@verbose I'll be honest, my first reaction to your message was "who's Derek Chauvin?" Having Googled it ... oof, yeah, extremely coincidental timing. My bad. I don't know how to remove a tweet, but it can't be done from the chatroom. Do you really think it should be removed, or can it stand now that the verdict is out?
Complete coincidence. Since indigochild and b4rtr were mentioned in the quarterly best-of, I was going through indigochild's answers for a good one to promote, and that post stood out for its outstanding in-depth research by two different users.
@Randal'Thor Well as things turned out it wasn't all that inflammatory thanks to the verdict. I would still delete it, if it were up to me. (it's easy to delete from twitter itself, if you have the login and password to the actual Twitter account. I know @Mithical does; maybe they could delete it if they're around)
I didn't think you did it deliberately; I realize it was just a horrendous coincidence, but honestly, any discussion of murder trials and expectations of being acquitted, etc. are just painful right now in the US
I mean, granted, NZ was weird in its own way. People think of Auckland as a teeming metropolis. "Oh yes, Auckland is so cosmopolitan! We even have a gay bar!"
(Not kidding, someone actually said that to me)
I didn't live there. I went there on a long visit in 2018.
It's beautiful. I never knew where to look, because something captivated my eye wherever I turned. Flowers in someone's garden; birds or leaves on a tree; hills or the sea in the distance. It pampered the eye.
On an unrelated topic, @verbose, did you finish revising your answer about unlucky Macbeth? I remember you did a big rewrite from 1920s to 1970s, but were you talking later about doing another big rewrite based on some more evidence you found?
(I'm considering accepting the answer, and wondering if I should wait for further revisions.)
@Randal'Thor It's next on my list of things to tackle. Don't accept it yet. I would have been done except I think I've been spending the time I would have spent on it on the Basel course that @Tsundoku made me enroll in, so it's his fault
I'm even worse than @bobble when it comes to procrastinating on finishing up answers I've actually begun working on
here's my list of answers to work on. I know @GarethRees has a similar list. Of course in my case "to work on" could mean anything from "I know the answer to this one" to "I have a hunch, will need to verify" to "I have no clue but it's an interesting question" to "wow, the existing answers are wrong"
Or in a couple cases (like the "vowel shift" question) just a matter of looking more deeply into the answers and seeing if I have anything to add
also, some of the questions I bookmarked when there were no answers, and there are answers now so I could probably un-bookmark them but just haven't because of inertia
@verbose Well, either/or. Maybe some of those questions already listed would be good targets for you, or maybe you'll feel like adding your own answer there.
I feel like the Jekyll/Hyde question may be ultimately answered by Gareth, and the earectomy one by Tsundoku.
I'm not sure about the J&H question; I read it as unanswerable, because the novel isn't secretly set in Edinburgh. But I agree that it seems up Gareth's alley. The earectomy one is definitely the 'doku's
Yes, I should probably take some of my bookmarked questions and turn them into open bounties instead of thinking I'll work on them myself.
@verbose It's just a tweet from a literature-related Twitter account that few people follow and even fewer people respond to or retweet. Aren't we being over-sensitive if we decide to delete that? The USA is not the entire world, you know.
Walter Malone's poem "The World is My Home" is, on the face of it, openly a plea for humanity to come together as one united brotherhood rather than engage in disputes and wars:
Travel to East, I wander to West:
Each land that I see is dear to my breast.
I greet the green hills as I float down t...
And if we have few people following us, all the more reason to be sensitive to their feelings. I don't see how deleting the tweet harms anybody, and keeping it definitely has the potential for harm right now. Even prudence dictates that we delete it. We don't want someone to get upset and accuse us of being deliberately inflammatory.
@Randal'Thor the more I think about it the more confused I get. I think maybe what happened was that the hosts gave me a map conventionally oriented (north on top) but the only way I could actually orient myself on it was to hold it upside down.
@Mithical I'd tend to agree with Tsundoku - surely there's at least one high-profile murder trial going on somewhere in the world at almost any given time? - but I'm a bit too ill-informed about the news/politics of that particular country to have much of an opinion about it.
I admit it actually looks like we were trying to capitalise on a controversial news case by drawing publicity to ourselves with a topical question on that very day. That's not what happened, but 'twould've been in poor taste if it was.
Maybe we can re-post that same tweet later, at a better time. It's still a good Q&A, and will still be there later.
It wasn't just the fact that it was a high-profile murder trial. It was the fact that it was specifically a racialized murder trial where the white guy murders someone and the justice system is rigged in a way that leads to the assumption that he will get off scot-free
I am wondering what "ladies" means in the following sentences:
‘The first part,’ Angus says, ‘is: “Do brave deeds and endure”, which
was the school motto. The second part was added in by us boys: “If I
can’t move heaven, then I shall raise hell.” It used to get chanted
before rugby matches.’
‘An...
I am wondering what "Had enough in there?" means in the following sentences:
I push into the drawing room next door and as I walk through I stop
short in shock. A figure’s sitting there on the sofa, in the gloom.
After a moment I recognise it to be Olivia. ‘Oh, hey there,’ I say.
She looks up. H...
I am wondering what "Can’t think of the last time I did that." means in the following sentences:
‘Actually,’ I say, ‘I’m not all that tired. And I don’t have to get up
early tomorrow morning to deal with two crazy kids. There’s some wine
in our room – I could go and grab it.’
She gives a small s...
I am wondering what "he wasn’t very subtle about" means in the following sentences:
Hannah speaks first. ‘Olivia.’
The cave replies in a whisper: Olivia, Olivia, Olivia.
‘God,’ Hannah says, ‘that echo. Did your ex . . . did he do anything
to you? Someone I know—’ She stops, starts again, ‘my sis...
I am wondering what "show Callum what he was missing" means in the following sentences:
‘I was on my phone,’ I say, ‘and I could see that Callum was with
Ellie. She’d shared all these pics on Snapchat. There was one of her
sitting on his lap. And then another one of her kissing him, while she
he...
@Tsundoku I am a literary scholar from São Paulo, Brazil. I live and work in the United States, where I currently am Assistant Professor of English at the University of Florida.
literature.meta.stackexchange.com/a/1566/139 @Tsundoku I wonder which one of these would apply to Rejtő Jenő. Not that I want to ask questions about his books, he's just not my style.
@b_jonas Based on the Engiish Wikipedia article, it is a bit difficult to say. Are the books he published under the pseudonym P. Howard now republished under that pseudonym or as Jenő Rejtő?
Yeah, his book are filed under Rejtő Jenő (1905–1943) now, but then library catalogs tend to do that so as to normalize books with different spellings of the author, and show the displayed author in another field.
But there are a ton of different editions now because the copyright protection period expired.
Heck, old editions of Jules Verne books from the early 1900s used the displayed name "Verne Gyula", and I recall that confused me when I was young, there apparently being two Vernes.
That's not really related to Rejtő's case, I was just musing aloud.
Matthew 25:21 (NIV):
His master replied, "Well done, good and faithful servant! You have been faithful with a few things; I will put you in charge of many things. Come and share your master's happiness!"
From Atlas Shrugged,
"That's not all," said Danagger. "There's something you'd want to hea...
This passage is from The Children's Bach by Helen Garner
‘Once upon a time,’ said Philip. ‘There was a wonderful cafe. It opened
very early in the morning.
No. It stayed open twenty-four hours. It never closed. They never turned
off the machine. That’s why the coffee was perfect.’
It was easy. H...