David: I never got a cheap (less than 20 Euro) frying pan that was not non-stick coating. Apart from that, the metal is thin: Cats throw it on the tiled floor, it get so banged up that it won't work on a flat stove plate anymore. Handle breaks off. Screw or rivets holding it together rust through(the latter happens with expensive pans, too).
The indestructible hammered-from-one-piece iron pans are more costly, and they work best on gas or on an open fire.
Ulrika: The trouble with thrift stores and flea markets, I found, is that they prove the "time=money" equation. What you do not pay in money, you have to pay in time. If you have neither, you're SOL.
When I was broke, it took me half a year to find kitchen scales, but they only cost 3 Euro. Last month, I paid 30 for new ones, but it took me only half an hour to get them. With the charity stores where you get stuff for free, you *cannot* use them if you have regular work hours.
Also, I do not shop at Wal-Mart because I live in a place where groceries are so cheap that Wal-Mart could not compete and had to move out. Which is pure blind luck, even if it's satisfying. (Not so much luck for the farmers who have to sell meat and milk below the costs of production, though. Someone always pays.)
And Messrs. Aldi (not their real name) are some of the richest people in the country.
caffeine #74: I'm not defending Wal-Mart. They're an evil entity, and "other companies are doing it too" isn't any excuse. For my hometown, though, the vacuum left by the textile and furniture companies moving overseas is what sucked the economy dry, and I'm grateful that my relatives can shop at Wal-Mart because they're lucky to afford even that.
That is, actually, what makes the evil so grating. It leaves the people who it hurts most no choice but to support it.
Mia: For some reason, your posting put in my mind the image of gladiator games, where poor people do a Ben-Hur-like race (only on foot instead of wagons) and the winner gets the cheap laptop. Put the doorbusters on live TV, that's what you get.
Makes gambling seem positively ethical.
Mary Aileen #363: Same here. I trained myself to speak at the lowest end of my range, so my speaking voice is below middle c and very soft. (I still get complaints about speaking too high to be heard, so I use my guitar tuning device to check occasionally.)
My singing voice today is second soprano (up to high a), used to be first (up to d above high c) when I was younger. It is also quite loud, but I cannot use it for speaking.
It is kind of fun when I join a new choir. Every conductor wants to put me into alto and I have to insist (very softly) that they need to hear me sing some scales first.
David Dyer-Bennet #341: I hope that the difference is visible somewhow in body language or something!
Goodness, I hope that, too. I'm am awfully clumsy, I fall over invisible cracks in the pavement, walk into posts, or catch my sleeve on a door handle and then have my momentum carry me into the closest wall. I'm giving everyone who'd have a hard time dodging 200 lbs of really clumsy person a wide berth.
Rikibeth's mention of Sesame Street has reminded me of something I've been wondering about, and as we have an early-childhood subthread going:
Has anyone here (who is not from the US) seen Sesame Street in kindergarten age and got a bad case of confusion/an uncanny valley effect because of cultural not-quite-match?
Sesame street freaked me out in kindergarten when none of the other kid programs in similar format did, and seeing the eps thirty years later made me wonder if that might have been part of it.
vian, Debra, Stefan: I can see how no single size fits all, but still, English, of all languages...
Primary education plus politics, that's a match made in hell. The whole '70s to '00s school debates feel like conservatives whinging about being disrespected in '68. (And secondary education had it worse.)
Emma #208: He ran some tests and turned to my parents and said [...]: tell your imbecile relatives to mind their own business.
Great answer!
I got the "she can't possibly be reading" in kindergarten. With a side order of "and is probably disturbed". I sat under a table the whole day (safer -- the kindergarten teachers were not good at keeping kids from trying to kill each other with building blocks) and read pedagogical professional journals that the kindergarten had subscribed to and that were behind the teacher's desk. Kindergarten teacher didn't get why I'd sit under a table and look at a wall or text instead of "playing" with the other kids. (Correct response would have been, hi there, I am shortsighted, I have trouble recogizing faces, I'm not good in processing auditory information, because of that I have the articulation of a two-year old and I am very bad at a) dodging thrown building blocks and b) explaining this to you, so *leave me alone and let me read*.) My mother at least conveyed the "leave her alone and let her read" part convincingly and the kindergarten teacher backed off.
Summer Storms #215: suddenly I could see exactly how the letters on the page made the particular words of the story. I immediately got a different book that I didn't have memorized and tried that. Yep, I could read it. Few things have excited me that much since.
I think I remember that moment when "things started talking" to me (might be constructed, though). It was really that sudden. I sat in the bath and looked around, and all the letters around me made words.
Xopher #231: I actually had considerable trouble learning to read, probably because I was taught with Phonics (*spits*) by ignorant incompetent teachers.
They use Phonics in *English*? I thought it was a bloody stupid idea in Northern Germany where (native) people speak Hochdeutsch, which is phonetically pretty tidy. (Not as tidy as Spanish or Finnish, from what I've been told, but good enough that a kid who grew up in a high german speaking household and has good auditory processing can learn reading that way -- I'd never have learned it.) In *English*? I'm horrified.
John #193: As an English speaker learning German, one of my issues is that my brain has a hard time coping with the longer word lengths in old-orthography
My problem is that many compound words have a different meaning then the sum of their parts, and a different sound. "schlecht machen" (/ /-) is doing something badly, "schlechtmachen" (/--) is speaking ill of something. "allein stehend" (-/ /-) is standing alone, or without aid, "alleinstehend" (-/--) is a single person.
New orthography conflates different meanings into identical writing. It's no problem in speech, because the sound depends on what you mean, not on how it's written (at least for now). When speech adapts to writing, this will have created new homonyms, or have dissolved the more metaphorical compound meaning.
With non-compounds, the homonyms are already there. "of a greyish colour" used to be a different word in writing than "horrid". Isn't anymore, and I find myself mentally fading a scenery to grey instead of seeing it as scary.
I have the theory (as in, wild guess) that speed reading is what makes it so annoying to me. No idea if there was ever a study on it, and any study will have a hell of a time to control for class, I fear.
IngvarM. #196: The flip side is that I can't always tell what language I am reading and that can be VERY confusing.
Oh, word. I need to recall the image of the words on page/screen, or look for grammatical markers to find out what language I had read something in.
David #182: I know that I could read before I was three and three months, because we moved then, and I could read before that.
It was lucky -- I had perception problems that would have made me look retarded if I hadn't had that big obvious marker of high intelligence that early reading is usually seen as. (OTOH, as intelligent kids are never in any way disabled, I didn't get them diagnosed before it was too late to catch up.)
John #139 reminds me of the most surreal thing that ever happend to me in a big box hardware store...
I needed four wood posts, 1 metre each, as legs for a work table. The shop had 2 metre poles and a workshop where you could get wood cut to measure. Simple, one would think. Pick up two poles, go to workshop, two cuts, thirty seconds work, everyone is happy.
Only, there was no staff in the workshop, they wouldn't send anyone, and they wouldn't let us use the machines on our own. Instead they pointed us to, I kid you not, a sawbuck held together by duct tape and string, which was knee-high on one side and four inches higher on the other, wobbling like a chair with three-and-a-half legs. The saw they provided was a massive two-person one suited for sawing hardwood logs, if it had been sharp. It ripped the soft pine apart, and bounced every which way.
We really needed the stuff so we made do, avoiding injury by some miracle and ending up with some badly mangled but functional posts.
It has been 13 years, but I have never set foot into any store of that chain again and told everyone who didn't run away that everyone from floor staff to management was criminally clueless. Yes, I bear grudges.
David Goldfarb #148: I find that my reading/skimming speed in English and old-orthography German is about the same, while in new-orthography German it is waaay lower. I learned from that failure how I do it -- it seems I take an image of about half a page, translate it to compressed sound, and let my brain make sense of it while my eyes are half a page ahead. A word spelled in a way that "sounds" wrong (= new orthography) brings the process to a grinding halt. I need to go back, find where I was, identify the word, re-compile it, patch the sentence or paragraph, and only then get moving again.
This does *not* happen with words I do not know. Those get filled in from context.
I've had that stupid mutant superpower all my life. I get overlooked in hardware stores, at parties, and when standing in line in a pizza takeout place. It doesn't help that my speaking voice is a very soft alto.
Also I found that it's a field effect. When I go shopping with a friend who always gets noticed when she's on her own, she becomes invisible, too.
If I could control it, I could become a supervillain.
Lee @ 446:
Agree with you about the dog. A dog might growl at its owner when the owner has made the dog the alpha in the house, or when the dog is scared or in pain.
One of our dachshounds got cancer -- we didn't know how bad it was, but when he growled and snapped at everyone coming close, it was "to the vet, now". We had to have him put down that day, he was far beyond help.
Lee: I am by no means dead-set against corporal punishment as a tool; there are times (particularly WRT very young children and safety issues) when it's invaluable.
When a kid's too young to understand that "everyone's unhappy because of something I did, this is bad" (much less an explanation why something is dangerous and should not be done), I'm not sure how hurting the kid will help. Instant karma is one thing (I never pulled the dog's tail again after he bit me), but "you nearly did a thing that might have hurt you so I'm going to hurt you now" to an infant or toddler? Isn't that a little too complex?
David Harmon #331: that saying originally was about people who can't do their Thing for some other reason than incompetence
OK, I thought it was about how people who had to work hard and study all the nuts and bolts of a skill to become passably competent in it make better teachers than naturals.
Dobson, however, even if he had studied dog training for years, doesn't seem to have learned enough about it to understand that he's bad at it and why -- which is the minimum requirement for teaching from lack of talent.
#316: I'll never be getting over the dog scene. Is there any clearer indicator of "you fail at authority" than getting menaced by one's own dachshound? Mind-controlled by a goldfish, maybe?
Buying into Dobson's ideas about creating and exerting hierarchical authority is like falling for a beggar's get-rich-quick scheme or taking a notorious jailbird's advice on "how not to get caught".
I know they say "those who can't, teach", but there should be some level of incompetence below which you can teach only by bad example.
Albatross @ 103: As an adult, a lot of what you do to improve yourself or your life involves ignoring some levels of unpleasantness or discomfort or even pain
Not only as an adult.
I find the "no pain, no gain" (or, the way I have been taught it, "stuff that is good for you hurts, stuff that stops the pain is bad for you") hard to un-learn. I used to think that people working with adults would respect their clients or customers (or their money) enough to not push that meme, but ... obviously not.
Nancy @ 146: what's wrong with these white imitators who are neglecting their own ancestors?
That might point to a motive for cultural appropriation of that type. Those white imitators know exactly what crap their ancestors were up to (or know that staying ignorant once they look in that general direction will be hard work), so they prefer ancestors that are less well documented.
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