Montreal City Weblog

Kate 12:18 on 2021-11-26 Permalink Reply  

• DeWolf 13:46 on 2021-11-26 Permalink

  Zero new deaths today and the same number of people in hospital as two weeks ago. In fact, the number of people in hospital is the lowest it has been in nearly three months.

  In this week last year, we had twice as many new cases, five times more hospitalizations and 12 times more deaths. It’s a testament to just how well the vaccines are working. Let’s just hope we can quickly vaccinate kids and get booster shots to everyone who needs one.

• Mark Côté 15:28 on 2021-11-26 Permalink

  Indeed, Kate your death count is wrong for today. Santé Québec says 0 as DeWolf reported.

• H. John 16:19 on 2021-11-26 Permalink

  They didn’t go with nu as the name for the new variant. The WHO went with Omicron.

  And it’s worth noting, this new variant may not be stopped by the current vaccine.

• thomas 16:52 on 2021-11-26 Permalink

  They probably skipped over nu because of confusion on the pronunciation. It is actually pronounced ni.

• Kevin 17:28 on 2021-11-26 Permalink

  Spotted in Belgium from a traveller who went to Egypt, so we’re shutting down travellers from 7 other countries 5,000 km further south :/
  And a Canadian caught it in Hong Kong, likely from someone wearing a mask with a valve – you know, the kind that lets the wearer exhale all over others :/

• Ian 17:39 on 2021-11-26 Permalink

  Oh OK I though Kate was making a joke in Yiddish. I’ve been living on a Hassidic street for too long apparently.

• Kate 18:45 on 2021-11-26 Permalink

  I was making a Yiddish joke, but when I posted this it was still nu. Now it’s omicron. (I’m geeking out now because of “omicron particles” on Star Trek, but let that pass.)

  Mark Côté, thanks for the correction.

• ant6n 22:19 on 2021-11-26 Permalink

  VOY fan, eh?
  (I thought it was a German, “und nu?” – “and now / now what?” – then German is just a serious version of Yiddish)

• Raymond Lutz 10:17 on 2021-11-27 Permalink

  Kate, Je sais que c’est platte d’expliquer une joke, mais c’était quoi? Also (as if we needed this) the omicron variant seems to have a Ro AROUND TWO… That’s why we should have adopted an IP waiver for covid vaccines. Fuck Bill Gates.

  https://eand.co/why-were-heading-into-another-perfect-storm-of-covid-7f1ac97159f9

• Kate 11:35 on 2021-11-27 Permalink

  ant6n, at the risk of outgeeking you, they also turn up in DS9.

  Raymond Lutz: Yikes.

• ant6n 16:18 on 2021-11-27 Permalink

  3x in ENT, 1x in DS9, 3x in VOY (according to memory alpha). But nobody is an ENT fan.

• Kate 16:20 on 2021-11-27 Permalink

  ant6n, ENT had its moments. I didn’t watch it until years after it came out, and it was better than I’d been led to expect, although like any part of the whole epic, individual eps can be real slogs.

• ant6n 16:26 on 2021-11-27 Permalink

  Agreed.

• Chris 20:10 on 2021-11-27 Permalink

  But after the crap that is Picard and Discovery, ENT seems great in retrospect!

• Ian 20:21 on 2021-11-27 Permalink

  @ ant6n Yiddish is the only Germanic language that does not use the roman alphabet. It is very, very similar to Hochdeutsch but has simplified verb tenses and different vowel sounds. Worth noting, in Yiddish, “ייִדיש” pronounced “yiddish”literally means “Jewish”. For comparison in German “Jew” is “Jude”, pronounced “yoo-deh” and in Yiddish it is “איד”, pronounced “yid”. North American Yiddish has a lot more English loanwords, where many of the older Yiddish speakers that came to Canada after the pogroms have lots of Polish and Russian loanwords. I already have basic-to-intermediate German so I’ve been working on learning Yiddish. Given my neighbourhood I’ll have more chance to practice.

  For the record I’ve been rewatching VOY an episode a night for a couple of months now. I think it definitely holds up the best of all the series.

• ant6n 21:31 on 2021-11-27 Permalink

  @Ian
  My thinking of the comparison of Jiddish and German comes from the movie “train de vie” (1998), where a fictional small Jewish village during WWII decides to fake a nazi deportation train and “deport” themselves to the Soviet Union in order to escape actual deportation by the nazis. The guy chosen to play the Nazi commander has to take German lessons, and the teacher explains that German is very harsh, and that Jiddish is very soft, that Jiddish is a parody of German, to which he responds: “Do the Germans know we parody them? Maybe that’s the reason for the war” (see full film, with link to that scene here: https://youtu.be/OD57oQ-z9N0?t=1011)

• Ian 19:45 on 2021-11-28 Permalink

  That’s a pretty weird take, Berlin German (for instance) is very soft and Yiddish haas a strong throaty ch sound. Both pronounce “ich” as “ish”, though.