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The grocery store I shop at is a little weird. It's Halloween and in their'seasonal' department, they've put away the Halloween candy already and put out their Christmas candy. I wonder what genius did that?
It doesn't really matter for me. I don't give out candy any more. The turn out was just too unpredictable. One year I'd get thirty trick-or-treaters and the next year only three. With today's tiny candy bars I used to give out four to each kid. So to be ready for a big year it took a lot of candy. Just impossible to plan and I don't need tons of left over candy laying around the house.
Back to groceries: My regular store is fairly undependable. They won't have an item for months and then suddenly bring it back. They suddenly brought back pint freezer bags (just the right size for a half pound of hamburger, enough for two big burgers) after years. So I bought a couple boxes. I couldn't find any small cans of spinach today. I can live without. But is the store going to have them again ever?
Grocery stores seem to be chasing the lazy-market. Order on-line! For canned goods that's fine. But what kind of idiot would order fresh produce on-line? It's hard enough to get good produce in Arizona without removing yourself from the selection process. Our produce-market chain, Sprouts, has pretty much run Trader Joe's out of this side of town. When Sprouts was just here in Phoenix they used to have really good fruits and vegetables, but now that it's spread over many western states the quality has deteriorated to so-so. I've started going to a relatively expensive grocery store for meats. They have sales just about every week on some kind of meat in bulk. I go, fill up the freezer and dine high off the hog for a long time.
Does the rain in Spain fall in Catalonia? It was not at all surprising to see someone waving a Basque flag in the midst of the "Independence" celebration in Barcelona. In all my years in university and grad school, I knew only one person who studied Catalan (rhymes with flan). She was a Spanish major (of course), and she called it Catalian (rhymes with Italian). So I suppose that's what they were calling it in class.
Language nuts are as crazy as gun nuts. Since I taught a foreign language I occasionally ran into such people. One term my students of Ukrainian heritage were accusing our department head of being biased by not offering Ukrainian in addition to Russian. They didn't seem to notice the guy's last name wasn't exactly Russian. In fact he was a native of Lithuania and started teaching Russian back when, not because he loved Russia (far from it), but because with his thick accent he figured no one would hire him as an English lit professor! We have a law in Arizona that primary and secondary school classes have to be taught in English. Apparently some folks got paranoid that some Spanish lit classes in heavily Hispanic areas were being taught in Spanish. Heaven forbid that some Anglo kid might learn enough Spanish to benefit from such a class. The law also applies to schools on Native American reservations, But I think in those cases it's mostly ignored, because the state's authority on-reservation is a little iffy.
Then there is Kazakhstan, where the folks in power have decided to transition from using a Cyrillic based alphabet to a Latin based one for writing Kazakh. There is some practical basis for this since Kazakh is a Turkic language, and the most important Turkic language, Turkish has been written exclusively in Latin script since early in the 20th century. However only a minority of the people in Kazakhstan actually can speak Kazakh. Including those who know both Kazazh and Russian, Russian speakers make up about 85% of the population. I suppose it would be even more serious if being able to read Russian would allow you sound out Kazakh from Cyrillic. Not in the least. I've seen an older form of Latin script for Kazakh and its pretty much indecipherable as well! Maybe they are coming up with something new?
It doesn't really matter for me. I don't give out candy any more. The turn out was just too unpredictable. One year I'd get thirty trick-or-treaters and the next year only three. With today's tiny candy bars I used to give out four to each kid. So to be ready for a big year it took a lot of candy. Just impossible to plan and I don't need tons of left over candy laying around the house.
Back to groceries: My regular store is fairly undependable. They won't have an item for months and then suddenly bring it back. They suddenly brought back pint freezer bags (just the right size for a half pound of hamburger, enough for two big burgers) after years. So I bought a couple boxes. I couldn't find any small cans of spinach today. I can live without. But is the store going to have them again ever?
Grocery stores seem to be chasing the lazy-market. Order on-line! For canned goods that's fine. But what kind of idiot would order fresh produce on-line? It's hard enough to get good produce in Arizona without removing yourself from the selection process. Our produce-market chain, Sprouts, has pretty much run Trader Joe's out of this side of town. When Sprouts was just here in Phoenix they used to have really good fruits and vegetables, but now that it's spread over many western states the quality has deteriorated to so-so. I've started going to a relatively expensive grocery store for meats. They have sales just about every week on some kind of meat in bulk. I go, fill up the freezer and dine high off the hog for a long time.
Does the rain in Spain fall in Catalonia? It was not at all surprising to see someone waving a Basque flag in the midst of the "Independence" celebration in Barcelona. In all my years in university and grad school, I knew only one person who studied Catalan (rhymes with flan). She was a Spanish major (of course), and she called it Catalian (rhymes with Italian). So I suppose that's what they were calling it in class.
Language nuts are as crazy as gun nuts. Since I taught a foreign language I occasionally ran into such people. One term my students of Ukrainian heritage were accusing our department head of being biased by not offering Ukrainian in addition to Russian. They didn't seem to notice the guy's last name wasn't exactly Russian. In fact he was a native of Lithuania and started teaching Russian back when, not because he loved Russia (far from it), but because with his thick accent he figured no one would hire him as an English lit professor! We have a law in Arizona that primary and secondary school classes have to be taught in English. Apparently some folks got paranoid that some Spanish lit classes in heavily Hispanic areas were being taught in Spanish. Heaven forbid that some Anglo kid might learn enough Spanish to benefit from such a class. The law also applies to schools on Native American reservations, But I think in those cases it's mostly ignored, because the state's authority on-reservation is a little iffy.
Then there is Kazakhstan, where the folks in power have decided to transition from using a Cyrillic based alphabet to a Latin based one for writing Kazakh. There is some practical basis for this since Kazakh is a Turkic language, and the most important Turkic language, Turkish has been written exclusively in Latin script since early in the 20th century. However only a minority of the people in Kazakhstan actually can speak Kazakh. Including those who know both Kazazh and Russian, Russian speakers make up about 85% of the population. I suppose it would be even more serious if being able to read Russian would allow you sound out Kazakh from Cyrillic. Not in the least. I've seen an older form of Latin script for Kazakh and its pretty much indecipherable as well! Maybe they are coming up with something new?