@RegDwigнt Most odd. I haven't seen any of those here.
We do have various money-laundry shops, but it's not so easy to identify them, as they are usually types of shops that could be functional. You need to look how busy they are to tell, I think.
Non-human electoral candidates have been found in a number of countries. Often, the candidacies are a means of casting a protest vote or satirizing the political system. At other times it is simply done for entertainment value.
Electoral regulations may explicitly require candidates to be human (or equivalent wording), or they may require candidates to do things which animals cannot reasonably do (such as sign their names legibly on legal forms); most constituencies require candidates to be of the age of a legal adult, which eliminates many animals whose life expectancies usually make them too...
Hank the Cat, a Maine Coon from Northern Virginia, ran against Tim Kaine and George Allen for Virginia's Senate seat in 2012. He earned third place in the state, with nearly 7,000 votes
> In March 2019, a 3-year-old Nubian goat named Lincoln was elected mayor of Fair Haven, Vermont, defeating a Samoyed dog named Sammie by two votes.[21][22]
It's like Mad King Aerys II screaming BURN THEM ALL! when his city was about to fall to the rebel forces. Or Denethor trying to burn Faramir upon his own suicide-funeral pyre when he thought Minas Tirith was about to fall.
bier pyre, you know what I meant
Biden's team is going to have to sandblast the entire inside of the White House before picking out new drapes.
> Far from closing the book on the last four years, even if there is a change of incumbent in the White House, this election threatens to confirm and entrench the poisonous status quo.
@Robusto We are also very high. I went to the dentist and she said we'd better postspone treatment for 2 weeks because three dentists from the clinic caught covid, and the clinic might get closed any day.
Unidentified flying objects (UFOs) have captured the public's attention over the decades. As exoplanet detection is on the rise, why not consider that star-hopping visitors from afar might be buzzing through our friendly skies by taking an interstellar off-ramp to Earth?
On the other hand, cou...
> Wiener was born in Columbia, Missouri, the first child of Leo Wiener and Bertha Kahn, Jewish[4] immigrants from Poland and Germany, respectively. Through his father, he was related to Maimonides, the famous rabbi, philosopher and physician from Al Andalus, as well as to Akiva Eger, chief rabbi of Posen from 1815 to 1837.
I was taking a look at a scholarship opportunity that is offered as two types, "Doctoral INPhINIT - Incoming", and "Doctoral INPhINIT - Retaining". My question is I am confused to understand the words "Incoming" and "Retaining.
Maybe, retaining means someone already enrolled in a program?
Not sure whether it was this morning's Philadelphia tranch or the Pittsburgh one that pushed Biden over the 0.5% margin needed to stave off a mandatory recount in Pennsylvania, but clearly Reginald found Philadelphia scanned better.
Looks like there was another covid superspreader event at the White House on Tuesday: six more WH folks have tested positive, including Meadows who was everywhere breathing the virus on everybody. Fauci has refused to go to the White House for many weeks now, citing the rampant infection there.
@Robusto Trump called that particular figure a landslide in 2016.
SURVEY SAYS: In today’s English, the name of the god Thoth from Egyptian mythology most commonly rhymes with: swath, moth, oath, tooth, loathe, smooth, baht, rot, wrought, wrote, foot, or hoot. Pick any and all that apply, or say that none do so.
2
PBS has been streaming the spontaneous jubilant crowd celebrating with wild abandon in Black Lives Matter Plaza for two hours straight now. No wonder the imminently-ex President fled to a secluded isle of irreality.
@Robusto Yeah, me too. In the 2016 film Gods of Egypt, Horus (played by Danish actor Nikolaj Coster-Waldau) addresses Thoth (played by American actor Chardwick Boseman) as [tʰoθ], which surprised me a great deal.
Perhaps it is similar to how UK sloth ~ both versus US sloth ~ moth, but the /θ/ > /t/ at the start was if anything an even greater surprise. Historically Greek letters Latinized as ph or th were aspirated plosives not the fricatives of today.
@tchrist Yes. I was wondering about that too. Just this morning I wondered if Sappho was pronounced in Greek with a dental or a bilabial fricative—or something else. Combination of plosive and fricative?
@Robusto I think, without looking it up, that it was [ˈsɑp.pʰo] with a "geminated" (long or "doubled") plosive consonant split between syllables, with the second one aspirated. But that’s just a WYSIWYG interpretation that may be far removed from reality. @Cerberus ?
== Ancient Greek ==
=== Alternative forms ===
Ψάπφω (Psápphō) – Aeolic
Σάφφω (Sáphphō)
=== Etymology ===
According to Beekes, maybe from Pre-Greek due to the presence of the cluster "-πφ-".
=== Pronunciation ===
=== Proper noun ===
Σαπφώ • (Sapphṓ) f (genitive Σαπφοῦς); third declension
Sappho
==== Inflection ====
==== Descendants ====
=== References ===
Σαπφώ in Liddell & Scott (1940) A Greek–English Lexicon, Oxford: Clarendon Press
Woodhouse, S. C. (1910) English–Greek Dictionary: A Vocabulary of the Attic Language[1], London: Routledge & Kegan Paul Limited, page 1,024
...
Says /sapʰ.pʰɔ̌ː/ → /sapˈɸo/ → /sapˈfo/
And that's an open o originally that became close o later on.
> GOP Sen. Mitt Romney (Utah) congratulated President-elect Joe Biden after he was projected to win the White House race over President Trump. “Ann and I extend our congratulations to President-elect Joe Biden and Vice President-elect Kamala Harris. We know both of them as people of good will and admirable character. We pray that God may bless them in the days and years ahead,” Romney tweeted, referring to his wife.
@tchrist I think that's probably correct, but I'm not expert on pronunciation, and there is much we don't know about the pronunciation of Ancient Greek.
@Robusto Yeah pretty much. The many who were interested did.
A 10-fold fall in the currency value during the past 4 years. No joke. Your elections could have reverberations over here as strong as in your own country. If not stronger.
Sucks that the world is working like that. But let's save the bitterness for another time.
@Færd I'm not saying the US has been a supporter of democracy through the years. Obviously it hasn't. But let's hope this change of government brings better cooperation among all countries of good will. Maybe that's a Pollyanna-ish viewpoint, I dunno. But I do hope we can.
> Fox’s coverage became notably split earlier this week. The so-called news side of Fox, which is anchored in its daytime programming with conservative but not delusional journalists like Chris Wallace and Bret Baier, has done a generally straight-up job of reporting the results.
> But the primetime hosts at Fox News, especially Sean Hannity, who also functions as a nonofficial adviser to Trump, did not move as quickly to change their pro-Trump cheerleading. Thursday night’s episode of Hannity’s show was particularly egregious, with such guests as Texas Sen.
I remember a Murdoch recently left the family business.
> And this has led to unusually direct scrutiny of the Murdoch family, whose name has not usually been mentioned in the many years and fountains of media criticism of their network.
@Cerberus I think they are, but not usually on CNN, MSNBS, and other mainstream Democrat-leaning US networks. They're always railing at Fox and its anchors and hosts, not usually the Murdochs.