English Language & Usage: Multi-Layered Discourse Room - 2020-04-08

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2:22 AM

Is the term covering letter used only for job applications, or not? Can I use this term to describe a letter that is included with a bundle of documentation for registration of a medicinal product? This documentation is submitted to a country's health authority which decides whether to issue a marketing authorization for a drug.

4 hours later…

6:31 AM

@CowperKettle Yes, it can apply to any batch of documents (or a single document), and you can call it just a cover letter.

1 hour later…

8:00 AM

@RegDwigнt I'm floored.

@Cerberus Well, there lies a huge potential. You need to learn a lesson or two from Nepal on how to monetize your lofty wonderlands.

8:33 AM

But make sure to hire local Sherpas from the Himalayas

Everest Sherpas: 'They're not heroes. They're rockstars'

Cause they have literally evolved to do well at high altitudes

Real life X-men: Biology of the world's greatest climbers - the Sherpa

> On the contents of a registration dossier, in view of an amendment to the Rules for Registration and Expert Evaluation of Medicinal Products for Human Use adopted by Decision No. 78 of 03 November 2016 of the Council of the Eurasian Economic Commission

Is this okay, or should I move the numbers to the end?

> On the contents of a registration dossier, in view of an amendment to the Rules for Registration and Expert Evaluation of Medicinal Products for Human Use adopted by Decision of the Council of the Eurasian Economic Commission No. 78 of 03 November 2016

9:18 AM

user image

Matt E. Эллен

😂

10:20 AM

First time I see an actual emoji here.

I thought we were an anti-emoji group.

I'm ... kinda disappointed.

Matt E. Эллен

I'm promoji

I don't follow the herd

unless the herd is also promoji

That's a bold statement.

I prefer italic.

@Gigili We use Unicode characters

(╯°□°）╯︵ ┻━┻

┬─┬ノ( º _ ºノ)

Also it's probably the only thing in the world that confuses @Cerb, so it's a useful weapon

That's another bold statement.

That's it. I'm getting the pitchforks...

Matt E. Эллен

⋔

that's not a great looking pitchfork

10:32 AM

Yeah, but it'll do.

On a unrelated note, John Prine passed away.

10:49 AM

RIP

@MattE.Эллен careful now. Just as easily as you were promojied, you can be demojied again.

Matt E. Эллен

that would be demojivational

11:32 AM

I've always thought my humbleness is one of the things that makes me so awesome.

3

2 hours later…

1:30 PM

@Gigili Indeed, you are possibly the most modest person in the world. You could put it on your résumé.

did you see the buccaneers are returning to their 2002 superbowl jerseys?

@skullpatrol No, I didn't. I think that's probably all the Super Bowl trimmings they'll see this season.

In fact, nobody might see any this year. There might not be a season.

In which Tom Brady gets $26 million for grinning and showing up for photo shoots.

yup

Why did I never get a job like that? Nobody cared if I grinned, and there were never any photo shoots, except when I worked for a place that had an "Our Team" section on its website.

And nobody paid me anywhere close to $26 million.

1 hour later…

2:37 PM

@Gigili: A snarky way to say that: You're very humble, and you have a lot to be humble about.

@CowperKettle It's called a cover letter ... not a covering letter. At least in the US.

When "trickle-down economics" finally begins to benefit me, the revolution will have arrived and I'll be among the first to face a firing squad.

3:30 PM

A revolution born of firing squads will be an ill-begotten revolution.

3:53 PM

@Færd Which is what they all are.

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1 hour later…

5:05 PM

> This is the new void, created in the long-forgotten shadow of the old void. We will slowly build this world into something new and beautiful.

Okay, MuseScore, I give up.

I'm not too drunk enough to even parse that.

@Robusto isn't it nice to be a Commie.

No snark. Actual Commie here genuinely wondering.

Watched this last night:

OAN: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver (HBO)

Jesus Christ. And there I was thinking watching Fox News 25/8 was the most pain I could possibly endure.

I don't know why, but in the last five days or so I've kept thinking back to watching Idiocracy.

Yeah, I know, that old dud.

It wasn't particularly well-made, and it wasn't particularly funny.

But we'd look past it. We'd be haha and hoho so funny, look at this, isn't this true.

Well fuck me, it is true. And still not funny. Except now there's no looking past it anymore.

Last night on MuseScore, someone asked, "should evolution be taught in schools". I posted the harshest, meanest, fuckest-youest reply I have ever posted on the Internet.

Never read the replies.

Of course there were replies. Never read them.

The world is not going to shit, no. But some parts of it have clearly completed the journey.

6:14 PM

@Robusto I wouldn't go that far, but thanks!

@Robusto Ha! I like your version better.

Ugh, I hate resumes and cover letters.

7:09 PM

@RegDwigнt link or it didn't happen

Well damn. Bernie Sanders is out. Now it's over. RIP USA.

@Mitch musescore.com/groups/the-debate-group/discuss/5057690

@Færd The French Revolution killed lots of people, but quite a lot of that revolution is well-revered.

Ask and you shall receive.

@Mitch are you saying we will well-revere Trump?

I'm not disagreeing. Just checking.

@RegDwigнt That's impressively consistent... support for both ID -and- creationism. Are these all kids on there?

@RegDwigнt I'm not getting the analogy.

@Mitch average age is 15. Average. Age. Is. 15.

Lots of people are 9.

Apr 3 at 16:23, by RegDwigнt

And no, I'm not even joking. There's a "guess my age game" thread.

7:22 PM

Are you suggesting Trump is... Robespierre? Napoleon?

@RegDwigнt Oh.

It's understandable that they're idiots.

@Mitch you'll get the analogy in due time. That time will be way too late, tho.

especially if they're into music

snap

@Mitch Idiots don't grow on trees. You have to be raised by idiots to become an idiot. And you will raise more idiots still.

It's a give-and-take kind of situation.

7:35 PM

@RegDwigнt Robespierre then?

@Mitch we'll see about the part about dying in his bathtub.

Or was that Marat? I don't really care that much.

Robespierre was guillotined in the Thermidorian Reaction. And Han Solo made the Kessel run in 12 parsecs.

What the hell are those kids talking about evolution for -on MuseScore-?

@Mitch here's a tasty dessert for you:

musescore.com/groups/the-debate-group/discuss/5058006

Shouldn't they be worried about the onslaught of the dreaded I-V-VI-IV progression?

When you hit that sweet IV is when the devil swallows your soul.

@Mitch I'm sorry, what is IV? I'm on MuseScore, remember.

Is it like HIV but minus the age?

7:58 PM

@Mitch I doubt if it were revered as well by today's standards if it happened in our time.

I may have overgeneralized a bit.

8:09 PM

@Færd Well yeah.

It's not like I'm trying to defend executions.

I understand. I guess I'm frustrated with revolution being hijacked by its most extremist forces.

Which is very likely to happen when things get violent.

8:31 PM

A revolution is almost by definition already extreme.

Yeah but it can happen peacefully under a robust democratic system that effectively responds to the will of the public without bursting at its seams.

In principle.

@Færd well, the French Revolution wasn't universally revered in its day.

Which is why I'm saying, give Trump a couple decades and he'll be revered alright.

That cracked me up.

He'll get the nicest state funeral imaginable, with a million people lined up along the streets and genuinely weeping tears of sorrow.

Look what happened to that fucking arsehole Reagan.

No history book mentions him as "fucking arsehole". You can go and check, if you don't believe me.

You may be right, but that's not the kind of reverence I'm talking about.

@RegDwigнt Some do, in a cloaked way.

8:40 PM

History doesn't care about what kind of reverence you're talking about. History only cares about the kind of reverence put on display by a million people lined up in the streets and weeping.

A hundred years from now, all US school books will mention both Bushes alongside the founding fathers.

If the US still exists then, of course.

There are many serious historians who don't pay homage to public opinion.

If it doesn't, they'll just mention Taylor Swift instead.

@Færd yeah, but how much homage is the public opinion paying to serious historians?

Like, how many serious historians can the public opinion even name?

Quick, name fifty. Right now.

I donno. That's beside the point.

I wasn't talking about the opinion of anybody.

Yes, sure. Beside yours. Not quite beside mine, though.

Okay.

8:43 PM

@Færd history is written by winners.

That's true, to a large extent.

Trump is a winner. Bernie Sanders is not.

What if a campaign shifts the ground underneath the establishment parties and loses and gets forgotten?

The real effects on policies may endure.

All I'm saying is, it's all nice and games for us being smart and critical in this room here, but for as long as they haven't replaced the evening news with a live transcript of this room, you shouldn't be holding your breath.

Oh god forbid.

8:46 PM

Why, we could post some J-pop videos. That would be nice.

Sheena Ringo - La Salle De Bain

I'm not confident in my punditry and TV hosting talents.

It's good that you are.

Yes, many decades of practice.

The Internet grew up with me. And not the other way round.

In chat rooms?

Back when I studied maths thirty years ago, we would gather late at night in chat rooms and chat with people all over the world. Over IRC.

White text on black screen. On a screen with a resolution of a very poorly printed post stamp.

Hmm. I first chatted online on Yahoo, I believe.

8:50 PM

This video of Shiina that I just linked, people would get that one off some obscure forum, some alt.comp group, as a low-res AVI, then burn it onto SVCDs, and pass it around for me to watch.

Maybe 17 years ago.

@Færd Yahoo was 10 years in the future, like.

We've come a long way.

And here we are.

Some people haven't.

Strike that, make it "most".

And frankly, I myself would rather have IRC than Facebook.

@RegDwigнt Yeah. Move over for OAN, a news outlet for people who think Fox News is too nice.

8:52 PM

You would chat to some stranger from Spain, telling them that you lived a couple miles away from the French border. In Spanish. Of which you'd only knew like three words. Donde, esta, and zapateria.

It was fucking awesome.

@RegDwigнt They were 10 years into the present. Then Google came along and ate their lunch.

Nov 5 '19 at 17:44, by RegDwigнt

I remember the very first time I used Google. I remember exactly who first mentioned the word to me, and where we were at the time.

@RegDwigнt Reminds me of Q-Basic's interface.

It was the same guy from whom I heard the word "Gigabyte" for the first time.

And I was like WHOA.

@RegDwigнt Oh me too. But Google had launched long before I guess.

8:54 PM

Virginia Slims cigarettes TV commercial (1968)

I remember when you had to get an invitation from a Gmail user to be able to sign up yourself.

Those were the good old days, yeah?

@Robusto I remember when people on TV would drink vodka and smoke.

Kinski - Talk 1977 Teil 1 von 4

Klaus Kinski, b'god. Nosferatu!

@Robusto I'm not any more miserable today. Maybe a bit happier.

So, depends.

8:59 PM

@RegDwigнt He smoked Marlboros? Dafuq?

I remember when you had to connect resistors and transistors to generate a single letter on LEDs

@Robusto his TV interviews were like legendary. His Wutausbrüche.

An uncontained volcano, live on national TV. Smoking.

@Mitch I remember when you had to write your own word processing program if you wanted word processing.

@Robusto Funny. Freud's nephew was behind the smoking advertisement campaign.

@RegDwigнt He had a short fuse?

9:01 PM

@Mitch I remember programming Für Elise into the school computer in Turbo Pascal 5.5.

Torches of Freedom

"Torches of Freedom" was a phrase used to encourage women's smoking by exploiting women's aspirations for a better life during the early twentieth century first-wave feminism in the United States. Cigarettes were described as symbols of emancipation and equality with men. The term was first used by psychoanalyst A. A. Brill when describing the natural desire for women to smoke and was used by Edward Bernays to encourage women to smoke in public despite social taboos. Bernays hired women to march while smoking their "torches of freedom" in the Easter Sunday Parade of 1929, which was a significant...

@Robusto do you know Klaus Kinski?

(Serious question. If you don't, you're missing out big time.)

@RegDwigнt Only from films.

Well fuck. You are missing out big time.

I remember sending messages via smoke signals with a binary error-correcting Goppa code based on the method of scheduling round robin tournaments for the Finnish football league.

9:02 PM

I can't be everywhere all at once.

I can't win this ageist "I remember" game.

Klaus Kinski - Wutausbruch am Filmset von 'Fitzcarraldo'

@Færd This is the only ageist game us old-timers can win, sonny.

I'll let you enjoy it then.

Yeah, this is our lawn.

9:04 PM

Any lawn is a crow's lawn.

That's Werner Herzog's voice in the off, if I'm not horribly mistaken.

Fucking hilarious.

@RegDwigнt Holy fuck.

Like Sir Richard Attenborough whispering to us, "the wild antelope is a frail and brittle creature".

@Robusto that's not even the worst one. Just the easiest to google. Also, that's on a film set. Of a film whose production was rather notorious for being a complete catastrophe on every level.

But he was just like that in actual TV shows.

Where people would ask him innocuous questions, like "how are you today". And then he'd explode just like this, only ten times worse.

All the while everyone was wearing suits and smoking.

Fucking A.

@RegDwigнt Yeah. And the guy he's berating finally tells him to go eat the shit he's been talking (or something to that effect, it went too fast for me). I'm surprised the rest of the crew didn't applaud.

What you need to know about Kinski, in a nutshell, is that he spent like decades of his life like Dostoyevski. In a cold moist cellar with a candle, hoping to make a couple cents in the next month if not the next week.

A true breadless artist in every sense of every cliché.

9:11 PM

I wonder if Kinski knew any words that weren't offensive.

That forms your character alright.

@Robusto he did, but it was quite an art to get them out of him.

But when he did deliver them, boy did he deliver them.

Scheissegal is a new one for me.

Haha, that's exceptionally common.

Scheiß- is a very productive prefix.

Takes any word at all.

Maybe I just forgot it, or the people I was around were too polite.

Scheißhöflich, you mean.

It's basically the direct equivalent of fucking.

Scheiß-Reg, Scheiß-Rob. Scheiß-Merkel. Scheiß-Putin.

9:14 PM

I remember seeing Fitzcarraldo and wondering what the big deal was.

Yeah they didn't have making ofs back then.

Well, it was a movie about an auteur who drove everyone around him to their deaths. Kinda like real life for Kinski, I see now.

Absolutely.

Klaus Kinski Wutausbrüche - Best of Mix 2014

Completely uncontrollable.

A force of nature to put it politely.

Which he never would, of course.

9:34 PM

@Færd I remember when we used to play the remember game against old people and win.

@RegDwigнt No, I can see that.

24 mins ago, by Robusto

I wonder if Kinski knew any words that weren't offensive.

A few years back I watched the movie about the that crazy kid who went to Alaska to commune with the bears and he sorta did until one of the bears ate him. While the girl friend watched. Later on the bear ate her too.

The point is, besides all the eating of people, is that Herzog narrated it and so whenever I hear is voice for anything else it feels sorta creepy.

The whole Tiger King series had that vibe. But it wasn't narrated by Herzog.

Maybe if it were narrated by Tom Hanks we'd all be entertained by it even more.

Both the caged tigers show and the bears eating peoples show.

Life is like a box of chocolates?

@skullpatrol To a polar bear, life is like one of those igloos, crunchy on the outside, chewy surprise in the center.

9:53 PM

iirc, rob was chased by a grizzly bear

@Mitch I haven't watched that one yet. Not sure that I'd want to.

I saw the key scene on YouTube. Where he shows the video to that woman. The audience can't see it, and neither can Herzog. And that's what makes it all the more poignant.

He's a great master.

The Inner Chronicle of What We Are – Understanding Werner Herzog

Watch this some time. It's 40 minutes, but it's worth it.

Jul 10 '17 at 14:44, by Robusto

Getting back to bear attacks:

Back in my youth I went on a lengthy hike in Jasper National Park in Canada. The ranger who set us up gave us the warning about bears. He handed us cans of pepper spray and little bells to put on our packs, which would alert bears in the area to our presence.
He also told us we needed to be alert to bear sign.
What's bear sign? we asked
Mostly be aware of bear scat in the area. Meaning bear shit.
You have to be able to tell the difference between black bear scat and grizzly bear scat.

@Mitch Tom Hanks is a disgusting bigot that's never made a good movie in his life, except Joe and the Volcano and Forrest Gump, and nobody will even agree with me on the latter.

OK, what's black bear scat look like?
It's full of berries and nutshells and things like that, he told us.
Uh-huh, and grizzly scat?
He grinned and said, You'll find grizzly scat to be full of pepper spray and these little bells.

I used to have some respect for Hanks, and his Instagram account is quite wonderful. But he totally lost me for good when I saw his reaction to Ricky Gervais at the most recent Golden Globes.

There's no recovering from that, I'm afraid.

In the land of the Sandlers, the one-eyed Hanks is king.

10:33 PM

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11:10 PM

0

Q: am/is/are or none

Why is the following sentence right (if it is)? Car in the garage. I thought it's better to write 'Car is in the garage' similar to 'I'm in the garage', but I hear sentences like this too often, so I feel like I have to ask. Thank you in advance.

> I hear sentences like this too often.

Where do people even live.

Sounds like Mars to me...

11:34 PM

Right, why is YouTube recommending this to me now:

I AM NOT JESSICA CHASTAIN (Bryce Dallas Howard)

Is it because I can't stand Ms Chastain? How would they even know?

I never told anyone.

Oh and the video is actually quite okay.

Maybe I should arrange that for the castagnets and the jet engine. @Mitch would never even notice.

11:48 PM

RIP John Prine.

John Prine - "Your Flag Decal Won't Get You Into Heaven Anymore" (Live)

John Prine - "Souvenirs" - Live from Sessions at West 54th

His wife got corona, he stayed by her side and got infected. She recovered. He did not.

Hi!

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