Interesting Links for 06-06-2024

[andrewducker]

1. Scottish judges asked to overturn rape case rule barrier

(tags:law rape scotland )

2. Tokyo government to launch dating app to boost birthrate (requiring you to confirm you want to get married and provide proof of income)

(tags:Japan marriage relationships children viaSwampers )

3. Help challenge the ban on puberty blockers

(tags:LGBT transgender bigotry law CrowdFunding UK )

4. Major cause of inflammatory bowel disease found

(tags:disease inflammation genetics )

5. First human infection caused by avian Influenza A(H5N2) confirmed in Mexico

(tags:Mexico flu birds doom humans )

6. Israel Secretly Targeted American Lawmakers With Gaza War Influence Campaign

(tags:Israel propaganda socialnetworking USA politics )

7. "Do Not Stand At My Grave And Weep" - trans edition

(tags:death poetry transgender LGBT )

8. I cannot stand the parodies of Modern Major General

(tags:music parody funny lyrics )

9. Flawed, scandalous trials tank FDA expert support for MDMA therapy

(tags:research ecstasy regulation )

10. Australia wants to become a renewable energy superpower. Can it?

(tags:australia renewables )

11. Russia's is acting provocatively on the Estonian border

(tags:russia Estonia OhForFucksSake doom )

Comments

7.

[drswirly]

That tumblr post was clever but it didn't fool me very long - "The Elements" by Lehrer is a far too often mimicked song! The scansion made it obvious and trivial to figure out, and furthermore the rhyme scheme soon evaporated any doubt.

It took until the second paragraph to be completely sure - insertion of "cacophonous" was blatant as it's too obscure. There's nothing wrong with slanted rhymes if using them makes phrasing nice. (I've often tried to write them but regrettably I'm too precise.)

I kept on reading anyway in case of meaning that I'd missed, but sadly the conclusion failed to demonstrate a sudden twist. In short, it mattered little as its problems they were several - oh wait, it was a parody of Modern Major-General!

Re: 7.

[andrewducker]

Very nicely done!

Re: 7.

[channelpenguin]

:-)

I wasn't sure at first about your last paragraph, but stress on "that" and all was well.

( I am a singer and I write songs and I'm really really really irritated by dodgy scansion or prosody. Makes the sung phrase less understandable.)

Re: 7.

[drswirly]

It's true. Indeed, I thought shortly after that "in case of things I might have missed" would have been better, but there's no edit on here.

Ah well, it will do for a few minutes of doodling!

[mountainkiss]

On the basis that the Elements song is an honourable exception, the parodies song is utter heaven.

[andrewducker]

I was delighted to notice, on about line 3, that I was singing it in my head.

[andrewducker]

Aand today is the day I realised that The Elements Song is to the tune of Modern Major General.

[mountainkiss]

Oh I am delighted!

[calimac]

"a possibly recognizable tune" is, as I recall, what Lehrer says in the introduction. Emphasis on the possibly, I guess.

[andrewducker]

In my defense, I've never seen The Pirates Of Penzance.

But I have *definitely* heard Modern Major General on numerous occasions. And The Element Song on several. I suspect I was always paying too much attention to the words to notice what the familiar music was!

[simont]

I once went to a church wedding, and found that one of the hymn tunes sounded familiar for some reason, which is unusual for me because I'm 100% atheist and don't normally know any hymn tunes at all (unless you count Christmas carols).

At the time I only felt a vague unspecified sense of familiarity, and couldn't place it. But after the service, someone else pointed out that it was the tune of "Deutschland, Deutschland, über alles". In such a completely different context my brain hadn't thought to search that hash table!

[andrewducker]

That is an...interesting choice.

[zz]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gott_erhalte_Franz_den_Kaiser

[calimac]

8) A Midsummer Tempest by Poul Anderson takes place in an alternate universe in which every word in Shakespeare's plays is literally true, as a result of which the characters speak in Shakespearean blank verse. Only it's printed as prose, so the question is, how long does it take for the reader to notice?

[simont]

The same device is used in Sandman, when Dream encounters Shakespeare in the pub. Their dialogue is split between speech bubbles in the usual comic-book style, but it all fits perfectly to iambic pentameter.

[andrewducker]

I *totally* failed to spot that.

[bens_dad]

9. I was very slow to see this - I blame it being written not audio.
I might have heard that The Elements was a parody, but I had not taken it in, possibly because I knew Lehrer's version first.

I was a pirate/policeman in my school production of Pirates, so am fairly familiar with the Modern Major General.

[bens_dad]

2. If it is a government app, why do they need your tax statement?
They should already know that.

[channelpenguin]

hehe you assume different gov depts actually talk to one another and share data.

DEFINITELY not the case in Germany, and I guess then also in Japan.

Tax here is handled locally ("county" level and even within cities at a district level). If you move, you get a new tax office. For many bureacratic things, you even get a specific person as a contact (sounds good but really pretty useless since German bureaucrats pretty much NEVER answer emails). When they were doing a reassessment of property values for the German version of "council tax", I had to fill in lots of info already known by the "county" Land Register. I Really don't know why (my guess was a) sheer lack of automation or comms betweeen systems and/or lack of staff to handle that task b) there are loopholes that rich people's clever tax experts can use... German tax law is bigger than ALL OTHER TAX LAW IN THE WORLD COMBINED!)

[bens_dad]

7 (stand and weep).

While I can see that this relates to the poem, I am not getting the plot.

For those of us not on Tumbler, who therefore cannot see related comics, is there any context to this story, such as what sort of trans person the main character is ?
Thanks.

[andrewducker]

One who is dead to his family.