JFC what is it about Greeks?

Jun. 8th, 2025 08:49 am
conuly: (Default)
[personal profile] conuly
A shocking number of people will blithely tell us all about the book they read, in English, on an English-language subreddit, and never tell us that they didn't read it in English. I can only catch so many of them - if they don't say "English isn't my first language" or make any obvious foreign language errors then I'll never know. (Some of them say "I read this in my own language" and then don't tell us what that language was.)

Most of these people, if prompted, will tell you what language they read it in. Three times now, I've had to ask twice because they refused to answer the question in a useful way, and every time that person has been Greek.

I thought it was a little funny the second time, but three times is the start of a worrying pattern, especially as it's not at all the most popular not-English language posted there. Maybe there's something going badly wrong with their school system?

(And, sidenote, even if you're certain it was translated from English you still ought to tell us the language it was written in. At least in theory this can help us weed out false positives, although I may be expecting too much of fellow commenters to that subreddit.)

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Photo cross-post

Jun. 7th, 2025 12:29 pm
andrewducker: (Default)
[personal profile] andrewducker


My brother Mike got me this for my birthday, and it just takes a weight off my mind being able to say "bring the steam temperature up to 95 degrees and hold it there"

(Control over oil temperature when frying eggs is also awesome.)
Original is here on Pixelfed.scot.

oursin: Photograph of Stella Gibbons, overwritten IM IN UR WOODSHED SEEING SOMETHIN NASTY (woodshed)
[personal profile] oursin

Actually, I can't find that the article by Molly-Jong Fast in today's Guardian Saturday is currently online, alas - clearly she had a sad and distressing childhood, even if I was tempted, and probably not the only one to be so tempted, to murmur, apologies to P Larkin, 'they zipless fuck you up...', the abrupt dismissal of her nanny, her only secure attachment figure, when Erica J suddenly remarried (again) was particularly harsh, I thought. No wonder she had problems.

And really, even if she does make a point of how relatively privileged she was, that doesn't actually ameliorate how badly she was treated.

Only the other day there was an obituary of the psychoanalyst Joy Schaverien, who wrote Boarding School Syndrome: The Psychological Trauma of the “Privileged” Child.

***

Another rather traumatic parenting story, though this is down to the hospitals: BBC News is now aware of five cases of babies swapped by mistake in maternity wards from the late 1940s to the 1960s. Lawyers say they expect more people to come forward driven by the increase in cheap genetic testing.:

[V]ery gradually, more babies were delivered in hospital, where newborns were typically removed for periods to be cared for in nurseries.
"The baby would be taken away between feeds so that the mother could rest, and the baby could be watched by either a nursery nurse or midwife," says Terri Coates, a retired lecturer in midwifery, and former clinical adviser on BBC series Call The Midwife.
"It may sound paternalistic, but midwives believed they were looking after mums and babies incredibly well."
It was common for new mothers to be kept in hospital for between five and seven days, far longer than today.
To identify newborns in the nursery, a card would be tied to the end of the cot with the baby's name, mother's name, the date and time of birth, and the baby's weight.
"Where cots rather than babies were labelled, accidents could easily happen"

Plus, this was the era of the baby boom, one imagines maternity wards may have been a bit swamped....

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A different sort of misattribution: The furniture fraud who hoodwinked the Palace of Versailles:

[T]his assortment of royal chairs would become embroiled in a national scandal that would rock the French antiques world, bringing the trade into disrepute.
The reason? The chairs were in fact all fakes.
The scandal saw one of France's leading antiques experts, Georges "Bill" Pallot, and award-winning cabinetmaker, Bruno Desnoues, put on trial on charges of fraud and money laundering following a nine-year investigation.
....
Speaking in court in March, Mr Pallot said the scheme started as a "joke" with Mr Desnoues in 2007 to see if they could replicate an armchair they were already working on restoring, that once belonged to Madame du Barry.
Masters of their crafts, they managed the feat, convincing other experts that it was a chair from the period.

***

I am really given a little hope for an anti-Mybug tendency among the masculine persuasion: A Man writes in 'the issue is not whether men are being published, but whether they are reading – and being supported to develop emotional lives that fiction can help foster'

While Geoff Dyer in The Books of [His] Life goes in hard with Beatrix Potter as early memory, Elizabeth Taylor as late-life discovery, and Rosamond Lehmann's The Weather in the Streets as

One of those perennially bubbling-under modern classics – too good for the Championship, unable to sustain a place in the Premier league – which turns out to be way better than some of the canonical stalwarts permanently installed in the top flight.

Okay, I mark him down a bit for the macho ' I don’t go to books for comfort', but still, not bad for a bloke, eh.

(no subject)

Jun. 7th, 2025 12:32 pm
oursin: Brush the Wandering Hedgehog by the fire (Default)
[personal profile] oursin
Happy birthday, [personal profile] sally_maria and [personal profile] spiffikins!
conuly: (Default)
[personal profile] conuly
has got to be shrinkflation of dumb phone games.

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The Sickening Has Me

Jun. 6th, 2025 08:20 pm
andrewducker: (xkcd boomdeyada)
[personal profile] andrewducker
I spent the day feeling bad for lacking focus, and wondering why I couldn't get anything done.
And then I slept for an hour on no notice.
And now I'm very wobbly and all of my muscles gently ache.
So I think I'm going to chalk it up as "The Plague" and hope I feel better tomorrow.

Nostalgic Music Party!

Jun. 6th, 2025 07:07 pm
oursin: Brush the Wandering Hedgehog by the fire (Default)
[personal profile] oursin

After a few distinctly less than summery days, today has been quite sunny.

Okay, I think I've had some of these before.... maybe.
Summer Nights


The downside: Summertime Blues:


Not sure if Summer Wine is for drinking then, or made then, with sinister summer herbs:


Obligatory Lovin' Spoonful


Kinks chilling on a Lazy Sunny Afternoon:


Carole King another one wanting it to be over:

andrewducker: (Default)
[personal profile] andrewducker
I see we're back at the "Labour attempt to introduce a mandatory ID card" stage of history*.

My feeling last time, was that the main problem that they always have is that they *start* with the cards being mandatory.

If you start with "Here is a thing that makes your life much easier, that you can carry about if you like." then that will get you 85% of the way there. And then, once you have a voluntary ID card that's not causing any problems for anyone, and that 85% of the population is using to make their life easier, *then* you move in and say "The only people who don't carry an ID card are weirdos and troublemakers, and they're causing friction in the system, we could make it all run more smoothly if only they *had* to carry one."

But no, they always try to go instantly from "Nobody has an ID card." to "Everyone must carry one at all times." - which forms a coalition of all sorts of people from across the political spectrum, and ends up being far more politically costly to them than if they'd just boiled their frog slowly.

(None of which should be taken as me taking a position on ID cards. I'm just constantly bemused by their inability to get things done by trying to rush them through in the most authoritarian manner possible.)

*Younger readers may not remember the fuss in 2006 (repealed in 2011)

podcast friday

Jun. 6th, 2025 07:10 am
sabotabby: (doom doom doom)
[personal profile] sabotabby
I remain once again mostly behind on podcasts, but maybe have a listen to It Could Happen Here's "Governing Fertility: How Pronatalist Policies Kill." (Trigger warning: It contains fairly graphic descriptions of what happened in Romania under Ceaușescu, which legit gave me nightmares as a kid. 

One of the particular hallmarks of both Trump 2.0, his ex-BFF Elon (who is responsible for approximately 30,000 child deaths in his short tenure as Grima Wormtongue), and far-right populist/techbro movements around the world, is an obsession with forced pregnancy, insemination, and reproduction. Obviously this is viscerally upsetting to everyone who's read or seen Handmaid's Tale, and given that the actual supposed problems with a declining birth date are mostly solved by immigration, which they want to decrease, bears some further examination. They don't just want to ban abortion, but pursue incentives for large families headed by heterosexual married couples, punish the childless, and create eugenics programs. The one thing that they don't want to do is care for whatever children are born, or create social conditions where families can live in financial and physical stability, because then the money would be sad.

The gang looks at a number of movements, including Spain and Japan, but Romania is actually the closest parallel to Trump's plans, and it's important to confront that horror straight in the face so they you know exactly what they want for American families and children. Although, you know, eventually the Ceaușescus got shot in a basement and dragged through the streets so at least there's that to look forward to.

(no subject)

Jun. 5th, 2025 05:15 pm
loup_noir: (Default)
[personal profile] loup_noir
 At my age, you'd think I would know better than to keep working after my wonky back said stop.  I never learn.  The grasses and weeds are driving me crazy.  All that bending and pulling was my first mistake, and the next mistake was listening to Past!me say I could jump back into the fray while still rather broken.  Back to floor time, heating pad, and more Ibuprofen than I like to take. 

About the only accomplishment I can claim is finishing reading "The Searcher" by Tana French.  American cop retires to rural Ireland in hopes of a new life and discovers he's still a cop.  French can craft sentences that stop the eye and require re-reading to enjoy them at their fullest.  Now I'm suffering a book hangover.

Life, it's all about back and birds right now.  The grass has to wait until maybe next Monday.  


oursin: Photograph of small impressionistic metal figurine seated reading a book (Reader)
[personal profile] oursin

I did a quick search over past posts and I see that bibliotherapy has been a thing that I have been posting the odd link about for A Long Time, though I see the School of Life's page thereon is now 404. In the way that things are constantly being suddenly NEW, I see I also had a link much more recently on the topic about which was cynical.

But I find this article really quite amusing if sometimes determined to use all the Propah Academyk Speek: Reading as therapy: medicalising books in an era of mental health austerity:

When reading is positioned as therapy, we argue, evaluative intentions intersect awkwardly with the cultural logics of literature, as practitioners and commissioners grapple with what it means to extract ‘wellbeing effects’ from a diffuse and everyday practice. As a result, what might look initially like another simple case of medicalisation turns out to have more uncertain effects. Indeed, as we will show, incorporating the ‘reading cure’ troubles biomedicine, foregrounding both the deficiencies of current public health responses to the perceived crisis of mental health, and the poverty of causal models of therapeutic effect in public health. There are, then, potentially de-medicalising as well as medicalising effects.

We get the sense that the project was constantly escaping from any endeavours to confine it within meshes of 'evidence-based medicine': 'Trying to fit the square peg of reading into the round hole of evidence is where things sometimes get awkward.'

Larfed liek drayne:

In five experiments on how reading fiction impacts on measures of wellbeing, Carney and Robertson found no measurable effects from simply being exposed to fiction: the mechanism, they note, is not akin to a pharmaceutical that can prescribed.

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