Sanzo, who is a lot like Goku—there are pix, but we’ll have to get more organized.
And, officially, Maddy ii, a platinum butterfly fin.
We’ve been worried because the fishes are so spooky and don’t seem to be eating much, though we’ve had temperatures more like April than June—but I think we may have hit critical mass with these two new ones: the fish generally race now between the pump (depth) and the shallower waterlily clump. But they ARE moving, and are getting restless. This is much more normal behavior, instead of huddling close in cover. Now they’re making forays out to explore, and have established a second ‘safe place’ to go to. This is good.
We have also gotten the water clear as drinking water—I got clever and ordered 10 feet of HVAC blue-white filter that is meant to filter air. THIS gets the pollen that was clouding the water. (Pine and cedar, we think.)
Anyway, we did observe them eating a bit. I’ve also ordered some special food—silkworm husks, probably silkworm remains, which are now being sold commercially by Hikari (food). This is a staple of koi diets in Japan, and they are generally very highly colored.
Yay for more fishes! You may indeed not have had enough before the new additions. Funny how “critical mass” works. Of course, “safety in numbers” is the driving force at work — that’s why they school. Can’t resist asking if they teach Reeling and Writhing in your Koi school . . .
Those two links I left you ( both here: https://theowlunderground.wordpress.com/2017/06/07/a-treat-for-eye-and-mind/ ) had some gorgeous pictures of golden koi and some just garden variety koi, but lots of beautiful scenery, and David Attenborough narrating — but if he bugs you, you can just turn the sound off and watch the pictures. It goes into the ecology of the rice paddies. The Japanese have been farming rice for so long, the rice paddies have developed their own unique ecology. I’ve been retreating more and more to such places as a refuge from the train wreck of the current presidency.
Long time ago, back around 1980, I went to a dinner at the “Proud Bird” in L.A. with a friend. They had a pond with koi next to the entrance. One of them was, I swear, big enough to carry Trident missiles – it was at least two feet long. (And begging for food. Not exactly a request, when they’re that size.)
I used to go to a restaurant with a huge koi pond in front of it. The building was something between Japanese and Tiki. The restaurant floor was broken into islands by streams with koi in them.
It was a wonderful place to eat, but eventually changed into a private club or something. Maybe the health laws tightened?
The Proud Bird was like a club house for Continental Airlines. How do I know? I want out with a Continental gate agent about 30 years ago.
It’s currently being rebuilt into a “food bazaar” and meeting center. But the planes will still be there. (IIRC, it was a computer meeting. Either ACS or SigGraph.)
Continuing to work on the hypertension. The fishes do a great job in that regard when all is going well.
Do the fish at school also study Rhythmic Ticks and go on to Higher Rhythmatics?
So, a big brother / sister and six little fishes constitutes enough for a critical mass mini-school? Hey! You could add a magnet and make it a magnet school. All right, that does sound a bit fishy, but carp-eh piscem? :grins:
I’ve been enjoying a few of the “Begin Japanology” videos on YouTube the past week. These are just under 30 minutes each and strong on information and local color compared to recent Western infotainment documentaries. They’re done by a British outfit in Japan.
I gave up and ordered a crock-pot, as I still don’t know where mine is hiding in storage. Very likely, the Tex-Mex (and any other) cookbooks I had, I will need to replace. This will give me a reason to try out more Asian and Tex-Mex home cooking. — My wok, however, *did* make it safely here, for which, I am immensely grateful, as it’s become one of my favorite cooking tools.
There are likely to be soba and udon noodles on my grocery list, and white and red miso paste, though I don’t yet really know how to cook with miso paste, just that I want to try something.
I am still puzzled why the Japanese did not abandon Chinese kanji in favor of hiragana and katakana. I wonder how they’ll change in a few hundred years.
I wish I could make sense of why Irish spelling insists on such bizarre holdovers from earlier centuries, instead of reducing down somehow to a sensible system that reflects modern pronunciation. I’m sure there are regular patterns, but without knowing the language, I’m frequently dismayed when I see words or names. I keep running into Irish names when looking up things for character naming or just rummaging around lately. :shrugs:
My new desk and bookcase finally arrived, but friends have yet to come by to help put them together. Yes, prefab, but they should be serviceable. The boxes do look nice….
I’m not sure that the Japanese WANT to abandon kanji…..hiragana and katakana are closer to Roman and Greek language structure than to Chinese. We haven’t abandoned our alphabet to a different symbology, either. The Roman and Greek characters are several thousand years old. They work for US. Why not extend the same logic to the Japanese? They work for them. Granted, there are 4 different symbologies…kanji, hirakana, katakana, and Romanji. You might note that Chinese also includes Arabic numerals, though, as most languages are now using them.
As for keeping holdovers from previous centuries, I think it’s important to do that, otherwise, we lose sight of where we were and from where we’ve come. I love the sound of pure Irish, but don’t understand a single word, just like I like to hear someone speaking in Russian, and I don’t understand much past “Dah!”, “Nyet!”, “Spasibo”, “Dos Vedanyah”, or “nekulturny”…..
BCS: the modern Irish spelling currently being taught/used in Ireland is a revised, modernized form of spelling which semi-reflects modern pronunciation (I say “semi” because Irish has many, broadly differing dialects and so won’t reflect all of the pronunciation variants by any means). For example, the word for “new” is spelt “nua,” whereas historically (that is, until the Irish Republic government got ahold of it), it would have been spelt “nuadh,” but the “dh” had become silent in enough dialects that they dropped the etymologically correct, older spelling.
I hate the new, Irish spelling because I can’t recognize the etymological roots and cognates of half the words (or remember them for that matter). The primary Celtic language I know is Irish’s sister tongue/dialect, Scots Gaelic, which has kept many of the older spellings.
English too uses older spellings (think “knight” which orthographically is distinguished from “night”). The advantage of retaining prior phonetic features in spelling is that the reader can more easily recognize what word is meant than when the writing system reflects pronunciation more exactly.
@BlueCatShip — English has the same problem. The printing press was invented right in the middle of a great transition period in English: It was in the middle of the great vowel shift (shift in pronunciation), and all the leftover bits of “no longer pronounced that way” spellings from Anglo Saxon hadn’t been weeded out, nor Norman French fully homogenized into the language, nor had all the different regional dialects been averaged out and the corresponding variations in pronunciation, declension, and the spelling variations that entailed. Let’s face it. When it came to setting type, Caxton was just winging it.
Re: Irish I think there was a bit of bloody mindedness in the Irish spellings — to make it as hard as possible for English speakers to learn to read the language. Irish spelling is every bit as arcane as French spelling, and the French have never felt obligated to pronounce all the letters in a word either, as far as that goes.
The major problem with all of it is the printing press. If you regularize and sort out the spelling, that leaves you with all those books printed before you did that. What do you do with them? How do you decide (and who decides) which books will be “transletterated” to the new spelling, — and who pays for it? Of course, somebody could come up with a “transletterating” computer program to scan them into, that would regularize the spelling and put them in e-book form, but you still have this vast amount of “pre-spelling-regularizing” printed knowledge and literature that suddenly becomes way less accessible to us ordinary people types.
I think the Spanish have the best idea. They have for centuries had a “College” that decides what is Spanish and what isn’t, and they decide what new words to let into the language, how they will be spelled and add them to the dictionary. They also keep the spelling updated. Spanish, I think, is the easiest language to learn to read. The pronunciation rules are so easy, anyone who knows the pronunciation rules could pick up a text in Spanish and read it correctly, even if they had no clue what it meant.
There’s a discussion of Irish spelling/pronunciation in the current Open thread at Making Light. There’s a reason why it’s spelled as it is, even if it would appear to be smarter to fix it.
Two things that helped to contribute to the general weirdness of English were the fact that when the 4 major dialects of early modern English got mushed together one may have contributed the pronunciation of a word and another one the spelling of it [sorry, too lazy to look up the references but Shakespeare is loaded with them]
The other factor is one I heard in a Historical Bibliography lecture: A lot of early English printing was actually done in the Netherlands due to taxation and censorship issues. You are more likely to get logical orthography if a printer can actually read what is being printed. [I haven’t heard this one from other sources, maybe Hanneke has some input]
Another language that is very regular is Ukrainian. I used to read Ukrainian news articles to my dad, whose first language was Ukrainian but he didn’t read it. I had no idea what I was reading, but I could follow cyrillic script. We could jointly figure out what was going on.
Heh, well, I’m sorry I gave the impression I thought the Japanese would just drop the Chinese kanji. My thought is that the Japanese will likely transform them or drop them as time goes on, in favor of hiragana and katakana, which are syllabic and simpler. The Chinese have a much harder problem with their system in how to find something simpler that fits the Chinese languages and is from China, not elsewhere.
Oh boy, am I familiar with how odd (and why) English and French spelling are what they are, and yes, those date back about a thousand-plus years now, and aren’t likely to change except very gradually.
Irish and Scots Gaelic spelling: I do get, from a little reading, that the ‘I’ has to do with vowel length, and the ‘h’ (or a dot) have to do with soft and hard consonant changes in how words change form based on grammatical forms. So I know there are good reasons in there, etymology being part of it too. It’s just that I’m perplexed, looking at it without knowing how it works and how it’s pronounced.
Yes, I like things like that; like hearing Irish or Russian or Japanese, other languages, without understanding them. — And there is something fascinating in how we can figure out bits and pieces at times without knowing a language. Sometimes we can understand an emotional tone and intent and sometimes not, and glean a hint about the words being used that way. It’s fascinating how it’s possible to pick up some things yet be so confounded by others when trying hard to understand each other.
Just recently, I heard a song in the “Imagine Project” by Herbie Hancock with guest artists (singers, musicians). This included a song which may have been with India Ariye, in which she (or some female singer) has background lines in an African language, probably a translation or expansion on the English words. I don’t know what language it was, Swahili or some other. But I was struck with how beautiful it was, and yet I don’t know a thing about the language. It was gorgeous. (I’ll have to hunt up the song title and see what I can google up about it.)
Heh, well, I’m sorry I gave the impression I thought the Japanese would just drop the Chinese kanji. My thought is that the Japanese will likely transform them or drop them as time goes on, in favor of hiragana and katakana, which are syllabic and simpler. The Chinese have a much harder problem with their system in how to find something simpler that fits the Chinese languages and is from China, not elsewhere.
Oh boy, am I familiar with how odd (and why) English and French spelling are what they are, and yes, those date back about a thousand-plus years now, and aren’t likely to change except very gradually.
Irish and Scots Gaelic spelling: I do get, from a little reading, that the ‘I’ has to do with vowel length, and the ‘h’ (or a dot) have to do with soft and hard consonant changes in how words change form based on grammatical forms. So I know there are good reasons in there, etymology being part of it too. It’s just that I’m perplexed, looking at it without knowing how it works and how it’s pronounced.
Yes, I like things like that; like hearing Irish or Russian or Japanese, other languages, without understanding them. — And there is something fascinating in how we can figure out bits and pieces at times without knowing a language. Sometimes we can understand an emotional tone and intent and sometimes not, and glean a hint about the words being used that way. It’s fascinating how it’s possible to pick up some things yet be so confounded by others when trying hard to understand each other.
Just recently, I heard a song in the “Imagine Project” by Herbie Hancock with guest artists (singers, musicians). This included a song which may have been with India Ariye, in which she (or some female singer) has background lines in an African language, probably a translation or expansion on the English words. I don’t know what language it was, Swahili or some other. But I was struck with how beautiful it was, and yet I don’t know a thing about the language. It was gorgeous. (I’ll have to hunt up the song title and see what I can google up about it.)
I barely remember learning (a long time ago in librarian school) that the Netherlands were a bit of a printing hub in the early years, because of less censorship and regulations, and being a trade hub with good connections to transport the books; but don’t really remember anything more.
Off topic, yesterday I followed a link from Rachel Neumeier’s blog to a video of an ice skating pair that I think some people on here might like:
“This video of French skaters Vanessa James and Morgan Ciprés performing a choreographed routine to Disturbed’s rendition of Simon & Garfunkel’s classic hit “The Sound of Silence.””
This makes me want to mention some more, related, recommendations that I hope some people here will like.
People who like Patricia McKillip’s books might also like to try Rachel Neumeier’s The City in the Lake.
Rachel got the link for the skating video from another new writer I also like, Stephanie Burgis. Her lovely MG book The dragon with a chocolate heart just came out in the USA, and I can really recommend it for anyone who likes chocolate, dragons, and reading books written for a younger audience.