I had a French teacher who claimed that "let them eat cake" was a bit of a mistranslation and that "cake" was just a different, maybe fancier, type of bread.
Like the situation was more like someone said "Marie, the people don't have any baguettes to eat." And she replied "Well then let them eat brioche"
Still probably apocryphal, but I think maybe a little more believable if it were true while still showing the tone-deafness.
It also just feels very French to me.
What they were actually using prior to the space pen, and what the soviets used, were grease pencils, which really basically are crayons
I'm all for splitting hairs over semantics, and I'll agree with you that "fascist" probably isn't the best label for Iran
But if you take a step back and look at the big picture, it does look a hell of a lot like fascism.
Extreme right wing, militaristic government, social and economic regimentation, charismatic, authoritarian dictators, focusing a whole lot of hatred and blame on people in the nation who don't conform and towards external enemies, etc.
I don't know that they're exactly nationalistic, but they do have religion filling pretty much that same role, and let's be real, the line's pretty damn blurry between religion and government there.
And they don't exactly make racial/ethnic superiority a centerpiece of their identity, but they're certainly not exactly sitting around singing "Kumbaya" with their minorities either, and again we have religion filling a pretty similar role in other ways.
You can get into the weeds about the specific philosophies at play here and about the history that led them to their current situation, and there's certainly merit in doing that, but as far as the casual observer is concerned, they do look and quack a hell of a lot like fascists, and while it's not the best label for what they have going on it's certainly not the worst either. I'd maybe prefer to slap a qualifier on it- something like pseudo-fascist, islamo-fascist, maybe something like "Farscism" if we want to get a little cutesy with the wordplay to separate it from "classic" fascism.
And similarly I'd probably want to slap a few qualifiers onto the term "theocracy" as well before applying it to Iran, I don't think that just that one word really points the whole picture.
And now that I'm looking at it, "fascist theocracy" might be a contender for how I'd label them.
If you’re going to give it, you have to be able to take.
Any reporter, media personality, and random schmuck who has an opportunity to interact with trump had better seize this opportunity to only address him as "Piggy" from here on out.
If we want to get a little nitpicky, the Moroccans kind of have it right
Sure there's advent leading up to Christmas
But "christmastide" really begins on Christmas day and continues on into January (January 5th for Epiphany, or slightly longer if your Catholic because they technically count the feast of the baptism of the lord as part of christmastime.) When you talk about the "twelve days of Christmas" the first day is Christmas.
The lyrics to "Good King Wenceslas" (otherwise known as "that Christmas carol whose tune you recognize, but have no idea what the lyrics are if you even know that it has lyrics") starts with the titular king looking out his window "on the feast of Stephen" which is the day after Christmas.
Different branches of Christianity, countries, cultures, etc. of course do things in all kinds of different ways, and I'll be the first to admit that I don't know much about Moroccan Christians, nor much about Islamic attitudes towards Christmas there (though since they were doing Christmas events, I think it's fair to assume that these weren't exactly hard-liners who believe that no Muslim should ever have anything to do with Christmas) so I can't really say why they do their Christmas stuff the way they do there, but it could be they just never got the memo that how we celebrate Christmas has changed a bit over the last few centuries.
Honestly, even when I was in middle and high school (so we're going back around 20 years now) I don't remember a whole lot of that
The main topics of conversation I remember were sports, video games, music, movies, TV, weed if you were a stoner, vacations, parties, and other plans you had and things you'd done recently, etc.
Pretty much the same shit I'd talk about now.
My personal experiences of course may not be representative of everyone, and like I said, it's been about 20 years so it's very possible my memory is faulty.
"locker room talk"
Most of my friends and I are pretty traditionally "manly" men. The kinds of guys you turn to if you need to build something, fix something, need to cut down a tree, want to drink beer and smoke cigars, shoot guns (not after drinking the beer,) go fishing (beer is ok for that,) etc.
I have basically no clue what's going on in any of their sex lives. We never really comment on women's appearances, and when we do it's kept to just a very quick observation, "man, she's hot" kind of thing.
Damn near any time some sort of sex talk comes up it's our female friends stoking the fires.
I'm pretty sure my wife and her friends talk more about sex in an afternoon than I have in my whole lifetime.
Maybe it's because we very rarely find ourselves in a locker room, most of aren't exactly the gym or team sports type.
Oh yeah, it's absolutely primarily an infrastructure issue. Some proper bike lanes would go a very long way.
There's a good smattering of the usual things- some people are dumb, some parents suck at parenting, etc. also at play, but that's not particularly unique to bikes.
Our roads are designed around cars, it's very often extremely frustrating and unsafe to have to share the road with bikes.
As an example, most of my commute is along a 2 lane road (1 lane each direction) that's winding, poorly lit, and has almost no shoulder. The speed limit is 35mph, which isn't a speed most cyclists can keep up for very long if they can reach it at all.
If there's traffic coming the opposite direction, it's often difficult or impossible to pass that cyclist safely so very often I've been stuck driving 10 under the speed limit around a cyclist I can't get around.
And again, it's a windy, poorly lit road, coming around a corner it would be very easy to hit a cyclist if I wasn't being careful (which I am, but many are not)
To add insult to injury in my particular case, there's actually a very nice bike path that runs directly parallel to the road, you can actually see it from the road for much of its length, and there's lots of places to get on and off of it, it's paved, it's actually almost as wide as the road itself.
There's also the issue that a lot of them don't always follow the rules of the road, you see a lot of the lane-splitting, running red lights, etc.
And there's good reasons for some of that behavior, I've heard them, I don't disagree with them, but the fact of the matter is that it makes them unpredictable, which is the last thing you want to be on the road.
Some also ride at night without proper lights and reflectors, which is really a problem with some idiots and shouldn't be generalized to bikes in general, but some people are going to do that
There's also Americans' love of big SUVs with big blindspots that makes bikes harder to see when they're around you in traffic.
As for ebikes, I have a love-hate relationship with them.
They can keep up with traffic a lot better, which helps my first point a lot.
They've also gotten a lot of people out on bikes who wouldn't have otherwise, which is great, but it also means that a lot of those people are going from not having ridden a bike since they were like 10 years old to feeling bold enough to be out in traffic because their bike can keep up but never really learned how to coexist with traffic on a bike, so we're doubling down on the unpredictability.
There's also the issue that out of traffic, in spaces where e bikes coexist with pedestrians and regular bikes on trails and such they're often zooming around at unsafe speeds.
And there's the usual patchwork of laws and regulations from one state to another, and a lot of shady imported brands selling bikes that don't meet those regulations. A lot of the e bikes on the road around me are overpowered and too fast for what the laws allow. And people also let their kids ride them which also isn't allowed.
I'm all for more people riding bikes in general , but the current situation with infrastructure, regulations, enforcement, and education here make it a really unsafe and frustrating to share the road with bikes.
One of my friends lived in a really old house that had been converted into apartments. Everything was of course laid out really weirdly because they crammed a bedroom, living room, and kitchen into what I'm pretty sure was originally 2 bedrooms and part of a stairway
One of the only built-in light fixtures in that house I'm pretty sure was an old gas light that someone screwed a lightbulb holder onto about 100 years ago and has been there ever since.
Permanently Deleted
I'm from PA, lyme is pretty common here.
One of my friends moved to Seattle, and one when he came back to visit family he managed to catch it.
Apparently he got a call from the state health department in Washington after he got his test results back basically asking "where the hell did you get Lyme disease"
He told them he'd been in PA, and they were basically like "ok yeah that checks out"
Other comment hit the nail on the head with their link
But for those who won't click the link, its basically just that once upon a time that's what the price of a package of nails that size was, bigger nails cost more pennies than smaller nails.
While we're on weird hardware measurement, I might as well talk about wire gauge
Basically it's an arbitrary standard because it's what someone somewhere set up their wire making equipment to do and other people just followed the same standard (though of course different parts of the world use different standards for different things, so there's diff6 "gauge" measurements in use in various places for different things)
But the general idea is you would start with a thick wire/rod, and pull it through a die to stretch it out into progressively thinner wire
The original rod would be 1 gauge, one pass through the die and its 2 gauge, one more pass and it's 3 gauge, etc. which is why the diameter gets smaller as the numbers get bigger
Then there's shotgun gauge, and I have no idea why this is the standard they decided to measure this by, but it's what it is. It's the number of lead balls that size it would take to make a pound.
So a 12 gauge shotgun has a bore of .725 inches. It would take 12 .725 inch lead balls to make a pound.
For a 20 gauge shotgun, the bore is .615, and you'd need 20 balls that size to make a pound.
And then they throw that system out the window with .410 shotguns and just call it by the fucking bore diameter.
And I'm not gonna even touch on railroad gauges, American screw sizes, etc. not because it's not interesting (to me at least) but because I've run out of fucks.
The abbreviations come from Roman times, popular currency in Rome were librae, solidi, and denarii.
There were 12 denarii in a solidus, and 20 solidi (or 240 denarii) in a Libra
In pre decimal British currency they kept the latin abbreviations, but denarii became pence, solidi became shillings and librae became pounds (and this is why the £ symbol for pounds looks kind of like an L)
And over the years at different times currency was issued in various fractions and combinations of those, such as quarter penny (farthings) and half pennies
Also, what a joke that the officer basically shrugged and said he couldn't help if no crime had occurred.
So I definitely get where you get that impression but what the article says is (emphasis mine)
After the agent identified himself, the officer told him “he could not assist with someone following or recording him if no crime had occurred, and that local law enforcement was en route.”
Which to me kind of sounds like cop-ese for "She's allowed to follow and record you if she wants, so how 'bout you fuck off before we cause an even bigger scene?"
Now would it have been nice if the cop had arrested the nazi for brandishing or something? Sure, but you're living in a fantasy land if you think that would have gone anywhere. I'm pretty sure any half-decent lawyer in the country could have gotten those charges thrown out because a "law enforcement" officer drawing their gun when they feel threatened while on an "operation" isn't exactly illegal. And the arresting cop probably would have just found himself in hot water for interfering with the "operation"
And it was a Fullerton officer but the incident occurred in Santa Ana, so there may have been jurisdiction issues where he legally couldn't have done much beyond what he did since he was out of his jurisdiction. Honestly a lot of cops probably would have said "not by town, not my problem" and kept driving.
I don't know every chain off the top of my head to double check, but I assume that those two and the 3 I mentioned are probably more-or-less the top 5
And using the locators on their websites, I can find 1 VCA-affiliated vet, and a handful of Banfield (mostly out of PetSmart) and blue Pearl locations operating under their own names. Nothing else came up around me
I suppose it's possible some of them may be part of some smaller chains, and I'm not going to comb through every last vet in my area, but a cursory glance at a handful of them that I've used doesn't look like any of them are affiliated with any kind of chain.
I very well may live in a bubble, but this is actually the first time I've heard of them, are they really that widespread?
I can think of about a half-dozen independent veterinarians off the top of my head within maybe about 20 minutes of me
We do have a handful of Banfield and Blue Pearl locations around, which now that I'm looking into it also seem to be owned by Mars, which is wild
But even still, they're still dwarfed by the number of independent vets.
In the US at least it's sort of a legal grey area
We of course have our usual patchwork of different local and state laws, and I believe it is outright banned in some parts of the country
But overall, federally, I believe it's more of an issue that there's so little demand for it that no slaughterhouse for horses has bothered to open and go through the necessary USDA inspections and such to process horses for human consumption.
I believe, if you really wanted to, you could go slaughter a horse yourself and feed it to your friends and family and be totally in the clear, but if you try to sell that horse meat anywhere you'd have the USDA beating down your door (not a lawyer, don't go feeding your friends horse based on my understanding of the issue)
As for the cultural reasons that Americans don't want to eat horses and why it is outright banned in some parts of the country, I can't really comment on that. I'd eat a horse and wouldn't feel the least bit bad about it.
I actually did a make your own pizza party a while back, I encouraged people to get weird with it and a lot of my my friends are kind of foodies, so here's a couple standouts
Goat cheese, hot honey, fig preserves, and capocllo
Spicy hawaiian - grilled pineapple, bacon, ham or spam, jalapenos, drizzle of hoisin sauce
Mac & cheese
Taco- taco meat, cheddar, red onions, jalapenos, lettuce tomato
Cheeseburger - ground beef, cheddar, mustard, ketchup, pickles, onions
Desert pizza- pie filling, vanilla glaze, crumb topping
Sort of a knock-off flammkuchen- creme fraise (sour cream would probably also work fine,) gruyere, onions, bacon
Buffalo Chicken - chicken, hot sauce, blue cheese crumbles, diced celery, shredded carrots
Breakfast pizza- eggs (we used quail eggs because my pizza oven is on the small side and we could get them, just crack them right onto the top of the pizza,) bacon, sausage, hash browns
Chicken Tika masala
Greek- kalamata olives, feta, spinach tomatoes, balsamic
And of course we had all of the standard pepperoni, sausage, mushrooms, olives, peppers, etc.
A couple different sauces - standard pizza sauce, pesto, vodka sauce, Alfredo, etc.
I played for a handful of years around 2009-ish
Never got very far, don't think I hit max level, never got super into any particular aspect of it
But I had fun fucking around online with some friends
Probably the biggest source of strife in my marriage is that my wife played for the alliance and I was horde.
And well over a decade later my text message notification sound is still a murloc.
Same boat, my computer is basically the computer my wife built probably about 12 years ago before we got together, it was pretty beefy for its time. I basically stuck her old components in a new box (and also stuck a newer graphics card in it because I got a really good deal on a used 2060)
Still manages to run most games out there on acceptable (to me) settings.
Made the switch to Linux about a week ago, no major issues, some things are arguably running better now. It's not without its hiccups but so far things have gone pretty smoothly.
EDIT: went with Mint over Zorin though.