start a victory garden and ration your IRRATIONALLY ANGRY feelings, part 3

Because that's how we say it.

Rhymes with "Greg."

But I thought Americans were all about nobly trying to standardize English spelling and remove inconsistencies where possible? It's like my longstanding (intensely tedious, I can only apologize) bugbear about "Auld Lang Syne" and where/how/why/when the idea took hold that it was pronounced, "Auld Lang Zyne", I mean, why, wtf?

my name's pasta

i can't tolerate people who spell my first name wrong

― assawoman bay (harbl), Friday, 24 February 2017 00:21 (sixteen hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Lookit I don't wanna start a fight but we haven't even established that you pronounce it correctly so I mean

there is only one way to pronounce my name so that is not the problem. the problem is people who need to make all Cs Ks and all Is Ys and add Es to everything.

tom d powerfully otm

XP skilfully avoiding my cross examination imo!

C'mon, my fellow Americans, "ai" is a diphthong and it is not pronounced like "eh." I've always pronounced "Craig" to rhyme more or less with "vague." Is this a regional thing?

when you're typing an address into Google maps and the address you want autocompletes so you move to click on it and the damn address CHANGES right as you do that

C'mon, my fellow Americans, "ai" is a diphthong and it is not pronounced like "eh."

How do you pronounce the word "said"?

saw-yeed

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/7/7b/Sayidlost.PNG/250px-Sayidlost.PNG

the idea took hold that it was pronounced, "Auld Lang Zyne"

I'm no linguist, but I suspect this wasn't the result of an idea, but another example of Grimm's Law. The dipthong ng is voiced and it is simpler to follow it with a z than an s.

I'm no linguist either, is there another example where an S sound becomes a Z sound? Anyway it's Scots and no-one in Scotland says "Auld Lang Zyne".

is there another example where an S sound becomes a Z sound?

How do you pronounce the word "realise"?

At the start of a word.

.. or even, 'The dipthong ng is voiced and it is simpler to follow it with a z than an s.'

We need La Lechera to sort this for us.

Bread that is double-packaged, in a cellophane wrapper inside a plastic bag.

When I'm out somewhere with my two year old, say in a checkout line or at a park, and some dickhole adults come up behind us or next to us and have loud, profanity-laden conversations. Irrational because I'm sure I did this kind of thing once upon a time. But if I could press a button that made ice-pick shaped hailstones fall from the clouds and into their skulls...

we dial into our calls through our computer now using a special headset rather than phones. it's nice and convenient, but it makes your voice sound more clear and realistic than the phone does. which is cool and all, but like HD did to visuals, it amplifies noise that would normally not be heard.

there's this one guy who smacks his lips and clears his throat every call and on phones, I'd never notice it, but on these calls I can practically hear the mucus and saliva with great clarity and it's just gross. he can't possibly know he's doing it.

worst is that he adjusts his headset which is something everybody does and usually it doesn't make noise, but here it makes a disgusting rubbing sound, like ToeJam and Earl were getting freaky in a bathtub.

I keep wondering if I should tell him but it's not like he's doing it on purpose, it's just the technology makes it all crystal clear, including the gross stuff that used to be in the background

^at work, i mean

It's pretty common where I work for people to just ask "whoever's making noise" (we all know) to go on mute.

Oh i do that all the time. This guy is making the noise while he's presenting though. It is just that the headset and clear quality of the sound is picking up his excess lip smacking and throat clearing that his cell phone/desk phone never did

Weirdly he's the only one i notice it with though.

When I'm on a work conference call I need to remember to mute before I open a beer.

lol.

It's a la croix, I SWEAR.

the worst thing like that that ever happened to me was when I first became virtual and got my new laptop. for whatever reason, I guess the system was set up as such so that when I logged into WebEx the first time, it immediately flipped my camera on.

I'm the type of guy who likes to roll out of bed the way I am and work, as we don't do video conference calls. so I was shirtless. and we're in a meeting with like 30-50 people, and my web cam comes on, and shirtless me shows up in a small square on screen, capturing my head, my neck, and shoulders/top of my torso (no nipples, thankfully).

There was a 3-4 second delay between me seeing that on my screen and my project leader messaging me "your web cam is on", and I jumped beneath the table, then popped back up to where I could flip off the web cam but not appear in its line of vision.

omg

I've had people on conf. calls forget to mute while they were taking a piss

I have coworkers who have been on conference calls, wear their headsets into the restroom AT WORK, and have had to go "yeah, uh huh" while standing at the urinal to cover the fact they were peeing

haha. I usually try to tell them in the instant messenger "brb" so I can do that, but then half the time during meetings nobody reads it and then calls on you anyway, so there have been a few times where I took the phone into the bathroom w/ me, always on mute, just in case.

training after lunch is the worst, cos I'll have all this caffeine to re-energize me and it overstimulates my bladder, and when you're the trainer, it's kind of awkward if you say "uhhh, I need a moment, sorry", because then everybody else steps out of the room and you come back and everybody's chattering/not ready to go. and learners don't like it if you break too soon after lunch as it spaces the day out weird. so yesterday I'm evaluating people in simulations and my bladder is about to explode, but we're slightly behind schedule so I got ambitious and tried to delay the break to the two hour mark.

by the time it was time to release them, I had to talk like the micro-machine man and sprint to the bathroom, which fortunately was only 50 feet away. the joys of working at home.

the downside to the latter is if you have roommates and your stupid brother comes out singing Billy Joel at the top of his lungs not knowing you're on a call. glad I live alone now.

in theatre you have to be careful to turn mic packs off if you're going to do that.

I did South Pacific once in this troubled community theatre production, and we were having an off-night, and Billis is on stage after "Honey Bun", and the guy playing Emile Debec (who was so paranoid about messing up his hair, he put a plastic bag over his head when he took shirts on and off), apparently mistimed how much time he had. he was supposed to show up on stage to talk to Billis, who was now alone, but well, instead he opted to take a shit.

Many theatre companies entrust their actors to turn their mic packs on before going on stage, but this one didn't. They were always on, but the sliders were down until the appropriate cues were reached, then they would turn them up for that performer. So this dude's in the bathroom when he's supposed to be onstage talking to Billis, who is now frantically trying to stall by himself for about a minute. By the time the cue arrived, he'd already done his business, so fortunately THAT didn't make the airwaves, but he hadn't flushed yet.

so moments later, the auditorium of about 500 people was treated to Emile Debec flushing a toilet in surround sound, followed by someone barking at him to get on stage and him running without his shirt tucked in all the way. Billis turns to him and SCREAMs, not even in character "LOOK WHO FINALLY DECIDED TO SHOW UP'. and in Noises Off fashion, the director, who resembled Bilbo Baggins a little, came waddling backstage angrily, asking everybody "what's the distraction? What's the distraction?"

I would see that show

the "not now" button in notifications, which really means "we'll nag you every few days until you say yes":

• Would you like to turn on notifications? (Yes | Not now)
• Purchase this product/service today! (Learn more | Not now)
• Give us your phone number for added security (OK | Not now)

AVG antivirus is now basically just bragging that it exists, endless notification windows telling me it's up to date

disgraceful

the one thing stopping me going back to windows is the prospect of all the nagware/adware built into windows 10 and anti-virus apps

You want irrationally angry? It really bugs me that for years people were saying the cavendish banana was doomed, and that there was this blight that was going around killing all the plants. There were tons of articles, I want to say there were two books.

This book came out in 2008: https://www.amazon.com/Banana-Fate-Fruit-Changed-World/dp/0452290082

Here's New Yorker article from 2011: http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2011/01/10/we-have-no-bananas

Washington Post 2015: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2015/12/04/the-worlds-most-popular-banana-could-go-extinct/

NPR a year ago: http://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2016/01/11/462375558/our-favorite-banana-may-be-doomed-can-new-varieties-replace-it

BBC a year ago: http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-35131751

And here we are now, with plenty of bananas. I love bananas. I don't want bananas to die. I want them to save the bananas. But how can something so common be on the verge of extinction for coming up on 10 years, with no signs of being on the verge of extinction? Maybe they are in fact on the cusp of extinction. But prices are stable, store shelves are stocked ... so what's the story, banana industry?

fake news iirc

yes we have no bananas.

bananas went extinct 7 years ago when they were replaced in stores by monster fingers

Yellow journalism

lul

uh, didn't the panic cause a lot of caution about soil and plant contamination across continental boundaries? and a lot of research in place just in case widespread contamination occurs

it's like people saying a lack of vaccination could cause the resurgence of whooping cough on a wide scale and shrugging because no one you know has whooping cough

I don't think so, since that stuff happens in isolated clumps (it happened here last year) but a crop-threatening banana blight would affect literally every store, thousands of stores, everywhere, since every store has bananas, and so far nada. Anyway, the most recent articles I cited just above - and there are a ton more - were from just a year ago. And they've been appearing regularly for almost a decade. And yet I have not yet seen the "we did it, good job everyone!" article.

Maybe bananas truly are on their way out, at least these bananas. But there have been other produce or products faced with threats or shortages, and it's typically reflected in, well, shortages, and higher prices. Like, a year or two ago, when drug war stuff in Mexico affected the lime crop? Those are limes, grown all over the place, but they were being sold for like 2/$1 one summer, or more, and restaurants were forced to do without them for budgetary reasons. But you'd think a decade of "bananas are doomed" would have some impact, but nothing so far, save a bunch of "bananas are doomed" stories.

No, it'd pop up in isolated clumps, and if those aren't dealt with, then the disease could spread. Kind of like how cities with the emerald ash borer attacking ash trees will systematically cut down all the affected ash trees -- that's been going on in my city for the last couple years.

Farms in Australia, where the banana problem has been reported, have been doing just that: destroying every affected plant to make sure it doesn't spread. In humans, we're a little nicer and go with a quarantine.
http://www.abc.net.au/news/2016-11-01/industry-starts-destroying-plants-on-infected-banana-farm/7981732