Nonsense. I've even had hens that paired together to open doors – one flying repeatedly on the handle, another one pushing the door. And those were reform hens that seemed particularly blunt relative to their peers.
I agree with the sentiment, but Normans speaking a Breton variant of French… Oh gosh… And why "they"? What's with the lumping of 300+ million French speakers with the personal opinion of one person? What's that talk about relevance as if not being number 1 meant that the language was damned?
Nice anecdotes, but the last one is a misinterpretation that got me into a rabbit hole. "poe-tat" is juste "patate" and is widely used not the least because it's just faster to say than "pomme de terre" (following Zipf's law of abbreviation and the principle of least effort). It's more informal, but it's pedigree is excellent as it comes from Taíno via Spanish, was first recorded in 1582 and recorded by the French Academy in 1762… which was actually only the case for "pomme de terre" in 1835! It seems that "pomme de terre" referred to other tubers in the distant past, but that the famous agronomist Parmentier remarketed "patates" as "pommes de terre" in the 18th century to promote their acceptance.
And yet, you'd say "the House of the Virgin Mary" or "the House of Windsor" in English (which translate to "la Maison de la Vierge Marie", but the "Maison Windsor" in French). English grammar has incorporated a lot of key Romance features alongside its Germanic ones.
The term "Old English" is completely misleading in this context given how distant modern English is from that language. Both were spoken in England, that's about it. Applying the same logic to "France", should we then consider Gallo-Roman works like Ausonius's Mosella (c. 370 CE) to be "French" literature?
The Beowulf manuscript dates from around 975 CE and is written in what might be better termed Anglo-Saxon. How much can you understand from this random sentence: "þa me þæt gelærdon leode mine, þa selestan, snotere ceorlas"? ("So my vassals advised me well…) I personally can't understand a single word or even relate it in any way to the English I know.
On the other hand, the Sequence of Saint Eulalia was composed in "Old French" in 880 BCE and seems rather intelligible to me. I also just took a random sentence from the Chanson de Roland (c. 1100 BC) and can understand all of it: "Seignurs, vos en ireiz. Branches d’olive en voz mains portereiz, Si me direz a Carlemagne le rei Pur le soen Deu qu’il ait mercit de mei." I'd even go so far as to say that's closer to modern French than Shakespearean English despite being written in Anglo-Norman … Which also means it should probably count as being English literature if Beowulf qualifies…
I guess the lesson here is simply to remember that reality is always a lot more granular than we first expect and that any sweeping judgements on languages, countries, etc. over the span of millennia make very little sense. By that criteria, the linked article was pure clickbait to begin with.
Interesting mix of wood too. The 1619 viola has a very tight grain spruce top and the maple back has a beautiful curl. Same with the 2019 Beilharz cello and the 1785 Storioni violin – the curly maple really shows. The back on the 1705 Goffriller cello seems very plain on the other hand, and suprisingly so does the 1717 Stardivari's. The 19th century Hopf violin has nice curly maple, but the grain on the top seems extremely loose. Any idea how do these compare musically? And does someone know if Stradivarius ever used curly maple and when curly maple was first used for musical instruments?
In Italian, corporativismo has a distinct meaning that is unrelated to the concept of commercial corporations. It refers to a system of collaboration between social groups, represented through joint associations of employers and workers. Essentially, it is a state-aligned alternative to independent trade unions, a "national syndicalism" of sorts.
Muskotrumpia may excel in performance-based state capture, but fascism it is not. The anti-state culture of the U.S. clashes with the "everything for the state" ethos that defines fascism. We're simply entering textbook Caesarism territory.
In Western Europe at least, cows are kept in pastures, which are permanently dedicated to that use and not used as fields to grow crops. All in all, cows are probably only low carbon in premodern rural contexts in West Africa and Asia for instance.
> Multi-metallic systems often involve variable exchange rates between different classes of money, and I've mused that this might be something worth reintroducing to modern financial systems.
How and why? Even as arbitrage is easier to effect as ever? The point of the bimetallic system was that gold wasn't available in high enough quantities for the needs of the economy (monetary mass) and was too valuable for small-denomination coinage. Those aren't problems we currently have…
The eye of the beholder... I've had hens understand how to jump on handles to open doors. Certainly, they lacked the subtlety to shut up once they started gobbling up food, but they knew how to open doors, creep in and stay silent until they reached the kitchen. Nobody trained them to do so, and they certainly had never tried jumping against doors before that happened. Not only did a hen figure out what we were up to with those door handles but suddenly, from one week to the next, each one of our 4 or 5 hens got the memo. I'd venture the guess that most humans find it more convenient to disparage whatever creature they happen to exploit.
I was extremely pleasantly surprised by the fact that Ethiopians seem to sharre a proper understanding of terroir for qat and honey and, boy, are there major differences from one region to the next. (Astonishingly I didn't perceive anything similar for coffee, which was dark roasted almost everywhere I went, despite astounding bioclimatic and genetic conditions throughout the coffee belts.) The Chinese certainly have something like it, but probably more refined and articulated around much higher social classes. Certain teas were paired with mineral waters from a specific source for instance — that far exceeds the more rustic French notion of terroir.
That being said, terroir is something more that just "land" and includes the idea of common rules or ways of doing things, and of course genetics.
When a type of cheese can only use the highly creamy milk from a specific breed of cow, the result is highly specific and tasty, yet it doesn't express anything that's really related to the land itself at that stage. Camembert is widely understood as a typical terroir-expressing product, yet it would be pretty much the same if it were produced elsewhere than in Normandy with the same production methods, breeds, yeasts, and same access to pasture for cows for instance. It's the common approach that lends terroir to it. (Well, theoretically, because the an unpasteurized Camembert fermier will actually be more similar to a creamy, soft-ripened farmer's Brie than a pasteurized industrial Camembert, the slight difference is butterfat content notwithstanding).
The fetishizing actually transformed the way local products are perceived and grown, by lending importance to the idea that instead of going for something generic, we should be aiming to express something more, the way some grape varietal can express the underlying mineral bedbrock (as with Chardonnay in Burgundy's Chablis area, which is geologically a region of Kimmeridgian limestone). It's posh to some extent. I remember meeting a old wine producer from the Loire region at a wine tasting a few years back who was befuddled by some of the audience's questions and that basically asked us to keep the complex questions for his son because he had only been trained to make wine that was nice to drink in the same way his forefathers did and just had no idea in what way his soil and grapes were special because those were the only ones he knew.
A lot of it is fake/commercial gatekeeping and poring over details of DOC regulations can be quite disturbing at times. For instance, DOC foie gras produced from Barbary ducks, which cannot naturally deliver fat liver like geese and that were never used before being hyperselected by the French agricultural research institute INRA in the postwar era. Meat products or cheese that use generic methods that could be applied anywhere seem to be the worst offenders. DOC cheese with clonal lines of moulds, give me a break… DOC wine in Italy seems to be similarly impacted if I'm to believe Jonathan Nossiter of 'Mondovino''s fame. Interestingly, one of the Italian winemakers in his follow-up documentary 'Natural Resistance' actually says something along the lines of "there's no concept of terroir in Italian"" and basically everyone in that documentary use the French word. I really do think it's an interesting, elusive concept, but one that intuitively clicks with people throughout the globe that don't necessarily have as mature a word for the same ideas and that most French people don't necessarily understand either because of how commercialized it is and how prevalent the paradigm of uniformization has become. Everyone wants terroir, but Camembert uses albino moulds because everyone wants them perfectly white, cider comes with labels mentioning how the liquid might be cloudy but it remains perfectly safe to drink, etc.
Same in many countries in Europe. Also see France's South American forests in French Guyana. Much better managed than Brazil's. Incomparable, actually.
As others have noted, some printers (for instance Epson EcoTank) have printing costs that are pretty much on par with laser printers and almost no clogging issues. People usually don't take into account energy costs when buying laser printers (toner is typically kept warm from instant, no-preheating printing) and, crucially, laser printers are terrible for indoor air quality. I therefore reached the opposite conclusion as you…
Not in my experience. Have had one for several years, switch it on when I need and turn off for weeks at a time. Runs perfectly and total cost of ownership is already lower than the mid-range pro HP printer I had before.
Also laser printers draw a lot of power constantly, you may be confused here. The toner needs to be kept warm.
We mostly chose to travel by car to cover more ground. Some places were very peaceful (Dire Dawa, Bale…), but it only took us one day out of Addis before deciding to play "spot an AK-47" (a franchise based on our "spot a bunker" game in Albania). The only place outside the capital were we counted only one total was Lalibela, despite staying two and half days. We would easily see a dozen AK-47s every single day, plus an uncountable number of rifles from the 1930s and 1940s. Afar was not an outlier in that regard, despite pretty chill overall. Tigray I also liked and we had only positive interactions there, especially in and around Axum. I also wanted to mention that I hold nothing against Tigrayan militias, especially given what unfolded a few months later. Militias did not marginal by any means in Tigray, though we may simply have chanced upon some kind of operation to see as many as we did. They didn't seem particularly hateful or prejudiced against us in any case and we never got to talk with any due to the language barrier. Even the Oromo militias that arrested us were okay to be honest. Bigotry and supremacist thinking was something that I found mostly among Amharas from the capital capable of expressing themselves in English and the profound spite and mob-like violence was mostly an Oromia thing. We got our cheap and battered 4x4 stoned four times in Oromia villages for instance. It was so weird going from a place where we would get thrown rocks at to the very next where kids would be curious and nice, play football with them or letting them play with our camera, drinking tella or sharing qat with adults, etc.
Returning to the Afar, the story about tourists being gunned down was told to me by an embassy source, but it may have been unrelated, older than stated, or even plain false (the seeds of doubt are now sown in my mind!). The whole thing being at least in part a mafia protection racket was something I was told by the folk who set it up for us, however, and something that felt realistic at the time given that we were targeted for random things like trying to cross a government bridge without also paying for the barge that it replaced. I actually tend to believe that there would be more attacks if insecurity were the cause. Clearly, few travellers would go up to Dallol and then cheap out by refusing to pay 50 or 100 bucks for protection, especially seeing all those weapons around them.
The armed guard was actually the mafia you paid to visit. Some tourists got shot a few weeks before I went because they tagged along and hadn't paid the steep protection racket fee. Went a few years before you for something like 5 weeks, and violence was rife in the countryside. I saw dozens of refugee camps (people fleeing ethnic violence), a large number of torched cars or buses, got surrounded by hundreds of armed Tigrayan militia at one point, arrested by the Oromo militia, intimated or racketed more times than I can count, and even witnessed a village being emptied out by armed militias after a few hours notice in the midst of harvest season before being razed for the purposes of civil construction works (and razed it was…). Anything but a peaceful society. Safe at night… Yes, somewhat, but my father (who lived there) still got knocked unconscious and stripped to his knickers one night.