So… I went to see a Musical yesterday. Don’t do that very often and overall it was pretty fun.
However a frustrating thing was that since I live in Germany, the musicals here are all translated and sung in a bizarro German cover version. To top it off they then hire non-german speaking actors who then try to perform phonetically, thus completey mangling the pronounciation and making the dialogue & lyrics very difficult to understand. ie Actually following the narrative is frequently not easy…
I didn’t watch Lion King, but this video is a good example of what I mean, as most of these singers are NOT german speakers and are singing german cover versions…
Just… sing it in English then? Why don’t they do that. It seems it would be easier for everyone. Germans mostly spoke good English when I visited (except the more rural areas of Thuringia, Cold War hangover ftw).
Beats me… Generally their english is pretty good and I’m assuming most of these songs are popular in their original form there as well. Its just that when they bring them to the stage and try to tell a story seems like it needs to be in german…
I wonder if I could ask for some help in this thread, it’s pretty random but didn’t seem “big” enough to start a new thread over.
So, look, I’m a potty mouth. Been that way since grade school, and most of my friends and family were casual about the swears. But I’m a dad and have small kids who pay attention to this sort of thing, and I need to get better about this. And I am better than I was, I don’t really thoughtlessly pepper my sentences with bad words, but there are times when I lose my temper or stub my toe or some random occasion where I just yell out something tourette’s-like and this is really, really hard to stop doing. It’s like I need to rewire my subconscious brain to stop having one in the chamber for occasions like that. Luckily so far my kids don’t imitate me, I just get this sort of solemn, “Daddy, you shouldn’t say that.” And of course I shouldn’t. Is there an effective way to try to purge the impulse or at least clean things up a bit, that you guys have found effective?
Side note: I can totally see myself 20 years from now being all Kathy Bates and saying stuff like “cockadoodie.”
Amongst my friends, I have a bit of a reputation for… uh… creative invective, so I definitely get where you’re coming from.
For a while, both around kids and in the office, I tried the old standard of replacing my more colourful turns of phrase with innocuous versions, but as you note, that tended to only work until something really caught me off guard, at which point out came the unfiltered versions. Many eyebrows were raised and disapproving looks were offered.
I certainly won’t claim to be great at it now by any means, but I’ve found it more effective to train myself to bite my tongue completely (usually non-literal) for 5-10 seconds when I’m surprised. Let my conscious thoughts catch up and urge “dude, don’t say that!” to whatever curse is running through my head.
That is, for me it’s easier to go cold-turkey rather than to try to tone it down. End result is I’m less free with the swears even in contexts where it’s less problematic, which is also probably a good thing.
I developed a mouth when I started working in IT. I blame everyone I worked with for that. I do have a 4 year old nephew though, and my sister admonishes me for such words and let’s me know when I am on speaker phone around him. I am actually pretty good around the small people area, but when their parents claim crap is a bad word, and I remind them promptly that I usually say much worse.
I’ve tried to tone it down a bit though overall. It’s… hard.
It’s about the many ways in which the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand very nearly failed. In fact, reading that, it is absolutely amazing he was killed at all. It reads almost like a plot for a comedy of errors. Was a movie ever made about this?
I dunno about movies, but the Extra Credits folks did one of their Extra History mini-series about it. Not just the assassination itself, but also the various diplomatic blunders and such that led to the start of hostilities.
I was just chatting with one of my officemates about this yesterday: that a lot of famous successful assassinations were random, off-the-cuff happenstance, and a lot of history’s well-planned assassination conspiracies failed.
So I’m walking through a parking lot. It’s hot. I see a child in a car, eyes closed, red faced. I think the child is in danger of dying. What are the legalities? Can I just break the window? Do I call 911 first? And if I do, and the child dies, am I at fault for delaying?
Pretty sure it depends on the state. Here in Michigan you can break the window to save a child, but not a dog. Though there’s been attempts to pass laws for the pooches too, and another one is going through the sausage grinder right now.
Yeah, if I see an animal in distress in a situation like that, sorry bud, but your window is getting broken. And I’m probably going to kidnap your pet as well if this is how you treat one. I’ll deal with the lawsuit later, or small claims court or whatever.
Yep. I’ll break the window to get any living thing out of there. If there is an issue with that, I’ve got a feeling Social Media might help. it has in the past. In Oregon, the law protects you to save kids and animals.
