mike carey

(Source) Just my luck, 250 million year old salt and it expires next year. [ATTACH=full]15046[/ATTACH]

They are a drama queen works for me. Just as 'You are a stud' defies grammar but works.

It's not new, if you read back through the thread, this has already been discussed. The singular they has been used by good writers for hundreds of years.

There is still a Welsh speaking community in Chubut province. I can remember seeing a BBC program (Songs of Praise) in which they reported on an Argentine doctor working in a hospital in Wales. He spoke Spanish and Welsh, but not English.

Completely unrelated to Buenos Aires, there are remnants of Australian agricultural practices and people called Kennedy (and other Anglo names) in rural Paraguay. They are the traces of an 1890s socialist experiment of a new society (New Australia) set up in that country. To illustrate LatBear's point about the influence of the original people, the remaining descendants of the settlers mainly speak Guaraní now.

Consider demands that people might make, but decide for yourself and post the details. If people really want to meet up, the venue will be of secondary importance.

Indeed, and industrialised or not the two richest countries (per capita) in 1900 were Argentina and Australia. Argentine won the close race to be the first to send refrigerated beef to Europe (we might have been aiming for lamb, I'm not sure). As I recall, the British response to the Argentine seizure of the Falkland Islands stunned the Argentine middle class for just that reason.

It's a statue of Pilate's fwiend!

That's the message that comes up if you're blocked, although I don't know if it appears in any other circumstances. Try logging out of your RM account and checking the ad. If you can see the ad at rentmen.eu and not at rent.men that could be because you are logged on at the latter and not the former. Logons to the two versions of the site are separate. although it's the same account and password.

There's several of us here! Lol, of course we have learnt to use the same calendar as you, you're just behind the times. I see this anytime I fly to LA, I arrive there before I'd left Sydney. As for flying back, a whole day vanishes somewhere! As @Bertster noted, the characterisation of the day as Invasion Day and therefore a day of at least reflection, if not mourning, is becoming increasingly prevalent. I doubt it will happen soon. I have no doubt that something needs to change, but I'd prefer to see the day be made more inclusive and address that sensitivity. Solemn reflective and commemorative ceremonies in the morning, with the happy celebrations (including naturalisation ceremonies) held over until the afternoon and evening. The day itself is a perfect way to mark the end of the summer holidays, and for the country to shift back into 'serious' mode. I agree that in some ways it's a peripheral issue, but to me part of the government's job is to identify such issues that have the potential to be deeply divisive and nip them in the bud. This is an issue that has the potential, like equal marriage, to become a big issue if it's ignored or dismissed. Anyway, I went to the supermarket and bought a lump of roast lamb to mark the day, and watched Australia (finally) beat England in a one-day cricket match.

Interesting how something that was the watchword for something that is polite and demur became the name for something so different.

It's a fox (I added that to my post just now) but not a small one. These eagles can be over a metre long and have a wing-span of almost 3m.)

Hmmm.

I've posted this before (not sure if it was here). [ATTACH=full]15045[/ATTACH] This is a wedge-tailed eagle (ed: taking a fox) in the WA wheatbelt in 2013. http://www.abc.net.au/news/rural/2013-12-05/flying-foxes-in-the-wheatbelt/5138450

It seems like a pointless bureaucratic imposition. I can see that the state wants to capture a record of prescription for auditing of individual and collective health care, and for statistical purposes. I don't have a regular pharmacist, and I suspect I'm not alone. Luckily doctors here can issue paper scripts (and all do) but they are printed from the doctors' computers not hand written. Surely the reasons for the NY regulations would be satisfied if doctors gave their patients a printed script that their pharmacist could use to access the computer version? (My cynical side suspects that there is no data basing or collective use of the data, rather they have mandated a point to point electronic dissemination method that has more in common with pigeon post than a modern digital system.)

Only half a pound(ing)?

@youngboldone, find an escort you like, book a time, go and see him and let him pound you into oblivion (or vice versa). Stop beating about the bush. Once you've been there once, refine your approach. I have met several well regarded escorts who are on here and didn't discuss things in excruciating detail. Guess what, it worked each time.

Nope, why do you ask? I have interacted with him on Twitter and periscope, but I don't 'know' him.

I guess it's a fine line between being hired from Twitter and being discovered on Twitter and then hired. Some people, I'm sure, find escorts on Twitter and elsewhere at roughly the same time, chat and perhaps hire. Social media is everywhere and sometimes it's hard to know which it the 'first contact' medium.

The ad expired (during a period that was before it had stated that he would be back in NYC) and then was gone (error code 404, not found, as opposed to expired) for a time. Killian posted a comment (#64) here that he understood why people would be sceptical as to whether it was he who had posted a new ad with his pics. As you noted, the ad is back and current.

(Source) 'I swore this was a flying carpet at first glance.'

It does, a few minutes' worth of lightning can do that!

I mentioned that it was 36 degrees in Canberra yesterday, but it rained over night and it was pleasant today. The rain came with a lightshow as seen here (long exposure, obviously) [ATTACH=full]15021[/ATTACH]

Nice bit of shade!

That was as I thought I remember too, but I cited Shakespeare as I was sure of his (their?) use of it. This (which I could have found quickly yesterday but didn't) is the Economist's Prospero column's Jan 2016 take on the issue. Why 2015’s word of the year is rather singular Singular "they" has been used since Chaucer. Why is it still controversial? AT THE turn of each year, several dictionary publishers and language groups choose Words of the Year. How did everyone do for 2015? If you’re a traditionalist, whether on language or culture more broadly, they did terribly. If you think change is more good than bad, it’s an interesting crop. The Oxford Dictionaries went far afield, choosing something even most linguists wouldn’t consider a “word”: http://emoji.fileformat.info/gemoji/joy.png In case that didn’t render properly on your screen, it is an emoji, one of those adorable or maddening (depending on your view) faces that convey a sort of metamessage in online communication. So what does it mean? “Tears of Joy”, according to the keepers of Unicode. A debate rages about whether emoji are language. (In your columnist’s view, they are best considered “paralinguistic”, the written equivalent of body language or tone of voice.) In any case, emoji go beyond pure signs, like a picture of a dog meaning “dog”: plenty of emoji, and this is one, take acquired knowledge to understand. A bit like Saussure's arbitrary signifier. A word, no, but Oxford’s choice of an emoji was certainly very 2015. The next WOTY choice wins Johnson’s award for “most baffling”. When you think “Word of 2015”, did you think of “-ism”? Merriam-Webster’s lexicographers did. Peter Sokolowski, one of Merriam-Webster’s editors, gamely explains that Merriam-Webster does not go for a top-down choice, but makes its selection based on the words most looked up on Merriam-Webster’s excellent free online dictionary, and which ones climbed the most, year-on-year. “Socialism”, “communism”, “fascism”, “terrorism” and “racism” all saw big spikes in lookup traffic. (Some year.) So did, more happily, “feminism” and “capitalism”. How to crown a single word? Slice off that “-ism” and present it to the world. It was a Solo monic choice: about as satisfying as winning half a baby in a custody dispute. Dictionary.com is one of the newest WOTY purveyors. They, at least, got a word that feels intimately connected to this year’s news, despite not being a terribly interesting word in itself: “identity”. America’s college campuses have been rocked by racist incidents on one hand, and rowdy protests over careless use of language—taken to be grossly offensive by a minority—on the other. “Cultural appropriation” was also a hot topic, self-evidently insulting to some, robustly defended as cultural exchange by others. So there was plenty of heated talk about "identity" and its uses in 2015. Finally, the American Dialect Society, meeting last week, made in a way the most unusual choice. To capture 2015, members tapped a word almost a millennium old, a borrowing from Old Norse that improbably became part of the English pronoun system. Languages typically don’t borrow pronouns, but the Old English nicked “they” from their Viking foes. What made the third-person plural noteworthy in 2015? The fact that it is not always plural at all: the ADS specified “singular ‘they’” as the word of the year. In casual running speech, nearly everyone says things like “find a good teacher and take their advice.” But some conservatives insist that “a good teacher” is singular and therefore it must be his advice, or his or her advice, or making it find good teachers and take their advice, an unsatisfying change to the sentence. Linguists and historians (and Johnson) point out that singular they has deep historical roots: in the King James Bible, Chaucer, Shakespeare, Jane Austen and beyond. English has a gap in its pronoun system (other languages have an impeccable singular gender-neutral pronoun, but we do not). “His or her” is clumsy, especially upon repetition, and “his” is as inaccurate with respect to grammatical gender as “they” is to number. Invented alternatives never take hold. Singular “they” already exists; it has the advantage that most people already use it. If it is as old as Chaucer, what's new? The Washington Post’s style editor, Bill Walsh, has called it “the only sensible solution” to the gap in English’s pronouns, changing his newspaper's style book in 2015. But it was also the rise in the use of they as a pronoun for someone who does not want to use “he” or “she”. Facebook began already in 2014 allowing people to choose “they” as their preferred pronoun (“Wish them a happy birthday!”). Transgender stories, from “The Danish Girl”, a hit movie, to Caitlyn Jenner, an Olympic athlete who has become the world’s most famous trans woman, were big in 2015. But such people prefer their post-transition pronouns: “he” or “she” as desired. “They” is for a smaller minority who prefer neither. But the very idea of "non-binary" language with regard to gender annoys and even angers many people. In other words, as transgender people gain acceptance, “non-binary” folks are the next frontier, like it or not. Who knew a thousand-year-old pronoun could be so controversial?