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2:34 AM
@Cerberus Not that I'm familiar with.
 
@tchrist Hmm perhaps the book is wrong.
Or it is very old.
 
Maybe something out of the 1920s. Or 1880s.
@Mitch You mean bobby pins not baby pins, right? Or have you really gone full Daenerys on us and are pinning them up to little burning crucifixes along the road up to Golgotha?
 
@tchrist Another, more recent dictionary says that, contrary to earlier suggestions, there exists no such idiom in American English.
 
Ahah.
 
@tchrist The first reason is funny (fights in bars?), but picking up women in gay bars, yeah, I know many straights who do that.
Women are more open when they expect the men to be gay.
And...you have little competition.
 
Interesting.
All of that.
 
Until the number of straight men increases too much.
Usually, the straight men accompany gay friends.
But they still have their own motives.
Besides having a good time.
 
3:11 AM
I've heard that it's more fun than straight bars. I don't know. I'm pretty sure I've never had "fun" at a straight bar.
 
Whenever I went to a gay bar with straight friend(s), it was usually they who ended up kissing sur place, not I.
With a girl.
 
Mais bien sûr, sir.
 
@tchrist Some say that.
What is "fun" to you?
 
Not being nervous. Being relaxed and laughing.
To start with.
 
It can be a code word for sex, in dating applications...
 
3:13 AM
Being with friends.
Oh.
I didn't mean it that way.
That's play.
 
Hmm but why did you not have a good time in 'straight' bars?
 
I never got into the habit. I'm not really a "bar" person.
 
This notion of being mindful of fights is somewhat strange to me.
 
Yeah.
 
@tchrist That I can understand.
But then there is no reason why you should like a gay bar, is there?
 
3:14 AM
Boys? :)
Burning Man has bars everywhere, but none of them are ever either "straight" or "gay".
 
But the 'straight' bar has girls?
 
Sure, but they're weird there.
 
@tchrist Isn't that a festival?
 
Yes.
 
Bars need time to become something.
 
3:15 AM
Perhaps.
 
At least, usually. Unless they advertise as gay when they open?
Rainbow flags are everywhere now, so you can never really know from the outside whether some bar is gay.
 
That would seem weird in that venue. Exclusionary or something. I don't know. But the many de-facto sex clubs there are certainly more oriented than the bars ever are. I dunno, it's been a long time since I've been to any such places.
I'm really tired right now. Just checked in before bed, whither I must perforce repair.
 
@tchrist Yeah, could be weird.
Or not.
Tradition?
Sleep well!
 
> In the original version of the song as recorded by Dudley the lyrics include the words "...I'm taking little white pills and my eyes are open wide..." a reference to the stimulants some truckers used to keep driving.
Oh, the good old times.
 
4:11 AM
> Women’s half of the yurt. Central Asia, USSR, 1980s
 
4:45 AM
Nice.
The child seems to have modern/European clothing, though?
 
Yes, because it's the 1980s already ))
The girl must be going to school
 
Yes, too bad about the clothes, though!
 
 
2 hours later…
6:55 AM
 
 
2 hours later…
8:28 AM
Anyone who knows what this means
If this proposal is accepted, it will require India to increase its strategic oil reserved to 90 days requirement.
 
8:40 AM
Word of the day: limerence
2
Limerence is a state of mind which results from romantic or non-romantic feelings for another person and typically includes obsessive thoughts and fantasies and a desire to form or maintain a relationship with the object of love and have one's feelings reciprocated. Limerence can also be defined as an involuntary state of intense desire. == Definition == Psychologist Dorothy Tennov coined the term "limerence" for her 1979 book, Love and Limerence: The Experience of Being in Love, to describe a concept that had grown out of her work in the mid-1960s, when she interviewed over 500 people on the topic...
 
9:07 AM
Thus far, going up in both daily cases and daily deaths.
The government is taking some harsh steps, so this might change soon.
QR codes, compulsory vaccination, and so on.
And finally there are big medical-grade refrigerators for vaccines present in major cities. Gradually the infrastructure for vaccination is being built up.
 
@CowperKettle I was a guest at a yurt, which they preferred to call a ger, in Mongolia in the 1990s. The residents were a man and his wife and a little boy. Four guests, 2M, 2F. No segregation within the building. It was poor living but they slaughtered a lamb for us and provided fermented mare’s milk as a drink. They had a generator to run a Tv and a sewing machine. They were very pleased to have an American visitor. The husband did traditional songs with dancing for entertainment after supper.
 
9:35 AM
The first part of the lamb ready to eat was the liver, with a wrapper of fat around it. I was given a slice but couldn’t eat it, so gave it to the dog. I ate mostly rice. The meat parts were passed around in a pot, from which one could select. The rice was in a separate pot.
We drove near a herd of yaks on the way back to Ulan Baatar, but the driver wanted to bring into the city some illegal rodent meat (a small squirrel sort of animal), which he did,
For moving the ger, which was heavy because of the oilcloth that made it waterproof, thry borrowed a truck. They moved to get to better grazing land, which was “commons.l
It was a hard life. They were friendly and cheerful people. The boy wanted to grow up to be a shepherd
…like his father
 
10:20 AM
@Xanne Cool! I've never been in a yurt or chum or any other kind of traditional tent
A chum () is a temporary dwelling used by the nomadic Uralic (Nenets, Nganasans, Enets, Khanty, Mansi, Komi) reindeer herders of northwestern Siberia of Russia. The Evenks, Tungusic peoples, tribes, in Russia, Mongolia and China also use chums. They are also used by the southernmost reindeer herders, of the Todzha region of the Republic of Tyva and their cross-border relatives in northern Mongolia. It has a design similar to a Native American tipi but some versions are less vertical. It is very closely related to the Sami lavvu in construction, but is somewhat larger in size. Some chums can be...
 
10:34 AM
@Xanne I read several years ago that in Central Asia, some herders are very well-off, and now carry satellite Internet dishes along with their yurts
 
10:55 AM
@gateprep what part is puzzling you?
 
Urban consolidation describes the policy of constraining further development and population growth to within the boundaries of preexisting urban areas rather than expanding outward into suburban areas. Urban consolidation seeks to increase the population density of a given urban area by expanding upward, redeveloping preexisting buildings and lots, and constructing new facilities in available spaces. It is theorized that discouraging urban sprawl and encouraging further development of housing units in preexisting urban areas will lead to a net gain in social and economic prosperity (e.g. mo...
I like this idea. Building higher buildings, but with parks around them.
 
 
1 hour later…
12:10 PM
Sant'Agata de' Goti
 
12:23 PM
This was expected, but now people across the globe must rise to stop this
 
1:09 PM
@Cerberus Maybe their use of petty there is suspect, and actually they mean small or insignificant? But yeah, like Tom I have never heard that particular usage.
In the plural, peanuts can refer to an insignificant amount of money: They expected me to work for peanuts, so I quit.
 
1:42 PM
@Cerberus The OED notes: "peanut politics n. U.S. colloquial petty politics, political action inspired by mean or narrow motives; (formerly also) politics carried out in an underhand or secretive way."
otherwise none of the definitions mention petty
 
Feb 2 '14 at 15:37, by Robusto
                            The toil
Of thought evoked a peace eccentric to
The eye and tinkling to the ear. Gruff drums
Could beat, yet not alarm the populace.
The indolent progressions of the swans
Made earth come right; a peanut parody
For peanut people.
 
 
2 hours later…
3:34 PM
Yekaterinburg this morning. A state of emergency has been declared in the southern district.
 
Looks like a computer game.
 
The peat bog refuses to stop burning ))
 
@Robusto The word 'pietluttig' is actually slightly unclear to me.
 
The hopes were for the rains in the weekend, but they are not coming until Tuesday, according to updated weather reports.
 
@Robusto That I know.
@MattE.Эллен Thanks! That is a bit closer.
Still, what we'd need is peanut referring to a person.
In Dutch, the common expect is de pineut zijn, "being the pineut", which means getting the short end of the rope, being the victim, etc.
And this older dictionary connect pineut with some (apparently non-existent) American usage.
However, a newer dictionary has a quotation in which pineut is used simply like "person", without any connotations of victimhood or smallness.
It's strange how people seemed to think it was 'obviously' related to English peanut.
Maybe it is from piñata.
If you're the piñata of the party, you're not having a good time.
 
3:53 PM
 
Is that someone we should know?
Only €1500 for a shirt, that's peanuts.
 
Maybe it's some philosopher. It's from a philosophical memes feed on Twitter
I'm not savvy about philosophers
 
I'm not savvy about anything.
 
4:12 PM
Very philosophical.
 
Thank you, Plato.
 
Leo Tolstoy's bicycle driver's license, issued by Moscow city authorities.
Citizens were required to carry it with them. And to have a license plate on the bicycle.
For ease of detection, bicycle license plates were of different color each year.
 
@CowperKettle Now that would be nice to have.
 
So that an inspector could easily see that you haven't purchased a proper plate for the current year.
 
@tchrist Sorry, I think of GoT as a myth instead of history. So I think of pinning with safety pins. It's more sober and responsible.
@Cerberus How was the concert?
Best time to record a performance..no one dares cough.
 
4:30 PM
@Mitch Pretty good.
Especially the New World Symphony.
 
nice
very Star Wars
 
Although I must confess I feel asleep at some point. That always happens to me when I am sleep deprived and sitting still in a warm environment.
I don't know Star Wars.
 
John Williams has made classical music popular by copying the greats for movie themes
@Cerberus Bum BUM, ba ba ba BAH bum, ba ba ba BAH bum, diddly bum.
like that
 
Like that!
> I am convinced that the future music of this country must be founded on what are called Negro melodies. These can be the foundation of a serious and original school of composition, to be developed in the United States. These beautiful and varied themes are the product of the soil. They are the folk songs of America and your composers must turn to them.[7]
> I have not actually used any of the [Native American] melodies. I have simply written original themes embodying the peculiarities of the Indian music, and, using these themes as subjects, have developed them with all the resources of modern rhythms, counterpoint, and orchestral colour.[8]
 
actually, the Darth Vader theme is more like Holst's Mars.
 
4:33 PM
— Dvořák on his Symphony no. 9 "From the New World".
 
@Cerberus I... don't think he was successful in his plan. He made great music but it only has the slightest elements of African-American music.
 
> In 1893, a newspaper interview quoted Dvořák as saying "I found that the music of the negroes and of the Indians was practically identical", and that "the music of the two races bore a remarkable similarity to the music of Scotland".[10][11] Most historians agree that Dvořák is referring to the pentatonic scale, which is typical of each of these musical traditions.[12]
 
Dvorak is more like John Philip Sousa (the marching band guy).
 
@Mitch Of course he was merely incorporating some features of it, into the 'higher' genre.
A pentatonic scale is a musical scale with five notes per octave, in contrast to the heptatonic scale, which has seven notes per octave (such as the major scale and minor scale). Pentatonic scales were developed independently by many ancient civilizations and are still used in various musical styles to this day. There are two types of pentatonic scales: those with semitones (hemitonic) and those without (anhemitonic). == Types == === Hemitonic and anhemitonic === Musicology commonly classifies pentatonic scales as either hemitonic or anhemitonic. Hemitonic scales contain one or more se...
 
@Cerberus Lots of Far East music (both classical and ... er demotic (ie not the popular music of today but folk music)) is mostly pentatonic (China, Japan, Java)
@Cerberus Gershwin was more successful in 'adapting features'
Dvorak is famous for -saying- he did it (the passage you chose), but Gershwin has actual elements you can point to.
@Cerberus The African-derived pentatonic scale is a subset of the notes of the classical European major scale. (neither was derived from the other)
 
4:39 PM
@Mitch There you go.
 
@Cerberus which is to say that if Dvorak used pentatonic then it was not necessarily african-american but rather not particularly European classical.
 
@Mitch Yeah, probably.
That's why he felt that Indian and Negro music were similar.
 
4:54 PM
I'm no ethnomusicologist but if memory serves, Indian classical music is way more complicated than European classical (at least the scale systems they use) More notes. in each scale and more scales (lots of different steps) and lots more meaning and relationships among the scales ... I can't say anything about Indian melody or harmony or counterpoint which are what European classical (also popular music) seems to excel at).
Which is all to say, how does Dvorak compare to Ariana Grande?
un momentito
maybe more of un momento
 
nods
 
in the meantime listen to this:
 
Listening to Mahler's 6th at the moment!
 
 
1 hour later…
6:21 PM
Dazzle camouflage, also known as razzle dazzle (in the U.S.) or dazzle painting, was a family of ship camouflage used extensively in World War I, and to a lesser extent in World War II and afterwards. Credited to the British marine artist Norman Wilkinson, though with a rejected prior claim by the zoologist John Graham Kerr, it consisted of complex patterns of geometric shapes in contrasting colours, interrupting and intersecting each other. Unlike other forms of camouflage, the intention of dazzle is not to conceal but to make it difficult to estimate a target's range, speed, and heading. Norman...
 
 
2 hours later…
8:28 PM
@Cerberus He could have been talking about Ancient Greece just as easily.
There is nothing in Dvorak's "New World" Symphony that strikes me as particularly relating to Black or Native American cultures.
It's a fine piece, but I suspect he may not have heard enough of either.
 
@Robusto Yeah, probably.
 
Supposedly those are well researched.
 
8:45 PM
@Robusto It is certainly not classical pronunciation.
What time is that supposed to be?
I'm not sure about late Hellenist pronunciation.
I hear y pronounced as /i/.
Ou pronounced as /u/.
Ai pronounced as /ɛ/.
G pronounced as some palatalised fricative.
 
@Cerberus Alkibiades and Socrates make appearances, so ~400-430 BC?
 
Then it sounds quite wrong to me.
A bit more like New Greek.
 
Probably.
 
Oh, well. They tried.
Too bad those commercial operations never, ever consult actual specialised classicists.
But the fact that they focus on classical Greece is nice anyway.
I hear the game looks quite beautiful.
 
It is definitely that.
They play rather loosely with historical presentations of actual people, though. Alkibiades is presented as a drunken lecher, and Socrates as something of a buffoon.
 
8:56 PM
Oh, dear!
Then again, who knows what they were really like...
 
True.
 
9:30 PM
@Cerberus ok un megamomento
and out again
 
9:56 PM
@Mitch Nice.
 
10:07 PM
@Robusto And yet Aaron Copland's rousing works of Americana strike home, despite him being himself a Brooklynite as born and barmitzvahed as they come.
So I guess there's Eastern European on one hand and then there are immigrant Eastern Europeans on the other.
@Cerberus I'm pretty sure it's just [ɣ] in most positions, just as in Spanish.
Apparently with exceptions for nasals before it or velar stops following it. But this is just normal stuff that happens phonologically to that sound in many languages.
Apparently this contributed to @terdon having far fewer problems pronouncing Spanish than any normal American ever would: he had the sounds from Greek.
 
@tchrist Right, well, it sounds like New Greek to me.
 
Makes sense.
 

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