(no subject)

[shadowkat]

1. Hmmm...interesting:

North Carolina Republican Calls it Quits with GOP, Joins Democratic Party. Now if everyone else in the country would make the same decision, all would be well.

Can't say I blame him. Just don't understand why more people aren't jumping ship? Because if they did, maybe Trump would slither back under whatever rock he had crawled out from under. I preferred it when he was busy with the Celebrity Apprentice and Miss America. Damn, NBC for canceling. That kept him busy. And easy to ignore. Now he's everwhere - in the book store, on the television, in the newspapers,on the internet, it's getting harder and harder to ignore the idiot.

2. Celiac disease, and, more generally, gluten intolerance, is a growing problem worldwide, but especially in North America and Europe, where an estimated 5% of the population now suffers from it. Symptoms include nausea, diarrhea, skin rashes, macrocytic anemia and depression. It is a multifactorial disease associated with numerous nutritional deficiencies as well as reproductive issues and increased risk to thyroid disease, kidney failure and cancer. Here, we propose that glyphosate, the active ingredient in the herbicide, Roundup®, is the most important causal factor in this epidemic.

Weird. Except I think I had this since I was a child, so not really sure what fish have to do with it.

3. The Wonderbag as a Slow Cooker

4. This Tree Beautifully Reveals the Relationships Between Languages



Click at the link above to get a poster of it.

And go here for Nordic Languages Chart

Comments

[paratti.livejournal.com]

We've got the linguistic swag of Empire added to the Romance language. Pukka pajamas for bungalows etc.

[beer-good-foamy.livejournal.com]

Lucky bastards. The only country we ever managed to colonise was Finland. ...Not a whole lot of exotic concepts to import.

[paratti.livejournal.com]

Sauna and Stabbitiness?

[shadowkat67.livejournal.com]

Not to mention IKEA, Swedish meatballs, Swedish furniture, and oh, Girl with the Dragon Tatoo...although not really lingual influences.

[beer-good-foamy.livejournal.com]

Well, we learned to blame the Finns for that, at least. :) In terms of language, though, there's very little influence on Swedish from Finnish - we had them for 700 years, and in all that time borrowed maybe a couple of dozen words. Which should tell you something about how easy Finnish is. (They have 15 noun cases. Fifteen. Saatana perkele. Even the Germans get along with four.)

[paratti.livejournal.com]

We're still boggling at the languages which gender objects.

[shadowkat67.livejournal.com]

The English did get around, didn't they? For a small island, they managed to colonize over half the world before WWI and WWII put a damper on things. Let's see how many continents and countries did they colonize? (It should be noted that my ancestors -- as in great great grandad was most likely English on one side...came over in the 1800s, I think, I don't really pay that much attention to genealogy, it tends to give me a headache. But I have a paternal uncle who's an addict.)

1. North America (sort of...that is debatable at times. France and Spain put up a good fight. Let's just say Britain controlled the largest portion of North America)
2. Australia
3. New Zealand
4. India
5. Africa (specifically South Africa)
6. Hong Kong
7. Indonesia

France ? A portion of North America, Africa, Carribean, Vietnam, Belgium, and that's about it, I think?
Spain? South America, Central America, a portion of North America, Africa, (hey they did better than France)
Portugal? South America (although I think Spain got the bigger share)

I don't know about the others...

I think Spain and England are the winners in the colonization/imperialism game.

[beer-good-foamy.livejournal.com]

Well, the English and French pretty much divided all of Africa up between them. But yeah, most western European nations got in on it at one time or another. (It's not that we didn't try. We really wanted to get in on the slave trade and other profitable bits. We were just never very good at it, post-viking times.)

While the Germans, Austrians, Turks, Greeks, Russians, Persians and Arabs concentrated on their neighbours and clambered all over each other for a couple of thousand years.

And you wonder why the world's fucked up.