The perpetual calendar

In ,
Robert Bannister typed:
R H Draney wrote:
Hatunen filted:
On Wed, 10 Mar 2010 15:46:26 -0800 (PST), "Peter T. Daniels"
wrote:

On Mar 10, 3:56 pm, Hatunen wrote:

@nd BTW, someone in some op-ed column this week noted that the
Olympically much played "O Canada" is about the only national
anthem you can hum.
Did they check out all 205 or so national anthems? Including the
dozen or more that use the same tune as "America"?
Good grief, you're literal. I, personally, take the "about" to
indicate there could be others.

It's certainly one of the world's more *presentable* anthems....

I, myself, would be quite content if the SSB were replaced by
"America the Beautiful"

Let's see, we've already got votes for:

Star Spangled Banner - current titleholder, unsingable tune taken
from a drinking song, harshly imperialistic lyrics

God Bless America - upsetting (to some) religiosity

America the Beautiful - better, but there's still that "God shed His
grace" business

My Country, 'Tis of Thee - same tune as "God Save the Queen",
already pulling duty as the "national hymn"

This Land Is Your Land - plagued with pinko associations

Battle Hymn of the Republic - simultaneously nationalistic and
religious, plus you have the whole "John Brown's Body" connection

Clearly none of these is a perfect choice if we insist on universal
acceptance...someone's got to sit down and write a new one....r



Aren't national anthems fun? We've got someone here agitating again to
have Waltzing Matilda as ours.

Yours always reminds me of "The Song of the Western Men".

--
Ray
UK

Robert Bannister wrote:
Peter T. Daniels wrote:
On Mar 10, 9:28 pm, Andrew Usher wrote:
Peter T. Daniels wrote:
?????????????????????????????????????????????????? ??????????????????
Why would you put "C.E." on a cornerstone?
If it means the same thing as AD ...

It makes no sense to use "A.D." in any context that isn't explicitly
Christian, which is why "C.E." was invented in the middle of the last
century.
Funny, then, that exactly that has been done for over a thousand
years.

And for how many of those thousand years have those elided agents of
the passive verb given a damn about the non-Christian majority of the
world's inhabitants?

Very few people - Christian, Jewish, Muslim, Hindu, atheist - object to
days of the week named mainly after Norse gods in the Germanic languages
or Roman gods in the Romance languages, nor do you hear a clamour to
rename the months, whose names appear in even more languages. People who
get upset about a little thing like "AD" are just looking for something
to complain about.

Ah, you mean people who go out every night carrying baseball
bats looking for somebody to defend themself against?
pjk

Robert Bannister wrote:
R H Draney wrote:
Hatunen filted:
On Wed, 10 Mar 2010 15:46:26 -0800 (PST), "Peter T. Daniels"
wrote:

On Mar 10, 3:56 pm, Hatunen wrote:

@nd BTW, someone in some op-ed column this week noted that the
Olympically much played "O Canada" is about the only national
anthem you can hum.
Did they check out all 205 or so national anthems? Including the dozen
or more that use the same tune as "America"?
Good grief, you're literal. I, personally, take the "about" to
indicate there could be others.

It's certainly one of the world's more *presentable* anthems....

I, myself, would be quite content if the SSB were replaced by
"America the Beautiful"

Let's see, we've already got votes for:

Star Spangled Banner - current titleholder, unsingable tune taken from a
drinking song, harshly imperialistic lyrics

God Bless America - upsetting (to some) religiosity

America the Beautiful - better, but there's still that "God shed His grace"
business

My Country, 'Tis of Thee - same tune as "God Save the Queen", already pulling
duty as the "national hymn"

This Land Is Your Land - plagued with pinko associations

Battle Hymn of the Republic - simultaneously nationalistic and religious,
plus you have the whole "John Brown's Body" connection

Clearly none of these is a perfect choice if we insist on universal
acceptance...someone's got to sit down and write a new one....r



Aren't national anthems fun? We've got someone here agitating again to
have Waltzing Matilda as ours.

I wonder how many of them know what, in fact, was a matilda.

pjk

On Mar 11, 8:26*pm, Robert Bannister wrote:
R H Draney wrote:
Hatunen filted:
On Wed, 10 Mar 2010 15:46:26 -0800 (PST), "Peter T. Daniels"
wrote:

On Mar 10, 3:56 pm, Hatunen wrote:

@nd BTW, someone in some op-ed column this week noted that the
Olympically much played "O Canada" is about the only national
anthem you can hum.
Did they check out all 205 or so national anthems? Including the dozen
or more that use the same tune as "America"?
Good grief, you're literal. I, personally, take the "about" to
indicate there could be others.

It's certainly one of the world's more *presentable* anthems....

I, myself, would be quite content if the SSB were replaced by
"America the Beautiful"

Let's see, we've already got votes for:

Star Spangled Banner - current titleholder, unsingable tune taken from a
drinking song, harshly imperialistic lyrics

* God Bless America - upsetting (to some) religiosity

America the Beautiful - better, but there's still that "God shed His grace"
business

My Country, 'Tis of Thee - same tune as "God Save the Queen", already pulling
duty as the "national hymn"

* This Land Is Your Land - plagued with pinko associations

Battle Hymn of the Republic - simultaneously nationalistic and religious, plus
you have the whole "John Brown's Body" connection

Clearly none of these is a perfect choice if we insist on universal
acceptance...someone's got to sit down and write a new one....r

Aren't national anthems fun? We've got someone here agitating again to
have Waltzing Matilda as ours.

It would be a shame to replace Tie Me Kangaroo Down in that capacity.

It was a pointless change, which, in any case, has only been adopted
by a few.

China has been depopulated? This is a momentous event. When did
this happen?

Sorry. Are you saying that the Chinese write in English?

Silly anglophone-limited grasshopper! It's not just English speakers
who have adopted the Common Era nomenclature and who are part of that
"few" that you wrote.

Very few people - Christian, Jewish, Muslim, Hindu, atheist - object
to days of the week named mainly after Norse gods in the Germanic
languages or Roman gods in the Romance languages, [...]

.... probably because in in their languages the days of the week aren't
necessarily so named. Pop quiz: Posit that you're a Muslim, speaking
Turkish. What are the days of the week named after in your language?
Posit that you're a Muslim, speaking Arabic. What are the days of the
week named after in your language? Posit that you're a Christian,
speaking Lithuanian. What are the days of the week named after in your
language?

"C.E." may not have been invented yet in 1957, or if it had been, it
hadn't yet gained currency.


(I guess if Peter replies at all, he's going to argue that the three
citations we've found do *not* constitute "gaining currency", since he
knows he's infallible.)

Any halfway-decent practitioner of verbal tap-dancing will tell you that
by far the better way to try to squirm out of admitting this particular
error is to re-define "gaining currency" as "obtaining financial
backing", and to wonder at length why people didn't understand that that
was the intended meaning all along. A well-practiced verbal tap-dancer,
who has been tap-dancing out of dunderheaded mistakes for years, will
have advanced strategems ready to hand, such arguing that the
subjunctive clearly implied that another universe with a wholly
different history was being discussed, and only a fool wouldn't have
seen that. Simply refuting, or even addressing, the easy-to-research
facts is the mark of a rank beginner in the discipline.

On Fri, 12 Mar 2010 08:26:47 -0800, Evan Kirshenbaum
wrote:

Adam Funk writes:

On 2010-03-11, Evan Kirshenbaum wrote:

R H Draney writes:

It's certainly one of the world's more *presentable* anthems....

Sword in one hand, cross in the other, valor steeped in faith. I
wonder how non-Christian Canadians feel about that.

They don't speak French.

Actually, quite a number of French-speaking Jews from North Africa,
Lebanon, and Syria moved to Quebec in the '50s. Other Jews in Quebec,
like William Shatner, who grew up in Montreal, almost certainly speak
French.

I was a grad student at McGill University 1965-66 and my wife
took a teaching job with the Protestant School Board of Greater
Montreal[*], teaching at Outremont High School. This being
shortly after the Algerian War of Independence the Outremont
district was heavily populated by French-speaking Jews (Pied
Noir) who had fled Algeria.
[*] At that time Montreal had two school boards, a Protestant and
a Catholic board. Only Roman Catholics could attend or be
employed by the Catholic school board, while the Protestant
schools got everyone else, including Orthodox Christians. Some
Protestant schools were conducted in French for French-speaking
non-Catholics.

But most qualified speakers of French in Quebec were Catholic so
the Protestant schools had to look abroad for teachers of French.
("Abroad" including the rest of Canada.)

The Jews made some efforts to have a Jewish school board. I have
no idea of the current school arrangements in Montreal

--
************* DAVE HATUNEN ) *************
* Tucson Arizona, out where the cacti grow *
* My typos & mispellings are intentional copyright traps *

On 2010-03-12, Evan Kirshenbaum wrote:

Actually, quite a number of French-speaking Jews from North Africa,
Lebanon, and Syria moved to Quebec in the '50s. Other Jews in Quebec,
like William Shatner, who grew up in Montreal, almost certainly speak
French.


Does he ever sing in French? Just curious.


--
And remember, while you're out there risking your life and limb
through shot and shell, we'll be in be in here thinking what a
sucker you are. [Rufus T. Firefly]

On 2010-03-12, Evan Kirshenbaum wrote:

Robert Bannister writes:

Why would Jewish historians use a dating system based on the supposed
date of Jesus' death? Since it's you, I won't ask whether you are sure
that the edition you're looking at hasn't been reprinted and tampered
with by a later publisher, but it is surprising.

It's not surprising at all to me. It was the dating system used by
the country they lived in and the one that would be familiar to most
of their audience. The same reason the Israeli newspaper _Haaretz_
gives today's date on their website as "12.3.2010"[1]. I truly is the
"common era", the "vulgaris aerae". Earlier, they may have used "AUC"
without believing (or caring about) the ostensible date of the
founding of Rome.

[1] On the Hebrew web site. On the English web site, interestingly,
it's "Fri., March 12, 2010 Adar 26, 5770"

They assume the people who read Hebrew can all do the conversion in
their heads, whereas many of the English-readers need help with it.

;-)


--
I don't know what they have to say
It makes no difference anyway;
Whatever it is, I'm against it! [Prof. Wagstaff]