Danish, eh? At least Seebach is too dead to be embarassed by his immortality. He seemed very happy during the video, if you know what I mean.
Over on Crooked Timber they're talking about the bebop classic "Cherokee", and the lyrics to that song (by a British composer who wrote lots of Injun-themed songs) were incredibly, incredibly cheesy. Good thing Charlie Parker didn't have a vocalist.
Franklin was, as we all know, a British double agent. Lyndon has explained this in great detail.
The turkey is not a patriotic bird, except for the wild turkey. The turkey was well established in England before any English settlers came to America.
By 1575, turkey was becoming the usual main course at an English Christmas.
At this late date, should we still be slavishly following the customs of the mother country? I think not.
The key to having a good turkey day is to eat duck instead. Mmmmmmmm duck!
While duck is fatty, it's all Type Z fat, which tastes wonderful and actually helps prevent heart disease! And it also helps you lose weight!
Fact.
You probably won't have leftovers, but if you do it's best not to eat them cold because the fat is tastiest when hot. The best duck I remember was stuffed with green apples, but duck is almost always good.
Mmmmmmmm.
This has become obsessive for me. Results at my URL. Did you know that the opposite of Dan Savage's "Skipping to Gomorrah" is Thomas Hardy's "Far from the Madding Crowd"?
OT, but this is too much fun. Drop over to Unfogged for the "Unsuggester" thread.
Or to find the exact opposite of your favorite book, go here:
http://www.librarything.com/unsuggester
For example, the exact opposite of "Atlas Shrugged" is Flann O'Brien's "The Poor Mouth".
But the exact opposite of "The Poor Mouth" is something by Terry Pratchett; Pratchett is the opposite of almost everything, because apparently his fans read no other books. Flann O'Brien is only #2, because his books are less popular than Pratchett's.
I'm with Malthus. Declaring a category of outlaws is what Bush has done, in part, and the boundaries and definitions are slippery. Already "ecoterrorists" are being targetted by Homeland Security, and unless the state power changes hands, within ten years or so I expect to see an "ecoterrorist" stripped of citizenship and rights of appeal and held incommunicado without charges.
The scare quotes are valid. The ecoterrorists haven't killed anyone in 20+ years of sabotage. Not terrorists. In almost all cases they were taking specific steps to avoid killing anyone. In no cases did they try unsuccessfully to kill someone. The Portland Oregonian did a scare story about this a few years ago, and of you read it carefully you realized that there was not much there.
The comparison of the support of terrorists with the support of privateers strikes me as valid, though. It seems to consist of the provision of a home base under conditions of plausible deniability. The US did it in Nicaragua, of course, and as far as that goes, Afghanistan.
OK, OK, it was the Doobie Brothers who led the British Invasion.
Slip of the tongue. You really pick nits.
I have an editing error in a comma series to report, though it is not an Oxford comma issue.
Max Weber wrote a book about music in which a phrase was translated "The twelfth, fifth, and seventh octave". The seems clumsy, as though it perhaps should read "The fifth, seventh, and twelfth octave."
But actually the "fifth" is not sequential like the "twelfth" and the "seventh", but a musical interval like the octave.
The translator probably wrote "The twelfth fifth and the seventh octave", only to have the editor correct him. (In the German it would have been clear because of capitalized nouns: "The twelfth Fifth and the seventh Octave".)
Is that geeky enough for all y'all?
I was taught grammar in HS (starting in eighth grade), but I guess that doesn't count as "recent memory".
Patrick (12:58) is hereby absolved of any suspicions of being a Strunk and White advocate.
Well, I'm the Ivy-basher here.
I know about need-blind admissions, but somehow it doesn't work. You still end up with a highly privileged cohort (partly because of differences in HS quality), and the less-privileged students try to fit in. (An exacerbating factor is that a primary goal of education can be helping people escape from their communities in order to join more prosperous communities.)
I think that this is becomes a negative factor when the Democrats rely on Ivyish whiz kids. That makes it harder to establish channels of communication with non-elite communities. (As I keep saying, Republican populism is fake, but Democratic elitism is real.) I think that this can be a negative factor in certain types of well-intended service and charitable organizations, which often develop a condescending air.
I didn't say, but should have, that American elite schools provide a tremendous education for motivated, well-prepared students. But it's too easy for the others to slack through, so an Ivy credential doesn't tell you a lot. I get the feeling that the student culture in most schools is not strongly intellectually oriented. A lot of students seem to have specialized in glibness studies and pop culture.
Granted, my comparison is with places like Swarthmore and Reed. (Do I think that all schools should be like Swarthmore and Reed? Pretty much. They do what colleges are supposed to do.)
My son went to Tufts, and it was a disappointing experience. It's not Tufts per se, but that whole privileged way of life, which he wasn't confortable with. It was all upper middle class and above -- as he said, Tufts wasn't all white, but it might as well have been.
OK, now -- Orwell is fine but Strunk and White, not. I refer you to Geoff Pullum at Language Log, and Steve at Language Hat, both of whom are always right.
The guy's bad writing seemed definitely to be the result of trying to "dress up" ordinary writing. Since his ideas weren't that powerful, I can understand his motive. (His response was badly written in exactly the same way.)
I've been saying for some time that Democrats give too much voice to Ivyish types (Tufts is a minor-league AAA Ivy.) I'm also told that undergrad ed in the Ivies isn't necessarily very intensive, once you get in. College is really for networking and learning to behave properly in social situations, you know.
Orwell mostly wrote about deliberately bad bureaucratic-ideological writing which was designed to obscure and confuse the issue. As far as I know he wasn't talking about a temporal decline, but just was outlining the ideal types of badness.
Not only that, Erik, but think about it. Mother Theresa and Princess Diana died within a few days of each other.
Bad luck comes in threes. Who was the third? President Mobutu of Zaire (Congo).
The crescent is a moon symbol, obviously, and has been used by many different peoples and religions, including the pagan Mongols who destroyed the Caliphate. Nowadays it has a bit of a Muslim tinge though (e.g., the "Red Crescent" ~ "Red Cross'.)
I've never been a great admirer of John Rawls. His son's thinking seems hyper-rational in a way similiar to contemporary philosophy, but even more so -- he works out ideas rigorously without doing reality checks.
IT'S BEEN DONE!
If I were fire, I'd burn up the world;
if I were storm, I'd raise a giant swell
and drown it all; if I were God I'd hurl
this rat's-ass circus all the way to hell.
If I were pope, how happy I would be!
I'd cheat the Christians blind and suck their blood.
To serve as emperor I might agree,
so I could chop off everybody's head.
If I were Death, I'd go to see my dad —
of course with mother I would do the same.
If I were Life, I'd run from them like mad.
If I were Cecco, as indeed I am,
I'd take the lovely and the lively dames
and leave for you the ugly and the sad.
From the Italian of Cecco Angiolieri (Siennese, c.1258–1312).
A free translation, but not more violent than the original.
http://www.monadnock.net/translations/it_fire.html
I'm not so sure about the Missouri Compromise metaphor. Didn't that lead to Bleeding Kansas, Franklin Pierce, etc.?
"Fatigue is my drug" said Henri Michaux. Some of his stuff is much like this.
He also tried mescaline without especially liking it. A major writer who's not too well known.
The latest date guessed for the poem is about 1020 AD under the reign of Knut / Canute. Most date it earlier, as early as 700 AD. Because of the setting, Many think that it was written under Danish rule or under the auspices of a king partly of Danish descent.
I like the Chickering translation / text, which includes parsings of a number of passages.
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