Question of the Day: International Mother Language

[the_siobhan]

13 – Clean Out Your Computer Day: When was the last time you cleaned out your fans and dusted off your motherboard? Have you looked at your graphics card to see if its cooling fan and fins are clean? For that matter, when did you last clean out or even opened the case? Or have you ever cleaned out your computer or had someone clean it out for you?
14 – Organ Donor Day: Are you signed up/registered to be an organ donor? Do you regularly or occasionally donate blood?
15 – World Hippo Day: How much do you know about hippos? Have you seen one outside a zoo?
16 – Innovation Day: Are you the creative sort who can easily come up with new innovations, or are you better at following-up with developing other people's ideas?
17 – My Way Day: the day where you are encouraged to do whatever you want, however you want. Have you ever treated yourself to a day like this?  What did you do?
18 – Battery Day: How many things in your house are unusable without batteries? (If they don't run on mains power.)
19 – World Whale Day: Have you ever been whale watching? Tell us about it.
20 – Love Your Pet Day: Do you have pets? Tell us about them – cats, dogs, other species? How many?

Ugh, hosing out the computers was on my to-do list and no, I didn't do it. My house is absolute dustbowl, so maybe this weekend. I am signed up to be an organ donor but my organs are probably too old to be much use - I got a letter in January that said I had aged out of the stem cell donor registry. I know a normal amount about hippos and have only ever seen them in zoos. Probably better at following up other people's great ideas. My way day sounds like it's just "don't interact with other humans" day by a different name. I have no idea how many battery operated objects I have in my home and I would be entirely suspicious of the type of person who could just pull that info off the top of their head. I have never been whale-watching. I have a cat.

21 – International Mother Language Day: What is your native language? How many languages do you speak fluently or near-fluently? How many languages besides your native language have you studied?

I am distressingly mono-lingual. The cousins who grew up in Ireland all speak Irish, but since I grew up here I do not. I don't even speak French, because the French classes in Ontario schools in the 60s and 70s were fucking pathetic.

I tried German for a while, because the housemate speaks German, and I thought they might practice with me. They did not practice with me. And then I actually went to Germany and the people there all went, "Why would you waste your time learning German?" Um.

So now I'm trying Spanish. It is supposed to be one of the easier languages, and I logic that there are lots of Spanish-speaking places people can be from where they don't necessarily also speak English so it might actually be more useful. I've been plugging away at Duolingo, which means I am getting reasonably good at reading it, but speaking is still really difficult.

So the other day I posted on the FaceThing - "Hey anybody want to be on a discord channel to practice Spanish? - and I got a handful of yeses, so today I started a Discord channel for practising Spanish. We'll see how it goes.

Let me know if anybody wants to join.

***

I was talking to some friends the other day about watching old movies with my gf and one of my friends started talking about how great a movie Paws of Fury is - it's apparently Blazing Saddles remade for kids. So I told the gf about it. And it turns out, she had never seen Blazing Saddles. So we watched it together.

Friends.

It has not aged well.

At all.

***

Saw the Old Man on the weekend and he was absolutely fine. Probably as sharp as I've ever seen him in fact.

So either he's taking considerably longer to bounce back after hospital stays, or he was down from some bug. Seeing as I was levelled by a cold the week after, probably he had a cold and gave it to me.
 

Comments

[greylock]

I watched Blazing Saddles a few years back.
It's aged, but I thought it was still mostly fine.

[the_siobhan]

In the days of Richard Pryor, normal people with potty-mouth was shocking, and I guess therefore funny. It's lost a lot of it's power in the time since. Same with casual slurs.

[silentq]

I took some Spanish classes but my brain still spews out French when I try to speak it. I can read it reasonably well - aka enough to be a tourist - so I'll take it.