The New ZBB Quote Thread

[Raphael]

Nursultan Nazarbayev resigned!

Goddamn, why is American news coverage so crap? I had to dig to find the story (Google News apparently thinks it much more important that I know what critics think of Weezer's new album) and WaPo story didn't even mention who's taking over from him. Apparently he's been thinking about this for some time--even going so far as to ask the Constitutional Court how to do it--and yet I never heard so much as a whisper about it.

[Linguoboy]

...even she would have to resign

Sooner or later, we're going to have to stop saying this.

[Linguoboy]

First, a Republican senate will not agree to give a prosecutor free and unfettered reign to pursue ill-defined and wide-ranging criminal investigations against a Republican President, his Republican administration, and his mostly Republican friends, in the run-up to a general election. That's, like, #3 on their list of "things not to do" at this point. Nuclear apocalypse, the release of smallpox, and giving Mueller a new mandate.

[Raphael]

Best description yet: "she fell on her sword and missed".

[Raphael]

[...]
Fun fact: the top Irish exports (other than tax evasion) are...
[...]
- mixtures of odiferous substances and mixtures
[...]

[Linguoboy]

Thanks for the explanation, Raphael. Thanks for trying, Sal, though you were completely unhelpful.

[Raphael]

This discussion made me curious what the Dutch call Hollandaise, so I looked it up in the Dutch Wikipedia and found this glorious first sentence:

Hollandaisesaus (of Hollandse saus) is een van oorsprong Franse saus die vooral in Duitsland populair is.

("Hollandaise sauce (or Hollandic sauce) is an originally French sauce that's especially popular in Germany.")

[Raphael]

Yes. They had the vote on whether to have the vote on having a vote, and now they've had the vote to have the vote. They have now voted to have the vote.

[Raphael]

Some of the stuff about education (and voting) comes from the fact that people of all political opinions tend to believe their opponents are uninformed. After all, if people were well informed, they'd have our opinions!

[Raphael]

One positive thin: my semi-functionin emerency computer CAN use the wifi. It's just that the wifi was also broken, and I've fixed it. One neative: the semi-functionin emerency computer is unable, as perhaps you've been noticin throuhout this post, to type the letter ''. Which made it a fun bit of rimarole to even et to this website, particularly as the names of the two best-known search enines also feature the letter ''. [I have now manaed to download a keyboard mapper**, but it won't take effect until I reboot this machine, and this machine takes, I am not kiddin, almost five minutes to boot up from scratch, and I'm feelin a little fraile riht now... So for now, I'll just have to make do with an amusin speech impediment.]

[Raphael]

Media outlets are reporting that people from Biden's campaign have contacted them to ask them to stop booking Giuliani. Though I can perfectly well understand why they don't want him out there spewing nonsense conspiracy theories about their candidate at every opportunity, I'm 100% in favour of letting him continue to implicate himself and others live on the air. (Favourite quote: "Should I just keep quiet?" From a lawyer.)

[Linguoboy]

Enormity is primarily defined as Deviation from moral normality

It is primarily defined that way only if your dictionary is:
a) an antique
or
b) a specialised dictionary for students of pre-20th century literature
or
c) shit.

[Vijay]

There's a coffee shop near here that's taken to selling something they call "pumpkin spice flavour". What the hell does that even mean!? Pumpkin is not a spice!
Another one has taken to selling (in theory - the staff warn people not to order it because it's disgusting) "bonfire spice" flavour, which at least makes a little more sense but is still a pretty weird concept...

There is a place here in the US of A known as Starbucks, and they invented something called the "pumpkin spice latte" (presumably pumpkin-flavored with some sort of spice flavor added, even though this is not entirely certain), and since then "pumpkin spice"-flavored items have taken off....

[Vijay]

From "The Bugs - Can you speak Bug?"

...okay, so the Bug is either asking me (human-DEF) to go murder a bunch of enemy Bugs, or is informing me that all the humans are going to be killed. I'm pretty sure it's the first, but I'm a little concerned that it's the second.

[...]

Purely for the sake of not getting eaten, might I inquire "question predator.DEF"?

[Raphael]

According to a rough estimate by some people at the New York Times, perhaps about 750 million people in China are currently under some sort of domestic lockdown.

I.e., 10% of all living humans are now under a lockdown with the intention of stopping a virus epidemic. It sounds like the type of notification you'd see in a videogame, but it's reality.

[Raphael]

Well, hopefully, the upcoming containment period should be a great opportunity for everyone to sit down and reflect a bit on what's really important. Health. Toilet paper. Pasta. Having loved ones you can endure the presence of for a few weeks.

[Kuchigakatai]

In a continuation of the quote above... Ars Lande spends his first few days working from home with his kids around.

Telecommuting with kids turns out not to be so hard. I mean the kids sometimes whine, or insist that I play with them, and the youngest one tries to be helpful by bashing keys on my keyboard. So, really, they're no worse than my coworkers!

[Linguoboy]

I do a lot of switching back and forth between LtR and RtL writing, and what I've learned is that expecting website design to function properly with RtL writing is like asking your white grandpa to pronounce your Indian friend's last name: there's a lot of earnest trying, but everything just ends up wrong.

[Pabappa]

Ke na se ganzhe marksezhe, be ora tave lela ne ar tas shancham shinet.
And I take walks in the cemetery, since everyone there is six feet away from me.

[Raphael]

We already have flying cars and they haven't caught on as a normal part of life--we call them helicopters. Thus far they've been too expensive, large, difficult to operate, and require too much infrastructure to become common.