August Pieces Of My Mind #1

You don't have to commit genocide to get a ton of ubiquitin.

Borg dames? Groan.

Sounds like he’s got six hands and three guitars.

This is quite easy to do, if he's layering three different guitar tracks in the recording. Which is hardly a new technology: Alan Parsons used it to good effect on Dark Side of the Moon. (Yes, that would be the Alan Parsons who later formed a studio prog-rock band that released ten albums between 1976 and 1987. They never played live gigs because it wasn't possible at the time to recreate the studio sound on stage.)

I heard Mr. Thompson live in Stockholm two weekends ago. Sounded like three guitars etc.

"There’s a chemical compound called ubiquitin. Must be the opposite of unobtainium. "

Assuming that defines a scalar of rarity, where along that line would texmexium be?

Taking a clue from Alfred Hitchcock relating to MacGuffins, in this case of the elemental kind, might there not a Macguffin table of the elements?

Possibly an entire Macguffin universe made of Macguffin elements and operating according to the laws of Macguffin physics?

On tea: You do know that Darjeeling and Assam are geographical regions in India? If you grew Assam tea in Darjeeling, it would still be Darjeeling tea. It's like Chianti wine: you can only call it Chianti if it comes from that part of Italy. If it was grown anywhere else (including a part of Italy outside the defined region), you have to call it Sangiovese, which is the variety of grape used.

Wikipedia tells me that Darjeeling tea comes as white, green, oolong, and black. Most of it is marketed as black even if it isn't fully oxidized (and therefore would be considered oolong). The altitude has a strong impact: Darjeeling is in the mountains, just east of the eastern border of Nepal.

Assam / Darjeeling: that was kind of the joke.

To be horribly pedantic, I think Assam is a botanically distinct variety of Camellia sinensis from the variety used for Darjeeling. I like them both. Prepared right, Darjeeling isn't the least bit sour to my taste. Dry, certainly, like a fino sherry or madeira with a similar cask-aged woodsy flavor while Assam is almost hoppy like a beer. I assume you get your tea at Ikea so there's your problem right there.

Försoffad is a label I'd proudly own. But what about its opposite? My folks' neighbors are always out toiling in the vacant lot next door every weekend while I'm out smoking on the deck. When they're away my dad waters their plants and in return he can pick some berries. When they come back, they can tell he's picked some and will say something like "I see you've been picking some berries" to let him know. One Christmas, in return for my dad's watering and mowing their lawn all summer when they were away, they gave him ten perfectly ruled squares of Hardanger lefse. I've been looking for a word to describe that sort of close-fisted Protestant work ethic that fills me with disgust but nothing describing industry and diligence is sufficiently pejorative.

Seven of Nine playing board games?
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Mummies in Egypt began long before Age of Pharoahs, study shows http://phys.org/news/2014-08-embalming-rewrites-key-chapter-egyptian.ht…

My mummy is from 1927. I am visiting her in the geriatric ward later today, she is in for a blod transfusion.

(Skeptic Alert: We've got a live one:) "Indians Used to Burn Water for Heat" http://freethoughtblogs.com/dispatches/2014/08/14/co-republican-indians…
Fracking is OK because something something firewater?

Did Richard Thompson play his wonderful version of Britney Spears's 'Oops! ... I Did It Again' - I don't think that needed more than the usual number of hands but it did require big cojones to break down the musical barrier.

He did not, but I've heard it on his live record 1000 Years of Popular Music. Good stuff!

Re.“becouched”
Other literal Swedish terms/words (Courtesy of The Local.) :
Gums: tandkött (tooth-meat)
Weed: ogräs (un-grass)
Tjuvlyssna/eavesdrop (thief listen)
Hospital: sjukhus. Sick house.
Vegetables: grönsaker. Green things.
Straw: sugrör (suck pipe /suck tube)
Nipple: breast wart.
Bruise. Blåmärke. Blue mark.
Vacuum-cleaner: dammsugare. Dust sucker.

"Before they left Africa, early modern humans were 'culturally diverse' http://phys.org/news/2014-08-left-africa-early-modern-humans.html

Interesting! Thanks Birger!

Birger @13: How many of those are specific to Swedish, and how many are loan translations?

The German word for hospital is Krankenhaus. Literally, "sick house." So that one may be indigenous. But the German word for hydrogen is Wasserstoff (literally "water stuff"), which is a loose translation of "hydrogen" from Greek to German.

I've seen examples in Chinese as well. Their word for telephone, dianhua, literally means "electronic speech". And their word for traffic light, honglu, combines the words for "red" and "green".

Eric, Swedish versions of originally German words and concepts are very common, so maybe all the examples?
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"Possible eruption at Bárðarbunga" http://volcanocafe.wordpress.com/2014/08/17/possible-eruption-at-bardar…
A volcano where the Icelanders used to bung bards?

I'm not so sure about the word for weed ("un-grass"). Although wheat, rye, barley, etc. are technically grasses, I'm sure people grow other crops, and at least in English-speaking countries we have come to associate "grass" with a landscaping feature that rich people in the 18th century developed to impress other rich people ("Let's use perfectly good agricultural land to raise an utterly useless, high maintenance crop!"). So maybe that concept was borrowed from English. Then again, the concept of "weed" existed in Elizabethan England (one of John Dowland's songs, which Sting recorded on his lute album, includes the word).

At Eric Lund. Ever hear of Les Paul? He pretty much invented over-dubbing, etc.