I’ve discovered ‘Nailed It’, a new Netflix baking show hosted by Nicole Byers, in which less-than-skilled home bakers compete in recreating fancy cakes in a bid to win $10,000. It’s like reverse Bake Off and it’s hilarious.
I started Hebrew, which is why I’ve been dead on this blog, but I don’t think I can ever properly convey to you guys the sheer cultural whiplash of spending years learning Japanese from Japanese teachers and then trying to learn Hebrew from an Israeli
Japanese: you walk into class already apologizing for being alive Hebrew: you walk into class, the teacher insults you and you are expected to insult her back
Japanese: conjugates every single verb based on degree of intended politeness, nevermind keigo and honorifics Hebrew: Someone asked my teacher how to say “excuse me” and she laughed for several seconds before saying we shouldn’t worry about remembering that since we’ll never need to say it
Japanese: if you get one stroke wrong the entire kanji is incomprehensible Hebrew: cursive? script? fuck it do whatever you want, you don’t even have to write the vowels out unless you feel like it
Japanese: the closest thing there is to ‘bastard’ is an excessively direct ‘you’ pronoun Hebrew: ‘bitch’ translates directly
Fun fact: Israel has possibly the lowest power-distance metric of any culture in the world, while Japan has one of the highest. I didn’t realize that the CTO of my company was the CTO until somebody else told me, because everybody called him by his first name and engaged in mutual shit-talking/playful insults with him.
In Japan, even calling your boss by the wrong honorific is liable to get you in trouble.
And apparently there’s some sciencey cooperative venture going on between Israel and Japan in an official diplomatic capacity. I want to be a fly on the wall when Japanese and Israeli scientists work together.
I mean, the language was developed to argue with g-d, so.
“If you want to show your support for the project, you can shop themed merchandise in the Team Supreme Shop, where Leonard says a portion of the sales will go toward autism awareness.”
one thing me n my art loving gf would do is visit galleries and play a game called “root, loot or boot”
the gist is that you would look at a group of paintings in a room and decide which figure in the painting you’d root (fuck, in Australian slang), which painting you’d loot (steal and put on your wall at home) and which painting you’d boot (punt into the garbage because it’s shit and Not Art)
a couple of things about my experiences:
1. this game is a lot more fun if you’re attracted to women because there’s so many Hot Gals to choose from
2. if you are attracted to men, you will spend a lot of time going “well, looks like I’ll have to pick jesus again” as my bi gf did
3. it gets more complicated in modern art museums and you find yourself having saying, “I’d fuck the rhombus” “you CAN’T fuck the rhombus” “then I’ll fuck that blue squiggle thing. what’s it called?” “creeping existential dread in blue” “then does that mean I’m fucking the squiggle or am I getting fucked by the existential dread it represents?” “aren’t we all already getting fucked by existential dread?”
4. if you play this with an art history nerd, they may decide to kill you over one of your “boot” choices
5. you will get Disapproving Looks from other patrons who overhear your heated debates
6. it’s also the best fun you’ll ever have in an art gallery
this would be worth the drive up to minneapolis to play this at the institute
heads up i’m gonna fuck the entire chinese jade collection and boot every rothko, fight me
I don’t know if anybody outside of the UK knows this, but in 2009 the entire island of Great Britain was so fatigued with the X-Factor churning out mediocre xmas hits and somehow getting them to the top of the charts every fucking year that we all banded together to make Killing in the Name Of the chrimmy number one. now whenever the music channels do a crimbo #1 chart count down there’s a 5-minute Rage Against the Machine interlude where poor little Joe McElderry’s cover of The Climb should have been. merry christmas