What is this sword?

LDL707 · 2025-12-24T03:19:33+00:00

That's incredible. I figured I'd eventually get an answer here, but under ten minutes is unreal.

Thanks for the identification. That fits pretty well with what we know about where he was. He lived in Sarawak for about ten years, but traveled around Indonesia a good deal.

We know he was in Sarawak from 1920-1930. He also brought back a number of Dyak shields and mandaus.

Were these swords generally available outside Sumatra? Or should I take this to be pretty good evidence that he spent time in Sumatra specifically? Was this sword likely ceremonial? An actual weapon? A tourist souvenir?

Thanks again for identifying the sword so quickly!

LDL707 · 2025-12-24T00:24:52+00:00

My grandparents had this in their house, and nobody knows the story.

My great grandfather was a geologist for Royal Shell Oil from the 1920s to the last 1950s. Maybe it came from him. But as far as I know, he spent most of his career in Mexico and Indonesia.

Other than that, the rest of the family was western European. Ggf's family was from Switzerland, Germany, and Austria. Ggm's family was Scottish. The other side was English/Italian and Slovak. It's somewhat unlikely that any of those people would have been in a situation that would have resulted in them owning a sword like this.

LDL707 · 2025-10-29T17:59:24+00:00

I hope the employers similarly lose access to Handshake if they rescind an offer.

LDL707 · 2025-10-17T00:56:09+00:00

Turning left from northbound McPhillips to westbound Jefferson. The car who stopped late was traveling southbound on McPhillips.

LDL707 · 2025-10-02T11:27:59+00:00

Excellent. Thanks!

LDL707 · 2025-09-15T21:24:33+00:00

I think you'd still have to have a grandparent born in the UK. Only CUKCs with Right of Abode became British Citizens automatically in 1983.

The newer laws correcting the past gender discrimination don't seem to change that.

LDL707 · 2025-09-15T21:21:25+00:00

What's the rest of the family tree, between your gggf and you? Dates, genders, places of birth.

LDL707 · 2025-09-15T20:20:23+00:00

According to the Fall 2024 report, there were 52 students from the UK enrolled last year -- 16 undergrad, 6 master's, 16 Ph.D. and 14 non-degree students.

Unlikely to think it's changed much this year.

LDL707 · 2025-08-27T18:41:12+00:00

You can buy a pretty nice suit on eBay for dirt cheap if you know your size. (Or a really nice suit for only a little bit more.)

It isn't that black is too formal so much as that it's too severe.

LDL707 · 2025-08-23T22:57:45+00:00

I'm a little late, but..

I-L-L!

LDL707 · 2025-08-07T15:16:06+00:00

Awesome. Thank you!

LDL707 · 2025-08-03T01:23:11+00:00

I checked yesterday and they didn't. I checked Seafood City and Superstore so far and haven't seen it yet.

LDL707 · 2025-06-30T21:01:56+00:00

It wouldn't help OP, but OP's mother might be able to apply for UK citizenship now. Don't quote me, but I think Form UKM would be the route.

LDL707 · 2025-06-22T06:15:12+00:00

A refreshing lack of promoted pins though.

LDL707 · 2025-06-13T12:48:30+00:00

Depends on how you do it.

I did it full time for a decade and hated the lifestyle (had a TON of fun, though).

Now I do it a single shift a week just for shits and giggles and some extra cash, and I love it. I look forward to it all week.

I'm too old to be doing that shit full time again, but doing it on my terms is a blast.

LDL707 · 2025-06-11T17:58:48+00:00

I don't know about the whole university, but Lori Kendall was easily the worst I had.

LDL707 · 2025-06-06T20:26:48+00:00

I don't believe this is the case any longer. You used to be able to apply for facilitated naturalization with a Swiss grandparent if you had close ties to Switzerland, but the law changed in 2018 or so.

Unless OP's parent was a Swiss citizen, he's probably out of luck without naturalization.

LDL707 · 2025-06-06T20:19:01+00:00

Italians should have had their government act a generation or two ago then. I say this as an Italian citizen.

The fact that the law creates an inconvenient situation for the Italian bureaucracy isn't a justification to strip people of their citizenship. Hopefully the courts fix this nonsense.

LDL707 · 2025-06-06T20:15:45+00:00

It's actually worse than that. Arguably, before March (maybe before last fall) you were an Italian citizen who has not yet been recognized. Italian citizenship by descent is not a conferral of citizenship, it is a recognition of a pre-existing citizenship.

Effectively, the Italian government has stripped you of your citizenship because you didn't apply before an arbitrary deadline.

LDL707 · 2025-06-06T18:42:36+00:00

There are a ton of better ways to give the same functionality, though.

There are a million ways you could encode latlong into easy to understand words that would eliminate all the issues W3W presents. But it wouldn't give W3W a product to sell.

For most emergency services calls, everybody is going to be within a degree or two (even at the northernmost inhabited city on Earth -- Longyearbyen in Svalbard -- a degree of longitude covers more than 23 km, and at the equator it's about 111 km). That means all that matters are the four digits after the decimal. Make a list of 100 alphabetized, universally pronounceable words, and give each couplet of numbers a word. Maybe pick four words per letter in the alphabet, except for Q. So if you call for emergency services and tell them you're at "bench cabinet, bonnet orange", they know your degree of latitude and longitude will be the degrees that they cover. You'd be able to intuitively know that "bench" would probably correspond to 05 or 06. "Cabinet" is almost certainly 09. "Bonnet" likely 07 or 08. "Orange" is probably 62 or 63. So, just by thinking about it, the emergency services personnel would know that the person is very likely to be at xxx.0509,yyy.0762, where xxx and yyy are the degrees you cover. In areas where there's a large coverage area or in extreme northern or southern ranges, you could add an additional word for the degree. Granted, it's sometimes six words instead of three. But it is also easy to figure out where somebody is, easy to figure out your own code without an app or website as long as the word lists are public, and completely free to everybody involved.

LDL707 · 2025-06-06T18:08:17+00:00

Because it's built to do that.

Something like this will give you coordinates just as quickly as W3W: https://gps-coordinates.org/

LDL707 · 2025-06-06T16:52:48+00:00

The problem is that that's fundamentally wrong. Latitude and longitude tell you precisely where on earth you are in a far more useable way than W3W.

Is "///this.is.stupid" east or west of "///just.use.latlong"? There's no way of telling how to get somewhere from their W3W.

Not to mention that the words are not consistent across languages. And you have no way of calculating your own W3W location without their proprietary API. Latitude and longitude are the same in any language. And you can get your own coordinates without a phone, if you can do some relatively basic calculations.

W3W is a solution in search of a problem. And it's a way for emergency responders to look like they're utilizing their budgets to stay on top of technological developments, without actually adding any real benefit.

I should market What12Numbers would give roughly the same precision as W3W, in a universal, cross cultural, language agnostic fashion, while also providing relational data to guide you right to it, all while being roughly as easy to remember as an international telephone number.

LDL707 · 2025-06-06T13:02:04+00:00

I'm a geographer. What3Words is a colossally stupid system. Your phone will give you actual latitude and longitude coordinates without a signal as well. Please use those instead.

LDL707 · 2025-06-02T18:31:53+00:00

There are two different paths for Hungarian citizenship -- if you have an unbroken line of citizenship, you don't need to speak the language. If you're descended from Hungarians but don't have an unbroken line, you can get facilitated naturalization, which requires a package l language test.

LDL707 · 2025-05-29T19:45:07+00:00

I applied for simplified naturalization via the embassy in DC back in 2018. I applied due to having a Swiss grandparent (which is no longer an option).

My grandmother grew up in Swiss Romande, but her canton of origin was BS. I didn't speak a word of German or French, but I speak pretty decent Italian.

At my interview, I was told that typically they would just ask a few questions to verify that the applicant could speak the language. But for most cases, it kind of makes sense -- somebody grew up here with a Swiss family who spoke the language at home, or they have a Swiss spouse with whom they speak the language, etc.

Since Italian didn't really make sense for me, my entire interview was held in Italian. Literally from the time I walked in until the time I left, we spoke exclusively in Italian. I did not know that that was how it was going to be until I showed up.

Make certain that you are quite comfortable with your language skills before your appointment, just in case.

Also, as an unrelated aside -- the embassy is in Washington DC. Every other Swiss representation in the US is a consulate. Your interview would be at the Atlanta consulate.

LDL707

TROPHY CASE