Phonemic change does not happen on an individual human lifespan... precisely because the older generations lock in linguistic features of language while they are alive. Language experiences less Mendelian evolution than you think it does.
It's also worth noting the effects on a language of population movements beyond just the founder effect -- what happens when two distinct linguistic populations collide?
Languages spoken by folks who move around a lot and interact with speakers of many other languages seem to undergo a kind of erosion, where extreme difficulties in the languages (be it grammar or pronunciation, and always relative to the speech communities involved) are simplified. Meanwhile, languages spoken by folks who don't get around much and don't have a lot of contact with speakers of other languages tend to keep (or perhaps even elaborate on) complexities that would not survive in a higher-traffic environment. This is all broadly speaking, of course.:)
... right now, it's not really much better than most of the fringe notions of language, like Germanic substrate hypothesis, and the putative relationship between Korean and Japanese.
I agree with most of why you're saying here. However, the relationship between Japanese and Korean is only "fringe" for political reasons. Any serious look at the two languages makes it clear that they are indeed related -- the question is, how.
Interestingly, not only are Japanese and Korean grammars extremely similar (not decisive a match, by any means), but we also begin to find shared vocabulary -- though admittedly not as much as we'd like, it's also important to realize that these two linguistic and ethnic groups were last intimately connected around 400 AD, before either group used any writing system with phonetic fidelity (both used Chinese, not just the characters but also essentially the language, when writing). It's not very well known, but the Japanese government (such as it was then) sent something like 40,000 soldiers to the support of the Baekje kingdom, one of Korea's "Three Kingdoms", and when the Baekje regime fell, the Baekje upper classes and nobles just moved to Japan and were accepted into the Japanese court. This suggests some very strong ties.
Moreover, we *do* know that the big Korean dialectical groups (Silla, Goguryeo, Baekje) were already distinct enough to pose communication problems in the Three Kingdoms period, with modern Korean tracing its lineage back to the Silla kingdom -- which beat out the Baekje. Much later, Korean underwent a major sinicization around the Middle Korean period, 1400-1800 or so, where native Korean words fell out of use and were replaced by imported vocabulary from Chinese.
Yet despite so much historical room for divergence, we can still find plenty of cognates if we just look. I'm not steeped enough in the older forms of either language to be able to trace things back as far as I'd like, but I can certainly begin to rule out more recent imports, like gudu in Korean for "shoes", which apparently was borrowed from Japanese kutsu. If we can find not just isolated cognates in both languages, but whole clusters, that would support the argument for a common linguistic ancestry. And there do appear to be such clusters.
By way of background, I'm a Japanese-English translator with a penchant for looking into etymologies and word formation. Japanese has a number of interesting semantic clusters that don't get talked about much, word groupings like maru / muru / moru, or naru / noru. Korean has words of similar meanings that cluster around similar consontants and vowels.
J: naru, "to be born", "to become", matching with nasu as the transitive, "to bear", "to produce"
K: nada, "to be born", "to appear or arise", matching with nahta as the transitive, "to lay (an egg)", "to give birth"
J: noru, "to be on top of something else", matching with nosu as the transitive, "to put something on top of something else"
K: nohita, "to be laid or put", as the passive of nohta, "to place on something", "to cast"
There seem to be other clusters as well, such as around J mura / maru / muru / moru, "village / round / gather, group / cluster together", all relating to ideas of togetherness, and K maeul / malda / moeuda, "village / roll up / come together".
Then there are groups of cognates that begin to show clear sound shifts:
J: hoshi, "star"
K: byeol
J: ashi, "leg / foot"
K: bal
J: hachi, "bee"
K: beol
J: mizu, "water"
K: mwul (attested in some dialects as mil)
For beginnings, there's a pretty clear J "h" -- K "b" shift going on, with some exceptions like for J ashi. However, Old Japanese apparently began many words with "p" that later morphed int
Google isn't into bribing IT decision makers, they rely on the strength of their offerings.
These days, that practically *is* bribery right there -- oo, your software actually *does what it says on the tin*?? You mean I no longer have to guess which parts of your documentation are outright lies? Want!
'Course, the fact that I'm armpits-deep in trying to figure out MSO 2003 to 2007 formatting cruft issues might color my judgment somewhat. CSS makes a *lot* more sense than Microsoft's never-quite-baked styling. And don't get me started on the abomination that is Office "Open" XML, which I've recently had to become very familiar with in a file format conversion project here at work... >:-(
And then there's SDL's "wonderful" localization software, but that's niche enough I doubt anyone here would have much interest.
As near as I can tell, the FCC gained authority over wired communications by court decision, not by being granted the authority directly.
Interesting. I haven't delved into the history, and assumed it was an outgrowth of their radio regulatory role.
Arguably, congress had a legitimate interest in establishing the ground rules for a commons such as radio waves, although I think allowing the homesteading style ownership of a channel by being the first to use would have been better.
The recent round of auctions makes it clear that this commons is not open to little folk. Perhaps homesteading would have been a better model.
There's a reasonable argument that the federal government does not have the legitimate authority to regulate purely local wired communications, despite the current state of the law.
I certainly agree with you here, though thinking it through, I'd imagine the definition of "local" might need some hammering out -- Is it local only if I have a dedicated line between points A and B (and the line doesn't cross any state lines)? Is it still local if I'm using the phone company's lines to make a local call, only the nearest exchange is a few counties over? Etc., etc.
Searching for the FCC's charter turns up no apparent hits. Searching more specifically turns up what seem to be charters produced by various committees within the FCC, as opposed to something covering the FCC as a whole. This page seems to be the most relevant listing of charters and regulations, but again nothing seems to cover the whole FCC, aside possibly from the extremely dense FCC Rules and Regulations links list.
There are a fewpages on the FCC site that touch on the internet and the FCC's regulatory role, which mostly just say the FCC doesn't regulate the internet or ISPs, with no explanation for why. Other pages like this one describe future goals of the FCC with regard to specific sub-areas of internet policy.
In the admittedly brief bit of searching I've done so far, though, I can find nothing that either resembles an overall charter for the FCC as a whole, or that lays out the FCC's regulatory scope with explanations for why things are or are not included therein.
According to the About the Federal Communications Commission page on the FCC's site:
The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) is an independent United States government agency. The FCC was established by the Communications Act of 1934 and is charged with regulating interstate and international communications by radio, television, wire, satellite and cable. The FCC's jurisdiction covers the 50 states, the District of Columbia, and U.S. possessions.
The Working Group will assist the Commission in identifying, evaluating and addressing policy issues that will arise as telecommunications services move to Internet-based platforms.
From these, I find myself still puzzled as to why the FCC can and does regulate telecom companies, preventing them from engaging in any traffic-slowing, redirecting, filtering, throttling, or other technical hobbling of competing services, and yet this same FCC is not allowed to similarly regulate ISPs.
I do find an explanation in the sleight-of-hand committed in the 1996 Telecommunications Act, which classified ISPs as providing "information services" instead of "telecommunications services" (some background here), apparently formalizing some of the FCC's policies to protect little-guy ISPs from big-guy telecoms (more here). This Act seems to have been based on 1) the understanding of the internet at the time, given the early date and the non-technical backgrounds of pretty much anyone in Congress then, and 2) business interests that were very keen to not have to play by the stricter rules applied to telecoms.
While this may have had the intended effect of protecting the little guy and incentivizing innovation in internet services, the rise of media conglomerates that have been allowed to buy up everything from content production through to online delivery services despite the clear and present conflicts of interest, and that have since begun to see what kinds of anti-competitive behavior they can get away with, strongly suggests that this distinction between "telecommunication service" and "information service" might need revisiting -- or at the very least that the FCC (or some other entity) should rework the ways in which these "information services" are regulated.
While I feel very strongly that content and distribution must be split up somehow with regard to major media control over internet access (hello, intrinsic structural conflict of interest), I cannot speak much to the current round of those pushing for net neutrality legislation, in part due to the copious amounts of obfuscation going on on all sides of the public policy issue, and in part due to the hidden and underhanded way in which legislation is drafted in this country (last-minute riders, for instance).
That said, the FCC *is* the Federal Communications Commission, so I'm a bit confused about how the internet would not fall under its purview just by definition. Bringing up the FCC's past decision to classify the ISP business as different from telecoms seems moot to me -- regardless of whether that decision was right or wrong at the time, the circumstances have clearly changed, and the internet is now a vital communications technology without which the US economy simply couldn't function (without massive and likely painful changes). Properly reclassifying the internet as a telecommunication technology and then just applying the laws already on the books would seem the key -- but for the problems of regulatory capture in the US government.
And even the Republicans don't generally oppose some forms of socialism (eg. Social Security).
I was generally with you until this point. Last time I recall hearing a lot of noise about social security, it was George W. pushing to have it privatized (plundered). That's pretty much the opposite of socialism. I don't recall the Republican party coming out very strongly against W's proposal.
The hits to 401(k)s and mutual funds alone are bad enough, but imagine if they had indeed privatized the social security system -- just in time for the whole party to tank.
I tried to purchase an Mp3 from amazon, it wanted me to use their default downloader. Which was not compatible with 64 bit linux
So while I don't have to use itunes specifically to use the IPod. . Linux is not an option for it at present
It is possible to get the Amazon MP3 downloader up and running on 64-bit Ubuntu -- I use it on my home machine running 64-bit Ubuntu 10.04. I don't recall which exact libraries you need, but this hitlist should get you started.
One of my favorite silly names is from a sign in front of a small municipal building in Indiana. Though not visible from Street View, the last time I was by there, the sign out front proudly proclaimed: City of Gas City City Hall.
Though more obscure this side of the water, another of my favorites is a sign along the waterways in Koutou-ku in Tokyo, labeling a tributary as the Shin-sen-gawa River. Translated fully, it's apparently the New River River River.
Part of the problem comes for humanity's capacity for metaphor. Time is lumped together with space as "spacetime", and mathematical models turn time into a dimension, with descriptions of "light cones" and other theoretical constructs that, while useful for purposes of illustration, ultimately lead us down thought-experiment rabbit holes.
Time is simply our perception of the rate at which things change. There is no past, there is no future. There is only now, the point at which change occurs. Time "travel" is thus a silly concept -- there's no "when" to go but now.
You have an exec of an Indie game which probably never expected to make so much money.
An EA exec on the other hand is employed to get the maximum money for the shareholders. More often then not experimental games don't make as much revenue as the mainstream ones. You mess up, you get fired. So it is safer for the exec to release another NFL/FPS/Sims game then it is to make something new.
Looking at the economics (in terms of motivations and the psychology of situations), the basic question can also be broken down to which group the exec is trying to please.
For the indie company, privately owned, management needs to look at the bottom line -- sales, where the money comes in -- and is thus beholden to the customers.
For the major corporation, post-IPO and publicly owned, management needs to look at the top line -- profits, the numbers that affect the share price -- and is thus beholden to the shareholders.
This is a gross oversimplification, but it does begin to illustrate why so many corporations seem to care exactly squat about their customer bases, whereas smaller and medium-sized privately-owned companies tend to pay more attention to what people buying their products and/or services actually want.
Those aren't crickets! That's a WMA file of recorded cricket sounds being streamed from Microsoft directly to my Zune!
No, no, the official terminology is squirting, as amply demonstrated by Ballmer's disturbing money quote:
I want to squirt you a picture of my kids. You want to squirt me back a video of your vacation. That's a software experience.
Frankly, a bit too soft for my preference. Methinks the Ballmer needs more roughage in his diet -- and perhaps some time familiarizing himself with the connotations of his word choices, the better to avoid any similar outbreaks of logorrhea (a.k.a. "runny brain") in future.
Well, there was the udon, and other dishes, well before there was... that other thing.
"Bukkake" is from butsu, meaning to hit something, and kakeru, to cover something. Together the meaning is a bit like "to cover something with lots of stuff all at once" -- which, alone, is perfectly innocuous, and could easily refer to food toppings or heavy blankets. It's only in certain other contexts that this gets at all off-color.
Now that's a disturbing image. Though sadly it seems to be accurate.
I can't recall where I first ran across it, but someone once said this was all mathematical: two half-asseds make an ass-whole. And WP has gone well beyond half-assed.
I'm sorry you took it as an insult; it was an attempt at humour, and while I admit it was at your expense, it was meant in jest -- hence the Muphry's Law reference and the smiley.
That aside, the only comment in this particular branch by GameboyRMH was simply that the initial broadcast of Power Rangers was more than 15 years ago; I don't see the clear implication that you do. "First aired" = "initial broadcast", which pretty clearly has nothing to do with reruns, so your comment looked to me very much like you'd misread GameboyRMH's post. But that's just my take on it.
How long has any other Republic lasted? A half-century or so at best, probably.
The oldest republic is San Marino, from 301 AD. So, a bit longer than a half-century:-)
Though considerably younger, it's also worth pointing out that Iceland has been a democratic republic for quite some time too (since 930, according to some accounts).
Slashdot Mirror
Phonemic change does not happen on an individual human lifespan... precisely because the older generations lock in linguistic features of language while they are alive. Language experiences less Mendelian evolution than you think it does.
It's also worth noting the effects on a language of population movements beyond just the founder effect -- what happens when two distinct linguistic populations collide?
Languages spoken by folks who move around a lot and interact with speakers of many other languages seem to undergo a kind of erosion, where extreme difficulties in the languages (be it grammar or pronunciation, and always relative to the speech communities involved) are simplified. Meanwhile, languages spoken by folks who don't get around much and don't have a lot of contact with speakers of other languages tend to keep (or perhaps even elaborate on) complexities that would not survive in a higher-traffic environment. This is all broadly speaking, of course. :)
Cheers,
... right now, it's not really much better than most of the fringe notions of language, like Germanic substrate hypothesis, and the putative relationship between Korean and Japanese.
I agree with most of why you're saying here. However, the relationship between Japanese and Korean is only "fringe" for political reasons. Any serious look at the two languages makes it clear that they are indeed related -- the question is, how.
Interestingly, not only are Japanese and Korean grammars extremely similar (not decisive a match, by any means), but we also begin to find shared vocabulary -- though admittedly not as much as we'd like, it's also important to realize that these two linguistic and ethnic groups were last intimately connected around 400 AD, before either group used any writing system with phonetic fidelity (both used Chinese, not just the characters but also essentially the language, when writing). It's not very well known, but the Japanese government (such as it was then) sent something like 40,000 soldiers to the support of the Baekje kingdom, one of Korea's "Three Kingdoms", and when the Baekje regime fell, the Baekje upper classes and nobles just moved to Japan and were accepted into the Japanese court. This suggests some very strong ties.
Moreover, we *do* know that the big Korean dialectical groups (Silla, Goguryeo, Baekje) were already distinct enough to pose communication problems in the Three Kingdoms period, with modern Korean tracing its lineage back to the Silla kingdom -- which beat out the Baekje. Much later, Korean underwent a major sinicization around the Middle Korean period, 1400-1800 or so, where native Korean words fell out of use and were replaced by imported vocabulary from Chinese.
Yet despite so much historical room for divergence, we can still find plenty of cognates if we just look. I'm not steeped enough in the older forms of either language to be able to trace things back as far as I'd like, but I can certainly begin to rule out more recent imports, like gudu in Korean for "shoes", which apparently was borrowed from Japanese kutsu. If we can find not just isolated cognates in both languages, but whole clusters, that would support the argument for a common linguistic ancestry. And there do appear to be such clusters.
By way of background, I'm a Japanese-English translator with a penchant for looking into etymologies and word formation. Japanese has a number of interesting semantic clusters that don't get talked about much, word groupings like maru / muru / moru, or naru / noru. Korean has words of similar meanings that cluster around similar consontants and vowels.
K: nada, "to be born", "to appear or arise", matching with nahta as the transitive, "to lay (an egg)", "to give birth"
K: nohita, "to be laid or put", as the passive of nohta, "to place on something", "to cast"
There seem to be other clusters as well, such as around J mura / maru / muru / moru, "village / round / gather, group / cluster together", all relating to ideas of togetherness, and K maeul / malda / moeuda, "village / roll up / come together".
Then there are groups of cognates that begin to show clear sound shifts:
K: byeol
K: bal
K: beol
K: mwul (attested in some dialects as mil)
For beginnings, there's a pretty clear J "h" -- K "b" shift going on, with some exceptions like for J ashi. However, Old Japanese apparently began many words with "p" that later morphed int
Google isn't into bribing IT decision makers, they rely on the strength of their offerings.
These days, that practically *is* bribery right there -- oo, your software actually *does what it says on the tin*?? You mean I no longer have to guess which parts of your documentation are outright lies? Want!
'Course, the fact that I'm armpits-deep in trying to figure out MSO 2003 to 2007 formatting cruft issues might color my judgment somewhat. CSS makes a *lot* more sense than Microsoft's never-quite-baked styling. And don't get me started on the abomination that is Office "Open" XML, which I've recently had to become very familiar with in a file format conversion project here at work... >:-(
And then there's SDL's "wonderful" localization software, but that's niche enough I doubt anyone here would have much interest.
Cheers,
As near as I can tell, the FCC gained authority over wired communications by court decision, not by being granted the authority directly.
Interesting. I haven't delved into the history, and assumed it was an outgrowth of their radio regulatory role.
Arguably, congress had a legitimate interest in establishing the ground rules for a commons such as radio waves, although I think allowing the homesteading style ownership of a channel by being the first to use would have been better.
The recent round of auctions makes it clear that this commons is not open to little folk. Perhaps homesteading would have been a better model.
There's a reasonable argument that the federal government does not have the legitimate authority to regulate purely local wired communications, despite the current state of the law.
I certainly agree with you here, though thinking it through, I'd imagine the definition of "local" might need some hammering out -- Is it local only if I have a dedicated line between points A and B (and the line doesn't cross any state lines)? Is it still local if I'm using the phone company's lines to make a local call, only the nearest exchange is a few counties over? Etc., etc.
Cheers,
Searching for the FCC's charter turns up no apparent hits. Searching more specifically turns up what seem to be charters produced by various committees within the FCC, as opposed to something covering the FCC as a whole. This page seems to be the most relevant listing of charters and regulations, but again nothing seems to cover the whole FCC, aside possibly from the extremely dense FCC Rules and Regulations links list.
There are a few pages on the FCC site that touch on the internet and the FCC's regulatory role, which mostly just say the FCC doesn't regulate the internet or ISPs, with no explanation for why. Other pages like this one describe future goals of the FCC with regard to specific sub-areas of internet policy.
In the admittedly brief bit of searching I've done so far, though, I can find nothing that either resembles an overall charter for the FCC as a whole, or that lays out the FCC's regulatory scope with explanations for why things are or are not included therein.
According to the About the Federal Communications Commission page on the FCC's site:
... and the Internet Policy Working Group intro page:
From these, I find myself still puzzled as to why the FCC can and does regulate telecom companies, preventing them from engaging in any traffic-slowing, redirecting, filtering, throttling, or other technical hobbling of competing services, and yet this same FCC is not allowed to similarly regulate ISPs.
I do find an explanation in the sleight-of-hand committed in the 1996 Telecommunications Act, which classified ISPs as providing "information services" instead of "telecommunications services" (some background here), apparently formalizing some of the FCC's policies to protect little-guy ISPs from big-guy telecoms (more here). This Act seems to have been based on 1) the understanding of the internet at the time, given the early date and the non-technical backgrounds of pretty much anyone in Congress then, and 2) business interests that were very keen to not have to play by the stricter rules applied to telecoms.
While this may have had the intended effect of protecting the little guy and incentivizing innovation in internet services, the rise of media conglomerates that have been allowed to buy up everything from content production through to online delivery services despite the clear and present conflicts of interest, and that have since begun to see what kinds of anti-competitive behavior they can get away with, strongly suggests that this distinction between "telecommunication service" and "information service" might need revisiting -- or at the very least that the FCC (or some other entity) should rework the ways in which these "information services" are regulated.
Cheers,
Orange.
While I feel very strongly that content and distribution must be split up somehow with regard to major media control over internet access (hello, intrinsic structural conflict of interest), I cannot speak much to the current round of those pushing for net neutrality legislation, in part due to the copious amounts of obfuscation going on on all sides of the public policy issue, and in part due to the hidden and underhanded way in which legislation is drafted in this country (last-minute riders, for instance).
That said, the FCC *is* the Federal Communications Commission, so I'm a bit confused about how the internet would not fall under its purview just by definition. Bringing up the FCC's past decision to classify the ISP business as different from telecoms seems moot to me -- regardless of whether that decision was right or wrong at the time, the circumstances have clearly changed, and the internet is now a vital communications technology without which the US economy simply couldn't function (without massive and likely painful changes). Properly reclassifying the internet as a telecommunication technology and then just applying the laws already on the books would seem the key -- but for the problems of regulatory capture in the US government.
Ah, well.
And even the Republicans don't generally oppose some forms of socialism (eg. Social Security).
I was generally with you until this point. Last time I recall hearing a lot of noise about social security, it was George W. pushing to have it privatized (plundered). That's pretty much the opposite of socialism. I don't recall the Republican party coming out very strongly against W's proposal.
The hits to 401(k)s and mutual funds alone are bad enough, but imagine if they had indeed privatized the social security system -- just in time for the whole party to tank.
Cheers,
You're missing the function to add the dots after the slashes.
I tried to purchase an Mp3 from amazon, it wanted me to use their default downloader. Which was not compatible with 64 bit linux
So while I don't have to use itunes specifically to use the IPod. . Linux is not an option for it at present
It is possible to get the Amazon MP3 downloader up and running on 64-bit Ubuntu -- I use it on my home machine running 64-bit Ubuntu 10.04. I don't recall which exact libraries you need, but this hitlist should get you started.
Cheers,
And the accompanying number of hookers will probably rival the population count of several smaller nations.
No, no, it will probably be the populations of several smaller nations. Why think small? ;)
A part of me feels sorry for this fool.
As in, I pity the fool...
Sometimes actually I miss the 80s.
Cheers,
Even further back:
Constantine the Great AD 337
I don't know if it's worth mentioning, but do dah, do dah! in Navajo basically means "no it isn't, no it isn't!"
Cheers,
So how come no one's gone with Hitler Telecom?
(Not really trying to Godwin, just pointing out that some names are too tainted even for megacorps.
Perhaps another Pinkwater fan? :)
One of my favorite silly names is from a sign in front of a small municipal building in Indiana. Though not visible from Street View, the last time I was by there, the sign out front proudly proclaimed: City of Gas City City Hall.
Though more obscure this side of the water, another of my favorites is a sign along the waterways in Koutou-ku in Tokyo, labeling a tributary as the Shin-sen-gawa River. Translated fully, it's apparently the New River River River.
Cheers,
"head and shoulders over the iPhone"
Does this means WP7 is like iOS, but with dandruff?!
Dandruff = flaky, so yes.
Cheers,
Part of the problem comes for humanity's capacity for metaphor. Time is lumped together with space as "spacetime", and mathematical models turn time into a dimension, with descriptions of "light cones" and other theoretical constructs that, while useful for purposes of illustration, ultimately lead us down thought-experiment rabbit holes.
Time is simply our perception of the rate at which things change. There is no past, there is no future. There is only now, the point at which change occurs. Time "travel" is thus a silly concept -- there's no "when" to go but now.
Cheers,
B. take advice from a lawyer specializing in disability discrimination law.
I'm pretty sure that people using any particular keyboard layout do not constitute a protected class of people. Much less "disabled".
It probably still falls under the scope of OSHA's ergonomics guidelines.
Cheers,
They are two different kinds of execs.
You have an exec of an Indie game which probably never expected to make so much money.
An EA exec on the other hand is employed to get the maximum money for the shareholders. More often then not experimental games don't make as much revenue as the mainstream ones. You mess up, you get fired. So it is safer for the exec to release another NFL/FPS/Sims game then it is to make something new.
Looking at the economics (in terms of motivations and the psychology of situations), the basic question can also be broken down to which group the exec is trying to please.
This is a gross oversimplification, but it does begin to illustrate why so many corporations seem to care exactly squat about their customer bases, whereas smaller and medium-sized privately-owned companies tend to pay more attention to what people buying their products and/or services actually want.
Cheers,
Those aren't crickets! That's a WMA file of recorded cricket sounds being streamed from Microsoft directly to my Zune!
No, no, the official terminology is squirting, as amply demonstrated by Ballmer's disturbing money quote:
I want to squirt you a picture of my kids. You want to squirt me back a video of your vacation. That's a software experience.
Frankly, a bit too soft for my preference. Methinks the Ballmer needs more roughage in his diet -- and perhaps some time familiarizing himself with the connotations of his word choices, the better to avoid any similar outbreaks of logorrhea (a.k.a. "runny brain") in future.
Another neat recent addition was the introduction of Recipe View, which adds depth to food preparation searches.
I wonder what it would make of:
Bukkake udon: Cold udon served with various toppings liberally sprinkled on top
- from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Udon#Cold
Well, there was the udon, and other dishes, well before there was ... that other thing.
"Bukkake" is from butsu, meaning to hit something, and kakeru, to cover something. Together the meaning is a bit like "to cover something with lots of stuff all at once" -- which, alone, is perfectly innocuous, and could easily refer to food toppings or heavy blankets. It's only in certain other contexts that this gets at all off-color.
Cheers,
That place is an asshole... full of assholes...
Now that's a disturbing image. Though sadly it seems to be accurate.
I can't recall where I first ran across it, but someone once said this was all mathematical: two half-asseds make an ass-whole. And WP has gone well beyond half-assed.
Cheers,
I'm sorry you took it as an insult; it was an attempt at humour, and while I admit it was at your expense, it was meant in jest -- hence the Muphry's Law reference and the smiley.
That aside, the only comment in this particular branch by GameboyRMH was simply that the initial broadcast of Power Rangers was more than 15 years ago; I don't see the clear implication that you do. "First aired" = "initial broadcast", which pretty clearly has nothing to do with reruns, so your comment looked to me very much like you'd misread GameboyRMH's post. But that's just my take on it.
Cheers,
Lucas is recasting Ashton Kutcher in the role as a romantic interest for Queen Amygdala.
See Kutcher in his groundbreaking role as King Hippocampus! Coming soon to a cerebellum near you!
The oldest republic is San Marino, from 301 AD. So, a bit longer than a half-century :-)
Though considerably younger, it's also worth pointing out that Iceland has been a democratic republic for quite some time too (since 930, according to some accounts).
Cheers,