Coffee House Musing

My phone is a Samsung, so in a pinch I can use it as an immersion heater to make instant coffee.

As I've pointed out to you before, ideologies are for lazy thinkers - e.g. people who get their ideas from YouTube.Ideologies are only part of the spectrum of thought. There are people who actually think about issues instead of just having knee-jerk reactions based on ideologies.

The problem arises when an ideology is used as a reference for answers to all questions. It's like using the Bible to answer all questions. A lot of the answers aren't there.

I, for one, have never been bleeped (as far as I know) - and I have used most of the "offensive" words. I think it's more about obsession than the words themselves. If you call everybody a "racist idiot" you might get bleeped. But thanks to my immense vocabulary I can call somebody a racist idiot in several different ways. It makes for more interesting posts (whether I know what I'm talking about or not).

On the other hand, if you have enough volume, you're bound to get something right once in a while.

One place I used to work, one of the young women bought a new car.. Somebody asked, "What color is it?"She answered, "Blue."Somebody commented, "I hear those are good."

I noticed that a couple of years before covid when a lady wearing a niqab asked me a question. Our senses overlap more than we often realize.

I have that problem with the TV. And with DVDs, the music and sound effects are way too loud but I can barely hear the dialog.I may have to stop bragging that heavy-metal music didn't damage my hearing.

I have watched Das Boot with subtitles and also dubbed into English. I liked the subtitles better because, though I only understand a little German, the dubbing didn't ring true. (All of my grandparents were German; my parents used to speak Low German when they didn't want us to understand what they were saying.)I like submarine movies. I once borrowed a DVD lfrom the library just because it had a picture of a submarine on the cover - the dialog was only Russian and Ukrainian. I couldn't figure out what the title meant - 72 Metpa - until I remembered that the Cyrillic "p" is our "r". 72 meters.

My mother professed to understand only plautdietsch. Her father, my grandfather, spoke English to his 47 grandchildren but my dad spoke plautdietsch to him.To complicate matters, all four of my grandparents were born in Ukraine. My dad's dad, my other grandfather, did a hitch in the German Army around the turn of the 20th century. His parents, my great-grandparents, were from West Prussia. It isn't something I brag about but the German martial music still stirs my Canadian blood.

• In The Enemy Below, U-boat captain Curd Jurgens plays a song on the phonograph which transmits through the water to Robert Mitchum's destroyer to show that they're not dead yet:
  "To YOU My Friend, and YOU My Friend
  To all of us together
  Here's a toast to life,
  And to laughter and song...."
• In The Battle of the Bulge, Robert Shaw and his fellow Germans sing the Panzerlied in German (but they sing the same verse six times).
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• In Cabaret, Michael York and his German friend stop at an outdoor cafe; a young boy gets up and begins to sing, "The sun on the meadow is summery warm, the stag in the forest runs free...." The camera pulls back to show he's wearing a Hitler Youth uniform. Then an old man joins in and another and another joins in untill everybody (except Michael York and friend) is singing, "Tomorrow belongs, tomorrow belongs, tomorrow belongs to me!"

I read somewhere that the Angles who crossed over to Angle-land with the Saxons and Jutes spoke a language quite similar to plautdietsch. The plautdietsh-speaking Mennonites who migrated to northern Poland also picked up some of their language there before continuing on to Ukraine. My dad used to say that Germany was made up of a hundred little countries, nominally the 'Holy Roman Empire' before it was unified/conquered by Prussia. I suppose the artificial borders helped to foster separation of dialects.

Fun fact: Lignum vitae wood was used for propeller-shaft bearings. It's strong, hard, heavy, dense, water- and salt-water-resistant and contains natural oils that make the bearings self-lubricating.

I was in Montana that day. They told us the visibility was so bad in Missoula that police were stopping traffic.I live about 850 mi ENE of Mt. St. Helens and we were told not to wash our cars because trying to remove the fine ash would ruin the finish.

How can you say that and still support the right wing?

It's a miracle! Rotifer Jesus, risen from the grave!