Yes! Dancehall parodies are a thing! Of them, my favourite is Fake Jeans Admit It.
So, Vybez Kartel is kind of known for singing about clothes. For other things too, but singing about clothes is one of the things he does. Of those songs, the most well-known is the one where he fangirls super hard about how much he loves his shoes.
De ledda hard // De suede sof Tootbrush get out the dus fas Everybody ha’fi ask where mi get mi Clarks Everybody ha’fi ask where mi get mi Clarks
However, this isn’t his only song about how great his clothes are! No, he has another one which is a more general exploration of his style and how #quality it is.
Straight jeans and fitted Inna white t-shirt we did it We rock dose shades to di limit (Uptown, uptown) Same so wi dweet, wi dweet ah portmoooore (OH)
Mi gucci belt ah di realest Mi rosary chain ah di purest Mi G-shock watch: Timeless Same so wi dweet, wi dweet ah portmoooore (OH)
But, if you think that looks silly, then you’re not alone. It was ripe for parody from the start. Enter DJ Bambino, who’s here to sing about his own style – and how to look fly on a budget.
Fake jeans – admit it! Knock off T-shirts – we did it! We rock wannabe Clarks to di limits (Downtown, downtown) Cyah shop uptown cuz we too poooor
Mi grocery belt a di realest Mi clothes knock off – but ah di cleanest! Got nuh G-shock watch, so mi timeless Cyah shop uptown cuz we so poooor
I love my culture
Tags:
#music #anything that makes me laugh this much deserves a reblog #I haven’t actually listened to these songs #(I might do that later) #but that ”timeless” pun is amazing #puns #oh my god
All the gods of myth and legend are real, but having your prayers answered depends on discovering which god can hear you. You figured out which god is listening to your prayers, but they’re not what you expected.
Suzy was dissapointed. Most people her age had discovered their deity so far, and she was starting to think she was godless. She turned the next page of McBayers’ Little Book of Deities, and tried reading their names aloud to see if she’d get a reaction. It had taken her weeks just to get through Chinese spirits and deities, and had finally reached the first page of Egyptian Gods and you.
“Ammit? Amun? Anhur?” Nothing. Her heart slowly sank again.Three more tries, and she’d stop for now.
“Anubis?”
The ground shook. The lights in Suzy’s room flickered and went out. A single flame hovered in the middle of the room, and as it grew to a blaze it changed form. Within the blink of an eye, there was a tall figure standing in Suzy’s room. The body of a man, and the head of a jackal. His eyes shone bright as he peered at her.
WHAT IS IT, SUZY OF THE HOUSE MILLER?
“You’re the deity that answers my prayers?”
INDEED. I, ANUBIS, WHO RULES OVER THE LAND OF THE DEAD, IS HERE TO ANSWER YOUR REQUESTS.
Suzy thought for a moment. “O great and mighty Anubis who rules over the afterlife, can I please have a puppy?”
Anubis seemed taken aback.
IN THE CENTURIES THAT I HAVE BEEN PRAYED TO, THIS IS THE FIRST TIME I HAVE BEEN REQUESTED SOMETHING LIKE THIS. CHILD, HOW OLD ARE YOU?
“I’m eight and a half. My mommy says that if I can take care of a puppy, I can keep it.”
ARE YOU CERTAIN YOU DO NOT WISH FOR ME TO BRING PLAGUES UPON YOUR ENEMIES OR WEIGH A SOUL FOR YOU?
Suzy shook her head. “I want a puppy.”
CHILD, IN TRUTH THIS WISH I CANNOT GRANT. MY JOB HAS BEEN TO BRING PEACE AND LEAD SOULS INTO THE AFTERLIFE, NOTHING MORE. IF I WERE TO CREATE A HOUND FOR YOU, IT WOULD BE FORMED OF BONE AND SOUL ALONE.
Suzy thought for a second. She would have liked to have a nice fluffy puppy, but then she remembered how Aunt Marge’s Sphinx cat was still nice, even without fur.
“No fur is fine, as long as they don’t bite and make a mess.”
Anubis nodded, and raised a hand. Underneath his palm an intricate symbol appeared on the floor. It glowed bright, and the floorboards burst apart. Up sprang a massive skeletal dog, bigger than suzy herself. Its eye sockets held blue flame, and its jaw hang partly open in a perpetual grin. It slowly walked over to Suzy and nuzzled her.
“What does it eat?”
IT WILL NOT NEED SUSTENANCE, AND WANTS NOTHING MORE THAN TO SERVE ITS NEW MASTER. I HOPE THIS WILL SUFFICE.”
“I love it. Thank you, Anubis.”
Anubis looked slightly taken aback, but nodded peacefully.
FAREWELL FOR NOW, SUZY OF THE MILLERS. IF YOU EVER NEED ANYTHING ELSE YOU HAVE BUT TO ASK ME.
Suzy nodded, and ran over to her parents’ room to show them her new dog. She was pretty sure they couldn’t object to this pet.
I listened to “Death From Above” and “The Judas Boats” on my traditional Saturday afternoon walk yesterday.
First of all, while I miss the primeverse*, I think I am starting to warm up to this one, or maybe it’s starting to warm up to itself and I’m sensing that. The Red Panda is starting to feel more…himself, in spots, and I’m not sure if that’s a character thing, or if Taylor’s gotten more confident at voice acting in later episodes, or what.
Also…okay, look. For my readers who have not listened to the Red Panda Adventures, and who–like me–are often very sensitive to authors’ politics shining through in their fiction, I want to assure you that it is pretty subtle. There’s no anvils, there’s almost no pressuring even by the standards of someone who can hear SJ dogwhistles a little too well.
That being said, there is nevertheless a clear sense, while listening to the primeverse Red Panda Adventures, that a liberal wrote this. Not enough to be pressury, just enough to be…home-y. I get the feeling that, while I may not know what makes this author tick (I often have trouble with grokking what makes a given liberal tick), I do know what he considers socially acceptable and what he doesn’t, and I can trust him to stay within those bounds as much as he can given the setting, and to provide a sense that the narrative disapproves in those times he can’t.
The pilots don’t feel like a liberal wrote them. They feel like…like an apathetic centrist wrote them. Someone whose birth subculture has not much overt bigotry but a lot of low-level background stuff, who might very well come to the conclusion that this was still horrible if he ever gave it some serious thought, but who never has given it that thought. There’s these little moments in the pilots of…other people might call them “microaggressions”, but I think of them as culture shock. Those little off-balance moments where you realise that your interlocutor’s standards of social acceptability are different from yours, that you can’t predict (can’t trust) what they’re going to do and say as well as you thought you could.
It’s not my place to ask**, but I wonder if maybe Taylor was an apathetic centrist at the time, and moved to liberal-land sometime in the mid-00’s. If he did, it’s fascinating that it shows so clearly. If not, it’s still very interesting that it feels like he did.
Alternatively, maybe it feels apathetic-centrist because it was intended to be played on mainstream radio for a “mainstream” (thus presumed apathetic-centrist) audience, and in podcasts he could be more himself. I think I’m going to have to listen to the Season One Spectacular again, particularly the bits about how the Red Panda came to be.
—
*I was going to switch to some other podcast for my walks for a while once I was done with Red Panda ones, but I think I might have to go straight into a re-listen.
**I don’t really want other people to ask, but it occurred to me that somebody might take it upon themself to ask anyway. If so, please do not link me to him. There’s some stuff in my Red Panda tag that would be very awkward for the author to see.
(Okay, upon reflection I can think of one anvil: the Chinese-laundromat bit in The Crime Cabal. But it was short, and also in a book rather than the main audio series.)
—
Also, @theshadiertwin, I wouldn’t have noticed the hurt/comfort-ness and Red/Baboon/Anna potential on my own, but I think I can see what you mean.
It is one of the most well-known lines English poetry has to offer: “Quoth the raven, ‘Nevermore.’” It is an eerie verse found in Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Raven”, and we all know what the the first word in it means. It’s a weird, extremely uncommon verb in the past tense meaning ‘to say’. Now use the same verb to ask if the raven said “nevermore.” Did the raven… and now most of you – excluding you language and etymology enthusiasts out there – are struggling because you don’t know what the infinitive of quoth is. What has happened?
The English language is fairly old, so it isn’t surprising to find out that many words have died out, i.e. they aren’t in use anymore and can oftentimes not be understood by native speakers. Look, for instance, at the Old English noun costnunge and try to guess what it means. No idea? Maybe the context will help. It can be found in the sentence And ne gelæd ðū ūs on costnunge, found in an OE version of the Lord’s Prayer. It means ‘temptation’, or rather meant that, seeing as it hasn’t been used for a very long time. If you read Middle English versions of the prayer, you’ll see that the noun had already been replaced by a ME form of temptation.
What does this have to do with quoth? Quite a bit, actually, only that it is a far more interesting word. It belongs to a class of verbs we call defective verbs. These are verbs exhibiting an incomplete conjugation, which means the verb doesn’t have a (modern) form for every tense, aspect, mood, or person. Modal auxiliaries are prime examples; take can for example, which has a preterite form, could, but it doesn’t have a present or past participle. The verb must is an even more extreme case as there isn’t even a past form. An example of a lexical defective verb would be beware because bewares, bewared, or bewaring aren’t normally used in present-day English. With quoth, we have the 1st and 3rd person sing. past tense form still being known to speakers, which is rather interesting and unusual, and if it weren’t for “The Raven”, who knows if we would still know about this verb. We also don’t use it anymore unless we want to write a fancy poem with archaic language.
Quoth comes from the ME verb quethen, from OE cwethan. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, all forms of the verb save for the one in question were no longer in use by the end of the 16th century. But why did people stop using the verb? We cannot look into the heads of the people who spoke English a thousand years ago, but one reason is certainly the competition the verb had to face. The most common verbs in Modern English that have the same or a similar meaning are say, speak, and tell. And man, are they common. They were already around in Old English times, when we had secgan, sprecan, and tellan. Believe it or not, it gets even more interesting.
The exact same thing happened in German, another West Germanic language! In Old High German, the verb quedan, cognate with OE cwethan, was still used very frequently, but then it disappeared. Its competitors were the same as in English. In present-day German, we still find sagen (OHG sagēn), sprechen (OHG sprehhan), and (er)zählen (OHG zellen).
It’s the sad little story of a verb we know was once there because of a poem, but that left us a long time ago. Or did it? Turns out the verb actually managed to find a backdoor to stay alive! Maybe you’ve even had it in mind for some time now. The verb I mean is bequeath, a very formal word. All it took for it to survive throughout the centuries was the prefix be-, which also made it gain new meanings, among them the ones the word still has today. The etymology section in the Oxford English Dictionary includes the following sentences:
An ancient word, the retention of which is due to the traditional language of wills. Originally, like its radical cweðan, a strong verb; but having only weak inflection since 1500.
Bequeath is a regular lexical verb whose forms can all be used, and since it turned into a weak verb, the preterite form today is bequeathed, not *bequoth. Let’s see if it’ll manage to stay around in the future. Its odds are certainly much better than those of the word it was derived from, for it has found a comfy place in formal English and legalese, and its competitors aren’t nearly as fearful either. Congratulations. You can now show off in front of your friends when discussing “The Raven” ;)
I think I’d always assumed that quoth was related to quote, but Etymonline says they’re from totally different roots:
late 14c., coten, “to mark (a book) with chapter numbers or marginal references,” from Old French coter, from Medieval Latin quotare “distinguish by numbers, number chapters,“ from Latin quotus “which in order? what number (in sequence)?,” from quot “how many,“ from PIE *kwo-ti-, from pronomial root *kwo– (see who).
I listened to “Death From Above” and “The Judas Boats” on my traditional Saturday afternoon walk yesterday.
First of all, while I miss the primeverse*, I think I am starting to warm up to this one, or maybe it’s starting to warm up to itself and I’m sensing that. The Red Panda is starting to feel more…himself, in spots, and I’m not sure if that’s a character thing, or if Taylor’s gotten more confident at voice acting in later episodes, or what.
Also…okay, look. For my readers who have not listened to the Red Panda Adventures, and who–like me–are often very sensitive to authors’ politics shining through in their fiction, I want to assure you that it is pretty subtle. There’s no anvils, there’s almost no pressuring even by the standards of someone who can hear SJ dogwhistles a little too well.
That being said, there is nevertheless a clear sense, while listening to the primeverse Red Panda Adventures, that a liberal wrote this. Not enough to be pressury, just enough to be…home-y. I get the feeling that, while I may not know what makes this author tick (I often have trouble with grokking what makes a given liberal tick), I do know what he considers socially acceptable and what he doesn’t, and I can trust him to stay within those bounds as much as he can given the setting, and to provide a sense that the narrative disapproves in those times he can’t.
The pilots don’t feel like a liberal wrote them. They feel like…like an apathetic centrist wrote them. Someone whose birth subculture has not much overt bigotry but a lot of low-level background stuff, who might very well come to the conclusion that this was still horrible if he ever gave it some serious thought, but who never has given it that thought. There’s these little moments in the pilots of…other people might call them “microaggressions”, but I think of them as culture shock. Those little off-balance moments where you realise that your interlocutor’s standards of social acceptability are different from yours, that you can’t predict (can’t trust) what they’re going to do and say as well as you thought you could.
It’s not my place to ask**, but I wonder if maybe Taylor was an apathetic centrist at the time, and moved to liberal-land sometime in the mid-00’s. If he did, it’s fascinating that it shows so clearly. If not, it’s still very interesting that it feels like he did.
Alternatively, maybe it feels apathetic-centrist because it was intended to be played on mainstream radio for a “mainstream” (thus presumed apathetic-centrist) audience, and in podcasts he could be more himself. I think I’m going to have to listen to the Season One Spectacular again, particularly the bits about how the Red Panda came to be.
—
*I was going to switch to some other podcast for my walks for a while once I was done with Red Panda ones, but I think I might have to go straight into a re-listen.
**I don’t really want other people to ask, but it occurred to me that somebody might take it upon themself to ask anyway. If so, please do not link me to him. There’s some stuff in my Red Panda tag that would be very awkward for the author to see.
Tags:
#Red Panda Adventures #Gregg Taylor’s Twitter looks exactly as I would expect a Twitter to look #given only that it was run by the same person who wrote the Red Panda Adventures #mostly tweets about the shows and other fandoms and home life #but with occasional standard liberal fare mixed in #oh look an original post #reactionblogging #our roads may be golden or broken or lost
Today I learned that you can download the entirety of Wiktionary onto your smartphone. Speaking as someone without a cellular data connection who likes her apps to be as self-sufficient as possible, this is so cool.
If I had a larger SD card, I could even get Wikipedia! (Or rather, Wikipedia as it was ~3 months ago, but still.) (~18 GB for an imageless version, 50-something GB for the full copy.) So, while I currently still don’t get to have Wikipedia at my beck and call at all times, the problem is now merely “too little storage space”, which is much easier to fix than “how the fuck do you even download Wikipedia”.
I haven’t played around with it that much yet, but initial tests are promising. (I tried using my local copy of Wiktionary just now to double-check my usage of “self-sufficient”, and it worked fine.)
(A while ago I was reading the Eclipse Phase RPG sourcebooks, and at one point they mention a device characters can get that stores a local copy of space-Wikipedia, automatically updating itself whenever you have space-Internet access and providing you with Wikipedia-as-of-the-last-time-you-had-Internet when you don’t have Internet access. And I was like “Damn, *I* want one of those”. Turns out, you can pretty much have one of those.)
Tags:
#I mean there’s a lot of tech in Eclipse Phase that’s like ”damn I want one of those” #but that one stuck out because it seemed like it might actually be feasible at our current tech level #and indeed it is #give or take a live-update mechanism #(which might very well be the hard part) #oh look an original post #proud citizen of The Future #Brin owns *two* 2010’s computers now #the more you know #(the following category tag was added retroactively:) #101 Uses for Infrastructureless Computers
Brinens and Things 