@Robusto hmm, I don't find it that funny honestly, but I'm sorta like Batman, you shouldn't ask me to rate Persian internet comedy. I think you can tell they're just stereotypes of superstitious old people complaining about things. Ghormeh sabzi is a stew made from beans, some vegetables and tomato sauce, and it's yummy. A religious tradition here is giving out nazri, which involves cooking food in large pots and giving it out for charitable purposes

@M.A.R. That's more or less what I expected. I always like to give things like this the benefit of the doubt, remaining open-minded, but my usual reactions range from puzzlement to disappointment. Thanks.

I mean, it's supposed to be funny because modern people cook in small pans, and she wants huge witch cauldrons to cook a lot of food, and this contrast is supposed to be funny. I guess it can be after a few drinks.

Well, it sounds like it's working a very select audience for nudges of recognition, not actual humor.

There's another running joke that people think drinking orange juice is really great, it makes you immune to lots of diseases. I guess people in the west have the same sort of attitude, and if a standup comedian made a joke about it, I'd be the one in the audience to cough

@Robusto yeah that's probably the idea

The one about sweaty peasants in the bazaar sounds fabricated though, unless Shah's rule was worse than I thought

There is a category of stand-up comedian in the US who trades in ethnic humor—Russian, Mexican, whatever—where the entire act consists of "jokes" like this: "So a white guy be like this ... [demonstrates "white" stereotype] ... and the Mexican dude be like this ... [more stereotypes]". I don't find those funny at all.

I guess part of the funniness also involves the jokes people make about those brand and stores, but I couldn't relate because I have no idea who or what Lord Jones is.

@Robusto they're okay as a quick meme sometimes, but if I'm investing my time on listening to this guy, he better be funnier than a cheap meme made by a 13-year-old

@M.A.R. Neither do I.

@Robusto They can be if they are really brilliant.

Otherwise they are cheap.

The best jokes are often about taboos.

But only violating the taboo is not enough for a good joke, as some (lazy or stupid) people seem to think.

I think it's the same for Jewish comedians. Many of the funniest American comedians have been Jewish, but if all they do is get up there and trade in ethnic inside jokes, outsiders are by definition excluded.

That can also be an issue, though it's not something I remember seeing.

@Cerberus By the way, there's another reason we couldn't watch much of Barbarians. The main character, a German hostaged to and adopted by Governor Varus, looks way too much like Mark Zuckerberg.

@Robusto Hmm how unfortunate.

They cut his hair that way too.

A bit similar.

The flat hair do.

Yeah. We should ask Zuckerberg to put on some Roman armor so we can compare better.

Close.

@Cerberus I can't really say I really understand the chart. If there were an article that went with it maybe that would help.

I am writing university application.

And I don't know what to write for autobiography section.

Are there any good tips and tricks to write autobiography for computer science?

My background knowledge is : I know very little about writing essay and I sort of suck in English grammar+Got limited vocabulary in my mind which probably won't impress professors.

Or can you guys at least share good resource to learn to write good autobiography?

Word of the day: dudeen

Minus 4°С

The last winter run.

The next Saturday, it will be above zero C.

> The New York Post cited a purported email from Hunter Biden in August 2017 indicating he was receiving a $10m annual fee from a Chinese billionaire for "introductions alone", though it is unclear who was involved in the alleged introductions. bbc.com/news/world-54553132

Europe is locking down again. If masks are so great, why lock down?

Masks are not a panacea.

But they are great.

@CowperKettle Russia excess deaths are said to be much higher than Covid-19 deaths, suggesting under-reporting.

Or just emphasis on management, not cases.

@Xanne Yes, in Russia the statistics have been badly manipulated by the authorities.

The excess deaths statistics at year-end uncovered the extent of manipulations.

A number of newspaper articles and investigations appeared.

But the people are extremely apathetic, and don't care much.

I think that Russians will not care until people start dropping dead in the streets.

As my friend said, so what, people have been always dying.

Today I run to the ParkRun and back together with a man, about 35 yo, a worker, who leaves not far from me.

On the run back, he said to me that there "is a big war upcoming, because international agreements are getting broken. Russia is being harassed by the West, has been since 2008".

"That's why we should not change Putin for everybody else".

"You cannot change a commander when there's a big war upcoming".

I said - "What about the USA? They have been changing their presidents for 200 years"

He laughed. "The elections in the USA is a sham. Several rich families have been controlling everything always. You know, the Clintons, the Kennedies, the Bushes".

That's in a nutshell the propaganda that people will spew upon you suddenly now and then.

The people who watch Putin's television.

"The big war is upcoming. The West wants our oil and gas. The elections are all a sham."

"There will soon be war" is a common theme with politicians here, too. It tends to fan a kind of nationalist fervor, which helps create greater unity at the polls, I think.

I'm amazed at how this propaganda suddenly springs upon you from persons who outwardly appear highly intelligent. I knew a girl who excelled in chemistry and worked part-time as a chemistry teacher to pay for the university. So bright. And all of a sudden she would say that Russia's opposition leaders are subversive elements, like Vladimir Lenin was back in 1917, and want to overthrow everything, have a revolution.

It's like one second there is a sane person before you, and the other second there is a zombie who just repeats some stuff imprinted by the propaganda.

Next week, Russia's third vaccine enters into use.

The first 100 thousand doses. This vaccine is made of inactivated whole-capsid viral particles. Theoretically, I guess, this might be the best vaccine, because it lets your immune system to aquaint itself with all parts of the virus.

I mean, to remember all kinds of epitopes (viral surfaces) instead of just the select parts, as with the Sputnik V vaccine, which only encodes the "hook" part that the virus uses to get inside cells.

> Every Indian or other person who engages in or assists in celebrating the Indian festival known as the "Potlatch" or the Indian dance known as the "Tamanawas" is guilty of a misdemeanor, and shall be liable to imprisonment for a term not more than six nor less than two months in any gaol or other place of confinement;

@CowperKettle Where did you get that? Sounds like something from colonial times.

@Robusto From Wikipedia, the article about Potlach.

Ah. And it's Canadian, hence the spelling gaol.

Yeah, how dare the indigenous peoples celebrate a benign tradition of community. Lock 'em up!

It's curious. I wonder whether there were similar bans in Russia.

When my mother was traveling to distant oil drilling locations as part of her job (counting of hours worked by oil and gas workers), the authorities strongly prohibited to take along any spirit-containing substances, but people took them anyway, and sold to the indigenous peoples, who promptly drank them.

Their alcohol dehydrogenase genes are very weak, and they become addicted quickly and strongly.

Thus they begged women to give them colognes and other liquids that contained alcohol, to drink.

Native Americans and Alaskan Natives are five times more likely than other ethnicities in the United States to die of alcohol-related causes

> For example, Higuchi and colleagues (17) found that as alcohol consumption in Japan increased between 1979 and 1992, the percentage of Japanese alcoholics who carried the protective ADH1B*2 gene version increased from 2.5 to 13 percent. alcohol.stanford.edu/alcohol-drug-info/i-bet-you-didnt-know/…

Evolution works fast.

@CowperKettle This is true. And it has to do with having to adapt to lands and customs not their own.

When I was a young man I went with a caravan to deliver books to the Pine Ridge Reservation school. We stayed on the reservation, and were pretty much welcomed, but the poverty there was abominable. Young people our age could not find work, and spent what little money they had on beer.

Where Europe went wrong in its vaccine rollout

@Cerberus ^

> Within the U.S., almost one-third said that population was between one billion and two billion; the answer is 289 million. (2002) nationalgeographic.com/science/article/…

What? 30% of the US sample thought that US population was 1 bn people? Hard to believe.

Some even placed Iran at the location of Yekaterinburg. I'm very, very flattered.

@CowperKettle Yeah, but my country has a lot of ignorant people. To quote an old movie, "They don't know nothin' and they don't wanna learn nothin'."

One journalist famously said that Russia has a population of 8 million people.

Lesya Ryabtseva, when interviewing an opposition-leaning Russian writer and director.

That made some memes. Moscow had more than 10 millions at that moment.

YouTube is full of videos about Americans' ignorance of geography. See this search.

Happy Nowruz!

@CowperKettle I always wonder how significant the prevalence of troll responses to these polls are though

IIRC it was that poll or another, some people located Iran in another state in the US.

I mean, sure, geographically ignorant, but that much? That's kinda obvious it's trolling

@CowperKettle Sounds like an announcement Winston would read on a wall

Is Malcolm in the Middle good?

I'm liking Bryan Cranston everywhere I see him and I wonder if the show that helped him rise to fame is worth watching

I can't find the link, but when @RegDwigнt was pooh-poohing Breaking Bad I linked him to the "I'm the one who knocks" scene from Season 4, and his flabbergasted response after watching it was: "OMG, is that the guy from Malcolm in the Middle?"

Okay, I couldn't have gotten any better endorsement

Changing Reg's mind

That's unprecendented

Inorite.

@CowperKettle So Ian Frazier, the author and reader of Travels in Siberia, says people often wonder how Russia could be so great and so horrible simultaneously, and that many attribute that split to Russia's "childhood" (the 13th and 14th centuries) when they were brutalized by the Mongols.

@M.A.R. Eide Nowruz Mubarak

@Mitch Eide shoma ham mubarak!

@M.A.R. Yes.

@Mitch Any relation to Hosni Mubarak?

BTW Finglish is not German, I dunno why you're capitalizing every word

@Robusto Same word, yeah

@Robusto His name means 'be blessed' or 'be happy' just like ol' Barak Obama

"gifted", roughly

Oh yeah, "blessed"

OIC

@M.A.R. Like it's on a banner?

@M.A.R. same as 'baruch'

in hebrew

like

@Mitch Eid mubarak is a sentence fragment like "happy new year"

"baruch something something adonai blah blah let's eat"

@Mitch That is one prayer I can live by

But since you ask, MITM is an autobiography (of the Malcolm character). So it is a very particular American childhood: dealing with being a gifted child, having an extremely strong mother, the crazy energy of 4 boys. They had really good comedy writers and really good actors all around.

@M.A.R. Yay! We're all Jewish!

The Simpsons but they have real skin

@M.A.R. MITM has to keep somewhat closer to reality

@Mitch What makes that prayer different from all other prayers?

@Mitch I mean, technically, Islam at least used to treat Christianity and Judiasm as sorta its subsets

Futurama is basically the Simpsons but scifi

The lore goes like "These guys were prophets and holy, they weren't Gods or anything though, and our prophet brings the final version of religion".

@Robusto Oh so you're the clever one.

@M.A.R. Like Bahai is basically the Christianity to Islam's Judaism.

Or Buddhism to Hinduism

Uh, it's too late at night for me to process that

or

Christianity doesn't really have a successor religion that is ... nicer?

Yeah I never really understood the Buddhism Hinduism distinction

Mormonism?

Christian Science?

Scientology?

I have heard both very good and very bad things about Mormons

Leprechauns and fairies?

Goosebumps?

Jack Black?

@M.A.R. What sort of bad things about Mormons?

I mean they haven't had any crusades (yet)

Or inquisitions.

Eh, I dunno. I was never paying much attention. But it's the internet. Every basement dweller feels entitled to call millions of people savages

People hate religion in general

Those people who do that? Savages.

That's not to say religious people aren't getting crazier and crazier recently sadly

But when you take into account 20 centuries of history, eh

The trouble is, any set of a million people will include plenty of savages.

Genau

Even if those millions are secular

Genou

nou

nougat

What is nougat made from?

Wait

please do not tell me

I hope it is no one I know

nagani

Nagano

It's definitely a Japanese word

That too

Why do they all look alike

Japanese words

umami

and I mean it to sting

Nagano-ken (Nagano prefecture) 長野県

Is that what umami is?

Something something pufferfish

No

Nice, so I drank this dough with an umami taste two days ago

@M.A.R. You're thinking of fugu. 河豚

Umami so fat when she sits arounf the house she sits -around- the house

Wait, not dough

dough is an acquired taste

Uh, does English have a word for the drink that's essentially yogurt with water and some salt?

yeah. that's called 'bad milk'

Mount fugu

But they don't all look alike.

Arabic characters all look alike. So there.

I means, Russians have a modified version of they call kefir

Yeah, kefir. That's it.

I've drunk kefir. It's for when you wanna wrestle a bear or something

Well, the more dilute version would be the Iranian kefir

Not so potent

So you leave it to ferment naturally, and then when you drink it, there are lots of really tiny bubbles bursting on your tongue

I could get addicted to that

I forgot English for a moment there

Haha.

@Robusto With this microscopic Arial, can't blame you

عید نوروز مبارک

Yeah. Arabic looks like what the barber sweeps up after giving you a haircut.

You should see Thai

Now those are hairballs

BTW I read somewhere recently that a worryingly high percentage of the Chinese youth can't write Chinese at all

@M.A.R. ภาษาไทยเป็นภาษาจริงๆหรือ?

Thai looks like what text looked like before you learned to read.

Ancient runes in RPG games

@Robusto haha I don't even remember that.

I mean, let me reword: even I don't remember that.

Have I known you for thirty years now? Feels like it.

BTW, the latest translation for your reading and listening pleasure:

musescore.com/user/27897310/scores/6674607

And BTW BTW: I spent the last three months or so contemplating whether I should rewatch Breaking Bad. Kinda itching for it.

It was, like, really good.

I miss that a lot.

@Robusto Ah, I read that yesterday.

It has a point, in that Brussels seems to have taken less direct control of the production of vaccines.

I doubt it had the power and resources to do so: compared with Washington, the power and money invested in Brussels is tiny.

It cannot directly intervene in stuff, in many cases.

But I think nobody knows for certain what happened exactly, with big pharma.

Or at least we, the general public don't have all the information, about negotiations and contracts and stuff.

Some other points in the article are probably also true.

Even so, I know the EU invested heavily and research and production by big pharma.

It was not just signing contracts and letting them do their thing.

Five weeks behind America, sounds about accurate.

We shall see.