i have two and a half hours to kill while i wait for this SuSE ISO to download

[rone]

In Foster City, we have an automated espresso machine, and one of those near-boiling taps.  Here, the office has a guy fetch coffee and tea with milk and sugar, once in the morning, once in the afternoon.  I wonder how much it would cost us to get a coffee service going in the US; god knows it's much nicer than having to get up, walk a few steps to the kitchen, and make my own drink.

I haven't had a carbonated beverage since i left the US.  It's very weird.  I almost opened one from my room's minibar the other night, but i stuck with water.

I've been reading my boss's grilf's short fiction.  It would've easily fit in talk.bizarre's heyday.

If George Bernard Shaw thought that England and America were two countries separated by a common language, i wonder what he'd've said about India.  Because cultural borders here happen every time you walk over a hill or cross a river, English is the lingua franca de facto, but i'm having a hell of a time understanding most people, and i wonder if someone from Chandigarh has as much trouble understanding someone from Chennai if they're nominally speaking English.  I find myself asking people to repeat themselves almost every time, and i've had to just give up and nod like an idiot a few times.  It doesn't help when people make poor assumptions; i asked my driver how much his car cost, and he replied, "5 lack."  Leg?  "Lack."  Turns out a lakh is 100000 rupees.  How am i to know that?  And spelling here is an almost Elizabethan adventure; two examples are Lakshmi/Laxmi and sari/saree.

I've just about wrapped up work here, which guarantees i'll have Friday free for, i dunno, something.

Comments

Liquid Berlitz

[skipernicus.livejournal.com]

I don't know about India, but a couple of beers made Glaswegian english infinitely more accessible - and the effect seemed to last past the intoxication.

[ronebofh.livejournal.com]

Maybe that's the problem. I've been Quaker-sober since i left home. None of my coworkers seem to be the drinking sort, either. Perhaps i'll have a cocktail tonight with dinner.

[arian1.livejournal.com]

Ask for a local drink, see what you come up with :)

[ronebofh.livejournal.com]

No thanks, they'll just give me jaljeera. Eugh.

[eejitalmuppet.livejournal.com]

There's a drink they make by fermenting cashew nuts, then distilling the result. Avoid it. Just trust me on this.

[ronebofh.livejournal.com]

Have you had Cynar? That was pretty bad...

[missionista.livejournal.com]

I can usually figure out what people are saying, but the body language is another thing altogether. My favorite is the head-bobble, which can mean "yes, no, I'm not sure, we're out of chai, I'll have the chai for you in just a moment, I don't understand a word you're saying" and several other things, all at the same time.

[ronebofh.livejournal.com]

Oh, god, the head-bobble. It strikes at something deep in my mind; i just want to reach out and slap them.

[palecur.livejournal.com]

Hah, that's what you get for not reading the Ramayana. For some reason lakh = 10^5 is firmly in my head, though I couldn't name a single character other than maybe Arjuna.

(ps: I did not finish the Ramayana. That thing goes on for approximately forever.)

[tinellaq.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I noted that as well, mostly from reading the newspapers. Somehow, reading aobut a 180 *word I don't understand* rupee bribery scandal doesn't quite have the intended impact.

Either Bangalore is less of a transportation nightmare than Delhi, or you're understating the scariness of traffic. I'm curious as to which.

The campus where I was working didn't have a coffee run. It had a room with machine that produced, on demand, tiny cups of overly sweet milky instant-coffee-like-liquid. There was a guy whose job seemed to be to just sit in the room with the machine and perform machine-related functions - passing you cups, wiping up spills, keeping the apparatus stocked with whatever substances it required to do its work.

[motis.livejournal.com]

Your George Bernard Shaw attribution caused me to go a-googling, as I've heard the same witticism credited to Winston Churchill and Oscar Wilde. It seems to be one of those mysterious gems uttered by someone somewhere, or many people in many places, but without definite particulars as to who exactly where... another example of this is the old chestnut about hydrogen and stupidity, which has been attributed as widely as Einstein and Frank Zappa.

I found a website that purports to debunk this sort of multiple attribution; this one seems to generate quite a lot of requests for clarification, as they included it in their FAQ at http://www1c.btwebworld.com/quote-unquote/p0000149.htm. Here's what they say:

Sometimes the inquirer asks, ‘Was it Wilde or Shaw?’ The answer appears to be: both. In The Canterville Ghost (1887), Wilde wrote: ‘We have really everything in common with America nowadays except, of course, language’. However, the 1951 Treasury of Humorous Quotations (Esar & Bentley) quotes Shaw as saying: ‘England and America are two countries separated by the same language’, but without giving a source. The quote had earlier been attributed to Shaw in Reader’s Digest (November 1942).

Much the same idea occurred to Bertrand Russell (Saturday Evening Post, 3 June 1944): ‘It is a misfortune for Anglo-American friendship that the two countries are supposed to have a common language’, and in a radio talk prepared by Dylan Thomas shortly before his death (and published after it in The Listener, April 1954) - European writers and scholars in America were, he said, ‘up against the barrier of a common language’.

Inevitably this sort of dubious attribution has also been seen: ‘Winston Churchill said our two countries were divided by a common language’ (The Times, 26 January 1987; The European, 22 November 1991.)

[ronebofh.livejournal.com]

I think you'll like this analysis (http://www.tartarus.org/martin/essays/burkequote.html) of Burke's famous quote.