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Post by Verbivore on Feb 9, 2019 9:34:59 GMT
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Post by Dave Miller on Feb 9, 2019 12:34:10 GMT
Randomly found the following and thought it "different" enough to share. A different beat …Would Ginsberg et al. approve? Kevin McCloud’s Grand Designs beat poem. Oh, I enioyed that! Kevin McCloud is one of my heroes and I always enjoy his “essay to camera” at the end of each episode of Grand Designs. He has a great way with words and with mocking himself - always appealing to me.
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Post by Verbivore on Feb 9, 2019 13:33:30 GMT
Randomly found the following and thought it "different" enough to share. A different beat …Would Ginsberg et al. approve? Kevin McCloud’s Grand Designs beat poem. Oh, I enioyed that! Kevin McCloud is one of my heroes and I always enjoy his “essay to camera” at the end of each episode of Grand Designs. He has a great way with words and with mocking himself - always appealing to me. As a consumer of very little tv (and what I do choosily access is on line) I'm no great fan of so-called lifestyle shows – with the exception of McCloud's Grand Designs (the Antipodean version just doesn't cut it the way KMcC can). He has a most delightful way of dealing with the Grand Delusions of some house-owner/builders/renovators without putting down the individuals – plays the ball, not the [insert your preferred noun for Homo sapiens]. And, as Dave commented, he mocks himself – rather typical (to my interpretations) of British humour, and endearing. As I've seen it for a lo-o-ong time, there are two basic humour elements that separate UK/AU (which are quite of a kind, ours just reinterpreted a tad for the Antipodes) from US humo(u)r: 1. Who's the brunt of the joke?* In British/AU humour the joke is usually on the teller, self-mocking – not the audience. * Many Americans take themselves (and their issues) so seriously that they can't laugh at themselves, so the joke is on the audience, or some defenceless, absent third party. (Generalisation I'm happy to be better informed on … .) 2. Filth* British/AU humour treats sex / scatology / toilet humour very differently from Americans'; an overarching hygiene complex precludes laughing at a turd, for example. The Brits do it cleverly; Americans do it crassly. (Another generalisation, but how wrong is it?)Dave in CA: I'm sure there are Americans who appreciate British humour – whacky stuff like the Pythons seemed to have worked in the US from its sheer zaniness – but my observations above are from my – rarely enthusiastic – exposures to "entertainment tv" and a range of show clubs, in Oz and the US, the latter in the early 80s. I'd like to hear your take on it. How do you perceive UK/AU humour v US humor?
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Post by Little Jack Horner on Feb 10, 2019 0:06:54 GMT
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Post by Verbivore on Feb 10, 2019 11:46:33 GMT
That was interesting, LJH. Thanks.
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Post by Twoddle on Feb 10, 2019 11:48:15 GMT
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Post by Verbivore on Feb 10, 2019 12:19:53 GMT
More – thanks, Twod. I recall seeing the first half of that some time ago, but have no memory of the rest. Mr Fry is always entertaining and provocative and, even though at times I have difficulty accepting his take on something, I enjoy his style of argument and presentation. His is that dry, intellectual, often lexical humour – the thinking person's humour perhaps – that I've enjoyed most of my life, despite being a born-and-bred rural Aussie (is it perhaps my 4-way British genes?) and he uses it to great effect in "pushing barrows". I am inclined to agree with all S Fry's pronouncements on religion, but my inner pedant occasionally bristles at his linguistic liberalism / extreme descriptivism. He's an interesting and challenging Bear of Very Large Brain.
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Post by Little Jack Horner on Feb 12, 2019 13:58:27 GMT
Despite the plethora of rubbish on YouTube, there is also some good stuff. Whilst browsing recently, I came across an item called “The Brachistochrone” which turned out to be a discussion about the properties of various polygons and curves including many with which I was unfamiliar such as roulettes; cycloids; and prolate and curtate trochoids and it mentioned a means by which square wheels can roll smoothly along a suitable track. Specifically, a brachiostone is a curve which, if constructed as the slope of roller-coaster would result in a configuration such that a trolley released at any point on the track would arrive at its destination at the same time as another trolley commencing at the same time at any point on an exactly parallel track. Here is the video— m.youtube.com/watch?v=skvnj67YGmwOf particular interest to me was the passing reference to the fact that “ingenious” and “ingenuity” are etymologically distinct. It turns out that ingenious derives from the Latin ingenium meaning mother-wit, whereas ingenuity derives from the same source as ingenuous, i.e. the Latin ingenuus meaning free-born or noble. It seems surprising that not only are ingenious and ingenuity etymologically different but also that ingenuous and ingenuity are etymologically identical. Maybe, other visitors to this forum know this but I was surprised. Maybe those who knew this might like to see the presenter of the video riding a bike (hardly a bicycle) with square wheels.
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Post by Twoddle on Feb 12, 2019 19:43:56 GMT
Thanks LJH. In my cycling days I sometimes wondered whether there was a name given to the way a point on a wheel's outer surface travelled, and now I know it's a cycloid. It used to interest me that, on every revolution of the wheel, that point accelerated from zero speed (relative to the ground) to a maximum speed, and then decelerated back to zero for an infinitely small period of time. On the other hand, relative to the axle, the wheel rotates at a steady speed (given a steady speed for the bike). Does that point on the wheel experience repeated acceleration and deceleration, or a constant centripetal/centrifugal force? The latter, I imagine, because it wouldn't notice any change if the wheel were to leave the ground.
The UK's fifty-pence and twenty-pence coins, despite having seven sides, have a constant diameter and are designed to roll through slot machines smoothly. Apparently the shape's known as an "equilateral-curve heptagon" or "Reuleaux polygon".
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Post by Verbivore on Feb 12, 2019 21:16:57 GMT
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Post by Twoddle on Feb 12, 2019 23:25:29 GMT
It's to do with peer groups, isn't it? My French tutor has lived in England for much longer than she lived in France but still has a French accent. She tells us that her eldest daughter, now twenty, has a very refined English accent and uses correct grammar, her middle daughter speaks with a local accent, and her youngest daughter, whose boyfriend hails from east London, has adopted a guttural, glottal-stop, dropped-aitch manner of speaking that drives the mother to distraction.
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Post by Verbivore on Feb 13, 2019 9:26:44 GMT
Over my two years in North America I cultivated are far more Aussie accent than I'd used at home. Perhaps it was an assertion of identity, to keep company with my boomerang/kangaroo t-shirts. It was a good time to be there – particularly Canada – as Oz had just won the Americas Cup, and any Aussie, or Kiwi, was welcome to the cup; the Canadians knew they couldn't win it, and because of their antipathy to both the British and Americans, they wanted us or the Kiwis to win (they must like us).
It was a good time to assert my Aussie-ness, I suppose, and I was the unintentional toast at many a party or other gathering.
When I returned home, I never quite regained the "refinement" I'd left behind, and to this day speak a tad more Strine than I was raised to do. Example: Until NA, I'd never used g'day as a greeting; in NA I used it all the time – and the habit stuck. Pre-NA friends and acquaintances commented on that, but no-one ever suggested I'd gained an "American" accent. On the other hand, if I spend much time with British persons, I can catch myself somewhat parroting their speech.
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Post by Verbivore on Feb 14, 2019 8:09:05 GMT
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Post by Verbivore on Feb 19, 2019 5:23:35 GMT
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Post by Verbivore on Feb 19, 2019 21:30:42 GMT
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