I’ve been up for ages… what kept you?I brought you a stick.I got my own sleeping bag now that I’m a big dog.Sometimes it rains at the Festival!What a red face you got…French Antarctica.I’m pretty cute, aren’t I?Come on in, the water’s fine.Hydra Island, Greece.Ittoqqortoomiit, North Greenland.Garden…Japanese style.Kudu.Kalsoy, Faeroe Islands.You look better with my eyes closed.I’m a plumbed basilisk… pretty smart, don’t you think?
If you have some spare pumpkin, remember that wildlife love it… so garden, woods, wherever. You’ll be helping to feed someone who is hungry. Also, while we are on the subject, even if you don’t feed birds, when it starts to get cold, please put out water, and make sure that it isn’t frozen over.Red Panda.Awwww. Love.You like my baby box? Even better than the ones that the Sun tried to burn, eh?
Fabulous picture of Kalsoy. Both Kunoy and Kalsoy simply soar 2,6 to 800 ft seemingly out of Klaksvik harbour. Kunoy is less precipitous than Kalsoy. The wonderfully serrated ridge of the latter looks like it would make a fabulous summit traverse but I suspect that the rock is too friable for safe progress.
Kunoy has a series of little village in the bays up the east side, communication being by ferry or by the cairned paths which lead over the intervening ridges. I read once that in the old days, the schoolteacher who divided her time between the two northernmost villages would have to use the cairned path rising to over 2,000 feet between them in the two or three miles, roped between two men, in stormy weather when it was too rough to go by boat.
Told my wife all about these wonderful islands when we went to the Faroes about 25 years ago – but the mist was down to sea level and she didn’t see a thing on the day we went north – nor did she want to see my slides from the early 70’s when we got home.
Lovely. Life reaffirmed, particularly by orangutans. I wanted to caption the first one “What can I say? If I’d known he was Mr. Trump’s barber I’d never have let him within arm’s length of my hair”.
Lovely. Blimey though that is some cliff on the Faroes and MNR being such a hip place of course one of the readers has been there. Red pandas are the best, aren’t they. What is it with the cuteness of red animals because thon fox is cute too. And as for the life affirming orangs…
Anyway how common is it for dugs to have two different coloured eyes cos Laoch from Skye does too? Inquiring minds want to know.
Yes, a pal of mine out the West End of Dundee had a Bernese with different-coloured eyes – aka heterochromia iridum – one husky blue, the other normal brown. He was a lovely, affectionate, slobbery, furry great softie of a thing. Very difficult not to love.
Great stuff as ever, Tris. My favourite has got to be the pup with the pumpkins. I’m sure it’s a Berner Sennenhund (Bernese Mountain Dog). I first encountered them where they originally come from, in the Bernese Oberland. Those puppies grow up into very large adults and they are utterly charming at any age. Like so many large dogs they seem to be gentle giants, quiet and amiable, but I imagine they were originally bred to protect herds from wolves and I don’t think wolves would have hung around long if they encountered a couple of these guys. Speaking of gentle giants, not far from where I live there’s a couple who have three black Newfoundlands. They often walk them locally and everybody stops to look and often pat them. Newfies, of course, are massive – they make the Berner look slight – and to see three of them together is some sight. It’s a bit like seeing someone out walking three ponies.
Tris, I believe they live in an ex-council semi – although I don’t imagine they’ll have too much furniture. Mind you, they also won’t need central heating in the winter 🙂
PS: However, depending on wildlife for lawn care does have its drawbacks. We live in a suburban area with a lot of tree cover on one side that stretches for some distance, with a branch (a small stream that runs water when it rains) running through it. There are lots of deer in the woods who sometimes stroll out into the neighborhood at night. We see many more deer than stray dogs.
The other night as we turned into the driveway, we were next to a family of deer, a doe and two fawns, who were munching on our neighbor’s front yard grass. A few nights later, the same deer family was taking care of the grass in the vacant lot on the corner. The downside of such a lawn maintenance arrangement is that the deer occasionally eat the neighbor lady’s back yard flowers. She is not amused!
dc….Wiki says that Kudu are two species of antelope. There is a Lesser Kudu and a Greater Kudu, but then Wiki doesn’t really say very much about the difference. It would be interesting if there were a greater number of Lesser Kudu, and a lesser number of Greater Kudu, but I have no reason to think that is so.
Wiki does describe a Kudu-related sport:
USE IN SPORT —
In the sport of kudu dung-spitting, contestants spit pellets of kudu dung, with the farthest distance reached being the winner. The sport is mostly popular among the Afrikaner community in South Africa, and a world championship is held each year.
I knew about kudu from my time in East Africa, and if ever knew how to tell greater and lesser kudu apart, I’ve forgotten. Something to do with one or the other of them having a white patch where the other one doesn’t, something like that.
My favourite, though, is the dik-dik. They are almost unbearably cute, and (or so the locals say) they generally come in pairs – as in mated pairs. That jibes with my recollection – I only saw them a few times, and they did indeed come in pairs. They’re protected now, in Kenya anyway, but someone who went down in my estimation told me that they are perhaps the most delicious of all bush meats. Here’s a dictionary definition of dik-dik. Which are not at all the same things as a tuk-tuks.
“Noun. 1. dik-dik – any of several small antelopes of eastern Africa of the genus Madoqua; the size of a large rabbit.” A shame to kill such an animal, particularly without the excuse of hunger.
Ed….For some unknown reason, I’ve heard of the dik-dik. Upon study and reflection, it occurs to me that there is probably an actual competition among the African people to come up with funny names for species of antelope. 😉
Hm… silly names … well, there’s the animal known in Swahili as kongoni, which is perfectly reasonable, whereas in English it is known as either the wildebeest or the gnu. The former is from Afrikaans, as you would expect, and the second is reportedly from a language formerly known as Hottentot (a derogatory term), perhaps or probably what linguists now call Khoekhoegowab. I say “a” language because your average European colonist would be supremely unable to distinguish between any of the “click” languages spoken by Bushmen (a derogatory term), known nowadays as the San – all black, so all the same, sort of thing – an unfortunately common attitude among the white settlers.
It came as a surprise to academic linguists in recent decades that the so-called Khoi-san languages were not even all in the same family, and at least two are language isolates. They do, however, share the click consonants, they are tonal, and of course supremely challenging for speakers of European languages.
The San are the direct descendants of the humans who lived in that region 100,000 years ago – only the aboriginal peoples of Australia have a history that can rival that, which the out-of-Africa theory of human origins would tend to support. That’s the “might as well be axiomatic” type of theory, not the “untested or untestable hypothesis” kind.
Mental health warning – it’s been a very long time since I sat my last university finals paper in linguistics. The field has moved on since then, and I haven’t been following it, though one or two things that I had my doubts about at the time have been clarified.
In a nutshell, take what I said about the San / Khoi-San languages with a grain of salt or three.
Ed….Thanks for the word of caution regarding the San/Khoi-San languages. I’ll certainly be cautious in what I say in a barroom (pub) argument on the subject. 😉
In fact, before pontificating on any matter in a social or academic setting, I always try to determine if anyone in the group has ever studied the particular subject or traveled to the location under discussion for example. If not, I know that I can speak freely.
There is always someone out there who knows better than we ourselves do – unless you happen to have one of those truly great intellects. Oh, except no one is as good at being us as we are ourselves.
I’m not so much happy that I remember as much as I do as happy that I haven’t forgotten more than I have, and I find the increasing difficulty of laying down new memories very frustrating indeed.
Thank you, Tris! Much appreciated, and you are very welcome.
You’ll recall, I’m sure, being taught that the word “barbarian” comes from Greek, because to the Greek-speaking mind anyone speaking furrin around them was just mouthing nonsense syllables. That translates, culturally, today into, e.g., monoglot English-speakers calling the native languages of stigmatized racial / ethnic / whatever groups as “gibberish” or “jibber-jabber” – and if they describe French and German that way too, it’s difficult to work out whether it’s worse or better.
Linguists know that no one has the right to say that one language is “better” than another. We need to bear in mind that they all accomplish the same goal – communication, and not just in a “nominative” sense, meaning that language is not just for naming objects, actions and phenomena. From my own experience, I would say that French is logically tighter than English, so you have to work just a bit harder to talk nonsense in it; however there is no shortage of French people who are hell-bent on doing that work, even if it kills them, just as there are among English speakers.
I can tell you that Russian is extremely good at telling you exactly how things happen, but it is not so easy to express relationships of time and probability as it is in English.
What else? Oh, the number system of Russian is horrible – it’s really very clunky in all the Slavic languages.
In English, grammatical gender is easy peasy, but our phrasal verbs drive everyone else bonkers – even speakers of Dutch and German, who have them too, except they are, of course, different.
I hate the idea that languages are dying and am hugely admiring that people are working hard to protect them.
People in places like Green;land and the Faroe Islands are working hard to preserve their languages in a world where small languages are in peril.
I’ve always found it extremely easy to talk nonsense and make a fool of myself in French. I remember causing much mirth at a dinner one sweltering night in Orléans, when I announced to the company present that “I was HOT”. As you know, one HAS heat in France, one is not hot, unless maybe one is a lot better looking than I am!!
I’m always fascinated by the French (and French only) numbers of sixty-ten and Four Twenties, and worse still Four Twenties Ten.
If the Swiss can say septante, huitante and nonante, I’m not sure why the French themselves have to give an arithmetic analysis of the number.
Quatre-vingts-dix-neuf…. honestly, I ask you. 99… nonate-neuf!
Tris…….Fascinating indeed! When you mentioned your use of “I am hot” in France, it reminded me of years ago that you were surprised when I said I was going to EAT dinner. You said that one HAS Dinner in Scotland, if I recall it correctly. Both terms are in fact used here, but I’m sure that “eat dinner” is used more often in the Midwest, at least in an informal family and friends setting. One would more likely HAVE a formal dinner in a fine restaurant, or a state dinner at the White House for an extreme example.
As you will have seen, Danny, wildebeests and hartebeests are not the same animal. There are more different kinds of animals than there are (individual) words for them, and this is just as true of Swahili as it is of English – though you can be sure that the native speakers have it sorted out to their satisfaction.
I associate kongoni with wildebeests, but I am not in the least expert in Swahili – I would have to ask one of my foster sons if I wanted to find out for sure, but they probably wouldn’t sit still long enough for that. The other phenomenon you would have to take into account is that if you, for the sake of argument, 10 different nouns with which to name animals, and you have 100 animals, when you repeat the exercise in another language using 1:1 equivalences for your 10 different nouns, the membership of each set will very likely not be the same – and taxonomists will slap something Linnæan on them in Latinized Greek, then argue amongst themselves, and then the animal genetics people will come along and tell them they’re all wrong and have been since Linnæus had the idea of naming them all in the first place, and then the genetics people will start to argue amongst themselves, and smaller fleas have smaller fleas to bite’em.
It’s taken me a while, but I’ve finally remembered – another word for the gnu is “nyumbu”. There was an argument in my car once about what they were called, with my Kikuyu guy (from the Nairobi area) saying they were “nyumbu”, and my Maasai guy (Kajiado distric, east and south of Nairobi towards Namanga and the Tanzanian border) saying they were “kongoni”. You note that Swahili was a second/third language in each case – which does complicate the affair rather.
There’s also “paa” – deer or antelope or something. When you see a double A in Swahili, the accepted wisdom is that there used to be an L separating the two, which has dropped out – if you put it back in, no one is going to understand you, probably, but it will fit in with the syllabification rules governing the rest of the language. On that note, when we know that the word “impala” comes from isiZulu and that isiZulu is another Bantu language, and that the noun classifier you would want to stick on to the front of “paa” in Swahili if you were inclined to do so would be M (I think), then you can see where I’m going with that, though I would need to take a serious look at Zulu to be sure, and I never have, so apply yet more salt.
There’s also the word “kulungu”, but it’s beyond me to say what it covers exactly – if you say “deer” in English, what animals are covered by the term, I wonder, and how many have names of their own as well? It occurred to me just now, thinking about all this, that the hypernym “animal” in Swahili is “mnyama” – and meat or flesh is “nyama” …
If you ever go to East Africa, unless you are a vegetarian you must have nyama choma, which is, literally, roasted / grilled meat. Order that, and the server will come to your table with the cooked leg of a dead goat, hack chunks of it off the bone with a machete, hack the chunks into bite-sized pieces, and disappear. You then eat the individual chunks, trying to beat your companions to the best bits but trying not to be too obvious about it, dipping the pieces in a little pile of salt placed there for the purpose, chew, chew a bit more, chew some more again, spit out anything unchewable, and swallow.
Ed……interesting that there are more species of animals than there are names for each one……and the variety of names in various indigenous languages. In English, then, it’s a matter of applying Latin/Greek “scientific” names by one naming system or another.
North America has the rattlesnake, but there are something more than 30 species, and lots more subspecies. All similar, but often very different in appearance. (I’m pretty sure that they all rattle before they strike.)
Danny, I should hope they would indeed rattle! If I were bitten by a rattlesnake, so called, which had not rattled before striking, I think I would be miffed enough to put in a complaint about false advertising.
Sorry – Danny – click languages. The clicks are found not only in the Khoi-San languages, they have found their way into neighbouring Bantu languages as well. I used to know a Herero guy from Namibia – this was years ago, when we were at university, and before the end of apartheid, while Namibia “South-West Africa” – was under South African rule. Herero is a Bantu language, but it does not itself use clicks, if I remember correctly, though others, such as Zulu and Xhosa, as is quite well known, do.
Digression: through knowing this guy – damn my memory – I found out quite a lot of things I did not know before about the history of that part of the world. Here’s a sample, culled from Wikipedia: “From 1904 to 1907, the Germans, who had colonised present-day Namibia, waged war against the Nama and the Herero (a group of Bantu pastoralists), leading to the Herero and Namaqua genocide in which they killed at least 80% of the Nama and Herero populations.”
Anyway, my Herero pal – my memory has lost his name – had a girlfriend – same story about the name – from Zimbabwe, an Ndebele-speaker from Matabeleland – Bulawayo itself, I think (at a time when there was conflict between Joshua Nkomo and Robert Mugabe, guess who won). Ndebele is quite closely related to Zulu and does have clicks, three of them, so one evening all three of use were sitting shooting the breeze generally, and I asked (a) whether Ndebele had clicks, and (b) would she please say a few things so I could hear what they sounded like when spoken by a native speaker. Which she did.
The thing that struck me was how beautifully and effortlessly she produced them, and how clearly distinct they were – and I for the life of me I could not reproduce them. With my training, I can pronounce most language sounds that strike English speakers as weird when they hear them, but not these. Maybe practice would help, or maybe I would have a speech defect in any click language…
Ed…….I’m defeated by something a lot more common than a click language. I can’t trill/roll an “R”. People have tried to tell me how, and I just CAN’T do it. It’s amazing that opera singers for example do it so effortlessly……..on EVERY R-word.
Ach, you just need more practice, Danny! It generally takes about an hour per speech sound, in my experience. Actually, /l/ and /r/ are two of the most difficult sounds for people to produce; we know this because they’re the last two that children acquire, and it should come as no surprise that there are so many languages in which /r/ and /l/ are the same phoneme – i.e., performs the same function, are heard as the same – and which one you get depends on what the sounds around it are. The other way of saying that is that they are allophones (of each other).
We Scots arre well known forr ourr strrongly rrhotic speech, which some unculturred people dismiss as barrbarric, demn theah eyes, it’s enough to make a whale wail. No one can say “dirrty purrple currtains” or “burrnt turrnips” quite like we Scots can, not that anyone would want to all that often.
And if you’rre rreally good at doing trrilled rrrrs, you can do it with just mouth brreath, and do fairr imitations of a cat purrrring as well.
Ed…..In Lawrence of Arabia, Alec Guiness plays an Arab in a way that he seems unable to pronounce the “L” in “Lawrence.”
It seems that no one can pronounce the “R” in Edinburgh like a Scot.
He shouldn’t have had any trouble with /l/, or with distinguishing it from an /r/… There’s that wonderful phrase in Arabic, “Bismillah ir-Rahman ir-Rahim”, which translates as “In the name of God, most Gracious, most Compassionate”, just as a f’rinstance. The one that Arabic speakers have difficulty with is /p/ and /b/ because in Arabic they are, you guessed it, allophones.
A Tunisian colleague of mine in New York reported that some friends had come to visit him from Tunisia and appeared in Manhattan in a rental car, where they proceeded to get totally confused – in Manhattan, and probably inside the car as well, come to think of it – and decided they had to stop and ask directions. So they pulled up next to a fire hydrant that happened to have a policeman in attendance, and the driver, wishing to set out on the right foot, asked “Can I bark here?” To which the policeman replied, “This is America, you can do whatever the hell you like, but you can’t leave your car.”
LOL Ed…….Love the story about the Tunisian and the fire hydrant!
In this clip, Alec Guinness seems to pronounce the L’s in the dialogue normally, but here and throughout the movie, he clearly and deliberately pronounces “Lawrence” as “Arence.”
I’ve always thought that Guinness’ motion picture voice was something of a miracle.
I like Claude Rains’ line: “On the whole, I wish I’d stayed in Tunbridge Wells.”
Brings to mind the fact that ever since the mail bombs and the synagogue shootings, Trumpy has been diverting attention by giving speeches about a “CARAVAN” of foreigners from Central America who he says will soon be storming the southern border. Trumpy tells us that the mob of marauders is primarily made up of murderers, gang members, and drug dealers, who will soon be pouring over the border and attacking us. SO, he has ordered the army to deploy up to 15,000 troops to hold back the evil brown skinned foreigners. The Saturday Night Live show on NBC did this parody of two hideous women who are actually on FOX News.
I heard some Congressman from Florida this morning talking about how the CARAVAN in full of ISIS and Middle Eastern terrorists, who seem to have thought that Guatemala was a convenient entry route for the USA…
Tris……LOL……LOL…….oh yea, Trumpy says that the CARAVAN is just full of Middle Eastern terrorists, ISIS fighters, and Iranian saboteurs, etc, who presumably took advantage of ALL those convenient flights from Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, and Tehran to Guatemala and Honduras to begin the 1500 mile WALK to the US border.
All we have heard from Republicans for the last couple of weeks is the Caravan hysteria. There was a new wrinkle last week when a FOX News commentator said that the Caravan people were carrying smallpox and leprosy. FOX had to walk back the smallpox claim, since smallpox was eradicated from the earth about 40 years ago.
One good thing about having the election over with. Trumpy can quit jabbering about “THE CARAVAN.” 🙂
I mean, seriously Fox… if you’re gonna run a story like that, at least choose a disease that actually exists.
I’d also not be too worried about terrorists who think that the best way to get to Texas from Tehran is a flight to Tegucigalpa and then walk the rest of the way, carrying all their bomb making equipment, whilst suffering from various nasty diseases.
I’ve seen both of them – I understand that Laura Ingraham has a brother who has – this was the word – “disavowed” here because her politics and attitudes are so disgusting. As for Jeanine Pirro – there is something seriously wrong with that woman. I was astonished to learn that she’s a judge. That alone is proof that there is something rotten in the state of the American justice system: another skin-crawling piece of sh*it.
Danny, re the Laura Ingraham etc. video – I couldn’t get it using my VPN through France or the UK, I had to set it to the USA – Munguinites, if you don’t have a VPN, you should get it – Big Brother IS Watching You!
Danny, indeed all you Munguinites out there, here’s a podcast for you that has three (male) speakers of Scottish English on it – so even if you’re not interested in the subject matter, it’ll let you hear what we sound like. https://is.gd/MjTXGv
PS Ed……I agree about Laura Ingraham and Jeanine Pirro. In fact, Pirro is unhinged even by FOX News standards. By comparison, she makes Ingraham seem almost sane. 🙂
Pet owners! Instead of listening to your dogs go mad on November the fifth – treat your neighbours to YouTube heavy metal hits! Turned up to eleven!
There’s a feeling I get…
Conan……For much of my life, I thought that fireworks were only for the Fourth of July. (American Independence day.)
Then I learned that most of the world shoots fireworks on New Years/Hogmanay. (Now done some in the states, but no big New Years shows like the Edinburgh display.)
And I just recently discovered Guy Fawkes’ Night fireworks. I knew about Fawkes, but not the fireworks.
Tomorrow (Tuesday) is election day BTW. With any luck and enough angry voters, Trumpy’s Republicans will suffer an ignominious defeat. Will probably be some fireworks if so. 🙂
In France, on 14 juillet, the fireworks are spectacular, particularly in Paris, but all over France to a greater or lesser extent.
They celebrate getting rid of the King; the Brits, on the other hand, celebrate the fact that they failed to get rid of the king and the English parliamentarians. Bloody weird lot!
I’m with the French.
Best of luck tomorrow, mate. Vote early and vote often! We shall watch the results with interest and with our fingers well and truly crossed for you.
Tris…..I hadn’t thought about the fact that the French and the Americans celebrate getting rid of Kings, while the English celebrate keeping the King.
Maybe if there’s a big crowd at our polling location, we can slip in unnoticed and vote two or three times……LOL. Lot’s of excitement! Almost like a presidential election.
Best of luck from me too. It’s important to all of us, not just Americans. It’s a good thing Trump is widely considered to be insane – if he weren’t, we’d be in WWIII already.
Thanks Ed. The midterm election to reelect the House of Representatives and 1/3 of the Senate is usually a petty dull affair. But not this one. It has become a referendum on Trump. And as soon as the voting is over today and the 116th Congress is seated on January 3, the buildup to the presidential campaign in 2020 will begin. Next year will be a year of speeches and fundraising by countless Democratic candidates, then almost the entire year of 2020 dedicated to the state presidential primaries, the nominating conventions, and the formal presidential campaign. Effectively, the presidential campaign has become almost a two year process. Trump is so hated and so crazy that the 2020 election campaign will be a real circus. He might even have one or more challengers to his own re-nomination by the Republican Party.
There’s a good chance that Trump will be impeached before his term ends, in my estimation, anyway; the evidence and the charges against him and his dynastic criminal enterprise are likely to be so damning that not even the Republicans will be able to ignore them, especially if their majority in the Senate falls to only one or two above 50.
Whether the low-information, Dunning-Kruger types, the white supremacists / nationalists, and the lunatic far-right survivalist militia cult fringe swivel-eyed tinfoil-hatted hair on fire brigade will take it lying down is another matter – especially if Trump calls for jihad to shore up his dictatorship…
It’s a real nail-biting cliffhanger of a thing this time, isn’t it? In all sorts of ways.
Ed…..that’s right! Media is reporting record voting for a midterm election. By far a record early vote of over 30 million before the polls opened today. I voted early and had no line, but a line was forming when I left the polling station. It takes me a while. I read over all the state constitutional amendments and legislative proposals, etc, but mostly I triple check the ballot to be sure I didn’t accidentally vote Republican someplace. 😉
We hope. We pray. High turnout is a good sign for the Dems, I believe, and the early voting figures are phenomenal. Oh well. It won’t be over until the fat lady sings.
Ed……I heard tonight that almost 30 million votes have already been cast. By far the biggest early vote for a midterm election. Yes, that’s usually a good sign for the Dems.
I put Rammstein on full blast and I can’t hear the artillery barrage outside any more. My wee staffie seems to be ok but my wife’s now lying on the dogs bed shivering in fear.
MUNGUIN'S NEW REPUBLIC 
Fabulous picture of Kalsoy. Both Kunoy and Kalsoy simply soar 2,6 to 800 ft seemingly out of Klaksvik harbour. Kunoy is less precipitous than Kalsoy. The wonderfully serrated ridge of the latter looks like it would make a fabulous summit traverse but I suspect that the rock is too friable for safe progress.
Kunoy has a series of little village in the bays up the east side, communication being by ferry or by the cairned paths which lead over the intervening ridges. I read once that in the old days, the schoolteacher who divided her time between the two northernmost villages would have to use the cairned path rising to over 2,000 feet between them in the two or three miles, roped between two men, in stormy weather when it was too rough to go by boat.
Told my wife all about these wonderful islands when we went to the Faroes about 25 years ago – but the mist was down to sea level and she didn’t see a thing on the day we went north – nor did she want to see my slides from the early 70’s when we got home.
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I’d love to go. I’ve just read a series of novels (Nordic Noir) set in the islands, and it has stirred my interest.
Have you seen the Lesley Riddoch programme on the islands?
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Lovely. Life reaffirmed, particularly by orangutans. I wanted to caption the first one “What can I say? If I’d known he was Mr. Trump’s barber I’d never have let him within arm’s length of my hair”.
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He he.
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Lovely. Blimey though that is some cliff on the Faroes and MNR being such a hip place of course one of the readers has been there. Red pandas are the best, aren’t they. What is it with the cuteness of red animals because thon fox is cute too. And as for the life affirming orangs…
Anyway how common is it for dugs to have two different coloured eyes cos Laoch from Skye does too? Inquiring minds want to know.
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Glad you liked it.
I’ve never seen a dog with two different coloured eyes (in real life) Laoch was the first and now this wee character.
Anyone?
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Yes, a pal of mine out the West End of Dundee had a Bernese with different-coloured eyes – aka heterochromia iridum – one husky blue, the other normal brown. He was a lovely, affectionate, slobbery, furry great softie of a thing. Very difficult not to love.
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“He was a lovely, affectionate, slobbery, furry great softie of a thing.”
Yeah but what about the dug 🙂
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Och no, my pal isn’t nearly so furry.
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Ha ha ha
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pp, if it’s cute animals yir after, google, Mongolian Fox.
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Is that the same as a Tibetan Fox?
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Ah think so.
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Beauties then. I looked up some pics. Maybe include one next week. 🙂
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Excellent point about pumpkins which I didn’t know. Will pass on to family – and it might get them out to the woods, which would be a bonus. Thanks.
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Yep… and think of all these happy squirrels.
🙂
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Great stuff as ever, Tris. My favourite has got to be the pup with the pumpkins. I’m sure it’s a Berner Sennenhund (Bernese Mountain Dog). I first encountered them where they originally come from, in the Bernese Oberland. Those puppies grow up into very large adults and they are utterly charming at any age. Like so many large dogs they seem to be gentle giants, quiet and amiable, but I imagine they were originally bred to protect herds from wolves and I don’t think wolves would have hung around long if they encountered a couple of these guys. Speaking of gentle giants, not far from where I live there’s a couple who have three black Newfoundlands. They often walk them locally and everybody stops to look and often pat them. Newfies, of course, are massive – they make the Berner look slight – and to see three of them together is some sight. It’s a bit like seeing someone out walking three ponies.
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Crickey, Andi, THREE of them. They must live in a BIG house… or be content with very little space. 🙂
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Tris, I believe they live in an ex-council semi – although I don’t imagine they’ll have too much furniture. Mind you, they also won’t need central heating in the winter 🙂
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Nice group of critters! The Kudu is a handsome animal. If you have a Kudu, you’ll never need a corkscrew.
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Munguin is searching the internet for one now. Grass kept short and expensive wins opened… and cheaper than Tris… who could ask for more?
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Tris……I hadn’t even thought about the Kudu’s lawn mowing capability. 😉
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Ah, but Danny, you’re not Munguin. He thinks of everything.
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PS: However, depending on wildlife for lawn care does have its drawbacks. We live in a suburban area with a lot of tree cover on one side that stretches for some distance, with a branch (a small stream that runs water when it rains) running through it. There are lots of deer in the woods who sometimes stroll out into the neighborhood at night. We see many more deer than stray dogs.
The other night as we turned into the driveway, we were next to a family of deer, a doe and two fawns, who were munching on our neighbor’s front yard grass. A few nights later, the same deer family was taking care of the grass in the vacant lot on the corner. The downside of such a lawn maintenance arrangement is that the deer occasionally eat the neighbor lady’s back yard flowers. She is not amused!
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That sounds lovely.
Your neighbour should put up a notice:
Dear Deer,
Please don’t eat the flowers.
Or else!
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It is kind of interesting to still be alive. I am pretty sure I have never heard or seen a
Kudu before. I kind of hope they are a protected species.
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dc….Wiki says that Kudu are two species of antelope. There is a Lesser Kudu and a Greater Kudu, but then Wiki doesn’t really say very much about the difference. It would be interesting if there were a greater number of Lesser Kudu, and a lesser number of Greater Kudu, but I have no reason to think that is so.
Wiki does describe a Kudu-related sport:
USE IN SPORT —
In the sport of kudu dung-spitting, contestants spit pellets of kudu dung, with the farthest distance reached being the winner. The sport is mostly popular among the Afrikaner community in South Africa, and a world championship is held each year.
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LOL…
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kudu
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I knew about kudu from my time in East Africa, and if ever knew how to tell greater and lesser kudu apart, I’ve forgotten. Something to do with one or the other of them having a white patch where the other one doesn’t, something like that.
My favourite, though, is the dik-dik. They are almost unbearably cute, and (or so the locals say) they generally come in pairs – as in mated pairs. That jibes with my recollection – I only saw them a few times, and they did indeed come in pairs. They’re protected now, in Kenya anyway, but someone who went down in my estimation told me that they are perhaps the most delicious of all bush meats. Here’s a dictionary definition of dik-dik. Which are not at all the same things as a tuk-tuks.
“Noun. 1. dik-dik – any of several small antelopes of eastern Africa of the genus Madoqua; the size of a large rabbit.” A shame to kill such an animal, particularly without the excuse of hunger.
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Ed….For some unknown reason, I’ve heard of the dik-dik. Upon study and reflection, it occurs to me that there is probably an actual competition among the African people to come up with funny names for species of antelope. 😉
The dik-dik:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dik-dik
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Ah, Danny, you beat me to a dik-dik pic, as it were.
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Tris……I take the opportunities that come my way……as quickly as possible……LOL.
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Hm… silly names … well, there’s the animal known in Swahili as kongoni, which is perfectly reasonable, whereas in English it is known as either the wildebeest or the gnu. The former is from Afrikaans, as you would expect, and the second is reportedly from a language formerly known as Hottentot (a derogatory term), perhaps or probably what linguists now call Khoekhoegowab. I say “a” language because your average European colonist would be supremely unable to distinguish between any of the “click” languages spoken by Bushmen (a derogatory term), known nowadays as the San – all black, so all the same, sort of thing – an unfortunately common attitude among the white settlers.
It came as a surprise to academic linguists in recent decades that the so-called Khoi-san languages were not even all in the same family, and at least two are language isolates. They do, however, share the click consonants, they are tonal, and of course supremely challenging for speakers of European languages.
The San are the direct descendants of the humans who lived in that region 100,000 years ago – only the aboriginal peoples of Australia have a history that can rival that, which the out-of-Africa theory of human origins would tend to support. That’s the “might as well be axiomatic” type of theory, not the “untested or untestable hypothesis” kind.
The Bantu languages came along much, much later.
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Mental health warning – it’s been a very long time since I sat my last university finals paper in linguistics. The field has moved on since then, and I haven’t been following it, though one or two things that I had my doubts about at the time have been clarified.
In a nutshell, take what I said about the San / Khoi-San languages with a grain of salt or three.
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Ed….Thanks for the word of caution regarding the San/Khoi-San languages. I’ll certainly be cautious in what I say in a barroom (pub) argument on the subject. 😉
In fact, before pontificating on any matter in a social or academic setting, I always try to determine if anyone in the group has ever studied the particular subject or traveled to the location under discussion for example. If not, I know that I can speak freely.
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There is always someone out there who knows better than we ourselves do – unless you happen to have one of those truly great intellects. Oh, except no one is as good at being us as we are ourselves.
I’m not so much happy that I remember as much as I do as happy that I haven’t forgotten more than I have, and I find the increasing difficulty of laying down new memories very frustrating indeed.
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LOL… Yes Danny, there’s nothing worse than pontificating on a subject, only to find that the bloke sitting next to you has a doctorate in it!!!
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Yes Tris…….VERY embarrassing! 🙂
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Another piece of fascinating linguistics, Ed. Thank you.
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Thank you, Tris! Much appreciated, and you are very welcome.
You’ll recall, I’m sure, being taught that the word “barbarian” comes from Greek, because to the Greek-speaking mind anyone speaking furrin around them was just mouthing nonsense syllables. That translates, culturally, today into, e.g., monoglot English-speakers calling the native languages of stigmatized racial / ethnic / whatever groups as “gibberish” or “jibber-jabber” – and if they describe French and German that way too, it’s difficult to work out whether it’s worse or better.
Linguists know that no one has the right to say that one language is “better” than another. We need to bear in mind that they all accomplish the same goal – communication, and not just in a “nominative” sense, meaning that language is not just for naming objects, actions and phenomena. From my own experience, I would say that French is logically tighter than English, so you have to work just a bit harder to talk nonsense in it; however there is no shortage of French people who are hell-bent on doing that work, even if it kills them, just as there are among English speakers.
I can tell you that Russian is extremely good at telling you exactly how things happen, but it is not so easy to express relationships of time and probability as it is in English.
What else? Oh, the number system of Russian is horrible – it’s really very clunky in all the Slavic languages.
In English, grammatical gender is easy peasy, but our phrasal verbs drive everyone else bonkers – even speakers of Dutch and German, who have them too, except they are, of course, different.
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Ed…..very interesting! I’d never thought at all about phrasal verbs.
I had to “look it up.” An interesting list I think:
https://www.englishclub.com/vocabulary/phrasal-verbs-list.htm
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Handy list, Danny.
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Language is fascinating, and rich too.
I hate the idea that languages are dying and am hugely admiring that people are working hard to protect them.
People in places like Green;land and the Faroe Islands are working hard to preserve their languages in a world where small languages are in peril.
I’ve always found it extremely easy to talk nonsense and make a fool of myself in French. I remember causing much mirth at a dinner one sweltering night in Orléans, when I announced to the company present that “I was HOT”. As you know, one HAS heat in France, one is not hot, unless maybe one is a lot better looking than I am!!
I’m always fascinated by the French (and French only) numbers of sixty-ten and Four Twenties, and worse still Four Twenties Ten.
If the Swiss can say septante, huitante and nonante, I’m not sure why the French themselves have to give an arithmetic analysis of the number.
Quatre-vingts-dix-neuf…. honestly, I ask you. 99… nonate-neuf!
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Tris…….Fascinating indeed! When you mentioned your use of “I am hot” in France, it reminded me of years ago that you were surprised when I said I was going to EAT dinner. You said that one HAS Dinner in Scotland, if I recall it correctly. Both terms are in fact used here, but I’m sure that “eat dinner” is used more often in the Midwest, at least in an informal family and friends setting. One would more likely HAVE a formal dinner in a fine restaurant, or a state dinner at the White House for an extreme example.
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Oh goodness, Danny. Fancy remembering that… Must be 15 years ago.
True… I have a meal and you eat a meal…. although we both obviously eat it… and we both have it.
Interesting, though.
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PS Tris…….Absolutely amazing about the names of the French numbers! Very interesting!
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They are foreign, Danny… What more is there to say?
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Ed……I certainly agree that the dik-dik scores high on the cuteness scale.
Yep……I guessed it…..Kongoni is another name for another antelope.
Wiki: “The hartebeest (/ˈhɑːrtəˌbiːst/;[3] Alcelaphus buselaphus), also known as kongoni, is an African antelope.”
Ed, you are my go-to source on languages. (Those click languages would defeat me for sure.) 😉
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As you will have seen, Danny, wildebeests and hartebeests are not the same animal. There are more different kinds of animals than there are (individual) words for them, and this is just as true of Swahili as it is of English – though you can be sure that the native speakers have it sorted out to their satisfaction.
I associate kongoni with wildebeests, but I am not in the least expert in Swahili – I would have to ask one of my foster sons if I wanted to find out for sure, but they probably wouldn’t sit still long enough for that. The other phenomenon you would have to take into account is that if you, for the sake of argument, 10 different nouns with which to name animals, and you have 100 animals, when you repeat the exercise in another language using 1:1 equivalences for your 10 different nouns, the membership of each set will very likely not be the same – and taxonomists will slap something Linnæan on them in Latinized Greek, then argue amongst themselves, and then the animal genetics people will come along and tell them they’re all wrong and have been since Linnæus had the idea of naming them all in the first place, and then the genetics people will start to argue amongst themselves, and smaller fleas have smaller fleas to bite’em.
It’s taken me a while, but I’ve finally remembered – another word for the gnu is “nyumbu”. There was an argument in my car once about what they were called, with my Kikuyu guy (from the Nairobi area) saying they were “nyumbu”, and my Maasai guy (Kajiado distric, east and south of Nairobi towards Namanga and the Tanzanian border) saying they were “kongoni”. You note that Swahili was a second/third language in each case – which does complicate the affair rather.
There’s also “paa” – deer or antelope or something. When you see a double A in Swahili, the accepted wisdom is that there used to be an L separating the two, which has dropped out – if you put it back in, no one is going to understand you, probably, but it will fit in with the syllabification rules governing the rest of the language. On that note, when we know that the word “impala” comes from isiZulu and that isiZulu is another Bantu language, and that the noun classifier you would want to stick on to the front of “paa” in Swahili if you were inclined to do so would be M (I think), then you can see where I’m going with that, though I would need to take a serious look at Zulu to be sure, and I never have, so apply yet more salt.
There’s also the word “kulungu”, but it’s beyond me to say what it covers exactly – if you say “deer” in English, what animals are covered by the term, I wonder, and how many have names of their own as well? It occurred to me just now, thinking about all this, that the hypernym “animal” in Swahili is “mnyama” – and meat or flesh is “nyama” …
If you ever go to East Africa, unless you are a vegetarian you must have nyama choma, which is, literally, roasted / grilled meat. Order that, and the server will come to your table with the cooked leg of a dead goat, hack chunks of it off the bone with a machete, hack the chunks into bite-sized pieces, and disappear. You then eat the individual chunks, trying to beat your companions to the best bits but trying not to be too obvious about it, dipping the pieces in a little pile of salt placed there for the purpose, chew, chew a bit more, chew some more again, spit out anything unchewable, and swallow.
Delicious.
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Ed……interesting that there are more species of animals than there are names for each one……and the variety of names in various indigenous languages. In English, then, it’s a matter of applying Latin/Greek “scientific” names by one naming system or another.
North America has the rattlesnake, but there are something more than 30 species, and lots more subspecies. All similar, but often very different in appearance. (I’m pretty sure that they all rattle before they strike.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_rattlesnake_species_and_subspecies
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Danny, I should hope they would indeed rattle! If I were bitten by a rattlesnake, so called, which had not rattled before striking, I think I would be miffed enough to put in a complaint about false advertising.
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LOL Ed……I think they are required to rattle by law. But as you suggest, if you charged one in court, it would just be your word against his. 🙂
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Sorry – Danny – click languages. The clicks are found not only in the Khoi-San languages, they have found their way into neighbouring Bantu languages as well. I used to know a Herero guy from Namibia – this was years ago, when we were at university, and before the end of apartheid, while Namibia “South-West Africa” – was under South African rule. Herero is a Bantu language, but it does not itself use clicks, if I remember correctly, though others, such as Zulu and Xhosa, as is quite well known, do.
Digression: through knowing this guy – damn my memory – I found out quite a lot of things I did not know before about the history of that part of the world. Here’s a sample, culled from Wikipedia: “From 1904 to 1907, the Germans, who had colonised present-day Namibia, waged war against the Nama and the Herero (a group of Bantu pastoralists), leading to the Herero and Namaqua genocide in which they killed at least 80% of the Nama and Herero populations.”
Anyway, my Herero pal – my memory has lost his name – had a girlfriend – same story about the name – from Zimbabwe, an Ndebele-speaker from Matabeleland – Bulawayo itself, I think (at a time when there was conflict between Joshua Nkomo and Robert Mugabe, guess who won). Ndebele is quite closely related to Zulu and does have clicks, three of them, so one evening all three of use were sitting shooting the breeze generally, and I asked (a) whether Ndebele had clicks, and (b) would she please say a few things so I could hear what they sounded like when spoken by a native speaker. Which she did.
The thing that struck me was how beautifully and effortlessly she produced them, and how clearly distinct they were – and I for the life of me I could not reproduce them. With my training, I can pronounce most language sounds that strike English speakers as weird when they hear them, but not these. Maybe practice would help, or maybe I would have a speech defect in any click language…
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Again, Ed, fascinating.
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Thanks again, Tris! Tris, Munguinites generally, please tell me when you think I’m going on a bit too much.
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That has never happened Ed. You always make learned and interesting contributions to MR..
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Ed…….I’m defeated by something a lot more common than a click language. I can’t trill/roll an “R”. People have tried to tell me how, and I just CAN’T do it. It’s amazing that opera singers for example do it so effortlessly……..on EVERY R-word.
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Ach, you just need more practice, Danny! It generally takes about an hour per speech sound, in my experience. Actually, /l/ and /r/ are two of the most difficult sounds for people to produce; we know this because they’re the last two that children acquire, and it should come as no surprise that there are so many languages in which /r/ and /l/ are the same phoneme – i.e., performs the same function, are heard as the same – and which one you get depends on what the sounds around it are. The other way of saying that is that they are allophones (of each other).
We Scots arre well known forr ourr strrongly rrhotic speech, which some unculturred people dismiss as barrbarric, demn theah eyes, it’s enough to make a whale wail. No one can say “dirrty purrple currtains” or “burrnt turrnips” quite like we Scots can, not that anyone would want to all that often.
And if you’rre rreally good at doing trrilled rrrrs, you can do it with just mouth brreath, and do fairr imitations of a cat purrrring as well.
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Ed…..In Lawrence of Arabia, Alec Guiness plays an Arab in a way that he seems unable to pronounce the “L” in “Lawrence.”
It seems that no one can pronounce the “R” in Edinburgh like a Scot.
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He shouldn’t have had any trouble with /l/, or with distinguishing it from an /r/… There’s that wonderful phrase in Arabic, “Bismillah ir-Rahman ir-Rahim”, which translates as “In the name of God, most Gracious, most Compassionate”, just as a f’rinstance. The one that Arabic speakers have difficulty with is /p/ and /b/ because in Arabic they are, you guessed it, allophones.
A Tunisian colleague of mine in New York reported that some friends had come to visit him from Tunisia and appeared in Manhattan in a rental car, where they proceeded to get totally confused – in Manhattan, and probably inside the car as well, come to think of it – and decided they had to stop and ask directions. So they pulled up next to a fire hydrant that happened to have a policeman in attendance, and the driver, wishing to set out on the right foot, asked “Can I bark here?” To which the policeman replied, “This is America, you can do whatever the hell you like, but you can’t leave your car.”
I dunno if he arrested them or not.
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LOL Ed…….Love the story about the Tunisian and the fire hydrant!
In this clip, Alec Guinness seems to pronounce the L’s in the dialogue normally, but here and throughout the movie, he clearly and deliberately pronounces “Lawrence” as “Arence.”
I’ve always thought that Guinness’ motion picture voice was something of a miracle.
I like Claude Rains’ line: “On the whole, I wish I’d stayed in Tunbridge Wells.”
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Ouch! Voice coach, eh? I heard him say the words Edinburgh, Glasgow and Aberdeen and had to stop.
Have some David Tennant on Scottish reactions to Trump: https://youtu.be/0nTrs-HuuUc?t=243.
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Ha ha ha ha ha
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Ed…..Very funny piece!
Brings to mind the fact that ever since the mail bombs and the synagogue shootings, Trumpy has been diverting attention by giving speeches about a “CARAVAN” of foreigners from Central America who he says will soon be storming the southern border. Trumpy tells us that the mob of marauders is primarily made up of murderers, gang members, and drug dealers, who will soon be pouring over the border and attacking us. SO, he has ordered the army to deploy up to 15,000 troops to hold back the evil brown skinned foreigners. The Saturday Night Live show on NBC did this parody of two hideous women who are actually on FOX News.
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I heard some Congressman from Florida this morning talking about how the CARAVAN in full of ISIS and Middle Eastern terrorists, who seem to have thought that Guatemala was a convenient entry route for the USA…
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Tris……LOL……LOL…….oh yea, Trumpy says that the CARAVAN is just full of Middle Eastern terrorists, ISIS fighters, and Iranian saboteurs, etc, who presumably took advantage of ALL those convenient flights from Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, and Tehran to Guatemala and Honduras to begin the 1500 mile WALK to the US border.
All we have heard from Republicans for the last couple of weeks is the Caravan hysteria. There was a new wrinkle last week when a FOX News commentator said that the Caravan people were carrying smallpox and leprosy. FOX had to walk back the smallpox claim, since smallpox was eradicated from the earth about 40 years ago.
One good thing about having the election over with. Trumpy can quit jabbering about “THE CARAVAN.” 🙂
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LOL. I heard about the smallpox scare.
I mean, seriously Fox… if you’re gonna run a story like that, at least choose a disease that actually exists.
I’d also not be too worried about terrorists who think that the best way to get to Texas from Tehran is a flight to Tegucigalpa and then walk the rest of the way, carrying all their bomb making equipment, whilst suffering from various nasty diseases.
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I’ve seen both of them – I understand that Laura Ingraham has a brother who has – this was the word – “disavowed” here because her politics and attitudes are so disgusting. As for Jeanine Pirro – there is something seriously wrong with that woman. I was astonished to learn that she’s a judge. That alone is proof that there is something rotten in the state of the American justice system: another skin-crawling piece of sh*it.
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Danny, re the Laura Ingraham etc. video – I couldn’t get it using my VPN through France or the UK, I had to set it to the USA – Munguinites, if you don’t have a VPN, you should get it – Big Brother IS Watching You!
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AVG do it at a reasonable cost.
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Danny, indeed all you Munguinites out there, here’s a podcast for you that has three (male) speakers of Scottish English on it – so even if you’re not interested in the subject matter, it’ll let you hear what we sound like. https://is.gd/MjTXGv
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Ed……The sound of the Scottish “R” in Edinburgh is unique. Only a Scot can pronounce it properly. 😉
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PS Ed……I agree about Laura Ingraham and Jeanine Pirro. In fact, Pirro is unhinged even by FOX News standards. By comparison, she makes Ingraham seem almost sane. 🙂
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Tris…….I like your analysis of the terrorist threat from the “Caravan.”……LOL.
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That is a truly fantastical animal!
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You’re right. Sooo cute.
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Danny.
Perhaps the Kudu will survive as a fuel for human stupidity. Then it merely has to out-live humans.
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OT
My dogs are now listening to Rammstein instead of fireworks, and I am grateful to them.
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Preferable to fireworks…
And brilliant scenery too… until the guy fell.
Sad but happy ending.
My German isn’t good enough to understand it all. But I was pleasantly surprised that it wasn’t “Without You” by Harry Nilsson in German!!!
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You ain’t seen nothing yet…
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Remember, these are the evil Russians that we will have to go to war with because of Putin. Putin BAD.
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Makes a change from SNP BAAAD. Nice music though 🙂
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Putin definitely BAD. Yer ordinary Russki person – more of them should get out more, but that’s the same everywhere.
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Freebird works too. Possibly me headbanging in the living room distracts them.
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Pet owners! Instead of listening to your dogs go mad on November the fifth – treat your neighbours to YouTube heavy metal hits! Turned up to eleven!
There’s a feeling I get…
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Conan……For much of my life, I thought that fireworks were only for the Fourth of July. (American Independence day.)
Then I learned that most of the world shoots fireworks on New Years/Hogmanay. (Now done some in the states, but no big New Years shows like the Edinburgh display.)
And I just recently discovered Guy Fawkes’ Night fireworks. I knew about Fawkes, but not the fireworks.
Tomorrow (Tuesday) is election day BTW. With any luck and enough angry voters, Trumpy’s Republicans will suffer an ignominious defeat. Will probably be some fireworks if so. 🙂
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In France, on 14 juillet, the fireworks are spectacular, particularly in Paris, but all over France to a greater or lesser extent.
They celebrate getting rid of the King; the Brits, on the other hand, celebrate the fact that they failed to get rid of the king and the English parliamentarians. Bloody weird lot!
I’m with the French.
Best of luck tomorrow, mate. Vote early and vote often! We shall watch the results with interest and with our fingers well and truly crossed for you.
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Tris…..I hadn’t thought about the fact that the French and the Americans celebrate getting rid of Kings, while the English celebrate keeping the King.
Maybe if there’s a big crowd at our polling location, we can slip in unnoticed and vote two or three times……LOL. Lot’s of excitement! Almost like a presidential election.
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Best of luck, mate.
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Best of luck from me too. It’s important to all of us, not just Americans. It’s a good thing Trump is widely considered to be insane – if he weren’t, we’d be in WWIII already.
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Thanks Ed. The midterm election to reelect the House of Representatives and 1/3 of the Senate is usually a petty dull affair. But not this one. It has become a referendum on Trump. And as soon as the voting is over today and the 116th Congress is seated on January 3, the buildup to the presidential campaign in 2020 will begin. Next year will be a year of speeches and fundraising by countless Democratic candidates, then almost the entire year of 2020 dedicated to the state presidential primaries, the nominating conventions, and the formal presidential campaign. Effectively, the presidential campaign has become almost a two year process. Trump is so hated and so crazy that the 2020 election campaign will be a real circus. He might even have one or more challengers to his own re-nomination by the Republican Party.
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There’s a good chance that Trump will be impeached before his term ends, in my estimation, anyway; the evidence and the charges against him and his dynastic criminal enterprise are likely to be so damning that not even the Republicans will be able to ignore them, especially if their majority in the Senate falls to only one or two above 50.
Whether the low-information, Dunning-Kruger types, the white supremacists / nationalists, and the lunatic far-right survivalist militia cult fringe swivel-eyed tinfoil-hatted hair on fire brigade will take it lying down is another matter – especially if Trump calls for jihad to shore up his dictatorship…
It’s a real nail-biting cliffhanger of a thing this time, isn’t it? In all sorts of ways.
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Ed…..that’s right! Media is reporting record voting for a midterm election. By far a record early vote of over 30 million before the polls opened today. I voted early and had no line, but a line was forming when I left the polling station. It takes me a while. I read over all the state constitutional amendments and legislative proposals, etc, but mostly I triple check the ballot to be sure I didn’t accidentally vote Republican someplace. 😉
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We hope. We pray. High turnout is a good sign for the Dems, I believe, and the early voting figures are phenomenal. Oh well. It won’t be over until the fat lady sings.
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Ed……I heard tonight that almost 30 million votes have already been cast. By far the biggest early vote for a midterm election. Yes, that’s usually a good sign for the Dems.
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I put Rammstein on full blast and I can’t hear the artillery barrage outside any more. My wee staffie seems to be ok but my wife’s now lying on the dogs bed shivering in fear.
Another partial success.
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LOL You really can’t please all of the family all of the time!
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So I tried this.
The results were inconclusive but the principle I believe is sound.
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Sound being the operative word.
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I know it isn’t Tuesday yet…
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