I can't say when and where the chicken was domesticated, but "chicken" (tarnegol) is one of the very few Sumerian loan-words in Hebrew.
Let's see, b4uno at 13's made their first post here. And it seems to be barely-relevant copypasta. And they want us to go visit a URL -- but they give us a tinyURL rather than actually telling us where it leads.
I think I won't be doing that, then.
geekosaur @315:
I see I was insufficiently clear. Let me try again.
That was the first villanelle I've ever written. It was hard. Who'd have thought? :)
Better?
Coming up: one unironically pro-torture villanelle, in tetrameter.
Please note: I do not actually endorse the views put forward in this poem! Do not expect me to defend them!
Where everything is just and fair
who would use violence to compel?
Is this a sin too great to bear?
But man's a beast, and places rare
(in this world of living hell)
where everything is just and fair.
Bodies toppled through the air
the day the mighty towers fell.
Is this a sin too great to bear?
Go waste your mercy, I don't care.
You think your soul too fine to sell
where everything is just and fair.
But still you need someone to dare
wrest truth from those who will not tell.
Is this a sin too great to bear?
There is no effort I would spare
to see my loved ones safely dwell
where everything is just and fair.
Is this a sin too great to bear?
That was the first villanelle I've ever written. It was hard. Who'd have thought? I mean, it's a 19-line poem and you only have to write 13 lines!
Apropos of nothing:
While the Making Light community is generally tolerant of polite dissent, I do think that there are some ideas which are considered beyond the pale. Simply expressing them may not be enough to get you banned, but it's not going to win you any friends, either, even if they're couched in lyric verse. Support for torture and opposition to civil rights for gay people are probably two of them. I imagine that advocating the disenfranchisement of women or blacks, or the execution of heretics, would get a similar reaction. I consider this a feature, not a bug.
On the other hand -- while the Making Light community is generally tolerant of polite dissent, and while even people posting in support of the general consensus can lose their vowels or be otherwise reprimanded for conversational fouls -- in my observation the level of politeness required of people who disagree with the general consensus is higher than the level of politeness demanded of those who agree. [1] This is unfortunate but perhaps inevitable.
[1] The instance that springs to mind is of a poster in favor of voting for third party candidates being smacked down for bringing up the argument in an unrelated discussion, while a different poster, arguing against voting for third party candidates in an unrelated discussion, was praised. Of course, other people will have different interpretations of these events, as they were as always more complicated than that. I will hunt down links if I have to, though I may not do it quickly.
Kate @ 46:
The Encantadas by Herman Melville. Nothing to do with biology, but everything to do with the Galapagos Islands. Not very much plot, beautiful prose.
Trillian took her two pet mice
And off to space they went
The mice got off, while Beeblebrox
Was probing Arthur's Dent
They met with Slartibartfast
Who had some lovely fjords
He like terraforming planets
And tinkering with Fords
Fenchurch and Lintilla both
found Random cradle-robbable
Where fangirls are concerned, there's nothing
Infinitely improbable
Lila #106:
And by "an illiterate clod" you mean "George Bernard Shaw," right?
The Lovely Myfanwy
It's by Walter de la Mare, though, rather than being a traditional Welsh anything.
I have sung (and probably will again) Heather Dale's Mordred's Lullaby at filksings. It's a lovely song, but I wouldn't sing it to my son.
There's always Tom Lehrer's MLF Lullaby, though.
anaea #173:
Thanks! I'd never heard that, and am probably not in a good position to catch it in the wild, unless it becomes much more broadly popular in the future.
It seems like most of the examples were of it being used as a subject pronoun, although there were one or two examples where it was an object pronoun. Interestingly enough, when it was paired with a possessive pronoun, it was "his," making the full declension (?) yo/yo/his. I wonder if this would apply even if the person being referred to was female?
anaea #64:
I'm afraid I'm not seeing anything like that after a quick scan of the front page of your livejournal. Could you link to a specific entry, pretty please? I am always eager to keep abreast of new linguistic developments.
In re: learning dead languages, all the ones I learned in university were taught comprehension only, except for an odd spot of conjugation and declension. This strikes me as a fine way to teach a language for the purposes that we were learning them, which were, a) to be able to decipher a text in that language with the help of a grammar and dictionary, b)to be able to decipher a text in any language with the help of a grammar and a dictionary, c) to get an understanding of the different ways grammar works in different languages, and d) to be able to infer grammatical rules from texts.
These, in turn, strike me as reasonable purposes for linguistics students.
My Syriac teacher, especially, tended to be dismissive of teaching composition in dead languages, on the grounds that you couldn't be sure, or even reasonably confident, that you'd gotten it right. He was fond of saying, "Carl Brockelmann only ever composed one sentence in Syriac, and it was wrong."
While abridging the Doctrine of Addai for his Syriac chresthomathy, Brockelmann found it necessary to write a sentence to join two sections together. In it, he used a lamed to mark the direct object of a verb, which is unexceptional in Syriac, except that subsequent research showed that it couldn't be used with that particular type of verb. The moral was that there are always more grammatical rules in a dead language than anyone living now knows about, which is good news for linguists who want to write papers, but worse news for people who want to compose grammatically-correct sentences in those languages.
Also, I'm kind of appalled that the wikipedia article on Carl Brockelmann is a stub. On the other hand, I really don't want to do the research and write an article myself.
Teresa @ 114:
Most people wouldn't have access to a kiln. And even if you did, re-firing a pot consumes resources -- fuel, time and space in the kiln -- that could be devoted to making new pots, which are worth more.
Much easier to toss it in the midden and get a new one.
Claude Muncey @ 85:
Good pots and pans last all but forever. (Not an exagerration -- archaeologists might wonder about the fashions for a particular age, but we almost always know what people cooked with)
Yes, because they made so damn much of it. Up through the middle ages, most cooking was done in pottery vessels, which would break, or get saturated with food. They'd have to be replaced every couple of months. Disposable goods are not an invention of the modern age.
(Also, of course, they tended to make their clothing out of more perishable material than their cooking vessels. Note that non-perishable material =/= non-perishable object. See also, plastics.)
Some of these could really work. I especially like the Little Red Riding Hood and Cat in the Hat ones.
Here's mine!
Wealthy heiress and ardent posthumanist Brooke Theodorus rejects all human suitors in favor of merging her consciousness with scholarly AI CastleBonn. However, her new existence proves unsatisfying, as CastleBonn's great intellectual work proves to be nothing more than an endless series of Wikipedia edit wars.
When CastleBonn suffers a catastrophic server crash, will Brooke be able to retrieve the pieces of her mind from the masses of corrupted data and resume an independent existence? And what about the only other surviving fragment of CastleBonn's personality, a rogue subroutine named Will with a modest DeviantArt gallery and big ambitions?
Meanwhile, a brilliant young hacker who goes by the name of 3 has revolutionary ideas about content delivery. Working on a shoestring budget, he puts together a startup that looks like it just might get off the ground -- until he starts playing World of Warcraft. Will he be forced to sell out to the Man in order to buy a flying mount for his paladin, Victrix?
Middlemancer: the first major motion picture to be released direct-to-youtube!
Alter and I have been watching old Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies with our 1.5-year-old.
(I will never say a bad word about political correctness again. But I digress.)
At last three or four times, a character has said "You are now in the hands of the dear old Maestro," or something similar. This is clearly a reference to something, but I have no idea what.
Google isn't talking.
Help?
Lee #321:
A reasonable caution is undoubtedly a good idea. However, the line between "If it seems too good to be true, it probably is" and "If it's good, it probably isn't true" is not necessarily a clear and bright one, especially to a young teenager with an imperfect grasp of emotional nuance. I prefer to err on the side of optimism. This probably has something to do with the fact that I've had a basically good life, and nothing really bad has ever happened to me.
(Please not that the causation I'm implying goes in one direction -- I've had a good life, so I tend to be optimistic. In no way do I mean to imply that optimism will magically protect you from bad things.)
(Also for the record, I will be twenty-eight in a week and change, am fully clothed, and don't care to discuss my perversions or lack thereof at the moment. I've met probably between ten and twenty of the regular posters here, mostly casually. miriam beetle, however, can vouch for the last twenty-six years or so of my existence, although she probably remembers the first few of those imperfectly at best. Alter S. Reiss is better qualified to settle the pervert question.)
| Year | Number of comments posted |
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| 2009 | 1 |
| 2008 | 16 |
| 2007 | 12 |
| 2006 | 2 |
| 2005 | 9 |
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