Intermission

The Languagehat residence is experiencing a multi-day power failure. Please stretch your legs and purchase something from the snack counter during this brief intermission.

Comments

  1. Trond Engen says

    Apparently, the website is running on scholar power. Good luck in the snow!

  2. Electric Dragon says

    Meanwhile, here is some light music: http://www.youtuberepeat.com/watch/?v=t6jqaA_jeZ8

  3. I’ll add a few more miles to my lunch run. Sit tight, Siberia!

  4. Stay warm, ‘hat! Row when you can!

  5. Ah, too many inches of Global Warming. Mind you, we’re sweltering over here. Shorts weather yesterday.

  6. J. W. Brewer says

    At least the spammers infesting certain other threads during our host’s incapacity are in less snowy climes.

  7. After the snow shoveling comes the spam shoveling.

  8. I hope you don’t have to start burning books to heat the place!

  9. I’m back! Thanks for your good wishes, all, and no books were burned (fortunately we have a couple of cords of wood stacked in the garage). However, the spam removal was indeed arduous.

  10. I should add that the announcement was posted by Songdog, my stepson/site administrator, who had access to the internet via his iPhone. Mrs. Hat and I are thinking about getting some such devices, despite our suspicion of anything that isn’t driven by wind, water, mule, or hand crank.

  11. rootlesscosmo says

    You know what literacy plus rural electrification equals…

  12. … I can’t guess.

  13. Trond Engen says

    A well-read light district?

  14. I believe the intended reference is to Lenin’s remark “Communism equals Soviet power plus electrification of the whole country.”

  15. Ah well, red-light district, I suppose.

  16. Trond Engen says

    I believe the intended reference is to Lenin’s remark
    Oh. so that’s where the reading “red” comes from.

  17. I think “soviet” should be read in lower case here. Nothing was worse about the Soviet Union politically than its gross betrayal of the soviets.

  18. I think “soviet” should be read in lower case here. Nothing was worse about the Soviet Union politically than its gross betrayal of the soviets.
    I certainly agree about the betrayal of the soviets, but since Lenin never had the slightest interest in them except as a useful lever to achieve power, it wouldn’t make sense to use lowercase here, which would drastically misrepresent what he was saying. For him, Soviet = Bolshevik.

  19. I think it could be read either way. The statement is propaganda, after all, and the pre-existing connotations of soviet were still useful at the time: it was not yet an open equivalent of ‘Bolshevik’.

  20. Good point.

  21. In Spinrad’s Songs from the Stars, all white power comes from “muscle, sun, wind, and water”, which pretty much restates your point. But something is wrong in utopia: where do the components of solar-powered wings and radios come from? And what is the ultimate objective of the fabled black sorcerers (“We’ve been using nuclear power for centuries, and only had ten core meltdowns ever!”) of Space Sciences Inc.?

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