Time To Fire Up The Blessing Generator

@wtp
AIUI every Pidgin is different dependent on the underlying local language. So, no, Nigerian Pidgin is unlikely to be understood by, say, Solomon Islanders.

Barkeep, a pint of best please. Ping.
Bless you, sir. May one of your wireless earbuds never be in danger of falling into the toilet.

So, no, Nigerian Pidgin is unlikely to be understood by, say, Solomon Islanders.
Having spent more than a little time in various parts of Central America, in cities I could understand and make myself understood with my mediocre Spanish, but most of the dialects in the remote areas were nigh incomprehensible often even to people in a remote area one remote area over, so it is also quite possible, particularly given Nigeria is larger than all of Central America, that Nigerian Pidgin might not be universally understood in Nigeria.

Having spent more than a little time in various parts of Central America, in cities I could understand and make myself understood with my mediocre Spanish, but most of the dialects in the remote areas were nigh incomprehensible
IIRC, Victor Davis Hanson has remarked that many illegal immigrants in California are now coming from Oaxaca and that they and Spanish-speaking Mexicans from the north find each other to be incomprehensible.
And I seem to recall hearing that this sort of situation could be found in various parts of Europe in the days when almost nobody traveled more than a few miles from home.

For anyone wanting to hit the Amazon link…
For the penurious…
The innarwebz are truly both wondrous and frightening.

For the penurious…
From the Dedication page: “Faught in the war against the Fascists 1043-1945”
Faught. Yes, he faught. Fraught with thought he faught, I’m sure. But hey, his son got the doctorate. Who is this BS dummy to question it?

Oh Lord…this gets richer…Relating all this to my wife who asks, “Well maybe ‘faught’ is a real word”. To which I haughtily reply…gimme a break. If it was a real word, the spell checker on this blog would not have underlined it…but the subject matter being what it is I had to check Google. So I types “define faught”…Now if you observed the title page on that doctoral thesis, the author got his BA from the University of New Orleans…so clicking through on the first link…”Faught was a cajun term in south Louisiana for fart. Common Misspelling of the word fart.”

Heh. 902 years. Well my having fought fonts appears to have left me fraught with faults. I’m my defense though, I don’t have the doctoral committee from one of the greatest universities to ever exist on the planet (so presumed) reviewing my posts.

IIRC, we’re in the 3,048th wave of “eating insects is de future”
Don’t forget the algae!

I’ve been struggling along with “The Boat of a Million Years” on and off over the last six months. I find Anderson… grueling.
That seems like a very surprising statement to me. Have you read anything he wrote earlier in his career? I find most of his work pretty snappy, prose-wise, and the stories move along at a brisk pace. TBoaMY was one of the last things he wrote, and a bit like Leiber, I think his abilities may have declined late in life. I haven’t read it myself since I was a teenager and remember only the premise and a couple of scenes that made an impact on me.
I do still enjoy Fritz Leiber
I hadn’t read anything by him until last year, when I picked up the first of the Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser collections. About halfway through I purchased all the others. Great fun, and very inventive.
I love Howard, but if he’s a bit too pulpy for your tastes you might want to try a collection of Clark Ashton Smith stories. He was part of the circle of literary friends that included Howard and Lovecraft, and his tales have their own distinct flavor. I’m particularly fond of his dying-Earth “Zothique” stories.

Blind Lemon Jefferson invented Texas blues
Hope y’all got a diligent sexton on stand-by.

I miss the interesting links.
The Anti-Woke circle-jerk not so much… y’all remind me of the old farts sitting a mall food court.

And what’s more, Anderson and Piper were libertarians while Pournelle was a conservative. No Asimovian Stupidities™ from them.

@pst314, Mr. Pournelle was granted a specific license by Mr. Piper to write stories in his universe.

Thanks for the blogging, David. Have ‘pinged’ you some British pounds.

Again, thanks to all who’ve chipped in, including all those much too shy to say hello, or who’ve subscribed, or done shopping via the Amazon links. It’s what keeps this place here and is much appreciated.

Just to be clear, I do not have shares in UnHerd or anything like that, but just came across this which makes for dismal reading:

Of the many horrible things you might witness as a junior doctor in the capital, among the worst must be watching a teenage gang trying to break into the ward you work on, hoping to finish off a victim, punching your colleagues out the way to get to him.
Where I work, there’s a “code red” every day. That’s what we call the arrival of a stabbing victim [ … ] Just a few weeks ago, a boy came in with knife wounds and was taken to have a CT scan to assess the damage. But his attackers were not satisfied with wounding him — they wanted him dead. After turning up at the hospital, the whole gang rushed to the CT scanners. [ … ] Gangs come up with all sorts of ways to try and access victims who have survived. Sometimes, they pretend to be family members [ … ]
[ … ] The Major Trauma team often includes ex-military doctors. There will be up to five different surgeons working to save one victim simultaneously. This, of course, places a great strain on the health service, but the upside is that London surgeons have become experts — the best in the world — at treating stab wounds [ … ]

Although through personal experience I tend to groan inwardly when I hear the phrase “raise awareness”, this is the pseudonymous author’s stated intention for the piece – to let it be more widely known how often armed gangs invade hospitals, bringing their disputes or, whatever it’s for, with them.
But in this case it seems fair enough.

WTP, apparently the interesting thing about William Shakespeare is that he spelled his name in various ways, with around 15-20 versions known including “Shakestaffe”, but the one way that is NOT recorded is the now accepted spelling “Shakespeare”. I always suspected that some long ago Don at Oxford (or wherever) was having a sort of private joke and managed to get that spelling accepted as “correct”.
On SF, there was, some 50 or so years ago (so 1970 or so) the idea that there were three “great” contemporary SF books; Dune, Stranger in a Strange Land, and Stand on Zanzibar (by John Brunner if you have not heard of it). Of those, just IMHO, only Dune really remains a classic. Heinlein can be OK – again for me The Moon is a Harsh Mistress is his best and most readable, but he suffers quite badly from the syndrome I once saw described as “I tells them, then I tells them what I told them, then I tells them again in case they missed it…” didactism writ large, and very present in his late works like Methuselah’s Children. If you want a lighter “adventurous” read from an absolute craftsman of exotic worlds, Jack Vance is always worth exploring. James Tipree Jnr is another quirky and pseudonymous writer.

The secret, I suspect, is to have fewer knife-wielding degenerates.
By any means necessary™, as the left has been saying for generations. That means far more severe penalties for criminal behavior and far more stringent immigration laws.

The secret, I suspect, is to have fewer knife-wielding degenerates.
“The security guards we have are pretty impressive and fearless, but theirs is a massive job — do we really want to ask Joseph and his buddy Emmanuel to stand up, unarmed, just the two of them, against 12 teenagers with 12″ kitchen knives who have stabbed before and are here to do it again, all for £18,000 a year?”
I would arm them and tell them to shoot such vermin without warning. “Two to the chest, face gets the rest.”

Agreed re. Heinlein. Very few of his books have no didacticism (though his short stories are mostly free of it), but he’s such a compelling writer than I can mostly ignore it until I will Fear no Evil; that and all its successors I just ignore, as his obsession with various types of sexual congress has become utterly tedious.
Oh, by the way, Ping!

I grant Fred Foo a specific license to fuck right off back to whatever swamp he came from.
Seeing as how Gospodin Foo (if that is his real name) appears to have spilkes in his genectegezoints over one of the main themes here, I offer another exciting chapter of Today In Wokness™…
Join us now as we explore “Cultural Appropriation: Babywearing”.
To be honest I didn’t know what in the hell “babywearing” is, but apparently it is toting your sprog around in a rucksack”.
Because wypipo never invented anything but stole everything from PoCs, it is true that ancient wypio never carried their kids. The only three options were levitation – this was only allowed by kings and queens and the power to levitate was, of course, magic performed my court magicians who were PoCs. The middle aristocracy used prams made of gold, silver, and ermine, made and pushed by PoC servants. The average peasant just tied a rope to the kid and dragged it like a sack of potatoes.
Medieval depictions of wypipo using babywearing techniques are just the earliest examples of cultural appropriation. Below we see a young European peasant with a papoose clearly stolen form American Indians, and St. Christopher is using a device invented by early Arabs.

That means far more severe penalties for criminal behavior and far more stringent immigration laws.
And a lot less of this wormy posturing.

Speaking on knife wielding degenerates…
I have to call BS on the whole story. A quick search shows a Code Red in the UK is just massive h(a)emorrhage for any reason, not just a stabbing. If you are calling a Code Red (which is a fire in the US) fr a stabbing, you are not going to waste time with a CT, it would go straight to OR, stab wounds being pretty obvious. Gun shot wounds you might (or more likely plain films which can be done in the OR) because bullets can bounce around.

…gangs sometimes go in for “bagging”, which is when they stab the victim in the rectum, so that they need a colostomy bag for the rest of their life.

Aside from the impracticality of deliberately stabbing someone in the rectum absent the victim being tied down spread eagle, a rectum can be repaired (might require a temporary colostomy), and even in the event a rectum must be removed, an ileo-anal pouch can be made. There is other sketchy medical wisdom besides that.

What feels odd, to me, is that so many people — children — are being stabbed in London hospitals and yet almost no one outside the hospital seems aware of it.

Gangs are running amok through London hospitals, but no one reports it, and the article is the only thing that shows up.
Right.

David and all commenters British: Knife crime is clearly a serious problem in the UK, but I never see any reports breaking down the identify of the perpetrators by nationality, race, religion, etc. I get the impression that most of such crime is the work of immigrant gangs and individuals, but am willing to acknowledge that impressions can be imprecise.

Babywearing.
In the cause of equality (or is it equity these days) I propose that wypipo cease appropriating black culture by wearing their offspring in this way. In turn I would expect that a corresponding respect be shown to white culture by not using any form of wheeled transportation, including but not restricted to, perambulators, buggies and motorised vehicles of any size or description.

I found that CT story a bit hard to believe as well, but the again…? I saw a story yesterday somewhere stating that knife stabbing of children in China is such a problem that police are stationed outside of schools where elites take their children.

Meanwhile, in other Woke™ Hospital Violence, the University of Louisville is hosted a seminar on body terrorism on fat LGBTQ§↔↔₳ people.
Alas, we missed it, but next month we can learn about “gender affirming” hormone care, and in November, of course, racism and LGBTQC-47 people.

“Bold, gender neutral lazer show could spell trouble for the Trump presidency while raising awareness for their community”
Something tells me they started with ‘stick laser in anus’ and then went in search of an excuse.

Something tells me they started with ‘stick laser in anus’ and then went in search of an excuse.
It’s a pity that the Zombie blog is inactive, although I suppose we don’t need an endless series of posts whose titles could all be “Mentally Ill Degenerates in San Francisco Did Something Stupid”.

I can think of some alternate ways of permanently dealing with creatures like him.
Gender reassignment surgery is wasted on the wrong people.

Trolling France:

Daring speculation: one reason Victorian Britain had a lower murder rate than today is that murderers got a death sentence rather than prison followed by parole.

I started to read Dune years ago. I enjoyed it up till Paul fell in love, at which time the rest of the plot came to a screeching halt. I never watched the movie.

“Family demands answers”: sorry about the mangled html, David. I thought I had abandoned it by closing the window when I could not get it to look right in preview.

Knives: from the Antipodes via The Age newspaper this weekend:
https://www.theage.com.au/national/they-ll-pull-knives-on-ya-how-a-teenage-boy-s-night-out-turned-to-tragedy-20210730-p58ekm.html
And the Green-Left want to make things more difficult for licensed gunowners while yobbos can easily get their weapon of choice from their mother’s kitchen – if they haven’t already stolen one from some shop like the New Zealand terrorist did recently while under close surveillance.

I have to call BS on the whole story.
I think that assessment may be a tad precipitous – but then I suppose your point is to suggest I’ve done the same in accepting the veracity of the story.
As she’s a junior doctor (well, if you believe even that), I’m certainly willing to believe that she may well have amalgamated a number of stories and anecdotes from others so that at least part of the account is basically break room hearsay but presented as though these were things she herself may have witnessed.
As to the fact that there have been no other reports on this phenomena: firstly, that, after all, is the stated point of the article.
But secondly, the media in the UK operates somewhat differently than it does in the US.
For instance, in the 1990s in the UK there was a wave of gun crime both in London and across the North, especially Manchester and Leeds.
And while some gun crime incidents were in fact reported during that time, not all were.
I can confirm this because I know personally of two occasions in which whole streets were cordoned off following shooting incidents yet neither one of them was reported until long after the incident and both were buried in the middle pages in extremely vague reports of less than 50 words each.
Similarly, a friend of mine who was working A & E (ER) in the period told me victims of gunshot wounds were being brought in three, four times a week (this is an extraordinary rate in country where firearms are difficult to obtain). Again – this was barely reported on and, if it was reported at all, was likely buried deep down.
Later still, someone I had known at high school was sent to prison after shooting someone to death over an unpaid gambling debt. Sensational as that might sound, I only heard about it from yet another friend who had been present in court at the sentencing. If it was reported anywhere, it would, again, have been a footnote buried in a column of local news.
I’m not sure why the British media is quite like this given that it can hardly be accused of shying away from sensational stories, but there you have it.

Thank you for fixing my faulty html, David. I wish I knew exactly how that happened, so as to avoid it in the future.

Or, “Yes, he’s robbin’ y’all. OH WELL.”
It wasn’t all that long ago that the public response to such statements would be to either lynch the dead thug’s relatives or expel them from the community, on the entirely sensible grounds that folks cannot afford to allow dangerous evil people to live among them. As has been remarked, the police and courts exist in part to protect criminals from the public.

As noted before, the world is not greatly enriched by the presence of such creatures. Or by the presence of those who would excuse their choices.
That is now the majority of people. I’ve encountered far, far too many of these apologists and such to believe otherwise. This is why major corporations support BLM and similar. It’s not just the “eat me last” thing. I would even say that is not a very big part of it. Far, far too many of the “grown ups” of all generations have been brainwashed into believing that the sociopathy that we see and is so often documented here is justified. This works so well because “those other people” they see as ripe for picking. It’s not “eat those other people first”, it’s a means of justifying an opportunity to join in with whatever mob to destroy the others and take their stuff.

A quick check showed open beds (ICU and otherwise) in Houston.
Indeed. As some others on the interwebz know, I volunteer for a Hospital affiliated w/the TMC (That’s Texas Med. Center, Y’all), and as part of my regular duties is to verify data – and what is often reported has only the vaguest allusion to reality (for example, a recent count of MHTW showed that the “hot floors” were at 95%, so of course, the local media spewed “Local hospital nearly overrun by Covid patients – discounting the fact that the other floors and buildings were near empty…).
It’s sad, really, to see the state of media.

Oh dear, how sad. Never mind.
I saw another tweet about that which said that it was not vigilantes but a rival gang. However, the Evening Standard and the Independent confirm that it was vigilantes. Given how useless the police and courts have become, who can blame citizens for vigilantism? Speaking of which, why is it that “human rights” lawyers are only ever interested in the rights of criminals and not their victims? /rhetorical question

Oh dear, how sad. Never mind.
The inevitable consequence of abolishing civic justice will not be social justice, as so many on the left seem to believe, but mob justice. And mob justice, as we can see from that video, is frequently a very unpleasant thing indeed. Still, at least he won’t be re-offending any time soon. So there’s that.

@pst314: oh, yes, permanent ban. AmbushPredator is dead. Long live Xenosmilus4! 😉
On the Tower Hamlets event, for ‘rival gang’ read ‘Bangladeshi immigrants fed up with being preyed upon by African immigrants with little or no action by police, and deciding to turn the tables’. All part of the glorious and vibrant diversity that so enriches London.
’ And mob justice, as we can see from that video, is frequently a very unpleasant thing indeed.’
That’s bullfighting for you. Mostly, the man with the red cape wins. Sometimes, he gets the horn. 😉

Nomination for today’s most stupid thread.

If there was an announcement of your new Xenosmilus4 I missed it,
Julia, put down the gin and tonic, just for a second, and throw a link in the comments.

Local media loves eyeballs on its stories. Accurate crime reporting is often good for garnering eyeballs – bleeds, leads etc. The media also loves to support “its side”. Accurate crime reporting is almost always bad for the narrative, inasmuch as there’s a strong correlation between ideology of local government and crime rate. As a former resident of the blood soaked hellscape of the People’s Democratic Republic of Chicago, I can assure you that imperative #2 very often outweighs imperative #1.

Fraught times? Don’t you mean faught?

That’s your own damn faught. What on earth possessed you to snort them?

That’s your own damn faught. What on earth possessed you to snort them?
You don’t remember when David experimented with “spicy” and “extra spicy”? And without warning us? To this day I cannot see a hot sauce bottle without having flashbacks.

Would that be a record, David?
Not even close.