The Reading Room

6:42 AM

@bobble That's a good general question, maybe worth bringing up on meta. My own feeling is towards "Answer but leave that part out". Better than answering something in a way that you aren't sure about or may not be good, and no reason to stop you from answering the parts that you can answer well. Maybe someone else will come along and post a separate answer to the final part.

@bobble The SFF answer isn't really a One Correct Answer (as it might be in other situations where there really would be nothing we could add); it's basically a "we don't know" followed by some informed speculation. Maybe someone else can come up with some different ideas for the informed speculation part, or different evidence for "we don't know". Sometimes just copy-pasting from a cross-site dupe is the best we can do, but I feel like this answer isn't one of those cases.

I'm sure @Alex can come up with some weird theories :-)

7:32 AM

@Tsundoku My point is, the principle is the same for any public observance. But we're talking at cross-purposes.

@Tsundoku Has that date been adjusted for the Gregorian calendar?

@Bookworm Someone should have directed the asker to Writing SE if it is a self-written poem. Sadly, I didn't see the comments here and on the question until too late. Sigh.

oh nvm, apparently writing SE doesn't do critiques of self-authored works either

@Tsundoku Yes, you should. I'm a fan of vegetarianism and so is Randolph.

@Tsundoku Is that a Monty Python reference?

@Randal'Thor They seem uncertain about who said it. They're quite certain it's not Shaw.

@bobble Thanks! But I've not read Atlas Shrugged and have no desire to; objectivism/libertarianism is basically fantasy, which isn't my thing. It's possible that Dannager is an employee of Galt's who did some great work or something, and that there's therefore actually a Biblical parallel intended. Without reading the work, it's hard to say.

@bobble Gallifreyan is wrong, IMO. There's no good reason to leave that question open.

@Tsundoku I think English grammar isn't taught any more in the US, and learning foreign languages is uncommon. When learning a new language, US learners often struggle because they don't even have the terminology to understand the grammar of the new language. So you tell them "puella" is nominative and "puellae" is genitive, and then you have to explain what cases are, because they have no idea.

@Tsundoku It's just so bizarre the way languages are taught in India; you learn how to read and write a language, and its grammar, but they don't even teach you basic conversational skills. I've had seven years of French, and I can't speak it at all. I can read it pretty easily. Conversely, any Indian language I speak, I have picked up conversationally, not from having studied it in school.

@bobble Do you mean you attended school in some place where Cantonese was the medium of instruction? Or that you spent time in a Cantonese immersion school in the US?

8:11 AM

@verbose That sounds strange.

Oh it was. And is. The thing is, most high-stakes exams in India are public. That is to say, you're taught at your school by your teachers; but the examinations are conducted by a board of education. Your own teachers don't set the questions, nor do they grade your answers. So I guess it's just impractical logistically to conduct conversational exams of hundreds of students?

@verbose While many first-world countries have the problem of not really being able to grasp the nature of life in very different countries, I get the impression that the US has it more than most, maybe due to having almost no neighbouring countries.

I mean, Britain has its fair share of ignorant Britocentric people and even xenophobes, but at least we're all aware that there's other countries right next door with different languages and cultures, and many of us have at least visited some of them.

How many people in the US have never even been outside the country?

About 42% of US citizens have a passport. But I imagine about half of those in turn use their passports to cross over into Mexico or Canada.

And of those two, Canada doesn't really count. I love Canada (hell, I was married to a Canadian until the bastard died on me) and appreciate its differences from the US, but Canadians (rightly) complain that US folks don't actually understand that Canada is a different country.

Does anyone, except Canadians and better-informed USicans, understand that Canada is a different country? :-)

It's actually very difficult to travel abroad if you live in (say) Kansas. The distances involved are so great.

It's super expensive. I mean, from London you can buy a £30 ticket on RyanAir and find yourself in Barcelona. It costs ten times that to get to Europe from the US.

And those are the cheap tickets.

When I lived in Indiana, it was too expensive for me even to fly to California.

@Randal'Thor Fair point.

(And yes, I lived in India and then in Indiana, and yes, you're the first person who's ever made the obvious jokes about that, how clever of you!)

8:30 AM

@verbose Unless you get picked up by a tornado and taken to Australia.

@Randal'Thor There is that.

When I visited Sydney, I did look around me and say, wonderingly, "Toto, I don't think we're in Kansas any more." Sadly, my host didn't get the reference.

@verbose You visited Sir Philip? So that's why you're such a fan.

His name is spelt Sidney, sadly. But there is a town of that name on Vancouver Island, and I've been there.

Actually I was in Auckland for about a month, and my pal Paul (who lives in Perth) made a deal with me; he said he'd fly from Perth to Sydney if I'd fly from Auckland to Sydney. I realized he was actually flying the greater distance, so I said yes. (Besides, Paul is a wonderful man and seeing him was incentive enough.)

Oh on another note, Randolph and @b_jonas, I'm taking a math class for the first time in literally decades.

Perth is in Scotland, so that's a much greater distance :-)

ha

Funnily enough, Paul is Scottish.

8:42 AM

I spent some time in Perth many years ago.

In Australia, just Sydney airport.

Well, he's a bit of a mutt. His dad is Scots, his mother is Brazilian but of Japanese heritage, his wife is Malaysian, and he lives in Perth with his wife and daughter.

@verbose Should've gone to the South Island of New Zealand then. I hear that's the Scotland of the southern hemisphere.

@Randal'Thor I thought (mistakenly) that I couldn't afford it.

I meant he should've, being a Scot.

oh, ah.

My host in Sydney was a Kiwi, oddly enough. And my host in Auckland was from Newcastle-on-Tyne and spoke eloquent Geordie. I could barely understand him.

So like the first night in Auckland, I say to him: "Where do I get a transit card? You know, like the Opal card in Sydney, that allows me to ride the buses and trains?"

And he said, "Oh yes, they're called the Op card here."

Puzzled, I said, "Op card?" and he said, yes, op card.

I said, "O-P, op?" And he looked at me like I was an idiot and said, "Haitch oh pee, 'op"

ANYway the story is that my husband, his maternal uncle, and my father-in-law all died in a three-month span between September and December of 2017. Then my mother-in-law (who had just lost a son, a brother, and a husband) was in the hospital with pneumonia. Then her condo got flooded because a drainpipe burst during a freak thunderstorm, so she had to live in a hotel for several months while the damage was being repaired. Net result, I spent several months in Vancouver in late 2017 – early 2018

To recover from all that, I decided I needed to go some place far away where I didn't know anybody and where I could speak the language. That meant either Fiji (where Hindi is commonly spoken) or New Zealand. I guess I could have gone to Guyana as well, but that didn't occur to me at the time.

So I went to NZ, but I had no idea what my financial situation was going to be like after my husband died. My sister paid for my plane ticket as a gift. So I just spent my days walking around Auckland, which is spectacularly beautiful so it was a good thing to do.

I did spend a couple of days at a place called Rotorua, because it's a center of Maori culture and it seemed silly to go all the way to NZ and just hang out in Auckland where the Maori culture isn't as front and center.

And as I said, I did go to Sydney.

But like an idiot I never made it to the South Island, because I thought I was spending too much money already. That was dumb, because as it turns out I could have afforded it, I just didn't know that.

8:59 AM

@verbose Damn, that's a lot of shit to happen at once :-(

TIL that Hindi is commonly spoken in Fiji.

I could also have gone to Bangladesh, but that would have been too close to home.

@Randal'Thor Well, the deaths weren't a surprise; all of them had been terminally ill for at least a year. When it became clear they were all going to die within the next couple months, my mother-in-law and I started a betting pool to see what the order would be.

If you ever go back to NZ, check out Dunedin. It's "the Edinburgh of the south" (literally, nearly everything in the city is named after something in Edinburgh), beautiful small city laid out like an octagon, got the world's steepest street as it's nestled in an extinct volcano, and within spitting distance of the Otago peninsula where you can go and see nesting albatross and penguins at close range.

@Randal'Thor That is actually a great conundrum. I really loved NZ, and would like to visit the South Island. (And even Dunedin is "the town of Edin" as in Edinburgh, yes? Since Paul's from Edinburgh, he should definitely visit if he hasn't already)

@verbose Finding some humour in that situation is quite the feat.

On the other hand, I've never been to Europe (unless you count changing planes in Frankfurt) or Latin America (not even Mexico, and I live in fucking California, so I have no excuse)

9:05 AM

@verbose Yes, Dunedin is the Scots Gaelic name for Edinburgh. The NZ Dunedin also has a Princes Street, a George Street, a Water of Leith, etc. etc.

So the question is, do I go back to NZ or do I see parts of the world I've yet to see

Oh, I guess from western North America you took the Pacific route to NZ?

and I think it's stupid for me to revisit NZ (or Singapore, another country I enjoyed visiting); when I have spent so much time and energy on Philip Sidney, I should go to England and Flanders

@Randal'Thor yup.

@Randal'Thor Hah. Well, when my husband was released from his last visit to the hospital into home hospice, we had to have an ambulance get him home. But he was cold and needed a blanket to be warm. When the ambulance guys came to transport him, they said, sir, we need to take the blanket off you to put you on the gurney, but we'll cover you once we get you settled.

They got him settled, then one of them said to the other, "Cover this guy with that sheet, will ya?"

And I said, "Isn't that a bit premature?"

They gaped and after an awkward silence one of them finally laughed and said, "Not going to reply to that one."

Either you laugh or you cry. The whole situation was absurd.

Are you a Scotsman, Randolph?

Wordplay and gallows humour. No wonder we get along together.

And vegetarianism

9:11 AM

@verbose I wouldn't describe myself as that. Let's say I'm a Brit who's moved around a lot.

@Randal'Thor k

Also, here's the gallows humor document I created when Zephyr was dying

@verbose Not sure whether to laugh or wince awkwardly.

Or point out that there's a tense inconsistency between the first and fourth items.

@Randal'Thor What inconsistency? The hospice provided a hospital bed at home. That is, one of those beds where you can raise the head or the foot of the bed by pressing various buttons, and that have a railing that can be raised to prevent falls from out of the bed.

@Randal'Thor Laugh. I did. The whole thing was just so absurd, there was nothing else to do. I saved my crying for until after he died.

@verbose Tense inconsistency. Past in the first bullet point, present in the fourth.

@Randal'Thor Oh, ah.

9:23 AM

@verbose Wikipedia doesn't say whether that day was converted, so it is possible that it wasn't.

@verbose Well, yes. Is Monty Python too old now for allusions?

Q: What does "Sensible plans of action clicked their wooden sides together without meaning," mean?

@Tsundoku No, not at all, I just wasn't sure.

Bookworm

0

This passage is from The Children's Bach by Helen Garner In the huge room beyond the partition the phone rang and she heard Elizabeth pick it up. Before the caller had a chance to speak, Elizabeth said in a slow, low, very distinct voice, ‘Don’t ever ring this number at this hour, ever again. Is...

11:58 AM

twitter.com/JuliusGoat/status/1386974117652541442?s=20

@Randal'Thor Well I'm also ignorant of the education system everywhere else. We have neighboring countries and I've visited some of Europe, but I don't interact with education there.

Alex

12:39 PM

@Randal'Thor As good ol’ Dumbledore says, I have many theories, each as unlikely as the next.

12:54 PM

"We read, ulitimately, in the shadow of mortality. And I think it does matter immensely what you read and how you read it." (Harold Bloom, who is obviously right about this.)

@verbose And Facebook is Cthulhu redux?

1:54 PM

@verbose They taught Cantonese in English. We would get (20-ish) word lists for that week's lesson and have to memorize all of them, characters and sound, then every so often there would be a test.

At some of the higher levels I think it was more immersive, but the most immersion that occurred at my level was being required to ask for the bathroom in Cantonese and but English.

If we were taught how to make our own sentences, I remember not one whit of it

@Randal'Thor advantage of being born to immigrant families (I'm second-generation on one side and forth-generation on the other) I've always known that there's a much wider world than 'murica, and something about life there :)

@Randal'Thor would deleting that part of the answer be a remedy for now?

@bobble *instead of English. Wow, autocorrect

2:29 PM

I noticed @bobble has overtaken one of our long-time experts andejons in rep. Congrats!

rustles up a bounty for andejons :-P

ooh, and I'm close to passing Ahmed

I'm #5 in the yearly rep league, which seems strange to me as I don't think I post that often

Seeing Spagirl below me was a surprise

Mithical

@bobble It's not like it's a huge site :P You don't need to post a ton to be in the leagues. (It is an achievement, though!)

@bobble Sure, I suppose so.

I also feel vaguely that more could be said about "a clumsy act of duty", but can't quite articulate anything specific.

I removed my analysis and just left the bit where I say their interpretation of the meaning is correct

@bobble Yes, but you and him will probably be close for a while, as he's actively posting too. andejons is pretty much dormant these days.

2:35 PM

makes me a bit sad, since I don't like having such a short confirmation as an answer - I always want to add something

Spagirl has a higher rep/post ratio than me: ~67 vs ~61. Guess I need to hit some more HNQs :)

And now you're above Ahmed Samir :-)

@Randal'Thor I can see about a meta post there; the tag-FAQ I was sorta hoping that Tsundoku's answers reflecting current tagging consensus would get voted to the top so I could link them more convincingly

o\ leaving for a bit

Bookworm

5:36 PM

0

Q: Why is this a great poem?

They fuck you up, your mum and dad. They may not mean to, but they do. They fill you with the faults they had And add some extra, just for you. This Be The Verse [Philip Larkin] If I attempted something of that sort (starting a poem with the F-word) I'm sure I would be basted. I sometimes...

poetry

5:52 PM

If anybody feels the need to binge watch Harold Bloom: scroll down to "Interview and Lectures" on this Harold Bloom page. More videos to come!

Q: What fueled the street lights in 13th-century Cordoba?

36

Córdoba, Spain is often said to have had street lights in its Muslim period, which ended in 1236. How did those street lights work? In Lawrence of Arabia, Prince Faisal was dramatized as having said to Lawrence: "You know, Lieutenant, in the Arab city of Córdoba were two miles of public lighting ...

technology spain islamic-history

^ another question that could've been an interesting historical-context one here

And TIL that French SE has a littérature tag. I assume @Tsundoku monitors it for anything migrateable to here :-)

Of course ELU is still the most promising migration source just because they close so much stuff.

7:16 PM

6 hours ago, by Tsundoku

"We read, ulitimately, in the shadow of mortality. And I think it does matter immensely what you read and how you read it." (Harold Bloom, who is obviously right about this.)

xkcd.com/971 Frankly, I suspect the book isn't even necessary.

Wow, that is actually glorious!

It's one of the rare good ones from the last decade of xkcds.

Not sure if the biting satire was intended, but fortunately that doesn't actually matter either. ;-)

The biting satire is absolutely intended. I always complain about how hard it is to access books published abroad here, how I often can't find them in libraries, and in the rare case when I order one from abroad it's expensive. Do you think I'll say it doesn't matter what I read after that?

Depends on what is supposed to be starized. But yes, or no.

7:26 PM

@NapoleonWilson Well xkcd satirizes homeopathy. I'm just spouting random stuff without a point.

Ah yes, the hover text makes a bit more sense then. I understood it primarily as driving the "books inspire the imagination" feelgood-narrative ad absurdum.

That's why I thought that likely wasn't Mr. Munroe's intention.

@NapoleonWilson Do you mean xkcd.com/294 ? No wait, that one is also a satire.

pbfcomics.com/comics/book-world then?

9:54 PM

@Randal'Thor I have never seen any literature questions on French SE that got close votes. And if they were in French, they wouldn't be valid here without an English translation.

Spagirl

10:08 PM

@bobble I did take most of January, February and March off ;-)

Congrats on your progress :)

@Spagirl thanks! I'm enjoying myself here :D

(to people in general) I'm not sure what to do with the comments on this answer of mine; I mean, I would recognize the other idioms but they seem a bit tangential because my answer was just about the specific idiom in the question...

I stopped replying, but perhaps my last comment has been misinterpreted as a "request for you to prove to me that there are other idioms" instead of "I am done talking about this, this is not relevant"

@bobble 14111 is probably right that the origin of "like a streak" is a shortened version of "like a streak of lightning", but you don't necessarily have to do anything about the comments.

they're just being mildly annoying pings is all, since I don't want to discourse on the validity or existence of other idioms

considering just deleting my comment

10:35 PM

@bobble If you think the comments are tangential, you can ignore them. When people make comments pointing out aspects that are only tangentially relevant to one of my answers (and even more tangential to the original question), I often ignore them. The commenters often forget about those comments anyway.

Spagirl

11:50 PM

@bobble I commented because I thought it was constructive, adding weight to the view that lightning was related, because I thought you might want to edit something into your answer. But as you are done talking about it :) I've posted an answer including Lightning as I do think its relevant and it would be a shame if reference to it were lost in a comment clean up. The more answers the merrier and all that.