Tag: culture

Read 13 things you should never say to a person from Scotland (Real Word)
Banter with a person from Scotland by all means. Get to grips with their colourful Scottish expressions and phrases. But, there are some things you dinnae want to say to avoid getting on their wrong side.  Follow our sound advice and you’ll dodge getting told to ‘haud yer wheesht’ (shut up), ...
Read Um, almost the entire Scots Wikipedia was written by someone with no idea of the language – 10,000s of articles by Kieren McCarthy
In an extraordinary and somewhat devastating discovery, it turns out virtually the entire Scots version of Wikipedia, comprising more than 57,000 articles, was written, edited or overseen by a netizen who clearly had nae the slightest idea about the language. The user is not only a prolific contributor, they are an administrator of sco.wikipedia.org, having created, modified or guided the vast majority of its pages in more than 200,000 edits. The result is tens of thousands of articles in English with occasional, and often ridiculous, letter changes – such as replacing a “y” with “ee.”
Read 5 Excellent YA Books About Selkies by Abby Hargreaves
If books about mermaids aren’t really your thing and you’re looking for something a bit earthier, you might be interested in selkie lore. For the uninitiated, selkies come from Scottish folklore, stemming particularly from the Northern Isles of Orkney and Shetland. Selkies, a kind of mythical creature that shapeshifts from a seal to a human form. In many examples of selkie legends, part of the lore typically involves a woman selkie who loses her pelt to a man of the land. When this happens, she is tied to him so long as she is unable to find her pelt, and therefore unable to return to her seal form and her ocean habitat. These six YA books about selkies drop readers into stormy seaside towns, sparkling ocean depths, and treacherous rocky crags.
Apparently this is a “thing”? I’m going to download a sample of one and give it a try.
Read Child Ballads (Wikipedia)
The Child Ballads are 305 traditional ballads from England and Scotland, and their American variants, anthologized by Francis James Child during the second half of the 19th century. Their lyrics and Child's studies of them were published as The English and Scottish Popular Ballads. The tunes of most of the ballads were collected and published by Bertrand Harris Bronson in and around the 1960s.

Burl Ives’s 1949 album, The Return of the Wayfaring Stranger, for example, includes two: “Lord Randall” and “The Divil and the Farmer”. ❧

Annotated on August 04, 2020 at 08:59AM

In 1956 four albums (consisting of eight LPs) of 72 Child Ballads sung by Ewan MacColl and A.L. Lloyd were released: The English and Scottish Popular Ballads, Vols. 1–4. ❧

Annotated on August 04, 2020 at 09:05AM

Illustration by Arthur Rackham of Child Ballad 26, “The Twa Corbies” ❧

Annotated on August 04, 2020 at 09:06AM

Joan Baez sang ten Child ballads distributed among her first five albums, the liner notes of which identified them as such. ❧

Annotated on August 04, 2020 at 09:07AM

Watched The Celtic World, Lecture 24: The Celts Today by Jennifer Paxton from The Great Courses
In the final lecture, end your 2,500-year journey with the Celts by considering the Celtic nations in the 21st century. Bilingualism, modern Celtic pop culture, and renewed nationalist groups pushing for politcal autonomy are merely the tip of the iceberg in this satisfying conclusion to a truly epic history of culture, politics, and warfare.
Read Western Individualism May Have Roots In The Medieval Church's Obsession With Incest (NPR.org)
Researchers combed Vatican archives to find records of how ancient church policies restricting whom one could marry shaped Western values and family structures today.

Western Educated Industrialized Rich Democratic (WEIRD) countries ❧

I love this acronym!
Annotated on August 01, 2020 at 05:41PM

That restructuring of societies in Western Europe in turn also benefited the church, notes Henrich. “In some sense, the church is killing off clans, and they’re often getting the lands in wealth,” he says. “So this is enriching the church. Meanwhile, Europeans are broken down into monogamous, nuclear families and they can’t re-create the complex kinship structures that we [still] see elsewhere in the world.” ❧

If true, this is an astounding finding.
Annotated on August 01, 2020 at 05:46PM

Read The American Death Cult by Anil Dash (Anil Dash)
A significant percentage of conservative culture in America defines “freedom” as death. This is causing a lot more problems right now than even its usual horrible effects. Some explanation, for those who may not have context. Why do we need to have guns? To protect our freedoms! Well, what about
Read I re-read Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman! by Jason McIntoshJason McIntosh (Fogknife)
Revisited this collection of Richard Feynman's eclectic adventures, and found them more inspiring than ever -- though parts demand a charitable eye
I’ve been tempted to read this. Thanks for the thoughtful review! This is some great writing Jason.
Read Bari Weiss Is Leaving the New York Times (vice.com)
The writer and editor has self-expelled from the newspaper, she tells VICE.

Update, 11:22 Eastern: Weiss has posted a letter of resignation addressed to Times publisher A.G. Sulzberger on her website. In it, she denounces the Times for fostering an atmosphere of stifling conformity and accuses her now-former colleagues of bullying: ❧

Having your own website is a must, particularly when you’ve just left one of the biggest platforms on the planet and still need to have a platform to reach your audience and the world. 
Annotated on July 17, 2020 at 04:27PM

Liked a tweet by Daphne K. Lee (Twitter)
 
Read The Horniest Emoji, Ranked by How Horny They Are (Cosmopolitan)
While sexting, video-sexing, and Zoom dating are all well and good, sometimes you wanna inject some flirtiness into your everyday text banter without having to get camera-ready, ya feel? Enter the humble emoji. While they’ve always been great for zuzzhing up your convos, we must call upon them now more than ever to communicate our horniness from afar.