"The "folk community" things above made me blink..."
The skip stepping and goose stepping communities haven't always been that distant. Especially before WWII there was a lot of ... interesting ideology feeding into the revival of folk traditions, including some extreme nationalism.
I don't know the literature that well, but I know that Steve Corrsin has done a lot of research on the sword dancing side of this.
mds @ 198:
I just checked: the restaurant I was thinking of was Grasshopper, in Union Square, Allston. Its web site, at least, is still there. It may be time for another visit to the restaurant itself.
Ken Brown @84:
That's pretty par for the course in London. There are loads of Halal Fried Chicken shops. There's a chain of them local to the bit of London I live in called Morley's Fried Chicken. Its pretty much the pits of the eating-out experience - where you go if you can't afford Macdonalds.
I should probably have mentioned that the co-worker who described these was talking about his university years, when I suspect he judged quality and cost a bit differently.
Ok, this is one of those threads where I saw the initial posting, didn't respond, and then had to take notes reading all the responses before I could sensibly comment.
On kosher Chinese food: agreed about it being almost anywhere there are enough observant Jews and one Chinese cook. Aside from the classic joke about Chinese food as the traditional Christmas meal of Jews (because it's all that's open), I have a childhood memory of a Chinese waiter (not on Christmas), noticing how my family ordered, asking, "Are you Jewish?" and then, "Ah, yes. Jews like Chinese food!"
On vegetarian lobster: there is (or used to be; I haven't been there in a few years) a Buddhist vegetarian restaurant in Boston with an entire menu of mock meats. They had an excellent lobster dish made, not from wheat gluten, but from very fine noodles. Regardless of what it was pretending to be, it was delicious.
On Cajun sushi: after all this discussion, I still have no idea what this would be, so I think it still wins the prize for odd cross-cultural combination.
On "teriyaqueria": I've never seen one, but I want to go.
In the brief period I lived in London a friend pointed out to me that, although KFC had long abandoned any mention of its "F" word, there were innumerable other restaurants called "Your-improbable-state's-name-here Fried Chicken". "Kansas Fried Chicken" particularly jumped out at me. Later, when I mentioned this to a Muslim co-worker, he mentioned that he loved those places. In his experience most were run by Muslim South Asians and were thus Halal, so he could get a meat meal there.
Alex @13: kayak.com has at least something like the "what others have been quoted" database you're asking for, and uses it for various charts and comparisons. Kayak is a meta-search engine, querying airline sites and, apparently sites like orbitz, giving a wider range of ways to search and view the results, and then referring you to the original sites if you want to actually book a flight. I haven't explored all the features but I've been shifting over from orbitz to kayak for a lot of travel searches.
R. M. Koske @48: I'd actually managed to forget all the Usenet posting style flamage until just now. That summary fits my memory of the issue pretty well. I don't think it was just a few nuts in my Usenet days (although I would say that if I were one of the nuts, wouldn't I?)
For any given forum it comes down to 1) how hard it is to figure out context; 2) how hard it is to skip excess text; and 3) local standards. Usenet was unfriendly to top-posting on all three counts, since some groups were gatewayed with mailing lists, some were rendered as digests, everything was typically rendered in 80 columns of plain text, and the standard that evolved was therefore minimal bottom- or inline-posting.
Alex@63: And thus any ticking object in fiction was a bomb. Or maybe a crocodile.
I don't think the "improvised device" logic works as well for LEDs, though, at least not since the invention of duct tape. I think it's just an equation of blinkenlights = active technology. If it's lit up, following movie plot logic, it's the thing you should focus on.
abi @169: Movable Type autocloses any tags accidentally left open in a post. If your own close tag didn't work it will have put another one in when it posted the message.
Probably not the way I inserted those mock tags, but I appreciate the idea of the software automatically limiting my embarrassment to one post.
<extreme_embarrassment>I'm an idiot: I just looked up the thread in question and realized that "yo" was one of the first suggested translations.</extreme_embarrassment>
And I'm not too sure about that end tag.
Terry Karney@164: I think anaea is making reference to a recent paper which says the word, "yo" has become a gender neutral pronoun.
Thinking of a recent-ish Beowulf thread: wouldn't "Yo!" make a good alternate translation for "Hwæt!"?
Too many short replies to post separately. (And, speaking of posting delays, while I was writing this several of my comments were posted by other people, shortening this post significantly. That reminds me of a lesson learned in Quaker business meetings: if you actually get people to listen to each other, sometimes they notice when they're being redundant and stop. And then, sometimes they don't.)
Abi@31: There are ways of dealing with the lack of synchronization if it gets too confusing; Fungi@40 already mentioned threads. Of course, threading is problematic for posts like this one, and I sometimes find heavily nested threading difficult to format readably.
Fungi@40: "I wonder how long until someone reimplements Usenet in Flash, if they haven't already..."
How would that be different from the various Usenet interfaces that already exist?
TexAnne@14: "grammo"
When I worked in speech recognition we used to refer to transcription errors as "speakos". It's one of those neologisms that, in context at least, tell you exactly what they mean even if you've never heard them before.
Abi@7: "I'm a tester. Edge cases generated while you wait. Awkwardness a specialty."
My one successful bit of career advice was to a friend who complained that every piece of software she used seemed to crash in new and obscure ways. I was able to suggest a job where this was considered a talent.
Fragano #17: Serge #16: 'Sausage, leak and apple pie'.
Actually, that describes a lot of my pie crusts. They do tend to crack.
-David
Serge @ 197: Several of Unibroue's beers have names like that: La Fin du Monde, Maudite, Don de Dieu... When my wife graduated from divinity school we made sure to have plenty of those at the party.
-David
#179: I'd generally say that sake is wine, not beer
From my (limited) knowledge of sake manufacture, the process is more like beer making, with the additional step of a mold fermentation in addition to the yeast fermentation. In terms of drinking, though, it's definitely more like wine.
Along with the onion-free gibsons and tonic-free G&Ts I would list the cachaça-free caipirinhas I've been served. I'm not sure what the point is of serving a drink without the main distinguishing ingredient.
(Mind you, contrary to our hostess's characterization of cachaça a few years ago , I actually do like some cachaça enough to drink it straight, so I particularly miss it when its absent. On the other hand, the cachaça I would drink straight isn't the cachaça I would mix with limes and sugar.)
#236 I'm reading C.E.Petit's comments as more like "You keep mentioning the DMCA. I do not think that law means what you think it means."
Here's Harold Feld's take on this.
JC@#2: Feld (who IAL) takes it exactly that way -- a way to assert their rights without squashing anybody.
In addition to Language Log, I recommend Ben Goldacre's Guardian column Bad Science. He often targets sponsored "studies" like the 20-words bit, most recently on the 16th.
Following the money: "Tesco, which commissioned the report, said it was responding by launching a scheme which allows all UK comprehensive schools to interact and communicate with other schools around the country using its internet phone technology."
Since the gravy discussion has continued into the third day of Thanksgiving (which includes six assorted game birds with pear sauce): This year's discovery was that roasting the neck and giblets with vegetables produced a very good gravy base, letting us make the gravy the day before and thereby avoid a last-minute task. It wasn't quite as good as starting with all the carmelized drippings and vegetables from the pan, but anything not done right before the meal allows for two or three more calm breaths during the day, so we may stick with it.
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