Vagueness and the Aftermath - A sporadic diary

[tikay]

Bit busy atm, but you get that in French more clearly (bear in mind the base of our language is heavily influenced by the Norman invasion):

You use the perfect tense to recall a thing that happened in the past (apologies for any errors, francophiles):

J'ai joué des échecs

I played chess

And the imperfect tense to recall the process of doing something in the past:

Je jouais des échecs quand j'ai eu mal à la tête

I was playing chess when I got a headache

I won't be correcting you Mr Tal, keep it coming.

I'm more than happy to assist you, too.

[RED-DOG]

Just lately I've become really interested in design.

Most of the things around us are so familiar that we no longer notice them, but at some point, someone had to design them. A belt buckle, a tin opener, a mouse trap..

All very simple, but imagine starting from scratch without a pattern.

[Rod Paradise]

Design's interesting - but coming up with a new material for the designers to work with.....

http://www.stuff.tv/5-mind-blowing-materials-will-change-future/feature

[RED-DOG]

FFS!

I'm just getting to grips with old stuff and he's showing me new stuff...

[Rod Paradise]

FFS!

I'm just getting to grips with old stuff and he's showing me new stuff...

And new ways to make newly designed stuff....

http://www.stuff.tv/12-surprising-reasons-you-need-3d-printer/feature

I love the idea of needing new curtain hooks, so you download the file & print them yourself

Of course the Police & press are starting the scare stories about home printed guns.... in Manchester. I'd not be trusting a plastic barrelled gun, and I'm pretty damn sure getting a gun in Manchester is easier & less costly than buying a 3-D printer & designing one.

[RED-DOG]

God bless The Times.



http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/opinion/columnists/benmacintyre/article3903867.ece



If you can't Ben Macintyre's article there, you can probably read it here.



http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/world/a-hatred-that-still-dares-speak-its-name/story-fnb64oi6-1226746673318

[RED-DOG]

A hatred that still dares speak its name

    Ben Macintyre
    The Times
    October 26, 2013 12:00AM



IN 1933 the German light-heavyweight title was won by Johann Trollman, a 25-year-old boxer with a nimble, athletic style that prefigured Muhammad Ali. The bout was swiftly annulled, ostensibly because Trollman was deemed to be breaking the rules by dancing around the ring, but in fact because Nazi Germany would not tolerate a non-Aryan champion.

When the fight was restaged Trollman arrived as a caricature Aryan, with his hair dyed blond and his body powdered with white flour, in protest at Germany's race laws. Forced to stand still in accordance with "German boxing style", he was battered into submission in a few rounds. In 1942 the boxer was sent to Neuengamme concentration camp. Two years later he was beaten to death by a guard.

Trollman was a bona fide hero who took a courageous stand against bigotry, yet his name is virtually unknown. His story would make a memorable movie, but it is unlikely Hollywood will touch it - because Trollman was a gypsy, or Sinti, as ethnic Roma in Germany have called themselves for centuries.

The Nazi extermination campaign against the Roma claimed 250,000- 500,000 lives - a cataclysm known in the Romany language as the Porajmos - "the devouring". Perhaps as much as 70 per cent of Europe's Roma population was swallowed up by a hatred that dates back at least 12 centuries and is on the march again.

All over Europe poisonous little boils of anti-Roma feeling are erupting, powered by economic dislocation and the fear of mass migration from Bulgaria and Romania. The Roma are the fastest-growing ethnic group in Europe, a cross-border underclass with 80 per cent below the poverty line, marginalised, maligned and feared like no other.

Last year a Swiss magazine carried a front-page picture of a young Roma boy holding a gun, with the headline "They come, they steal, they go". In Hungary the far-right Jobbik party took 17 per cent of the vote by stirring up resentment of "gypsy crime and parasitism". In France Roma shanty towns are demolished and swiftly spring up again; Roma are sent back east, only to reappear a few weeks later. In Hungary, Bulgaria and the Czech Republic, attacks are rising.

The French Interior Minister notes that Roma have "lifestyles extremely different from ours", in a grimly familiar use of the first and third person, the old "us" and "them". Those remarks immediately invited comparison with the persecution of Jews in wartime France, but such attitudes are backed by nearly 80 per cent of the French population. The Roma are by no means the only immigrants heading to France, but they are the poorest and weakest and therefore the easiest to target for eviction, backed by popular prejudice.

Anti-Roma feeling is as deep and persistent as anti-Semitism, but largely unacknowledged and, in parts of Eastern Europe, actively tolerated.

Against this backdrop comes the story of "Maria", the little girl found living in a Greek shanty town with a Roma couple not her biological parents, immediately evoking the medieval myth about gypsy kidnapping of white children. The Greek press dubbed her the "blonde angel", in obvious contrast to her alleged abductors who are dark and, by implication, diabolical.

A few days later a seven-year-old blonde girl was removed from a Roma family in west Dublin, although she has now been returned to them. Three more Roma have been arrested in Greece on suspicion of abduction. The hunt is on.

Historically, the children of Roma are more likely to be stolen by non-Roma than the other way around. In 19th-century Hungary and Transylvania, Roma children were forcibly taken from their parents to be brought up by other ethnic groups. In the 1970s the Swiss authorities were still removing Roma boys from their homes to be raised in orphanages.

From the moment they migrated out of northern India in about the 8th century, the Romany people were seen as a threat, irreducibly "other" with brown skin and an alien Sanskrit-based language. Even the name gypsy (which some Roma find offensive) was based on the false assumption that they came from Egypt.

The history of the Roma is one of persistent persecution and constant wandering. They were nomadic in part because they were not encouraged to stay, forever pushed out and on, chased from place to place.

In Saxony gypsy hunts were a popular entertainment. In Prussia King Friedrich Wilhelm permitted the hanging of gypsies without trial. For centuries they were enslaved by the aristocracies of Eastern and Central Europe, bought and sold as chattels, sometimes by weight.

The prejudice reached its peak with the rise of Hitler, but the contrast between the devouring of the gypsies and the Holocaust of European Jewry is telling. The Roma were targeted not as a racial group, but as an "asocial" class. Similarly those who denigrate the Roma today claim to do so on the basis of their supposedly degenerate lifestyle, rather than skin colour.

The very uncertainty of the death tally shows how the Nazi killing machine made little effort to keep count of murdered gypsies. As a largely illiterate and uneducated group, the Roma did not leave the sort of writing that has memorialised the full horror of the Jewish genocide. There is no Roma counterpart to Primo Levi.

While attitudes towards Judaism, homosexuality and disability have transformed utterly since the war, the Roma remain on the margins of memory and history. It was not until last year that a memorial was finally unveiled in Germany to the Roma victims of Nazism.

Vaclav Havel wrote that "the Roma are the litmus test not of a democracy but of a civil society". We are a long way from another holocaust, but Europe is again in danger of failing that test. Child-abduction is an appalling crime; immigration a vitally important issue. But when we talk of "blonde angels", antisocial lifestyles, "us" and "them", we are reviving the ancient language of prejudice that a gypsy boxer fought against when he climbed into the ring 80 years ago.

The Times

 

[Laxie]

Hiya Tom   Hope yourself and the family are well.  Don't know if you're a Banksy fan, but he's been a busy man in NYC this month.  His goal was to produce some sort of 'art' every day in October around NYC.  The public have been on a bit of a scavenger hunt to find his latest work each day and the police have been going nuts trying to catch him.  I've been enjoying the reports along the way so I thought I'd post a link or two here

With his own site, you must scroll down to the bottom and work your way up...  http://banksy.co.uk/

There are news articles all over the web this month, covering his day to day antics in NYC.

This is a snippet from his latest work at a strip club...  http://gothamist.com/2013/10/24/banksys_new_piece.php#photo-1 

and this 
http://gothamist.com/2013/10/25/banksy_hustler_club_stripper_video.php#photo-19

Click to see full-size image.

It's art, ya know. 

[RED-DOG]

<3 Banksey.

Did you see this dawn?



http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-24518315

[Laxie]

<3 Banksey.

Did you see this dawn?



http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-24518315

Yeppers and the woman pushing for a discount was unknowingly brilliant!  lol Here's the video to go with that story...

[celtic]

Hi Laxie,

Have you seen this thread?

http://blondepoker.com/forum/index.php?topic=61457.msg1857999#msg1857999

[Laxie]

Hi Laxie,

Have you seen this thread?

http://blondepoker.com/forum/index.php?topic=61457.msg1857999#msg1857999

I hardly ever yapped, even when I yapped. 

Been a bit busy lately and not really kept up with things around the place.  Went to Ireland to visit Sarah and finalise the divorce last week.  Landed back here to find Jack down on one knee formally proposing!!!  First time I've ever had a formal 'down on one knee' proposal and I was like a giddy school girl after it.  Full steam ahead now on our move to America and wedding once we get there!  wiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii

In the meantime, I need to get a wedding dress, but there's an issue with size.  I'm too damn big.  lol  I've been doing the Couch to 5k programme since mid-September and Jack has run along with me.  Motivation and all that.  I reckon he's gone with because he was sure I'd be quiet while I'm running.  Too busy trying to breathe. 

Anyway, getting there and only a couple of weeks away from running my first 5k.  Now then, if the weight would just hurry and go, I'd be able to get shopping for that dress.  No pressure.

[pleno1]

congrats, good news.

[RED-DOG]

Hi Laxie,

Have you seen this thread?

http://blondepoker.com/forum/index.php?topic=61457.msg1857999#msg1857999

I hardly ever yapped, even when I yapped. 

Been a bit busy lately and not really kept up with things around the place.  Went to Ireland to visit Sarah and finalise the divorce last week.  Landed back here to find Jack down on one knee formally proposing!!!  First time I've ever had a formal 'down on one knee' proposal and I was like a giddy school girl after it.  Full steam ahead now on our move to America and wedding once we get there!  wiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii

In the meantime, I need to get a wedding dress, but there's an issue with size.  I'm too damn big.  lol  I've been doing the Couch to 5k programme since mid-September and Jack has run along with me.  Motivation and all that.  I reckon he's gone with because he was sure I'd be quiet while I'm running.  Too busy trying to breathe. 

Anyway, getting there and only a couple of weeks away from running my first 5k.  Now then, if the weight would just hurry and go, I'd be able to get shopping for that dress.  No pressure.

How exciting.

The whole story would make a great film script, and I love a happy ending.

Please let me be the first to congratulate you.

xx


PS- I know Pleno congratulated you already, but he doesn't count.

[Laxie]

Awwww, cheers.