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From what I gather from Finnish media, so far there’s not a lot known about what happened. Russian sabotage is one of the likelier possibilities, but the weather’s been sucky here on the south coast of Finland, and so a ship dropping an anchor where it shouldn’t, either because of confusion, navigational error, or panic, is also fairly thinkable. Finland hasn’t raised its military readiness (there were some news reports saying that, but that was a mixture of the new prime minister getting the… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Kattullus at 1:46 AM on October 12, 2023

I took a glance at Finnish media again, and with the admittedly large caveat that my Finnish language skills are rudimentary, it seems that Finnish authorities have determined that the damage to the pipeline can’t have been caused by divers or a submarine. The most likely culprit is a Russian four-decade-old ore and oil carrier, SGV Flot, which was stationary near the pipeline. The shipping company says that the ship was merely sheltering from the storm, and while that is plausible, some feel it… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Kattullus at 7:53 AM on October 12, 2023

The Finnish police have released a statement, The investigation is now focused on the role of the vessel Newnew Polar Bear. Excerpt: The police have established in the criminal investigation that the movements of the vessel Newnew Polar Bear flying the flag of Hong Kong coincide with the time and place of the gas pipeline damage. For this reason, the investigation is now focused on the role of the said vessel.

[…]

Yesterday the National Bureau of… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Kattullus at 1:43 PM on October 20, 2023

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posted to MetaFilter by Kattullus at 11:34 AM on October 17, 2023

I think it’s a great essay, I just came to MetaFilter to post it, but I’d like to nitpick Sandifer’s argument that Time Rag, a song I really like, is consciously a “rap song”. The earliest attested use of “rap” in the meaning of “rap music” is over a year after the song comes out. Now, I agree with Sandifer that Baez has incredibly fine-tuned antennae, but I find it incredible that she was among the very first people in the world to talk about “rap” in that sense.

Now,… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Kattullus at 9:28 AM on October 16, 2023

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There’s a blog, largely a comprised of quotations from books the blogger was reading, and given that the he committed suicide, it’s hard not to read the entries as meditations on death and reasons to keep living. He typed up the whole of Averno, which is my favorite Louise Glück collection. I don’t know for sure if it helped him, but I imagine it did, at least for a while. I don’t know if Averno helped me, but it’s a great book, and its final lines have stuck with me.… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Kattullus at 2:52 AM on October 15, 2023

It’s remarkable how the vibe of everyone on-set changes when Elliott Smith starts playing the song, they all seem like people who’ve all fled their god’s command to seek truth and beauty, and then that song rises from the deep and swallows them all, even the puppet.
posted to MetaFilter by Kattullus at 2:38 PM on October 13, 2023

Sontag is really underrated as a short story writer. I have a collection of her complete short stories, and they’re never less than interesting, and though she has her faults as an author, as a rule the flaws are interesting in their own right. If you like the Way We Live Now, I’d recommend getting a copy from your local bookshop.
posted to MetaFilter by Kattullus at 8:34 AM on October 13, 2023

Home video shows apprehensive Putin in sweatpants – Yle publishes images from secret trip to Finland is an odd little story about a trip Putin took to Finland in the 1990s, back when he was an functionary in the St. Petersburg municipal government. Excerpt: This is pre-rich Putin, Putin in a bad shell suit, with a bad haircut, bad vest, doing everyday dad stuff,” says Luke Harding, Russia expert and former Moscow correspondent for the British newspaper The Guardian.

The… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Kattullus at 3:10 AM on September 26, 2023

I have been feeling the same, UN, but I found solace in the unlikeliest of sources, an in-depth report by Patrick Wintour in The Guardian about changes within the politics and bureaucracy of the European Union (no seriously). The EU is an organization which is dominated by inertia, and so once it starts moving in a certain direction, it takes a lot to slow it down, and it’s definitely moving in the direction of opposing Russia and supporting Ukraine. Excerpt: “The EU has changed. There is no… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Kattullus at 4:53 AM on October 4, 2023

Here’s a podcast episode where Kate Riga, of Talking Points Memo, interviews her colleague Josh Kovensky, who was a reporter in Ukraine before joining TPM, and Tim Mak, who was the Ukraine war correspondent for NPR before they let him go and he started The Counteroffensive. It has a lot of good info on the state of the war, of Ukraine away from the front lines, as well as what’s going on in the US Congress with aid for Ukraine (though it was recorded before McCarthy was ousted). I found the… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Kattullus at 7:18 AM on October 9, 2023

NBI: Cause of pipeline damage was likely mechanical, not an explosion from YLE News is a good overview of the current state of knowledge about the damage to the gas pipeline between Finland and Estonia. Excerpt: Finnish officials on Wednesday said it was not likely the damage to a pipeline between Finland and Estonia was caused by an explosion, but noted the line had been physically damaged.

The National Bureau of Investigation's (NBI) probe into the suspected sabotage… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Kattullus at 9:52 AM on October 11, 2023

The New York Times had a report on the battle of Avdiika yesterday, which provides plenty of context. If you’ve been following events in Ukraine for a while, you’ll remember the town from a battle in 2017 which was perhaps the last time before 2021 that people were worried that war was going to break out.
posted to MetaFilter by Kattullus at 1:33 AM on October 12, 2023

Oh, there's a blue joke towards the middle of the set, in case you're at work or have kids around.
posted to MetaFilter by Kattullus at 12:52 AM on October 7, 2023

Oh! I forgot to mention that Pera is joined on stage for the podcast bit by musician Ryan Dann.
posted to MetaFilter by Kattullus at 3:59 AM on October 7, 2023

The one year Alex Shephard didn't write his prediction article, he guessed correctly (on Twitter so not linking).

Personally, I haven't connected with Fosse's prose works, but I love his plays and poems.
posted to MetaFilter by Kattullus at 4:27 AM on October 5, 2023

philip-random: am I terrible person for pointing this out? And I suppose I should allow for English not being the man's first language, but even so (and yes, this is maybe my biggest single grammar peeve), unique cannot be qualified and/or contextualized

Unique has a range of meanings, it can mean “one of something”, as you have it, but it can also mean “characteristic of something” (e.g. her love of the jazz accordion is unique to her) or just simply… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Kattullus at 12:02 PM on October 5, 2023

kyrademon: Anyway, if someone wanted to read Jon Fosse, anyone have a recommendation on where to start? How about Annie Ernaux or Abdulrazak Gurnah?

I’ve never connected with Fosse’s prose works, but if you can find a staging of one of his plays, which I feel will probably be more common now, I’d absolutely recommend going to a show. I don’t think English translations of his poems have been published in a book, but if you google his name plus poems,… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Kattullus at 12:07 PM on October 5, 2023

The reason why scholars take acrostics seriously is that Greeks and Romans developed that technique very far. The most extreme is fourth century CE poet Publilius Optatianus Porphyrius, who I made a post about way back when.
posted to MetaFilter by Kattullus at 10:02 AM on October 5, 2023

My son is eight, he is completely unable to parse a page of google search results, just doesn’t have the training to filter out the noise for the worthwhile links, while he understood DuckDuckGo’s results just fine. I have a feeling google will be dominant until it suddenly isn’t, because it’s getting sooooo bad at the one thing its users want.
posted to MetaFilter by Kattullus at 11:42 AM on October 3, 2023

atrazine: -Literature and History

Of all the podcasts I listen to (many mentioned here already, but let me shout out The Bugle and Kermode & Mayo’s Take) the one I feel most protective of is Literature and History. It’s such a remarkable undertaking, making lengthy episodes about often obscure but historically important books, and being clear and entertaining, that it’s just somewhat mindboggling that it’s all just one guy, Doug Metzger, who also… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Kattullus at 1:40 AM on October 3, 2023

I’ve been using browser YouTube Music for music, and it’s benefited from Google’s negligence of it. Now I worry it’ll be a focus and will slowly go to shit like everything else Google focuses on.
posted to MetaFilter by Kattullus at 2:28 AM on September 27, 2023

dis_integration: Of course the real irony is that the effort to "de-Nazify" Ukraine has made the Ukrainian Nazis more powerful than they had been since the 2nd world war.

You are wildly misinformed. In the last Ukrainian parliamentary election, far right parties received about two and half percent of the vote. The far-right candidate did no better in the last presidential election.

There’s currently one far-right… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Kattullus at 7:36 AM on September 26, 2023

mazola: I found this piece thoughtful and helpful.

Ling drew most of his conclusions about the activities of the Waffen-SS Galicia division from a book written by the son of a veteran of the unit. With the best will in the world, it’s hard not to think that a son is at least somewhat biased towards his father.

I went looking for more information about the book, which I’ll note was published by a reputable academic press, but… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Kattullus at 2:38 PM on September 26, 2023

I liked Actually, the Biggest Roman Empire Freaks Are Women by Luke Winkie in Slate. Excerpt: Ayelet Lushkov, another professor at UT who counts herself as a lifelong Rome obsessive with a particular interest in Latin literature, goes a step further. She argues that the version of the Roman Empire men might claim to be captivated by—codified in highly aestheticized video games and films, crimson blood splattered on shining porcelain walls, wanton decadence and excess, Joaquin Phoenix pointing… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Kattullus at 8:43 AM on September 23, 2023

mistersquid: Every person on Earth, not just men, should daily think about the Roman Empire because the Empire never ended.

I enjoyed that little essay (though it derailed my evening for about fifteen minutes on a fruitless quest to learn the origins of the last name Hydomako) but it made the common error of taking a quote of Philip K. Dick’s and try to explain it as if it was written and thought by a reasonable person. Here’s the opening paragraph:… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Kattullus at 11:22 AM on September 24, 2023

This is a very well executed performance, I find their hyperreality kinda uncomfortable to look at, but the skill with which it’s presented is amazing.

In the interview they sound so much like everyone I know of my early millennial generation who went to drama school, that my wild guess is that they’re actors in their 30s.
posted to MetaFilter by Kattullus at 10:40 PM on September 20, 2023

I remember reading an article gadzoinks ago about a statistical comparison between all the world’s languages, and English was a huge outlier, in the top ten of languages that were the least similar to other languages. But unfortunately I can’t find it.
posted to MetaFilter by Kattullus at 11:29 AM on September 19, 2023

I wish they’d credited the writers. For instance, “Chuckles Bites the Dust” was written by the great David Lloyd who also wrote some of the finest episodes of Frasier, including the brilliant “Ham Radio”, when Frasier Crane directs a radio play. Incidentally, I’d absolutely have put that on a list of best tv episodes.
posted to MetaFilter by Kattullus at 11:14 AM on September 19, 2023

On the one hand, if Minhaj had just said right at the beginning “of course these aren’t real, they’re jokes”, this wouldn’t have been a story. As well, he shouldn’t have been a dick to his high school girlfriend. I don’t know exactly where the boundary is, I mean he’s entitled to telling his story, obviously, but using photos of her, blurred though they were, is clearly far over the line.

On the other hand, and I should preface this by saying that I think extremely… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Kattullus at 12:16 AM on September 17, 2023

My point wasn’t that Minhaj did nothing wrong, but that American culture holds white people to different standards than people of color.
posted to MetaFilter by Kattullus at 5:25 AM on September 17, 2023

Rannazzisi lied about being in the World Trade Center on 9/11, Minhaj exaggerated the seriousness of the death threats he received. No one disagrees about the fact that he received those death threats.

To paraphrase another stand-up comedian, one is perjury in the first degree, the other perjury in the ninth.
posted to MetaFilter by Kattullus at 1:39 PM on September 18, 2023

dhammond: repeating demonstrably incorrect lies about how this sort of expose wouldn't happen to people who aren't "brown"

Not one white standup comedian who has had his stand-up routines fact-checked in this manner has been mentioned in this thread.

Rannazzisi didn’t talk about 9/11 as part of his comedy routine, it was something he said in interviews.
posted to MetaFilter by Kattullus at 2:36 PM on September 18, 2023

Etrigan: It wasn't just on stage.

Yes, that's my point. Again, I'm not implying that Minhaj did nothing wrong. I say in my first comment in this thread that he stepped way over the line when he included pictures of his ex-girlfriend in his set. But that Minhaj's stand-up routines are considered reportage seems wildly different to me than the Rannazzisi case.

There's a sentence in Malone's story which I've been thinking about a… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Kattullus at 3:39 AM on September 19, 2023

I can’t find it online, but if I’m not misremembering wildly, John Oliver used to have a routine about watching the tv show 24 with Bill Clinton. I think it actually happened, it started off as a story he told on the Bugle podcast, but as far as I know no one ever questioned it, even though the point of the joke was that the former president had really strange ideas about spycraft and law enforcement.
posted to MetaFilter by Kattullus at 10:17 AM on September 19, 2023

I realize this is starting to become a bit of a derail, but I’ve found the Bugle episode where Oliver recounts the anecdote. It’s number 65, which you can listen to in mp3 form here.

Oliver tells the story pretty much right away, after talking about swimming with turtles. It’s a little bit different from what I remember, Clinton merely talks about 24 to Oliver and an extremely random group of dinner guests in the former president’s hotel room.
posted to MetaFilter by Kattullus at 11:05 AM on September 19, 2023

Some years ago I picked up the Margaret Jull Costa translation of The Book of Disquiet. I read about a hundred pages and quit because it was deathly dull. There was nothing obviously wrong with the translation, the sentences were interesting, and cohered well with the text around it, but the whole thing felt like a bunch of airy nothings.

Much later I confessed my non-understanding of Pessoa to someone well read in Portuguese literature, and he told me that the version… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Kattullus at 3:13 AM on September 17, 2023

Finally, Rubiales has announced he’s resigning (The Guardian).
posted to MetaFilter by Kattullus at 2:04 PM on September 10, 2023

Spain’s World Cup-winning squad to continue boycott of national team by Suzanne Wrack in The Guardian. Excerpt: All but two of Spain’s 23-strong World Cup-winning squad have signed a statement saying “not enough” has been done to make them feel safe and respected and said that they will not be available for selection for the national team.

In a two-page statement the players express their “enormous dissatisfaction” at the events that followed their World Cup win,… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Kattullus at 2:12 PM on September 15, 2023

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posted to MetaFilter by Kattullus at 11:12 AM on September 15, 2023

This is such a weird, slapped together list. For starters, it doesn’t have a single song by a non-anglophone artist. It’s also got a bunch of factual errors, probably the most glaring of which is that Jay Kay isn’t dancing on “moving sidewalks” in the Virtual Insanity video, but that the room is on rollers, and is being moved around, and the camera is attached to the room, giving the illusion that the floor is moving.

Also, Hammer and Tongs (a.k.a. Garth Jennings and… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Kattullus at 11:57 PM on September 13, 2023

The vicious hatred of female internet pioneers in the early years of this century, Heather Armstrong and Julie Powell also spring to mind immediately, is a really stark example of how the patriarchy will always find willing foot soldiers to do its dirty business.

We had a technology that was presented to the world as an opportunity for human beings to connect in new ways, present themselves in full, be open and free, but the moment it was women doing that and talking… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Kattullus at 1:20 PM on September 13, 2023

Faint of Butt: It's great that she's happy living her life and all, but as far as I know she still hasn't recanted her defense of one of the UK's most dangerous transphobes, so ::shrug::

I know there was debate about whether it counted as a recantation or not, but Izzard criticized that transphobe for escalating rhetoric in a radio interview earlier this year.
posted to MetaFilter by Kattullus at 7:38 AM on September 12, 2023

In Icelandic “robot” is “vélmenni” (machine-man), and if the robot isn’t man-like then the prefix “vél” is used with whatever is most appropriate.
posted to MetaFilter by Kattullus at 12:11 AM on September 11, 2023

In this particular case it’s because “robot” doesn’t mesh well with Icelandic grammar. In a related case, the loanword “bot” became “botti”, which works well, and so the neologism “þjarkur” seems to have lost out. Purism is policy, but policy isn’t language. I’ll note that even before it was policy, it was practice in Iceland, that words which didn’t have obvious routes to being Icelandicized, lost out to neologisms.

That said, yeah, cultures with a rich tradition of… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Kattullus at 6:38 AM on September 11, 2023

Sorry, in Icelandic it’s “sjónpípa” (vision pipe, literally).

And I’m not sure mafia counts because it’s a proper noun.

Incidentally, if you want other languages to check against, Japanese and Vietnamese both have rich traditions of forming neologisms.
posted to MetaFilter by Kattullus at 1:38 PM on September 11, 2023

Well yes, Icelandic has plenty of loanwords that are in common use, for example "kaffi" and "fax" for "coffee" and "fax". My point wasn't that there are no loanwords in Japanese, but that Japanese-speakers have a tradition of creating neologisms that goes back centuries.
posted to MetaFilter by Kattullus at 5:45 AM on September 12, 2023

I remember coming across Colin Hay's Beautiful World, knowing nothing about him, on a MP3 blog, and being completely blown away. At his best, his songs sound like he's just coming up with them in the moment, just improvising them spontaneously.
posted to MetaFilter by Kattullus at 7:43 AM on September 11, 2023

YLE News, the Finnish public broadcaster’s English language service, has an interesting article about what analysts can tell from satellite images of Russian military bases near the Finnish border. It has some interesting things about how the Russian military’s logistics are functioning. Here’s an excerpt: Images reveal that a large gabled hall was built amid the cannons and tanks stored at the depot in early July. It was probably made using the same technique as the news structures in Alakurtti,… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Kattullus at 3:38 AM on September 10, 2023

Miko: I had hoped there was a very good reason like the one you’v e mentioned, The River Ivel and Katullus. That feels right and is definitely something that’s just inscrutable to an American.

Funnily enough, this is something I got to know from working in an agency for the blind in the US, though after that I started to notice it in other contexts as well. Older people who’d lose their sight wouldn’t own radios, but they’d have TVs that they’d start… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Kattullus at 1:51 AM on September 10, 2023