mike carey

I saw a tweet here (in Aussie twitter not in the forum) quoting him as saying, 'Pressure is a privilege' in relation to Simone Biles.

Disappointing, although as @BSRnotes Olympic tennis is not a really big deal, much less the doubles, but Novak has backed out of the bronze medal game in the mixed doubles. A consolation medal for Ash Barty.

Love it!

All that is true, but I doubt that the Japanese broadcaster has the same sway as NBC over the IOC, or that the Tokyo Organising Committee would be able to influence scheduling to suit Japanese audiences. As you pointed out earlier, NBC pays a shit-tonne of money for the rights, and although US tennis players are few now, they would likely not have known that when scheduling decisions were made. Will the IOC be flexible if players complain? I doubt it unless it's going to affect their bottom line, they don't give a f**k about athletes, only money. (BTW, I wasn't suggesting that NBC's influence is a bad thing, just making the obvious point that it is a thing.) Sitting here one hour ahead of Tokyo time, they'd have to try really hard to make live broadcast times inconvenient here.

The issue is more the insistence on the games being in certain months, irrespective of weather. The Sydney games were, like Seoul, in September (daylight saving started in August that year). Spring in Sydney can be pretty nice. Part of the reason for the IOC's schedule is that it has picked its window in the global sporting calendar. Another part of the puzzle is NBC, 11am in Tokyo is 7pm PDT. Swimming usually has its heats in the morning and finals in the evening. Except in Beijing and Tokyo. Morning finals mean US prime time viewing. (I can't remember if Sydney was the same.)

Leaving aside the fact that I didn't address you at all, I would never address you in the third person, that would be unspeakably pretentious, and rude. But I think luluwhammydingdong protests too much. Oops, I just did it.

True and not true simultaneously. Using them when the gender of the person is known or assumed is not all that common. They have, however been used that way frequently since at least Shakespeare's time. Few people would even think before making a public address announcement along the lines of, 'Someone has left their car lights on in the car park.' Your wider point that any change will only happen when people choose to adopt it is correct. On this basis, I don't see any of the made-up pronouns catching on. Soi-disant grammatical purists (aka pedants) can fulminate all they like, but the future of gender neutral third person singular pronouns will not be decided by them.

I considered typing 'bert mah rahts' but figured that may have needed subtitles even in this forum. 😁

Pita now has the opportunity to hang around for an Olympic games in the city where he lives. It's only 11 years away!

There is really no holiday that is considered to mark either the beginning or the end of summer here, I was just playing with the fact that our Labour Day is at the start of October (well, it is in NSW, SA and the ACT, other states and territories have it in March (first or second Monday) or May (link to May Day). Australia Day (26 Jan) is seen as the end of the summer holidays, and return to school, to serious government processes and serious business, but that is not the end of summer. The switch between football and cricket seasons is probably a better proxy for season change. Melbourne Cup Day, first Tuesday in November is sometimes considered the start of the summer 'silly season' when much of the country 'turns off' until Australia Day. Canberra has a couple of quirky 'rules' (popular currency only, nothing official) to mark seasons. Heaters should not be turned on until Anzac Day (25 April) because doing so would be soft in our relatively cold climate, and tomato seedlings should not be planted before Melbourne Cup Day because of the risk of frost. In northern Australia, summer and winter are not significant as seasons, the big distinction is between the wet and dry seasons. From an indigenous perspective in the Top End (of the Northern Territory) there are six seasons. https://www.experiencethewild.com.au/?p=Birding-Info-Weather-Seasons (Europeans are called Balanda by first Australians there. It is derived from Hollander.)

Whether it's the result of bullying or complicity, there are politicians state and federal in the US who have resisted or declined to use or even allow proof of vaccination. But with the Canadian border the 'But mah rights' crowd face a different circumstance, a foreign government (or to be precise, a foreign border official) who tells them that their right not to carry proof ends at the border, and they have a simple choice, show proof or climb back on that plane and go home.

Interesting that health care systems have the capacity to record pronoun preferences, but in most settings a practitioner will only use the preferred pronoun if they need to talk about the patient to others. In most of their interactions the pronoun in use would be 'you'. That's not to minimise the importance of using their preferred pronoun in those settings. (At times using the person's name may be preferable, but that's a separate issue.)

I wouldn't make that assumption. Yesterday I sent an RM message to a guy in NZ who I've chatted with intermittently about meeting for a while (he was previously in Oz but in a different city, and now, well 'Delta') and he responded within two hours. His RM ad says he last logged in on 31 May. Since then he has also activated his 'Available Now' notice multiple times. So, it's clear they can do stuff without being 'logged in'.

Not an absolutely auspicious name if you have some knowledge of Australian, in particular Tasmanian, colonial history, admittedly with a different spelling of his last name. Long story short, Pearce escaped with several companions from the penal station at Macquarie Harbour on the west coast of Tasmania. His companions were intended for, and used as his rations for the arduous cross-country journey to Hobart. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_Pearce

Ever so slightly a surprise in the men's football. Australia 2 - Argentina 0

I guess here the rule should be not to wear white before Labour Day. (It's the first Monday in October in some states here.)

It was a cold morning in the nation's capital today. https://twitter.com/cosmicpinot/status/1417955596477763586?s=20

I'm not one, but my observation is that they are both. The new ones are long term contributors to the forum and they use their time reading and contributing here to enforce the rules and remind others about them.

The sense of elation is not as profound as it was in 1993 when Juan Antonio Samaranch announced that the winner was Syderney, but this afternoon in Tokyo the IOC announced that the 2032 games will be in Brisbane. Australia will join the US in having three summer games host cities (obviously Los Angeles will have hosted three itself by then, and London has hosted three as well). I hope I live to see it!

Bon anniversaire!

@Unicorneven when I was having frequent hearing tests and they suggested it was as good as it had ever been, I sometimes had difficulty hearing things in some settings. I have no idea what was going on there, but I suspect part of it is expecting not to be able to hear in some circumstances. Someone in a mask could be one of those. I haven't had any problem giving the person collecting contact tracing information at the supermarket entry my name and number (my phone can't do QR codes), or talking to other staff in shops, nor have I had any noticeable problems talking to people. I have to think that there is an element of expecting not to be able to hear someone in a mask rather than an actual problem.

I really hope that they don't have to cancel the final trial event for the 2020 Paralympics!

I had noticed that the spacing is different than it was in the old system, but it's symptomatic of a feature that often comes up in MS Word styles. That is, lines are single spaced but paragraphs build in a half or full line spacing after the text of the paragraph. When it was in a Word document I knew enough about it to either let it do its thing or to make sure that all the vertical spacing was done with line spacing rather than clear space after a paragraph. It's possible that I could do that here, but for the most part if it looks right in the input box it will look right when it's posted. (In Word, I used to always work with the formatting symbols turned on so I knew what it was doing.)

As others have said, apart from the privacy aspects (which may or may not matter depending on your preferences and the issue involved) some things are geo-blocked. I know a lot of Australian broadcast media are only available in this country, and the same sort of restrictions are imposed elsewhere. I frequently see youtube and some cable TV content from the US that 'the up-loader has not made available in your country'. I've never seen the need to use a VPN to see it, I just move on, but I can understand why people would do so. For the most part, if you use Facebook or Google you've lost any privacy anyway, so I'm not sure that protecting any that remains is worth the effort.

Last rights are fine, we just want to avoid any last rites!