Uri

Black and white photo of a clean shaven white middle aged man wearing a shirt and tie and fiddling with the dials of an electro-theremin

For anyone who’s curious, this is what Paul Tanner actually looked like.

Ĥaĥa! Mdr (=multe da ridoj), even :)

That's sad to hear. Alexander's Ragtime Band does manage to avoid racial stereotypes better than you'd expect for a song of that topic and era. And Berlin did write Supper Time, years before Strange Fruit. Though he also wrote plenty of c*** songs (including the original Puttin' on the Ritz).

Favourite musicals

The JRB one is hilarious! What about Falsettos (namechecked in Act 2 but not covered AFAICT)? As an aside, here are my Top 100, but I'm not saying which is top: flic.kr/p/2qMXEHr

In increasing order of pain:

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of...

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grammy_...

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of...

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Academy...

PS Ooh! Just discovered that it also has the Canadian provinces: not just 🏴󠁣󠁡󠁱󠁣󠁿 but also 🏴󠁣󠁡󠁮󠁵󠁿 and the rest!

(Interestingly, my Linux laptop also supports some other non-RGI flags like 🏴󠁵󠁳󠁯󠁨󠁿 and 🏴󠁵󠁳󠁮󠁭󠁿, but not the rather more useful 🏴󠁵󠁳󠁰󠁲󠁿 or 🏴󠁥󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿. Though at least it renders those as a flag with a question mark, rather than just 🏴.)

As an aside, the 🏴󠁵󠁳󠁴󠁸󠁿 emoji for Texas isn't an RGI sequence, and so is unsupported on many platforms: including on iOS, where it displays as 🏴. Which is even more useless than most unsupported sequences like 🐱‍👓, which at least display meaningful sequence constituents.

Similarly zucca and zucchini in Italian (from the same Latin root). By analogy, maybe English should call courgettes gourdies?

People of England, your attention please. If you count yourself as an ally of trans people, here's an opportunity for real assistance. Good guide in quoted post, but do please use your own words where you can.

Consultation open until 11.59pm on 25 June 2024 (BST). www.gov.uk/government/c...

I think Hi-gens is more common in British English: eg see www.oed.com/dictionary/h... or www.collinsdictionary.com/dictionary/e...

Œstrogène by L'Oréal

I expect the transition will be quicker this time too, given that the 1.0 phase is already dominated by big companies. It took almost 10 years to go from Napster/Kazaa to Spotify/Deezer.

Does this require a simple majority of the 15+2 judges?

To be fair, pancake day is the most underwhelming carnival/mardi gras substitute I know of.

So in some weird-ass calendar the UK tax year does still start on New Year's Day :)

...have been a leap year under the old calendar and the Treasury didn't want to miss out on any revenue.

It's actually a cool story why! It used to be March 25, which was also New Year's Day when the year number changed. When GB adopted the Gregorian calendar and moved NYD to Jan, it was moved to April 5 so that 1752 would still be a full tax year. And in 1800 it was moved to April 6 as that would...

It's December, so here are a collection of end of year digital housekeeping tasks you can do while chilling out for the holidays in order to improve your privacy and security for entering 2024 on a good footing. You don't have to do all of them, but they're stuff to consider!

As an aside the 249 ISO 3166-1 "countries" is the reason why there are two US flag emoji: 🇺🇸 (US) and 🇺🇲 (US Outlying Islands).

To get to 150 you'd need to exclude countries like Estonia, Trinidad and Tobago and Cyprus (if by population) or Kuwait, Jamaica and Lebanon (if by area). It really doesn't work.

195 is UN full + observer members. 197 is that plus Taiwan and Kosovo. 249 is ISO 3166-1 codes, which includes dependent territories too. Struggling to think how you can get less to less than 193 though (UN full members).

That's right. Ancient Greek ὀκτώποδες > Byzantine Greek ὀκταπόδια > Modern Greek χταπόδια. The stress change accompanied the switch to a diminutive form (more obvious in the singulars).

(Also if you want to go for the full boustrophedon experience, you could omit word spaces and allow line breaks in the middle of words)

Jains too

Next you’ll tell me that "Roman" =\= man who rows.

So it looks like bsky converts PNGs to JPEGs and, on the app at least, reduces the resolution. Here's an external link that might be more readable: i.imgur.com/VHejqZ8.png

How some music bands got their name: the etymologies of 58 band names from 10cc to ZZ Top. (message me if you'd like a text version as this is too big to fit here)

The origin of various band names. Not all of these have been covered by @andrewhickey.bsky.social's 500 Songs podcast yet, so apologies for any mistakes!

According to Wikipedia: "This may be the result of a gravitational interaction between NGC 4622 and another galaxy or the result of a merger between NGC 4622 and a smaller object."

Apparently Arnie wanted to dub Terminator himself but his Austrian accent was considered too 'rural'. Though IIRC Andrew Sachs did dub himself in Fawlty Towers.