English -> American

See: http://linuxgazette.net/119/lg_launderette.html#nottag.5

Totally unrelated...

(Meaning, I can't find the original context -- Jimmy)

[Sluggo] '"It looks like New Orleans has lucked out." Those were the words of a meteorologist at the US weather centre as the fierce winds and sheeting rain of Hurricane Rita were abating. Now here's a confession. We weren't sure what that meant. Whether it meant the the city was lucky or unlucky? Even the Canadian on the team got it wrong, we had to consult an American. It means lucky.'

Yep. If you've lucked out, it means your luck hasn't run out.

More Bacon

[Jimmy] It's called 'back bacon' because... (drum roll...) it's made from the pig's back. Better quality meat. Usually, the bacon that's made into rashers comes from the pig's stomach (pork bellies are one of the more important agricultural commodities), and "dinner bacon" usually comes from the legs.

[Kat] Could we get a picture of that, too?

[Jimmy] Sure. http://www.mettricksbutchers.co.uk/products/large/gammonjoint001a.jpg

[Kat] Wow. Now that looks really appetizing. Especially before breakfast.

[Sluggo] It looks like three pork chops stacked together.

[Sluggo] Er, you're babbling meaningless phrases. American bacon is the same as rashers?

[Jimmy] Pretty much. A rasher is a slice of bacon.

[Sluggo] What's dinner bacon?

[Jimmy] The lack of a better phrase :)

I'd assumed you'd be familiar with it, I'm more than likely wrong. In Ireland, one of the most common meals is boiled cabbage, bacon, and potatoes. Think of a joint of pork, except... bacon.

[Rick] Yummy.

This somehow reminds me: What is it about your Scottish neighbours frying all their food? And how did they come by their mania for pizza?

[Jimmy] I don't know, honestly. Maybe the Scots just love the student lifestyle?

[Rick] I do think you're right.

Long as I'm ever so politely ranting about certain cultural oddities of your assorted eastern neighbours: I was very surprised that the assembled Britons in Glasgow, with exactly one exception, seemed completely puzzled by a t-shirt I wore around the convention. It has a red building in the background, and large yellow McDonalds-style arches in the foreground. Caption says:

McOlsen's

Lutefiskburgers

1 sold

Mind you, I certainly wouldn't expect everyone to get lutefisk jokes, but, for Heaven's sake, Norway's only 400 km from Aberdeen. (The one exception was an English volunteer in the convention operations office, who took one look, recoiled, and said "That's reVOLTing!"

For those who're new to the horror that is lutefisk ("lutfisk", per the Swedes), here y'are: http://linuxmafia.com/pub/humour/power-of-lutefisk.html

[Jay] [ picks teeth up off floor ]

Damn; Clay's good.

[Martin] I cannot resist in offering another scandinavian "speciality" - the one which we danes frequently rely on when wanting to describe the horrors of swedish food - "surstrømning" is fermented fish. It is tinned under (I am told) very controlled conditions to allow the fermentation to progress in the tin, which starts to bulge (cannot be stacked in the supermarket). Opening such a tin outside a bucket of water results in a jet of contents being sprayed out, which is why it is usually eaten out of doors.

With an appropriate shudder.

[Rick] Fear. Mere threat of this is my Swedish-American mother-in-law's Ultima Ratio Regum. [r1]

[Rick] Mind you, I have no complaints about Glaswegian cuisine: The fish'n'chips, sausages, oat biscuits, porridge, and stovied tatties were quite lovely -- and I'm sure my arteries will forgive me eventually.

[Jimmy] Oat biscuits... My Dad had a recipe, once. The only think he really baked, but he gave only copy of the recipe away, and could never repeat it. Alas.

[Rick] This looks promising. I might try some: http://www.bbc.co.uk/food/recipes/database/spicedoatbiscuits_70435.shtml

[Jimmy] (Though on the upside, my mother once worked as a baker, and more than makes up for the loss :)

[Rick] I didn't even mind the haggis.

("Fair fa' yer honest, sonsie face,

Great chieftain o' the pudden race!")

My wife and I eschewed (not chewed) the fried Mars bars(!), and ditto the deep-fried pizzas.

[Jimmy] I've heard several reports of deep fried Mars bars, and all who have indulged heartily recommend them: think fritters.

Also recommended is flash-fried ice cream.

Pizza though? That's just evil.

[Rick] Pizza, now: Historical oddities in Italy (and Greek-settled pre-classical Italy) notwithstanding, one thinks of pizza as an idea exported from the Little Italy neighbourhood of lower Manhattan. One does not associate it with northern Europe.

[Sluggo] Cue Archie Bunker quote: "I want to eat something American, like a pizza!"

[Rick] You would hardly, for example, picture Robert the Bruce tossing a wad of pizza dough.

And yet, you could hardly throw a rock in Glasgow and not hit two or three pizza parlours. It was very strange.

[Jimmy] Y'know, the last time I was in Dublin, I thought the same thing. But I was drunk, and may simply have been walking in circles :)

My friend, who was offering me the use of a spare room, took me for a walk, explaining "you'll know when we get there".

(Half an hour later)

"Um... is this just an effort to sober me up?"

"Yes"

"Does the fact that I've figured that out qualify me as sober enough?"

"I suppose"

And so, thanks to my friend's valiant efforts, I was able to remember the concert I'd come to Dublin for in the first place.

(This particular friend has only been drunk once, just to see what it was like. He figured that while he was trying it out, he should try everything, so 23 or so different shots and 9 or so different beers later, he lost the use of his legs and his hands locked together in such a manner that the only way to get him home was to carry him by the elbows to a taxi. His descision to avoid alcohol afterwards has never, to my knowledge, been questioned :)

[Rick] You got the feeling that it was a prerequisite offering for any sort of restaurant: You saw stores offering "PIZZA!, and hummus, shwarma, and babaganoush", "PIZZA!, and fish and chips", and "PIZZA SUPPER!" (fried chips served with a frozen pizza that that has been defrosted and then deep fried).

[Jimmy] But was there any haggis and pineapple pizza?

[Rick] I wouldn't doubt it, but hadn't the courage to look.

[Sluggo] Wikipedia has a picture of what I'd call bacon and calls it "streaky bacon". http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bacon

[Jimmy] Yeah. It's streaky bacon because it's streaked with fat.

[Sluggo] I thought streaky meant it was cut into strips. We don't differentiate by fat content. Most of our bacon is shockingly fatty like the picture, but sometimes it's leaner.

[Jimmy] No, though streaky bacon almost always is cut in strips.

[Jimmy] Back bacon isn't: it has a thin rind at the top, the rest is lean.

[Sluggo] Some people do wrap strips of (streaky) bacon around cubes of meat from said shish kebabs, and it makes an elegant dinner.

[Jimmy] Sure. We do that with sausages, but I'm curious about the shish kebab way.

[Sluggo] Wikipedia has a picture of what I'd call bacon and calls it streaky bacon.

Canadian bacon & pineapple is one of the most popular types of pizza, second only to pepperoni. But you rarely see Canadian bacon except on pizza.

[Jimmy] Well... have you ever seen a slice of it? That's what most rashers look like here (and, presumably, in England).

[Sluggo] A round disc, paper thin, like ham but denser, little or no visible fat.

[Jimmy] Hmm. It just occurred to me to check the company website, and here we go: http://www.dewvalley.com/products/cooked_back_bacon/

[Sluggo] OK, never seen something like that.

[Sluggo] Did your experiences with butchering make you a vegetarian?

[Jimmy] Nope. I do, however, know a few people who ceased to be vegetarians after their experiences :)

There are one or two people who refuse to eat rashers because they've "seen things" ("done things" more like [j1]), but the company I work for is one of only two in Ireland to meet the highest hygiene standards available.

To be fair, I have seen quite a few... questionable things done, but... um... we have the highest certification... what about everything else I eat?

FOCTL

[Ben] For me, there's actually a difference between Armenian and Turkish coffee [1], although it may well be connected to the specific areas of Armenia and Turkey from which the people who made the stuff for me have come. (I actually have a lot more experience with Armenian coffee, even after all these years in the US. Go figure.) I strongly suspect that there's a lot of overlap, particularly in regions that border on each other, but my sample set has not yet included that.

[1] As Sirdar Argic cheers his idiotic head off...

[Jay] Serdar.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serdar_Argic

:-)

[Ben] Why, you turkey - OOPS!!!

:)

[Jay] Benjamin Okopnik's criminal Armenian grandparents are responsible for the conversion of linuxgazette.com to a CMS.

:-)

[Ben] [ FOTCL ]

I am slain. You have the [stylistic] advantage of me, sir.

[Jay] Oh, yeah: "Friends of the Children's Library"? :-)

[Ben] http://okopnik.freeshell.org/acronyms.cgi?string=FOTCL

:)

Coffee

[Sluggo] Like Greek coffee vs Turkish coffee vs Arabic coffee.

[Pedja] Actually,there are few differences in actual preparing of coffee (water boils longer or more than once,sugar/milk/honey are added etc.) [p1]

In these parts [p2] , Turkish coffee(or 'turska kafa') is predominant kind, although Nesscafe and espresso are also popular,among the fancy crowd. [Starbucks would be very popular here,it has high 'hype' factor attached to it].

[PeteJ] That's funny that you should mention Nesscafe, as over here (UK) they're mostly known for (what they consider to be premier) instant coffee that tastes nothing like coffee (IMHO it's probably the worst instant coffee on the market, apart from maybe the shop branded instant coffee powder).

[Pedja] I agree,Nesscafe sucks.Bad.

My current favourite instant coffee is Kenco's Rapport. Nice and bitter, not coloured water like Nescafe :-) To be honest, I drink far too much coffee 8*)

[Pedja] I haven't heard of that one.Must try it sometime. What do you mean,'too much coffee'? There's no such thing. [p3]

[PeteJ] Actually, I misspelt it, it's Kenco Rappor.

[Pedja] I learned to prepare it years before I actually started drinking it,and it's a skill and a ritual [yes,we take our coffee very seriously :-)]. It's sometimes hard to get it right,which is especially noticeable if you drink it with no sugar,as I do,because if it boils too long or not enough coffee is added to boiling water,it's too thin and flat[a.k.a 'sikterusha',if you want your nosy neighbours to leave really fast,you make them one of those,and they get the message :-)].

[PeteJ] It's interesting that you say how long it's boiled. I was taught to make coffee by my Dad, who always cautioned me on using too freshly boiled water because of the affect it could have on the taste. I guess I make it at about 70'F - should be cool enough to be drinkable from the get go :)

[Pedja] First sip of hot coffee at 5 a.m(when I get up to prepare for work)....Mmm... My tongue gets burned often enough,but it's worth it :0) .

[PeteJ] Same ritual here too, up at 5am, make coffee, roll cigarette, drink coffee, smoke cigarette, ah, now I can focus! Do you travel far for work? I'm up at 5am because I travel 75 miles to get to the office - but then I love my job :)

[Pedja] Factory where I work is across the street,5 minutes from where I live, but I must get an hour early from bed,because of contact lenses that I wear.My eyes are too sensitive to just get up of bed and instantly put them on. Work starts at 6.15,so I have some time to prepare for the cruel world <g>. I don't like my job that much,but it pays the bills.

[Jimmy] Amen, brother! (I also work in a factory)

[Pedja] Actually,I don't like most of my coworkers that much,they are a stupid and narrow-minded bunch,with few(thank $DEITY)

[Jimmy] At least I can say the reverse is true for me. There's a certain kind of... appreciation of the surreal, bordering on insanity that people get once they've worked where I work for a certain length of time, and I love it.

exceptions,but that allows me to concentrate on the job.I always admired ones who deal with people on daily basis,it is hard.Stupid people,I mean,but let's face it,most of the people are stupid, that's my experience,anyway.Not that I'm that smart,but I'm smarter than most. BTW,Pete,what do you do?As a BOFH <g>?

[PeteJ] lol - almost. My official title is 'Pick Developer', but the job entails DBA, support, and development on, a database system called D3 (used to be called Pick long ago).

[PeteJ]

> I make it at about 70'F 
                     ^^^^

[Jimmy] ITYM 70'C.

[PeteJ] Mea Culpa :)

[Pedja] There are three things every household must have at all times:bread,sugar and coffee,no matter how poor are they.Weird,yes.

[PeteJ] Hmmm, replace sugar with Peanut Butter and I'd agree with you...

[Pedja] I never could understand Peanut Butter,it looks...just wrong.Oh,well...

[Sluggo] What about almond butter? Nothing sinister about it. They just put the nuts in a grinder, and there it is.

[Pedja] Nothing sinister in putting the nuts in a grinder? Ouch!

[Ben] That was my first thought when I saw it. I like the way your mind works, Pedja. :)

[Pedja]

Oh,wait.You mean...

<SLAP>

I feel a bit butter now...

Yes,like,how sinister butter can be?

BTW,wasn't butter used in the scene from "Last tango in Paris"?

I'm told that few couples tried that, with rather...messy...results <g>.

[Ben] There's a story in my past (very fortunately in the past, and I can comfortably contemplate the fact that it's moving away from me every second...) of a very cute young lady whom I desperately wanted, a 2-lb. jar of Vaseline, and the forepeak of my old boat. The entire forepeak, that is, as well as its contents (i.e., us.) I had just about enough brain left (it started when I was rather inebriated) to remove all the cushions before commencing operations... it took several weeks to get all that goop out of there.

Fortunately, Vaseline doesn't rot the way butter would [shudder].

[Pedja] OK,Italian Cabernet(great wine) is starting to wear off,time to refill.

[PeteJ] I can't understand those who put it on bread along with butter/margarine. However, I /really/ don't understand those that have it with jam/jelly too!

[Pedja] Ugh.Peanut butter and jam/jelly?I really don't want to know what that tastes like, if it has any sane taste of all.Americans are weird bunch.I remember Mike Patton from 'Faith no more' (they are no more,sadly) once said:"People don't believe that we are American band.Best compliment I ever had." <g>

[Jimmy] Tea comes higher on the list than coffee over here, but it holds true.

[Pedja] I've heard,years back,a story about a man asking for Turkish coffee in a Greek part of the Cyprus.He was never seen again :0).Not that was related to coffee... AFAIK,Turks drink more tea than coffee,anyway. After 500 years,the left us coffee,burek,baklave and strong preference to blonds over brunettes :-) .

Recent studies suggest that running /usr/bin/coffee from cron at
regular intervals can be more effective at enhancing uptime than
launching a big coffeed process at startup.

(Serbia and Montenegro)

[PeteJ] I'm the first to admit I don't understand Baltic politics, and that's despite trying to education myself via TV documentaries on the history of the area.

[Pedja] Eastern Europe,actually.

[PeteJ] Heh, what did I tell you :)

[Jimmy] The Baltic States are Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia. (I always forget Estonia, because they don't speak a Baltic language there).

[Pedja] Politics here is quite simple really.Grab as much as you can as quickly as you can,sod the rest. There is more to it,but not much(xenophobia,fear of change,pathological attachment to 'glorious' history...). Running joke here is an request for .xxx TLD,it would solve quite a few problems.

[PeteJ] I guess the nearest we have to that is the political [pete1] situation in Eire/Northern Ireland.

[Pedja] Irish culture is quite popular here,we have a band "Orthodox Celts" that plays Irish music(both covers and their own),there are few Irish pubs in Belgrade, Celtic has strong fan club here...Some think that Irish people are like us, temper and abuse of alcohol wise.'Beer fest' is very popular,amount of beer that's consumed during that 3 days is fantastic.

[PeteJ] That sounds like fun :) BTW, I'm English - sorry if I gave the impression I was Irish/lived in Ireland.

[Jimmy] Vast amounts of beer, consumed over 3 days, you say? In Ireland, we call that a weekend :)

[PeteJ] It's funny how all nation's histories are 'glorious' to their inhabitants. However, I have a distinct distaste for most the recent (last 400 years) history of my country (England) - Imperialism is never a good thing.

[Pedja] Objective and critical view on ones nation history is good thing,IMHO. Unhealthy,emotion-driven,false in it's core('we were great once') interpretation of history prevalent here is another thing entirely.

Thread diverges: Gaiman, Ebooks etc.

If you try to interpret history from scientific,rather clinical way,based on facts rather than folklore,you are instantly labeled as traitor and unpatriotic,enemy of the state. Do you know any other country that killed it's own prime minister because he wanted to take the country from 18th to 21st century?

[PeteJ] When someone derives their power from things 'just the way they are', it's frightening the lengths they will go to in retaining their power. Of course, power usually means money, ultimately.

[Jimmy] No, but if you make the centuries into variables, then I guess you could say "all of them"?

Gaiman, Ebooks etc.

[Jimmy]

"I think," said Shadow, "that they think they're the white hats."

"Of course they do. There's never been a true war that wasn't fought between two sets of people who were certain they were in the right. The really dangerous people believe that they are doing whatever they are doing solely and only because it is without question the right thing to do. And that is what makes them dangerous."

"And you!" asked Shadow. "Why are you doing what you're doing?"

"Because I want to," said Wednesday. And then he grinned. "So that's all right."

-- Neil Gaiman, "American Gods"

[Pedja] Great book,that.A friend of mine has it in English(I bought translated one),but he is somewhat reluctant to share it.Now,I need to brake his legs^W^Wpersuade him to borrow it...

[Jimmy] English homonyms claim another victim! ("Break")

[Pedja] I hate when I do that... Thanks for pointing it out.

[Jimmy] I was helping my son with his homework during the week, and had to examine his spelling. The first word in the list was "there". Those bastards!

[Pedja] Heh.I use Aspell for that,and I wonder if it checks spelling by British or American spelling rules (they are different to a degree,right?).

[Rick] English^wCommonwealth and American spelling rules do differ to some degree, and yet are the same in being utterly mad.

[Pedja] ["Utterly mad"....I just love that expression. <g> It's time to get that "Black Adder" DVD set.And "Thin blue line".And "Mr Bean".And....]

If native English speakers can't decide how to spell,what the fsck the rest of us are supposed to do?

[Jimmy] Deal with it :-P

[Rick] Join our suffering. ;->

Voltaire is said to have suffered quite nicely, while trying unsuccessfully to become fluent in English, and finally exclaimed in frustration, "May the plague take half the English language, and the ague take the other half!"

(At the risk of killing that joke: The two words are pronounced very differently, even though they're spelled nearly the same.)

[Rick] You can determine your global aspell configuration by typing "aspell config | more", and vgrepping the output. Note that each user can have his/her own configuration, using dotfiles.

[Pedja] Hm.It's en-US.So,that's why Aspell spelling seems a bit odd to me at times. My English teachers preferred Commonwealth version,apparently.

[Jimmy] Makes sense, I suppose, given the relative distances.

[Rick] I appeased my USA teachers by telling them I'd solemnly swear to stick to dictionary-correct spelling. (It's not my fault they didn't ask which dictionary. I had in mind the Compact OED.)

[Jimmy] /me checks Subject line

Thread change: British phone numbers

Yeah!

Really, the set of differences is pretty small, neither makes much more sense than the other, and neither is any more consistent.

[Jimmy] A friend of mine started writing fiction and poetry a year ago, and enlisted my help as a proofreader. Aside from a few odd ideas about punctuation, his only recurring problem was mixing up "there", "their", and "they're".

[Pedja] "Look there,they're using their brake to break the car." Yes,that's easy.As in "This is Unix.I know this." from 'Jurassic park'.

[Jimmy] That's it :)

[Pedja] BTW,what do you think of Gaiman/Pratchett book "Good omens"?

[Rick] The more of the sly references in it you "get" the more howlingly funny it is. Many Yanks reading it had seen the rather dumb motion picture "Omen" that gets pilloried in passing; I hadn't.

[Jimmy] One of the few horror films I managed to see as a kid. My Dad was a bit strange that way. He had no problem with letting me watch porn when he thought I was old enough (12), but horror? No.

(In fact, it was probably a matter of pride that he could let me watch it, as Ireland had a heavy-handed censor in those days)

[Rick] But on the other hand, I'd read the "Just William" series of boys' novels that are lovingly parodied in the second half of the book, so I found that particularly winning.

[Jimmy] That part had annoyed me until last time "Good Omens" was mentioned here. I knew I'd read something like that, but couldn't remember the name.

[Rick] Let me just say this: You'll never see a "Queen" album or a tiny Japanese car quite the same way, again.

If you want to be able to get all the joke in that or any other Pratchett work, the Annotated Pratchett File is your friend: http://www.co.uk.lspace.org/books/apf/

[Pedja]

Thank you,Rick Moen!

Now,I officially request that:

1.you get knighthood(Sir Rick Moen <g>)

2.day consists of at least 36 hours instead of rather pathetic 24.

There goes my 6 hour sleep....must read...

[Rick] Well, you have too much blood in your caffeine system, already.

BTW, it's firm tradition (though not law, despite popular misconceptions on this point) for 'Murricans to decline titles of nobility, so to be gracious about this the UK grants only honorary knighthoods to Yanks, e.g., recently to Gen. Schwartzkopf.

[Jimmy] I liked it. I think I may need to read it again: it seems the American and British versions are quite different.

[Pedja] What?There are two versions?How do I know which I have?

[Rick] Look on the title page, to see where the publication house was.

[Sluggo] I didn't follow this thread, but there was a story a few weeks ago about a Canadian author who was unhappy that the US edition of her book had all the cultural references replaced with American equivalents. Clubs the characters belonged to, foods they ate, etc.

[Rick] Yes, I'd be pretty incensed, too -- even without the influence of Canadian-identity syndrome.

With which, of course, I'm sympathetic, being a thoughtful and internationally-minded neighbour (he says, backing away slowly ;-> ).

[Jay] And, conversely, the Punctuation Book has an author's note in the front in the Murrican edition explaining that it had purposefully not been De-Britted at all; cope.

[Rick] To see exactly what the textual differences are in the case of Good Omens or any other book Pratchett had a part in, consult (what else?) the Annotated Pratchett File, at http://www.co.uk.lspace.org/books/apf/ .

http://www.co.uk.lspace.org/books/apf/good-omens.html has:

- [p. 32/13] "Sister Mary had expected an American diplomat to look like Blake Carrington or J.R. Ewing."

Leading male characters in the 1980s Power Soaps Dynasty (Blake Carrington played by John Forsythe) and Dallas (J. R. Ewing played by Larry Hagman). The general image is of somewhat rugged American masculinity. In a suit.

[Pedja] It's been quite popular here,"Dynasty".One episode a week(Monday),empty streets in towns,everybody watching. Cat fight in mud(Alexis and Crystal,methinks) was hilarious,with cheering("Hit her!Pull her hair out!") and everything. "Dallas",on the other hand,was never excepted that much.

[Jimmy] Heh. They used to broadcast both here too, six months after the original broadcast. I don't remember much about either, but I do remember the "who shot JR" stuff: people were phoning relatives in the US to find out :)

[Rick]

The Good Omens paperback replaces "an American diplomat" with "the American Cultural Attache".

[Pedja] I thought that "{American,Russian,whatever} Cultural Attache" was doublespeak for spook. Or so I've heard...

[Jimmy] Kinda. "Cultural Attache" is a generic kind of description for someone who works in, e.g., an embassy (Civil Servants: World Tour!).

[Rick] I think it often is. That's a traditional silent addendum to the way the Westphalian System's game gets played (the system of nations being "recognised", having extraterritorial embassies, and being able to carry out certain forms of mass violence but not others, that was imposed by the Congress of Vienna as a reaction to the French Revolution).

[Rick] and

- [p. 70/42] "The message had come during Cheers, one of Crowley's favourite television programmes. Woody the barman had [...]"

In the American edition of Good Omens, this scene was changed to refer to the series The Golden Girls and the character Rose. (The effect remains the same).

Nobody knows the reason for this change, since both are American sitcoms anyway. Speaking personally, I think Crowley is definitely a Cheers person, and would not have liked The Golden Girls at all.

[Pedja] "Cheers" I know,but "The Golden girls"?WTF?

[Sluggo] It's about three women in their 60s. A pun on one's "golden years". As "Mary Tyler Moore" was the first TV show starring a single woman with her own career, and "Rosanne" proved that a show about a fat woman could get ratings, "The Golden Girls" showed there was an audience for older women.

Perhaps "The Golden Girls" was at the peak of its ratings at the time.

[Rick] {shrug} It's not as if I ever watched any of those things.

[Rick] and

- [p. 161/104] "[...] eight other people [...] two of them [...] and one of the other six [...]"

Or at least, that's what it says in my hardcover version and in the American trade paperback. In the English paperback, however, the quote says "one of the other five" (italics mine), which is of course rather confusing, since two plus five usually equals seven, not eight.

Terry says: "[...] we got the numbers right -- I checked the original MS. This is another manifestation of the strange numbers glitch (remember famine, the seven letter word?)"

See the annotation for p. 154/98 for the 'famine' glitch Terry refers to.

and

- [p. 377/264] "It was Sunday afternoon."

According to Terry, the U.S. edition of Good Omens has about 700 extra words in it, because:

"After the MS had been accepted and edited by Gollancz, the American editor at Workman in NY asked for a couple of things for the US edition, one of which related to Warlock.

He was an American boy, you see, and she was certain that Americans would want to know what had happened to him. So we said ok, and wrote it. To the best of my recollection that was the biggest change, although there were other minor additions (some we were able to slip into the Gollancz hardcover at proof stage, but the Warlock bit was too long). I have to say we also polished things up here and there, too, although I think we were able to transfer most of those changes to the UK proofs too.

And then since the one done for Workman was technically the final MS the UK paperback was set from it."

For the people owning the British hardcover of Good Omens, here is the text of the added section:

[snip]

[Pedja] What could possibly be the difference?Not that I have anything against reading it twice <g>.

[Jimmy] Well, APF explains it (thanks Rick!).

[Rick] Publishers tend to be nervous and arguably neurotic people, terribly afraid that something will make a book "inaccessible" to particular readerships.

[Ben] [sniff] Well. I'm glad somebody noticed; it's been long enough. Being all nervous and neurotic just isn't worth it unless somebody notices. :)

[Rick] This is the same mental aberration that lead J.K. Rowling's USA publisher to change her first volume's title from Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone to Harry Potter and the Sorceror's Stone, apparently on a theory that Yanks are too ignorant to understand the mediaeval reference, or might be mislead into thinking this is a book about philosophy.

[Sluggo] It's not so much ignorance as "this is an obscure fact that has no relevance to my life", so the schools don't teach it.

But you are talking about a population whose majority couldn't find Japan on a map. (And the reason it's not taught is the same, unfortunately.)

[Pedja] I had a rather heated argument few years ago about that Harry Potter book. Apparently,she thought(without actually reading)

[Jimmy] Or... "She spoke (without actually thinking)" :)

that book is about witchcraft and black magic,much of that "opinion" based on name of it("It's called '...and Sorcerer's stone',Sorcerers are bad(anti-Orthodox),so it must be satanic.And there is magic in it.

[Jimmy] I had a lot of similar conversations when I started listening to metal, even though (at the time) none of the bands I listened to were even vaguely Satanic.

[Pedja] And Latin.I don't understand it.Burn it,burn it!").

[Jimmy] I had been wondering how those 'Latin'[j2] bits translated, but they probably translate just as well into every other language in Europe.

[Pedja] I had to restrain from beating her to the ground with hardcover edition of "Satanic verses".

[Jimmy] Tsk, tsk, tsk. It would have been much more effective to say something in Latin in a threatening voice: "nolite iudicare ut non iudicemini" ("Judge not, that you be not judged"[j3] )

[Rick] Both the United States and the United Kingdom have a certain number of analogous people. Mocking them doesn't seem to make much of an impression.

[Pedja] I've read few pages of it,but then got "The art of deception" by Kevin MItnick,so "Good omens" will have to wait.SO many books to read,so little time...

[Jimmy] I know the feeling.

See: Lifehack

[Pedja] Reading a book on computer screen...it just doesn't feel right.

[Jimmy] That'll be the eyestrain :)

[Pedja] There's also the danger of falling off the chair laughing,common when I finally get PTerry reference <g>(thanks to Rick for apf!). Maybe I need a safety belt or something...

[Pedja] But,many books I can't find(or can not afford)in a dead tree version,so I adapt to new times.

[Jimmy] Plus, you can't use grep on paper.

[Pedja] Yup,eyeball grep is prone to errors.It sucks when I try to find particular quote,I know it's there somewhere,but can't find it for the life of me(that's correct idiom,hopefully.Any good reference on those?Need to google.)

[Jimmy] Yes, that's correct.

I read a number of speed reading books when I was younger, so my 'eyeball grep' (nice phrase :) is pretty good.

[Pedja] Thanks for the perl snippet,it'll come handy. Google and Yahoo also have plans for on-line library,or so I've heard. That would be cool.

[Jimmy] Google's version... well, it looks interesting, I suppose. You can already get something similar for several titles at amazon.com

Yahoo's version... I hope to heck they're not going to just repeat everything that's been done by Project Gutenberg.

[Pedja] Duplicate effort?Yahoo?No...

[Jimmy] Well... on second thought, maybe it won't be a bad thing. There are quite a few books out there that differ vastly between editions, and newer PG etexts tend more towards preserving the details of the books, rather than 'just' providing text versions.

[Jimmy] You do know about Distributed Proofreaders (http://pgdp.net) and DP EU (http://dp.rastko.net), right?

[Pedja] I haven't heard of Distributed Proofreaders yet(thanks),but Projekat Rastko? It's one of the coolest things ever to come from this country.

[Jimmy] Ah. That explains how there are so many books in Serbian there. It's nice to see how they've expanded the range of languages available (or soon to be available) from Project Gutenberg. Last time I looked, they had books in Farsi and Hieroglyphics(!).

[Pedja] What's interesting is that project started in 1997 as private effort, and didn't receive any help from state until late last year,just when EU offered to help.Now everyone and their dog wants to be a part of this.Luckily,project manager Zoran Stefanovic is far too intelligent to fall for empty promises of local political elite.They promise,but do not deliver.Yes,I'm bitter(without lemon).

[Jimmy] That'll be the coffee ;)

[Pedja] Check out http://www.rastko.org.yu

British phone numbers

[Sluggo] And what's this about British announcers telling people to "call us on 0800 666444"? It's at a phone number, not on it!!!! On is what you're speaking into, as in, "I'm calling this Nigerian businessman on the phone at +234 1 6664444 to discuss a joint venture."

[Jimmy] I don't see how either makes any more (or less) sense than the other. Do you have any evidence to support your position? (Because, y'know, rephrasing your argument doesn't count :-P)

[Sluggo] People are at addresses, so it's logical to be at phone numbers too.

Or do you say, "I'm on 7 Lucky Shamrock Drive"?

[Rick] It's a good thing you carefully avoided actually inserting the phrase "English language" into a sentence already housing the perilous word "logical", or the universe might well have exploded.

[Jimmy] I would use neither, preferring "my {phone number, address} is...". I honestly can't remember having heard anyone use 'on' or 'at' in relation to phone numbers.

I think I would be more likely to say an address is 'on' a street rather than 'at' it. 'At' a street?

(Also, I'm no longer used to thinking of phones as having a fixed location, so the address analogy doesn't work for me anyway).

[DSRich] But in America we park "on the street" or "in the driveway" (need a shovel to get out?) or "on the corner" (doesn't that get you a ticket?). We travel "on the train" (not in it - go figure). How do those translate into British?

[Sluggo] In Esperanto there's a warning that people might live in, on, at, next to, or along a street depending on their language background, so you have to be prepared for any of these.

(En Esperanto estas averto, ke oni eble logxas "en", "sur", "cxe", "apud", aux "laux" strato laux sia nacilingvo, do preparigxu auxdi iun ajn.)

[DSRich] I am of an age where discussing what someone "was on" was usually a reference to their mental state and/or what trace chemical impurities they had introduced into their bodies...

[Sluggo] That's not on.

(Britspeak for "That's out of the question", AFAIK.)

[Rick] ObJapaneseEtiquette: "That would be very difficult."

[DSRich] Imagine whirled peas.....

[Sluggo] I've seen a similar bumper sticker: "Visualize whirled peas"

[Rick] Seen in Berkeley: "Visualize Rent"

Caboose

[Sluggo] 'trainers' does need translation.

I grew up reading lots of British books, so I figured I was all set considering it's the "same" language. Just remember quid, pram, lift and bonnet. (And chips, biscuit, and treacle; but you get the idea.) But when I arrived, every five minutes there was some word I'd never heard of. The first was the "no trolleys" signs next to escalators, what the heck does that mean? I could only imagine somebody carrying an electric bus on an escalator. Then I saw the same sign in front of a supermarket and realized it meant cart. Then there was "taking the piss" and "naff".

[Jimmy] = "making fun of" and "awful/tasteless"

And why did everybody say "sorry" when we ran into each other; they hadn't done anything to me. (That part has rubbed off on me: I find myself saying "sorry" where I used to say "excuse me".)

Der Spiegel has several good articles this week, including this one about an al-Qaida TV show on the Internet. http://service.spiegel.de/cache/international/0,1518,378633,00.html What's more horrifying than what they do is the propaganda they think will attract recruits. Or rather, the fact that this propaganda works. But near the bottom it says the host "speaks dialect-free standard Arabic, making it unclear in which region the editorial operation is based." I'm not sure that's possible with English because all forms tag the speaker as English[Am] or English[Br].

[Jimmy] Not really. Look at any mainstream Hollywood movie: I dare you to guess where any of the actors come from.

(The former is predominant in the Americas and parts of east Asia; the latter everywhere else.) The best you could do is mislead people. (Some Irish accents sound American, New Zealanders say nobody guesses they're from New Zealand,

[Jimmy] Just ask them to say word with a short 'i' in it (fish, with); if it comes out sounding like a 'u' (fush, wuth) they're from New Zealand.

and RP has been taught all over the world.) Spanish movies for an international audience use a mid-Atlantic dialect that avoids sensitive words on both sides. ("coger" means to answer a phone in Spain but in Argentina it also means to fuck, so the American word "contestar" is used instead.) If you wanted to be both politically correct and region-free in English you'd have to... not talk about cars, a(ir|ero)planes, or TV program(me)s at least. Don't talk about elections or you'll have to decide whether the candidates stand for them or run for them, or stand down or step down. Or rail(roads|ways) and their (ticket collectors|conductors) and (conductors|engineers?) and dining (cars|wagons).

[Jimmy] Um... I'm not following. It looks like your examples are (US|British), but I've only ever heard a dining car called a dining car (though that could be because "wagon" means something else in Ireland).

Can you say "caboose" in English[Br]?

[Jimmy] I think most people would understand that, or think it has something to do with cowboys.

[Sluggo] What else do you call the back of a train?

[PeteJ] Erm, the front on the return journey. The trains I travel on daily are composed of an engine, 8 carriages, and then another engine. However, every single passenger train I've seen in the UK has a driver's cab both at the front and rear (except for preserved steam railways).

[Sluggo] They're mainly on freight trains. Do you have many of those or does everything go by truck? We don't have many passenger trains but we have lots of freight trains because of the long distances. All that stuff from China has to get from the ports to the interior somehow, and trucking that massive volume would be way too expensive. The trucks mainly do deliveries for individual distributors or stores.

[PeteJ] We have some freight trains, but most of it goes by truck. The few freight trains I've seen look like they've come from a quarry, although I've seen a couple that appear to be carrying vehicles (difficult to tell as the wagons are covered, although the 'Ford' logo is a bit of a give away).

The railways were abandoned as freight carriers during the 80s, due to the cost, and as you say, part of the journey will always require a truck.

Royal Mail stopped their last mail train a few years ago too. They've started using rail again in the last year for transport between London and Scotland, but the mail isn't sorted en route like it used to be.

I remember reading many years ago that freight is the only profitable cargo on a rail network, and will usually subsidise the passenger trains. This explains why the prices in this country for rail travel are very high, and continue to climb.

[Jimmy] The answer's in the question: "the back of a train". It doesn't come up that often in conversation, so I don't know if there's a more specific word. Next time I go somewhere by train, I'll ask (though I expect to receive that "what have you been taking" stare).

[Sluggo] Specifically it means the last car, a special end-car.

[Jimmy] I think there are some of those around, but mostly it's as Pete described: engines at either end.

Lifehack

[Jimmy] Ooh! Lifehack! Project Gutenberg now offer HTML versions of most of their new etexts, but for older texts I pipe them through this 2 liner:

perl -ne 'BEGIN{print "<html><body><pre>";$i=1;}print "<a href=\"#$i\" \
name=\"$i\">$i</a> $_";$i++;END{print "</pre></body></html>";}'

so I can use bookmarks when reading.

[Ben] Nice hack! But you have yet to discover the wonders of $. :)

[Jimmy] True. $_ is about the only special variable I can look at without blinking. (I know, I know: perldoc perlvar)

[Ben]

perl -MCGI=:standard -wpe'BEGIN{print start_html}
s|^|<a href="#$." name="$.">$.</a> |;END{print end_html}'

[Jimmy] Nice! That s/// would never have occurred to me.

[Ben] Conversely, I suppose you could just do

perl -MCGI=:standard -wne'BEGIN{print start_html}
print"<a href="#$." name="$.">$_</a>";END{print end_html}'

which would make the entire line clickable and eliminate the need for visible numbers. [shrug] A personal pref kind of thing, I guess - especially if you add a tiny bit of CSS to remove the link decoration.

[Jimmy] Well, I use lynx in a VC for etexts -- I like to be able to drag over an armchair and relax -- so CSS is out. Having the numbers visible is OK for most things, though it would have annoyed the crap out of me for something like "The Count of Monte Cristo".

More Kebabs

[Sluggo] "In Russia Shawarma (Шаурма or Шаверма) (shaurma or shaverma) became one of the most popular street foods. Originally from the former Soviet Republics of Armenia and Azerbaijan, shawarma in Russia is generally eaten with a variety of julienned vegetables, tomato sauce, and garlic sauce that is wrapped in lavash."

[Ben] Damn, that would definitely be after my time. I'd heard of Шаурма as one of those "Asiatic" dishes, but I don't think I ever had it before I left Russia. It certainly wasn't being sold on street corners back then.

[Sluggo] This was at a stand (Russian: "kiosk") at what I'd guess you'd call a kiosk park. These had sprung up around all the metro stations during the time I was there, a concession to petit capitalism just before the Soviet Union collapsed. (I think they went back that far. I was there in 1995 and 1996.) People used them as convenience stores; the prices were slightly higher than in the rynoks (more established open-air markets). You could also deal with one person directly, in contrast to the traditional Soviet shops where you first paid the cashier, then stood in another line to pick up your items. But the best prices were at the huge marketplace at the All-Russia Exhibition Center in Moscow (formerly VDNKh, whatever that means).

[Ben] "Vystavka Dostizheniy Narodnogo Khozyaistva (SSSR)", or "Exhibition of Achievements of the National Economy (of the USSR)" - with the parenthesized part being used formerly but now deprecated. (For Mike: I'm sure you can imagine how the "Kh" was interpreted in the popular expansion. :)

[Jimmy] I just took a wild guess, filled it in, laughed way too much.

We tourists joked that the Center was "where the kiosk owners shopped", although I'm not sure it was strictly true. Rumor was that the kiosks were controlled by the Russian mafia.

[Ben] As I understand it, it was much more in the nature of totally-freewheeling capitalism - i.e., whatever you could hold was yours. And yes, the mafia took a "bite" out of everyone.

I only saw one shaverma stand during my travels, at the Gor'kovskaya metro station in northwest St Pete (Petrogradskaya Storona). At the time they were converting some of the slapped-together kiosk parks to proper permanent buildings. I don't know if this process was completed, but if so there would be a lot fewer shops than there were.

[Ben] It was actually a fairly smart move on the government's part to get rid of the kiosks: if the most prosperous ones converted to stores, they'd have a stake in chasing off the "illegal" vendors. As I understand it, it actually worked out. Mind you, I'm getting my info on this sorta sideways, through the news on Russian TV at my brother's house. Little or none of this gets mentioned directly, but the breadcrumbs are there.

[Jimmy] One of my Polish friends was telling me about how shocked he was when he first saw Irish news, because it was 'uncensored'. Like, if someone was murdered, it'd be on the news. Over there, there could be several murders per week, but few if any would be reported, in case it 'upset' people. Something like that?

(He also told a story about a rape/murder in the town where he lived, where the killer desecrated the corpse. The intimation was that it went unreported so the police could have greater leeway in how they dealt with the murderer if/when they found him).

The entrance to the Exhibition Center was huge, several blocks of grand boulevard and imposing Soviet statues that would have made Leni Riefenstahl proud. Inside was a monument to Sputnik, my favorite sight in Russia.

[Ben] Yeah, very post-WWII Russian; all of that. It was The Soviet Worker writ large in sculpture, song, and every kind of media they could lay their hands on... the thing is that once you got past the enforced idealism that they could still impose in the early school years, the reality that you saw diverged more and more (the average "Soviet Hero of Labor" was a dispirited, dissipated drunk who slipped his foreman a few bottles so that his work record would be slightly "adjusted" - say, from fifteen hours a week to fifty. Oh, and about that missing load of pipe...)

Crime Russian style: steal a truckful of vodka, sell it, and get drunk on the proceeds.

I don't know what the Center was used for in Soviet times (rallies?), but when I was there it hosted business conventions as well as the huge market. (Stalin must be turning over in his grave.) The metro station was still VDNKh but the Center was called Vsye-Rossiskaya Vystavka Sentr or something like that.

[Ben] It was actually a huge fair; agro, tech, etc. I recall, when I was just a wee kidlet, going there for the first time and seeing a "robot" (!) - a demo in which this 3-ton or so gadget with a manipulator arm fried an egg (turned on the stove, etc.) That's probably when I fell in love with the idea of electronics, computers, and all that stuff.

[The images are dated 1998 because that's when I scanned the photos, but they were taken in 1995.]

[Ben] Thanks - they brought back many memories!

[Ben] Yeah, very post-WWII Russian; all of that.

[Sluggo] Did you notice the people climbing it in the picture? That's one thing you'd never see in the US. There'd be a fence around it with a sign saying "NO CLIMBING" in case somebody fell off it and sued. There seemed like a lot less rules in Russia. You could drink in the park or on the train and nobody said anything.

Which reminds me of my Russian cop story. I was riding the train from St Pete to Moscow, an 8-hour trip. A man was sitting next to me and invited me to the lounge car. We had to go through like eight sets of doors to get to it. [s1] There was another man at the table, a cabinet maker from the Urals. My companion bought like $50 worth of vodka, one after the other, and flirted with the bartender woman. He tried to explain to me what he did but I didn't understand. So he showed me his passport, and I made out the words "Vnutrennikh Del" (Internal Affairs). I gather that means he's with the federal police or something. Later he took out his gun to show us. He was so drunk he left it on the table. The cabinet maker put it back in his pocket so he wouldn't forget it; what a citizen. I had to half carry him across four cars / eight doors back to the seat. Near the end of the journey he got up and went to a man seated six rows in front of us, made him get up, and took him away. It looked like he was transporting a fugitive. My thought was, "So that's how they do it in Russia." The most surprising thing was he wasn't wearing a uniform and didn't have to act all professional-like. Well, that and drinking on the job and leaving a fugitive unattended for two hours. I guess he figured, "We're on a train; where's the guy gonna go?" Suicide comes to mind: Dr Zhivago's father jumping from the train. And of course, whoever heard of transporting a prisoner on public transportation? The soldiers were the same way: didn't wear their uniforms when they went out drinking, didn't feel the need to act all professional-like.

[Rick] Mike, your posting was held in the moderation queue on account of that attachment, that caused it to be more than twice this mailing list's maximum message size of 40kB.

It would be better in the future, if possible, to put such files in a directory reachable via ftp or http, and then post the URL instead of sending the attachment in-line -- for lots of reasons, including some subscribers having less bandwidth to spare than you and I are used to.

We could of course change the value from the Mailman default of 40kB, but then the question becomes what's a better dividing line and why. The usually recommended Unix-ey remedy, instead, is as above.

[Sluggo] No, the limit makes sense. I normally put such files on my website for people to snap up. I just didn't want to commit to leaving my computer on this time.

Pic of my favorite gyro shop, which has a hilarious name: "Aladdin Gyro-Cery".

The street it's on. Note how the Aladdin sign is almost as big as the store. There's a pho place in front but I haven't been in it. The hippie-green building in the background is a used record shop with a rave upstairs; the multicolor building behind it used to be a used record store but it went under. The tall building we call "Mount Safeco"; it's an insurance company (SAFECO). This is the University District, where I lived for fourteen years, and now transfer through every day on my way to work.

A politically-correct clothing store nearby. "Made in downtown LA. Sweatshop free." I haven't been in it.

Rick's Rant

A lot of people seem to like Flickr, for that purpose (http://www.flickr.com/ -- a Yahoo property). After uploading photos, it furnishes some automatic image-manipulation (image rotation, sizing, thumbnails, notations, RSS/Atom feeds, albums, "tags"=categories). With the default no-charge login, individual images you upload must be < 5MB, only your most recent 200 uploads are accessible, only various scaled-down image variants are available (not your original file), and there's a 20MB/month bandwidth cap. Such accounts are advertising-subsidised. Naturally, there's also a "Pro account" upsell, that eases those limits.

Which is a sneaky way for me to shlep into the conversation a broader topic: people deciding to use commercial services to hold their personal data -- or not -- which is tangentially relevant to the recent blogging thread on this list.

The topic of hosting comes up quite a lot in my family and among my friends, and sort of an ongoing tug of war: I and a relative few others remain in the "if I want it, I'll do it myself, thanks" camp; everyone else goes for various hosted-services fads.

[Jimmy] Y'know, since you wrote this, I've found myself remembering this message with almost every other article I've read recently.

First: http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/oreilly/tim/news/2005/09/30/what-is-web-20.html

"In our initial brainstorming, we formulated our sense of Web 2.0 by example:

Web 1.0                          Web 2.0
DoubleClick                 -->  Google AdSense
Ofoto                       -->  Flickr
Akamai                      -->  BitTorrent
mp3.com                     -->  Napster
Britannica Online           -->  Wikipedia
personal websites           -->  blogging
evite                       -->  upcoming.org and EVDB
domain name speculation     -->  search engine optimization
page views                  -->  cost per click
screen scraping             -->  web services
publishing                  -->  participation
content management systems  -->  wikis
directories (taxonomy)      -->  tagging ("folksonomy")
stickiness                  -->  syndication"

Web 2.0 (or Web 1.9 as NTK would have it) seems to be the dumbed down version of the Semantic Web: non-standardised meta information in simple XML vs. (over-)complicated RDF.

[Rick] ObJavaTaunt: http://www.garbett.org/upload/books.jpg (URL just now provided by my Ruby on Rails-fan spouse.)

[Suramya] Ha ha, thats soo true... This is one of the reason's I don't like Java that much.

[Rick] The big one that hit me a few years ago was LiveJournal -- followed thereafter by innumerable other "social network" services. (Note: The LiveJournal server-end code apparently used to be open source, but then was taken proprietary.

[Jimmy] Um... I think that's the other way around. Live Journal's server code was open source last time I checked (a week ago), and they were one of the mentoring organisations for Google's Summer of Code.

[Rick] I was going by comments here (dtd. 2003-11-30): http://www.livejournal.com/community/abuse_lj_abuse/27502.html?thread=1138542

LiveJournal has decided to place all new code into the ljcomint cvs repository. This repository is not publically available, nor is it available to volunteer developers. The users who have worked so hard to support and develop LiveJournal are being left in the cold, with only core developers able to access the code to the new features.

This trend is not slowing, is not showing any signs of stopping, and most likely will not.

An ex-LJ support person comments:

Open Source LJ code only includes certain things.

[Jimmy] Heh. No wonder I couldn't find any information about the projects they had going on :)

Passports

[Rick] (I had to make an unplanned side-trip into London from Glasgow because my passport had vanished, and so I was obliged to visit the US Embassy to get a new one. The whole gory tale is here: http://deirdre.net/posts/2005/08/glasgow-ricks-departure/ )

[Ben] Ye Ghods, Rick. That's totally insane, and I'm sorry to hear that you had to go (be dragged through) it. The last time I had anything to do with the Passport Office, even by proxy, was when my gf lost her passport in Bermuda. She went down to the embassy, got interviewed for a few minutes to establish her bona fides, paid a small extra fee for them to issue her a passport on short notice (the Bermudian immigration people were rather insistent about "as quickly as possible"), and that was the end of the problem (she emphasized to me how unfailingly polite and helpful they were throughout the process.) However, that was pre-9/11, when Americans were nearly as free as, say, the average European. Well, OK - the average East European.

[Thomas] From what I understand, that's nothing compared to all the other things that go vanishing from Bermuda. :)

[Ben] :)

<dark humor>

Ah. NOW I know what happened to that relationship.

</dark humor>

It seems that US embassies these days - particularly in places like the UK that are obviously our enemies and would blow us all sky-high if we fail to be ever-vigilant - are fortresses with one purpose and one purpose only: to protect those inside from those outside. Including, obviously, from any US citizens who are not part of the privileged few. Hell, if they really loved America, why would they be travelling in the first place? If they're not traitors, then they're at least sympathizers - next thing you know, they'll whip out a turban. Ya just can't trust'em, I say.

Cheers,               It is by caffeine alone I set my mind in motion.
Rick Moen          It is by the beans of Java that thoughts acquire speed,
rick@            The hands acquire shaking, the shaking becomes a warning,
linuxmafia.com         It is by caffeine alone I set my mind in motion.