Friday Ephemera (741)
How the pyramids were constructed. || Overstepping. || Incoming. Or down-going. || Because it can be done. || Big woman, six-five. || Oh delicate Rose. || I’m guessing the dog is the brains of the outfit. || “A week after the boys’ detention, their families vanished.” || Sea view of note. || About this high. || Smoke, some shouting. || Sharp look, 1983. || Roadside baby parking, 1973. || It’s a miracle substance. || All-male semi-final in women’s pool tournament. || Problem solved. || Parenting scenes. || Parenting scenes 2. || Hiring based on competence? Can’t have that. || The progressive retail experience, parts 586, 587, and 588. || Pedro is trusted with children. || Docteur Qui. || Marital woes. || Fire helmet, safe word not included. || And finally, the return of the Ogmios School of Zen Motoring.
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I really ought to try that next time. The thing is, in the heat of the moment I forget these great ideas.
I tried it on Maggie, the Yorkshire terrier. Unfortunately all I had on hand was grated Parmesan and it just made her sneeze.
And now we see it over and over in writing instead of merely hearing it. At least with spoken English, the “could of” sounds enough like “could’ve” that it can be forgiven. Now the written version is so common everyone thinks “could of” is correct.
I’m trying to comprehend why that particular interaction was felt necessary. I mean, you could just nod or smile, or say, “Morning.” Instead of being a total arse.
I see it so often, I can only assume that some teachers no longer correct it, for fear of seeming inegalitarian, or racist, or something. But you might as well wear a big sign saying, “I don’t want to be taken seriously.”
I’m just going to leave this here.
Seen recently: The updated Good Samaritan.
Two sociologists walk by and see the man who’s been robbed and beaten. One to the other: “We must find the man who did this. He needs our help!”
[ Slides tin of Quality Street to Nate. ]
Ooh. Cottage pie for lunch. And I don’t have to cook it.
Score.
British policing, the wonder of the world.
Oh, and that thing that never happens has… well, you know.
Oh, and that thing that never happens has… well, you know.
“I shouldn’t go to prison for child pron because my son wants to keep beating girls at sports” has to be unique in the annals of jurisprudence.
That one smells a bit staged to me. It’s like ufo videos. Rather blurry and hard to make out biker-boy’s face. Not saying it is but…kinda like extraordinarily claims requiring extraordinary evidence, claims that are extraordinarily annoying should have clearer video.
Also smelled a little bit like a Buffalo Run.
Someone with some significance in the anti-woke world needs to be giving out a Chocolate Teapot Award.
See also: “Tow the line”, “a shoe-in”, “a fragrant violation”, etc.
Correct grammar is increasingly condemned as “white supremacy”, although that attitude has its roots in the 1960’s.
However, it’s clear that many school teachers are themselves grammatical ignoramuses (not to mention of low intelligence).
…claims that are extraordinarily annoying should have clearer video.
Poor lighting, cheapass helmet cam or the like, downscaled to a manageable file size for uploading.
Next time the guy should have a rig like this one because if there is one thing the world is short of it is extraordinarily annoying Lycra clad shitwits.
Band name.
See also: “Tow the line…
You rang?.
I believe you have posted that famous painting before.
More by Repin:
David and its regulars commenting on the latest lunacy at the Guardian.
I believe you have posted that famous painting before.
It is the most famous, however, if you prefer Popoff, if not, there is also a sculpture of the painting on the banks of the Volga, oddly enough.
That’s actually much classier than what I tend to picture.
Ack! His regulars! His regulars!
Toys of note. (Caution advised)
Then what do you mean when you report your radiant return from a haircut?
The essence of “he needs killing”.
It’s no wonder they go after those praying quietly.
Full… of… cottage… pie.
Can’t… move…
If the shoo fits.
There’s my gift shopping done.
Time for a ten mile run. Up you go! Move! Move!
Heh.
Via Julia.
Toy of note
My contribution to grammar in our office…
Vis-a-vis the “correct grammar” and “correct spelling” things…
Here’s a thought or two on the issue. Language, fundamentally, is a tool for thought. Not necessarily communication; thought.
Your language is unclear and poorly organized? So, too, will be your thinking.
Case in point: Observe the necessity for every profession to develop it’s own specialized internal language, which others term “jargon”. Reality? You can’t use the language to think about it, you have to come up with something.
Which is why so many trades and professions are impenetrable to outsiders.
English has several advantages in this regard, due to its flexibility and utterly voracious attitude towards collecting terminology and suchlike. The problem is that English is a poorly organized grabtastic tongue that has developed huge blind spots, and is difficult to think in.
There are reasons that the left pays so much attention to language and language control. Control the language, control the thinking.
Which is hard, in English, because you really can’t control something that’s busy squirming out of your control. A net good.
Contrarily, a net disadvantage is that you have to spend a bunch of time working on your English skills in order to really use it as an effective tool for thinking. You have to pay attention to it all, and carefully consider how it affects your thinking, and develop an awareness of how it naturally channels your thoughts into certain paths, certain patterns.
Many doubt me when I say this, but consider: One reason that Asian children have an easier time with math is that many Asian languages have entirely rational and well-organized counting systems built-in, which makes mastery of math a lot easier. If you don’t have to spend time talking about how to count, then you can spend time learning how to manipulate numbers.
It’s the same with spelling; consider how much time is spent spelling things “correctly” in English. WTF? Why are such things as “spelling bees” even a thing? Shouldn’t a phonetic alphabet lead naturally into a rational spelling system, one that is consistent? How much time do we waste on that trivial crap, and lording it over others when they make the mistakes they do?
Lotta this stuff is simple one-upsmanship for the supposed “educated elite”; it’s a social marker, not a reality. “Oh, you can’t work out that the “could’ve” in spoken language isn’t “could of”? You’re a dummy!! YOU’RE NOT ONE OF US!!!”
Just like the bullshittery they pulled back in the day when they adapted Latin rules to English, cluttering it all up with crap that doesn’t really work, it’s all “WE EDUCATED!!! YOU DUMMY!!!”
Reality? It’s all so much bullshit. Like I was telling my schoolteacher relatives who’d twit me for mispronouncing some bullshit I read somewhere, you arseholes ought to be happy I read the damn thing somewhere, understood the meaning, and then used it properly in a sentence. Pronunciation from the spelling that’s become conventional? WTF? So I got it wrong… You never use that word in conversation, so I’ve never heard it, and now you’re going to give me crap because I used it, correctly, but mispronounced it…?
And, those same jackasses wondered why I never pursued much in the way of a higher education. They taught me contempt for such things long before I ever graduated high school.
English badly needs fixing, in a lot of ways. As a tool for rational, critical thought? It sucks. And, a lot of its speakers are far more focused on their little games of one-upsmanship than the content of the thinking they hear expressed in it. I say we are far past the point where it should have been reformed.
The English language keeps changing. Case in point: “Plough” was once pronounced the way it is spelled. Thus, people who read Shakespeare in translation have an easier time than English and American students who read it in the original.
I don’t know how this compares to the situation of, say, modern French students reading ancient French texts (Rabelais, Descartes, Cyrano de Bergerac, Jean-François Regnard, etc) but suspect it may be less difficult thanks to official efforts to prevent the language from changing.
Listening to podcasts has clued me in to just how many highly knowledgeable and intelligent people mispronounce some words which are mostly encountered in print but not in conversation. Victor Davis Hanson and Jordan Peterson are just two examples.
The left is not insane and evil. No, not at all.
“The move to close stores in Black communities is Jim Crow racism, and we won’t stand for it”, said Jamarius Washington
Oh, come on. That’s Key & Peele levels of satire.
Still marvelling at how driving around London can be transformed into a gentle, slightly agreeable experience
Residents of Southwestern Ontario will no doubt remember CityTV’s Night Moves and Night Walk.
I’m not saying it was giant Chads, but it was giant Chads
There chads in the Earth in those days.
The Other Half was given a large tin of Quality Street
As a child I was always much more excited about the tin than it’s contents; high quality metal containers have a myriad of uses. And often taste better than the chocolates.
The desire to remake a classic is often a sign of a mediocre mind
An interesting thread I saw elsewhere: rather than remake a classic, suggest a remake of a movie that had a good idea but a mediocre execution.
could I instead be sent to Castle Anthrax?
No; it’s too perilous.
Similarly, if you’re a person who wants to “help the mentally ill”? Fine; help them. But, you’re obviously not fit to determine if they’re sane: You’re too close to the problem
It’s an extremely common pathology for people with substance abuse or sexual trauma to want to become counselors “to help others”. It’s a form of coping mechanism and it means they’ve stopped making progress. They think that if they can “cure” others out of their trauma, it will compensate for the the fact that they aren’t cured themselves. Good therapists will discourage abuse victims from going down this path.
Reflecting back at pst314…
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/GaQp2xeXkAA3FY6?format=jpg&name=large
See, the issue here is that this jackass is entirely delusional. White people are the problem? Really?
Who was it that stopped the Atlantic slave trade, again? Who was it that fought the Civil War over slavery, and then freed the slaves? Who freed the slaves in South America?
Wasn’t blacks, that’s for damn sure. The legal precedent here in the US for life-long indentured servitude, i.e. “chattel slavery” was established by a black man over another black man… No white involved.
I think the real reason that so much animosity exists over race in this country is pretty ‘effing simple: It was a gift.
Blacks did literally nothing to earn it. What I think should have happened is that there should have been something that they had to do, in order to “earn” the whole thing in their minds. A simple gift, which is how we framed it, leaves them feeling resentful and disempowered, because they realize that what was given can be taken away, while what was earned and fought for… Cannot. Psychologically, most blacks remain locked into the plantation mentality, and they resent the shit out of it.
What I resent the shit out of is being blamed for this situation. I personally have never enslaved anyone, bought a slave, or even “repressed” a black person. Neither did a lot of my ancestors, some of whom fought to free the slaves in a rather nasty civil war over the issue. Voluntarily, I might add… I can trace my ancestry back to numerous abolitionists.
So, why is slavery my fault, again? You want to resent someone, you really ought to resent the people who sold your ancestors off in Africa, who’re mostly Arabic and black.
I’m going to make a prediction: Racism is going to come back, and it’s going to come back hard. Most blacks will wind up either deported, dead, or back in some form of institutionalized setting, under supervision.
Why is that going to happen? Stupid people like this guy in the X/Twitter post. A minority does not pull this shit off successfully. They’re going to trigger a massive wave of reciprocal resentment and hatred that will make Jim Crow look like a game of patty-cake. Most of the foot soldiers for that “race war” will be Hispanic, and one of the motivating features for their actions will be acceptance by this supposed “white majority”. It won’t be formally laid out, or planned, but that’s how it’s going to go down. Blacks think that they’re far more powerful than they are, and it’s sad to observe the effect that these self-destructive acts are going to have. People are going to get tired of it, and when enough of the “rest of us” get sick and tired of incessant blame and black criminality, the worm is going to turn. Largely due to idiots like this…
I’ve never heard a single word of gratitude from any black American for anything that my abolitionist or Civil War veteran ancestors did. Not even an acknowledgement. All I ever hear is rage about the 1% of white Americans who were slave owners, and who my ancestors loathed and fought against. This is not a recipe for “good relations”; I have ceased listening to blacks about their self-created problems, and I no longer give a flying f*ck about any of their issues. I simply wish for them to go away and not bother me any more. Were I able to talk to my ancestors? I’d flatly tell them that “liberating” the blacks was a chump move, and that what should have been done was simply “sending them home”.
I’m flatly just tired of the BS. The way it is framed, every white everywhere is guilty of abusing blacks. That’s a lie; I’m done with even entertaining it. You start out from a premise that I’m guilty for what my ancestors did, then I want to know when black America is going to start taking responsibility for what their ancestors did… Which, ironically enough, includes a whole lot of slave-owning pricks who happened to be white. Given the miscegenation that went on, nearly all American blacks have some white, so by their theories of ancestral guilt…? They, too, need to pay someone their due restitution.
Not to mention, when you start talking about paying blacks back for slavery, I would like to know when we’re going to begin calculating what the blacks have done to nearly every city they’ve become a majority in. I mean, Detroit used to be a pretty nice place, until the Democrats and blacks took it over and ran it into the ground…
There would be a superfluity of choice.
Good ideas are nothing without good execution.
I must face my peril.
And that sort of personal attention is much more effective than a burning coat in the alley.
Just gonna leave this here…
https://x.com/RealDianeYap/status/1847773281656647742
She makes some good points…
She makes some good points.
Yeah, but that voice! A female Chinese Sam Kinison we don’t need.
“Jim Crow racism”
@pst314,
That link is pretty much spot-on for why I think the future isn’t black…
I’m hearing things around me from people who’d have never said such things, in the long-ago yesteryears of my youth. People are losing faith in the received wisdom of tolerance and amity, seeing that it is a one-way street.
In short, they’re wising up to the con, and that ain’t going to end well.
For whom?
A number of writers have recounted receiving unsolicited letters from fans saying “I have this great idea for a story. Let’s you write it and we share the revenue 50-50”.
Especially important for David’s youngest readers for whom facing peril is an important part of growing into manhood.