Sun 7 Oct 2007
Yeah, yeah, we know we’ve been lazy lately. Sue us.This week we wonder which foreign threat will destroy Australia first, Africans or the Internet? We also discuss some news items about people with unexpected numbers of body parts, and Jana presents a new Things that are Dumb.
October 9th, 2007 at 8:13 am
The hickory-smoke barbeque amputated leg was mine, but I did not send you the man with two penises.
(Now, there’s a sentence I didn’t think I’d ever utter.)
October 9th, 2007 at 9:02 am
The Romans hated the Phoenicians and waged war on them. One piece of Phonecian technology the Romans admired though was their use of fluttering banners to signal different military manouvers. The Phonecian word for these banners was ‘menafa’.
The Romans borrowed this word and contracted it to ‘mappa’, and mappa came to mean a sizeable piece of cloth, such as you might cover a tabletop with, or draw a map on (and hence ‘map’), or make into an apron (and hence ‘napron’).
In Old French ‘mappa’ became ‘nappa’.
About 1250, the suffix ‘kin’ was added, adopted from Flanders and Holland, probably from Middle Dutch ‘-kijn’ meaning ‘little one’, to describe a little table cloth: ‘napkin’.
It wasn’t until 1925 that ‘nappy’ appeared in British English to describe baby’s underpants. The word ‘nappy’ is a contraction of ‘napkin’ as ‘pressie’ is to ‘present’.
‘Diaper’, on the other hand, comes from the ancient Greek ‘aspros’, which originally meant ‘rough’, and was applied to the raised parts of coins. As coins became used, they tarnished and the rough parts polished, so eventually aspros took on a new meaning: ‘bright’.
‘Dia’ meant ‘two’ or ‘divided’. Cloth of the time that was shiny was usually shot through with silk or gold, hence ‘dia-aspros’- ‘through-bright’
The Ancient Greek ‘dia-asperos’ became, in Latin, ‘diasperum’. The meaning of this in 900 in France changed to’white’ instead of ’shiny’. By 1330, ‘diapre’ meant white cloth. 1596 has the first recorded usage of ‘diapre’ for underpants for babies.
The first recorded use of ‘diaper’ in the US is in 1837.
The word ‘nap’, a downy surface of cloth, appears in 1440 from Middle Dutch or Middle Low German ‘noppe’, to mean ‘tuft of wool’. It was probably introduced to England by Flemish cloth-workers. The roots of this come via Old Swedish ‘niupa’ - ‘to pinch’, and that from the Gothic tribes about 2,000 years ago, who used ‘hniupan’ meaning ‘to tear’. Nowadays in America this meaning of ‘nappy’ is more common. In its sense of ‘curly, frizzy’, a ‘nappy-headed boy’ is a racial slur, and Americans are thus unlikely to adopt the word ‘nappy’ for ‘diaper’
October 9th, 2007 at 9:15 am
Zebulon, I’m beginning to suspect that you own a copy of the Oxford English Dictionary.
October 9th, 2007 at 4:59 pm
I wish…!
You Google something but then you think, “Is that really true?” and “Yes, yes, but where did that come from?” and before you know it, that’s a very enjoyable hour wandering through history down the cyber-drain. The strange thing is that I hated history at school; now I love it.
I precised the Diaper / Nappy story from quite a few online sources. As Newton said, “I have stood on the shoulders of giants”. I started the chase by adding ‘etymology’ to the search words and then just clicked around to see what would come up.
October 10th, 2007 at 10:35 am
hmmmm…I left you guys a message a couple weeks ago. Well I wasn’t sure because there was just a generic message on the voicemail again. I double checked the phone number, so I guess I got it wrong twice and someone is wondering why they have a long rambling message about religion, podcasts, babies, and Battlestar Galactica. I’ll try again tomorrow!
October 11th, 2007 at 12:19 am
Guys, I just got a long rambling message on my voicemail about religion, podcasts, babies and Battlestar Galactica. I wonder why.
Weird.
October 11th, 2007 at 7:23 am
On the election, what I still find baffling is that the government can seemingly arbitarily pick a day to have the voting. Ours is always the first Tuesday in November, and everything else has to be scheduled around that. For example, states are going to have their primary elections for the Republicans and Democrats in a few months, and even the states have a set order they follow. If one wants to change their primary date, it turns into scheduling chaos. Anyway, without knowing so far ahead of time when the election is, how do primaries get scheduled in Australia? Do they just happen simultaneously, say, a month before the real election?
The American primaries would probably make much more sense if every state did theirs at the same time, but as it is, it’s become this weird slice of Americana when election season kicks off and all the candidates, press, celebrities, and political nerds descend on some tiny town in New Hampshire, the first primary state. No one pays attention to this place except for a month every four years.
October 11th, 2007 at 8:37 am
What’s a ‘primary’?
I’m guessing Australia is like the UK. We have the general election on a Thursday, and the sitting government just picks the most likely Thursday that they think they are going to win on to hold it. That can be any week in any year (up to seven years) into the current government.
October 11th, 2007 at 9:57 am
Disaster! Our voicemail account has been cancelled due to lack of use (this is all your faults, listeners).
I’ve created a new one, but there doesn’t seem to be an option to choose the number anymore. The number is (206) 350-8626 (ironically, the old ‘UBOB’ ending was 8262, so we almost got what we wanted purely by chance. We’ll put up a new greeting as soon as we get a chance.
I wonder who got Adam’s message …
October 11th, 2007 at 1:09 pm
A primary election is when the members of one political party select who they want to be their candidate in the general election. That’s what Obama, Hilary, and the rest of the Democrats are fighting for now, as well as the Republicans. I don’t think the people actually choose who the candidate for the general will be, but one will end up emerging as the front-runner, and the party will throw their support behind the best contender in the general election.
The idea of having the election on any Thursday in any year still sounds nutty to me. Why isn’t there outrage? It reminds me of gerry-mandering in the US, where sitting Representatives will re-draw their district maps to make sure they get the neighborhoods where most of their supporters live.
October 11th, 2007 at 4:01 pm
<p>In Australia we have the Westminster system (although we’re not crazy enough to have a House of Lords (and we don’t have any lords we could put in one, anyway).</p>
<p>There are no primaries in the Westminster system, because there isn’t a President; the Prime Minister is the leader of the party with the most seats in Parliament, and the cabinet is made up of other senior members of that party.</p>
<p>I didn’t know the UK had elections on Thursdays - we always do it on the weekend. Does that mean people don’t have to go to work on the Thursday of an election?</p>
<p>And having so much leeway on when an election is called is, of course, an invitation to call it when you have the least chance of being voted out. The Howard government is just holding out until the latest possible moment in the hope that a comet crashes into the opposition leader’s house, as they don’t seem to have much else to hope for at this stage.</p>
<p>However, from my limited understanding of the US system, there are plenty of things which I think are dubious. Firstly, many of the people in the most senior decision-making positions in the President’s administration aren’t elected, and aren’t answerable directly to the public if they do terrible things (presumably Rumsfeld wouldn’t have lasted as long as he did if this hadn’t been the case). Also, many of these people have come from powerful industries who have arguably bought a representative in government by funding the President’s election campaign.</p>
<p>Secondly, as I understand it, elections in the US are run by the political parties themselves, or members of those parties who have been elected to office. That’s how Jed Bush could have large numbers of eligible black voters struck off the voting register before the last Presidential election to improve his brother’s chance of winning. In Australia there is an independent Electoral Commission which is run by public servants outside the party machinery.</p>
October 11th, 2007 at 5:31 pm
The UK doesn’t get a day off work to vote. The polls open early and close late, so you can vote before or after. Or you can have a postal vote each time if you say you had a reason for needing one once (like “being away on business”).
Why isn’t there outrage with the ‘choose your date’ system? I suppose because we’ve always done it that way, and a fixed term Government causes different sorts of problems.
We have an independent civil service, so the idea of them changing along with the Government seems strange.
We don’t have electronic voting (so no hanging chads). The people who count the vote are mostly volunteers.
We have first past the post voting, so that also favours the big parties. There’s a move to introduce proportional voting.
We do have boundary redrawing, but it’s only a few times a century, and there’s always a big fuss.
The House of Lords is slowly, slowly being dispensed with - to start with the hereditary seats are being reduced in percentage and the number of political appointees is rising by the Government creating new Lords.
One outrageous thing is that MPs and Lords never have had to justify or account for their expenses as there was a ‘gentleman’s agreement’ they would keep it reasonable, but after e.g. £40,000 a year travel claims have started to come in, there is some talk of changing that.
We also get to vote on who sits in the European Parliament.
October 11th, 2007 at 5:58 pm
Like only two other countries, (New Zealand and Israel) the UK has no written Constitution, so no Ammendments either.
Ultimately European law outguns UK law, so you can always appeal up the ladder to Brussels if you e.g. have a human rights issue.
October 11th, 2007 at 6:26 pm
Australia seems to have had a past infatuation with kooky voting systems, so in our lower house we have preferential voting, and in our upper house we have proportional. I guess it was thought that, without an hereditary system for putting mad people in our upper house, proportional voting, which favours fringe political parties, could do something similar through voting.
And Australia has a constitution, but it’s an act of British Parliament. I would have thought New Zealand had something similar.
October 11th, 2007 at 7:09 pm
In the US, the primaries are like division playoffs before the Super Bowl. Then when the general election is held, it’s like the Super Bowl… few people participate but everyone watches, discusses the commercials instead of the game and the next day it doesn’t seem to matter who you were rooting for. The End.
Actually, we do vote in the general election. When tallied, it’s called the popular vote but that figure doesn’t matter because we’ve really just sort of given our state’s delegates (number based on population) orders to put their vote in for the winning candidate. Technically, the delegates can go crazy and ignore the state’s majority vote and vote for who they want but it’s rare and not customary at all. Typically this means nobody gives a shit who anyone in states like Rhode Island, Montana or Alaska voted for since they don’t offer many delegates.
(In most but not all state primaries, participation depends on your party affiliation, if you have one. You can register to vote with no party affiliation, as I did. Some states open it up primary voting a little though. Finally, the general election is a free-for-all.)
It’s obviously a flawed process… see our last few elections for proof… but all the wig-wearing founding fathers designed the E.C. system to sort of protect the voting population from itself and prevent close calls. I think it should be eliminated for the popular vote. (I won a couple of speech contests in high school on this here topic, plus won $10 in early 80s US dollars! That was enough to buy a couple of junk bonds, an eightball of coke and a couple of hookers for a night but I digress…)
In the states our voter turnout is always embarrassingly low. More people prob. vote for American Idol contestants. So you get a weird skew sometimes. All the old folks, fringe wingnuts, hardcore party traditionalists, obnoxiously loud pundit-fueled idiots, and also the dead people of Louisiana all dominate the voting booths. The average American bitches for four years about the president and then decides getting in line for a mega-grande mochaccino at Starbucks is more worth their time. That is unless they’ve been convinced their vote will stave off an imminent invasion of turbaned, bearded men with C4 vests or keep homoseshuals from having loud anal sex on their front lawn with their feeble grandparents and the family dog. WHICH COULD HAPPEN AGAIN IF YOU VOTE FOR MY OPPONENT!
And that my friends, is how a bill becomes a law.
Paid for by the people to elect Kevbo. A non-profit group dedicated to a brighter tomorrow through random acts of arson.
October 13th, 2007 at 2:52 pm
If only my vote COULD keep those homoseshuals from having loud anal sex on their front lawn with their feeble grandparents and the family dog I wouldn’t grizzle so much about Australia’s compulsory voting which means I have do drag my arse out of bed on a Saturday every 3(ish) years and go down to the local primary school and tick some boxes on a piece of paper and even though I do undertake this onerous activity my homoseshual neighbours are still having loud anal sex on their front lawn with their feeble grandparents and the family dog.
October 14th, 2007 at 7:57 pm
Perhaps, Bernadette, you could reach an agreement with the neighbours so that first you go and vote, and then on your return they go and vote?
That would then guarantee you could enjoy your own and their front lawns uninterrupted for an hour or so on a Saturday once every 3(ish) years. Perhaps then you would look forward to your democratic duties, rather than seeing them as some onerous task.
We’re not forced to vote over here, so the above remedy doesn’t work for us. Not for lack of trying though, believe me.
October 15th, 2007 at 2:56 pm
I’ve heard that the Jolly Jumper also causes pigeon-toes as the baby stretches to . My niece is an example of this, as she spent a lot of time in one of these contraptions and now she is 11 and walks with toes severely pointing inwards.
I think that it is necessary here in Australia to have compulsory voting, as we are generally such an apathetic lot that hardly anyone would turn up if we didn’t have to!
October 19th, 2007 at 4:35 pm
Hah! I just saw a video of my friend’s four-month-old and laughed out loud when I saw he was ensconced in an Exersaucer.
October 25th, 2007 at 2:08 pm
tvindy Says:
June 12th, 2007 at 11:25 am
“I want to create a podcast with slide show/ no video.
Windows based”
Larrikin, I believe that’s what is called an “enhanced podcast”. The last time I looked into that, it was only possible to create such a podcast on a mac.
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Actually I got it don on a PC using Photoshop Elememts, mixed music with photos.
But I got fed up of WinDoze and The PeeCee and I have gone back to mac………..have not used one since the Classic.
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I came to the conclusion that Bill Gates is actually a son of Saddam Hosein