Forum: General Topic: C & C Meet Author Message Maarten #1 posted March 27, 2009 at 8:24pm (EST) edited March 27, 2009 at 8:24pm (EST)   Very nice that you guys met! Don't blame the provider for the photos on your cell phone! It's like blaming Volvo for a bad road. Or the swimming pool that the water is wet.

Forum: General Topic: Change is a'coming Author Message Maarten #2 posted March 16, 2009 at 2:50pm (EST)   Obama wants to block AIG bonuses President Barack Obama has expressed anger at $165m (£116m) bonuses paid to executives of bailed-out insurer AIG. "It's hard to understand how derivative traders at AIG warranted any bonuses, much less $165m in extra pay," he said. He also called the payments "an outrage" as he announced help for small firms hurt by the deep recession. He has told Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner to "pursue every single legal avenue to block these bonuses and make the American taxpayers whole." The bonus payouts to executives were announced on Sunday by US insurance giant AIG. "All across the country, there are people who work hard and meet their responsibilities every day, without the benefit of government bailouts or multimillion-dollar bonuses," said President Obama. "And all they ask is that everyone, from Main Street to Wall Street to Washington, play by the same rules." His economic adviser Larry Summers said the recent goings on at AIG were "outrageous". The $165m was payable to executives by Sunday and part of a larger total payout reportedly put at $450m. House Financial Services Committee chairman Barney Frank said the bonuses were "rewarding incompetence". "These people may have a right to their bonuses. They don't have a right to their jobs forever," he said. AIG has received bailouts from the US government totalling $180bn (£127bn) since coming close to collapse in 2008. "There are a lot of terrible things that have happened in the last 18 months, but what's happened at AIG is the most outrageous", said Mr Summers. But he admitted that, despite the strength of feeling in the White House, there was little the administration could do to stop the bonus payments. "The easy thing would be to just say... off with their heads, violate the contracts. But we are a country of law. The government cannot just abrogate contracts," he said. Mr Summers said that Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner had used all his power, both "legal and moral", to lower the payments. "I don't know why they [AIG] would follow a policy that's not really sensible, is going to ignite the ire of millions of people, and we've done exactly what we can to prevent this kind of thing happening again," said Austan Goolsbee from President Obama's Economic Recovery Advisory Board. Indeed bonuses for 2009 are to be cut sharply - by up to 30% according to AIG boss Ed Liddy - but those agreed for 2008 will be paid. Such concessions did little to appease angry senators. "Did they enter into these contracts knowing full well that, as a practical matter, the taxpayers of the United States were going to be reimbursing their employees? "Particularly employees who got them into this mess in the first place? I think it's an outrage," said Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell. Democrat Elijah Cummings was equally incensed: "It's like, OK, you got to help me screw you. And by the way I'm going to take your money and I'm going to slap you with it." Address : <http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/7945774.stm>...

Forum: General Topic: Greek To Me: Mapping Mutual Incomprehension Author Message Maarten #3 posted March 14, 2009 at 2:05pm (EST)   EyesOfCharisma wrote: > those do not look comfortable at all. Actually, they are. I had wooden shoes when I was young and they do walk rather nicely. Maarten #4 posted March 13, 2009 at 8:02pm (EST)   Frostbrand wrote: > Wow, this actually pretty interesting. May I have permission to copy > and paste your piece here and re-post it on my blog, arkle.silver-gateway.com? I'm glad you like it. But for permission, please ask these guys: http://strangemaps.wordpress.com/2009/02/26/362-gr... Good luck! Maarten #5 posted March 13, 2009 at 9:00am (EST) edited March 13, 2009 at 9:01am (EST)   they wrote: >Awake this early for nothing! That's even worse than being sick! > my grandma has a pair of antique wooden shoes that she said came from Holland. If they look like these they certainly are Dutch: Maarten #6 posted March 13, 2009 at 7:41am (EST)   they wrote: > If my Grandpa couldn't understand something spoken or written -- He'd > call it "dutch". I must admit, Dutch is extremely difficult. You're up early by the way! Maarten #7 posted March 13, 2009 at 7:02am (EST) edited March 13, 2009 at 7:11am (EST)   When an English speaker doesn’t understand a word of what someone says, he or she states that it’s ‘Greek to me’. When a Hebrew speaker encounters this difficulty, it ’sounds like Chinese’. The Korean equivalent is ’sounds like Hebrew’. Which begs the question: has there been a study of this phrase phenomenon, relating different languages on some kind of Directed Graph? Well apparently there has, even if only perfunctorily, and the result is this cartogram. When a Hellenophone has trouble understanding something, his or her preferred languages of reference, as far as incomprehension is concerned, are Arabic and Chinese. And while for Arabs the proverbial unintelligible language is Hindi, for Chinese it’s… the language of Heaven. For Romanians, the ultimate in incomprehensibility is Turkish, for the Turks its French and the French consider Javanese the acme in huh? But it is Chinese that, according to this cartogram, is the incomprehensible lingo of (p)reference for almost a dozen other languages, from Greek and Polish to Dutch and Lithuanian. Spanish, Hebrew and Greek are also quite popular, understandably so in the case of the latter two languages (isolate, relatively small languages) but more inexplicably so in the case of Spanish - a world language in its own right. Which begs the fundamental question: why is language X considered the summit of incomprehension by language Y? Doesn’t that at least require some passing knowledge (or to be more precise, an awareness of the existence) by Y of X? Mutual incomprehension results from the right mixture of inter-lingual proximity and unintelligibility. In the Middle Ages, for example, when the monks’ knowledge of Greek was waning, they would write in the margin of texts they could not translate, in Latin: Graecum est, non legitur (This is Greek to me, I can’t read it). Greek, an elite language even in Roman times(1), has remained the West’s most popular shorthand for gobbledygook throughout the time of Shakespeare, who coined the original expression “it was Greek to me” (in Julius Caesar, Act I, Scene II). In the comments section of Languagelog are listed a few examples of such close/distant language incomprehension pairs: * In Italian, one can ask: Parlo italiano o turco ottomano? (Do I speak Italian or Ottoman Turkish? - It has a nicer cadence in Italian) * One reported German expression for something incomprehensible: 'Mesopotamisch'. Another one: 'Kauderwelsch' (possibly referring to the Rhaeto-Romance language spoken in Switzerland) * Older Taiwanese refer to youthspeak, internet slang etc. as sounding 'Martian' to them. * Even Esperanto-speakers have been endowed with their own expression, pointing the finger at another constructed language: 'Estas Volapuk al mi!' (It’s Volapük to me!) * In Finnish, 'Siansaksa ('Pig German') is the word for incomprehensible gibberish. Notice the similar English expression 'Pig Latin'. * In Icelandic, one could say 'Þetta er latína fyrir mér' ('This is Latin to me') or 'Þetta kemur mér spánskt fyrir sjónir' ('This looks Spanish to me'). * 'Das ist mir Böhmischer Dörfer' (’That’s Bohemian villages to me') - this German reference to the incomprehension (or at least impronouncability) of Bohemian (i.e. Czech) village names is mirrored in the Slovak expression 'Je pre ma španielska dedina' ('(That) is for me a Spanish village'), and in the Slovenian one 'To mi je španska vas' ('This is a Spanish village to me') . Other related expressions, not just dealing with incomprehension so much as just plain chaos, are 'Czeski film' ('Czech movie') in Polish, for a kafkaesque situation, for example in dealing with bureaucracy. German has 'polnische Wirtschaft' ('Polish economy') for a chaotic situation and 'Fachchinesisch' for technical jargon. (1) In Rome of course, not in Greece.

Forum: General Topic: The L-Word Author Message Maarten #8 posted March 11, 2009 at 9:19pm (EST)   they wrote: > But then... I'm not gay You're NOT? In that case... you wanna marry me? Maarten #9 posted March 11, 2009 at 8:50pm (EST)   llamamama wrote: > I think he was getting at the fact that it's unamerican because we > all apparently hate gay people and have no common sense. Haha.. you are so wise... for an American! Maarten #10 posted March 11, 2009 at 8:48pm (EST)   Of course you have lesbians. Duh! I thought it was un-American as the majority of Americans still consider homosexuality to be some kind of illness that can be cured. And also because it shows nudity. Next page (only 10 shown here)