voluntaryXchange

What’s the English Word for Horse Served as Dinner?

Many people know the vocabulary: in English our animal words come from Anglo-Saxon, and our food words from Old French. †

So we tend cows, but we eat beef. Same deal with pork, and so on.

The other night while the vXyoungwoman was at work, the rest of us were around the table, and we wondered: if the French eat cheval, there should be an English word for horse served as food.

But there isn’t.

It turns out that eating horse is a culturally newer thing in France, dating back to the early 19th century. So it misses, by several hundred years, the importation of many French words into English.

BTW: English imports from many languages, but French is the predominant contemporary one. Lots of cultures eat horse, but none of their words have snuck into English.

† Interesting trivia on this page: venison is meat from large game (grand gibier), not just deer.

Masks In America

This is the top image on foxnews.com this morning:

Six people, presumably in line for COVID-19 testing, and 2 of the 6 can’t wear the mask properly.

And yeah … I’ll admit partial coverage is better than no coverage.

P.S. Part of me also wants to be ticked about 5 of 6 of them being on their phones … when I’m on mine when in line, I’m typically reading a book. I don’t think all five of them are reading books.

FWIW: About 3 years ago I started taking off points on exams in principles classes for students who were unable to follow directions: a point for each infraction. It’s a pretty bizarre experiment. Many students lose points here and there, some consistently lose several points each time, and whole classes will do worse on this if not reminded often. Directions are, of course, not hidden, and nowhere but the top front of the exam. It has really just amounted to a new way to put distance between the A students and the not-A students.

Not Really Conflicted At All

I'd like to be sympathetic to the good cops out on the streets this week, dealing with demonstrations and rioting.

But someone I know, love, and trust was charged for multiple crimes they didn't commit, and ended up pleading guilty to some to avoid the potential of a worse outcome.

The bad detective responsible is very likely out working the demonstrations in Salt Lake City tonight.

I can only sympathize with the African-American situation, and perhaps have some empathy. But, for my part I know that the cops aren’t on my side either.

Still Here

I have not gone missing. Due to COVID-19, I have been posting like crazy at SUU MacroBlog (over 100 posts there since late January).

SUU MacroBlog is where I cover current events for my advanced macroeconomics class.

I was on top of the pandemic coverage for them from late January; it was obvious to me that it might turn out to be a major macroeconomic event.

That’s an understatement.

********************************

On a related note, f**k the EU.

For year, I have written most of my blog posts in Open Live Writer, and before that Windows Live Writer.

But now, due to EU regulations, Blogger no longer accepts posts containing (potentially copyrighted) images from third party software.

SUU MacroBlog is hosted by Blogger, and has been since 2009.

For my workflows, this means that I now have to write posts in 2 different softwares. That’s not much of a problem, but it makes cross-posting from one blog to the other very difficult.

So, in the past, any of the work over there that I wanted to post here to look current was just a click away. Not anymore.

********************************

So, if you’re interested, head over to SUU MacroBlog. There’s quite a bit there about interpreting the statistics associated with COVID-19.

Contemplating Daylight Savings Time

Most people know when the shortest day of the year is.

But most people don’t know that the earliest sunset and the latest sunrise do not fall on that day.

It turns out, the earliest sunset (December 5th) is about 16 days before the shortest day (December 21st), and the latest sunrise is about 15 days after (January 5th).

So honestly, I started thinking about this in late January. I was noticing the “days getting longer”. By this, most of us mean we notice that it’s light for longer after work.

I did some mental math, and realized that it was about 8 weeks after the earliest sunset.

And so I thought … oh … sunset changes are symmetrical … so late January has the same sunset as mid-October. And I thought about how nice those cold evenings are in mid-October.

I decided quickly that daylight savings was a bad thing, and we should move the clocks back right now, so I could have those cold, beautiful evenings full of light until after 7 in late January.

I have been laughing to myself at how dumb I was for about about a week now.

Moving the clock back also moves the sunrise back. And the sunrise was not 8 weeks into transitioning towards summer, but more like four.

And in Utah, most of us live hard up on the west side of the mountains. Twilight in the morning is long: the sun is up, but it remains blocked by the mountains. On the shortest day, it comes over the mountains about 8:35 (even now on February 20th, I was watching rays of sunshine peek through a canyon at 7:45, 30 minutes after sunrise, but the sun wasn’t visible yet).

Why laugh at myself? If we got rid of daylight savings time here, on January 5th, the sun wouldn’t come over the mountains until 9:35. I think maybe I’d like to keep avoiding that.

No Sympathy from YouTube

A couple of weeks ago I attempted to post a video clip of Monty Python, in memoriam for Terry Jones.

I made the clip from DVD’s I own.

The underlying service for videos on this platform (Typepad) is YouTube. So I had to upload the clip to YouTube to post it here.

It was blocked as a copyright violation. Their algorithms blocked the video in less time than it would take to view once through.

I protested in writing that it was fair use. I was not attempting to profit from the clip, I had justifiable motivation, it was quite short, and I owned the source material.

During the period after which I made my appeal, they kept my video blocked.

After 13 days, they responded by declining my appeal.

***************************

All of this is perfectly legal, and above board, and I’m OK with that.

***************************

But, let’s think this through.

We now live in a world with an internet where:

• Content can be blocked immediately.
• Content can be blocked while it is under appeal.
• (And obviously) content can be blocked after you lose the appeal.

The key point here is that the content was always blocked.

This is not the internet we grew up with.

And remember Belk’s Third Law of the Internet:

If you think The Internet is terrible now, just wait a while.

The Internet Didn’t Used to Suck

Like many of you, I’m frustrated at what the internet has turned into.

I was the perfect person for the internet. I had been warming up my tech cred from 1987 or so (gosh, I’d been on BitNet), I was mildly into hacker stuff by 1990, emailing in 1991, the most tech savvy person on my job by 1992, and had a PC at home capable of getting the internet by late 1994, and a website by 1997. I pretty much retooled my career around what I could go on here.

For me, the first sign of trouble was probably around 2008-9 when Facebook started making it difficult to keep your personal and professional lives separate.

The last decade has been less fun. I struggle for the right word, but for me it’s the app-ization of everything. Working through someone else’s small list of possible tasks through a crappy interface is not my idea of fun.

Lest you think I’m a curmudgeon, there are some apps that I think are amazing, like SoundHound, Reelgood, Pushbullet, and Musicolet.

************************

Yesterday I came across Belk’s Three Laws of the Internet:

• Everything you hate about The Internet is actually everything you hate about people.
• The worst thing is knowing what everyone thinks about anything.
• If you think The Internet is terrible now, just wait a while.

I love that third one. “The moment you were just in was as good as it got.”

Neil Innes RIP

Neil Innes passed away at the end of the year. He was a quasi-Python, appearing in many shows and movies, but not part of the core group of six.

This is just audio, but it’s my favorite bit, and it’s him doing solo from the Live at City Center album:

He also wrote one of my favorite sketches, from the shortened, Cleese-free, last season about the most disgusting family in Britain: “More beans!!!”

Terry Jones RIP 2

Terry Jones passed away at 77 this week. He is the second of the Monty Python six to leave us (Graham Chapman passed away in 1989, and quasi-Python Neil Innes died earlier this month).

Monty Python are fairly tight with public use of their videos. This is why if you browsed the many obituaries available this week, almost all of them featured one of the few publicly available scenes, from Life of Brian.

While that featured Jones, I wanted to post something a little more meaningful to me. I chose this one. I think this qualifies as fair use; we’ll see how long it takes for it to be blocked. Sorry for the delay; it took until the weekend to find it.

Of the six, Jones was probably on screen the second least. And often, he did not play a lead character (the obituaries are right that he often appeared in drag as a dowdy middle-aged woman). But again, everything in the legacy media was a carbon copy of everything else. Damn algorithms.

So again, looking for something completely different: a sketch featuring Jones, probably written by Jones, not from Life of Brian, and not in drag. That’s slim pickings.

Monty Python did not attribute sketches to the individuals as writers. It was a group. So prizing out what is likely to be a Jones idea is tough. Generally speaking, if the sketch was longer and sillier, it was from Jones or Palin. If it was edgy, aggressive, and shorter, it was from Cleese and Chapman. If it was a song, or some unusual wordplay, it was Eric Idle, perhaps with the help of Neil Innes. If it was a cartoon or montage, it was probably Terry Gilliam.

Also, later in the series, they juxtaposed more: Cleese and Chapman would appear in sketches written by Palin and Jones, and vice versa. The famous turn by Cleese as a self-defense instructor worried about attackers bearing fresh fruit seems like it’s all Jones-Palin with Cleese inserted to bring his best.

Anyway, I think this is a Jones sketch featuring Jones. It’s from the first year of the show, and it’s pretty silly. Jones is filing the complaint.

You can see the sketch, preceded by a commercial if you click through this link to DailyMotion: https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x6qglg9. It starts about 40 seconds in.

Hard to say where the idea for this began. The Pythons wrote individually, then got together with a partner to sharpen things up, then brought that to the whole group for more fine tuning. The sweetness and innocence of this bit makes me think it started with Jones or Palin, with big help from the other one. The bit at the end, where there’s a quick transition to another scene with no punchline is all Jones.

Terry Jones, RIP

I don’t even know what to say. Just such a huge influence on my life since I first started watching in the 6th grade.

I do wish someone in the legacy media would show some clip other than Brian’s mother or Mr. Creosote … perhaps Clodagh Rodgers or something.

P.S. Also saddened by the passing of quasi-Python Neil Innes a few weeks ago.