Was autotune a direct result of Milli Vanilli? Discuss amongst yourselves.
Milli Vanilli couldn't happen now because their dance moves are too raw and real for a current audience.
I always thought the opposite, that pop fans don't care as much about lip-syncing today, don't expect a live performance to involve actual singing anymore so wouldn't really care. Maybe the actual singers and the fake singers would both end up as celebs.
Heebie have you heard of Black Box? They were responsible for some of the big house music hits of the early 90s (songs I never saw the music video for or knew what they were called, but heard a lot, like "Strike It Up"). They started out with "Ride on Time" which sampled an old disco song by Loleatta Holloway and they got a model to lip-sync over the 10-year-old vocals and dance in the video. This was a bit weird, but no big deal. Then that song was such a hit that they started getting a real singer to sing new songs (Martha Wash, the same one who was deemed too fat to be publicly associated with C+C Music Factory) and kept using the model as their frontwoman for videos and performances. Same thing basically.
Not about lip-syncing, and probably something people who know this world a bit better knew about for ages, but I was surprised to learn the dark underbelly of the Backstreet Boys and NSYNC in the form of their pump-and-dump specialist / possible chickenhawk producer who exploited the bands of his creation well over replacement level.
Huh, how did I not know BB? Watching the video for "Strike It Up", this is right in my middle school radio hits wheelhouse. (Ie maybe the local pop station didn't have a contract with their label and they were never broadcast in my town.) That sure is a terrible song, except as an homage to a slice of pop culture that I'm a quite fond of.
Yeah, I'm with Cryptic Ned. It seems more inconceivable to me that anyone would care if a modern Milli Vanilli got outed today.
After I saw/heard Post Malone, I decided nobody gives a shit about anything these days.
To what extent was Milli Vanilli hurt by the fraud being revealed as opposed to just being hurt by the contemporaneous shift away from cheesy shit that killed M.C. Hammer and the like?
Ashlee Simpson was outed on Saturday Night Live when someone pressed the wrong button and her voice performed the same song twice.
Unlike Milli Vanilli she actually did record her own albums, or so she claimed.
Cryptic Ned is right in 5. Immediately after (or maybe because of?) Milli Vanilli, it seemed like people stopped caring about lip syncing. C+C Music Factory's "Everybody Dance Now" came out shortly after the MV scandal, and people were kinda sorta aware that Martha Wash, and not the pretty model in the video, was the real singer, but it didn't seem to matter.
BTS is the biggest band in the world right now, and would anyone be all that surprised if it turned out that some of them couldn't sing very well? On SNL last week some of them were obviously lip syncing.
I think if the performer is dancing a choreographed routine, then everyone expects them to be lip-syncing, for sure.
Having never heard of the biggest band in the world right now, I think I just lost all credibility to speak any further on the matter.
Could somebody tell her what BTS is so that I don't need to feel stupid for asking.
I liked Milli, but I did not care for Vanilli.
It's good that you don't speak ill of the dead.
How dare you speak ill of the dead.
I watched the Vox thing on Kpop, and isn't that entire industry just repeated creation and destruction of Milli Vanilli type stars? The songs are written and choreographed for them, the band members just have to show up to a studio and sing close enough for autotune to work then lip sync to their recording while dancing. I guess that's slightly more than MV did since they never even recorded but it's not far off.
As everyone knows, that sort of thing has always been the case with musicians (rather than singers). Lots of records by huge bands, who play their own instruments when they perform live, are basically put together by studio musicians. Or some combination of the original band, plus a ton of gridding and quantising from the studio engineers, plus overdubs and drop-ins by session musos who can reliably play in time, in tune, and be inventive on demand. Some bands are totally up front about it, and credit session musos on the records, and some are ... not.
It's interesting how it seems (or seemed, maybe) different for singing.
Somebody explained to me how Ed Sheeran does a solo concert with multiple parts using something called a loop pedal. It sounded impressive, but why not hire a band to spread the wealth a bit.
Fight for 15 (band members on every tour).
Does my loop pedal ever show up late? Shoot heroin? Require bail? Get deported? No sir, it does not.
re: 26
Loop pedals are great. I have one, and use it all the time for home practice. It's trickier than you think to actually build a performance with one, you need really good timing and coordination to build up and then strip back layers.
And Mr nattarGcM is correct, though I prefer not to pump my own pedal.
Arcade Fire, that's a band the cares about jobs.
12. I had always thought it was normal but not universal for singers to lip sync when performing on TV and even in music videos. Was I prematurely cynical?
I don't hate job creation. I hate labor problems. Also, the erection of barriers to entry for new acts.
For videos AFAIK they do actually perform, but overdub with studio-recorded audio. Anywhere else I think a live performance is supposed to be live.
Live except very slightly less live for the looped part.
I bet you're one of those people who complain when the concert hall doesn't want to use the cannon for the 1812.
I complain when Aimee Mann doesn't want to use a cannon for her tour.
Anywhere else I think a live performance is supposed to be live.
The lip syncing from floats on the Macy's Thanksgiving Parade tends toward comically bad.
Anywhere else I think a live performance is supposed to be live.
One twist: a lot of musical groups nowadays are playing live, but there's also an accompanying pre-recorded "backing track." The backing track might contain, say, strings, extra keyboard parts, and some extra vocals. Plus a click track (metronome) which only band members can hear because it's sent only to their in-ear monitors.
So the musicians/singers you see on stage are producing the sound you hear, but there's additional filler sound coming in from the backing track.
I would love to see a documentary about how the sound is produced for a concert like the Rolling Stones or something similar. Maybe it could show each person with their feed isolated. Here is what sounds Mick is actually producing. Here is what is going out to the crowd.
The producer behind Milli Vanilli has done the exact same thing before, with Boney M, so I think he was fairly confused about exactly what the problem was.
They were much better than Milli Vanilli.
re: 40
Yeah, and I remember seeing a name band in a live concert performance, with a second guitar player behind the stage, adding extra parts. This was in an officially released concert video, and wasn't being hidden by the band, they just didn't have the guy on stage.
Robert Kraft should ask if he can hire an actor to recreate the hand job he received. That way, the public's right to know is protected along with his elderly penis.
For videos AFAIK they do actually perform, but overdub with studio-recorded audio. Anywhere else I think a live performance is supposed to be live.
Do you mean they perform if the video contains concert footage? I don't have any actual knowledge about music video production, but I've been wondering about whether singers are singing in their videos lately because I've been working on my pop technique and watching videos in part to see what mouth positions they are using. I've been watching Miley Cyrus in Wrecking Ball and Beyonce in Listen. Leaving aside the question of whether Miley was singing when she was swinging on the wrecking ball, ISTM that while they both might be making noise in some sense in the videos, especially as the videos go on (but even in the beginning of the Listen video) they are making movements with their bodies that aren't compatible with producing the sounds we are hearing, and their faces and necks are a little too lacking any sign of muscular effort. So maybe they're singing but I imagine that what they're being asked to do for the camera makes them sound terrible.
I guess that explains why so few operas have people swinging through the air.
There was a video somewhere of Mick Jagger and Bowie and it's the actual audio of them shooting the Dancing in the Street video, and it's very weird. I can't find it now - it wasn't silent, just some hoarse whispery singing.
Oh wait, it was easy to find. I just had the sound off on my computer.
But it wasn't the satire one, where the music has been removed and people are putting funny sounds on top. I believe it was real.
I like Cyrus's voice, including the warble.
53: Trying to sing Wrecking Ball has given me a whole new respect for Miley Cyrus. That song is hard in a way that I did not intuit listening to it. The chorus is such a high, driving belt for someone whose tessitura seems lower than mine. I think maybe I have figured out how she produces that sound (I'll see what my teacher says today). It involves opening your mouth really wide -- which in fact she does in the music video -- but even so it's just exhausting over the course of the song.
I certainly can't do that, even if the notes were in a range I can sing in.
I would also probably fall off if I were swinging through the air on a wrecking ball.
Don't sell yourself short, Moby. I'm sure with a good personal trainer and the right voice coach, you could sing that song while swinging on a wrecking ball every bit as good as Miley.
I don't think even the full efforts of the Disney Corporation could have made me more than a passable singer.
The best way to hear Wrecking Ball is to hear a folk band composed of four elderly Glaswegian men cover it in a bar on an island off the west coast, because the whisky is cheap there.
The best way to watch Wrecking Ball.
I really enjoy Miley Cyrus's voice, and especially like listening to her covers of classic songs (Jolene, You're gonna make me lonesome when you go, Fifty ways to leave your lover, etc.) because of her seemingly genuine love of all kinds of music.
The other day I heard "Party in the USA" for the first time in a while, and wow that autotuning is a crime against nature.
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Reflecting how far down constitutional ritual and reverence pervades here in the US. I'm at an advisory committee meeting for a worthwhile state initiative, second meeting, and they swore in the few members who weren't present at the first meeting, an oath to preserve and protect both US and state constitutions.
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IIRC, Stanster and I have bonded over our shared love of Miley's See You Again.
I just heard that on the radio. All the talk of needing to redeem herself seems overdone. Unless she wasn't just nervous but shit in the car or something.
And they left that part out of the song.
I guess I didn't understand the slang.
No wonder the kids turned to Korean music.
I would like to brag that I was home all day and intermittently practiced Wrecking Ball, adjusting my technique on the chorus away from what I talked about earlier, actually, and when I finally Whatsapped with my singing teacher he let me sing it all the way through, had one correction, and then after I made it was just like, "Professional. Polished."
I would like to opposite of brag that I think I may have ruined my brisket but I can't tell if I'm being paranoid. I had a big paella pan that I wanted to use to brown it but it had some rust and I used a variety of substances to try to clean it, and then washed it with soap, but I'm worried that I didn't get the soap and or rust out of the pan, and there was an aftertaste in the browning liquid that is going to transfer to the brisket. But the browning liquid also had a bunch of strong spices in it that aren't really meant to be eaten nearly straight so I can't tell whether I'm inventing the aftertaste. It's in the slow cooker now. Ugh. I hate cooking. Why are seven people coming to my house tomorrow to eat?
You'll know you've got your technique right when songbirds flock to you.
Boys love milkshakes. And rusted brisket.
54 No way that's real. It fits the pattern of the other videos in the genre too well. Also, no way those are the actual voices.
They explicitly credit other people for the voices (might have to expand out the text below the video). Anyway, they sync up supposedly-unedited background noise across shots with a single camera, which would be a really weird thing to do if it was candid.
Still, they did a great job creating an uncanny world.
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Going back to an earlier thread:
5 largest cities in Europe from 1200.
5 largest cities in N. America from 900.
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Assuming accuracy, the staying power of Istanbul is illuminating.
I find it pretty fascinating how cities that are really large often fall off the list only to come back centuries later. Istanbul is pointed out in 83, but you see the same thing in the NA map with Mexico City and in the world graph with Cairo and Beijing.
I think a lot of that is because the list has an arbitrary cutoff. Beijing didn't get not big, it just didn't have a growth spurt when NYC et al did. Then NYC didn't have a growth spurt when Beijing had its next one.
preface: I hate cooking so much.
okay, advice time. I found out kind of last minute that someone whose coming to this seder is a vegetarian. So I was trying to convert the matzo ball soup to be vegetarian. This has somehow involved four separate trips to the store. On the last one, I saw that this Swanson broth was cheaper than the College Inn, so I bought it. It's making me ill to smell as I pour it into stock pots. It's all mixed in the with College Inn though now, so I can't decide to just make a very small portion of soup. I feel like something that is grossing me out to smell is not going to be good. It would cost me like 30 dollars in broth and another twenty minutes to go back to the store a fifth time. Should I just scrap this and move on to other dishes or should I power through and make disgusting soup?
p.s. I really hate this. Remember this next year, Tia!
Maybe the answer is to make very small soup portions with chicken broth and the vegetarian just can't have any.
Actually I have some chicken boullion. I can make large portions of chicken soup.
Wait, I have one more almost quart of the good vegetable broth I didn't put in with the gross broth. The solution is to make a big batch of chicken broth and keep this last good vegetable broth to the side for the vegetarian.
Won't the vegetarian be put off by the lamb blood on the door posts?
I may be unfamiliar with current practice.
91 Yay, dinner is saved, and served.
As a vegetarian myself I hate being a pain in the ass for dinner parties but I salute your dedication.
91: I am the annoying vegetarian at my sister's seders. She does what you are winding up doing - makes a little bit of vegetable broth for me, and chicken broth for everyone else.
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Holy cow, did no one involved in the making of this Ancestry.com ad stop for a minute and say "hold up guys maybe this is not such a good idea"?
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Oh, geez. I'm not even clicking through, but the one postulating that people of mixed racial ancestry dating back to slavery are likely to be the product of clandestine romance rather than rapist slaveowners?
It's interesting how the cities having the growth spurts are indicators of changes, the appearance of new world systems, before the legatees of the old systems link into the new and grow back to prominence. A series of cities connected to Mediterranean and Atlantic trade - Palermo, Seville, Granada, Lisbon, Madrid, Havana - coming into peak prominence and then falling back behind older centers like Istanbul and Paris and Mexico City.
Another bleg! This recipe calls for raisins but never says when to put them in. I just started the simmer phase. Should I toss in some raisins?
I'd guess wait a bit, 45 minutes of simmering will make raisins into spongy mush.
Maybe halfway through -- give it 20 minutes? You want them rehydrated, but not cooked to shreds.
No! Never toss in raisins! The Devil's turds.
97 Yeah, I'm neither surprised nor outraged that a Canadian outfit would think that mixed race Canadians might have an interesting story, and it might be this kind. It's probably less fraught for them to go this way than trying to get people to look into their Metis ancestry.
Speaking as someone currently in the middle of converting to Judaism, and in the middle of many other complicated life things: if it makes you feel better, Tia, your seder will be far superior to the one I manage to throw together at the last minute, if also judged by more people. Also, vegetarianism is the one secular practice I think really is fundamentally religious in nature.
Well actually, yes, vegetarianism can be a formally secular practice. Many vegetarians are not (otherwise) religious. It's not necessarily tied to religious observance, although it can be.
Why are you doing the seder if you're brand new to the religion? Is it like having the new guy?
Stupid phone. Having should be hazing.
I guess converting men have it worse.
I think they take a little off with each new conversion. That's why very few convert from Islam to Judaism.
I should have been a religious studies major.
Said the actress to the bishop.
112. It's part of the hazing, I would assume.
I will forever remember that as the "let's just do it and be legends" seder. (It was just immediate family.) Sets up next year for a meta-seder on the theme of improvement over last year's... Tia, how did it go?
I've never thrown a seder, but one year at Easter my dad was talking about how the only wine they had when he was a younger was Manischevits (I guess because of a post-Prohibition lag), so I bought some. We both thought it was awful and we've both drank plenty of cheap wine in our lives. I think my sister threw the remainder away when the house was sold.
By the time I was born, he was drinking Blue Nun and something from Portugal that was in an oval bottle.
123. Mateus Rose. Godawful plonk that sold to the same market as Blue Nun, Black Tower and bloody Hirondelle.
They look exactly like the bottles of rum in the wreck of the Unicorn.
Chris is right. Rural Nebraska wine culture was slow to develop.
How is Bud Light like having sex in a canoe?
In either case it's kind of hard to see how you got there without passing up a much better option.
120: 3/7 of the expected guests actually came. People are so flaky. In the future, I need to conduct myself in a way that conveys a little more formality to discourage this, and maybe explicitly ask for notice if they won't be able to make it.
The guest I was given from the seder matching service at my unsynagogue was a Native American Sephardic Jew from New Mexico who spoke Ladino. That was great. She was also really generous in talking all her identity and all her experiences as Native and Sephardic -- she was just a very spontaneous sharer. Although writing about this I just got weirdly paranoid that my unsynagogue purposely matched me with her because I've been the teeniest bit of a gadfly about saying the organization needs to work on its diversity. She made this joke: "I keep telling my Native friends they cannot go to art school. There's nothing wrong with art school but that's all any of us ever do. We need doctors and lawyers. And you can be a doctor who makes art. But maybe that's because I'm also Jewish."
I enjoyed my own food, so that's something.
Matzo ball soup: the matzo ball I tasted when they were fresh was *incredible*. I think they all got slightly less incredible as they waited to be served and there was a lot of interball variation. In my own bowl there was one that was fluffy and delish and another that was dense and unfortunate and I don't really know how balls got distributed. My aunt got a good bowl I know because she said she was impressed that I had acquired the important Jewish skill of making light, fluffy matzo balls. I think the other guests maybe didn't because they didn't echo her saying the soup was good. :/
Brisket: Didn't taste like rust at all, in fact was quite good, but I served it and the tsimmes at just barely above room temperature and later I kind of regretted not getting them hotter for my guests. The tsimmes was pretty good but next time I'd cut down on the honey.
I attempted to make potato chip crusted zucchini stick and it was too disgusting to serve. I don't think I did it wrong, either. I just think it's a fundamentally gross recipe and I failed to sense that beforehand. But the dipping sauce was good and I served it with asparagus.
I dunno, people were more vocally enthused about the food last year.
Also my aunt is a really difficult person and my close friend and soon to be roommate got in an argument with her about "safe spaces" etc. I assured my friend later that that barely registered as conflict on my aunt's scale, but the conversation was still pretty uncomfortable for me because it touched on a bunch of subjects I don't talk to my aunt about and made me really conscious of needing to maintain the fiction that we have an honest, close relationship. I frankly was amazed that her interactions with our guest were as peaceable as they were. I'm sure that was partly her graciousness but she stayed till late so if she was really unhappy about something she would have just left, presumably. Everyone was still interacting and it was only my involuntary yawn that got everyone out of my house around 2 am.
I also need to explain to my aunt that even if you are mentioning, not using, the n-word, it is expected that white people will not say it. Because she's my aunt, this will likely also be a an exhausting argument.
The exteriors shots of Jack Reacher are really, really Pittsburghy. I've never seen the beginning before. The main difference is that the people in the movie are better looking. Also, nobody is smoking on the sidewalk.
Why is he just standing in the traffic part of the Fort. Duquesne Bridge.
The guest I was given from the seder matching service at my unsynagogue was a Native American Sephardic Jew from New Mexico who spoke Ladino.
Oh, interesting. Do you know what tribe(s) she belongs to? The sentiment about art being what you do if you don't have any other options is one I've heard before from Southwestern Native Americans.
Teo, ever met anyone who remembers the Chariot/Plowshare shenanigans near Point Hope?
136: I don't know if I've met anyone who personally remembers it, but it's well known in my circles and I've heard people discuss it many times.
Your circles being anthropologists?
No, Native and governmental/economic development people.
Assume a spherical development economist.
It's generally thought of as a classic example of outside people coming in and doing crazy/dangerous stuff in rural Alaska without adequately informing the locals. I know one guy who thinks they should have gone through with it because it would have put the region on a better economic development trajectory, but otherwise sentiments I've heard are uniformly negative.
Thanks. Since you're here, what were the politics of talking about "Eskimos" in 2013?
Also, for anyone interested, Point Hope is an amazingly symmetrical cuspate delta.
Depends where. In Alaska, a bit controversial but not really considered a big deal. In Canada, very offensive and a big deal.
145: If you like that sort of thing, check out Gambell at the northwest corner of St. Lawrence Island as well.
148: Just historical differences in how the term has been used and perceived. It has long had a much more pejorative implication in Canada than in Alaska, where it was long considered just a neutral descriptive term.
(This is changing in recent years as young Alaska Native activists are getting more plugged in to the international indigenous rights scene. 2013 would have been pretty early in that process.)
I once met a Canadian from BC who said his father had ice road trucked in northern Canada and the Eskimos there called themselves Eskimos and didn't give a shit.
There's definitely a generational divide in Alaska, with younger, more educated people finding it a more problematic term than older generations especially in the villages. There may well be or have been a similar dynamic in Canada, but with the change coming a generation or so earlier.
149: I'll take your word for it, but on Google the close-up was taken in winter and hard to interpret. For a subtropical schlub like me, anyway.
I just figured out Werner Herzog is in this.
Rated R for violence, adult themes, and brief Werner Herzog.
They're just driving over bridges and appearing miles away from where the actual bridge ends. Then, they do the same for tunnels.
Somebody has probably complained about that before.
128.1: Maybe the other four are lurkinh.
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"We found radioactive iodine in all of the children, milk and vegetation that we measured in the whole northern section of the state."|>
Iirc it's complicated because not all the Eskimo in Alaska are Inuit, so using Inuit isnt ideal either...
So, I just learned about BTS the way old people learn about this kind of stuff, CBS Sunday Morning. I can't figure out if they're deliberately trying some kind of gender-ambiguity thing or if I'm just wrong with my continued assertion that men's fashion hasn't changed since the 90s.
Or they just reverse-engineered the Backstreet Boys and figured if it ain't broke-
The very deliberately did just that.
Sunday Morning was better when it was mostly Charles Kuralt driving around an RV to visit his mistresses.
Although I hate cooking, I like the situation where you have a lot of random comestibles around and you can be mad scientist about it.
I just thought, hm, I have Elijah's wine that I failed to cover and now is sour. I also have this other wine that is too sweet. I wonder if they would be good together. Hmm, they are, but a little bit too heavy for what I'm in the mood for now. Maybe I'll add this seltzer. Hm, that seltzer is flat. Ok, maybe this unopened lemon lime seltzer will be interestingly piquant. And it is! And now I have a satisfying wine spritzer.
Wait. You can just steal his wine if he doesn't drink it?
Did you see the penultimate scene of Raiders of the Lost Ark?
I look young to the point of mild inconvenience. I could stand to age a few years.
Young people are lacking in religious education.
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That time when your kid -- college-bound in the fall, and almost 18, and about 6 foot 1 in height, so, you know, he already looks like a (baby-faced) college student who can look after himself, more or less - falls asleep on a flight that has been diverted to another airport, and wakes up all clueless and not knowing where he is or where he should be, but he's been sitting on a plane on the tarmac for several hours, and he just wants to go back to NJ ... and you get a call from a Canada Customs officer at the airport in Toronto, concerning "your lad, who is still a minor;" and sure, they can let him into Canada as a visitor, but if he's just going to back to the States, well, it's a bit irregular, and it might have to "go on a record;"... and then you have to explain that while he's traveling on an American passport, he's also a Canadian citizen, so: not really a "visitor," not at all; and that changes everything. "Well, if he's a Canadian, of course, then, that's okay..."
This kid has no idea (no idea!) how lucky he is, to have dual USian and Canuckistani citizenship, to be entitled to move freely between the two countries at any time, and to take up residence in either country at any time. O callow youth! What's weird, maybe, is that the Canada Customs official just took my word for it. And not even in person, but just over the phone!
(No word of a lie: my son has dual American and Canadian citizenship. But why should you believe me, if I told you that over the phone?).
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Would a Canadian lie? Even on the phone?
Canadians are able to lie but only if they're especially handsome and if the lie relates to firing the attorney general.
With your telling him that son is Canadian, he could look up info that's on file for Canadian passport too? Name, DOB, place of birth should be same as on US one and picture close too? But, it's probably the border guard just being a nice Canadian.
I'm surprised there's an issue. International diversions happen often enough and there are procedures to handle these things without it being a black mark.
175: That AG never should have been hired in the first place. She lacked the experience, and the temperament, to serve as the Crown's top lawyer; and we're now in danger of a scary right-wing government because she didn't like to have her decisions questioned (which is totally lawful, btw), didn't want to send a memo to the PMO (also totally lawful, and in the normal course of business, btw) explaining her decision.
Sorry! But you've just hit a nerve. This faux scandal is basically a personnel dispute, "elevated" to the level of "scandal" by a right-wing media eager to stir the pot, to keep things up with a bunch of stupid, and fact-free, click-bait.
And yes, it's on Trudeau that he ever gave her that Cabinet post in the first place. His mistake, and may he learn from it. He is young (or young-ish), and naive, and ridiculously handsome, fair enough. But he is still so much better than the Canadian alternative, and better by far than the American options.
That he and his office are now embroiled in "scandal" for asking for a legal opinion (again, totally legal, and totally normal) just drives me nuts.
to serve as the Crown's top lawyer
In Canada. I bet the U.K. and Australia equivalents outrank the Canada one. And there may be separate ones for England, Wales, and Scotland.
Maybe he should try being more corrupt? Its counter-intuitive, but, apparently, if there is a new scandal every day, the media just gets tired and the public looses all sense of perspective of just how bad each individual scandal is.
Almost literally all we ever do is lie but thanks for the cover story national reputation for being boring! Also my house is worth more than yours
178: In Canada, yes. I bet a bunch of Commonwealth countries outrank my home and native land in significance and importance, sure. But me, I am outraged by the right-wing media assaults upon mon cher Canada.
I guess Australia has fewer people than Canada.
And I really do mean it, you know? Am prepared to defend Justin Trudeau and his record, and to work very hard for his re-election.
I'm one of those lefty-liberal Canucks who sort of vacillates between the Liberals and the NDP.
A few weeks ago, in the midst of this faux SNC-Lavalin "scandal," I signed up to work for the Liberals. Because I've seen this play before (the hard right attacks, the left wing jumps on board, and the right wing wins every time, every single f**king time), and I don't like the ending. And please miss me with any anti-French, anti-Québec nonsense. Like, we're supposed to elect some kooky, white-nationalist supporter from Alberta because Justin comes from Montréal? I don't agree to that one little bit, and I'm not going down without a fight...
183: You really need to get rid of FPTP, even more than we do.
Am prepared to defend Justin Trudeau and his record, and to work very hard for his re-election.
Friends of Tim's parents in Kingston who are left leaning are pretty disappointed - especially on climate change. I'm pretty unhappy with how Trudeau has handled the pipeline stuff. I get the sense that he's unpopular in B.C. Tim's parents, sadly, are Conservatives.
If they aren't happy about it, they can switch.
Sorry I've been absentee. We were camping. The front page looks so trim.
187: Who authorized this vacation? I don't remember signing off on it.
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So I read GoT, and liked it. Abercrombie did not impress. What should I read?
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187: In theory, other FPPs could have fed the blog in your absence. Personally, I tend to think of my own posting status as "emeritus" or "lazy."
I have been wondering whether there will be an end-of-life plan for the blog at some point. I used to tell lourdes that his startup was like a fifteen-year-old goldfish and of course it wouldn't keep paying the rent for another decade, which isn't "failure" at all. Now it's a 20-year-old goldfish, I suppose, but that's probably because its rent-paying days are long over.
Personally, I'm going to troll Crooked Timber as "Wry Cooter."
Or hike the PCT if I come into enough money to retire.
I guess I should see if Crooked Timber still exists.
I have no plans to quit! I feel like I've got a sustainable rhythm, as long as everyone keeps their expectations appropriately low.
189. Dave Hutchinson, Fractured Europe series. The first one is Europe in Autumn. Imagine The Crying of Lot 49, rewritten by Raymond Chandler in a dystopian future with SF characteristics.
I agree about Abercrombie.
195: Thank goodness!
196.2: Yes, just has been the same since Fitch left.
195: Hooray. Crooked Timber is mostly too tedious for words. Other than the word "tedious."
I'll take your word for it, but on Google the close-up was taken in winter and hard to interpret. For a subtropical schlub like me, anyway.
Ah, I see what you mean. It's more obvious in summer pictures. Not nearly as acute an angle as Point Hope, but otherwise similar.
Iirc it's complicated because not all the Eskimo in Alaska are Inuit, so using Inuit isnt ideal either...
Indeed, the majority are not. Unlike in Canada, where "Inuit" was easily available as a replacement term, the cultural picture in Alaska is more complicated, which probably is one reason "Eskimo" has continued in common use longer here. What's starting to happen now that it's becoming more controversial is that people are replacing it with "Inuit" anyway, which is not technically accurate linguistically but works okay in practice because Alaskan Inuit tend to use the term Inupiat ("real people") as a self-designation instead.
I guess the implication that I'm a phoney isn't entirely underserved.
Cosign 196. Those books are a delight.
200: Sometime soon the linguistic community is going to have to start using a new word for the family. "Inuitic" would be consistent and also completely awful.
203: Yeah, it's going to start being an issue soon if it isn't already. I think it'd be good if they picked something based on a term that's relatively stable across the different languages (like nuna "land" or miut "inhabitants"), since the term for "people" happens to be so phonologically unstable.
Is there a phonologically stable term for "People of the phonologically unstable term for 'people'"?
It's well known in Anthropology that the best proof of women's higher status in prehistorical societies is the total lack of ethnic groups whose name for themselves translates as "People of the Large Penises."
I feel like I've got a sustainable rhythm, as long as everyone keeps their expectations appropriately low.
Ladeez.
I remember seeing a name band in a live concert performance, with a second guitar player behind the stage, adding extra parts.
Not to mention the story from the Beijing Olympics about the 8-year-old girl who won a national talent contest to sing on stage at the opening ceremony, but then they looked at her and decided she was too ugly to go on stage so she sang backstage and the third-place contestant got to go on stage instead.
Real life lesson for that one.
What kind of a person is enough of an asshole to do that to a little kid but not enough of an asshole to fix the contest earlier so only a cute kid can win?
I have very little experience fixing elections.
I guess if we're all agreed the main point is to cause pain to children, the question becomes is it better to win and be denied part of the prize or to never win at all?
Don't forget officially being deemed ugly.
I'm assuming they do that either way.
"Chen Qigang, the ceremony's chief musical director, claimed that this was because a senior Politburo member had commented that Lin's singing was not good enough, but preferred Lin's appearance to that of Yang."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concerns_and_controversies_at_the_2008_Summer_Olympics#Singing
It really is worth remembering, from time to time, that China was and is a murderous dictatorship and that the people who rise to the top in murderous dictatorships are without exception the scum of the earth. Mao was the scum of the earth, Deng was the scum of the earth, Hua Guofeng and Li Peng and Xi Jinping and the rest of them were and are the scum of the earth. And they're scummy in little ways just as much as they are on the big, multi-murdery ways.
If it were America, they could just add a swimsuit portion to the contest.
Also can I just say I think you're really mean to me. Just because you don't like cookies you shout at me all the time. I like cookies.
I just got you a whole new screen. I thought we were cool.
"A revolution is like taking the lid off a sewer" as one of my lecturers put it.
I know that breaking up is hard to do, but sometimes when a person and a phone have lost all respect for each other....
198. If "tedious" means "jam-packed with self-regard," then yeah.
227. Moby is looking for an excuse to switch to the cool new flexible Samsung phone. Unfortunately, there's bad news on that front.
Oh man, we were down to one sad post on the FP just now. Back up to two!
189: I can second the recommendation of Fractured Europe, especially now that it is complete and the ending fits the whole series.
The link attached to my name has a tag for Fabulous Ones. Chances are you'll enjoy some of those, or resolve never to return to the site.
56/Tia: this reminds me of a couple of months back when my ballet teacher decided to design a class around Nicki Minaj songs. Faster than you think! (Her gloss on this: all choreography got between 20 and 50% faster in the 20th century so you'd better be prepared. A bit IF CURRENT TRENDS CONTINUE, but it's me you ask for technocratic dullardry not her so...)
Friends of Tim's parents in Kingston who are left leaning are pretty disappointed - especially on climate change.
To be clear, I'm not saying that I am completely, or even mostly, satisfied with the Trudeau government. But in the context of the upcoming election, when the alternative is a government of right-wing yahoos who think Trudeau's carbon tax is some kind of "unlawful" and "tyrannical" imposition upon the right of every right-thinking Canadian to continue to pollute at will, well, yes, I will defend the Liberals and their record.
Any left-leaning Canadian who votes out of spite against the Liberals is pretty much voting for a crazy, kooky, right-wing agenda, is actively supporting the election of the worst possible people, ever (for example, Doug Ford in Ontario, a total embarrassment, and it's not working out too well...).