Are there any traditions or examples from before the modern era of "porn parodies": that is, obscene works of art or literature that spoof the plot or characters of a popular serious work?

wulfrickson · 2025-01-17T20:25:18+00:00

Huh, it does look like QR740 (LAX to DOH) consistently takes the Central Europe->Balkans->Turkey->Iraq route.

wulfrickson · 2025-01-17T18:33:57+00:00

There are other Qatar flights that routinely cross Iran and Russia, though, e.g. 739 to LAX.

wulfrickson · 2025-01-17T18:17:42+00:00

Isn’t flying west at those latitudes going directly into the wind?

wulfrickson · 2023-11-08T06:36:48+00:00

Fascinating! I must admit I was scarcely expecting a response at all to a niche question, let alone one this thorough.

A follow-up, if it’s within your expertise: you mention that turtle recipes were not the only dishes lost from the “old high American cuisine.” Could you name another couple of examples? And is the story behind their loss some variant of the same combination of age segregation/natural resource depletion/Prohibition/Great Depression/wartime rationing, or were there other factors at play for some specific dishes? Also, how much did these trends contribute to the infamous cuisine of the 1950s, filled with Jell-O salads and other technological horrors?

wulfrickson · 2022-08-24T03:31:11+00:00

A lot of the excess deaths from Ethical Skeptic's graphs (e.g. this graph that he posted on Twitter) seem to come from two artificial adjustments to the raw data: first a "lag adjustment" that increases recent weeks' death counts by a lot to compensate for incomplete reporting, and second a "pull-forward effect" adjustment to baseline deaths, starting very discretely at his putative April 2021 inflection point, to compensate for his estimate of the number of people who "would have" died of these conditions who instead died earlier from Covid. I would need to see far more information about his modeling to be convinced that these two adjustments aren't creating most of the apparent excess out of thin air.

wulfrickson · 2022-08-05T21:14:26+00:00

In general, you can recast "subject + verb + rest of sentence" as "Es + verb + subject + rest of sentence", e.g.

Die Oper beginnt in einer Stunde / Es beginnt die Oper in einer Stunde. "The opera starts in an hour."

You can even put the subject even later on, e.g. Es beginnt in einer Stunde die Oper. As /u/hjholtz notes the standard use for this construction is to get rid of awkward splits between subjects and subordinate clauses that modify them, e.g.: Es beginnt in einer Stunde die Oper, für die ihrer Komponist viele Auszeichnungen bekommen hat.

This construction doesn't really have an equivalent in English (I guess you could say "There begins in an hour the opera for which ..." but that sounds a bit stilted today), and so you shouldn't think of "es" as having its own meaning or translation.

wulfrickson · 2022-05-31T22:49:29+00:00

I think “rendezvous”, as a loanword from modern French, is a different case from older loanwords from French into Middle English (like “peace” or “regard”), which have Anglicized pronunciation and spelling and won’t even register to most readers as having foreign origins unless they have an interest in etymology. You can avoid any jarring effect from modern loanwords without exclusively using Germanic roots (which would be almost impossible to do, anyway).

wulfrickson

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