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RDCanecutter

Certifiably Surly
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Everything posted by RDCanecutter

  1. I used to play guitar in Catholic Folk Mass. I wasn't Catholic but the cute Polish girl was. A minor all day long baby.
  2. Or in a way that doesn't involves going up on top of roofs.
  3. Everybody thinks the damn Dutch are so hard-working but dammit tell me why 99% of damn Doggerland is still underwater?
  4. You'd be OK if you could swim away but you... just... can't... get loose.
  5. Did they say the Pledge in American, or Messican?
  6. Don't talk so loud, be coooool mannnn.
  7. Looks like every girl from my mid-60s kindergarten whose folks sent her to the newly-opened segregation academy in order to defy the Feds. To be fair, she looks a lot like the ones who didn't go there too. I guess what I am saying is I wonder why she looks like a kindergarten student.
  8. A close second reason to hate it is the sloppy cut/paste work under the geezer's chin where it looks as if a signature was erased, or else barely added. Then you have the uppity liberal with his nose hanging out, and the artist has no idea why that's a problem.
  9. Hi, aren't you in Austin? I would get around actual French speakers, there ought to be some sort of Cercle Français semi-attached to UT or similar where you can get a belt of wine in you and listen to real people jabber, and jump in yourself as old memories come back to life. These guys need volunteers so if you did anything for them, and told them you wanted to speak French, I bet you'd be in like Flynn. https://www.afaustin.org/volunteer They would also know about any events you could attend. For books I'd suggest getting into French comic books. Most of them are written for adults, and even if the language isn't dumbed down, you have a picture right there to give context. One of my favorite author/artists is Jacques Tardi. If you want wrist-slashing grim, get one of his WW1 comics like C'etait la guerre des tranchees (it was the war of the trenches) now also in English so you could get doubly-depressed reading both versions. A little lighter, still very noir, are his adaptations of Leo Malet's jazz-age detective Nestor Burma. Great atmosphere and street-by-street detailed views of walking around Paris puzzling out mysteries. Another favorite is the Louis La Guigne series, about a guy who lives on the margins from WW1 to the 1930s, traveling around the world getting in and out of trouble. From maybe the 80s but probably easy to find. The language in these two is not simplified, but you can pick up some good stuff and the stories are interesting. My last method of getting decent at a language is to have the radio banging in that language all day in the background. People don't seem to believe me on this, but it helped me "walk through the wall" in Spanish*. No doubt there are an infinite number available in all styles online. So tldr, Canecutter Conversation Method = Get around French people, read good French comic books, and play French radio in the background. *The "walk through the wall" moment is when you wonder why everybody suddenly switched to English, but they didn't. Usually follows several months of random unplanned exposure.
  10. Once an Armenian stiffed me for $150 worth of work and I'm talkin 1980s money. But the same guy also set me up with gigs with two other people who did pay me. One of them was an odd dude that acted like an early DeSantis minus the electoral drive. He and I were eating lunch in a town where he used to live, and he said he saw an old friend across the restaurant. I asked him if he wanted to say hi. "No, I live in ___ now, I have new friends in ___." The other was a Dutch CEO of a tech company who was no-nonsense but in spite of that he offered me a job. Like a damn fool I turned him down. Oh, and the Armenian guy had grown up in Jordan and carried a knife in his briefcase. No personal experience with Azerbaijanis.
  11. How about Neapolitan? This Paul fellow digs into the weeds on many dialects and his most recent is here.
  12. Finish the border wall and extend it to Louisiana. Install pipes along the top. Pump excess NOLA water to Phoenix and Southern California during dry years. That'll be $19.99.
  13. Along those lines, back in the Army I'd walk into the club and find the ugliest girl in there. When she started looking good, I'd stop drinking and go home.
  14. Mark Twain did some interesting writing on the Mississippi. Things I remember are that you couldn't see the river that early explorers saw, because it would have been miles to one side or the other as the channel shifted. Also, in Twain's day a busy river port could turn into a quiet country town almost overnight because the river shifted. It must have been like living next to a wiggly Interstate.
  15. It's what river deltas do, and this one has done before. I saw a different map where 2,000 years ago the southern 1/4 of Louisiana didn't exist, then different fans of silt spread out and overlapped. Wonder what influence if any that Native American farming had on the silt amount.
  16. You'll get more attention if you stuff a Flat Rate Priority Mail box with ingots.
  17. President Coolidge came down in a railroad train With a little fat man with a note pad in his hand President Coolidge say "Little fat man ain't it a shame" "What the river has done to this poor cracker's land"
  18. I'll kick you back 20% for every kid you get to sign up for Dr. Canecutter's Miracle Brain Ancient Caucasian Leadership Domination Seminar Cartoon Story Hour. $10,000 a year and you can't afford NOT to have your child enrolled in this because their rivals including the brat kid of that bitch Becky at the school board are already unlocking our course's secrets.
  19. This story will be cooler if it turns out to be laundered cartel money.
  20. The unstated thing is that for Poland and Ukraine to act pissy towards each other, it means neither one is all that scared of Russians.
  21. As if Tubs feels any connection to some school that used to pay him money.
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