For similar reasons, I found watching French movies with the French subtitles on helpful back in the days when I still spoke a little French - these days, it would be a hopelessly useless endeavour. Of course, I also found that subtitles excise a lot of dialogue, even in the original tongue.
Anyways, that's what your diary forced me to discuss.
Reading: Joke's Over on your recommendation. So far, so good.--The three things that make a diamond also make a waffle.
I always feel this kind of disconnect when I read these things. I mean, I know in certain parts of the world (darker, heathen parts, without the light of being part of Britain) these things are perfectly normal. In those areas, it makes sense to have these sort of primers, and reviews, and suchlike, just as you would with any other piece of machinery. But when I read them, I just think it is weird, surreal, and vaguely disturbing.
Bit like the US, really.
In only 12 years you have completely internalized a piece of knee-jerk legislation as an intrinsic attribute of Britishness.[ Parent ]
I'd have been 18, then. And I already thought people who were interested in pistols were weird.
More relevantly, though, the sale and use of pistols in the UK was to a very, very small niche. It never had pretensions of mass market appeal, unlike the sale of weapons in the US, which leads to this type of consumer type information. It's that which I find weird.
But I suspect if, say, they banned basketball after some kind of gangsta-rap scare, in a few years time you'd regard its practioners as similarly un-British.[ Parent ]
I don't have any figures, and, as I said, part of it may have been my age at the time.
And I already think of basketball players as un-British...
A better example may be this idea of banning 'samurai' swords, which is likely to capture some of teh historical re-enactment crowd. That is a bunch of people I think of as being weird, but also as representing a rather British eccentricity.
There's a fair bit about the Indian ocean, but mostly by and on Western ships.
These country ships plying in the Indian Ocean were often much larger than the European or American ships, few of which exceeded 300 tons, while some of the Asian ships were as much as 1,000 tons and 300 to 500 tons was commonplace. These capacious ships were manned with huge crews, usually well over a hundred men, but were weakly armed with only a handful of cannon since they appeared to face no real threat, attacks on native vessels being rare once the European nations had established their naval superiority.
Having said that, some of the desert and motel scenes are amongst my favourite ever film making. Wonderfully atmospheric too.
--------It's political correctness gone mad!