English Language & Usage: Multi-Layered Discourse Room - 2020-08-11

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2:49 AM

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I don't understand the punch box.

8 hours later…

11:01 AM

Word of the day: dimer of dimers

1 hour later…

12:08 PM

@CowperKettle He just thinks she's mentally impaired because she's not teaching noun genders. Not a particularly funny Calvin & Hobbes.

Is that really the joke? Rather...far fetched.

I said it wasn't very funny.

That's what I originally thought

The humor lies, I suppose, in his own misapprehension and confusion, which he feels must be her problem, not his.

Then I wondered if it could be that she gave Calvin a book from a language with noun genders and now he's mistakes normal words in, say, German as drug names

Again, far-fetched

12:11 PM

That involves information not available in the comic strip.

So no.

12:53 PM

Yeah, if that's all it is, it's pretty bad.

Well, it's part of the Calvin & Hobbes shtick. He imagines things that are weird and then gets exercised over them.

Mafalda did somewhat similar things sometimes.

Nov 9 '15 at 0:37, by Robusto

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But it can be hard to understand humor in another language.

Especially if that language is Japanese. I swear, I used to read manga and watch Japanese TV and so very often I would be dumbstruck by what was supposed to be really funny.

STILL, most of the comic strips you see aren't really funny even in your native language. So there's that.

1:13 PM

When you speak of a dimer-of-dimers, are you here talking about...

1. The peripatetic leader of the March of Dimes, that king of all nicklers and dimers everywhere?
2. Tetramerous flowers allying to ones whose own whorls are merely dimerous?
3. Verse with two-foot lines like the dactylic dimeters of higgledy-piggledies?
4. Tetramerous assemblies of doubled dimers in ionotropic glutamate receptors?
5. Dimercaptopropanol?

1:23 PM

@CowperKettle My understanding was that in the first two panels, Calvin is being exasperating. Then in the third panel, he comments on medication interaction problems. The inference to draw is that she is taking some pills right in front of them, presumably because Calvin's questioning is so annoying.

As others have said, this is a bit stretched, multiple unsaid cultural expectations. And taking multiple pills at once is funny like falling down a very long flight of stairs is.

@tchrist Receptors. I'm translating parts of an article on mechanisms of depression.

The mTORC1 cascade is horribly complex. Mindboggling complexity in each cell of the body.

@Mitch Ah! Thank you!

1:43 PM

@CowperKettle Or I could be wrong.

@CowperKettle What kind of translation tools do you use? (I mean software that doe grunt work for you, so that you can concentrate on subtleties). Any kind of autotranslate?

2:31 PM

@Mitch SDL Trados Studio

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2:48 PM

Interesting.

3:07 PM

@CowperKettle nice. are you doing translation Ru->En or En-> Ru? Is it mostly scientific papers or do you do... humanities? magazine articles?

4:01 PM

Opera is so nice.

4:21 PM

Why am I being informed by Edwin that my comment would be wrong if I posted it on a completely different question.

I would assume that kind of knowledge to be shared among approximately everyone ever.

@Cerberus ugh. I used Opera for twelve years like, and I pronounced it Opera. Now recently they started running ads on YouTube where they pronounce it opEra.

The actual fuck.

I would immediately stop using it if I were still using it.

That is just unacceptable!

@M.A.R. but how would you know that if you don't have them?

You have no grounds for comparison.

It's like saying "I've never written a symphony, and my life is that much happier".

You don't know that.

@Cerberus It's 2 hours of literal screaming about hackneyed melodrama for rich people.

@Robusto that's rather fascinating. His English is really good, maybe better than mine, yet I have to concentrate really hard to understand everything he's saying. And after a short while it's quite exhausting.

And, like, I never had such problems with agadmator, whose accent is much thicker.

It's like the uncanny valley effect but for speech.

Below a certain threshold, it's always good if you keep getting better. But above it, no amount of improvement will do, only perfection is acceptable.

Really weird.

@RegDwigнt You don't know that he doesn't know that. He can hear everyone else's complaints and be pretty sure.

@Mitch people complain about everything all the time.

Everyone who ever wrote a symphony kept whining what a horrible experience it was. And then killed themselves.

I'm not on Facebook and literally a million people complain that I'm not.

Your point is invalid. How about a nice game of chess.

(Also, don't be on Facebook. It's much preferable that you kill yourself for writing a symphony than for being on Facebook.)

((Also also, I know everything. We discussed.))

4:40 PM

@RegDwigнt Edwin is Edwin...

@RegDwigнt That's crazy and barbaric.

Inorite.

And inorite.

@Mitch Not really rich; people of lesser fortunes can listen to it, too.

@RegDwigнt I rather think it's the sound quality.

Really? I think the sound is perfectly fine.

I've listened to worse.

Remember that I've watched every single video on YouTube. And created some of them.

His piano wasn't even squeaking. Also, he didn't even have a piano.

@Cerberus Sure, like museums, the poors can aspirationally partake, but it's not produced for them.

Nobody can partake in museums anymore.

Corona finally accomplished what communism didn't!

4:46 PM

@RegDwigнt The quality of the sound makes his voice harder to hear.

They should have fully VR'd museums by now.

@Mitch I really don't think opera is produced for rich people.

Égalité, égalité, égalité !

I know tons of poor or non-rich people who watch opera.

@Mitch they should have not voted Trump.

That's the problem with they. They never do what they are supposed to do.

4:47 PM

@RegDwigнt Umm I have visited several musaea since the epidemic began.

After the first month or two, they reopened.

@Cerberus well, I for one watched opera as a kid. When I didn't even have an allowance.

And they were very quiet, which was perfect.

The moment I had any money at all, I forgot opera existed.

@RegDwigнt Exactly.

In the entire Bredius-museum in The Hague, there was only one other visitor when we went there last week.

It's a small museum, but with some great Jan Steens, and drawings by Rembrandt and Rubens, etc.

@Cerberus well it doesn't make any difference because it's a museum. Nobody wants to see it from the inside.

4:49 PM

The large musaea of Amsterdam keep setting visitor records every year (except this year).

The queues are very, very long.

Of course those who already have tickets hardly need to wait at all.

Nonsense. The last two museums I went to in Amsterdam didn't even play Gebroeders Rossig. So I left in disgust and never came back.

I imagine it will be the same for everyone else.

Here the only places that have queues are public swimming pools. You have a higher chance of hearing the Gebroeders there.

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This was the queue when a new exposition opened in the Nieuwe Kerk.

Haha. All these people and none of them have seen a tape measure in their life.

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This was when the Rijksmuseum reopened after construction works.

I guess it's only fair. Either you learn what six feet means in this life, or you get the corona and we put you six feet deep so you remember in your next.

@Cerberus what the fuck is there even to see that you can't see ten days from now, or ten years? It's a museum. It will outlive you, by design.

4:57 PM

@RegDwigнt There are always long queues. On opening days, more people get the idea to visit the musaeum.

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These are ordinary, daily queues for the Anne Frankhuis.

Those are tourists. I thought you hated them?

They have now grown shorter since 1987.

I hate them with all my heart.

But you said nobody wanted to go to a musaeum.

Then stop googling for images of them. You'll get a heart attack.

If you want to see them so much, look out of the window.

I have the curtains closed.

Because of the heat.

My point.

4:59 PM

But, yes, mass tourism has returned.

The city seems unable to control it, without new national laws.

Just sprinkle some corona in strategic places.

Did you hear Putin's daughter has been vaccinated?

I guess you can't hold her back now.

I have heard.

One wonders about the Russian vaccine.

How well does it work?

With testing cut short.

You'll see it soon enough when all the Russian daughters flood your streets looking for your museums.

I think they're not allowed to come here yet.

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+13°С, beautiful weather.

That building with pipes is called Titanic by local people.

5:12 PM

@Cerberus I'm waiting for it to be tested on the proletariat museum goers first.

@Mitch If it will be tested only on tourists, I'm OK with it!

How long does it take for a vaccination to 'work'?

Do you get the shot, you wait a couple beats and then...

PHWOOM

ANTI CORONA SUPER POWER ACTIVATED!

"two weeks"

OK Science, fix that!

The immune system needs some time to 'learn'.

@Cerberus You're very insensitive. Tourists are almost human.

I know some people who have been tourists and the seem OK.

To be honest, I've considered being a tourist, but haha, never actually done it. It seems gross, like what poor people do instead of bathing regularly.

@Mitch Exactly.

Quite honestly, I don't blame (most) tourists personally, but the soco-economic phaenomenon is a huge problem, which governments need to deal with.

And they are trying.

Various European cities have declared that mass tourism is undesirable, and they are trying to fight it actively.

5:22 PM

I mean is their own country so bad that they think the -Netherlands- is better?

It must be Hell, then.

And not in a good way.

haha

Hell was made up by old men to scare people into doing things they want, stupid old men things.

also those old men are ugly

Why not women?

And didn't all men die before their fortieth birthday when Hell was first conceived?

@Cerberus It's exactly the old women they're trying to manipulate. All those old women want to do is lie cheat and steal, and hell is the only way to get the old women to stop.

@Cerberus Oh. Yeah. Well, then, the 35 year old men.

@Cerberus Wait...not the French... because their entire economy is built around tourism. No French person actually eats macarons. Those things are cray expensive and taste like funny sand.

And no one actually -goes- to Germany, not on purpose or at least not for fun. 'Trying to fight it actively' sounds like reverse psychology to get more people in the door.

@Mitch Oh, those. <spits>

@Mitch France has lots of tourism, but also a large economy. It's countries like Greece that should be more worried.

5:57 PM

@RegDwigнt Which is funny, because he has an obviously Russian accent.

6:15 PM

> Teacher: pupils, this was a self-grading test. Now check your answers and grade yourself.
Me and my buddy:

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> Were you ever curious why many women consider men horrible? Let's investigate.

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Nice! 50 km ride

@CowperKettle More like 63 km ^_^

Woulda done more, but it was getting too hot. I really gotta get on the road earlier.

Since this CoViD thing I've been mostly riding by myself, so that slows me down and the sun just gets higher and higher.

6:30 PM

I was invited for a ride recently. Maybe I will go. I think that it's not dangerous to ride outside, provided that I don't shake hands and don't chat too closely to others.

We have a website titled Katushkin.ru

It's a website for organizing bicycle rides.

I've gotten a couple dozen friends throught it.

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This was 3 years ago, after a 2-day ride with tents to lakes in the Chelyabinsk region.

You look worn out. Or were you just resting before the ride?

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@Robusto Resting before getting on the train back home

So you cycled off to go camping?

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Yes, we cycled to a lake, camped there overnight, then to the next lake, camped there, then to the train station to go back home to the Sverdlovsk Region

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There are a lot of lakes in Chelyabinks Oblast. We camped at lake Itkul.

How were the mosquitoes?

6:37 PM

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@Robusto Strangely, there was not a lot of them

Good!

At lake Arakul (above) no mosquitoes, because the was a horrible constant wind from the lake over the mountain ridge on top of which we camped.

We had to haul the bicycles several hundred meters uphill.

I'd rather have wind than mosquitoes.

It was horrible, because my bike weighed maybe about 50 kilograms, with all the water and the tent and the potatoes and other food.

That was the problem with mountain biking in the woods in New England. Mosquitoes, black flies, you name it.

6:39 PM

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@CowperKettle That is a heavy bike.

There was a sudden gulliwasher rain on the way to the second lake, and some good samaritans in a truck picked us up for free.

@CowperKettle "gully washer" ^_^ (Or sometimes "gullywasher" ...)

They were returning from lake Itkul, where they swam, so they threw our bikes into the truck and hauled us maybe 20 km to the village.

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A ridge of stone near lake Arakul. People use to climb there.

A lot of rock climbers train there.

Yeah, rock climbing never held any allure for me.

6:45 PM

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And there are ancient holes made by ancient people on top of the ridge.

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Rock climbers at Devil's Tower, Wyoming. I've seen people doing this and I can't even watch, it just freaks me out.

Nice wall!

My brother used to have some climbing gear, but it was taking too much time.

Devils Tower (also known as Bear Lodge Butte) is a butte, possibly laccolithic, composed of igneous rock in the Bear Lodge Ranger District of the Black Hills, near Hulett and Sundance in Crook County, northeastern Wyoming, above the Belle Fourche River. It rises 1,267 feet (386 m) above the Belle Fourche River, standing 867 feet (265 m) from summit to base. The summit is 5,112 feet (1,559 m) above sea level. Devils Tower was the first United States national monument, established on September 24, 1906, by President Theodore Roosevelt. The monument's boundary encloses an area of 1,347 acres (545...

1260 meters straight up

We have a set of high rocks, called Devil's Town. A lot of local children jump from one rock to the next, and it's about good 30 meters of sheer fall if you are not careful.

Чёртово Городище (гора)

Чёртово Городи́ще — гора и одноимённый скальный массив на её вершине в Свердловской области, Россия. Гора со скалами расположены в 6 км к югу от посёлка Исеть в окрестностях Екатеринбурга. Геоморфологический памятник природы, популярный объект туризма и активного отдыха. Пользуется большой популярностью у скалолазов. == Описание == Гора со всех сторон имеет пологие склоны и полностью покрыта лесом. Скалы находятся на вершине покрытого лесом увала и представляют собой складчатый каменный гребень высотой 20 метров, составленный из отдельных массивных башен, возвышающихся на сложенном из гранитных...

Devil's Town

I took my first long bicycle ride to Devil's Town and back, in 2013.

I'm sure people have fallen from there.

6:48 PM

I thought it was a very long ride, but it was just only about 60 km.

@Robusto I'm sure too

I always wonder what people do halfway up Devil's Tower and they stick their hand in a wasp's nest, or get diarrhea, or what have you.

I thought the same when I saw the photo of Hitler's Nuremberg Rally. What of one soldier out of the 100 000 suddenly wants to go to the toilet ))

Go to the toilet, go to prison.

I've read about Soviet political meetings where people were afraid to stop clapping after some Party speech or other, fearing they might be singled out for not showing sufficient enthusiasm.

Yes, during Stalin's times.

The last political demonstration in the USSR was held by Leon Trotsky and his buddies in the 1920s, after that nobody dared.

It's midnight. Good night!

CYA

7:16 PM

@Mitch You're probably right about that. I saw that before I had any coffee. It's still not well constructed, but maybe better than I thought. Definitely not a laugher, though.

Seriously, when was the last time anybody actually laughed out loud looking at a comic strip in the newspaper?

8:17 PM

@Mitch That does make sense. Still less than excellent, though.

9:07 PM

@Robusto I walk down the street and see blank faces and think omg all those people are inwardly snickering at a New Yorker cartoon that they've only partially understood.

@Mitch New Yorker cartoons have gotten unfunny over the past couple of decades.

Kinda like @CowperKettle's concerns at the Nuremburg Rally

@Robusto I think they have the slowest burn of them all. I snicker at the 'on the internet everyone thinks you're a dog' one, and -every- time some one says "How about Thursday?" I snort audibly "How about never?"

@Mitch "How about never? Is never good for you?" is the one I remember.

I have a fat file of New Yorker cartoons from the '70s through the '90s, but it's in a box somewhere. Those were funny.

> Of course you have good ideas, Rosenberg. But we don't go off and do any old thing just because it happens to be a good idea.

@Robusto the great majority are nose-turn-uppable. Nancy and Sluggo. 'Love is', ugh

Well, they're just not funny.

9:17 PM

@Robusto That one's not that funny but I still snorted a bit.

My all-time favorite was a line of Dutch boys putting their fingers into holes in a dike, with a larger Dutch boy walking down the line, overseeing.

It's not just you. Garfield isn't meant to be funny.

@Robusto People are so enamored of the short stories, but every time 'I think hey people are so enamored of them, maybe I'll read one' and then I read one, I realize why I stop reading them. They're always disturbing. Not in a Twilight Zone way. More like a Black Mirror way but without the scifi part.

@Robusto haha...but it -looks- like it is supposed to be funny

Oh yeag, there are a couple of 'saturday morning' cartoons that look like they're supposed to be funny, and I didn't understand them for a long time, but then I realized, they're not trying to be funny, -at all-.

One is Steven Universe.

The other is...

argh

can't remember

@Mitch I can never seem to work my way through one of those. And then I see one in an anthology and it turns out to be good.

adventure time.

And forget the poems in that magazine. Seriously. Forget them all.

9:22 PM

ugh. giving poetry a bad name.

like what's the point

the nutrition info on a cereal box is more interesting poetry

It's like poetry by women who live Uptown East in a brownstone and have angst about something or other.

What they should have said to their mother. Stuff like that.

I always read the magazine for the long-form non-fiction stories about stuff. And that seems to have largely gone away.

@Robusto sorry ladies. they're all groany

@Robusto ?? really? we used to subscribe, but as interesting as the articles were, it was a bit of a slog to get through every week.

The science articles were always great. usually one an ossue.

@Mitch I still subscribe, and I never read every word of the magazine.

maybe their one or two science writers moved on, or the editor is an idiot

I remember when the magazine had long articles by John McPhee, Jonathan Schell, people like that.

Seymour Hersh.

9:30 PM

I always looked forward to Malcolm Gladwell... and then to find out not too long afterwards that it was not in fact based on actual evidence.

This book was originally serialized in TNY, for example.

@Robusto Ronan Farrow

I'm not one to fawn over Ronan Farrow.

@Robusto I don't know either, but he seems to be the next Hersh

Well, good luck with that.

9:32 PM

@Robusto Urban Alaska - tow words I've never considered together.

Hersh broke the whole My Lai massacre story.

@Robusto didn't Ronan break the Weinstein stuff?

Hardly equivalent.

Hersh did a number of things as big as My Lai...

Yeah.

9:36 PM

Oh yeah...Abu Ghraib

But his Obama era 'things' never really caught on.

If you've never read anything by John McPhee, I highly recommend him. My English degree is in writing, and one of my professors had us read a bunch of his works. There is NOBODY who can grab attention like he does on a subject you would imagine having to be dragged to.

I mean, how can you get interested in some guy who makes birchbark canoes? But you find yourself reading every fucking word.

@Robusto certainly not in substance, but as far as affecting society? Arguably ... hey I don't actually know anything here, I can barely remember what I had for lunch

10:20 PM

@RegDwigнt It's a slimy vegetable.

10:46 PM

Afro-European
Afrasian
Eurafrican
Aframerican
Eurafrasian
Austroindoeuramerican

@RegDwigнt most other people are, and it doesn't take very many tweets or Facebook messages to realize where is a cesspool and where isn't.

Why can't Asia ever come first?

Asiafrican not Afrasian?

I guess it ends in -ia and fits greatly as a suffix

Asiaeurope has too many vowels.

I'd say "that's racist" but I can't help the confusion of whether I'm an Asian or a Middle Eastern

10:57 PM

@M.A.R. You have a lot of control on who you're connected to on twitter. and you can always block tweets with certain words.

@tchrist asian-american

@RegDwigнt How do you decide food tastes horrible? You eat half a plate and decide it's 99% certain that it's shit, or you take a small bite and say 80% is sure enough?

@M.A.R. that's a whole nother kettle of fish.

@Mitch The prospect of opening Twitter every day to see hot tweets being Trump or people boasting they don't wear masks or yet another horrible or corrupt thing that happened in the middle East is something I wanna do without.

to a first approximation: East Asian (= CJK), South-East Asian (Vietnam/Cambodia/Thailand/Laos and the -sias), South Asia = India...-ish, and the Middle East (- Arabs, Iranians, Turks).

1) I'm sure I've hurt someone by leaving them out
2) I'm sure I've hurt someone by leaving them in
3) I know I've hurt someone by putting them together in the same group.

And if I join Facebook what I will almost certainly have to endure is the idiotic teenage anti-culture @Reg is so critical of all the time, and I'd prefer I didn't hate people more than they already make me do.

These thing thrive on being ideological battlegrounds, and not even good ones. People being petty and trying their best to ruin someone else's mood for the day.

11:04 PM

@M.A.R. But you can choose not to look at 1) the hot trends (you have to click into that) 2) you can block the word 'Trump' (lots of people you like most of their tweets of will happen to mention Trump) I blocked it and I currently don't want to stab myself in the face. 3) only connect to feeds you like... manage who you follow a lot - unfollow when there's too much annoying form a a particular person. No one is your friend on Twitter.

So why on Earth should I burden myself with having to visit Twitter or Facebook at certain intervals?

A couple billion people use them, so it's obviously unfair to say everyone is trying to stir up some shit on social media, some people just want to have an extra means of 'connecting' to people.

@M.A.R. There is something to be said about culture and though you can do the same things on twitter as facebook (block, manage who you're connected to), facebook tends towards ... people writing longer ranty things. though people on twitter write shorter ranty tweet threads. Also, all your relatives (old and young) are on FB. They're probably not on twitter

@M.A.R. That is a very good reason to not go on either.

@Mitch except they're not. Telegram was and is widely used by Iranians right now. Facebook and Twitter were never unblocked at any point so they never gained any traction in Iran

The only junk I ever see on twitter is in the hot trends which is like a car crash about to happen so it's hard to turn away

And enduring one medium propagating bullshit and hysteria has been enough already

11:09 PM

@M.A.R. So all your relatives are on Telegram?

Aye.

And I only ever visit it because of the announcements my university's channel makes

2 days ago, by Mitch

Fb is how you find out every one in your family is a worse racist than you thought they were already

Twitter is either Zarif whataboutisming about the US

Or self-proclaimed woke people trying to make witty oneliners and often failing.

@Mitch see, and I never joined the 'family' private group

Dad has, and sometimes you see him being annoyed about someone's opinion there.

FB is for family stuff (weddings, and cute dogs and scandalous photos of parties without masks), Twitter is for work stuff (marketing and cute dogs and scandalous political rallies without masks)

@M.A.R. uh that's what I use here for.

@M.A.R. ooh...link?

@Mitch your failures are better than most success stories.

11:14 PM

@M.A.R. Other people's opinions are the worst

@M.A.R. insert attempt at witty comment that fails here but totally rocks there

When in doubt, go meta!

@Mitch I guess just check out Zarif's Twitter account. They're not really exciting TBH, and looking smarter than Trump or Pompeo is not really a high bar

Which is itself meta!

And that was meta meta!

Or was it!

It's 4 a.m., have mercy

Look man...I don't read what I right, I don't expect you to also

also spelling

@M.A.R. but... wasn't Zarif... checks on google

O.k. u haz poin

11:18 PM

wait..who was the guy that got bombed?

Soleimani

oh duh

And I always get a kick out of how Americans pronounce his name

Trump pronounces it like it's an Italian dish

it is kinda funny in that nauseating way that all across the world -most- politicians are educated and try to be diplomatic (with a sprinkle of corruption) and there are those few wayward countries that are screwed by their leadership. It's just I didn't expect the US to be in the latter set.

@M.A.R. Stop it right there. YOu're going to put me off Italian food.

I mean everybody gets all upset when a famous guy gets bombed, but when regular noname people get bombed, it's sad and all but like who were they anyway.

ooh I got another one...

@Mitch "Oh man we're probably doing some bad shit in Afghanistan but eh, it's all for the greater good"

11:25 PM

people get all upset when there's that one white lady tourist who walked over the border and got put in jail as a spy, but people get shot in their own bed at night and nothing happens.

@M.A.R. soldiers are happy to do the task they signed up for, shooting people in the face.

@Mitch What part of "Soleimani" looks like "pizza".

OK that was harsh. Not the face thing.

I mean are there any other Italian dishes

7 mins ago, by M.A.R.

Trump pronounces it like it's an Italian dish

Yeah I'm just bringing it up again.

11:27 PM

@M.A.R. Lasagna?

To make a point

Spumoni

About social media

@Mitch well they technically are but everyone makes them their own way anyway.

wait what? Italian food and social media? I'm getting woozy

But you don't see many rectangular pizzas

11:28 PM

also it is very late for you you should get to bed it's a big day tomorrow

also I have to run

@M.A.R. Dude. You haven't lived long enough.

@Mitch really? Is it the equinox or something?

Sayonara!

Have a good Soyasomething as well

@M.A.R. Well, no, or rather I don't know, but maybe? I just gotta go and if you really did have a big day tomorrow, it would sound like I really cared.

Is Soya also Italian?

11:29 PM

Do svedanya

Khodahafez

@M.A.R. Stop. It.

BUt maybe yes.

Tschussi

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