The unimportant news thread

[Karl Henning]

Thelonious Monkfish has been renamed The Mad Monkfish.  Wonder if this was a rights issue.  I found this out by looking (for something else) on Google Maps.  I almost found out, in person, yesterday, because the original plan was to take my sister to Thelonious Monkish.

What happened was, as we looked for parking, we wound up parking in a garage just off Mass. Ave.;  on the walk to Mass. Ave., there was a Thai restaurant on Pearl Street, Pepper Sky, and we decided to give that place a try.  Excellent food.

[Ghost of Baron Scarpia]

If any of you non-US members want to understand the US, forget Trump and read up on this story. At the University of Maryland College Park, one of the largest research universities in the country and the primary undergraduate college in the state, an abusive football coach didn't bother to seek medical aid for a student athlete who had collapsed on the field from heat stroke. The 19 year old student died.

The president of the University of Maryland, Wallace Loh, tried to fire the football coach. Then the University Regents (essentially the board of directors of the University system) fired the University President in order the bring back the football coach who had more-or-less killed one of his students. What's a dead student (or two), as long as we win football games, right?

[JBS]

http://www.espn.com/mlb/story/_/id/25136344/fan-arrested-throwing-beer-red-sox-parade/

[Sydney Nova Scotia]

If any of you non-US members want to understand the US, forget Trump and read up on this story. At the University of Maryland College Park, one of the largest research universities in the country and the primary undergraduate college in the state, an abusive football coach didn't bother to seek medical aid for a student athlete who had collapsed on the field from heat stroke. The 19 year old student died.

The president of the University of Maryland, Wallace Loh, tried to fire the football coach. Then the University Regents (essentially the board of directors of the University system) fired the University President in order the bring back the football coach who had more-or-less killed one of his students. What's a dead student (or two), as long as we win football games, right?

So Trump is just the tip of the Horror story

[Ghost of Baron Scarpia]

So Trump is just the tip of the Horror story

Well, he's the symptom. Probably European football is equally absurd.

[Karl Henning]

If any of you non-US members want to understand the US, forget Trump and read up on this story. At the University of Maryland College Park, one of the largest research universities in the country and the primary undergraduate college in the state, an abusive football coach didn't bother to seek medical aid for a student athlete who had collapsed on the field from heat stroke. The 19 year old student died.

The president of the University of Maryland, Wallace Loh, tried to fire the football coach. Then the University Regents (essentially the board of directors of the University system) fired the University President in order the bring back the football coach who had more-or-less killed one of his students. What's a dead student (or two), as long as we win football games, right?

Priorities, dude!

[Todd]

How much money you need to be part of the 1 percent worldwide

[Draško]

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/nov/08/croatian-man-breaks-leg-vandalising-anti-fascist-monument

Ahahahahahahahahahahhahaha

Unrelated, the high school I went to was named Rade Koncar.

[André]

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/nov/08/croatian-man-breaks-leg-vandalising-anti-fascist-monument

Ahahahahahahahahahahhahaha

Unrelated, the high school I went to was named Rade Koncar.

In French, the fascist Ustasha movement members are named Oustachis.
https://fr.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oustachis.

They are ridiculed in the Tintin album The Calculus Affair, where they are renamed Moustachistes, the added letter making them characterized by their leader's outsize mustache, which was even the country's official symbol. That makes Tintin an antifa, then !

[Draško]

In French, the fascist Ustasha movement members are named Oustachis.
https://fr.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oustachis.

They are ridiculed in the Tintin album The Calculus Affair, where they are renamed Moustachistes, the added letter making them characterized by their leader's outsize mustache, which was even the country's official symbol. That makes Tintin an antifa, then !

Didn't know that. I've read maybe 3-4 Tintin books, but not that one. A new Serbian translation is coming out next year, so I'll rectify that.

[Jo498]

Note that Syldavia and Borduria feature already in several earlier Tintin books. "The Calculus Affair" is one of the best but much better if one knows the earlier ones where the characters (and in this case also the countries) are introduced.

[André]

Didn't know that. I've read maybe 3-4 Tintin books, but not that one. A new Serbian translation is coming out next year, so I'll rectify that.

Hergé loved plays of words and laced his albums with contemporary geographical and historical references. Therefore, the bordurian baddies live in a dictatorship with an omnipresent secret police. In King Ottokar's Sceptre, Tintin unveils a political coup staged by the Steel Guard (a reference to the fascist Iron Guard of Romania). The Steel Guard's leader is named Musstler, a contraction of the names Mussolini and Hitler. And so on...

[André]

Amid the usual Armistice and WWI commemoration articles was one in which the CBC relates how the Germans had started an unusual project: Lautarchiv (Sound Archives): recording the voice of foreign soldiers made prisoners to document the way people spoke, their accents, speech rythm etc. In some cases they (the prisoners) were to sing a song, relate souvenirs etc. Many were enlisted to recite the same extract from the Bible (the Prodigal Son parable). The idea was to document speech patterns with the prospect of using them to teach foreign languages with the help of sound reproduction technologies. A proto-Berlitz.

Link to the article:

https://ici.radio-canada.ca/nouvelle/1134923/voix-soldats-allemagne-archives

To hear the clips, click on the soundcloud links.

No need to read it (it's in French), but the sound clips provide fascinating insights. When I played the first one, from a belgian soldier, my wife, who was reading, immediately said "What's that? It's from home! ". It is spoken in walloon, a dialect that is no longer spoken, so most of the words are unintelligible, but the up and down singsong speech is unmistakably that of her native region. Other clips are from the Alsace, Bordeaux, etc. If one of these lads had been cryogenized and thawed in 2018, chances are he wouldn't be understood by most people. And vice-versa.

Compared to 100 years ago we have become a global village indeed.

[Ken B]

Amid the usual Armistice and WWI commemoration articles was one in which the CBC relates how the Germans had started an unusual project: Lautarchiv (Sound Archives): recording the voice of foreign soldiers made prisoners to document the way people spoke, their accents, speech rythm etc. In some cases they (the prisoners) were to sing a song, relate souvenirs etc. Many were enlisted to recite the same extract from the Bible (the Prodigal Son parable). The idea was to document speech patterns with the prospect of using them to teach foreign languages with the help of sound reproduction technologies. A proto-Berlitz.

Link to the article:

https://ici.radio-canada.ca/nouvelle/1134923/voix-soldats-allemagne-archives

To hear the clips, click on the soundcloud links.

No need to read it (it's in French), but the sound clips provide fascinating insights. When I played the first one, from a belgian soldier, my wife, who was reading, immediately said "What's that? It's from home! ". It is spoken in walloon, a dialect that is no longer spoken, so most of the words are unintelligible, but the up and down singsong speech is unmistakably that of her native region. Other clips are from the Alsace, Bordeaux, etc. If one of these lads had been cryogenized and thawed in 2018, chances are he wouldn't be understood by most people. And vice-versa.

Compared to 100 years ago we have become a global village indeed.

I thought Walloon was still spoken? Anyway, you are right about regional accents. You can even hear the difference generationally in Ontario. My son sounds more American than I do (example plural of house), I sound more American than my parents do.

I heard a Scotsman at the plumbing supply store yesterday. I am convinced they can't actually understand each other!

[André]

The last clip is spoken by a Canadian from London, Ontario. Did you hear it ? He speaks very nicely.

Walloon is spoken only among old folks in the countryside. Cousins of my father-in-law spoke it at home. Members of the next generation (my wife's) understand it but never speak it. It's fast becoming a cultural relic.

[JBS]

The last clip is spoken by a Canadian from London, Ontario. Did you hear it ? He speaks very nicely.

Walloon is spoken only among old folks in the countryside. Cousins of my father-in-law spoke it at home. Members of the next generation (my wife's) understand it but never speak it. It's fast becoming a cultural relic.

But it hasn't completely faded out.  From Wikipedia.

(And relevant to the preceding discussion on this thread!)

Numerous associations, especially theatre companies, are working to keep the language alive. Formally recognized as a langue régionale endogène (regional indigenous language) of Belgium since 1990,[6] Walloon has also benefited from a continued corpus planning process. The "Feller system" (1900) regularized transcription of the different accents. Since the 1990s, a common orthography was established (the Rifondou walon), which allowed large-scale publications, such as the Walloon Wikipedia officially in 2003. In 2004, a Walloon translation of a Tintin comic was released under the name L'èmerôde d'al Castafiore; in 2007 an album consisting of Gaston Lagaffe comic strips was published in Walloon

[Ken B]

The last clip is spoken by a Canadian from London, Ontario. Did you hear it ? He speaks very nicely.

Walloon is spoken only among old folks in the countryside. Cousins of my father-in-law spoke it at home. Members of the next generation (my wife's) understand it but never speak it. It's fast becoming a cultural relic.

I have a vague recollection that even Langue d'Oc isn't fully extinct. Which shocked me at least.

[Karl Henning]

Winners and losers from Amazon's HQ2 decision

[Ghost of Baron Scarpia]

Winners and losers from Amazon's HQ2 decision

And they got 1.5 billion in tax credits for coming to Queens, New York.

This practice of subsidizing huge corporations with tax cuts while the smaller businesses they compete with have to fend for themselves is one of the most insidious practices in the US economy. I wish there was the political will to make this practice illegal.

[Ken B]

And they got 1.5 billion in tax credits for coming to Queens, New York.

This practice of subsidizing huge corporations with tax cuts while the smaller businesses they compete with have to fend for themselves is one of the most insidious practices in the US economy. I wish there was the political will to make this practice illegal.

+1

In Cincinnati they subsidized a football stadium and guaranteed to buy any unsold tickets for 10 years!