(no subject)
Feb. 2nd, 2020 05:18 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
shadowkat1. Tried to do laundry today but was thwarted. Went down three times with laundry and trash, and while I was able to drop off the trash -- there were people doing the laundry. I'm considering just sending it out next weekend, if I'm unable to do it on a weeknight.
The first round it was three people down there, with the equivalent of ten loads between them. The second it was one person with six loads. The third, a man and his son with six loads. When I came up after that trip, I fell into a coughing fit for about fifteen minutes. And thought, okay that's it. The Universe doesn't want me to do laundry this weekend. Also doing laundry on rainy weekends is a bad idea.
Felt very frustrated. People have been frustrating me all week long. It's very hard to be kind to people when you are frustrated with them.
2. How to Change a Bigot's Mind.
Interesting article about deep canvassing which involves contact and listening. And being open. Very hard to do. I've done it in the past and was successful. I changed a few people's minds about Same-Sex marriage and Trans, but I can't do it right now. You have to be in the right head-space to do this. Non-judgmental, and able to see both sides. And I have to do too much of that at work -- plus I'm going through menopause....so the emotions are all over the place.
So, yes, it works. And yes, I recommend. But no, it is not always easy and to do it you have to be able to see a point of view that...well is hard to see and/or deal with.
In the same frame of mind as the above.. A Better Way to Look at Most Every Political Issue
America’s two-party system frequently forces binary choices on voters, and locating oneself on a left-right political spectrum can be a useful exercise. But I’d like to see more political analysis that recognizes the difference between equilibriums and limits and examines the coalitions that form around them. Seeing those frameworks more clearly would reveal instances when differences between Americans are not as sharp as they might seem, and enable marginal improvements to policy on issues where slippery slopes are unlikely and the main obstacle holding back reform is the fear of a limit that almost no one wants to cross.
I actually kind of agree with this. And it relates to other debates as well. I've lost count of the number of arguments that I've had with people where we actually agreed more than we thought. Our disagreement may have been on semantics or a misunderstanding of sorts.
In regards to politics, most people fall in the middle between the two extremes, they are equally terrified of the far right and the far left. They don't cart blanche on any of the issues. And I think that's the problem -- is the push to political extremism is frustrating those of us who fall in the middle.
3. English is Not Normal - apparently it's weirder than any other language on the planet. I do know it's not conducive to learning other languages.
English speakers know that their language is odd. So do people saddled with learning it non-natively. The oddity that we all perceive most readily is its spelling, which is indeed a nightmare. In countries where English isn’t spoken, there is no such thing as a ‘spelling bee’ competition. For a normal language, spelling at least pretends a basic correspondence to the way people pronounce the words. But English is not normal.
Spelling is a matter of writing, of course, whereas language is fundamentally about speaking. Speaking came long before writing, we speak much more, and all but a couple of hundred of the world’s thousands of languages are rarely or never written. Yet even in its spoken form, English is weird. It’s weird in ways that are easy to miss, especially since Anglophones in the United States and Britain are not exactly rabid to learn other languages. But our monolingual tendency leaves us like the proverbial fish not knowing that it is wet. Our language feels ‘normal’ only until you get a sense of what normal really is.
There is no other language, for example, that is close enough to English that we can get about half of what people are saying without training and the rest with only modest effort. German and Dutch are like that, as are Spanish and Portuguese, or Thai and Lao. The closest an Anglophone can get is with the obscure Northern European language called Frisian: if you know that tsiis is cheese and Frysk is Frisian, then it isn’t hard to figure out what this means: Brea, bûter, en griene tsiis is goed Ingelsk en goed Frysk. But that sentence is a cooked one, and overall, we tend to find that Frisian seems more like German, which it is.
4. Television Shows..
The Good Place Finale
Again, I love the philosophy dislike pretty much everything else. As a result, I found it a bit boring and not all that funny. Did however agree with the writers on the metaphysics, for the most part that's how I see it -- except I don't think there is an afterlife prior to it or any organizational system. So, I was with the writers from the rebirth, learning everything need to learn, being done, and able to rejoin the universe as energy. And that at our essence we are energy beings living in organic matter (which is painful). That made sense to me. Everything else, not so much. Although I do have a fondness for frogs. Not so much podcasts or frozen yogurt, though.
Anyhow, that said, it was a satisfying ending to the series and for the most part, worked rather well.
Legacies - Is interesting. They don't have the hot bad boy male leads that graced Vampire Diaries. Instead they have nice guys, and a more diverse cast, with a focus on bad girl super-powered witches. I think it's weaker plot-wise and structurally speaking than Vamp Diaries. But still compelling and innovative in its own way. After all we have a mystical Phoenix and a Fairy in the cast.
Prodigal Son -- I was a little disappointed in the episode before this week's episode. The one in which the Junkyard Killer took and tortured Bright. However, I'm not watching the series for the plot, but the relationship dynamics -- which are fun.
My mother and I may give up on Grey's Anatomy. It's boring us. And neither of us can get into Station 19.
9-1-1 Lone Star -- is better than expected. Rob Lowe makes a good lead, along with Liv Tyler. Also they are handling both the homosexual and transgender and Muslim storylines better than most. They do it by not being preachy about it. The Trans is a black male, who has a beard. You can tell he is trans. Also he's tough.
We also have a red-neck cowboy firefighter who is married to a black 9-1-1 operator. Which upturns the stereotype. What I like about 9-1-1 is they play with stereotypes and subvert them. They also do a good job of subverting and rewiring the medical procedural. It's great fun for anyone who likes Disaster Films -- which are a weakness of mine. I love Disaster Movies, I find them oddly comforting. People are often at their best during them.
Sandition -- I actually like the architect, Stringer, better than Sydney for Ms. Heywood. Stringer is more practical and down to earth. It's not like the book I read. Stringer wasn't in that book. And things were different. Also I have a feeling this is being set up more as a television series than well a mini-series -- it has that feel. (Turns out I was right when I read an article confirming that was the intent. Unfortunately ITV didn't renew. Maybe someone else will. Hard to know. Still waiting for Discovery of Witches to return, by the time it does -- I will have forgotten what happened. Maybe I'll read the books, did pick up all three dirt cheap off of a Kindle Daily deal.) Anyhow, it is slow in places. I'm not all that interested in the subsidiary characters and can kind of see why ITV didn't renew.
The first round it was three people down there, with the equivalent of ten loads between them. The second it was one person with six loads. The third, a man and his son with six loads. When I came up after that trip, I fell into a coughing fit for about fifteen minutes. And thought, okay that's it. The Universe doesn't want me to do laundry this weekend. Also doing laundry on rainy weekends is a bad idea.
Felt very frustrated. People have been frustrating me all week long. It's very hard to be kind to people when you are frustrated with them.
2. How to Change a Bigot's Mind.
Interesting article about deep canvassing which involves contact and listening. And being open. Very hard to do. I've done it in the past and was successful. I changed a few people's minds about Same-Sex marriage and Trans, but I can't do it right now. You have to be in the right head-space to do this. Non-judgmental, and able to see both sides. And I have to do too much of that at work -- plus I'm going through menopause....so the emotions are all over the place.
So, yes, it works. And yes, I recommend. But no, it is not always easy and to do it you have to be able to see a point of view that...well is hard to see and/or deal with.
In the same frame of mind as the above.. A Better Way to Look at Most Every Political Issue
America’s two-party system frequently forces binary choices on voters, and locating oneself on a left-right political spectrum can be a useful exercise. But I’d like to see more political analysis that recognizes the difference between equilibriums and limits and examines the coalitions that form around them. Seeing those frameworks more clearly would reveal instances when differences between Americans are not as sharp as they might seem, and enable marginal improvements to policy on issues where slippery slopes are unlikely and the main obstacle holding back reform is the fear of a limit that almost no one wants to cross.
I actually kind of agree with this. And it relates to other debates as well. I've lost count of the number of arguments that I've had with people where we actually agreed more than we thought. Our disagreement may have been on semantics or a misunderstanding of sorts.
In regards to politics, most people fall in the middle between the two extremes, they are equally terrified of the far right and the far left. They don't cart blanche on any of the issues. And I think that's the problem -- is the push to political extremism is frustrating those of us who fall in the middle.
3. English is Not Normal - apparently it's weirder than any other language on the planet. I do know it's not conducive to learning other languages.
English speakers know that their language is odd. So do people saddled with learning it non-natively. The oddity that we all perceive most readily is its spelling, which is indeed a nightmare. In countries where English isn’t spoken, there is no such thing as a ‘spelling bee’ competition. For a normal language, spelling at least pretends a basic correspondence to the way people pronounce the words. But English is not normal.
Spelling is a matter of writing, of course, whereas language is fundamentally about speaking. Speaking came long before writing, we speak much more, and all but a couple of hundred of the world’s thousands of languages are rarely or never written. Yet even in its spoken form, English is weird. It’s weird in ways that are easy to miss, especially since Anglophones in the United States and Britain are not exactly rabid to learn other languages. But our monolingual tendency leaves us like the proverbial fish not knowing that it is wet. Our language feels ‘normal’ only until you get a sense of what normal really is.
There is no other language, for example, that is close enough to English that we can get about half of what people are saying without training and the rest with only modest effort. German and Dutch are like that, as are Spanish and Portuguese, or Thai and Lao. The closest an Anglophone can get is with the obscure Northern European language called Frisian: if you know that tsiis is cheese and Frysk is Frisian, then it isn’t hard to figure out what this means: Brea, bûter, en griene tsiis is goed Ingelsk en goed Frysk. But that sentence is a cooked one, and overall, we tend to find that Frisian seems more like German, which it is.
4. Television Shows..
The Good Place Finale
Again, I love the philosophy dislike pretty much everything else. As a result, I found it a bit boring and not all that funny. Did however agree with the writers on the metaphysics, for the most part that's how I see it -- except I don't think there is an afterlife prior to it or any organizational system. So, I was with the writers from the rebirth, learning everything need to learn, being done, and able to rejoin the universe as energy. And that at our essence we are energy beings living in organic matter (which is painful). That made sense to me. Everything else, not so much. Although I do have a fondness for frogs. Not so much podcasts or frozen yogurt, though.
Anyhow, that said, it was a satisfying ending to the series and for the most part, worked rather well.
Legacies - Is interesting. They don't have the hot bad boy male leads that graced Vampire Diaries. Instead they have nice guys, and a more diverse cast, with a focus on bad girl super-powered witches. I think it's weaker plot-wise and structurally speaking than Vamp Diaries. But still compelling and innovative in its own way. After all we have a mystical Phoenix and a Fairy in the cast.
Prodigal Son -- I was a little disappointed in the episode before this week's episode. The one in which the Junkyard Killer took and tortured Bright. However, I'm not watching the series for the plot, but the relationship dynamics -- which are fun.
My mother and I may give up on Grey's Anatomy. It's boring us. And neither of us can get into Station 19.
9-1-1 Lone Star -- is better than expected. Rob Lowe makes a good lead, along with Liv Tyler. Also they are handling both the homosexual and transgender and Muslim storylines better than most. They do it by not being preachy about it. The Trans is a black male, who has a beard. You can tell he is trans. Also he's tough.
We also have a red-neck cowboy firefighter who is married to a black 9-1-1 operator. Which upturns the stereotype. What I like about 9-1-1 is they play with stereotypes and subvert them. They also do a good job of subverting and rewiring the medical procedural. It's great fun for anyone who likes Disaster Films -- which are a weakness of mine. I love Disaster Movies, I find them oddly comforting. People are often at their best during them.
Sandition -- I actually like the architect, Stringer, better than Sydney for Ms. Heywood. Stringer is more practical and down to earth. It's not like the book I read. Stringer wasn't in that book. And things were different. Also I have a feeling this is being set up more as a television series than well a mini-series -- it has that feel. (Turns out I was right when I read an article confirming that was the intent. Unfortunately ITV didn't renew. Maybe someone else will. Hard to know. Still waiting for Discovery of Witches to return, by the time it does -- I will have forgotten what happened. Maybe I'll read the books, did pick up all three dirt cheap off of a Kindle Daily deal.) Anyhow, it is slow in places. I'm not all that interested in the subsidiary characters and can kind of see why ITV didn't renew.
no subject
Date: 2020-02-02 11:58 pm (UTC)This is not true. All languages are equally "weird".
no subject
Date: 2020-02-03 12:40 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-02-03 12:46 am (UTC)Among other things, he certainly ought to know that Scots is closer to English than Frisian. He absolutely does know that English is not a language isolate like Basque or Korean.
English started out as, essentially, a kind of German.
It did not, no more than humans started out as, essentially, a kind of chimp.
That's tip of the iceberg stuff, I cannot read any more without losing it at him via you.
no subject
Date: 2020-02-03 12:53 am (UTC)Are you a linguist by any chance? You appear to have knowledge regarding languages that is more on the professional/expert level?
no subject
Date: 2020-02-03 01:04 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-02-03 02:48 am (UTC)I get it though, there are things I care far too much about and know quite a bit about in portions.
no subject
Date: 2020-02-03 01:05 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-02-03 02:54 am (UTC)Tolkien was a professional linguist who endeavored through his Lord of the Rings stories to play with and possibly preserve the ancient British tongue and dialect, along with a mythology of Britain. (I remember reading this when I visited a display of his work at the Morgan Library. )
Whether he was right about this or not, I've no clue. I found it interesting though. Welsh - I know has very little in common with Scottish or Irish, Irish and Scottish are closer as is Breaton. I can't understand any of them.
Also thick Scottish and Irish dialects are close to impossible to understand -- I know I ran into a lot of them when I first came to NY. Couldn't understand a word half of them said. It was not English.
no subject
Date: 2020-02-03 03:30 am (UTC)Scots is a Germanic language and closely related to English or possibly a dialect of English depending on whom you ask.
Scottish Gaelic is a Celtic language - specifically, it's a Goidelic language and very closely related to Irish Gaelic, and less closely related to Welsh, which is a Brittonic language.
no subject
Date: 2020-02-03 01:15 pm (UTC)Well, that would explain why I can't understand either. Also, why the Gaelic sounds nothing like Welsh. France has similar issues -- Breaton or Brittany, speaks a form of Gaelic that is not French. They've actually combined French and Gaelic.