And Flesh Gordon is indeed not very titillating. Too bad they didn't use the George Barr poster to publicize it....

The line, which got a big laugh from the audience, was "Councilors wi' part-time jobbies..."

If anyone knows what that was all about, what was it? Annotation, please.

Hence the general falling about.

Bronson Caves was in Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country.

Essentially, everyone in Northern Ireland speaks English. 10% or so also speak Gaelic to some degree or other (mostly other). Nevertheless, Sinn Fein insisted that Gaelic should be one of the official languages of the assembly and that official documents should be made available in Gaelic as well as English.

The DUP (hardline Protestant Loyalists) then argued that, basically, if the Dans were going to get their own language then the Billies would have to have their own language too. This would be "Ulster Scots".

The assembly administration, heaving a sigh, advertised for official translators. They found some who could do Gaelic, but couldn't find anyone who thought they they spoke Ulster Scots. In the end they improvised by getting a junior civil servant and telling him "to retype everything in the way that you think Ian Paisley would say it".

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Save_ulster_from_sodomy

David McNarry is a member of the Ulster Unionist Party, which is distinct from the Democratic Unionist Party, but mostly over personalities as far as I understand it.

You gathered all the 18+ con-goers, chose 3 or four teams of 3 (at least one of which had to consist only of girls), gave them some microphones and put on some hentai (anime porn) with the sound turned off. Each member of the team then had a specific function to fulfil: one did the male voices, the other the female ones, the last one was sound effects. Funniest team wins.

Surprisingly, the girls team was usually the funniest.

...and features Bjo Trimble, along with character actor John Hoyt, who probably appeared in more works of Cinéma than the Bronson Rocks.

My apologies if this reads oddly: some nights the pain meds work, and some nights they do not, and when they don't grammar tends to go out the window.

On the other hand Scots really exists and people really speak, and write in it. Depending on your point of view it is either a family of English dialects spoken in Scotland, or else Scots is a sister language of English that developed in southern and eastern Scotland in the middle ages and has since spread to the Highlands and to northern Ireland.

But it is certainly real. And have been used in government for centuries. A standardised version of it was used in formal writing, official correspondence, and legislation from the 14th to the 17th century (and occasionally into the 18th, especially in a church setting)

It is at least as different from standard English as the standard dialects of Norwegian are from Swedish - and a lot more different than Bokmal Norwegian is from Danish.

OK, since the 18th century, almost all the literature in Scots has either been, and there is an extensive literature in it, in a folksy, rural, setting, or else a deliberate political statement. And Ulster Scots, is, as Scots goes, not really that different from Irish English, but but it does exist and people do speak it in real life.

Aside to non-British-Islians: the Scots language or dialect is not the same as a Scottish accent, its the words and syntax you speak, not the voice that you speak them in. A Scottish accent with the occasional use of local or dialect words is not the same as speaking Scots - though there is a continuum between the two.

Here on Representative Poetry Online are the words of William Dunbar's Lament for the Makaris

And here, Hamish Henderson's great Freedom Come All Ye

Two wonderful bits of Scots verse well over four hundred years apart.

I never knew Iain Paisley was a Kiwi!

Needs more NOOOOOOO!!!

One Sunday morn young Lambton went
A-fishing' in the Wear;
An' catched a fish upon he's heuk,
He thowt leuk't varry queer.
But whatt'n a kind of fish it was
Young Lambton cuddent tell.
He waddn't fash te carry'd hyem,
So he hoyed it doon a well.

cho: Whisht! Lads, haad yor gobs,
An Aa'll tell ye's aall an aaful story
Whisht! Lads, haad yor gobs,
An' Aa'll tell ye 'boot the worm.

[This is the sort of English which gives the Google translator conniptions.]

Annotated text, and bad pun, here

Tennyson wrote some verse in the dialect of the southern Wolds, such as Northern Farmer: Old Style.

I know it as "The Famous Dampton Worm", and it was "John Dampton" rather than "Young Lambton", and it doesn't have a chorus. But it preserves "queer" as the word for the fish ("mighty queer" in the version I know). In fact, this looks like a direct dialect variant of the version I know, rather than something produced by the folk process over time.

DawnOfMinstrel, #14: You gathered all the 18+ con-goers

It being rather too early in the morning for my brain to be awake, I have to admit that my first parsing of this was, "Wow, that IS a small con!"

Music-hall song, mid-19th Century, much like Blaydon Races and Cushie Butterfield.

You wouldn't expect to get them on The Good Old Days: that might have been filmed in Leeds but it was very much a view centred on London's popular entertainment.

So this priest goes out fishing, and he catches a fish like no other he's ever seen. A nearby angler says, "Nice fukken fish."

"Such language!" says the priest.

"No, no," says the angler, "that's its name: It's a fukken fish."

"I see," says the priest, and takes the fish back to the rectory. And he calls to the nun, "Sister, I'd like to serve this fukken fish to the bishop when he visits tonight."

And the nun says, "Such language!"

But the priest explains, "No, no, that's its name. It's a fukken fish."

So the nun cleans the fish, and gives it to the cook and says, "It would be nice if you'd bake this fukken fish for the bishop's dinner tonight."

And the cook says, "Such language!"

But the nun explains, "No, no, that's its name. It's a fukken fish."

So the cook bakes the fish. That night the new bishop comes to visit....

And the cook brings out the entree and says, "I cooked the fukken fish."

And the nun says, "I cleaned the fukken fish."

And the priest says, "I caught the fukken fish."

And the bishop says, "I like you bastards already."

That's how I read it, too. Until just now. Thanks for the mental whiplash. :)

I've got used to following along to my true Mackem relatives, but my ex-wife couldn't. She'd last about 10 minutes, then she'd have lost enough of the thread to not understand what one was saying - she'd look to one of us to translate that sentence, which would allow her to fill in the gaps, and be able to follow along again for 10 minutes or so.

kye pairks: cattle fields
onsneck't: unlocked
wha'd: who'd

e’s powie wad dirl
as e pín’t oot the airn
bruntin the win wi e’s darg:
his hammer would ring
as he struck out the iron
scorching the wind with his labour

I would guess that "kye pairk" is cognate to "kine park", and "onsneck't" to "unsnicked", and so on. Accent and spelling are part of it, but so are word choices and words you wouldn't find in English. I imagine that if I heard it spoken, I'd be totally baffled.

*A site I highly recommend:
http://3quarksdaily.blogs.com/3quarksdaily/

Given the choice between serious British newspapers and serious American ones, I'll take the British ones for the headlines alone.

This was the reply:

hurrah, first comment that's not Russian spam!

no, I don't think that anyone had ever followed up with a report. It was held in a bar and on the whole it all went rather well. With lots of booze, how could it not? I thought that a couple of the readers/translators should have practised a bit more to keep up with the on screen dialogue but the main bloke who was also compering it (??Roger) was very funny, especially when he went off script. Alas I'm not aware of a recording

all in all wile good craic hey, as they say in these here parts

Mad as a box of frogs?

Sorry, did I type that out loud?

(I'm not sure why "Bronson Caves' is the common name - there's only one; and, really, it's more of a tunnel than a cave.)

You have to watch your angles when you're shooting there if you don't want to end up with the Hollywood Sign in the background.

Vasquez Rocks is a popular location because it's inside the 30-mile "studio zone", so you don't have to pay the crew travel & accomodations to shoot there.

I've seen four versions of Flesh Gordon - a hard-core porn version; the 'uncut' X-rated release; the R-rated version that's shown at most conventions and many revival houses; and, most improbably, the PG-rated version that turned up one night at the local 'family drive-in' in west Phoenix - it was 38 minutes long and the plot was a bit hard to follow - but it still had a lot of cool special effects.

The porn version was most certainly porn - real porn, not the "I-saw-a-bit-of-exposed-flesh-and it-made-me-think-of-sex" that so many internetizens refer to when they (mis)use the word.

It looked like it might have been made by adding hard-core inserts to the X-rated version; but it was definitely porn.

The intersection of Beverly Blvd. and La Cienaga - "where Beverly Center meets the Beverly Connection."

(A couple of sites outside the official boundary are also deemed included - MGM's Conejo Ranch, and an independent production facility in Simi Valley.)

For further details, see:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Studio_zone

http://www.filmla.com/zonemap/