Iversen's second multiconfused log thread

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Re: Iversen's second multiconfused log thread

Postby Iversen » Wed Nov 04, 2015 2:59 pm

EN: Today I had some free time before a meeting, and I spend it on the Ordovicium section of my Indonesian Earth history text. Forr some unknown reason there isn't a separate Cambrian section there, but there are sections about the following periods: ordovicum, devon, carbon etc. I don't know why the series isn't complete, but I'm reading primarily it to learn some Indonesian, so it is not a problem that some periods are missing (like the Cambrian and Silur).

INDO: Tidak adalah bagian Cambrian dalam artikel, namun kalau adalah akan dimulai dengan "ledakan Kambrium". Setelah pembekuan (mungkin seluruh) bumi, embusan napas vulkanik telah dihasilkan sebanyak efek rumah-kaca yang mencair bumi dan segera dipenuhi lautan dunia dengan hewan-hewan aneh. Tempat yang paling terkenal temuan fosil disebut Burgess Shales terletak di Amerika Utara, tetapi nama periode (Ediacaran) berasal dari tempat menemukan di Australia. Hewan periode yang sangat beragam - seperti yang bereksperimen dengan rencana lantai yang berbeda. Tapi hampir semua cabang sudah punah sekarang. Dalam Kambrium trilobita adalah kelompok hewan yang dominan. Mereka terlihat sedikit seperti kepiting tapal kuda, tetapi dengan tiga potong punggung dan kaki mencuat ke sisi.

EO: Estas longa priparolado concerne la Ordovicio kio mencias ke preskaŭ la tuta lando de la mondo kolektiĝis en la suda hemisfero en unu kontinento nomata Gondwanalando. En la unua parto kaj la meza de la periodo estis varma kaj humida klimato, sed iom post iom Gondwanalando glitis al la suda poluso kaj la klimato divenis pli kaj pli malvarma. La artikolo uzas tian fakton kiel argumenton por la estingo kiu finigis al la periodo - 80 procentoj de ĉiuj bestaj familioj kaj 25% de la bestaj familioj formortis. Sed tiu afaro devas okazi laŭgrade. Ĝi sugestis ke kiu al la kiu finigis la periodo estis gama ekbrilo el spacio. La ekbrilo mortigis ĉiun la vivadon, krom en la profundoj de la maro.

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Re: Iversen's second multiconfused log thread

Postby Iversen » Fri Nov 06, 2015 11:28 am

Yesterday I continued with my Indonesian text, and besides I refreshed some vocabulary using a simplified wordlist format - not three columns (target, base, target), and not even the usual two column repetition format (base, target), but just target, base. This demands less brain activity than base, target, but still more than just copying the foreign words. But I'll write more about sejarah bumi later.

In my newspaper today I read that there were several very large solar storms around 1000 years ago. What does that concern us here in 2015? Well, as late as 1859 the Sun caused the socalled Carrington event, a solar storm that affected even the primitive (and therefore presumably quite robust) telegraph systems of the day. If a similar event happened today we would see far worse problems because we use electronics so much. We would probably loose most of the communications satellites - goodbye mobile phones, goodbye internet - and there would be burn-outs in our electrical power systems which it would take some time to repair. So I'm glad that we haven't quite reached the paperless society which some overzealous futurists predicted for these turbulent days and times. Paradoxically the most primitive societies would survive unscathed, whereas I wouldn't be able to buy a bread in a supermarket if its electronic cash register didn't function. And nobody could tell me how long it would last if all mass communication was closed down.

Sometimes we do experience minor problems due to small solar storms - like in 1989, when the power grid of Quebec broke down after a solar storm which was much smaller than the one in 1859. Or Wednesday this week, where the radar systems of airports in Southern Sweden (including the one in Arlanda near Stockholm) were closed down for more than one hour after an absolutely minuscule event. The media in Denmark and Sweden were of course intrigued, and somebody asked a Swedish specialist named Muscheler about the risk of a major event. And he mentioned something I didn't know, namely that the Earth was hit by several very large solar storms around 1000 years ago - much larger than even the Carrington event. But the vikings couldn't care less so nobody wrote anything down about it. But the effects can be seen in ice cores from Greenland, so the scientists can not only date each event precisely down to the exact year, but also judge its severity.

Kunst100.jpg

By the way: yesterday I saw a program on TV where they showed a large image of the Sun where it seemed as if a large chunk had been torn out. But a scientist then explained that this area in the solar atmosphere definitely hadn't become totally empty overnight - just slightly cooler than its surroundings (and the solar atmosphere is extremely hot - much hotter than the surface - so a few degrees less would still be frightingly hot). But such slightly cooler areas could be places from which a solar burst would start its journey towards planet Earth, so we should not take the matter too lightly.
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Re: Iversen's second multiconfused log thread

Postby Iversen » Sun Nov 08, 2015 7:53 pm

I spent the weekend with my family so my study activity was on the whole somewhat underwhelming. But her Astra receiver can now actually see the Astra satelites through her massive hornbeam (whose leaves I spent half a day on removing from her lawn) and we celebrated the fact by watching 5 episodes of a program about.. well, the history of the planet. The series was shown Friday and Saturday on Phoenix, but originally it was apparently made by Arte, and the people behind it were Francophones. Unfortunately it was -as is wont in German television - shown with competing original speech and German dubbing. I have never understood why those German TV molesters can't turn down the volume of the original voices if they can't live without a German speaker. In Denmark we are lucky to have subtitles, but most big countries use dubbing. However an antipathy against subtitles can't explain why the alternative should be to let two voices speak at the same time at the same level.

GER: Die fünf Programme unter dem Gesamttitel "Kontinente in bewegung" behandelte Nordamerika, Zentralamerika , Südamerika, Afrika und das künftige Zusammenprall zwischen Afrika und Europa. Ich hätte gern noch dazu ein Programm oder zwei mehr über Asien, Australien und Antarktis gesehen, aber sie waren nicht da. Ich habe natürlich bereits ganz viel über dieses Thema gelesen, aber etliche Details haben mich immerhin erstaunt - wie zum Beispiel das die ganze Karibik vom Westen her zwischen Nord- un Südamerika sich bewegt hat, bevor die Verbindung zwischen Nord- und Südamerika entstand während der Pliozän-Periode. Ich wußte auch schon, das ganz Afrika östlich von einer Linie von Mozambique zu Eritrea sich vom Rest des Kontinents trennen werde, aber ich hätte vorher nicht bemerkt, das eine große Scheibe mit dem Viktoria-See in der Mitte dieser Landmasse folgen würde.

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Re: Iversen's second multiconfused log thread

Postby Iversen » Wed Nov 11, 2015 10:32 pm

IT: In questo momento sto ascoltando il quinto concerto per violino di Niccolò Paganini dopo aver ascoltato numero 1 a 4, oltre diversi pezzi più piccoli per violino solo o per violino più qualcosa di più. Il signor Paganini utilizza doppie fermate con armonici, pizzicati con la mano sinistra e tutte le altre invenzioni diabolistiche create dai virtuosi viaggianti per impressionare il pubblico ottocentista.

EN: Apart from that I have been working on my Greek. I have finished my text sollection about Crete, and then I got the idea to have a go at the article in the Greek Wikipedia about the evzones - the funny men parading outside the Greek parliament (the 'vouli'). And then the Wikipaidia shattered my beliefs by telling me that they aren't actually guarding the parliament, but instead a monument for an unknown soldier. What a letdown! Besides they act as the guard of the president and long ago they also guarded the borders of Greece. Their skirt is said to have 400 folds because the Turks ruled Greece for 400 years - but today most skirts don't stick to those sacrosanct 400 plies. The hat is called a 'fario' (φάριο), and the somewhat excentric footwear (υποδήματα) of the soldiers weich 3 pounds for each shoe, and each shoe contains 50 nails in order to make an impressive 'clang' each time it is hammered against the ground. I have no idea what the pompons are there for, except to amuse the tourists who flock to admire the leg muscles of these atletic mountain boys.

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GR: Η τελευταία κειμένο στην κριτική συλλογή μου είχε η Κνωσó για θέμα, το πιο διάσημο και πιο επισκεπτομένο των μινωικών ανάκτορων. Ανασκάφηκε από τον Evans, ο οποίος ανακατασκευάστηκε κάποιες γωνίες και σχισμές - και επιπλήχθηκε σκληρά από περισσότερες συναδέλφους πιο καθαρολόγους. Αλλά οι τουρίστες είναι ευχαριστημένοι, επειδή μπορούν να δουν πώς ζούσαν οι Μινωίτες. Τα σημάδια της ζωγραφικής μου είναι γνήσιες χαρακτήρες γραμμική Α.

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Re: Iversen's second multiconfused log thread

Postby Iversen » Thu Nov 12, 2015 7:15 pm

In the bus back home from my job today I got through several short articles about early hominids in Catalan, Greek and English. The article in English was intitled "Our Story: Human Ancestor Fossils", and it told about a visit to the Witwatersrand University in Jo'burg, South Africa, where they have got an excellent collection of old bones. These lucky guests were allowed to see and even touch the skull of the original 'Dart's baby', an infant Australopithecine who had been abducted by an eagle several million years ago and dropped among a pile of dead baboons. I have visited the same museum (see the picture below), but didn't ask for permission to fiddle with the exhibits.

The visitors also saw some huge bones of Homo Heidelbergensis, who spread from Africa to Europe about 500.000 years ago. According to this article the special thing about this species was its large size - an average Heidelbergian would be around 7 feet high (i.e. more than 2 meters high on this side of the Atlantic), and it is not surprising that some have seized the opportunity to declare that this might be the real bigfoot. Another article from the Smithsonean quotes much lower heights: "Males: average 5 ft 9 in (175 cm); Females: average 5 ft 2 in (157 cm) ". Both sources can't be right, but it is definitely more fun to think that we once had giants roaming the Earth. The English Wikipedia sticks to the lower size, and so does the Galizian Wikipedia, whose article seems to be a direct translation of the English one. The French and the German articles both mention the large brain, but avoid saying a word about the height, the Greek one says 1,8 meter (for men) and the Indonesian says 2.13 meters. My conclusion is that the species was made of rubber.

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Re: Iversen's second multiconfused log thread

Postby Montmorency » Fri Nov 13, 2015 10:59 pm

Iversen wrote:IT:
EN: Apart from that I have been working on my Greek. I have finished my text sollection about Crete, and then I got the idea to have a go at the article in the Greek Wikipedia about the evzones - the funny men parading outside the Greek parliament (the 'vouli'). And then the Wikipaidia shattered my beliefs by telling me that they aren't actually guarding the parliament, but instead a monument for an unknown soldier. What a letdown! Besides they act as the guard of the president and long ago they also guarded the borders of Greece. Their skirt is said to have 400 folds because the Turks ruled Greece for 400 years - but today most skirts don't stick to those sacrosanct 400 plies.


I don't know if you would have seen it, but on BBC TV there is quite a good series of programmes by Michael Portillo (a half-Spanish former UK politician) called "Great Continental Railway Journeys". He tries to base his journeys (so far as is now possible) on the 1913 Bradshaw railway guide to the continent. Tonight he was in Greece, and we got to see those guards close up. He implied that the skirts they were wearing (which looked like the ones in your photograph) were just their "workaday" ones, and that the ones with (allegedly) 400 folds were kept back for best. I noticed some annoying tourists posing for pictures right up close to one guard, who had to do his best to remain undisturbed at attention. This (or worse) used to happen to the guards at Buckingham palace, and tourists became such a nuisance that they now march up and down inside the railings, instead of outside. It was quite amusing though to see what looked like a sergeant major (in more normal military uniform) going up to each guard and checking that their uniforms were straight, etc. He might have also been wiping their faces down with water: I couldn't quite see.
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Re: Iversen's second multiconfused log thread

Postby Iversen » Sat Nov 14, 2015 5:32 am

I have watched several episodes of Portillo's series (maybe on the Travel Channel, but I'm not sure about that), and I generally like them - especially when he travels to places I also have visited. The old Bradshaw guide is unknown to me, but I have seen old versions of the Baedeker so I guess it is something like it in writing style and amount of information.

The Greek article from Wikipedia mentions a special festive version of the costume, and apperently it is worn on sundays, holidays and at official occasions - but the article doesn't say that it has more folds than the ordinary version. It does however mention a version with knickers, though you are not likely to see that at the Unknown Soldier's monument.
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Re: Iversen's second multiconfused log thread

Postby Iversen » Sat Nov 14, 2015 10:04 am

Yesterday I took a bus through the city center back home from my job. Well, it it was not a good idea, because precisely yesterday the traditional arrival per boat (not reindeer) of Father Christmas was scheduled to happened at precisely the time I passed by the harbour and the railway station, and of course the bus got stuck in the crowds. And let me confess one thing: already now in mid November I am sick and tired of Christmas, and if I had painted Father X being eaten alive by dragons at the stern of a boat in one of my surrealistic paintings I would have shown that to you already now. I was tempted to show my painting of a crucified Father X, but nah - too early and maybe too realistic. Instead you get the inevitable result of letting two heavily armed Father Christmases arrive per reindeer sledge at the same time in one spot. Actually I painted one 'Christmas nausea' painting every year for a long period during the 80s, but you won't see the rest of those until December when Christmas becomes truly ubiquitous and unbearable.

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Among the sundry texts I studied while waiting in the bus-back-home-from-work I would like to mention one article about Alfred Wegener in Icelandic and some articles about planet formation in Portuguese from scienceblogs.com.br. And it would be natural to tell about those now, but instead I would like to write a wee bit about Spanish organ music from the 16. and 17. century. Why? Because I listened to 1½ hour of this colourful 'raw' stuff yesterday, written by immortal world famous composers like Francisco Peraza, Correa de Arrauxo, Heredia, Santa Maria, Bruna, Durón and Cabanilles. But the master of them all was the first of them, the blind organist-composer Antonio de Cabezón, an employee at the Spanish court. I didn't listen to his music yesterday for one simple reason: he is so well represented in my collection that he has got his own tape - and it is filed under C. Right now I'm listening to (and transferring) tapes filed under P - 'P' for 'Peraza' - and I generally follow the alphabetical order.

SP: Estoy a 'P' porque el primer compositor dado con nombre en la banda es Francisco Peraza con un 'tiento', interpretado por Chapelet en el órgano histórico de la iglesia Colegiata de Covarrubias, dicho " magnífico ejemplar del siglo XVII". Hay órganos mas antiguos - quizá el primer fue el órgano idraulico de Ctesibius de Alexandria (se puede ver la reconstrucción de una 'ὕδραυλις' en el Museo de Aquincum de Budapest) , y mas tarde Carlomagno tenía un organo en su palacio en Aquisgrán (Aachen) en Alemania, un regalo del 'rey' de los Otomanos. Los viejos órganos españoles tenían dos particularidades: la 'trompetería', que consistía en una lengüetería horizontal dirigida directamente al publico en las iglesias y capaz de hacer más ruido que cualquier otra cosa de la época, salvo las armas para la guerra (y de hecho varios compositores para el órgano escribieron 'Batallas' para órgano). La otra fue el "solo teclado o manual, partido por la mitad, en lugar de los dos teclados habituales en los órganos europeos." Evidentemente, esto tiene consecuencias para las composiciones para órgano - una parte que excedería el límite entre los dos teclados medios no se podría jugar en los órganos españoles. La música escrita para órgano consistía en parte de tientos, es decir piezas breves con pasajes imitativos y una sensación general de improvisación. Música de órgano español también se distingue por sus duros efectos, y que se me permite ilustrar esto con una cita de la Wikipedia en Inglés sobre el compositor Francisco Correa de Arrauxo (o Araujo):

The Libro de tientos contains 69 works, of which 62 are tientos, ordered by increasing levels of difficulty - an indication that the purpose behind this work was at least partly pedagogical. (...) Correa's harmonic language, while not devoid of tonally suggestive progressions, is quite distinctly modal and represents a continuation of the idiom established by Cabezón and Aguilera de Heredia. The music of Correa is not devoid of innovation. Correa makes use of many devices unique to Spanish organ music of this period: unusual sonorities such as the augmented triad, unusual rhythmic groupings, and a notable dissonance which he vigorously defends, referred to as punto intenso contra remisso: the simultaneous sounding of a note and its chromatic alteration (e.g., C and C#). (...) Correa's organ music was inspired by the unique tonal qualities of Spanish organs, unequal temperament, and such devices as the divided keyboard.

I don't have a good picture of the 'trompetería" from Covarrúbias, but this one from Palencia at the Fundación Francis Chapelet homepage shows with admirable clarity what such a thing was. Image being a God-and-the-Inquisicion-fearing simple Spaniard from 1500 something, long before rock music and large machines, and then suddenly the organist lets hell loose from this contraption at the front of his infernal machine:

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Re: Iversen's second multiconfused log thread

Postby Iversen » Sun Nov 15, 2015 11:16 am

Now we are at the organs, I would like to mention a few things more about organs, namely the names used for their stops (or ranks, as on set of similar pipes often is set in rank and file, from the lowest to the highest). The thing that pushed me do write the following lines was finding the complete disposition of the organ in the Madrid Cathedral in the Spanish Wikipedia, and then I came to think about both the similarities and the differences in the nomenclature for organs from different countries.

And of course I first looked for the disposition of the trompetería of the Madrid organ:

IV Trompetería C-a3 : Trompeta bat. 8', Clarín T 8', Bajoncillo B 4', Trompeta magna 16', Violeta B 2', Orlos 8', Corneta VI, Violón 8', Flauta dulce 4'

OK, let's start with the numbers. An 8' stop plays the notes as they are written. An open pipe playing C two octaves below middle C would be 8 feet long, whence the name. So a 16' stop will sound one octave lower, and a 4' stop one octave higher. The Madrid organ has two 32' stops in the pedal, and they are so low that they can make your guts rumble. 64' stops exist, but are rare, and you have to go to the Boardwalk Hall auditorium organ in New Jersey to experience a 128' stop - and frankly I can't see why you should. Infrasound may be fun for elephants, but it is mostly known to cause nausea in humans.

To complicate matters a closed stop like the Gedackt only needs half the actual length because the air wawe inside bounces back from the top, but this is not reflected in the nomenclature. Sometimes you see fractions, and then the actual sound may be for instance an octave and fifth higher - typically one of overtones of the base tone. Such stops are called aliquot stops, and in the Madrid organ there are several 'nazardos' with weird intervals like a "Nazardo 17a 3/5'" (sounding two octaves and a third above). However such stops are only useful to add overtones to other, stronger stops, and for this purpose they are also offered as Mixture stops with several pipes for each tone.

OK, back to the trompetería madrileña. It is fairly obvious how a trumpet stop should sound, but it is not constructed like a real trumpet. There are two main types of organ stope: flue pipes and reed. The flue pipes are roughly constructed like recorders with a sharp edge to divide the air stream and create a resonance in the pipe, whereas the reeds have a 'tongue', i.e. a reed like that of a clarinet, but made by metal. And reed generally have a shriller, more piercing sound than the reeds, so the trompeta is obviously a reed voice. And the trompeta magna is obviously the same thing, just with pipes twice as long.

The 'Bajoncillo' is named after the small version of a bajón, which is something like an extinct bassoon. And it is one of the instrument names from the renaissance which only have survived as names for organ stops. The 'orlo' was the Spanish version of a Crumhorn (from German Krumhorn), which is J-shaped and has its double reeds enclosed in a box so that the lips of the player doesn't touch them (unlike the oboe). This produces a characteristic snarling or even buzzing sound with few possibilites of variation, which was popular in the renaissance, but due to changing tastes not at all in the following periods - until the instrument was revived in the 20. century for use in old music. Warning: in French organs (and in the names of some French organ pieces) there is a voice called 'cromorne', but that actually refers to a somewhat different kind of construction, closer to the modern oboe - but still with a fairly strident sound. The bombarde was another boxless double reed instrument from the renaissance, which allegledly survived in Brittany - and as an organ stop. The organ in the Madrid cathedral has a Bombarda 16' in its pedal.

The corneta has nothing to do with the cornets in brass bands. Cornetts in the renaissance were a kind of wooden trumpets with fingerholes like the woodwind instruments of the day

The flauto dulce 4' is obvious a delicate little thing with a sweet sound, playing all'ottava (one octave above the written notes) - that's clearly a flute pipe stop. And even sweeter sound emanates from the gemshorn stop (a German name). I have already mentioned the 'gedackt' stops, which all have a characteristic 'hollow' sound. In the - probably fictional - stop list in the English Wikipedia article this is indicated in two ways: there is an "8' Stopped Diapason" (contrasted with an "8′ Open Diapason"), but also a delightfully named "16′ Lieblich Gedeckt" in the pedal. The word "diapason" originally meant the pure octave, and these stops are not meant to stand out from the crowd in any way.

Finally there are a few stops which like the mixtur stops use several pibes per tone, but for a different purpose: by giving one of the pipes a slightly off-tone intonation you can make the sound vibrate at a suitable interval. One typical name for such stops is "Vox humana", but in addition to its "voz humana" the Madrid organ also has a "tremolo" and an "onda marina" which may use the same trick, just with shorter resp. longer intervals.

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Re: Iversen's second multiconfused log thread

Postby Iversen » Thu Nov 19, 2015 9:23 pm

I haven't written anything in this thread for a few days, and the reason is that I decided to add a new tag to my photo and postcard collection: food. In the old days when photos were expensive I mostly photographed impressive landscapes and buildings. With the low prices on photos now I have made more pictures of less 'serious' subjects. And well, my mother suggested that I made a list of my pizza photos, and then I extended the search to all kinds of meals, to fruit stands and fish markets and a lot of other things. That may sound like an innocuous idea, especially when I have them all registered on my computer, but with 35.000 items to check it nevertheless took two full evenings before I was satisfied.

Add to that the time I spend on my music transfer when I decide that the content of the tapes has to be recombined in order to concentrate the works of each composer unto as few units as possible. As when I noticed that I had three pieces by Rimskij-Korsakov on a tape named after the Swedish composer Ture Rangström, and I had a cello concerto by Kabalevskij on a tape with mostly Rimskij-Korsakov. The Kabalevskij concerto would fit very nicely in combination with a 'wavified tape' with other Kabalevskij works ... OK you get the idea. It takes time both to plan and to execute such schemes, and that time goes from my language studies.

I didn't have a painting of a pizza, so to illustrate the food theme I have chosen a painting called something like "the antitantalian apokalypse". The four horsemen in the back are straight out of the Revelations of st.John, and the person drowning in food is definitely NOT the Greek legendary figure Tantalos.

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Today I was in principle ready to study again after the food photo campaign, but ran then into trouble with one of the tapes I am transferring to Wav files: the thing plastic band had broken loose from the central plastic wheel, and to boot this particular tape was a cheap one which had been glued together and not put together with screws. So I had to open (and sacrifice) an old unimportant tape to give the culprit a new home. And after that I ran into a tape where short bits of sound were weak in the left channel. Luckily I can repair such things in Audacity, but it all takes time. In spite of such mishaps I have done some Polish wordlists based on bilingual texts from last week plus one page with new words from my big fat Pons German <->Polish, which is the only one among my Polish dictionaries that quotes verbs as imperfective and perfective pairs. I took the words from the section with przy- because those long, almost identical words are hard to learn one by one. The point is of course to learn to look at the root in the middle rather than the prefix or the various endings.

For instance I have the following verbs on my list: przeżywać / przyżać (survive), prztykać / prztyknać (snap your fingers (palcami)), przybijać / przybić (hit, strike down, nail), przybierać / przybrać (take (on), decorate) ... Normally it isn't a good idea to learn a lot of similar things (like twenty berries or the names of all European sparrows in one session), but sometimes you have to do the opposite: look at a lot of almost identical things to observe the small differences and find suitable memory tricks to remember them. And thus today became przy-day.

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