Meme - "The "Make A Wish" foundation really came through for little Billy: *Kid in hospital bed with nurse [?] flashing him*"
Meme - "Les premiers jours d'un Français à Montréal
"Trop chers les forfaits téléphones"
"Y a pas ça en France"
"Troy marrant leur accent"
"C'est où pour acheter de la weed?"
"Y a pleins de Français ici"
"Et ça fait combien eu euro ?"
"La France est championne du monde de football"
"Trop cher le vin ici, mais j'ai encore mes deux bouteilles que j'ai ramené dans ma valise"
"Comment on va aux Chutes du Niagara?"
"C'est où La Banquise?"
"Ah mais y a d'autres villes au Québec ?"
"700$ une chambre dans une coloc? Ca va j'ai encore des euros"
"En fait le Plateau c'est le Petit Paris"
"je vois pas de caribou"
"Un écureuil !"
"Les Québécois sont gentils"
"Jpensais qu'il y avait de la neige en septembre, j'avais apporté ma doudoune hihi"
"MDR donner un pourboire ?"
Meme - "*La pizza con l'ananas* Che schifo, ma come si fa a mettere la frutta su un piatto salato? Con il prosciutto pure, che vergogna...
*Prosciutto e Melone* SPETTACOLO!!!"
Why floor sitting is healthy and feels good. - "If the big message from the 2000s and 2010s was “Every office worker needs a standing desk,” then “Everyone should sit on the floor” is the 2020s-era sequel"
There's no evidence for this, so
Why Chopin Wrote Less Piano and Orchestral Music Than You Can Count on Your Two Hands - "“In a Mozart or Beethoven piano concerto if you removed the orchestra and told the pianist to play their part alone you’d be left with a bare bones structure. There would be some beautiful themes, some beautiful moments, and then there would be these very dull and uninspiring passages because you would be missing the core of the work. Now in Chopin if you take away the orchestra for the most part you would still end up with a fully-fledged and well-developed work. When the orchestra comes in it adds something – another layer – not instead of the piano, not in place of one of the piano themes or capabilities, but yet another layer, and more beauty.” “I think Chopin also had an interesting vision of how the orchestra instruments sounded which didn’t always translate well into reality. He’d write small details that were very important but could never be heard in the modern concert hall and are even difficult and challenging to register on a recording. “For example, there are solos by woodwind instruments that don’t have the power to project and don’t have the power to actually be louder than the piano, especially the modern pianos. We’re dealing with writing that sometimes is very thin. As a pianist that just requires you to adjust to find also the color of the orchestra and gather inspiration from what those musicians are doing and how they’re shaping the phrases.”"
Too bad this doesn't answer the question posed
‘Anything is possible’: why Iceland has become a classical music powerhouse - "Perhaps we have the country’s sluggish cultural development to thank for that. While the rest of the world was busy erecting barriers between music genres last century – roping off classical music, in particular – Iceland was simply trying to get things going. There was no time wasted deciding who was allowed to listen to what. For much of the second half of the 20th century, classical orchestral music felt new in Iceland. Here, the symphony orchestra was a postwar institution, not a 19th-century one."
Teen stabbed to death over sweet-and-sour sauce outside DC McDonald's - "A 16-year-old girl was stabbed to death outside a Washington, DC-area McDonald’s in an apparent dispute about sweet and sour sauce over the weekend. Naima Liggon, of Waldorf, Maryland, was allegedly killed by another 16-year-old girl outside the fast food chain in a popular nightlife section of the city around 2 a.m"
Why Arabs Lose Wars - "There are many factors—economic, ideological, technical—but perhaps the most important has to do with culture and certain societal attributes which inhibit Arabs from producing an effective military force... John Keegan, the eminent historian of warfare, argues that culture is a prime determinant of the nature of warfare. In contrast to the usual manner of European warfare which he terms "face to face," Keegan depicts the early Arab armies in the Islamic era as masters of evasion, delay, and indirection. Examining Arab warfare in this century leads to the conclusion that Arabs remain more successful in insurgent, or political warfare—what T. E. Lawrence termed "winning wars without battles."... These attributes included over-centralization, discouraging initiative, lack of flexibility, manipulation of information, and the discouragement of leadership at the junior officer level... In every society information is a means of making a living or wielding power, but Arabs husband information and hold it especially tightly... the Arab educational system is predicated on rote memorization... The emphasis on memorization has a price, and that is in diminished ability to reason or engage in analysis based upon general principles. Thinking outside the box is not encouraged; doing so in public can damage a career. Instructors are not challenged and neither, in the end, are students. Head-to-head competition among individuals is generally avoided, at least openly, for it means that someone wins and someone else loses, with the loser humiliated. This taboo has particular import when a class contains mixed ranks. Education is in good part sought as a matter of personal prestige, so Arabs in U.S. military schools take pains to ensure that the ranking member, according to military position or social class, scores the highest marks in the class. Often this leads to "sharing answers" in class—often in a rather overt manner or junior officers concealing scores higher than their superior's. American military instructors dealing with Middle Eastern students learn to ensure that, before directing any question to a student in a classroom situation, particularly if he is an officer, the student does possess the correct answer. If this is not assured, the officer will feel he has been set up for public humiliation. Furthermore, in the often-paranoid environment of Arab political culture, he will believe this setup to have been purposeful. This student will then become an enemy of the instructor and his classmates will become apprehensive about their also being singled out for humiliation—and learning becomes impossible. Arab junior officers are well trained on the technical aspects of their weapons and tactical know-how, but not in leadership, a subject given little attention. For example, as General Sa'd ash-Shazli, the Egyptian chief of staff, noted in his assessment of the army he inherited prior to the 1973 war, they were not trained to seize the initiative or volunteer original concepts or new ideas. Indeed, leadership may be the greatest weakness of Arab training systems. This problem results from two main factors: a highly accentuated class system bordering on a caste system, and lack of a non-commissioned-officer development program. Most Arab officers treat enlisted soldiers like sub-humans... The social and professional gap between officers and enlisted men is present in all armies, but in the United States and other Western forces, the noncommissioned officer (NCO) corps bridges it... Most of the Arab world either has no NCO corps or it is non-functional, severely handicapping the military's effectiveness... The show-and-tell aspects of training are frequently missing because officers refuse to get their hands dirty and prefer to ignore the more practical aspects of their subject matter, believing this below their social station. A dramatic example of this occurred during the Gulf war when a severe windstorm blew down the tents of Iraqi officer prisoners of war. For three days they stayed in the wind and rain rather than be observed by enlisted prisoners in a nearby camp working with their hands. The military price for this is very high. Without the cohesion supplied by NCOs, units tend to disintegrate in the stress of combat. This is primarily a function of the fact that the enlisted soldiers simply do not trust their officers... Decisions are made and delivered from on high, with very little lateral communication. This leads to a highly centralized system... The politicized nature of the Arab militaries means that political factors weigh heavily and frequently override military considerations. Officers with initiative and a predilection for unilateral action pose a threat to the regime... Taking responsibility for a policy, operation, status, or training program rarely occurs.. A lack of cooperation is most apparent in the failure of all Arab armies to succeed at combined arms operations... This problem results from three main factors. First, the well-known lack of trust among Arabs for anyone outside their own family... the complex mosaic system of peoples creates additional problems for training, as rulers in the Middle East make use of the sectarian and tribal loyalties to maintain power... Middle Eastern rulers routinely rely on balance-of-power techniques to maintain their authority... combined arms exercises and joint staffs create familiarity, soften rivalries, erase suspicions, and eliminate the fragmented, competing organizations that enable rulers to play off rivals against one another... Arab regimes classify virtually everything vaguely military. Information the U.S. military routinely publishes (about promotions, transfers, names of unit commanders, and unit designations) is top secret in Arabic-speaking countries. To be sure, this does make it more difficult for the enemy to construct an accurate order of battle, but it also feeds the divisive and compartmentalized nature of the military forces. The obsession with security can reach ludicrous lengths. Prior to the 1973 war, Sadat was surprised to find that within two weeks of the date he had ordered the armed forces be ready for war, his minister of war, General Muhammad Sadiq, had failed to inform his immediate staff of the order... In terms of safety measures, there is a general laxness, a seeming carelessness and indifference to training accidents, many of which could have been prevented by minimal efforts... When they had an influence on certain Arab military establishments, the Soviets reinforced their clients' cultural traits far more than, in more recent years, Americans were able to"
From 1999
Squatting Slavs: One of the internet's best-known memes is evolving - "Looking at some of the recently made posts by the most popular Slavic meme pages supports the argument that, despite all their flaws, such jokes have played a positive role in strengthening the relationship between emerging Europeans based on laughing at our shared experiences."
Expensive Engagement Rings Linked to Higher Divorce Rates - "The study was titled ‘A Diamond is Forever’ and Other Fairy Tales: The Relationship between Wedding Expenses and Marriage Duration. It successfully found the correlation between marriage success and marriage prices. Though they stated that the price tag and the marriage duration was “not or inversely associated,” they found enough correlation that one can start naming the ceiling on wedding spending."
Meme - Marty McCusker: "Buy physical media, you own nothing otherwise."
"Your Discovery content will be removed soon
PlayStation: Dear PlayStation Customer, As of December 31, 2023, due to our content licensing arrangements with content providers, you will no longer be able to watch any of your previously purchased Discovery content and the content will be removed from your video library. Click here for a ful list of affected tiles that will no longer be supported, We sincerely thank you for your continued support Thank you, PlayStation Store
PLAY HAS NO LIMITS"
DiscussingFilm on X - "Christopher Nolan says there’s concern of content disappearing from streaming services.” “There is a danger, these days, that if things only exist in the streaming version they do get taken down, they come and go.”"
Guillermo del Toro on X - "Physical media is almost a Fahrenheit 451 (where people memorized entire books and thus became the book they loved) level of responsibility. If you own a great 4K HD, Blu-ray, DVD etc etc of a film or films you love... you are the custodian of those films for generations to come."
Meme - "If paying for games is not owning
Then pirating them is not stealing"
Meme - "Ubisoft Touts Subscription Services As The Future Of Gaming, Says Players Need To Start "Feeling Comfortable With Not Owning Their Games""
"(If) Paying for games is not owning
(Then) Pirating them is not stealing"
Meme - "Me waking up at 2 am instantly knowing that my calf is cramped and I will soon endure the pain of a thousand suns"
Hidden Gem Travel Destinations You Should Absolutely Visit - "If you're anything like me, deciding where to take your next international getaway is one of the most challenging decisions to make. There are so many incredible places to see. And while the big tourist cities — like Greece or Tokyo or Paris — are popular for a reason, perhaps you're looking for something more off-the-beaten path."
At What Age Does Our Ability to Learn a New Language Like a Native Speaker Disappear? - "In one of the largest linguistics studies ever conducted—a viral internet survey that drew two thirds of a million respondents—researchers from three Boston-based universities showed children are proficient at learning a second language up until the age of 18, roughly 10 years later than earlier estimates. But the study also showed that it is best to start by age 10 if you want to achieve the grammatical fluency of a native speaker... There are three main ideas as to why language-learning ability declines at 18: social changes, interference from one’s primary language and continuing brain development. At 18, kids typically graduate high school and go on to start college or enter the work force full-time. Once they do, they may no longer have the time, opportunity or learning environment to study a second language like they did when they were younger. Alternatively, it is possible that after one masters a first language, its rules interfere with the ability to learn a second. Finally, changes in the brain that continue during the late teens and early 20s may somehow make learning harder... Perhaps even more important than when one learns a language is how. People who learned via immersion—living in an English-speaking country more than 90 percent of the time—were significantly more fluent than those who learned in a class... In what could be the most surprising conclusion, the researchers say that even among native speakers it takes 30 years to fully master a language. The study showed a slight improvement—roughly one percentage point—in people who have been speaking English for 30 versus 20 years. The finding is consistent for both native and non-native speakers."
The Most Popular Types of Language Tattoos - "Japanese tops the list of languages with an impressive 231,240 searches a year. It is closely followed by Chinese with 184,800 searches. This could be due to these languages using symbols in their writing that many may find aesthetically pleasing. Arabic is the third most popular language to get tattooed, with 81,600 annual searches. Celebrities such as Selena Gomez, Angelina Jolie and Rihanna have Arabic tattoos, which could help boost their popularity. At the bottom of the top 10 is English, with 9,240 searches. Hindi only just misses the top 10, coming in just after English with 8,040 searches. "
Meme - "Thought my Uber app was messing with me
*mass of cars* *accident*"
Meme - "Terrible recipe, I replaced the chocolate with used motor oil and it tasted like used motor oil"
255 Ways to Spell Schwarzenegger (According to Water Cooler Trivia Participants)
Clearly, people are racist for not being able to pronounce ethnic surnames
New York state could force Chick-fil-A to stay open on Sundays in the name of 'the public good' - "The Rest Stop Restaurant Act would force any businesses along the New York State Thruway to stay open every day of the week to accommodate travelers. The Thruway is a system of highways that spans approximately 570 miles across the state of New York. It operates under its own authority, the New York State Thruway Authority."
Everything Is Broken - "“There are still many good individuals involved in medicine, but the American medical system is profoundly broken. When you look at the rate of medical error—it’s now the third leading cause of death in the U.S.—the overmedication, creation of addiction, the quick-fix mentality, not funding the poor, quotas to admit from ERs, needless operations, the monetization of illness vs. health, the monetization of side effects, a peer review system run by journals paid for by Big Pharma, the destruction of the health of doctors and nurses themselves by administrators, who demand that they rush through 10-minute patient visits, when so often an hour or more is required, and which means that in order to be ‘successful,’ doctors must overlook complexity rather than search for it ... Alana, the unique thing here isn’t that you fell down so many rabbit holes. What’s unique is that you found your way out at all.” I had barely started processing this when Norman moved to change the subject: “Now, can I ask you two something? How come so much of the journalism I read seems like garbage?”... For seven decades, the country’s intellectual and cultural life was produced and protected by a set of institutions—universities, newspapers, magazines, record companies, professional associations, cultural venues, publishing houses, Hollywood studios, think tanks, etc. Collectively, these institutions reflected a diversity of experiences and then stamped them all as “American”—conjuring coherence out of the chaos of a big and unwieldy country. This wasn’t a set of factories pumping out identical widgets, but rather a broad and messy jazz band of disparate elements that together produced something legible, clear, and at times even beautiful when each did their part. But, beginning in the 1970s, the economic ground underneath this landscape began to come apart... Flatness is the reason the three jobs with the most projected growth in your country all earn less than $27,000 a year, and it is also the reason that all the secondary institutions that once gave structure and meaning to hundreds of millions of American lives—jobs and unions but also local newspapers, churches, Rotary Clubs, main streets—have been decimated. And flatness is the mechanism by which, over the past decade and with increasing velocity over the last three years, a single ideologically driven cohort captured the entire interlocking infrastructure of American cultural and intellectual life. It is how the Long March went from a punchline to reality, as one institution after another fell and then entire sectors, like journalism, succumbed to control by narrow bands of sneering elitists who arrogated to themselves the license to judge and control the lives of their perceived inferiors... Today’s revolution has been defined by a set of very specific values: boundarylessness; speed; universal accessibility; an allergy to hierarchy, so much so that the weighting or preferring of some voices or products over others is seen as illegitimate; seeing one’s own words and face reflected back as part of a larger current; a commitment to gratification at the push of a button; equality of access to commodified experiences as the right of every human being on Earth; the idea that all choices can and should be made instantaneously, and that the choices made by the majority in a given moment, on a given platform represent a larger democratic choice, which is therefore both true and good—until the next moment, on the next platform... The Obama administration could swiftly overturn the decision-making space in which Capitol Hill staff and newspaper reporters functioned so that Iran, a country that had killed thousands of Americans and consistently announces itself to be America’s greatest enemy, is now to be seen as inherently as trustworthy and desirable an ally as France or Germany... The biological difference between the sexes, which had been a foundational assumption of medicine as well as of the feminist movement, was almost instantaneously replaced not only by the idea that there are numerous genders but that reference in medicine, law or popular culture to the existence of a gender binary is actually bigoted and abusive... Facebook’s longtime motto was, famously, “Move fast and break shit,” which is exactly what Silicon Valley enabled others to do. The internet tycoons used the ideology of flatness to hoover up the value from local businesses, national retailers, the whole newspaper industry, etc.—and no one seemed to care. This heist—by which a small group of people, using the wiring of flatness, could transfer to themselves enormous assets without any political, legal or social pushback—enabled progressive activists and their oligarchic funders to pull off a heist of their own, using the same wiring. They seized on the fact that the entire world was already adapting to a life of practical flatness in order to push their ideology of political flatness—what they call social justice, but which has historically meant the transfer of enormous amounts of power and wealth to a select few... So, instead of reflecting the diversity of a large country, these institutions have now been repurposed as instruments to instill and enforce the narrow and rigid agenda of one cohort of people, forbidding exploration or deviation—a regime that has ironically left homeless many, if not most, of the country’s best thinkers and creators. Anyone actually concerned with solving deep-rooted social and economic problems, or God forbid with creating something unique or beautiful—a process that is inevitably messy and often involves exploring heresies and making mistakes—will hit a wall. If they are young and remotely ambitious they will simply snuff out that part of themselves early on, strangling the voice that they know will get them in trouble before they’ve ever had the chance to really hear it sing... Seduced by convenience, we end up paying for the flattening of our own lives... This disconnect between culturally mandated politics and the actual demonstrated preferences of most Americans has created an enormous reserve of unmet needs—and a generational opportunity"
Fascinating on X - "In 2012, a Burger King employee anonymously posted an image on 4-chan of him putting his feet in lettuce, with the caption: "This is the lettuce you eat at Burger King." It took 20 minutes for people to track down the branch the employee worked at and contact the news. The next morning, Cleveland Scene Magazine contacted the Burger King establishment and talked to the breakfast shift manager, who, upon seeing the offending photo, said, "Oh, I know who that is. He's getting fired.""
Wilfred Reilly on X - "Cheating on your partner is "making out on up" with another human being. This is virtually the universal definition, from every etiquette, etc book I have ever read ("A gentlemen does not have mistresses"). Him being nice to waitresses, or Her reading erotica, is not "cheating." A great deal of modern Internet culture involves bizarre control freaks describing behavior that would shatter almost every actual relationship as mandatory. I once had an upper-middle class Rules-reading partner who actually sounded like the Internet, and at one point "ordered" me not to do a whole range of things - from talking to most of my female friends to ever watching porn. I broke up with her almost immediately. I don't do most of the 3-4 things that often, as it happens, but took this as a sign she was a controlling loonie. This is 110% what will happen in real life, if you do this type of stuff with any successful man or woman."
Some people claim that watching porn is cheating, or anything which involves deception is cheating
Toronto Public Library features collection of previously censored, banned books
I like that the list includes The Satanic Verses, so it's not North America-centric, as well as books liberals have tried to "ban", and books "banned" for non-typically politically partisan reasons
"Weird Al" Yankovic - Like A Surgeon (Official HD Video) - YouTube
Meme - "SI VOUS NE POUVEZ PAS LE CACHER VOUS POUVEZ LE DECORER *le décolleté et des fesses*"
Americans Admit they thought things in Harry Potter were Magic but were Actually just British - "One American admitted to thinking that the popular British dessert, treacle tart, was magical... School houses and prefects are a staple in British schools and are also present in Hogwarts... Christmas crackers are a UK festive tradition that contains items that have declined in recent years... In Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, Harry takes everything off the train food trolley, and one person on Reddit admitted to thinking that was magic. To think that the person coming around asking whether we need refreshments on a train is magic is quite hard to believe. It’s just food at the end of the day... one American thought that pumpkin juice was a British thing, not a magical one."
When Passion Leads to Burnout - "You’ve no doubt heard the well-worn advice that “if you do what you love, you’ll never work a day in your life.” It’s a nice idea but a total myth. When we equate work we love with “not really working,” it propagates a belief that if we love it so much, we should do more of it — all of the time, actually. Who needs a day off when you’re not really working?! There’s a whole cottage industry committed to proliferating this mindset — from books, to talks, and even kitsch stores selling piles of “Work is Bliss” quotes on merchandise. This type of mentality leads to burnout, and the consequences can be both dire and hard to detect. As an expert in workplace happiness and someone who speaks internationally about workplace well-being, it’s easy for me to be consumed by my passion for the topic. I love my work, and as such, can easily fall victim to burnout. It’s one of the ironies of my job. Yet, I would never claim that it doesn’t ever feel like work. It is more like being involved in a complicated love affair. One minute it’s thrilling, passionate, engaging. The next, it’s exhausting and overwhelming, and I feel like I need a break... In a Gallup survey of 7,500 full-time employees, 23% reported feeling burned out at work very often or always, while 63% said they experience it sometimes... The WHO noted that the syndrome was characterized by three dimensions: 1) feelings of energy depletion or exhaustion; 2) increased mental distance from one’s job, or feelings of negativism or cynicism related to one’s job; and 3) reduced professional efficacy... While burnout can affect anyone, at any age, in any industry, it’s important to note that there are certain sectors and roles that are at increased risk, and purpose-driven work — that is work people love and feel passionately about — is one of them. According to a study published in the Journal of Personality, this type of labor can breed obsessive — versus harmonious — passion, which predicts an increase of conflict, and thus burnout... “an estimated 300 to 400 U.S. physicians take their own lives every year” — a suicide rate dramatically higher than that of the general public, 40% higher for men and 130% higher for women. A Dutch study found that female physicians experience more patient empathy and, as a consequence, higher levels and deeper experiences of burnout — one hypothesis for the alarmingly high suicide rates... So, what can leaders do to prevent purpose-driven employees in their own organizations from suffering? Dr. Ellison stresses that they can mitigate this “always-on” mindset by being aware of when passion becomes a double-edged sword."
