Hump Day [DOT 26/8/20]

26/8/20 MegMegMcGee 51

It’s the second night of the RNC, but I’m not watching it so you’re going to have to fill me in on the insanity below the line.

Did you want to wipe that smirk off the Covington Kid’s face? How much blow did the Trump kids go through backstage tonight?

“Flame, flames on the side of my head”

Jacob Blake paralyzed after Kenosha police shooting, family and attorneys say
https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2020/08/25/jacob-blake-kenosha-police-shooting/?hpid=hp_hp-banner-main_mm-kenosha-protest-1240am%3Ahomepage%2Fstory-ans

And they’ll say “how strong, how eloquent” but what choice does she have?

Big Yikes lady!

Hope it was worth it (it was not).

It’s been two and a half weeks since a wedding in Maine sparked an outbreak of the coronavirus among guests.Since then, the virus has spread so fast, Maine Center for Disease Control and Prevention said, that it has infected people that didn’t even attend the wedding, including residents of a nursing home and inmates at a county jail. The outbreak claimed the life of one woman on Friday, according to hospital officials.

https://www.cnn.com/2020/08/25/us/maine-wedding-outbreak-spreads-nursing-home-trnd/index.html

Stonks!

S&P 500 rises to another record, even as rally leader Apple snaps 5-day winning streak
https://www.cnbc.com/2020/08/24/stock-market-futures-open-to-close-news.html

Sprots!

My swim coach raped me when I was 17. USA Swimming made it disappear
https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2020/aug/25/my-swim-coach-raped-me-when-i-was-17-usa-swimming-made-it-disappear

Lionel Messi tells Barcelona he wants to leave but faces legal battle over clause
https://www.theguardian.com/football/2020/aug/25/lionel-messi-tells-barcelona-he-wants-to-leave-but-faces-legal-battle-over-clause

Just let me have this little bit of schadenfreude

#Bless

Shut up and take my money!

Hey, you, have a good day!

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51 Comments

  1. im having a pretty good hump day …..mostly coz im drinking today tho…noticed i was really really really looking forward to hitting me month sober this weekend so i can have a drink for the race…figured that probably wasnt a sign of me being over my drinkink problem…so im having me weekend today and actually turn up to work sober monday
    uhh..well..thats how i planned it anyway
    if i can has a drink today and not have one tomorow…ive actually made pretty good progress….sooo..thats what im doing

      • she’s still being nice
        another 2 days of her being nice and we are in uncharted territory
        but as is…we are starting to enter buy me a car expensive territory
        course…the answer remains

      • tbh..when she gets her own place she’ll apreciate how much money went into her free ride
        till then she can hate me


        i figure she’ll get over it…

        • That was pretty much the approach I took with the girls.  The older one figured it our pretty quickly after she’d moved out and gotten her own place…and then got a face full of reality.  The younger one learned from her older sister’s mistake and just kept finding ways to get other people to pay for her shit.

    • In news related to your unrelated news:
       
      I can speak German pretty fluently and am a native speaker of English. Since Dutch is kind of a blend of both I can read Dutch pretty fluently. Woensdag is a good example. I would have guessed it meant Wednesday (in German it’s Mittwoch, so not really related.) 
       
      Going in the other direction (for those of you who don’t speak Dutch) the word for “royal” is koninklijk. We say royal because English is a blend of Norman/French and two or three Germanic languages. With royal we went with the Norman. In German royal is königlich. 
       
      MY POINT IS I knew I could read Dutch but had never really heard it spoken. My chance came when one of my best friends married a Dutch guy and his family and pals attended. I imagined myself chatting happily if somewhat awkwardly with our visitors. I could not understand a word. And it’s too bad because some of the relatives, even the younger ones, couldn’t really speak English. I have no idea where they lived that they missed out on English-as-a-second-language, some village separated by dikes and frequent flooding maybe? The Frisian Islands? I don’t know.

      • …I believe that if you go back 1,000years or so Dutch (or whatever that language called itself then) might have been one of the bigger influences on the English language?

        …& unless I miss my guess Woensdag would be f I’m the same root as Wednesday in that both are a corruption of Woden’s day?

        …in fact the Norse thing accounts for the back half of the week…Woden/Odin’s day, Thor’s day & Freya’s day…with Saturday being a Roman thing about Saturn, Sunday being an easy one…& Monday & Tuesday are beyond me…but maybe nobody cared to associate with that end of the week?

        • You’re most of the way there. Almost all the days of the week are from Teutonic mythology:
          Sunday – named for the sun
          Monday – the moon
          Tuesday – Tiu (or Tyr), god of war
          Wednesday – Yep, Woden’s (or Odin’s) day
          Thursday – Thor’s day
          Friday – Frigga (or Freya), goddess of beauty
          Saturday – Saturn (tossing in a Roman/Greek god, ’cause the Romans gotta get into everything)

          • …really ought to have figured out the moon day thing…but I forgot about Tyr entirely so I’m glad you said that or it would have been bugging me all day

      • mittwoch….so very german
        no fuckin about straight to the point
        german is a beautiful language….if you have thick skin
        (oh the amount of people ive pissed off just saying it as it is as opposed to the sugercoated english version….)
        (also on the note of saying as it is……shit mate…if they couldnt speak a lick of english they never really went to school….only the densest of the dense miss out on english here…its taught in primary)

        • It was all relative. This wedding was at least 25 years ago. The pals all spoke English fluently. The mother, though, was born before WWII and I think somewhere near the German/Belgian border, where I would imagine the English influence would be least felt. The groom spoke fluent English so he did a lot of translating. I don’t know what went on with the siblings, but they’d all be in their mid-60s at least by now.
           
          Years ago I came across (God knows why) a BBC clip about some traditional restaurant in Amsterdam that was owned by a Dutch celebrity. A singer, I think. This was from 1967 or 1968. 
           
          Being the BBC there was a lot of background, which was fascinating, and showed quite a bit of Amsterdam as it was at the time. Then we finally get to the restaurant and no one spoke English. The whole thing was subtitled. So this was Amsterdam less than 50 years ago. I think it was only when the EEC finally admitted Britain that English became so pervasive. The French blocked them for many years, fearing just such an outcome, among other things. Learning English as a second language when you start at 5 is far different than trying to pick it up when you’re 25. I pity anyone learning English as a second language because it’s so quirky and irrational.

          •  I pity anyone learning English as a second language because it’s so quirky and irrational.
            im going to have to dissagree with you there….i mean sure…properly written english rip style….yeah…that aint easy
             

            but spoken…shit…easiest language in the world
            you can fuck it up as much as you like and people still understand..try that in any other language
            (huh….im sure ive said that before…)

            • I suppose you’re right about spoken English. But what is the ELL (English Language Learner) to make of tough, though, and through? Just an example of the top of my head. 

              •  
                its a tough language to learn through and through and from what i can tell its not worth the effort
                though rip may apreciate it….lord knows that dudes lingo is above my paygrade
                but really…proper english is dead… why bother learning it…. you’re just dragging on the torture
                put it out of its misery already

                • …it’s a tricky one…to me there’s a place for “proper” english…but I don’t think that’s been the majority share of the english that’s been spoken for a fairly long time…even in the UK itself?

                  …language is after all dynamic to no small degree & ultimately usage tends to trump claims that it ought to be more fixed – otherwise we’d all still sound like extras in a shakespeare play

                  …so on the one hand I feel like there being a “correct” version from which to deviate has its uses…& I wouldn’t object to slowing the likes of “m8s R gr8” replacing actual words & meaningful punctuation…but I’d as soon it didn’t go the other way & become a dead language?

                  • *shrugs*
                    words is words…..if you wanna sound smart and maybe be in charge you need them
                    me personally…i dont believe in any of that shit
                    im me…im here…fuck you
                    dat me

                    • …& far be it from me to tell you different…but I guess I meant my remarks in a slightly broader context?

                      …english being more or less the lingua franca of academia confers a good deal of advantage on english speaking countries when it comes to staying abreast of one thing or another…& for all that lawyer-speak is tedious in the extreme there is arguably some utility in being able to craft a thing in words which is both precise in its meaning whilst also being flexible enough to pertain across a wide variety of circumstances

                      …& having spent some years here & there studying both literature & philosophy of one sort or another I’d maybe argue that while words is words le mot juste is often a matter of putting the right words in the correct order at just the time…so not to get all animal farm about it but some words are perhaps wordier than others under the right circumstances

                      …mainly, though…it’s just that I’d count it such a tragedy were the language to evolve to a point that the sheer craftsmanship of some of the more accomplished exponents of the thing were to go unappreciated

                      …once upon a time bill shakespeare was a guy peddling pulp fiction as live entertainment…& in their day the metaphysical poets were not unlike the hip hop stars of recent memory all the way down to having ostentatious beef with one another & heaping large measures of self-promoting claims of their imagined prowess in & among their look-how-clever-I-am displays of Wit

                      …but these days most of the sorts of folk shakespeare sold tickets to would be more interested in some variety of reality tv than one of his plays…unless it had been turned into a highschool movie a la 10 things I hate about you, I suppose

                      …so it’s entirely possible I’m in the minority for thinking the way I do?

                    • for some reason i cant reply to your last comment
                      the reply button has gone missing….i assume its been stolen
                      anyways…i enjoy your wordcraft and i suspect here at least you arent in the minority for thinking the way you do
                      every now and then you surpass my ability to read english tho…
                      anyhoo…im on the other end of the spectrum…team how much can i fuck up the language and still be understood me…also team playing dumb coz its fun me

              • And Cough, Rough, and Through!😉
                 
                One of my absolute FAVORITE times I spent, as a tutor on my first Tech-College’s campus Writing Center, was the day I got to help a couple ladies who were late-middle-aged ELL students.
                They happened to have immigrated from a country in Africa, and knew *both* their country’s languages fluently. But because one of those languages was French, and they were also pretty  familiar w/ British English, they were getting confused with the way we Americans place our commas, semicolons, and colons… (SERIOUSLY, American English is a HOT MESS, y’all!😉😂🤣)
                I got them understanding that one of the *easiest* rules was “use semicolons in a series of things, when you *also* have more things that need breaking down–and those smaller things get commas between *them.*
                And that, when you’re separating clauses & such, you’ll most often be right, if you simply drop in a comma whenever you would *naturally pause* as you spoke.
                They had been trying so hard to make sense of the technical terminology in their textbook before that, and were almost flabbergasted, when i explained the easier tricks.
                They both asked me, “HOW do you KNOW this stuff, and *how* do you understand how to do it so easily?!?”
                And they both just laughed, at, AND with me(😉!), when i let them both know that, if *I* was trying to learn from their textbook, with all of those technical terms, like “Past Perfect Tense,” “Dangling Participle,” etc, I would be just as confused as they had been!!
                But I knew it, because my OWN English teachers, in both Elementary School & early High School had literally said, “Unless YOU plan to be an English Teacher yourself, You DON’T Need to Know These Terms!!! You ONLY need to know how to *DO* this stuff, and write a sentence ‘the right way'”
                And that THAT was what made all the difference…
                Unlike in *their* college “entry-level” class, my teachers simply showed us *how to do it,* and they didn’t bother with making us use/learn *the fancy terms* for WHAT we were doing… they had us simply practice writing, until we COULD write properly.
                No memorization of “proper terms,” no extra crap!
                And it made things SO much easier! Plus there was the fact that we were learning it as native *listeners* of the language, and first-time language learners, so we didn’t need to “unlearn” the structure of another language *first*😉
                 
                When I explained ^^that^^ to the ladies, and said that THEY had *me* beat on language, by multiple languages over–since they both knew at least *two* other languages in written AND spoken form–100% fluently–and *I* only have fluent English, with a bit of German–and that with enough time to scratch it out, I can *sort of* decipher written words from the Cyrillic-alphabet backgrounds, they thought it was hilarious!😉😂🤣
                 
                I was also really glad, that I could take off a good deal of the *pressure* they were feeling, by reminding them of the fact that French sentence structure is SO DIFFERENT, sometimes, from English. And that *it wasn’t JUST THEM*😉 
                 
                It also made me realize, how much we here in the US, mess with people and their self-esteem, when we unintentionally gate-keep, by expecting that folks *not only* learn a new language, AND how to structure it properly, but when we also expect them to learn a *secondary, JARGON language* as we TEACH them that new language!🙄😠🤬
                As if learning *one* new language ISN’T difficult enough!🙄🤨🤬
                I saw it over, and over again, in the adult ELL learners, who were coming in from that introductory English class–a prerequisite for ALL the other writing classes, needed for ALL the majors.😕
                All of them GOOD people, and SMART & INCREDIBLY DRIVEN.
                But who were STRUGGLING, who “felt so dumb” at that moment, and were second-guessing their abilities/whether or not they ought to even be attempting College–simply because THAT SHIT *IS* CONFUSING A.F.!🙃💔
                The teachers were using the textbook to teach, and they all MEANT well.
                But they didn’t seem to understand that the technical jargon of the *terms being used to describe concepts* is just CONFUSING. Even for us, who were native English speakers!, and that it was just confusion upon confusion, for folks who *aren’t* native listeners & speakers–because these are *technical* terms, that no one outside of perhaps copy editors *actually uses* on any sort of regular basis–if EVER.
                Once my fellow tutors or I were able to get folks *out* of their heads, and able to grok the concept that “The Book is Helpful–but ONLY TO A POINT!” and that *most* of us who ARE native English speakers & writers DO NOT USE/KNOW the jargon terminology, we just *do the things* without needing/knowing “the name” of the concepts, it ALWAYS went easier for those students💖
                I just wish that we had a better way of getting that info across & embedded in people’s psyches, BEFORE folks got dispirited & had their self-esteem dinged so hard!😕

                • …very true…although in my experience french sentence structure is quite similar to english if you go back a bit to the days when thee & thine were still in common usage?

                  …not entirely useful if one is unfamiliar with that sort of thing but it helped me out when it came to getting to grips with french as a kid

                  • I’d TOTALLY believe that they’re the same in that era, especially since there was so much overlap of rulers, so they were *mostly* using the same languages😉
                    But my writers were used to speaking/writing in contemporary conversational French,  and were trying to make the switch to Writtten American English “formal style” writing (APA style papers for the folks in Ed & Science majors, and MLA style for the rest)…
                    So sometimes parts of sentences, and various clauses would need switching around/adding–similar to the way that in German you’d say, “S/He goes to the store” but in English it’s “S/He is going to the store.”
                    I can’t remember now, exactly *which* part of the sentences it was, but it got to the point where I could ALWAYS recognize when someone had French (usually with British English) somewhere in their written-languages skill set, because there was inevitably *always* just a few words which were “out of place” in American English, phrasing-wise, but which also weren’t “wrong” either… 
                    But it was something we DID point out, so that folks knew how the phrasing usually works in the US…
                     
                    So that–either as they went along to higher levels of University classes, where teachers may be assholish sticklers (dear GOD, sometimes I LOATHE the potential for wishy-washiness, in APA-Style!🤬🤬🤬), or when folks are writing for business purposes (i.e. cover letters & other business correspondence), they didn’t get judged before ever having been met, as “Someone who doesn’t know how to write/someone who isn’t smart”, just because they didn’t use a midwestern-American phrasing style.
                     
                    I think that *probably* came about, because our supervisor/the Tutoring Dept head was an Australian, and a former nurse who’d worked all over the UK and Europe, before changing fields, to go into teaching. She obviously knew ALL the differences between “British English” and *our* “English over here, and she didn’t want any of our folks to get judged & ruled *out* of positions & jobs, before they could even get one foot in the door.

                    • …one I can remember someone struggling with & never seeming to overcome (despite a high degree of fluency & some understanding that it ought to be said differently) was “it doesn’t worth it”

                      …although (to my mind sadly) like as not you’d find it pretty easy to find a native speaker in the UK making the same error with less idea of it being wrong, let alone why

                      …the english have been pretty lax in teaching their own language to their children at least since I was a child

      • My mom made me take Latin in high school, which was fun but not functional. In grad school I had to demonstrate a reading knowledge of a foreign language, and I had bumbled into German as a freshman so I went with that. But that was a long time ago and I haven’t used it since. So if you hand me a German newspaper, I’m good for the most part. If you speak it in front of me, I’ll mostly understand you if you don’t talk too fast. But I have a terrible time putting together verbal replies in German. 

        • I, too, made strongly suggested my son take four years of Latin in upper school (#teamMom). He claims it was helpful in science classes during college.

          • It’s cool for English, too. I can tell you the Latin derivation of almost any word in English. Which is nice when you need a human dictionary, but not exactly a job skill. Even for a writer. But we also got to read about Roman history, which is utterly fascinating. Again, not super useful, but fascinating. 

        • Didn’t you find that Latin helped you with German grammar? That’s how the language is structured. They didn’t want the words, but they appreciated the organization.

          • To some extent, yes. Remember, this was all a LONG time ago. I’m an old. The problem with Latin, at least my classes, is that we only READ it, we didn’t try to speak or write it. Which I think is a disservice to learning to speak other languages. It dovetailed nicely with my grad school requirement, though. That said, I did get pretty good at German, even started having German dreams, but never used it and now it’s a struggle. 

  3. I did not watch the RNC Night 2 but read some recaps:
     
    1. Mel showed up wearing an outfit similar to those worn by the revolutionaries who marched on Havana with Fidel.
     
    2. I bet that Covington High kid is set for life. All I saw mentioned was that he is a former Covington High student. I don’t know whether he got kicked out, voluntarily left, or graduated, as he is now 18. No mention of where he’s going to college, if anywhere. He filed multiple defamations lawsuits and settled two of them, with the Washington Post and CNN. One was for $250 million and one was for $275 million. No one is saying what the settlements turned out to be. The other lawsuits are still pending, but if the other news organizations see that the Washington Post (with Bezos’s money they could have litigated until the sun burned out) and CNN settled they probably will too. 
     
    It is far too early for me to hate myself enough to say this but…the kid was right. The story was grossly misreported. He gets the last laugh. He goes from being one of the most reviled teenagers in the world to being the teenager held up around the world as an example of media persecution and an inspiration to contingency-fee lawyers everywhere.
     
    3. I didn’t see #COCAINE trending anywhere so Mel, Tiff, and Butthead/Eric must have taken a more sober approach.

    • Y’know, even if I didn’t despise the Republican Party, I can’t help but see a MAJOR difference between the speakers chosen by the Democrats and the motley crew of sycophants, racists, and general buffoons that the GOP has dredged up. I refuse to watch because I will not inflate Trump’s ratings (and we know how he feels about that) but I do read the recaps. You could find better speeches at any public high school’s class officer elections. 

      • If it makes you feel better, ratings for the RNC haven’t exactly been great. I have to imagine that any sane person tuning in will be extremely bored by two more nights of “the same damn speech in varying degrees of volume”, right up until we get to whatever truly horrifying horseshit Trump is gonna say on Thursday.

  4. …In unrelated local news, there is a strong possibility that after 52 days without, appliances may once again exist in my kitchen… (I’ll believe it when I see it.)

    • Everything will be fine. trump will put the full weigh of the United States government behind the disaster clean up and recovery. Much like he has with Covid 19….Oh shit, those people are FUCKED!

  7. Am I the only one annoyed that Trump’s appeals to African-American men are being read as “him seeing an opportunity get their votes” instead of “a blatant attempt to convince black men not to vote in the same way that Trump convinced white Progressive men not to vote”?

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