The Coalition of the Swilling

Woo Hoo! Trackback from Samizdata. You guys are becoming bigtime!

I'll want one.

I'd wear it in a heartbeat but I hesitate to give offense to my Coonass friends and risk being left swinging from a cypress before I had a chance to translate. (Cajuns rarely ask questions first and the Swampy reference is apt to irk them in their etoufees.)

Thanks for the votes of confidence, ya'll! I'm thinking we'll have mugs, too. Not everyone's a T-shirt type.

And your right Sylvan. I spend enough time in Nawlins to know one treads about the swamp on light toes, lol!

Ugh, only tourisses (that's the plural of "tourist") and tongue-in-cheek Tulane students actually say "Nawlins." :-p

And that would be us! {8^P We've been eight times in one year ~ do the Bywater Art Market as an excuse to spend 3 or 4 days in the city (we stay in the Bywater), and then eat our weight dining out. Shameful, isn't it?

Oh, I miss it tremendously: you're much closer in Pensacola than I was in Tallahassee, and of course even more so now that I'm up here north of Boston. I haven't been back in two years now. Roll Green Wave!

Print them. They will come!!

Here's a pic of the 'Solidarity' graphic that was THS' inspiration, for those of you who are younger then she is and don't remember it.

Mr. B, the "sc" in Solidarnosc has a hachek over each letter, so it is not pronounced "sk", but "shch", a weird Slavic consonant cluster that us non-Slavs have to spend a lot of time learning how to say. Russian, my favorite foreign tongue, has the same cluster. "C" by itself in the Latin alphabet usually represents the "ts" sound in Slavic orthography.

BTW, I missed the cultural reference to the Brit road-building protestor, Daniel "Swampy" Hooper.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk_news/story/0,3604,994224,00.html

Hey John. I never learned any of the slavic tongues when I was in college, but one of my roomates was a linguistics major and he studied them. I remember watching those incredibly brave workers in Poland when they were standing up to Ivan. Amazing.If you ever want to impress college chicks I always found that having books on "Old Church Slavonic" lying about worked wonders.

And there are so few people younger than me, veritable babe-in-arms that I am.

John, I remember that particular cluster from IFL in 7th grade. We were lucky enough to study 5 different languages for 7 weeks at a pop, then finish out the year in one we'd chosen. I enjoyed the Russian immensely. We had a real knuckle cracker for a teacher ~ expertly rendered cyrillic being his particular bailiwick. (7th graders can barely print in English.)

Sorry, what I meant to write was

Here's a pic of the 'Solidarity' graphic that was THS' inspiration, since the majority of you are younger then she is and don't remember it.

I'll take a T-shirt

Make it a better design than that
I like the slogan and NO KYOTO
symbol but background picture needs to be better.

Bingley BASTARD!!

Mr. B, I was in Lithuania when they were trying to divorce Ivan. Unfortunately the US was distracted with Gulf War I, so they hit us once with tanks and Spetsnaz on January 11, 1991, taking over all the radio and TV stations in the Republic. An acquantance of mine at Kaunas Technical University was killed - crushed by a tank.

"Old Church Slavonic" scored babes, huh? Didn't know that. All I can say is that "Partial Differential Equations of Mathematical Physics" didn't. Us engineering and science types always comforted ourselves with the thought that our earning power would score babes after college. Hah!

THS everyone over 5 years old remembers Solidarnosc, so that makes you what, about 28, 29? I wish I'd had an IFL cluster that young. All we had was French and Spanish in HS. I took Russian in college. I write more neatly in Cyrillic, Kana, and Kanji/Hanji because I learned them at a much more advanced age than the Latin alphabet - I was a REALLY sloppy handwriter as a kid.

Oh, John...sigh...bless your heart! As one Kerry, John entoned sonorously on the Daily Show "would it were so..." But thank you for the lovely guess!

Our IFL was wonderful and I was enthralled through all of them (French, Latin, German, Spanish, Russian) except the Latin. That was a teacher misfire tho, not the course. Plus that last 7 weeks in the language you'd chosen gave you entree into a first year course in 8th grade, vice 9th. (Didn't do me much good, as I xfr'd to the local Catholic high, which recognised and accepted NONE of my public school advanced credits) I'd signed up for Russian which was immediately kyboshed by my parents. Communists were none too popular at that time and, since they spoke Russian, the inference was that you must somehow be a sympathiser or anti-war type. Couldn't part my hair down the middle either. Fascists.

Gosh John, that must have been simply awful.

I wish people today knew about the Solidarity movement, but I doubt they do. Why teach kids about heroic struggles versus totalitarian oppression when you can teach them about "social studies" and all that really important stuff.

THS, I remember my parents making disparaging remarks about Russians / Communists, too, but there was a Russian dissident who owned the local Christmas Tree farm, so I was exposed to real Russians at an early age. My dad took us to board a Russian freighter in Baltimore about 1976 or so, I remember a Russian sailor carrying me up a 35 foot rope ladder to the deck.

I was lways was fascinated by the culture, too, so I jumped at the chance to get a Russian Technical Translator's certificate in college, and that's how I woun d up spending a couple of years in the USSR as it crumbled around me.

Everything I knew about the russkies as a child I learned from The Russians are Coming! The Russians are Coming! (no, it's not what you hope, Ken).