Coffee House Musing

dwise1 writes: So you can drink your coffee only if you have a compatible phone?

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

Phat writes: I fear that people of either political ideology won't listen until it's too late.

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.

AZPaul3 writes: Ideologies are categorizations of similar-like thoughts.

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.

LamrkNewAge writes: Some of my squeaks are bleeped out.

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).

Moose writes: "It is better to have people suspect you are stupid, than to post a lot of messages and remove all doubt".

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

dwise1 writes: "What color is that parachute?"

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."

Tanypteryx writes: Not being able to read lips is my biggest complaint with face masks.

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.

Tanypteryx writes: ... often I can hear the sounds well enough, but I can't understand what is being said.

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.

dwise1 writes: Though I suspect that it would be like closed captioning on YouTube, where it often it often chooses words that are quite different. Then compound that with their language translation feature -- ie, voice recognition of that other language coming up with the wrong words which are then fed through the translation into English to arrive at something that bears no resemblance to the video.

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.

dwise1 writes: Even many Germans have trouble understanding some of the dialects.

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.

dwise1 writes: Germans like to have their foreign movies dubbed into German, but they'll keep the songs in the original and subtitle them.

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).

• 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!"
  

dwise1 writes: It explains the patterns of differences in English's German cognates (eg, deer -- Tier, garden -- Garten, earth -- Erde, pipe -- Pfeife, thief -- Dieb, give -- geben) and also why those differences do not appear between Dutch/Frisian and English.

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.

dwise1 writes: Hochdeutsch is basically an artificial language that nobody speaks as a native dialect.

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.

kjsimmons writes: I was surprised at the amount of wood work there was inside the sub.

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.