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12:47 AM
@CowperKettle Why do nearly a thousand of your countrymen keep perishing of covid day in and day out? Your reported case rate doesn't seem to suggest so high a mortality rate as that is indicating. Are they only counting people as positive cases if they're already pretty sick, or just not reporting a whole lot of actual cases for whatever reason?
 
1:10 AM
@tchrist I think many countries are not reporting all cases, partly because they aren't very good at registering them, and partly because their governments don't like the figures.
 
1:40 AM
This is interesting: the words true and tree derive from the same PIE root (drew-o-, a suffixed form of the root *deru- "be firm, solid, steadfast.")
 
2:34 AM
Greek doru is tree, stem, stick.
 
3:28 AM
@Robusto toro steady as a bull
 
3:50 AM
@tchrist Two different Russian agencies in fact report wildly different figures.
There is a huge underreporting of cases in Russia.
Oppositional statisticians and analysts come up with "true" figures once a month or so, and then start wrangling and kicking among themselves on whose "true" figures are "truer".
Even the daily statistics on the number of vaccinations performed is so haphazard, that a volunteer project is working to collate all the different figures from all regions and come up with a kind of a general daily vaccination stats for the whole country.
Looks like the system created by Putin from about 2011 finally started bringing its rotten fruit, and yes-men came to predominate the upper tiers of power. Thus authorities are more afraid of Putin's "vertical of power" than they are afraid to bungle their tasks.
This is evidenced by the fact that the EpiVakCorona vaccine, most certainly a dud, continues to be produced and distributed to regions, and no official stands up to oppose this.
An Israeli statistician came up with this estimate, according to which Russia is among the countries with the highest excess deaths/100 thousand.
But still in terms of undercount we are keeping strong, we did not even make it into the top list, unlike Belarus.
EpiVacCorona (Russian: ЭпиВакКорона, tr. EpiVakKorona) is a peptide-based vaccine against COVID-19 developed by the VECTOR center of Virology. It consists of three chemically synthesized peptides (short fragments of a viral spike protein) that are conjugated to a large carrier protein. This protein is a fusion product of a viral nucleocapsid protein and a bacterial MBP protein. The third phase of a clinical trial, which should show whether the vaccine is able to protect people from COVID-19 or not, was launched in November 2020 with more than three thousand participants.The interim results of...
> At the start of the Phase III, trial participants and those vaccinated outside the trial began to form a community through the Telegram messenger network. On January 18, 2021, the members of the community turned to the Ministry of Health of the Russian Federation with an open letter, in which they stated that the production of antibodies after vaccination among them is much lower than declared by vaccine developers.
After such a scandal, one would expect a number of officals lose their posts, and the vaccination campaign to be banned for this particular vaccine.
Nothing happened. It is regularly shipped to regions and is given to people.
> April 20, 2021 the study participants got a reply, with refusal of performing any additional verification antibody tests or investigation of severe COVID-19 cases among vaccinated individuals. The reply include the following text: "Considering that the listed immunobiological preparations (vaccines) for the prevention of COVID-19 are registered in the prescribed manner, their effectiveness and safety have been confirmed."
In Russia, such official answers are called otpiska (an official answer that is couched in the appropriate language, but fails to provide any answer and addresses some very different topic altogether).
You send an official complaint to the state, providing facts that show: this vaccine is a dud. You ask in your letter: what is happening? Halt this vaccine right now!
The reply comes: "the vaccine was admitted and registered. Thank you very much".
> Conventional commercially available antibody detection systems cannot reveal post vaccination antibodies after EpiVacCorona.[9][10][8][11] Therefore, vaccine developers have designed their own detection test system, and they were criticized for not revealing antigens in this system.
The company came up with its own "antibody detection" system that is a black box.
 
4:27 AM
@Robusto That's odd. The first Harry Potter was the first book I really read in English in a single sitting, I could not tear myself from it.
 
4:50 AM
Medical term of the day: to express a dog/cat ("how to express a medium- or large-sized dog")
 
 
2 hours later…
6:22 AM
[ SmokeDetector | MS ] Potentially bad keyword in answer, blacklisted user (72): Why the abbreviation for the Doctor of Optometry is O. D.?‭ by Aims Education‭ on english.SE
 
6:50 AM
-14°С
 
7:10 AM
@Cerberus shrug
@tchrist When you're used to lying the truth is constantly unbearable.
@CowperKettle Is that like a gene
@CowperKettle It wasn't published in a journal or something?
That sort of thing is often a black box AFAIK, but there should still be some statistical analyses and reports, at the very least, in some reputable journal.
 
7:52 AM
@M.A.R. No, it means to press on the cat's bladder to make it pee
Medical language can be weird, although legal language will easily leave it in the dust.
 
@CowperKettle Hah
 
 
1 hour later…
9:09 AM
Fresh figures. 400 cases less than yesterday.
We are back at June levels.
 
9:46 AM
@Cerberus @Xanne: You may want to read this (if you haven't seen it). We simply do not have enough data yet about Omicron, contrary to what many popular news sources are claiming. After all, people look for what they want to find, not necessarily the truth.
 
 
4 hours later…
1:24 PM
Some random William Henley
 
1:38 PM
So I wanted to save me some work and rather than typing up the entire lyrics for Elvis's "It's Now or Never" just copypaste them off Google, right.
This the official lyrics for the song right now, according not to some random website but to Google itself:
I blame @Cerberus.
Happy New Year!
 
2:06 PM
Tatiana Baturo, a woman who lived in Minsk, met New Year in prison. She had come to support another political prisoner at a court hearing, and was arrested for that. She spent 45 days in prison cells, of them 20 days in solitary confinement as punishment for "bad behavior". While she was there, her father died. She was let go because of his death, and has used this occasion to flee from Belarus, leaving all behind.
In a move that became a tradition in Belarus and Russia, she was almost freed once, only to be instantly re-arrested. news-zerkalo-io.translate.goog/life/…
Her father wished to met her at this mock release, but she was rearrested, and his condition grew worse. He died of cardiac arrest.
I so hope that every and all Putin's and Lukashenko's thugs meet their due justice.
 
2:54 PM
@CowperKettle Different strokes for different folks.
 
To be honest, the last books were not impressive to me. They seemed too over-wrought and gloomy. Or maybe I grew too dull.
It's never easy to tell.
I never managed to get through them.
But the first 2 or 3 books seemed so good.
 
Nov 15 '18 at 15:33, by Robusto
When my sons were reading all the Harry Potter books I tried to read the first one ... and collapsed in an epic fail after only 50 pages.
 
And then I heard Rowling on BBC Radio in 2001, and she said there that she loved "The Tale of Two Cities", and I just went to the store and bought it, and lated read more and more books by Dickens. Thanks to JK Rowling. I mean I read them in English.
I had not read Dickens in Russian, it seemed too complicated to me, probably.
 
Her prose style annoys me, her characters are asinine, her plotting is cumbersome and obvious. My $.02. But the world disagrees with me most resoundingly.
4
 
I have an old 18-yo photo of the time when I was reading Dickens, with my cat and two thick Dickens volumes on my PC case
I took it on my Yashica camera, in the times of film photography.
The cat's name was Musia (Муся)
 
3:01 PM
Read A Wizard of Earthsea by Ursula K. LeGuin if you want to read a fantasy novel I thought was excellent.
2
 
Thank you! I'll try it.
In the 1990s I tried reading one book by LeGuin in Russian, "The word for world is forest". I did not get through the beginning
 
Try in English.
 
@RegDwigнt LOL
That's like the time I saw a CD with "Alice" by Smokey in a store in the 1990s, and tried listening to it. And there was suddenly this refrain "Alice? Who's the fuck is Alice?!"
 
@CowperKettle My cats like to walk on the keyboard, or even settle down there. They're not allowed in my office when I'm working.
 
@Robusto My cats loved sitting on top of the monitor, especially in winters.
When I first bought an LCD monitor in 2004 and removed this monitor that's on the photo, Musia jumped on top of the LCD monitor, and managed to sit there for a couple of minuts. It was a very sturdy and dependent, thick LCD monitor by NEC. I later gave it for free via a Russian fleamarket website Avito.
 
3:25 PM
Court has rejected the complaint of the guy who was on the cover of Nethermind and wanted to gain a lot of money through litigation.
What a prophetic album cover it turned out to be.
On top of the fact that the album was superb.
 
That's a million new cases. Yesterday. In the United States.
 
I hope that Paxlovid is already being prescribed in the US
That should bring deaths down.
 
There is very little of it to go around so far.
 
@CowperKettle Is that a pun, or did you just mistype Nevermind?
 
@Robusto Isn't that because you're looking for pearls and the world is content with sand?
 
3:36 PM
@M.A.R. The story of my life.
 
I mean, I'm a nitwit when it comes to music. I'll probably be able to tell that some song is great, but I would be content with mediocre music too.
 
My musical tastes are much more eclectic than my reading tastes.
 
A constant night time routine in our house is the younger generation's backlash against the older generation's acceptance of absolutely horrible shows on TV.
@CowperKettle was that the oral Covid pill?
Wonder how it works
 
@tchrist Yeah. I am so weary of this.
 
@tchrist This omicron is something eh
 
3:41 PM
@Robusto Oops, a typo
I listened to Nevermind a lot in 1995, playing computer games
And to "Unplugged in New York".
 
@CowperKettle Didn't we all?
 
I don't know ))
It was popular among a swathe of youths in Russia, but others listened to other groups.
If someone told me I would listen to Ukrainian opera songs, I would think him nuts.
 
@Robusto No, I couldn't listen to it
 
Nirvana defined grunge rock. Compared to them, nobody else qualified. Well, maybe Alice in Chains.
 
@Robusto Go team Earthsea
 
3:44 PM
I also remember a videoclip titled Black Hole Sun. I liked the way the faces got distorted there.
 
@M.A.R. Absolutely.
 
Just watched The Last Duel. It was designed to be enjoyable, so I enjoyed it and suppressed my inner critic
 
I don't know that one.
 
It's Ridley Scott's Rashomon
 
Ah.
 
3:46 PM
Though of course much more shallow
 
Ridley Scott is a mixed bag for me. Sometimes really good, sometimes just annoying. When he's not being obvious he's being occulted.
 
I listened several times today to this 1935 recording of a funny song from a 19th century Ukrainian opera. In this song, a husband was absent two days, drinking. His wife berates him in a funny way, and he comes up with excuses. I sat with a Ukrainian dictionary and unraveled the lyrics. youtube.com/watch?v=Kr7HTptaL7Y
 
@Robusto This is half annoying half really good
I wasn't in a bad mood and it didn't ruin the mood, and I'm still a bit burnt out so that's a compliment
 
I love this thing in comedic operas, when the woman and the man's lines combine at certain moments, and they sing together, each their own lyrics. Maybe there's some specialized term for this twist. I should listen to operas by Hilbert and Sullivan.
 
@CowperKettle Gilbert, not Hilbert.
 
3:51 PM
Yep
I read to some of their lyrics, G and S, and it's genius.
I first learned about Gilbert and Sullivan from a movie, a 1950s movie based on a stoby by Christie. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Witness_for_the_Prosecution_(1957_film)
*story
The Last Duel is a 2021 epic historical drama film directed by Ridley Scott from a screenplay by Nicole Holofcener, Ben Affleck, and Matt Damon, based on the 2004 book The Last Duel: A True Story of Trial by Combat in Medieval France by Eric Jager. Set in medieval France, the film stars Damon as Jean de Carrouges, a knight who challenges his former friend, squire Jacques Le Gris (Adam Driver) to a judicial duel after Jean's wife, Marguerite (Jodie Comer), accuses Jacques of raping her. The events leading up to the duel are divided into three distinct chapters, reflecting the contradictory p...
> On the review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, 86% of 263 reviews are positive, with an average rating of 7.30/10.
Must be good.
 
This is an example of what you're talking about:
 
@Robusto Thsnks, I'll listen now
Nice ))
 
I know the term for that kind of song, but the name escapes me for the moment. Perhaps @tchrist can help.
It's a common feature in opera, especially comic opera.
 
My brain wants to give me motet but that's not it.
 
Its chief feature is contrapunctuality.
 
4:14 PM
Apparently that is called a quodlibet.
A term which seems new to me.
 
4:28 PM
> Later, in a trio for three other male characters (“I Am So Proud”), Sullivan gave each man his own melody. These are presented separately, then combined into an intricate counterpoint that recalls the mastery of Johann Sebastian Bach. The Mikado may be a light and comic tale, but Sullivan saw no reason why the music could not reflect a serious level of craft, which is part of what raised Gilbert and Sullivan operettas above the standard of their competition and why their work remains popular.
 
@Robusto And you're a monster who like to take lollipops out of children's mouths and drop them on the ground.
 
Somehow the initial line reminded me of Bizet's Habanera from Carmen. But that's just an aria and chorus, in what was originally a contredanse.
 
@Robusto OK maybe not a total monster
 
> 2. Music. A musical composition combining several different melodies (usually popular tunes) in counterpoint, often in a light-hearted manner.

?c1809 F. Fiorillo (title) Petite niaiseries no. 1 quodlibet.
1820 B. Stephenson tr. J. N. Forkel Life John Sebastian Bach 5 They called this kind of extemporary chorus ‘a Quodlibet’ [Ger. Quodlibet]... Some persons are inclined to consider these facetiae as the beginning of comic Operettas in Germany; but such Quodlibets [Ger. Quodlibete] were usual in Germany, at a much earlier period.
 
@Robusto huh...I thought quodlibet meant 'to do whatever' ie not particularly structured
 
4:35 PM
The Mikado came out 10 years after Carmen.
> A quodlibet can only be brought to life if an audience is familiar with the component parts.
 
@M.A.R. I had a hard time suppressing my inner critic with it.
 
@tchrist Which is why each tune is sung separately before being combined.
 
@Mitch I believe you're thinking of a cadenza. That, or a credenza.
 
@tchrist That makes me think of The Grinch
> That old family gradunza, The old, three-handled family gradunza, The old, moss-covered, three-handled family gradunza. That hung on the family tree.
 
@tchrist It's also the one part of the opera that Bizet "borrowed" instead of originated. He thought it was a folk song, but it was from another opera. Funny that it became the most iconic part of Bizet's entire opera.
 
4:44 PM
'Ex Falso Quodlibet" is the usual math appearance meaning the principle of "if you can deduce falsehood (from your assumptions, then you can deduce anything (= whatever = 'quodlibet')"
 
4:55 PM
@CowperKettle Yeah, I forgot about Soundgarden. My bad.
 
5:20 PM
Another example of quodlibet.
 
5:43 PM
@user21820HATESSMOKING-HATS Yeah, I have seen it. We don't know yet, except that the number of infections will rise very fast.
@RegDwigнt I'll happily take the blame for things I do not understand, as is tradition.
 
6:02 PM
> Roman multi-tool, silver, 3rd century AD, Fitzwilliam Museum
@Robusto It's a tragedy that there was not a lot of such TV commercials in the USSR. We lost a whole era of cringe.
Cringe TV commercials appeared on our TVs only in the late 1980s
 
6:26 PM
@CowperKettle Pretty cool.
Why silver, one wonders.
 
6:49 PM
@Cerberus Maybe all other multitools rusted to dust or were too cheap to survive? I mean they were worn out and melted down to make something else.
Thus only silver ones survived.
 
@CowperKettle Good point.
Why make any in silver, though?
The only reason I can think of is when it is extremely important to prevent rust.
Perhaps it is a hardened alloy?
 
@Cerberus As a sign of wealth, to show off to others? Like the iPhones covered in cold and jewels
Maybe it is an alloy, I'm not an expert on silver alloys ))
 
>

This folding eating gadget has a three-pronged fork, a spoon,a spatula,a pick, a spike and an iron knife that has eroded away. There is a hinge to allow each item to be folded out when it was needed, or folded away for ease of transporting it. The spike might of helped in extracting the meat from snails, and the spatula in scraping sauce out of narrow-necked bottles. Some have even suggested the pick with the tiny spoon on the end could have been used to remove earwax.

While many less elaborate bronze folding knives have been discovered from antiquity, this one's complex design and the
From the site of the museum.
So the rusty bit was the knife.
And it was probably mainly used for eating, which usually does not require hard metal.
Just as your silverware is still made of silver, except the sharp of the knife.
 
Sterling silver is an alloy of silver containing 92.5% by weight of silver and 7.5% by weight of other metals, usually copper. The sterling silver standard has a minimum millesimal fineness of 925. Fine silver, for example 99.9% pure silver, is relatively soft, so silver is usually alloyed with copper to increase its hardness and strength. Sterling silver is prone to tarnishing, and elements other than copper can be used in alloys to reduce tarnishing, as well as casting porosity and firescale. Such elements include germanium, zinc, platinum, silicon, and boron. Recent examples of these alloys...
 
Yeah, like that.
Too bad the museum doesn't say what the ratio of silver is.
I think common soldiers had similar tools made of cheaper metals.
 
7:01 PM
@CowperKettle "There is nothing new under the sun."
 
There?
 
Yes. I'm always bad at translating Latin. :)
 
Oh, well, it's just Biblical, isn't it?
 
Oh is its occurrence in the Vulgate actually the first appearance in Western literature?
Smells like Gilgamesh. :)
 
No idea!
 
7:07 PM
"Smells like Gilgamesh" was a rock hit by the group Nirvana, composed by its singer-songwriter Siddhārtha Gautama
𒀭𒄑𒉋𒂵𒈨𒌋𒌋𒌋
 
> Quid est quod fuit? Ipsum quod futurum est. Quid est quod factum est? Ipsum quod faciendum est. Nihil sub sole novum, nec valet quisquam dicere: Ecce hoc recens est: jam enim praecessit in saeculis quae fuerunt ante nos. Non est priorum memoria; sed nec eorum quidem quae postea futura sunt erit recordatio apud eos qui futuri sunt in novissimo.
 
A Russian meme with Gilgamesh. "When you get the pizza from the delivery guy and hold your cat with one hand, to stop it from running outside"
Samawah, Iraq, the nearest city to the abandoned Uruk, where Gilgamesh ruled 2900 years B.C.
 
@tchrist A typically antique notion.
And pretty crude Latin.
 
Google Translate translated it almost perfectly to Russian. At least it seemed perfect.
Only the first short sentences were translated strangely, I did not get their meaning.
 
7:22 PM
@Cerberus "Nihil sub sole novum" sub sole non novem
""Nihil sub sole novum" sub sole non novem" sub sole non novem
"""Nihil sub sole novum" sub sole non novem" sub sole non novem" sub sole fortasse non novem
""""Nihil sub sole novum" sub sole non novem" sub sole non novem" sub sole fortasse non novem" naw man that's totally new
> What has been is what will be,
and what has been done is what will be done,
and there is nothing new under the sun
2
I don't know if what @tchrist gave is the Lating Vulgate or if it is a translation.
 
@Mitch Ah! Thank you!
> written c. 450–200 BCE
 
@CowperKettle That's much more natural English, but of course translation. ESV = English Standard Version which is (checks wikipedia) 2001
2001 AD
The English Standard Version (ESV) is an English translation of the Bible. The ESV was published in 2001 by Crossway, having been "created by a team of more than 100 leading evangelical scholars and pastors." The ESV relies on recently published critical editions of the original Hebrew and Greek texts.Crossway claims that the ESV continues a legacy of precision and faithfulness in English translation of the original text. Crossway describes the ESV as a translation that "emphasizes 'word-for-word' accuracy, literary excellence, and depth of meaning." Crossway also describes the ESV as a translation...
 
I was totally in the dark about all this complexity of Bibles up intil my 20s. I thought that Bible was just a thick black book, and it's a single book ))
 
The phrasing that is. The translation
 
> O the mind, mind has mountains; cliffs of fall
Frightful, sheer, no-man-fathomed. Hold them cheap
May who ne'er hung there. Nor does long our small
Durance deal with that steep or deep. Here! creep,
Wretch, under a comfort serves in a whirlwind: all
Life death does end and each day dies with sleep.
 
7:36 PM
@CowperKettle and it's not like you thought it was written originally in whatever language you're reading it in... just that... well... I mean you're not thinking at all.
The Vulgate (; also called Biblia Vulgata, Latin: [ˈbɪbli.a wʊlˈɡaːta]) is a late-4th-century Latin translation of the Bible. The Vulgate is largely the work of Jerome of Stridon who, in 382, had been commissioned by Pope Damasus I to revise the Vetus Latina Gospels used by the Roman Church. Later, on his own initiative, Jerome extended this work of revision and translation to include most of the books of the Bible. The Vulgate became progressively adopted as the Bible text within the Western Church. Over succeeding centuries, it eventually eclipsed the Vetus Latina. By the 13th century it had...
I can't tell from that article if the source used for the translation was Greek or Aramaic or Hebrew.
 
The New Testament was written in Greek.
Only the Old was Semitic.
> The Vulgate has a compound text that is not entirely Jerome's work.[4] Jerome's translation of the four Gospels are revisions of Vetus Latina translations he did while having the Greek as reference.[5][6]

The Latin translations of the rest of the New Testament are revisions to the Vetus Latina, considered as being made by Pelagian circles or by Rufinus the Syrian, or by Rufinus of Aquileia.[5][7][8] Several unrevised books of the Vetus Latina Old Testament also commonly became included in the Vulgate. These are: 1 and 2 Maccabees, Wisdom, Ecclesiasticus, Baruch and the Letter of Jeremiah
So it is a bit of a mish mash.
The Septuagint is a Greek translation of the Old Testament.
 
8:08 PM
@Cerberus I wasn't sure if Jerome (or really the translator to Latin of Ecclesiastes) had as a source the Septuagint or the Aramaic or Hebrew
I suppose I should infer something from "Several unrevised books of the Vetus Latina Old Testament also commonly became included in the Vulgate"
but I'm having trouble with logic.
 
All of the above.
 
So Ecclesiastes was already in the Vetus Latina?
 
I think most or all of the Vulgate was?
But I think the Vetus was perhaps not a single, standardised edition.
 
@Cerberus Not that there is any problem with that sentence (It's me, and I have no excuse like I sneezed or have a headache) but it reminds me of something...
 
@Mitch So I don't know about specific books, but large parts of the older texts were simply included in the new Vulgate as they were.
 
8:14 PM
people (and by people I mean academic/formal writers) can often write things to be correct in some compact but convoluted sentence, like a little puzzle, that takes a while to parse out all the implications. When they could have just said everything but with mu.tiple sentences.
dictionary entries tend toward this
as in, they're not wrong
 
I fully agree.
 
but
 
In general, this is bad writing.
 
and they say a lot
 
Unless there is a specific reason.
 
8:15 PM
but you have no idea what it is exactly they're saying
@Cerberus To save wordcount?
 
You can construct a long period that is still clear and readable, though.
@Mitch Yes.
Or character count.
 
And often when writing I think I am doing this, rearranging words in my head to squish down the idea into as small a set of words that will capture everything, by reordering pieces, relative clauses in just the right order, implied referents
@Cerberus It's not like there's a limit nowadays
one could say there's a limit on attention
 
@Mitch Yes.
 
@Cerberus What do you mean by that?
 
But consider the longuish sentence you have written just there: it reads easily.
 
8:18 PM
haha
ha
 
An affirmation.
 
@Cerberus and then there is
wait
referring to the wrong thing
 
@Mitch Mostly yes, except that it is still nice if some text fits into a smaller space, or into one line; and that fewer words can mean quicker reading.
I have a theory.
 
and then there is... there's this author of police detective stories, French Canadian, that we've been listening to on car trips...
 
If you write a long sentence in one go, it's usually readable.
After adding and removing and moving bits, it's usually less readable.
 
8:20 PM
and it was a revelation how the author would almost repeat close to verbatim some sentences
 
After a third, corrective pass, it can become readable again.
 
and we realized OMG this was written for old people or people who are not listening or people just about to fall asleep, making sure that they... get it
you know because they didn't get it 3 seconds ago.
but like whole paragraphs of variations of one sentence.
@Cerberus So essentially these writers are not going to the third step
 
@Cerberus Silver tarnishes, but it doesn't corrode. I think that's why.
At least partly.
 
But also, I've noticed powerpoint writing can also be somewhat ... I don't know... empty?
taking a narrative paragraph and splitting it into bullet points
but that's emptiness of a different kind now that I think of it.
a list of facts or points -should- be bullet pointed. the slide of those bullet points has no personality, that's the emptiness.
but the speaker needs to add the narrative to give the whole thing a story or personality
 
Also a voice. What is a speaker without a voice?
Hmm, I guess a speaker without a voice is a bureaucrat.
A writer's voice is principally what attracts me to a work.
 
8:28 PM
@Mitch Indeed, I think they are not.
@Robusto Yes, but you can clean and maintain equipment like that.
 
@Cerberus Perhaps. But I think it's also easier to work silver? I don't know.
And people have been using silver eating utensils since, like, forever.
 
@Robusto That's true, but most tools are made of harder metals.
@Robusto Yeah, I think that's the key: in eating, hardness matters less, except for knife blades.
 
Yeah. And if knife hardness is important with a meal, maybe you have other problems.
@Cerberus: Oh, in my reading I came across a term the author claimed to be Dutch: I think it was billebolle? Some kind of a snack?
 
@Mitch was it the impractical duel helms, or whatever they're called?
 
@Robusto Hmm I'm not sure I understand: what other problems?
 
8:43 PM
@Cerberus Food that is actually too tough to eat?
 
Isn't knife hardess always important, whenever you cut something?
 
Sharpness is more important than hardness, I think.
 
Well, that's the same thing!
 
But for most food, a "steak knife" is overkill.
 
Softness means you lose sharpness fast.
A silver knife will always be very blunt.
 
8:45 PM
It will still be fine for food other than steak.
 
And its thinness will mean that you will even bend it easily, or cause kinks to form or something.
 
But answer my billebolle question, if you please.
 
@Robusto This does not sound familiar.
Perhaps oliebollen?
 
Could be. Is that some kind of fried meat snack?
 
Deep-fried balls of dough and raisins eaten around New Year's Eve.
No meat.
 
8:46 PM
OK.
 
Could that be it?
Fit the context?
 
Wait, it's actually bittebolle.
 
I am re-heating one in the oven as we speak...
@Robusto That would be bitterballen.
Balls of ragoût crusted in breadcrumbs, deep fried.
 
Ah, OK. Thanks!
 
A common snack served in any café, but not e.g. at street vendors or snackbars.
You order them with your drinks.
 
8:50 PM
A wise policy.
 
Tip: if you are ever served them, let them cool off for longer than you think, or you'll burn your mouth badly.
 
Drinking on an empty stomach can be problematic.
 
The crust will cool down quickly, so you won't realise how scorching hot the inside still is.
Indeed.
@Robusto Good to know.
As with Game of Thrones, I will take your advice to heart and probably never read Harry Potter.
 
I really tried to read the first Harry Potter, because my kids were such fans. But alas, I could not.
 
I will keep it in mind.
 
8:53 PM
Do give Mary Renault a try, though.
 
She's in my e-reader.
Ready to be read.
So I can't forget her.
 
nods approvingly
Ahh, nothing like that first cup of coffee in the afternoon.
 
Hmm no sleep issues?
I have a straight question.
Is the girl in this video attractive?
 
Let me look.
 
She is obviously good looking, but she also looks cheap and fake.
At first I hated her, but now I think she looks sexy.
Despite her little gestures and fake hair.
Or because of.
I don't know.
Of course I didn't mean attractive as in a life partner.
 
9:03 PM
@Cerberus Yeah, not my taste.
 
Not even in an animal kind of way?
I mean, not for you personally, even.
 
My alarms go off when a woman is so heavily made up. Too soigné means too high maintenance.
 
Haha.
Yeah, and it makes her look fake.
But still.
 
Also, if the eyes are covered with mirrored sunglasses ...
But plenty of men would no doubt be hooting with lust for her.
She's also playing hard to get, telling the guy basically to fuck off, they can't even be friends.
 
Yeah.
 
9:08 PM
And he's like, hey, baby, I will love you so much ...
 
It's just that I like Juanes, and I was annoyed by this girl in his video.
 
Gender stereotyping writ large.
 
But now I kind of appreciate her role.
Yes, of course it's very stereotypical, but then what isn't, in pop music.
 
Alas.
 
Then something else: a cover of Aicha in a fairly bad French accent, but without any instruments, and I like it.
He makes all the sounds with his own body.
 
9:11 PM
Yeah. Funny, but why am I understanding the words? I don't really speak French ...
 
Good.
So it appears you do.
 
I've been able to read simple French for a while now. Like Le Figaro. But he's enunciating the song slowly and clearly enough for me to make out words, I guess.
 
Right, that helps.
But being able to read a newspaper means you know plenty of French.
 
I think, oddly enough, that learning Spanish has helped get me head and shoulders into the Romance languages.
 
Makes sense.
 
9:15 PM
And I generally remember words. There's some kind of vocabulary magnet in my brain.
 
It helps a lot, vocabulary synergy.
 
@Cerberus This reminds me of early Jacob Collier videos.
 
Very well done.
 
10:21 PM
@M.A.R. No, I had other problems. The first 1/2 hour it seemed like a documentary/reenactment of boring medieval local French politics... -really- boring but made with very well known actors so not sure if the producers were overcompensating for a bad script.
And then the 2nd act comes and you go 'oh... kinda like Rashomon... hm maybe this isn't boring after all' and it continues with pretty much -the same stuff-. Another POV should have things actually different but nothing was different. Also, boring, but at least you knew what to expect.
And then the 3rd act maybe it'll be diff... nope almost -exactly- the same things happened, the people lying (no spoilers!) are exactly who you think are lying.
And then Act IV is the fistfight scene (haha it's jousting but with pretty much the same narrative interest).
I guess the acting was good?
 
11:00 PM
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