Netanyahu lost his mind in a CNN interview with Wolf Blitzer. He will never be able to un-say what he said. Poor, sad Bibi.
Wolf Blitzer, 20 July 2014:
"You see these painful pictures though of these Palestinian children and these refugees, thousands of them, fleeing their homes. It’s a horrendous sight right now– if you look at the images, heart-wrenching. What goes through your mind when you see that?"
Netanyahu:
"I’m very sad. When I see that I’m very sad. We’re sad for every civilian casualty. They’re not intended. This is the difference between us. The Hamas deliberately targets civilians and deliberately hides behind civilians. They imbed their rocketeers, their rocket caches, their other weaponry, which they use to fire on us in civilian areas… What choice do we have?…
"All civilian casualties are unintended by us but actually intended by Hamas. They want to pile up as many civilian dead as they can because somebody said, and I mean, it’s gruesome, but they use telegenically-dead Palestinians for their cause. They want– the more dead the better."
“Those whom the gods wish to destroy they first make mad.”
Clearly this man is a psychopath. His "we are the victim" line is just no longer possible to sell, with hundreds of dead Palestinian civilians, a quarter of them children, and with fewer than 20 Israeli casualties, almost all of them soldiers.
So Adam, hurled from the moon, is inspired by his dream girl Eloy to become a universally acclaimed concert pianist.
I better back up a little. On the moon, Adam had been grabbed and hurled down to earth by the bus driver's goons. The autocratic bus driver, played by Bill Murray, needs to keep the passengers, mainly elderly shoppers, along with the crooner Eddie Fisher, busy with shopping.
I better back up a little. Adam had been advised by Father Knickerbocker that love and peace had been spread everywhere in the world by homeless bums, but only he (Adam) was capable of spreading love to the moon.
I better back up a little. The movie is called Nothing Lasts Forever.
http://youtu.be/Y2bXpNJSNaY
The movie was made in 1984 at about the same time as Ghostbusters, but it was never released. It shows up sporadically in film festivals. You can watch it on youtube.
Is it dystopian? Surely. A surrealist vision? Philosophical voyage? Stoner entertainment? Yes. Yes and no and yes. It shares themes with Metropolis, Wizard of Oz, The Matrix, 1984, and Twelve monkeys. I am sure you will find parallels of your own.
At the outset, a worldwide recession causes a rationing of essential services in the Port Authority, which engenders a gestapo-like regimentation. Adam gets shuffled from office to office in an endless bureaucratic loop. To prove that he has an occupation, Adam is given an art test, which is nude figure drawing in three minutes or less. Adam's sketch turns out to be nothing but a dark triangle, and he fails.
Adam's three-minute art test
Adam and Eloy find True Love on the moon.
Elderly moon shoppers
Those lovely lunar welcoming girls
Have fun! By way of explanation, the theme song offers, "It's a Barnum & Bailey world, just as phony as it could be, but it wouldn't be make believe if you believed in me!"
In 1950s rock, the saxophone was king. Randy Bachman recently did a show about rock n' roll saxophones on CBC (Canadian) radio . His show is called Vinyl Tap. Tequila by The Champs, with saxophonist Danny Flores, was featured in the 1985 film Pee-wee's Big Adventure. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Czxa5H3NuGs
Baker Street by Gerry Rafferty https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2j7uAimpx3k
Lore has it that sax player Raphael Ravenscroft was paid 27 British pounds for the recording session, via a check that bounced.
I want my doo-wop. There are tons of best-rock-saxophone-solo lists on line, which you can find easily, but they contain mainly tunes from the 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s. Fine, but where is the Doo-Wop? Randy overlooked it.
Doo-wop is fundamental to rock (yes, yes, I'm an old fart). I assembled my own representative list of forgotten doo-wop and early rhythm-and-blues tunes, each with an amazing saxophone solo. Doo-wop harmonies are so astonishing that -- you will see -- they cannot really be punctuated by anything as tame as an organ or guitar. It has to be a sax.
Fathead
David "Fathead" Newman was a sideman for Ray Charles before forming his own sextet. His solos are my favorites of all time, entirely spectacular.
Our friend @Mzkeekz found a language web site http://languagesoftheworld.info/ which turns out to be fun. It is about English dialects, among other things. There are also articles about Romance languages, Latvian, Russian, Sanskrit -- the gamut.
Maps: The Harvard Dialect Survey, conducted by Bert Vaux and Scott Golder, is a compilation of regional American differences. Researcher Joshua Katz of NC State University used it to construct maps. [ link ] Do you say soda or pop? grosery or groshery (grocery)? reely or rilly (really)? law-yer or loy-er? ant or ahnt (aunt)? Katz explores these questions.
you guys
42.53% of respondents
you
24.82%
y’all
13.99%, chiefly in the South
you all
12.63%
yous or youse
0.67%
yins
0.37%, chiefly in Appalachia
you ‘uns
0.20%, also chiefly in Appalachia
you lot
0.18%
some other term
4.62%
The deepest divide
Among the regional differences, the use of y'all is the deepest and most obvious linguistic divide in America. It separates Southerners from non-Southerners. I have a gut revulsion when I hear the word y'all. I can't help it. I grit my teeth and anticipate something flagrantly anti-science or misogynistic or racist.
Y'all know Obama is a communist muslim foreigner.
Y'all know climate change is just a liberal hoax.
Y'all know homosexuality is a sin.
I apologize if you belong to the y'all persuasion. There is nothing stupid or illiterate in the word y'all. I know that it is a fully grammatical element of language. But my experience has been reinforced many times.
TakeThis Quiz
It is a brief language survey of your regionalisms, grosery or groshery, reely or rilly, and at the end, it will produce a map (poorly designed as the colors red and blue are indistinguishable by one man in twelve) -- a map of everyone in the USA who talks like you. In my case, it located me exactly:
To cure depression, listen to this samba. Listen to it all day. It will make you feel better.
Mas que nada literally means "but that nothing." In Brazilian slang this means "come on" or "no way" or "yeah, right!"
Let's think back to 1966. Bossa nova was the new fad. The bossa nova was a whitebread attempt to make the samba palatable to Americans, and it was at this point that Sergio Mendez realized that palatable was not good enough. Brazil had its own rich tradition of European, African, and indigenous music, blended upon the vibrant polyrhythms of Africa. In the great diaspora of the 18th century, most Africans had been relocated not to the Caribbean, not to North America, but to Brazil.
So Brazil had its own native rhythms, driving rhythms. And Brazil had its native melodies too, that were layered over idiosyncratic ninth chords, seventh chords, and augmented sevenths. Think of "The Girl From Ipanema," which ought to be dissonant, as it is built from a melange of awkward chords, yet conveys a plaintive lyricism. (I am summarizing an interview with Sergio Mendez I heard on Q with Jian Ghomeshi)
Sergio Mendez brought the Brazilian melodies back to the samba. Fifty years later, Brazil is in the news. And the samba is exploding everywhere.
Etymology
Some Latins are defensive about the word "football." They claim that we Americans are using it wrong. Guess what, Jorge, it's not even a Spanish word. You stole fútbol from the Brits, didn't you. And you didn't even spell it right.
danish
fodbold
ukrainian
futbol
dutch
voetbal
vietnamese
bóng đá
german
Fußball
welsh
pêl-droed
portuguese
futebol
xhosa
isoka
romanian
fotbal
yoruba
bọọlu afẹsẹgba
spanish
fútbol
zulu
lezinyawo
This table proves that foreigners are all ignorant about football.
Viewing the games
The World Cup is available on ESPN in the USA. I do not get ESPN. Do you? If you live in Canada, you can use the CBC. If not, you can use the Spanish-language network Univision:
If you’re fluent in Spanish, you’re all set. And if not, well, the action tends to be pretty self-explanatory, and the word “goooooooaal!” sounds the same in English and Spanish. Right now I am watching Costa Rica vs Uruguay. The Uruguay guys are larger, the Costa Ricans faster, so it's an interesting game. Uruguay is leading 1-0.
You can see replays of the finished games in the following link (to see them live, you're asked to install some kind of media player, which I do not trust very much).
The object of the game
... is to eat the entire soccer ball while running at full speed down the field.
World class flops
Everybody agrees that Brazil was awarded an undeserved penalty free-shot after staging this fake injury (GIF):
FIFA: John Oliver gets it right
"Sepp Blatter? Even his name should have been red flag. If your name is Sepp, at the bare minimum, you've strangled someone in a bar fight. That's just a fact."
In a 2007 survey on the greatest Canadian inventions of all time, Poutine was ranked No. 10, ahead of the electron microscope, the BlackBerry, and the paint roller. Poutine is a dish of homemade french fries topped with white cheddar cheese curds and gravy. Ughhh. To denizens of the civilized world, it sounds unsavory.
In France, coincidentally, Poutine means Putin (Путин), as in Vladimir Putin. I find this fascinating. There is a perverse logic in it, since и represents a long E sound. Putin rhymes with "keen" not "vin."
From Le Figaro:
2000 kilometers from a real civil war, with real people dying and vertiginous geopolitical issues, a FEMEN media puppet with bare breasts attacks a wax statue in the sight of horrified Japanese tourists and the placid gaze of a plastic François Hollande.
So I met this Chinese fellow in Friendster in 2011. Li Yi has lived in China all his life -- not in Hong Kong, not in Taiwan, but in official authentic China. He lives in the city of Nanning, site of Guangxi University, which is on the southern tip of China. And yet he speaks English quite naturally.
Hello John
How are you? Thank you for emailing me. Do you plan to come here? Yes Guangxi university is a very famous university here in China. Do you have anything you want to know about me?
liyi
Li Yi,
Okay, yes. Why do you speak English so fluently?
Also, (answer optional) does the government block news about Tiananmen or Ai Weiwei? I don't want to make trouble for you.
-john
Hello John
I studied english at Guangxi University. English is a popular subject in China now. Parents pay a lot of money to put their kids in english classes do you want to teach english here?
It doenst matter you can talk about news here no one can see what you write. Maybe in public can cause trouble. Some news is blocked because there are a billion people here and if we have a panic maybe many people can get killed for no reason. I hope to hear from you soon. Do play games on friendster? I play Flower House. Also facebook and youtube is blocked here for reasons that i dont know
liyi
There will always be propaganda. There will always be patiotic reasons for suppressing the truth and lying about Tiananmen. Still, I don't understand how a billion people can tolerate having the wool pulled over their eyes.
in China, days before the 25th anniversary of the Tiananmen massacre, the government has blocked access to all of Google’s encrypted and unencrypted services in the country and announced a new front in its war against 'online rumors': Internet messaging apps. Censorship monitor GreatFire.org has called this the 'strictest censorship ever deployed.'
The Chinese government prohibits all forms of offline and online discussion on the Tiananmen protests, one of the bloodiest events in Beijing's modern history. Estimates of the death toll range from June 4, 1989, range from a few hundred to the thousands.
Back in the days of Xanga 1.0, you could attract a lot of visitors simply by asking one lame question. That is what thetheologianscafe always did. Nowadays of course it is not possible to track the number of visits. The clipping is from The New York Post.
Question: Do you believe Kim Kardashian and Kanye West were married? Or do you believe they weren't?
Forget about EuroVision. How about a music competition in the South Seas, in islands like Fiji, New Caledonia, Vanuatu, the Solomons, and Papua. I mean, when is the last time you gave any thought at all to Vanuatu?
In 2002 Vanessa Quai's song Freedom topped the radio charts in Vanuatu and the Solomon Islands, and it ranked second on the charts in Papua New Guinea. This is my favorite song. She was fourteen.
Vanessa Quai was born July 13, 1988 in Port Vila, Vanuatu. In 1999, she was one of 3000 competitors at the South Pacific International Song contest in Queensland, where she won third prize in the Gospel Category. Later that same year, she took first prize at the Nile International Children Song Contest in Cairo, Egypt. In 2004, she won first prize at the International Teenagers Singing Competition in Bucharest, Romania. Her music is reportedly popular in French Polynesia, and in 2008 she became the first Melanesian singer to tour Tahiti.
She sings in many languages, including French, Tok Pisin, and Motu. Quai’s mother is Fijian, and she also sings in Fijian.
There are more than 800 languages in Papua New Guinea (PNG). You want diversity? Do you like diverse rock-n-roll? Be sure to watch the middle part of this harrowing video.
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