Jamie123

That's why I'm an incurable romantic. It doesn't really matter what he was convicted of. The important thing is that he was convicted by a properly qualified court (kangaroo or otherwise). Many a person has been convicted of more serious crimes than those of which Trump was convicted, on much flimsier evidence. And the remedy has always been appeal to a higher court. Not election of the defendant to public office.

For all I know you may be correct. But it was a legally constituted court of law nonetheless. And I dare say you're correct that a President (while he remains president) can do no wrong. But to set the verdict aside now sends the message that if you're powerful enough then a court verdict means nothing if you disagree with it. (And that's what you're really doing when you call a court "kangaroo".) If Trump expects others to respect the law he should lead by example. P.S. Good to talk to you again Vort. I've been been away from the forum a few weeks. Hope all is going well.

Donald Trump is a convicted felon. He may also, for all I know, be a "very innocent man". However, there are many other convicted felons who claim to be "very innocent men". But are their claims of innocence alone going to get them out of prison? Not on your nelly! Why should Trump be any different? Shouldn't the President Elect be setting a good example, instead of trusting that the rules which apply to "ordinary people" (whether guilty or innocent) don't apply to him? Perhaps I'm an incurable romantic, but I'm still hoping that the sentencing goes ahead, and that the judge tosses every argument based on "he's the President" straight into the wastepaper bin, and gives Trump exactly the same sentence any non-President Elect would have gotten for the same crimes. Of course, it Trump successfully appeals the verdict then that sentence should quite rightly be annulled. But if the verdict is set aside now simply "coz he's the president" it is hard to see how Trump, the Republican Party or the US system of justice can have any credibility ever again.

TODAY IS INTERNATIONAL WOMBAT DAY!!!!

Laura Tobin has a degree in physics and meteorology. "One shoe off and one shoe on...diddle diddle dumpling...etc."

That is very interesting - thank you Zil! I'll watch the whole thing later. It's interesting that feminism wants to get rid of the mother, because (to state the obvious) without mothers there would be no more people! The same could be said about MGTOWs.

Pause for thought... I am totally new to the Kalevala, and have only read as far as Canto 6. My only other sources are Keith Bosley's introduction to his translation (which is rather highbrow and intended for proper scholars - not me!) as well as Tolkien's version of the Kullervo cycle, so I'm anxious to avoid the Dunning-Kruger effect. These reflections may be utter rubbish, so beware... The main characters in the early Cantos are the Air-Girl and her son Väinämöinen. In Finnish, the Air-Girl is called Ilmatar and sometimes this is treated as a proper name, but it really just means "female air". She has various other names: Nature Daughter, Sky Maiden, Ocean Mother. I find her arc so fascinating. She begins as a totally helpless victim, with no control over her situation - a victim of rape no less! She enters a period of latency, as she swims through the primordial ocean. But then everything changes when the duck arrives. She is no longer passive but strenuously active. She becomes the Master Builder of the cosmos - paralleling Christ/Jehovah in the role of creator. And yet she is not God. (Or at least not God with a capital G. You could call her a goddess, but she is subordinate to "The Old One" - the "All Father" who is only occasionally mentioned.) Following her labours of creation, she goes into labour - the supreme act of creation. Perhaps the creation of her son and the creation of the world are intended to mirror each other. But this burst of active creativity ends quickly. She remains powerful and important, but as a facilitator and adviser. Others now play the active parts. When the Earth is threatened by the Beast, she acts as liaison with the Sea People who can help. Väinämöinen continues to turn to her, and she gives him advice. Is this perhaps the ideal arc of femininity as conceived in ancient Finland? She suffers, she endures in passivity, for a short time she creates and then she steps back and let's others take control of what she has created? It's myth of course (and second-hand myth too!) but myths don't come out of nowhere. They mean something. When I've read more I'll no doubt have changed my ideas, but if anyone has any thoughts I'd love to hear them.

The saga continues.... Väinämöinen finds seven grains lying on a marten skin by the seashore. He clears out a glade in the forest (leaving just one tree -a birch - for birds to perch on) and and plants the seeds. They grow to become the first ever field of barley. People multiply across the Earth. Although the Air-Girl and the Beast and other such beings are not seen anymore, there are stll plenty of magicians. None of them is greater than Väinämöinen. One day Väinämöinen is challenged to a magic duel by a young wizard called Joukahainen. The upstart boasts he can easily beat Väinämöinen, but he is no match for the Air-Girl's son. He is soon trapped in a magic swamp, and at Väinämöinen's mercy. He offers Väinämöinen his best horse, his best sword, the best animals from his farm if only he will release him, but Väinämöinen cares nothing for these things. In desperation he offers Väinämöinen his sister's hand in marriage, at which Väinämöinen finally relents. He releases Joukahainen, who returns home to tell his family. He expects his mother to be furious, but to his surprise she is delighted. Nothing would please her more than to have Väinämöinen as a son-in-law! However, Joukahainen's sister Aino is not pleased at all: she tells everone she does NOT want to marry Väinämöinen, but no one takes the slightest notice of her. Aino's mother tells her to put on her best clothes and jewels - those made for her, for her own wedding by the Sun Daughter and the Moon Daughter. Aino does so, but wanders off on her own. After several days, she comes to the seashore where she sees three mermaids playing in the waves. "I will be the fourth!" she says. She takes off her beautiful clothes and jewels and jumps into the ocean. A hare is chosen to take the news of Aino's drowning back to her family. He arrives just as the maids of the house are taking a sauna. (Yes...the Finns had saunas, even back then!) The maids want to cook the hare, but he tells them he has an important message for their mistress. When Aino's mother hears the news she sobs and sobs and sobs for hours, but nothing will bring her daughter back. And there's the moral of the story, made quite explicit: "Never force your kids to marry people they don't want to marry, otherwise they might end up drownded!" We're on to Canto 5 now, would you believe? One day Väinämöinen goes fishing in his little boat. He catches a very strange looking fish, but soon discovers it is not a fish at all: it is Aino transformed into a mermaid. She tells him "You're a foolish old man! You only ever wanted me as your skivvy. You lost me once and now you've lost me again!" She jumps out of the boat and is gone. In grief, Väinämöinen cries out to his mother, the Air-Girl, whom he believes to be long dead. But she replies, assuring him she is still alive, and gives him dating advice. She says he should look for a new wife amongst the maidens of the North, who are far lovelier than any he has seen before!

OK...Episode 2... The Hideous Beast does terrible distruction on the earth, burning and reducing everything to cinders. But worst of all it makes a new tree grow - a mighty oak that blocks out the light of the sun and moon and casts the world into darkness. Väinämöinen believes that his mother can help. She has gone back to lying in the ocean, and had become friends with the powerful Sea People. So he calls out to her... The Air-Girl sends a Sea-Man to help her son. He is not very big - barely as tall as a man's thumb, or the span of a woman's hand. Väinämöinen wonders how much use he will be, until the Sea-Man begins to grow. He grows and grows until he is an enormous giant - so tall that his eyes are six feet apart! The Sea-Man swings his mighty axe and fells the tree with one chop! Light returns and the trees and plants can grow again! The world is saved! (Still not finished Canto 2. There's going to have to be a Part 3!)

Very powerful music! I've read there are other Finnish rock bands that have been inspired by the Kalevala too. Something worth exploring!

There are similarities for sure - but each mythology has its own distinct flavour. I'm getting to like the Kalevala (though I'm still only up to Canto 6).

I mentioned before how delightfully weird the Kalevala is. I've started reading it start to Finnish (excuse me for reusing your pun, Zil! 😁), and just got to the end of Canto 5. The creation myth at the start (Cantos 1 and 2) is so delightfully uber-weird it deserves a bit of artwork to celebrate it! Here we go... The Creation We start with a beautiful Air-Girl who grows bored living amongst the ether (where there's nothing much to do) and comes down to earth. However, there is not yet any earth - only Waves and Wind. She is helpless at the hands of these villains, who ravish her until she becomes pregnant. She remains pregnant for seven hundren years, without giving birth. One day she is lying in the ocean when a duck flies down and lands on her kneecap. It lays seven eggs: six of them gold and seventh iron. The duck sits on the eggs to hatch them, and they become warm and finally red hot. In pain, the Girl shakes them from her knee, and one of them smahes. The yolk of the egg becomes the sun, the white the moon, and the shell the earth and the sky. The Girl travels around the new-made world. She hollows out the ocean floor beneath her feet. She carves river valleys with her hands. She lifts up soil and rocks and forms them into mountain ranges. Finally she builds four mighty pillars to hold up the sky. Then finally she gives birth. She has a son Väinämöinen - the first and greatest of Heroes. Väinämöinen has been in her womb for so long that he is already an old man when he is born. Because of this, however, he is very, very wise. He travels all over the world, but finds there is nothing yet that grows - only bare rock earth. So he finds Sampsa, the Spirit of the Fields, and bids him to sow seeds everywhere. Trees and grass and flowers sprout up, and everything is very beautuful. But... ...a hideous monster rises up out of the ocean and... (No more time - and we're still barely half way through Canto 2! Stay tuned for the next thrilling instalment!)

Oh yeah we had Lassie too. And Champion the Wonder Horse.

I don't know if this is true but it wouldn't surprise me one bit!

I've been thinking over the last day or two: all humans tell stories. Stories are important to all of us. Look at the fiction section in any public library, or any bookshop. Every movie tells a story. Some songs tell stories. Paintings often tell stories. Jokes often take the form of stories. Stories are important to all humanity. There is no culture on earth (as far as I know) that does not tell stories. But who started it? Who invented the idea of a story? And what was the first story ever told? (I don't mean the first time a caveman told his fellows which direction to hunt the brontosaurus. I mean the first story invented as a story. To entertain and inspire and thrill an audience.) And do other species tell stories? We know that bees tell each other where the nectar's to be found - but that's a strict necessity for survival, not a recreation or an art form. Or is it only that? If ony we could understand their buzzing, would we hear the exploits of ancient bee heroes? What Jasons and Ulyssess* and Beowulfs might there be of the bee world? P.S. Now I think about it, Richard Adams anticipated this question in hs novel Watership Down. (At least as far as rabbits go - I've no idea what he thought about bees!) In case you haven't read it, its about a heroic band of rabbits and their society, which has a mythology centering around around the rabbit hero/god El-ahrairah. El-ahrairah is a trickster who shares much in common with Brer Rabbit and Loki. His adventures inspire the characters to use their own cunning to overcome adversity. P.P.S. Irrelevant bad taste joke: "Watership Down: You've read the book! You've seen the film! Now try...the pie!"

Interesting question - I don't know. I suppose Lonnrot must have written down the ballads more or less as he heard them. I don't suppose he'd have had much reason to change the metrical structures of the originals. But I don't know how we would test this. Maybe the oral traditions that Lonrott sampled have continued in remote areas of Finnland, and comarisons could be made. It would be interesting fo find out.

I mentioned this book a few months ago, when I was prattling about the statistics of Finnish. I started reading it then, but was initially put off by its weirdness (swans are people!) but I tried again last week and finished it in a couple of days. So here’s my “book report”: It’s a question of expectation: if you want to read it (or the Kalevala, on which it is based) be prepared for weirdness - what Tolkien himself called “luxuriant animism” – and just go with it. Don’t expect it to make much more sense than Alice in Wonderland. In one part of the Kalevala beer talks, threatening to burst out of its own barrels if its taste is not sufficiently praised! The story: (Spoilers coming up…) We start with a family of swans living in the marshes of Finland. One of the cygnets, Kalervo, is carried off by a bird of prey to a place where he becomes a successful farmer. His brother Untamo, who remained with his mother, covets Kalervo’s possessions (Kalervo and Untamo have by now unaccountably become human) and sends hired ruffians to attack his brother. Kalervo is killed, and his wife and children are taken as slaves. Kalervo’s wife is pregnant and presently gives birth to twins: Kullervo (the main protagonist) and his sister Wanona. Kullervo quickly grows big and strong, but nobody likes him much except his sister who becomes his only friend. Even Kullervo’s mother is not overfond of him, though she does give him his father’s knife as an heirloom. Untamo puts Kullervo to work, but finds he much too strong for ordinary tasks and ruins everything. Untamo tries three times to kill him, but is foiled each time by the intervention of Kalervo’s magical dog Musti (who has hidden in the forest since his master’s death). Eventually Untamo rids himself of Kullervo by taking him to a distant land and selling him to a smith named Asemo. Asemo hands Kullervo over to his wife, who sends him into the fields to tend her cattle. She is not a very nice woman. One day (just to be a b***h) she gives him a cake with a stone baked in it, hoping he will break his teeth. He cuts the cake with his father’s knife and breaks the tip on the stone. Furious, he summons wolves and bears of the forest to kill his mistress’ cattle. He then disguises them as cows and then leads them to the farm. When they arrive Asemo’s wife attempts to milk them, but they attack her. She calls to Kullervo for help, promising to be nicer to him in future, but he replies: “there is room enough in Hell for thee!” And so she dies. Kullervo prepares to return home, determined to kill Untamo and avenge his father. He receives advice from a “blue robed lady of the forest” who warns him to stay away from a particular wooded mountain. Kullervo ignores her. On the mountain he meets a beautiful girl with whom he makes love. Afterwards he tells her of his parentage, but in the middle of the tale she jumps up runs from him. She throws herself into a waterfall and drowns. Sad and puzzled, Kullervo continues his quest to kill Untamo. He summons an army of bears and wolves and attacks the village, killing everyone including his mother and siblings and even the dog Musti. As he stands over Untamo’s butchered body, his mother’s ghost appears. She tells him that the girl on the mountain was his sister Wanona (whom he had not recognised due to the passage of time), thus revealing the reason for her suicide. Kullervo returns to the waterfall, but feels he is unworthy to drown in the same pool as she. His sword speaks to him, saying that if it took pleasure in killing the evil Untamo, it will take more still in killing one who has slain his own innocent mother. (Mothers were supremely respected in Finnish culture; to kill your own mother is practically deicide.) Filled with remorse, Kullervo stabs himself and dies. There are two other segments to the book: a lecture by Tolkien himself on the Kalevala (a rough draft and a polished version – it’s worth reading both) and an essay by Verlyn Flieger on the relationship between the original Kullervo (from the Kalevala), Tolkien’s Kullervo and the stories of the Silmarillion (notably the unwitting incest in The Children of Hurin and the talking dog Huan in Beren and Luthien*) Though interesting, this last part will appeal mostly to the Tolkien uber-geeks (and semi-geeks like me). It won’t mean much to those who have only read The Lord of the Rings. After reading the story and the essays, I’m not surprised Finnish has such a monstrous vocabulary. Each character seems to have many different names: Kullervo for example is sometimes called Kuli, Sari or Sakehonto, and the narrator switches between these without explanation. From the essays we learn that Finnish (or at least the eastern Finnish in which the poems were originally written) is very fluid in its grammar. It contains many nonsense words inserted purely for poetic effect. And (here’s something that was entirely new to me!) the metre of the poetry** was the model for Longfellow’s Hiawatha. (Tolkien comes close to saying Hiawatha is a wholesale rip-off of the Kalevala, and is much more Finnish than Native American.) *It’s years since I read it, but I recall the earlier version of Beren and Luthien (from the Book of Lost Tales) also features a monstrous talking cat, who is Huan’s evil counterpart. This character eventually evolved into Sauron. **The original Kalevala is written entirely in verse. Tolkien’s version is mostly prose, with a few of the original verses inserted. It’s also worth noting that although it is called “the national epic of Finland” it is not an ancient document: it was first written down by Elias Lonnrot in the early 19th Century, based on folk tales he had collected from the villages of eastern Finland. Its publication coincided with one of Longfellow’s visits to Europe.

https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c4gz1w57xx5o.amp My brother and I both went to that school. We never had an emotional support tortoise in our day *sob*

I hope none of them was called Skippy!

We lost our family cat a few years ago. Her name was Pixie, though I always said this was short for "Pixinald Wicksinald Wallaby-Wombat", though whenever she got feisty (which was often) I called her "Mungo Muggins the Boggy Buggins" or "The Boggiest Buggins There Is". She was only seven, but she had a growth on her abdomen which would have cost thousands to operate on and (according to the vet) would have given her a couple more months at most. So I know how you're feeling. Cats are like family.

LOL a pity: you might have got more money out of the concrete company if the guy had punched you! 👊

I've been mulling over the "following rule". Suppose you have car A following car B at an initial distance D, both travelling at velocity v. If B starts to decelerate at time zero, and A a time T seconds later, then assuming their decelerations are equal both will come to rest a distance D-vT apart. (Do the algebra if you don't believe me.) To avoid a collision D-vT>0, so the safe stopping distance does scale linearly with speed and if the time gap is greater than T (the time needed to notice the car ahead is braking, move your foot to the brake pedal and press it) then in theory you'll be OK. However if the decelerations are different then the expression becomes a three term quadratic in v - which is a can of worms best left unopened. I still think the safe stopping distance method is best. P.S. I am coming over somewhat to Carborendum's view - the Highway Code does conflate two quite separate issues: following distance and visible road ahead (as in the case of a bending road or fog/rain). The wording does need to be clarified.

I think you're quite right. If they did have an accident they could always point to you and say "He said it would be OK! Blame him!" Make them aware of the facts and let them decide.

Quote from the Highway Code: All this is fine. However, it then goes on to introduce the "two second rule", which totally contradicts the first paragraph. (You cannot say that this is a "following rule" whereas the first is a "stationary object rule" because the first paragraph already made it clear that that was a following rule.) The whole thing needs to be tidied up by someone with a basic knowledge of kinematics. https://highwaycode.org.uk/stopping-distances-rule-126/