Hi there!
Welcome to our daily scheduled post, the **Daily Slow Chat.**
If you want to just chat about your day, if you have questions for the moderators *(please mark these \[Mod\] so we can find them)*, or if you just want talk about oatmeal this is the thread for you!
Enjoying the small talk? We have a Discord server too! We’d love to have more of you over there. Do both of us a favour [and use this link to join the fun](https://discord.gg/BTX7cK3R4k).
The mod-team wishes you a nice day!
5 comments
How does Belgian bureaucracy compare with German, French, and Dutch Bureaucracy?
Friday night I went to see a Finland-Latvia basketball game, a friendly match ahead of the upcoming FIBA World Cup. The arena was packed, and the game was a lot of fun. I was sat really close to the court, almost on the floor. I’ve never sat that close in a high level game like that, it was for sure different. A lot harder to grasp what was going on like sets wise, but you really get to experience the verticality in a whole different way compared to sitting further up. And Finland won, literally a buzzer beater
But what Finland didn’t win was Rally Finland. Already on Friday the home favourite Kalle Rovanperä crashed out, and just a couple of stages before the other home favourite Esapekka Lappi crashed out. 😔 Oh well. I went to the stages yesterday with my mate anyway, a nice day in the forest. There is a battle for 3rd between the Finnish driver Teemu Suninen and the honorary Finnish driver Takamoto Katsuta, so at least the home crowd has something to cheer for here. I’ll go see the last stage of the rally today, I think. It’s on my way home anyway.
Sports. 👍
Random dinner party guest: “Hey man, can I ask you a question about British culture?”
Me: “Sure”
Random dinner party guest: “What’s the deal with eggcups?” [just to clarify that there was no context to this whatsoever]
Me: 👀
Me: “What do you mean?”
Random dinner party guest: “What are they for?”
Me: “Umm…they’re there to hold your egg.”
Random dinner party guest: “In what way?”
Me: “…I mean, they’re like a holder for your e…sorry, I really don’t get the issue here”
Random dinner party guest: “But I mean, how do you use them?”
Me: “Well, so you put your boiled egg in the eggcup, and then you break it open, and then you scoop out the inside”
Random dinner party guest: “The inside, meaning the yolk?”
Me: “Yeah, and the white”
Random dinner party guest: “So you cut the egg open halfway?”
Me: “Kind of a third of the way from the top, I mean, far enough down so you can scoop out the inside of the boiled egg using a teaspoon”
Random dinner party guest: “And you cut it open with a knife?”
Me: “Yeah, just a normal knife”
Random dinner party guest: “So and then, the top just lobs off?”
Me: “I think you’re overthinking this slightly”
Random dinner party guest: “No, I mean, what do you do with the top?”
Me: “Well, the eggcup’s usually on a saucer of some sort, in case the egg’s a bit runny and some of the white starts pouring out. So you put the decapitated part of the egg on the saucer and then you scoop the egg out of that bit too”
Random dinner party guest: “And so the eggcup’s supposed to be there to hold the egg while you decapitate it with the knife?”
Me: “Yes”
Random dinner party guest: “Ok gotcha. We just put the egg on a plate and peel off the shell piece by piece”.
Question: Do other Europeans find the concept of eggcups weird too, or it just Americans?
Today’s the Hiroshima bombing anniversary. There’s a meme going around after the Oppenheimer movie depicting President Truman (US President 1945-1953) as the dude who gave no shits and ordered the bombing.
It seems that the nuclear weapons usage wasn’t treated that differently than a conventional air raid, so the military just did their own thing for the most part, only telling and consulting with Truman on the bombing target. He could have stopped the first two bombings I guess, but that’d be like canceling a normal air raid. Interestingly, he halted the third bombing for the moment the day after the Nagasaki bomb was dropped, saying that he was uncomfortable ‘killing those kids’. Dude was probably one of the least nuke happy people years later in the Korean War too.
Here’s something to read about if you want to:
https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/u25ec6/how_was_truman_told_about_the_nuclear_bomb/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=ios_app&utm_name=iossmf&utm_content=1&utm_term=22
Edit, Korean war and Truman: https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/5yp0z1/given_the_effectiveness_of_nuclear_weapons_in/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=ios_app&utm_name=ioscss&utm_content=1&utm_term=1
Update from “The Egyptian”: 80% in and omg why is this book so sad!!! There is just this overriding air of melancholy where the narrator describes the bad events to every single detail, but he nice things he’s like “oh, I don’t want to remember, it causes too much pain” (because the people with whom he had these memories inevitably die). Damn.
Speaking of history, BBC has really cool living history documentaries. They are usually about a group of historians/archaeologists living for a year as if they are in a certain historical era. They have a theme, like “Tudor Farm”, “Victorian Farm”, “Victorian Bakery” etc. They are so much fun and so informative. You can find them on YouTube. Is there something like this in your country?