very questionable personal amusement.
Article: https://nationalpost.com/opinion/rex-murphy-the-yaniv-outrage-has-left-canada-rightly-the-laughing-stock-of-the-world
There’s a Scandinavian language (Finnish?) with no gendered pronouns; their SJWs are probably bitching about THAT.
Then we have German, in which “a young lady has no sex, but a turnip has.” 😄
Again with people telling us that perfectly normal English is incorrect. First person “they” has been in the language for hundreds of years. It’s in the King James version (e.g. Numbers 15:12: According to the number that ye shall prepare, so shall ye do to every one, according to their number).
When faced with a person of unknown gender, you have only two choices: “they” or “he or she”. The first is vastly preferable IMO.
That’s third person ‘they’ but otherwise I agree with you.
“they” or “he or she”
Or just “he”, which is simpler, more concise, and leaves no real room for miscommunication unless one is speaking to an idiot.
Excepting the rig/de-rig on some gigs.
I avoided at least half that headache by making my presence too valuable at home base. Still, engineers and utilities did return to me with wonderful tales and amazing things broken in incredible ways.
I still ask myself, “Who runs several hundred feet of triax under a loch?”
English pronouns have a complex and rich history, interesting if you are an odd bod like me. The non-specific pronoun – ‘one likes this’, ‘one does that’ – was probably once ‘man’ instead of ‘one’. It is in German to this day. But that hardly reflects a male bias in Germanic languages; rather, until the Middle English period, ‘man’ didn’t really have a fixed gender connotation. (The older words for ‘man’ and ‘woman’ were ‘wer’ and ‘wif’.)
The simplest, easiest, non-gender specific third person pronoun is ‘it’, distinguished from ‘they’ which is properly a *plural* pronoun. Now, one might object to ‘it’ on the grounds that it is dehumanising – but if so, you’d have to ask, what about ‘they’? The effect is pretty much the same.
The demands of the progressive left for ‘they/them’ pronouns are based on this conceptual nonsense; ‘they’ is urged, not for any well-thought out reason but because it’s a) a fad and b) allows them to attempt an arbitrary exertion of power.
I’m old enough to remember being taught, maybe rogue but whatevs, that “they” was appropriate when the role was sufficiently generic as to apply to several people. That is, you would use “they” when describing what any number of people might possibly do. But “he” was to be used (sorry ladies) when speaking of something that one, unknown specific person might be do. I.E. “They should then click this button” but “Ask him to then click on this button”. I thought it was ridiculously confusing and tried to use they/them in my own writing wherever it fit, but he/him to avoid awkward (in a 1970’s sense) sentences. IIRC, when forced to pick a pronoun within a sentence (fill in the blank) otherwise constructed by the teacher, I got it wrong on the test. Which is probably another reason I preferred math class.
There are plenty of times when you know the target person is singular, but don’t know their gender. I’m not hugely woke, but I’m not going to assume a teacher I know nothing is about is a “he” because the only thing I know about them is that they are my daughter’s English teacher. If I’m talking to a workmate who wants me to ring a troublesome person, and I say “OK, I’ll call them”, my co-worker won’t even recognise that I’ve used singular “they”. Whereas if I say “Please tell me the gender of the person so I can accurately say, OK I’ll call him or I’ll call her”, then they will think I’m an idiot.
Now how many of you read that paragraph and actively noticed the times I used singular they/them/their? No-one. Because it’s an entirely natural part of English, that’s why. It is perfectly natural and used all the time.
There are plenty of times when you know the target person is singular, but don’t know their gender. I’m not hugely woke, but I’m not going to assume a teacher I know nothing is about is a “he” because the only thing I know about them is that they are my daughter’s English teacher. If I’m talking to a workmate who wants me to ring a troublesome person, and I say “OK, I’ll call them”, my co-worker won’t even recognise that I’ve used singular “they”. Whereas if I say “Please tell me the gender of the person so I can accurately say, OK I’ll call him”, then they will think I’m an idiot.
There are plenty of times when you know the target person is singular, but don’t know their gender.
Here you go, a pile of gender neutral terms one can use instead.
“Glucose Guardian instead of sugar daddy/mommy”
That has to be a parody.
That has to be a parody.
I thought so too, but after poking around, if it is, whoever runs the site has gone way over the top to be way over the top.
Then we have German, in which “a young lady has no sex, but a turnip has.”
A great line, Pogonip. I think you’re right about Finnish, which seems to be completely unrelated to almost all other European languages – no gendered pronouns. The pronouns we have in English are one of the few remnants of our old system of noun classes (masculine, feminine, neuter). Languages without grammatical gender apparently don’t usually have gendered pronouns.
Now how many of you read that paragraph and actively noticed the times I used singular they/them/their?
Every time, because the singular “they” has been weaponized against the use of the generic “he/him” in an effort to expunge all indicators of masculinity from the public discourse. I’ve thus become sensitized to it and mentally edit it as I read it. Plus you were explicitly referring to a generic individual, for whom “he” was the appropriate singular, gender-neutral pronoun.
WTP’s description above (“they” was appropriate when the role was sufficiently generic as to apply to several people. That is, you would use “they” when describing what any number of people might possibly do. But “he” was to be used (sorry ladies) when speaking of something that one, unknown specific person might be do.”) matches my own education on the topic.