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Marijn

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Today exactly 75 years ago, the first of 41,000 Allied paratroopers of the 101st Airborne Division under Field Marshal Montgomery were dropped into the Netherlands as part of the ill-fated Operation Market Garden.

The goal of the operation was to circumvent the Siegfried Line and invade Germany. The operation famously ground to a halt at the city of Arnhem but did lead to the liberation of southern parts of the Netherlands.

'Market' was the air assault to conquer 9 bridges including the famous 'A Bridge Too Far'. 'Garden' the associated ground offensive from Belgium into the Netherlands.

Edward R. Murrow reported the landings at Nijmegen from inside a Dakota:
 

Urwumpe

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Took me a while to notice (and ERB) that Tolkien really died in a symbolical year....

1973 or:

1 ring for the dark lords hand, sitting on his throne...
9 to the mortal, which cry...
7 rings to the gnomes in their halls made of stone
3 for the kings of the elves high in light


:blink:
 

Linguofreak

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Took me a while to notice (and ERB) that Tolkien really died in a symbolical year....

1973 or:

1 ring for the dark lords hand, sitting on his throne...
9 to the mortal, which cry...
7 rings to the gnomes in their halls made of stone
3 for the kings of the elves high in light


:blink:

I take it that's a back-translation of the German? How does the German version itself run?

The original English (modulo the reordering to match the year 1973) is:

1 for the dark lord on his dark throne
9 for mortal men, doomed to die
7 for the dwarf lords in their halls of stone
3 rings for eleven kings, under the sky

Actually, if you write the year little-endian (3791), the original ordering of the lines is recovered.
 

Urwumpe

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I take it that's a back-translation of the German? How does the German version itself run?

The original English (modulo the reordering to match the year 1973) is:

1 for the dark lord on his dark throne
9 for mortal men, doomed to die
7 for the dwarf lords in their halls of stone
3 rings for eleven kings, under the sky

Actually, if you write the year little-endian (3791), the original ordering of the lines is recovered.


Actually, I took the Blind Guardian version of it. :tiphat:
 

Linguofreak

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Actually, I took the Blind Guardian version of it. :tiphat:

Blind Guardian is a band, I take it?

---------- Post added at 23:01 ---------- Previous post was at 18:55 ----------

Q: Why couldn't the English access the WiFi during the Anglo-Dutch wars?

A: Because the Dutch had De Ruyter.

A trombone sounds as /me beats a hasty retreat, pursued by several volleys of overripe tomatoes.
 

Linguofreak

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Yeah, except I'm throwing them at you because of this comment:


Not the other one! :lol:

Now I'm really confused. Is there some rock I've been living under such that I've missed an important bit of pop culture? (Well, TBH, there are many such rocks, but I never know which is which :) ).
 

Urwumpe

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Now I'm really confused. Is there some rock I've been living under such that I've missed an important bit of pop culture? (Well, TBH, there are many such rocks, but I never know which is which :) ).

Yes, despite the urge to not call it pop culture, but it somehow is now. :lol:

Wikipedia might be a start there. Or search on Youtube for "blind guardian lord of the rings", in case you need the specific song quote.
 

Linguofreak

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It's the rock with the highest metal content... :lol:

Ah. That rock. Yes, I've been hiding under it. Never really been a fan of metal.

Although "highest metal content" could be any rock that contains no elements lighter than lithium. :p

A bunch of astronomers needs to put together a band called "heavy Metallicity". They'd actually just sing "Twinkle Twinkle little star", but astronomers standards for metal are really, really low.
 
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Urwumpe

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A bunch of astronomers needs to put together a band called "heavy Metallicity". They'd actually just sing "Twinkle Twinkle little star", but astronomers standards for metal are really, really low.

Brian May just sensed a disturbance in the force.... :dry:
 

jedidia

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My brothers.

I see in your eyes the same fear that would take the heart of me.

A day may come when we actually know what we're doing, when we are sure we tested everything and worked up all technical debt, but it is not this day.

An hour of certainty and confidence when all documentation has been read and understood, but it is not this day!

This day we release!

By all that you hold dear on this good earth, I bid you deploy, and hope for the best!

-- Aragorn, slightly paraphrased
 

Linguofreak

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It's a joke, based on the fact that in astronomy "metal" means anything heavier than helium, regardless of whether a chemist or physicist would call it a metal. Neon, for example, counts as a metal.

By extension, any music heavier than hydrogen or helium would also count as a metal. :)

---------- Post added 09-21-19 at 04:53 ---------- Previous post was 09-20-19 at 16:17 ----------

I've been mirroring old debian repositories on my main desktop for a couple of retrocomputing machines I keep around.

Just discovered that I'd somehow screwed up the permissions for the mirror. The machines it was serving files to found everything OK, but the cron job that was supposed to be keeping the mirror up to date didn't have permissions to write to anything, even its own log file.

My hypothesis is that I set up the cron job, then manually ran a mirror update to populate the mirror (rather than just waiting for the cron job to fire for the first time), and ended up running the manual update as root.

Doesn't much matter, as one of the releases I was mirroring was already archived, so I don't think anything changed in the ~4 years it took me to clue in, and the other passed into the archive in the interim, so it too had probably stopped receiving updates.

But it doesn't have to matter for me to feel like an idiot. :beathead:
 

Abdullah

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I just wanted to say that Dyatlov memes are not funny and are rude and ignorant.
 

Linguofreak

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Living in Dallas, I'm used to hearing fairly thick Texas accents, at least from older folk.

But it really throws me for a loop to encounter a deep Texas accent when *reading* a pronunciation guide for Old English, of all things.

From Beowulf:

"Egsode eorl,⁠ syððan ǣrest wearð
fēa‐sceaft funden:⁠hē þæs frōfre gebād,"

The particular pronunciation guide I was reading was trying to tell me that the long "ǣ" in "ǣrest" should be pronounced like the "uy" in "buy". :blink:

(For those not familiar with Old English, its just a longer version of the "a" sound in "bat").

It took me a while to remember the joke about the way you'll hear the modern English long "i" sound pronounced in certain parts of the US south:

"We hold these Truths to be self-evident, that all Men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable raaats..."
 

jedidia

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The family is currently in vacation together with my parents. My Dad never rides escalators if he can avoid it to mitigate the slight risk of getting stuck, but now towards the end of the week he got lazy for a moment... And it promptly got stuck after never having had a problem all week! :lol:
Fate has it out for us, I tell ya!
 

Notebook

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They are awkward to walk on when they've stopped, especially if you have any mobility problems.

Was on a down-going escalator in a department store, it gave a violent acceleration then normal speed. Like a row of dominos everybody in front fell backward onto the legs of the person behind. Including me.
I couldn't lift the person in front of me off my knees and we all got deposited in a heap at the bottom of the escalator.
Luckily it was quiet and there were only a half-dozen on. No injuries though some folk were distressed.
Hate to think what it would have been like if it had jerked backward.
 
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