Sweet Fanny Adams

I got nuthin’. Nada. Zilch. Though I’m putting it down to my lofty standards rather than, say, a lack of mojo or imagination.

Consider this an open thread, in which to share links and bicker.

Comments

[Rafi]

Fanny Adams.
Noun, informal, British.
A nautical term for tinned meat or stew.

[David]

A nautical term for tinned meat or stew.

Heh. I didn’t know that one.

[Sam Duncan]

I always liked the WWI expression “San Ferry Ann”, which was, of course, the monoglot Tommies' rendering of “Ça ne fait rien” (“It's/was nothing”), but conveniently had the appropriate initials.

[Uma Thurmond's Feet]

For some reason, I'm reminded of a script W.C. Fields wrote that included a character named "San Quentin Quail."

Which referred to underage woman who convorting with could send you to San Quentin Prison.

Which also reminds me of a line from Jimmy Buffett's "Livingston Saturday Night" : "15 will get you 20, but that's all right," a line whose meaning I didn't grok until many years later.

[David]

I do find our chats terribly educational.

[Clam]

Bloody Brits.

'Rambo: Last Blood Falls to Downton Abbey in Opening Weekend at the Box Office'

https://comicbook.com/movies/2019/09/22/rambo-last-blood-downton-abbey-box-office/

[Farnsworth M Muldoon]

Which referred to underage woman who convorting with could send you to San Quentin Prison.

AKA, Romeo and Joliet*.

*(Illinois State Pen, for anyone not in the US who hasn't seen The Blues Brothers)

[David]

Bloody Brits.

Heh. No spoilers. I shall watch when it’s on TV.

What?

Oh, come on. It’s hard to be entirely unintrigued by a TV series that can wring high drama from smudges, improper spoons and Mrs Patmore’s collapsing pastry.

[PiperPaul]

The bad kerning of the 'A'.

[WTP]

Heh. W.C. Fields. "Water? Never touch the stuff. Fish f*k in it".

Well, you said open thread...

[Steve E]

The bad kerning of the 'A'.

A typesetter, suffering from pseudo-agoraphobic syndrome, is frightened by the huge space between the peak of the "A" and the right face of the "R" and overcompensates by kerning the two within touching distance, while becoming so distracted they allow the "Y" to drift too far from the "A".

The psychology of kerning is very real. Check your privilege.

[Baceseras]

Likewise: "Water? I said I was thirsty, not dirty."

[WTP]

The bad kerning

I don't understand what this has to do with making coffee?

[Morpork]

The bad kerning of the 'A'.

Actually the typesetter’s done something more bizarre than that - they’ve flipped the letter A, and then done lousy kerning. The hairline stem of the letter should be on the right, as it is with the U. Some damned fool has been mucking around in InDesign, methinks.

[Charlie Suet]

Does little Greta know what she’s doing or is she being exploited? At what point are you allowed to tell a sixteen year old autist that the world doesn’t revolve around them and their whims are vicious and stupid?

I forget who it was who suggested that the film Idiocracy is coming true, but that it’s the supposed highbrows who are degenerating, rather than the proles. Or perhaps journalists have always been dribbling hypocritical little cretins with no judgment or standards, and the internet is just exposing them.

[NTSOG]

Young Greta strikes me as a typical high IQ obsessive autistic having an intense focus on her favourite subject about which she knows factual information in minute detail, but with little understanding and interest [being an autistic adolescent and having little life experience] in secondary social issues and effects. One of the consequences of being autistic is that we - I and my brother are autistic - is that we are socially naïve, gullible and easy to manipulate. For those interested Dr Temple Grandin made a video about obsessional behaviour in autistics some years ago. In it she noted that, as her social skills improved and her behaviour amongst people became more adaptive she lost the intense obsessional interest in the specific subjects in which she had immersed herself previously and, through and by which she defined her sense of being in the world in the absence [being autistic] of the ability to empathise, i.e. relate spontaneously on the basis of feelings/emotions. [An interesting book is ''Autism and the Development of Mind'' by R. Peter Hobson. I should also note that I spent over 40 years working with autistic children and adults without knowing I was autistic: understanding autism and thus myself was a decades long obsession from undergraduate years until diagnosis.]

[WTP]

Or perhaps journalists have always been dribbling hypocritical little cretins with no judgment or standards, and the internet is just exposing them.

That. Though personally I can only vouch for the last 20-30 years of always. But that.

[Bill Peschel]

H.L. Mencken on his fellow journalists:

"There are managing editors in the United States, and scores of them, who have never heard of Kant or Johannes Muller and never read the Constitution of the United States; there are city editors who do not know what a symphony is, or a streptococcus, or the Statute of Frauds; there are reporters by the thousands who could not pass the entrance exam for Harvard, or Tuskegee, or even Yale. It is this vast and militant ignorance, this widespread and fathomless prejudice against intelligence, that makes American journalism so pathetically feeble and vulgar and so generally disreputable."

What I love most about this quote is that FDR said this, without attribution, at a Press Club gathering with Mencken in the audience. As you can imagine, the audience took umbridge at this, until FDR said it wasn't his opinion, he was only quoting an essay by his old friend Mencken.

"I'll get that son of a bitch," Mencken said sotto voce.

[Darleen]

Some very busy firemen

Very busy.

[Darleen]

On an entirely different note, I stumble across a site that had this running journal of all the Trans-cult-bullying-harassment of WrongThink people. VERY informative.

[Hal]

Sweet Fanny Adams

“Very good! Very good! I am afraid, commander, that some of your fellow citizens feel that just because my people invented advanced mathematics and all-day camping we are complete barbarians who’d try to buy their wives at the drop of, shall we say, a turban. I am surprised they’re giving me an honorary degree, considering how incredibly backward I am.”

“Oh? What degree is that?” said Vimes. No wonder this man was a diplomat. You couldn’t trust
him an inch, he thought in loops, and you couldn’t help liking him despite it.

The Prince pulled a letter out of his robe.

“Apparently it’s a Doctorum Adamus cum Flabello Dulci—Is there something wrong, Sir Samuel?”

Vimes managed to turn the treacherous laugh into a coughing fit. “No, no, nothing,” he said.
“No.”

. . . .

71-hour Ahmed reappeared at his other elbow in a gust of cloves. “I go, I hcome back,” he
growled happily. “The Prince hsays the degree is Doctor of Sweet Fanny Adams. A hwizard
wheeze, yes? Oh, how we are laughing.”

---Terry Pratchett, Jingo

[David]

Bromley scenes.

Via Holborn.

[JuliaM]

Also via Holborn, 'I'm telling my mum!':

https://twitter.com/Holbornlolz/status/1176379765860839424

[David]

Also via Holborn,

Chappie demands “respect,” or rather “fucking respect,” while grappling with police officers and having caused sufficient alarm for the police to be summoned in the first place. And then, like breathing, he cries racism. And again, it’s hard to miss the less than full-throated effectiveness of the police.

[David]

Also via Holborn,

Thing is, when things get hairy, what you want are some burly chaps who can bring down a horse. But it seems that our police force has rather different priorities.

Progress!

[David]

I hope the car’s okay.

[Mags]

I hope the car’s okay.

Darwin was right.

[David]

Darwin was right.

It has the makings of a comedy sketch.

Antifa pinhead #1: “Anarchist communism will be the ideology of the future!”
[ Antifa pinhead #2 runs into oncoming traffic, flies through air. ]

[Farnsorth M Muldoon]

Does little Greta know what she’s doing or is she being exploited?

One thing is for sure, she doesn't like to be upstaged...

[Farnsworth M Muldoon]

Well, I suppose it is one way of looking at it.

If we had proper communism there would be no global warming climate change disruption hysteria. Of course knowing when the food is properly done might be a bit of a gamble, but a small price to pay.

[David]

One thing is for sure, she doesn’t like to be upstaged...

When your ideological vanguard is a relentlessly indoctrinated child with quite serious mental health problems, you’d think, among the adults, some rethinking might be in order.

[WTP]

One thing is for sure, she doesn't like to be upstaged...

Money quote/post: "I see this girls face every day in my mashed potatoes."

I laughed. I'm going to hell. Meh. As someone said elsewhere, from their own reckoning, by the time these little hellions get any power over us to do anything, we’ll all be dead anyway. Someone hasn’t factored demographic transition into their doomsday cult strategizing.

What would be fun, not that I’d live long enough to see it, but imagining a scenario where these deluded children do gain power, live long enough to destroy the greatest prosperity in the history of man, and then THEIR children learn how their parents destroyed their childhood and destroyed prosperity with a doomsday cult. Fortunately for Greta & Co., all the lampposts should be gone by that point.

[Hal]

Thing is, when things get hairy, what you want are some burly chaps who can bring down a horse

Some burly chap who brings down a horse.

[Farnsworth M Muldoon]

... you’d think, among the adults, some rethinking might be in order.

Yes, but the trick is finding the adults, apparently something to which St. Greta has not been exposed.

[David]

Not entirely implausible.

[TomJ]

It's not just the enviroloons who are trying to pass off their policies as the inarguable wisdom of children.

[Sue Sims]

While I agree that the exploitation of Greta Thunberg is worrying, don't draw too many conclusions from her facial expressions: in many situations, Aspergers children (and adults) don't necessarily have appropriate expressions, just as they find it difficult to read the expressions of others. (My youngest son is Aspergers, and I've seen this many times.)

[fnord]

WTP
Or perhaps journalists have always been dribbling hypocritical little cretins with no judgment or standards, and the internet is just exposing them.

That. Though personally I can only vouch for the last 20-30 years of always. But that.
Posted by: WTP | September 23, 2019 at 23:09

It's not a new observation:

If you don't read the papers you're uninformed, if you do you're misinformed.
-Mark Twain

[Farnsworth M Muldoon]

I hope the car’s okay.

Related, learning why not to touch a cop's weapon.

[SumDumGuy]

It's not just the enviroloons who are trying to pass off their policies as the inarguable wisdom of children.

I had a friend in grade school who replied "Firetruck", when out teacher asked what he wanted to be when he grew up.

Not a fireman driving a firetruck, a giant red firetruck; hoses, ladders, axes, the works. He wasn't disabled mentally or otherwise, he just really loved firetrucks.

There is no such thing as inarguable wisdom, especially when coming from children, the left just knows that conservatives will hesitate to pick on a kid and anybody who does will get called out for being mean.

[David]

learning why not to touch a cop’s weapon.

I’ve been assured, quite emphatically, that they’re the clever ones.

[Charlie Suet]

Thanks for the information on autism - I apologise if I sounded callous in referring to it.

I have more experience with anxiety, which I think Thunberg and certainly other paraded kiddies have been cited as suffering from.

One of the features of anxiety is often catastrophising; part of the treatment is to begin recognising your own behaviour and its patterns. A good therapist will respect your fears, but not to the extent of regarding you as an accurate prognosticator of the future.

The Khmer Vert and their useful idiots make no distinction between feeling sympathy for those who suffer and thinking that their feelings are wholly justified.

[Darleen]

Profiles in Courage

I recently completed a book defending free speech. Emerald Press scheduled it for publication but then decided not to proceed. […]

I was notified of Emerald’s decision not to proceed by Tony Roche, Emerald’s publishing director, in an email on 10th June:

I am contacting you in regard to your manuscript In Defense of Free Speech: The University as Censor. Emerald believes that its publication, in particular in the United Kingdom, would raise serious concerns. By the nature of its subject matter, the work addresses sensitive topics of race, religion, and gender. The challenging manner in which you handle these topics as author, particularly at the beginning of the work, whilst no doubt editorially powerful, increase the sensitivity and the risk of reaction and legal challenge. As a result, we have taken external legal advice on the contents of the manuscript and summarize our concerns below.

[pst314]

learning why not to touch a cop’s weapon.

I would not have objected if the cop had shot him.

[Jeff Wood]

It was a superb left hook, with the weak hand, with little time to aim. Impressed.

Returning to an earlier comment, the Royal Navy enjoy a dish they call "Babies' Heads". I did, too, when I tried it aboard a frigate.

[pst314]

the Royal Navy enjoy a dish they call "Babies' Heads".

With Drowned Baby for pudding?

[lotocoti]

the Royal Navy enjoy a dish ...

"Train Smash" was a scran regular in another Royal Navy.

[Daniel Ream]

don't draw too many conclusions from her facial expressions

My conclusion is that she doesn't have Asperger's. That's a very trendy diagnosis. I think she's just a typical spoiled brat teenage girl enjoying playing queen bee.

[Y. Knott]

He wasn't disabled mentally or otherwise, he just really loved firetrucks.

I read (in the Reader's Digest, many years ago when it was worth reading) of a 'gifted' child whose teacher called his parents with concern. He'd been given the question, "Which of these three items are alike? - dog, elephant, ice cream cone?", and he'd gotten it wrong.

The father told the teacher to ask him about his answer; when she did, he told her that a dog and an ice cream cone were two things you could have in the back seat of a car.

His father did not tell the teacher that the kid regularly beat him at chess.

[Y. Knott]

"Train Smash" was a scran regular in another Royal Navy.

- And I'm led to believe that a USN staple, creamed chipped beef on toast, is referred-to by sailors sick of its frequency as "$hit on a shingle".

[GandalFish]

I've known more than a few folks with classic Asperger's syndrome. It's rare, very disabling, almost a 'spot diagnosis' (they talk and move in a very characteristic way), and patients can barely talk to two people, let alone a room full. I wouldn't diagnose someone I hadn't met, but I'm not convinced. The original description (translated from German) is not too hard to find. Dr Asperger himself was quite an odd fish, apparently.

[WTP]

My conclusion is that she doesn't have Asperger's. That's a very trendy diagnosis. I think she's just a typical spoiled brat teenage girl enjoying playing queen bee.

My suspicion as well. I get the sense that she's adopted a personality of being odd. Especially after seeing some video of/from her parents. Such an odd coincidence that her mother is supposedly an opera singer and her father (and his father as well) an actor.

[Lemmi]

Sweet Fanny Adams: The expression is likely derived from a 19th C murder in Alton, Hampshire. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fanny_Adams
The poor girl is related to a friend of mine.

[Ding]

My conclusion is that she doesn't have Asperger's. That's a very trendy diagnosis.

This is one disability where a social constructionist approach could do a lot more good than a born-that-way attitude.

Social skills really are socially constructed by access to mentors and peer groups and thousands of hours of eye contact and learning when to take your turn or shut up.

And social norms really can determine whether somebody who's a slow learner of social skills is able to integrate or not. For example, formal conventions of politeness, which are out of fashion now for being undiverse and unspontaneous and ungenuine, used to provide the awkward squad with icebreakers and means of faking it until they make it.

[Trevor]

"My conclusion is that she doesn't have Asperger's. That's a very trendy diagnosis."

I used to work with young people with 'special needs'. In 15 years I had the grand total of three clients with Asperger's. I can well imagine that if I returned to the field now there would be many many more. I remember when dyslexia became fashionable. It spread like wildfire.

[Trevor]

In the Mother of Parliaments today a member of the government referred to the phrase "When did you last beat your wife?" Some female opposition MP with the IQ of lichen rose to berate him for making light of domestic violence. He wept, you know, did Jesus.

[TomJ]

1. The phrase "the Mother of Parliaments", when originally used by John Bright in a surcharge in Brum, was preceded by the words "England is"; using it to refer to Westminster is a tad off target.

2. Said female opposition MP has used the phrase herself on Twitter, in response to a teacher who espouses traditional teaching methods vociferously. The tweet was in response to a one in which said teacher asked why she supported a principle; the tweet he was replying to had since
apparently been deleted, so it is impossible to say whether she was using our appropriately. https://mobile.twitter.com/oldandrewuk/status/748205060153303040?s=19

3. Various groups are apparently up in arms that Mr Cox "used a joke about domestic violence". This is, of course, arrant nonsense; the whole point of the expression is that no man would want to be thought a wife beater, former or current, and the question is therefore impossibly loaded. That domestic violence is seen more seriously now than when the phrase was coined only gives it more rhetorical force.