I feel I should add to Lee's point at #739, as a former bartender/smoker, specifically at the point when the smoking ban happened in Sweden. We moved our pub/nightclub to a new locale six months before the ban became law, and I can't recall any of us smokers complaining when we decided to race ahead of the ban and constrain all smoking to the smoking room we had prepared. The non-smokers were, of course, all for it, since it meant they didn't wake up feeling hungover after working in what we jokingly called "The Lützen Fog". And while we had to work a bit during the rollover period it was generally accepted by our guests, and though I can't say that we didn't lose part of our clientele by doing so (because there were too many factors involved there) I can say that the familiar faces of mine became the familiar faces of the young ones that became part of the staff after the move.
I do realise that my anecdotes from good old Communist Sweden are just that, but generally, and in my experience, these are the opinions of both the barstaff and the patrons. Mind you, I do have a counter-anecdote as well, but that one had different premises.
But I never knew how much people tended to pass wind at the bar until we didn't have a constant cloud of smoke hanging around the place.
As to the rest of the discussion (the relevant bit), I'm still trying to find out what I want to say, or if it's even worth saying in this storm of well-thought-out views. I might come back on that, or I might just listen. Umm, read. You know.
My absolute favorite bit was the one about the english language, since I(as well as several of my friends) have gone "well, it's a definite mixture of English and Swedish(except for the spelling, which is as weird as it gets)" about your regular Dutch. But the Frisian was just uncanny in that regard. Also, "the Vikings also gave us... The word 'husband' & The word 'thing'" delighted me to no end, although I had to ponder a moment about 'thing' before I realised what the connection was(since 'thing' would usually be translated as 'sak' while 'ting' in that sense is not a common word, apart from its presence in composite words such as 'någonting'(something), 'allting'(everything)and 'ingenting'(nothing))
The bits about cultural(and the particular case of subcultural) lineage, however, I felt was more of a description of its general mechanism rather than something specificaly british. No less true because of that, of course, but I felt that it could have been better served by a show with specific focus on that part(and there might be something delightfully well done about that bit out there that I don't know of).
Nevertheless, I must agree with you on comedians and nonfiction programming, and it makes one wonder why there are any number of people who seem to do these programs as acts of devotion to The Gods of Dull when they should be ditched fast enough to achieve relativistic speeds and people who make it interesting(such as comedians) should be hired even faster.
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| 2006 | 1 |
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