Crocefisso

The Finnish entry is hot too.

News for any UK people: it looks very likely that the new govt. is going to decriminalise the licence fee when the BBC licence comes up for renewal in 2016/7 or whenever it is. To put that in context, the BBC today ran a report which effectively said that sometimes extremist views are good because they challenge established ideas so why is the govt even trying to tackle them, and then compared Islamic extremists to Gandhi and Mandela. I'm not sure victims of say 7/7 or 9/11 needed their established ideas challenged in quite that way.

Have just started a book called Oliver VII by a Hungarian chap called Antal Szerb. The blurb leads me to believe it's about a king who deposes himself to go on holiday and ends up joining some ruffians and impersonating himself. Fun times.

I'm aware, constituency is an awful word though. In North American English, people tend to pronounce the second and third syllables as some bastardisation of stitch and chew, and it sounds awful. FPTP may work now to keep out 'extremist' parties, but it also could allow them in with far less than the majority of the vote. And I'd consider SNP a more extremist party than UKIP. UKIP is not too far to the right of the Tories, which makes it amusing you'd call them a party of morons. SNP is indeed also extremist, but for all their "56 MPs the voice of Scotland will be heard at last" nonsense, they're now out in the cold. During the Labour years Scotland had a big say in national govt thanks to being a Labour stronghold, and had some say during the Lib-Con coalition because, again, a lot of Lib Dem seats were in Scotland. Over the coming years SNP parliamentarians, who are fringe left, vote consistently against a centre-right majority government with no ability to change the outcome. I predict an SNP collapse in 2020. [End of SNP digression.] But the truth is that the UKIP lot are not all too similar to the Tories. People forget that at least 2/3 of Tory MPs are in some sense pro-Europe, and Tory policy isn't based on nostalgia for 1950s Britain. UKIP is the party of low skilled people who don't like the fact that Eastern Europeans can out-compete them because they got used to being lazy. Just because some fringe Tories like Dan Hannan are UKIP-esque shouldn't tar the whole party. The Tories also have people like Ken Clarke, lest we forget. Meanwhile, in Estonia, a sexy young cousin is spotted by a notorious predator.

Even under your premise that the riding matters more than the country as a whole, FPTP is still a failure. If a candidate can win a riding with >30% of the vote, over 70% of the voters in that riding are not represented at all in parliament. I'm a supporter of a form of listless MMP that I could expand on, but STV also achieves representation within a riding and semi-proportional results too (albeit in a far more complicated manner). To be pedantic, in Britain it's a constituency, not a riding, which in Britain is an archaic term for how Yorkshire used to be divided into 3 ridings. As for the whole "candidate can get 30% and win", it's true, but then any parliamentary system with more than 2 parties has the same problem, even in a country like Germany where PR is used - in 2009 Merkel returned as Chancellor with 34% of the vote. Only in Presidential runoffs like US or France does someone always get at least 50% by definition. And in practice, there are many seats where the winner gets more than 50%. My local Tory has just been returned to Parliament with close to 60% of the vote. Very few win with below 30%, they have to be ultra-marginal seats. And, truth be told, FPTP is good at shutting out extremist parties. UKIP is a fringe right party of morons who took almost 4 million votes but 1 MP, and the Green Party are a far left fringe which took a million votes and one MP. In any other system, these would be very powerful parties.

FPTP is not a sham, people just don't understand the principle behind it. The media focus on party leaders obscures the fact that we're not voting for a party leader or even necessarily a party, but each constituency sends someone to Parliament and it is Parliament which chooses the PM by expressing the confidence of the house in a certain individual. So how the vote falls within a constituency is, theoretically and realistically, far more important than the national picture. Meanwhile, what a perfect outcome: Conservative majority which, though narrow, will be bolstered by the de facto collaboration of the DUP and UUP from N Ireland (8 and 2 seats respectively), plus losses for Labour and Ukip and status quo ante for the god awful Greens. Meanwhile, the tribalism of the SNP has only produced a Tory government they were powerless to stop. =D>

some people do actually like kids But most of those people are kids.

Let him meet the family, it's a true test of his commitment.. And it's funny. :twss: Anyway, what's been happening in my life.. Had to tell someone their sister died, went to a nasty car v motorbike accident whereby the guilty person was a rude woman, went to a firearms incident which turned out to be a suicide, and off for this weekend. Probably gonna take the girlfriend and drive towards central England to do something. And I want to find a Five Guys restaurant.. Also it's voting today for the UK, no clue who to vote for yet though. They're all cutting my job except one party.. >_> I voted Tory. What's your job and which party won't be cutting it? My guess would be that the Greens are the only ones not to cut it, but given how left wing the Labour Party is on employment - anyone who has been on JSA for a year has to be given a job in the private sector was one of their ideas a while ago, unsure if it made its way into the manifesto - I can't imagine how arcane it has to be for them to cut it. Unless you're like the Sub Manager of Protective Overalls at a hospital or something really out there.

Are you by any chance unemployed?

Those are grammatically sound, it's when the preposition "to" is dropped that it becomes ungrammatical. As for those two examples, they are also not conventional in British English: "Write me a letter" would usually be said as "write to me." Or if you want the letter for a specific purpose, "put it in writing." "Write me up a list..." would be "Write a list..." or simply "write it down." In Britain, the phrasal verb "to write up" is associated with e.g. writing up the results of a scientific experiment and other formal/professional functions. Anything casual is "write down" 99% of the time, so a shopping list would be written down, not up. @ Alg: a lot of it is posturing. I tend to notice these things more because, English not being my 1st language, I think I naturally pay more attention to how things are said. The link of British-isms is a mixture of the accurate and nonsense cliché.

It would be interesting to see what counts as proper English in America versus Britain. E.g. in America it's common to say "write me" but in the UK (and Australia and other Anglophone countries, I think) that's a grammatical nonsense - you have to put "to" in the middle of the phrase. Although it could be that "write me" doesn't pass for proper English in America and is merely used a lot. Also, I've lost track of who is American, who is an Arab, where this advertising company is based, and what's going on any more. PS. As for politicians trying to be colloquial to reach people, watch Labour Party leader Ed Miliband trying to say "hell yeah." Not only was it hilarious, it's also slang from the wrong country. Not many British people say hell yeah. It would be like Hilary Clinton trying to connect to people using cockney rhyming slang.

Not exclusively, but the right to do so is protected by the notion of free speech. I acknowledge that the 145 are entitled to do what they have done. But if you read the published open letters and justifications they provide, most of them say fundamentally misunderstand freedom of speech. So when people say, "I'm for free speech" and give a bogus definition, I think it's fair to say that by being so misleading they are, in a sense, "enemies" of free speech. Just as a homeopathic doctor is an enemy of medical science: they may give lip service to medicine, but they don't understand a damn thing about it.

Different people like different sports. :o

Agnostic. But that has nothing to do with my belief that freedom of speech should include the right to mock religious figures. Most sane people think that.

I want a boyfriend who can also be a girlfriend sometimes. Does anyone know where Bruce Jenner lives?

I don't know about mass produced. Granny never had any advice on that.

Went to Avebury yesterday. It's a big, very old stone circle in Wiltshire made for unknown reasons ~4000 years ago. A lot of druids were there, wearing flowers and beards and carrying big staves. The most senior ones also wore capes. Most of them were quite obese and unwashed. One of them was kissing the stones as she walked around. I concluded that I do not want to go back to Avebury. Edit: @Arceus, cheese - proper cheese - does not go "bad." Mould just makes it tastier. You should never throw cheese away. This is what my grandparents taught me.

A bit late, but the 145 writers/artists/morons who decided to boycott PEN for giving Charlie Hebdo a freedom of speech award because they are "for freedom of speech" but apparently not freedom to draw things have annoyed the Hell (or, as the Muslims say, Jahannam) out of me. Charlie Hebdo staff were shot for drawing about 3 cartoons in 3 years depicting an illiterate, likely schizophrenic 7th century Arabian warlord who some people think had a hotline to God. If they did not stand up for freedom of speech, I don't know what the [bleep] counts as standing up for it. Certainly the 145 useful idiots - using their right to free speech to advocate not having freedom of speech - are a lot, lot worse.

Neither of them are that hot. I've seen more attractive hotel maids. That said, Alba is the lesser of the two mediocrities.

*Italian (Sicilian) living in Britain. Otherwise, what I was essentially saying is OMG the New Yorker is so try hard - I never knew lololol.

I read an article in The New Yorker today and was astonished at how pretentious it is. The worst thing is the way they avoid a diphthong: rather than use the modern hyphen to separate vowel sounds (e.g. re-education), they do it in the French way (reëducation). It's so pedantic and 19th century. Also, the articles are too long. They take a lot of words to say very little.

To me this whole thing says more about US gun laws than anything to do with Muslims/atheists/race relations. The affair was over a parking ticket (and not pre-planned) and by all accounts the perpetrator was known for his gun toting ways. Though maybe that's a distortion in the British press.

I once went on a German exchange where the moment I go to my exchange partner's house in suburban Hamburg I was made to shovel the sidewalk and road of snow and ice for about 2 hours. Wilkommen aus Deutschland.

Recently finished The Spectre of Alexander Wolf, by Gaito Gazdanov, am reading The Carter of La Providence, by Simenon. Will probably read either some Sherlock Holmes or Hitchiker's Guide to the Galaxy next.

I think we need a SaqPrets thread. One minute you're in love, then you're not, then you're jumping off a bridge, then spending a night in an icy forest. In America they would say dafuq, I think. Today I have been playing a fun game on news websites in which I mix two headlines. Baftas 2015: Eddie Redmayne 'kills IS commander Abdul Rauf' Prince Charles asks why UK Muslims have failed to plan movie about his own youthful bobsled triumphs China executes mining tycoon Liu Han: 10 best quotes from the ceremony Ukraine crisis: don't threaten Putin with snogging, stage invasions and bottoms out