Comments on: Tropical Storm Maria

By: Bryan

Bryan — Fri, 29 Sep 2017 01:16:42 +0000

Quel dommage! In upstate New York there are a lot of French Canadians who migrated from Quebec for lumbering jobs in the Adirondacks and most high schools have French & Spanish courses. The French is Canadian, and the Spanish is Puerto Rican in many schools to make it a more marketable skill than academic French or Castilian Spanish.

Hell, the census forms in New York are just as bad, and on one form a distant cousin got switched from Henry to Henrietta by the interviewer. Imhof became Emhoff or Emhof on various forms, and Doemke became Dumka. Because of French pronunciation it makes a difference if the interviewer is a francophone who knows to include the unpronounced letters at the end of names.

By: Badtux

Badtux — Thu, 28 Sep 2017 21:58:46 +0000

Au contraire, Bryan. My father’s generation was the last generation in Louisiana that was raised in French speaking households and spoke French natively, and no, Cajun French is not spoken with a Southern accent, it’s spoken with a Cajun accent, Justin Wilson was *not* a Cajun, he was an Anglo from Baton Rouge. My father’s mother (my grandmother, who died when I was 1 year old) knew very little English, his father knew more but when they interacted it was mostly in French. My father would be 83 today if he were still alive. Native French speakers are getting very rare on the ground in Louisiana, most of them will be dead within the next ten years. My generation wasn’t raised in French speaking households, and neither were succeeding generations. The “English only” nativists had their way, in the end. (BTW, this makes searching through census records on my father’s side of the family *extremely* difficult, since my grandfather’s generation spoke only rudimentary English, and before that nobody spoke English, meaning that spellings in the Census records never match from decade to decade).

Regarding Gartner: They’re hacks who auction their “Product of the Year” off to the highest bidders. Deloitte… SNRK. Yeah, they trial’ed our product for a few weeks, then said “Nope, not interested” because we showed them too much wrong with their network. LOL. To say that I’m unsurprised that they ended up hacked is an understatement.

By: Bryan

Bryan — Thu, 28 Sep 2017 20:52:19 +0000

Mais non, ma chere! Go 200 miles west of me and thousands speak French with a Southern accent … in Louisiana. Buy a few zydeco records and enjoy. The US military is the largest educational institution in the world and only use native speakers in their language courses. My parents believed that no matter what you wanted to do, someone has written a book explaining how to do it. All you had to do was find and buy the book, read it, and practice.

OK, Kryten, I’ll give you the sugar glider and the quokka, but pretty much everything else want a piece of you. 😉

By: Kryten42

Kryten42 — Thu, 28 Sep 2017 17:54:42 +0000

Hi Juanita. 😀 Usually green. When not frozen in the middle of Winter or brown & bone dry in Summer. Like most places really. 😉 😀

I meant to say when visiting my Australia Pinterest page, you’ll need to scroll past all the recent political crap to find the most interesting stuff about places, fauna & flora. We have some interesting creatures here (and some of them won’t try to kill you! Unless you do something really stupid of course! But that’s the same advice for anywhere really.) 😀

I’m guessing you did if you saw the poor sod on the throne with a nosy snake visiting. Happens more often than outsiders might believe! 😆

Anyway, glad you enjoyed it! You’ll have to tell me some about your neck of the Universe! I’m always curious about such things. 😀

By: JuanitaM

JuanitaM — Thu, 28 Sep 2017 17:15:37 +0000

Thanks for the grammar lesson, Bryan. 😉 You wear a lot of hats, and most likely a bunch I don’t even know about. Lol. Who knows what you’ve been up to through the years. I always bug you when I want to know something about Russia, too. It fascinates me when someone is able to speak a foreign language fluently. I took 3 years of French, and I can read it well enough (albeit slowly) for magazine articles, etc. But I still can’t speak it. French with a southern accent is an ugly thing anyway.

Kryten, so you live in the green part of Australia! Your stories took me back some years to my growing up. Getting up early in the am for fresh eggs. I thought the chickens always looked so insulted when you snatched their eggs. Funny Pinterest page especially the guy on the throne! “If I don’t look at it, then it’s not really there.”

By: Bryan

Bryan — Wed, 27 Sep 2017 00:23:14 +0000

As Deloitte’s fingerprints were all over several disastrous IT projects in Florida, people who have been paying attention have avoided them no matter what they were selling.

By: Kryten42

Kryten42 — Tue, 26 Sep 2017 20:44:55 +0000

OT: If you or badtux or anyone knows someone using Deloitte, may want to show them this (and Gartner have serious questions to answer also): Deloitte hacked, a brown trousers moment? "Deloitte has managed the extraordinary feat of holding the world’s leading cyber security consulting firm position as assessed by Gartner while confessing to being hacked."

By: Kryten42

Kryten42 — Tue, 26 Sep 2017 20:22:27 +0000

Good Morning. Sorry for the typo’s above. Was late, or early… Just had a couple hours nap.

Anyway, just wanted to say that POTUS45 (or Donny Bankrupt) just tweeted about Puerto Rico. He blames them for everything.

I took a screen cap of the tweets here if you want to see the utter garbage (and my comment) on pinterest (the order of the tweets start @ the bottom & go up):

http://pinterest.com/pin/538461699189291153/

By: Bryan

Bryan — Tue, 26 Sep 2017 19:16:48 +0000

Whether or not it’s pronounced, if the ‘H’ is there the indefinite article is “A” [unless it’s Russian which doesn’t have articles of any kind]. Steve Bates is the authority on English.

By: Kryten42

Kryten42 — Tue, 26 Sep 2017 18:44:44 +0000

Yes I am Juanita! And proud to be so. I was raised on a Dairy farm (well, *mostly* dairy. We had sheep, mainly for wool, & chickens, for eggs… lot’s of fruit trees & vegetables. Horses too, mainly Clydesdale’s, though I was given a dapple-grey pony for my 10 birthday. I called him Tosca. 😀 When they were ripe, I’d grab a cucumber off the vine & a couple apples. One for me & one for Tosca. I’d munch the cuke on the way to school, sometimes a carrot. Funny, where our farm was in the 50’s, is now a major outer suburb of Melbourne. Part of our farm became the Town Hall & Railway Station. LOL Grandpa took me fishing & hunting from around 8. By the time I was 12, I was pretty good @ living off the land. I could find food & water, make a fire, build an oven with stones, shear a sheep, milk a cow, catch & shoe a horse… catch a snake. Handy with a knife, 101 uses for a good knife. LOL

I’ve pretty much lived all over Australia. And yes, it is ‘uge! A large chunk is desert. 2nd largest in the World after the Sahara. 🙂 We also have some of the biggest *ranches* in the World. the smaller ones are called Homesteads, the biggest are Stations. From memory, Cluny Station is still the largest here for over 100 years. 1,327 Million Acres! I pissed off a lot of Texas ranchers with that! Got into a non-verbal disagreement with one particular bunch. Some people have no sense of humor. Or very good survival instincts! LOL

If your curious, I have lot of pin’s about all kinds of Aussie places & flora/fauna & Some places I lived on Pinterest.

Pinterest: ♡Australia – Good, Weird, Bad

Funny… It was a long time ago, but I still miss the farm. Life was good & uncomplicated. I loved reading & learning sure, and Mom took me to the big city State Library in Melbourne most Saturday’s for the day. Mom loved books as much as I did. 🙂 We’d pack a lunch & snacks from the garden & trees. Mom would bake some Damper (Aussie bread) and some cookies, bottle of milk and lemonade Gran made. All fresh. Was a great day out for us.

Now, 1 lemon costs AU$1 and an orange is about AU$1.30! It’s insane. Used to just grow them. Cost nothing @ all. Oh well. Greed always win’s it seems.

I’ve never really likes cities to be honest. Can’t stay in one for too long. I like in a Large country town in Central Victoria now. Well, large by our standards, around 100,000 people. 4th largest town in Aus. I think. 😀

So, that’s me. Country Mouse. Always will be, until my last breath.