@jgbelacqua (Gosh, your name is really hard to type!) The NYT is sick, very sick, but still by far the most prestigious national newspaper with the biggest foreign desk -- so if anyone can do it, they can.
@Martha — I guess you never saw the good stuff then.
@Rhodri — Consider my brain thoroughly rotten.
**The Sense of the Sleight of Hand Man**
One's grand flights, one's Sunday baths, One's tootings at the weddings of the soul Occur as they occur. So bluish clouds Occurred above the empty house and the leaves Of the rhododendrons rattled their gold, As if someone lived there. Such floods of white Came bursting from the clouds. So the wind Threw its contorted strength around the sky.
Could you have said the bluejay suddenly Would swoop to earth? It is a wheel, the rays Around the sun. The wheel survives the myths.
@Cerberus — I thought Plato thought it was the theater that was immoral, because it was an offense to piety. Human beings pretending to be gods — where would it all end?
For example, he decided that women have fewer teeth than men because their jaws are smaller. It never occurred to him, I suppose, to go over and ask his wife to open her mouth so that he could count her teeth.
But I suppose that would have been too much study. "Every man should play the flute, but not too well," he said. Translation: nothing too much, not even empiricism.
But Ravel's genius was that he knew the instruments and what he could tease out of them. Stravinsky and Strauss, on the other hand, just didn't give a shit if their stuff was playable or not.
And just when the flutes have counted 48 measures of rests and raise their instruments to play, the conductor taps his baton and says, 'All right, let's go back to letter F and do it again.'
In elementary school, they allowed us to choose our instrument based on our interests. We ended up with about 20 trumpets, 20 clarinets, 10 flutes, 3 electric basses, a couple trombones, and the balance was snare drums.
In retrospect I don't see how our teacher handled it...
A friend of mine was a trombonist. I met him for lunch one day, and as I drove in to the restaurant parking lot I saw his car, and noticed that he had left his trombone in the back seat and the car was unlocked. I rushed in and told him, whereupon he gave me a shocked look and ran out to his car — but it was too late! Someone had thrown another trombone into the vehicle!
Q. How do you know when the stage is level ? A. The drummer is drooling out of both sides of his mouth ...
@HaL — Nice.
My favorite: Top ten reasons to play flute: 10. It's low maintenance (no reeds, valve oil, water, mutes, etc. to worry about). 9. Easy to tune. 8. Can easily overpower the tin whistle. 7. Extremely portable; can be slipped in a backpack, in your pocket, or through a needle's eye. 6. There are too many flutes in seisiuns to be very accurate. 5. You can pretend to play and no one will know the difference. 4. Learning to transpose fiddle music. 3. Lots of attention. 2. Higher than any other instrument.
And my ALL-TIME, NO SHIT, FAVORITE MUSICIAN JOKE EVER: A young child says to his mother, "Mom, when I grow up I'd like to be a musician." She replies, "Well honey, you know you can't do both."
________________________________________________ Q: What's the definition of perfect pitch? A: When you toss a banjo in the garbage and it hits an accordion.
The conductor of a symphony orchestra was known for his "strong personality." It was the final concert of the season, and the entire bass section had enough of the conductor's relentless criticisms, and were ready to quit. After a brutal rehearsal of Beethoven's 9th Symphony, selected for the finale, the bases decided to go to lunch together. They also visited the bar, and got rather drunk.
Returning to the concert hall with impaired judgment, they thought it would be funny to tie the last page of the conductor's score together with a string, as to embarrass him at the end of the concert. They did so, and the concert went on. The bases began to sober up a bit as they played, and grinned as the conductor reached for his score. YOU KNOW WHAT HAPPENED NEXT? It was the bottom of the 9th, the bases were loaded, and the score was tied.
@Martha Not to rain on your parade, but Kelly's answer was there first. Check the IDs. (You still got a +1 from me as per Lord Torgamus' comment. God, I am so nice...)
@RegDwight can you say this? "If they fail to do so, the paradox of interest rates may prove them difficult."
Probably not, but do you get what I mean? And how would you say this properly? It's the final sentence of my conclusion, so it should be slighly fancy.
Being Swedish but living in Kenya for many years I initially reacted when at the local market I was offered a paper bag (verbally) but given a plastic bag (physically).
This is always the case and was not a single incident.
I thought paper bag had become a common word for all kinds of bags in...
@MrHen The thing is, that's exactly why the OP is asking the question in the first place. The "information" in the answer is not only vague, but also not new.
@RegDwight Maybe people thought that it should be part of the question instead of the answer? Although I agree with your surprise — it is arguably some form of answer. Especially compared to others in the thread.
I’ve read this expression in a news article related to a Hawaiian politician: “He is well-regarded in both Washington and in the islands for his gracious manner and spirit of aloha.”
I understand that aloha is a Hawaiian greeting and, as such, I understand the expression in the quote above as “h...
That's actually something that has been bothering me for ages. But I'm too lazy to post a report on MSO. Plus it would get [status-by-design]ed anyway.
The first question is: why do you want to do that? It's a bad idea to use tables for page formatting, but if what you want is a table, you should use a table.
You should teach them to use CSS for layout and tables for tabular data. They will figure out that they can (mis)use tables for layout all by themselves.
@Cerberus they are assumed to occur in the same time frame as the main verb, generally. they don't indicate their own time, but inherit it from the context
A certain pedant is claiming that beginning a sentence with "That being said" is grammatically incorrect owing to the apparent logical contradiction in claiming that something in the past (e.g. the previous paragraph) is still "being said", i.e. unfolding in the present. He claims that only "that...
Being Swedish but living in Kenya for many years I initially reacted when at the local market I was offered a paper bag (verbally) but given a plastic bag (physically).
This is always the case and was not a single incident.
I thought paper bag had become a common word for all kinds of bags in...
i think paper bad would generally imply a bag made of paper. But the answer could be different based on geography
The answer is No. But people ignore being accurate, especially around the world.
The first question is: why do you want to do that? It's a bad idea to use tables for page formatting, but if what you want is a table, you should use a table.
You should teach them to use CSS for layout and tables for tabular data. They will figure out that they can (mis)use tables for layout all by themselves.
English Language & Usage: Multi-Layer…
English Language & Usage: Multi-Layer…