Behemoth! How are the ol' kidneys doing?

@verbose He is fine, thank you! I'm using a syringe without a needle to give him water, since he should drink at least 200 mL, according to online calculators, and he drinks very rarely. The doctor said to make sure he drinks enough, to avoid recurrent thickening in the urether

I should also take a sample of his urine and bring it for testing, but I haven't yet read up on how exactly one should collect a urine sample from a cat

@CowperKettle that seems pretty difficult to do, yes. How old is Be-mowþe?

@verbose He is about 10 years. We found him in 2019, so it's an approximation

His medical card says 'born in 2015'

ah. I didn't know cats got medical cards.

@verbose It's a cheap school copy-book :)

@CowperKettle ah

I remember those from primary school in India

Cool! I have a large copy-book from India, brought by my sister

oh nice

I just made a photo

And some writing she made in it

She has nice handwriting! And I learned something today. I didn't know Moscow was Europe's biggest city; I'd've thought London.

It's interesting that she chooses to write Hindi above the line, though. Conventionally it's written below.

Let me see if I can generate a quick sample and photograph it

So I guess I grew up writing the Hindi words below the ruled line and the English translations above

Ah!

(though I very rarely had to translate from Hindi to English ... not even for school)

I did not know that. That's handy.

Sometimes we would talk on the phone, and there would be an Indian in the background. For instance, there once was an electrician who came to connect an air conditioner, and she stopped now and then to say something in Hindi to him.

oh nice!

She lived in the campus at the JNU

the thing about living in Silicon Valley is that I get to talk in Hindi all the time. I don't even notice any more when people around me are speaking in Hindi, Telugu, or Marathi, it's so common here. (I was very surprised when I heard people speaking Marathi at a bus-stop in Auckland, though.)

They have peacocks there to ward away snakes. You could hear them cry in the background while chatting on the phone.

@CowperKettle Peacocks are beautiful but very unfriendly.

I mean, aggressive and suh.

*such

Ah!

I've never been to the JNU campus

I've not been to Delhi often

There's one building there in the form of a swastika

A library, if I recall correctly. One could see it as a swastika on Google Maps, in the satellite view

BBL, I need to learn some stuff to get my health certificate as a delivery boy

🤷🏽‍♂️ People do what people do. I guess it wouldn't be if that Indians don't get to use an ancient symbol of auspiciousness because of a much more recent association with Nazism?

Though when my sister's mother-in-law, visiting my sister in the US from Delhi, asked her to draw swastikas on the front doorstep for a particular festival, my sister had the good sense to refuse.

Enjoy!

*wouldn't be fair if ...

@verbose There's a bunch of high-rep Finns on Puzzling, for some reason. Maybe I can go and ping them to see if they'd be interested in coming over here to answer Kettu questions.

Strengthening the Puzzling-Literature connections yet further, although I've no idea why those two sites in particular should have so much overlap.

Is a mod around?

@verbose For a second I forgot I'm no longer a moderator on this site. I'm from the wrong site :-/

@verbose Is it about L.... again?

@Tsundoku I can neither confirm nor deny that. However, as a mod on French SE, you probably have some insight into the situation. @Randal'Thor got back to me privately, so thanks!

Yeah, "some insight", indeed ;-)

ha

@Randal'Thor Puzzles give them something to do during the long days and nights? Six months long in some parts of Finland, I understand.

I wish I could speak Finnish, or Estonian, or Karelian, or Hungarian. All the languages I know are Indo-European. 'Twould be fun to be able to speak like an Ugr.

@CowperKettle "One 'reads' a flag like the pages of a book, from top to bottom and from left to right"? I know of zero languages where books are read like that ....

@verbose If you like case systems, try Veps. Trouble is, if any learning materials exist, they're probably in Russian.

> Veps has twenty-three grammatical cases, more than any other Finnic language.

I guess the grammatical cases keep away the nut cases.

Oh cool I'dn't heard of Veps before. Do you speak it, @Tsundoku?

And I guess Chinese or Japanese scrolls could be read from top to bottom ... so I retract my statement about reading a flag from top to bottom

@verbose You're seriously overestimating me! :-D

@Tsundoku H'm I wonder what kept you away from Veps ...

@verbose A teacher of Chinese once gave us a short text and asked us to find out whether it should be read left to right, then top to bottom, or top to bottom then left to right, or top to bottom then right to left. (That was when I was still learning Chinese.)

@Tsundoku Was it one of those wills that have a completely different meaning depending on the order in which one reads the characters?

It was not a will; I can't remember what it was because it's too long ago. But all of these options could have been valid.

There was a story I read, a pastiche of the Judge Dee stories (not by van Gulik), where the plot was essentially: "No, madam, your late husband's will does not disinherit your stepson/his son. Read from top to bottom rather than left to right, it makes him the beneficiary and disinherits you."

And who got the inheritance when the will was read diagonally?

The story is silent on that matter. As also on the matter of who inherited if the will was read from right to left, etc.

@Tsundoku Someone gave me a copy of Karnad's memoirs recently. If you do propose Karnad as a topic challenge and it gets enough upvotes (you'd have mine), that would give me an excuse to read it

Thanks, but I haven't been suggesting any new topic challenge lately because I can never resist the temptation to buy books just to answer questions. I really don't want to turn my home into a librarinth.

@Tsundoku (a) libraries? I don't have room for books any more so now I just check stuff out of the library. That also forces me to read said books because there's a due date. (b) I realized that a lot of the books I have, I will not re-read. I gave away my entire P D James collection, for example. Fun stuff, well, written, but (for me) no enduring value. (c) e-books? Very small footprint. Though admittedly I've never had to plug a paper book in because it's run out of battery

I live in Stuttgart, Germany, where the library often doesn't have what we read in topic challenges. Let alone the secondary literature I check.

And I read paper books because I work with a computer all day already and don't want to look at yet another screen to read a book.

Time to turn off the computer, wash the dishes and go to bed. Today is World Sleep Day and I wasn't allowed to sleep at work.

@verbose that always depends on how you count the boundary of the city

@verbose hehe

@b_jonas Oh I assumed it was about population, not area?