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Post by questa on Mar 3, 2017 23:24:05 GMT
Iranians in particular are very swift to tell you they are Persian and nothing like "those Arabs". They point out that they have different noses and their women are "walking like princesses". They will even boast about "not having a drop of Arab blood in me".
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Post by Deleted on Mar 4, 2017 0:50:40 GMT
I have Canadian-Iranian actor friend. He was held up for hours at American immigration once for insisting he had never been to the Middle East. "But it says right here, boy, you were born in Eye-ran!"
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Post by lagatta on Mar 4, 2017 1:15:38 GMT
Well, actually many consider Iran part of the Middle East, even among eddicated people who know that they are Persians, not Arabs. Israel is also in the Middle East. These are always rather fuzzy categories, for example Turkey being seen as a European power when most of its land area AND POPULATION reside in Western Asia. Yes, of course Russia also has a hell of a lot more land area in Asia than in Europe, but most of the population lives west of the Urals.
While I certainly knew that the largest Muslim majority countries or countries with a large number of Muslims were not Arab, I didn't realize that the percentage was quite that low.
And casimira, it is a crime to destroy such a well-designed house, so well adapted to its setting.
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Post by Deleted on Mar 4, 2017 2:31:56 GMT
Well, Anousha doesn't!
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Post by lagatta on Mar 4, 2017 3:23:56 GMT
Who is Anousha?
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Post by Deleted on Mar 4, 2017 5:03:56 GMT
Anousha is my actor friend who doesn't believe that Iran is part of the Middle East.
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Post by lagatta on Mar 4, 2017 12:24:41 GMT
It isn't part of the Mashreq - the ARAB Middle East. What does she think it is part of, Central Asia? A cultural case could be made for that due to the linguistic closeness between Farsi and Dari, but it would be an unpopular opinion among the Iranians I know here.
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Post by Deleted on Mar 4, 2017 16:15:42 GMT
Yes. He says it's central Asia. Hey, I'm not arguing the case, merely passing on his opinion.
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Post by Deleted on Mar 4, 2017 16:44:54 GMT
In my job I had to see a lot of passports and one that I never forgot did not list a city of birth but just said "Asia Minor." That has always sounded to exotic to me. One of its cities is Troy.
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Post by questa on Mar 4, 2017 18:06:25 GMT
Ahh, Kerouac2, there you have it. Why do I go where I go. I don't feel the pull of the great cities of Europe but the old towns of the Silk Road weave magic for me. There are names of places that still send shivers up my spine...Tashkent, Samarkand, Uzbek and uighur.Any place name ending in "stan". I could never understand why South East Asia was referred to as the Far East ... it was all crazy.
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Post by Deleted on Mar 4, 2017 18:19:00 GMT
Well, to us the Levant (Lebanon, Israel, Jordan...) is the 'Near East' even though the term is not used anymore.
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Post by whatagain on Mar 31, 2017 13:04:26 GMT
I learned today that tou don't drive as well a car with 2 punched tyres
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Post by Deleted on Apr 22, 2017 12:43:37 GMT
<<It’s a common complaint on planes: flight-induced farting. Many people, when taking to the windy skies, feel an increased need to pass wind of their own. But it’s not something they ate or a health issue. It’s actually a scientific effect in progress.
Researchers in the 1980s actually created a term for this fartnomenon: HAFE, or High Altitude Flatus Expulsion. It was actually named for the increased need to pass gas that mountain climbers experience when at high altitudes, and it’s probably what’s going on when you need to fart in flight.
Even though the air in the plane may feel the same, it’s actually pressurized, simulating an altitude of about 6,000 to 8,000 feet. For people coming from lower altitudes, that can be a significant change. As a result, just like the air expands in your carry-on bag of chips, the air expands in your intestines by about 30 percent. It’s uncomfortable, and it wants out.
“The air pressure in an airplane is different than on the ground,” said Dr. Scott Kalish, a New York City doctor focusing on travel medicine, told The Huffington Post. “In certain people, it can predispose them to developing more gas.”
Luckily, passengers can combat this stinky science. Don’t hold it in (you may hurt yourself), but try to lessen the gas effect by drinking plenty of water, avoiding foods with a high salt and fat content, and, as recommended by another New York travel doctor, Dr. Marvin Cooper, walk around the plane and “shake up your bowels a bit.”>>
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Post by questa on Apr 22, 2017 14:59:04 GMT
So what happens to scuba divers with their intestinal pressures? A little known fact is that men working with scuba diving...eg abalone divers...are much more likely to father girl babies than boys.
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Post by onlyMark on May 1, 2017 18:38:58 GMT
An elephant defecates at a speed of six centimetres per second. ".....defecation duration is constant across many animal species – around 12 seconds (plus or minus 7 seconds) – even though the volume varies greatly. Assuming a bell curve distribution, 66 percent of animals take between 5 and 19 seconds to defecate. It's a surprisingly small range, given that elephant feces have a volume of 20 liters, nearly a thousand times more than a dog's, at 10 milliliters." www.bbc.com/earth/story/20170427-why-do
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Post by mossie on May 1, 2017 18:51:16 GMT
Stand well clear.
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Post by bixaorellana on May 5, 2017 3:41:13 GMT
I am floored! Just found out that the Slinky toy was introduced in 1945! I would have sworn on a flight of stairs that it was from the late 50s or early 60s. Huh! www.toyhalloffame.org/toys/slinky
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Post by Deleted on May 8, 2017 10:51:33 GMT
At age 39, Emmanuel Macron of France is the youngest democratically elected leader in the world.
If you count other regimes, he is in 4th place after Kim Jong-un of North Korea (age 34), Tamim ben Hamad ben Khalifa Al-Thani of Qatar (age 36) and Jigme Khesar Wangchuck, king of Bhutan (age 37).
The average age of the G20 leaders is 62. Up until now, Justin Trudeau was the youngest member at age 45.
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Post by whatagain on May 8, 2017 14:41:41 GMT
Pretty sure Marion Marechal aims to do better in 2022 - even if it means to drop 'Le Pen' from here name ...
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Post by bixaorellana on May 10, 2017 5:39:47 GMT
I just learned that James Comey is 6'8". That's really tall!
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Post by onlyMark on May 18, 2017 7:47:39 GMT
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Post by onlyMark on May 18, 2017 7:49:59 GMT
Today I read that sperm continues to writhe around in the testicles several days after death. That's why women don't want to be shagged by a zombie. Unless they're on the pill of course. Or you can get the zombie to wear a condom.
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Post by mossie on May 19, 2017 10:50:31 GMT
Didn't know you were in to necrophilia
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Post by Kimby on May 19, 2017 14:09:35 GMT
I just learned that James Comey is 6'8". That's really tall! He towers over Trump who is also tall. Maybe that's why he fired him...
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Post by kerouac2 on Sept 5, 2017 5:33:05 GMT
Not having gone to school in France, I didn't know that bag lunches are forbidden in schools here. I only learned this today by watching a television report about those strange Belgians who often send their children to school with sandwiches made at home. Naturally, the French report was quick to point out that this can cause hygiene problems, social class disparities, an unbalanced diet and insufficient exposure to different foods. It was also mentioned (but I have severe doubts about this) that the children who eat a hot lunch in the school cafeteria in Belgium would be eating a cold dinner that night because it is the Belgian tradition to eat only one hot meal a day. Naturally I had to look immediately to see what I would be eating this month if I were attending school in my neighbourhood: www.cde18.fr/tous-les-menus-cantine/
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Post by whatagain on Sept 5, 2017 10:21:44 GMT
I agree that Belgians tend to eat one warm meal a day. And we tend to do it with the whole family. So my father eats warm at lunchtime and bread (tartines) for thé evening meal.
People who eat warm like to eat together - so in the evening. Meaning if I eat the cantine At lunchtime eat twice hot meals during the day and so does my daughter.
Strangely we have a cantine in paris and I have sandwiches in Anderlecht.
Kerouac when I was a kid I had beer at school during meals. Light beer but still beer. But it was so long ago ;-)
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Post by kerouac2 on Sept 5, 2017 11:38:02 GMT
So it wasn't fake news for once!
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Post by bixaorellana on Sept 5, 2017 15:15:32 GMT
Oh gosh -- it's true that all food sounds more elegant in French! My other chuckle came from "composition des sauces", which seems to corroborate an American stereotype about French food, even for the tiny beret-wearers. Not having gone to school in France, I didn't know that bag lunches are forbidden in schools here. But do you suppose that was always the case? Possibly at the time you were in school and even much more recently, French kids could take lunches from home. Now that I think about it, the three points cited against bag lunches make a great deal of sense.
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Post by bjd on Sept 5, 2017 15:31:54 GMT
A friend of mine used to read the menus posted outside our kids' school for inspiration.
No reason for kids to take bag lunches since all schools offer a warm cooked meal at lunchtime. Cost depends on the family's earnings. It doesn't mean it's always very good, although I see that the school near Kerouac's is offering organic food. But at least it's a proper cooked meal and there are no vending machines selling chips and soft drinks in the schools.
And in recent years, they have also started having food tasting at schools to show kids about food and to explain that fast food is not good for them.
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Post by kerouac2 on Sept 5, 2017 15:34:16 GMT
I hadn't even clicked on "composition des sauces." It is fascinating, all the more so that even though I recognise the names of a lot of these sauces, I have never really known the ingredients of most of them.
As for not eating at the school cafeteria, the other possibility is to have lunch at home. I hope you are sitting down because the allocated obligatory time for a school lunch in France is 1h30 (I looked it up.). Obviously for small children, a lot of the time for the kids who eat at school is probably recess, but this also explains to me at last why in so many movies that I have seen over the years, high school students are sitting totally relaxed in cafés in the middle of the day.
I remember having 20 minutes for lunch in certain schools and in any case never more than 30 minutes in the United States.
Bixa, do you have any ideas what the official rules are in Mexico? And anybody else reading this thread, I would love to know about other countries, too.
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