Finland had to lower their high taxes on alcohol a couple of years ago, because of smuggling, and this week there’s a new study saying the effects was catastrophic, a marked increase in the number of alcoholics. We’ve also lowered our alcohol taxes because of smuggling and legal imports two-three years ago, though less drastically IIRC.
Technically it’s saturday. I’ve always favored the coptic calendar, where the day begins at six in the morning.
Questia. I should read some classic.
Robert Kaufman ’s memoir of his time as scientoligist is online.
Grandpa Bush violated Geronimo’s skull. Better link to this while Sploid is still online.
I just realized all the TV shows I’m translating is good fodder for a blog post. All the old stuff is for DVD:s if you’re wondering.
Huff. Five episodes from the 2nd season. Awesome! Especially the Oliver Platt character. Great performance. Also Huff’s wife. Typical that the Izzy actor got an emmy, her character has the only tugging at heartsrings stuff. Very entertaining show.
Dallas. I used to watch Dallas as a kid, I think starting right before Bobby was killed. This is earlier, and at least this episode it’s way more of a proper drama than I remembered. It’s a lot of emotion, and it’s all pretty real and believable, and surpriisingly subtle at times. Lucy’s having an abortion this episode, and Pam’s ambivalence is subtly handled.
Bobby’s not particularly angelic. Sue Ellen is tragic. J.R is a very compelling character. Even the soap opera elements makes them show people as pragmatically calculating in a way that’s real, and absent from most dramas, certainly in 70s television.
MacGyver. Two episodes. First one kinda meh, featuring Amish. Other one, where MacGyver’s boss gets tested, goofy fun. Neither features barley anything of the invention gimmick, oddly.
Prison Break Episode in 2nd season. What a silly show, sometimes awesomely so. I hate black helicopter shows though, though maybe the sillinness would redeem it. I wouldn’t have understood much of what’s happened, without doing research, and using a Television without pity recap. Tip for subtitlers, they’re very useful when you don’t have a script.
Penn and Teller: Bullshit! My sister likes this show, so I thought it was cool to translate something she’d watch. I’m not sure she’d like this though, since it’s about pets, and Teller’s contemptuous of people who care about them too much, and she’s a huge animal lover. Penn’s shtick is being an asshole, and well, he sure is an asshole. In this case, some of the stuff about the cat show kind of crossed the line into vicious, and those were real people. The show in general is so obviously driven by Penn (and Teller’s?) need to feel superior of people. No surprise he’s libertarian. Most was mildly entertaining, though, esp. the stuff about the guy who sold testicle prostheses for dogs.
The Unit. Original premise: A “realistic” (compared to James Bond) take on military special operation unit, like the Delta force. Execution is kinda meh, though. Not bad exactly. The geopolitics is as ludicrous as usual. Bizarrely, David Mamet is the creator of this not very serious show. WTF?
Subtitling entails a much more intense, attentive watching of the films than normal, unless you’re a film major writing a thesis or something. Will sometimes make for a v. different viewing experience, in this case it may have influenced how I viewed Dallas in particular.
I guess this won’t be a Osneresque blog after all. Writing about works of arts is hard! I’ve started writing about a book, and even if the posts are brief and unpretentious, as I planned, it takes more effort thtan other types of posts. Also, I probably don’t read enough books.
Luckily, I don’t have much to say about Persepolis, so it’s not as hard to put it in writing. I read the first volume last month, and my tentative verdict is: Pretty decent, but hardly a masterpiece. One thing that did surprise me, that I don’t remember anyone noting, is how clearly influenced its storytelling techniques to the far superior Epileptic by David B, who also wrote the introduction.
The dream sequences, most obviously, but generally David B’s startling ways of showing his inner life, as well as telling his parents story, and incorporating narration. Maybe the art too a little, though Satrapi’s art is much simpler (and fairly undistinguished). Maybe reading Persepolis first would make Epileptic seem less impressive and original than it is.
She manages to convey the time and place, but even though it’s often all about her inner life (the David B influence), it’s oddly impersonal, you don’t get too close to her, and certainly not any other characters.
I’ll start blogging again.
I haven’t given up on the blog, but I’ve had work to do.
Ross Douthat: Liberalism has science and progress to pursue—and ultimately immortality, the real goal but also the one that rarely dares to speak its name—whereas conservatives have … well, a host of goals, most of them in tension with one another.
In the answer to one of the letters here.
John Quiggin at CT writes about complaints about English loan words, in this case from Italians, and asks:
“I’d be interested to know whether the influence of English on other European languages goes beyond the importation of a relatively modest number of loan words.”
I answered:
As far as Swedish, yes, both the written and spoken word is riddled with anglicisms, ie phrases that are literal translations of english phrases. It leads to a lot of clumsy and ugly prose.
In the last 20 years or so, people who aren’t confident writers, have started writing compund words as separate words. Presumably, this is because of influence from English. Probably a majority of the younger generations do this. If it will eventually become the rule, which isn’‘t certain, I think it would be a rreal loss for the language, compounds are great.
In most disciplines, doctoral thesises are only written in (generally kind of poor) English, which wasn’t the case thirty years ago, and some are a little worried if present trends continue, the language will be impoverished, and no one will be able to write on certain subjects in Swedish, like African languages where technical writing and other kinds of complex writing is always done in the colonialist language, people don’t have the proper vocabulary in their native tongue. Swedish has of course a long, long way to go before we get the African situation, but the present situation is somewhat problematic.
We are generally spared from these kinds of “Woe! Foreign words pollutevour language” discussion. I wonder how often these people who english speaking media love to report about are representative of elite opinion in their countries as opposed to random cranks.
Inspired by this Brad DeLong post.
Birds. Lots of them.
Deers. Hundreds of times. They were completely shameless and unafraid back in the 90s, you’d often see them in broad daylight munching on our plants. Far rarer now, probably due to the recovery of the fox population, which was almost wiped out by some disease back then.
Rabbits. My sisters pet rabbits lived in cages in the garden. They were cute. RIP.
Cats. A fat old cat used to come and scare the rabbits. We had to shoo it away all the time. One time a rabbit got out of its cage, and the cat came and made it flee up the forest before Maria had a catch it. Last we saw of that rabbit. We don’t like that cat.
One of our new neighbour’s cats is in our garden like all the time. He was really tame and let Maria pet it the first time they met, but he can also be sulky and ignore her. The funny thing about this cat is that it always moving its tail around. It’s never still. He must have pretty strong tail muscles by now.
A fox. Me and my sister saw a red fox strolling around just five or weeks ago.
A hedgehog. Right after we saw the fox, Maria* discovered a hedgehog lying in our garden, all still like. She took it home and our mom fed it snails, and it became more active. So she let it out in the garden the next, but it never went away, and later she saw worms coming out of it. Ugh. Maria had to have a vet put it down. She was completely devastated.
A moose. In the late 90s. A calf, no horns, but close to full grown, still pretty huge. I actually went out to see it better, but stayed close to the door. It paid me no mind.
Another moose. Early aughts. My dad and Maria liked to tell my mom there’s a moose in the garden every April 1st, and she fell for it every time. So one time my dad says a moose had come and she didn’t believe him. But there was: A full grown male, IIRC. It started munching on our trees, or some other muchable thing, and my dad didn’t like that. So he had the bright idea of throwing a stick to scare it away. The moose charged. If he had stood a little farther from the door, maybe I wouldn’t have a father anymore.
* She’s moved out, but she used to come here all the time when she lived in her old crappy apartment, and still comes fairly often. I currently live with my parents, will move out in November. It’s fairly common to move back to your parents in you live around Stockholm and are in your mid-20s, according to a recent article in Dagens Nyheter.
