User talk:Ro Thorpe/Archive 2

Tasks: start a new article • add basic, wanted or requested articles • add definitions • add metadata • edit new pages

Welcome to the Citizendium! We hope you will contribute boldly and well. Here are pointers for a quick start, and see Getting Started for other helpful "startup" links, our help system and CZ:Home for the top menu of community pages. You can test out editing in the sandbox if you'd like. If you need help to get going, the forum is one option. That's also where we discuss policy and proposals. You can ask any user or the editors for help, too. Just put a note on their "talk" page. Again, welcome and have fun! Aleksander Stos 01:38, 5 October 2007 (CDT)

Re: thanks et al.

Since you tried I'll give you an approximation: it's something like un-j (accent on "un") -- but please keep it strictly confidential, I don't want my test to be too easy ;-) Aleksander Stos 11:39, 5 October 2007 (CDT) PS. I enjoy some differences too (on occasions I still edit enwiki/frwiki).

1. Just like this :)

2. Your infobox is pretty cool. I deleted something a few months ago as there was no working template, I guess. (I put the wikitext on the talk for possible future re-use.) It was famous Big Cleanup operation, we suppressed many unsupported links. Cheers, Aleksander Stos 03:03, 6 October 2007 (CDT)

User:Robert

Your link from Wikipedia doesn't work properly because you forgot to replace the space between your names with an underscore. It should be [http://en.citizendium.org/wiki/User:Robert_Thorpe] but you have [http://en.citizendium.org/wiki/User:Robert Thorpe] so the software thinks that you're just naming the link to "Thorpe". I almost just changed it there but I figured an anonymous IP channging your userpage would be a little suspicious. :-) --Joe Quick (Talk) 15:42, 9 October 2007 (CDT)

Re:Plural

I hope I haven't made the wrong impression--just that it's a benefit of the project to create its own article rather than to be a fork of WP. I'm not implying that there is any kind of ownership here, we encourage everyone to contribute. You're entirely welcome to develop the article as you see fit as well; I personally have a preference of not using material from WP. --Robert W King 18:18, 12 October 2007 (CDT)

Hey

Thanks for the greeting! I removed the comment, but what's happening again? I'm confused, sorry. Also thanks for revising the Jefferson Airplane article, it's one of 60s greatest bands. Yi Zhe Wu 14:22, 14 October 2007 (CDT)

Abba

Hi Robert, thanks for your note re ABBA-- will dig a bit and look into it. Feel free to edit accordingly if you have not done so. You can always leave a note on the article talk page too (later - just noticed you already did) if you think someone else might see things differently of course. Sorry for my long absence on CZ - work, work, etc, etc... Your note perhaps makes some sense given the ubiquitous extent to which ABBA / Abba was around in pop culture back then (I grew up in Australia where it was unbelievable to witness).

I guess the best approach might be to follow the most generally accepted approach in media that is out there from the time, and now too. If now is different to then I suppose we should go with what is most 'done' in reporting now as opposed to then. The whole topic makes me think back to those very different times quite nostalgically. Anyway, as with all at The Citizendium, 'rewrite away'. My editor expertise derives from the area of gay marketing not from music, so the points you made about name vs acronym could well hold sway. --Ian Johnson 09:51, 22 October 2007 (CDT)

Just checked the official site and they seem to go with ABBA rather than Abba, so I guess the all caps version is the current best option. Was good to revisit that site in any case. --Ian Johnson 10:03, 22 October 2007 (CDT)

Spelling pronunciation

Personally, I *hate* those international symbols since they're incomprehensible to me and look, I think, awful. On the other hand, they are, I suppose, useful to those who can understand them. In Wikipedia, for instance, we have this:

• Isaac Asimov (January 2?, 1920? – April 6, 1992), IPA: /ˈaɪzək ˈæzɪˌmɑv/, originally Исаак Озимов but now transcribed into Russian as Айзек Азимов [1]) was a Russian-born American author and

It looks awful to me but is, I guess, helpful. So I suppose that you should probably go ahead and add your stuff wherever you think it will be helpful. But telling people how to correctly pronounce salmon, often, February, and library is a fool's errand, hehe.... Hayford Peirce 13:32, 25 October 2007 (CDT)

I'm for anything that's helpful and not disruptive. Check out Wikipedia for Ken Rosewall and the various links to World No. 1 players etc. -- there were/are a couple of Europeans who have added 10 gazillion words about Muscles and his various records. I think a lot of their stuff is Original Research and heavily biased and I argued with them for a while but finally simply gave up and moved over to CZ. I saw him several times in the late 50s and early 60s, playing Gorgo, Rocket, etc. A great little player, and particularly so because of his long, long career. But nowhere near as good as Gorgo. Or Sedge or Segura, I would say. But certainly a great gentleman, even if he had "short arms and deep pockets," hehe, like most of the Aussies.... Hayford Peirce 14:10, 25 October 2007 (CDT)

I'm glad you got to see Gorgo -- he was terrific. I used to try to hit a two-handed forehand after watching Segoo but was baffled: I couldn't get the coordination right, so it was always softer than when I hit it one-handed. Check out my Pancho Segura article: hopefully it will give you a good idea of what this guy was about. Kramer says Rosewall was *maybe* better, but he doesn't sound very convinced about it. I'll take a look at the WP article -- it really needed cleaning up after Carlo C. and "German Friend" (I think) put in all their well-meaning but over-heated research. Maybe someday we could port it over to CZ and clean it up, which is what I've done with the Pancho Gonzales and Bill Tilden articles. Of course, I had written 95% of them at WP, so it was easier to do. On the other hand, they had gotten somewhat mangled by so-called WP "editors". My (great-looking) "Siamese" is actually a mix of Siamese and something else -- in person she looks almost 100% like a pure-bred Tonkinese, a fairly new official classification. Tonks are like Siamese generally but a little heavier in structure. Hayford Peirce 15:39, 25 October 2007 (CDT)

Little Pancho and Big Bill

Thanks for the heads up on the "Open era of tennis" -- I had missed that, and have just added "the" to the article. And, yes, it was absolutely his forehand. You've never seen anyone hit a better one. There were a couple of Aussies in the '30s, Bromwich and McGrath, who had two-handed backhands, but I don't know of anyone even remotely famous who had a two-handed forehand before Segoo. And no one else has ever had one to equal it since then. Maybe I should put some more quotes from Kramer into the Segoo article. Also, I read somewhere recently that Segoo himself now says that he should have tried using a two-handed backhand also but that, for some reason, he had never considered doing so at the time. As far as I can recall from the matches in which I saw him play, he *always* used both hands for his forehand -- he was so *fast* that he could get to anything. He played a serve and volley game, came in behind his serve, and generally hit his low volleys and half-volleys with one hand, though. I can't remember if he used one or both hands when hitting the higher volleys, however. As Kramer says in the article, he was the most fun player to watch of all time.

The Wikipedia pictures of the Tonks seem a little effete to me: I've seen other pictures in which they are more robust than that, and with deeper colors. But the breed *does* have wide variation in colors....

My old tennis coach, a tough old Irishman from San Francisco who was most definitely *not* gay, used to joke about Tilden being "the best mixed singles player of all time." In fact, check out my Ray Casey article in CZ. Also the WP article, which has a terrific cartoon from a 1925 London newspaper -- it still isn't in the CZ article because of copyright status. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ray_Casey Casey once had Tilden up one set in the only match they ever played but Big Bill pulled it out in the end.... Hayford Peirce 17:48, 26 October 2007 (CDT)

Cats

Yes, there are Tonkinese, Burmese (my sister had two for many years), and Birman, which is a *very* recent breed that I had never heard of until a couple of months ago: my dental hygenist has two of them. Hayford Peirce 17:52, 26 October 2007 (CDT)

Particularly since the French word for Burma is Birmanie.Hayford Peirce 17:53, 26 October 2007 (CDT)

Various stuff

Yes, Segoo had a 2-handed forehand & a 1-handed backhand. Go here for the pic that I want to put into various articles: http://www.autographedtoyou.com/celebpics/pancho_segura5.jpg I will add some more Kramer quotes. When I lived in London in 1968 I rented a telly just to watch Wimbledon. Kramer did the commentary on one channel, and Fred Perry, a guy Kramer detested, did it on the other. Check out the Perry article for some of Kramer's opinions. Kramer talked about "Poncho", the way it's pronounced in the States, and Perry and the other Brits talked about "Pan- (like a frying pan) Cho".

I will look at the WP Muscles article later today and get back to you.

Yes, Tucson is Mountain Standard Time, BUT without observing Daylight Savings Time. So right now there's two hours difference with CDT, but when the winter hours return, there will only be 1 hour difference. It's maddening. I'll have to look at your World Alphabetical Time for the arithmetically challenged. I have a couple of daughters in Tahiti, 1 in Australia, friends in Europe, and for 4 years a girlfriend who was from American Samoa, just across the dateline. More intellectual madness.

Who *is* the mysterious & departed Duncharris that you say I edited out? I don't catch the reference.

Science fiction as done by Evelyn Waugh, sounds good -- if only I could! The ending of A Handful of Dust, that’s rather sci-fi -- and pretty chilling.

Ray Casey – nice article, had never heard of him. No one else has either, except me.

In American schools and colleges, beginning at least with High School, maybe earler, an athlete who is on the Varsity team in any given sport is given a so-called Letter, which is actually (or it used to be) a physical cloth letter in the shape of B, for, let's say, the team's name, the Badgers, or maybe A, for Arizona, I dunno which. This letter could then be sewn onto the athlete's sweater for him to walk about in around campus. In a four-year high school or college, generally divided into 3 terms, a 9-letter man would be a tremendous athlete, one who had been on, say, the fall football team, the winter basketball team, and the spring baseball team for all three years -- the freshman, or first year, sometimes allowed athletes on the varsity teams, sometimes not. A 12-letter man would therefore be a *really* stupendous athlete, one who either had been on varsity teams as a freshman also, or who had managed to get letters in two sports simulataneously for at least three terms. Ray Casey, I believe, got letters in Rugby (the real thing, not American Football), tennis, basketball, and baseball. So he was a fine athlete. I could swot up the Letter situtation, I suppose, and write an article about it, but the tedium of doing so would be overpowering.

Presumably ‘Birman’ is pronounced like ‘Burman’? - You know, now that you're made me stop and think about it, I'm no longer sure. I *think* so: if we said "beer-man" that would be sorta Frenchy. So Burman is almost certainly correct. Hayford Peirce 16:28, 27 October 2007 (CDT)

WP Rosewall article

I see that Carlo has made some revisions to *your* last edits. One of the first lines now reads "He had a renowned backhand who enjoyed an exceptionally long career at the very highest levels from the early 1950s to the early 1970s". Hehe. That's an *extremely* long article with a ton of info. What would be your intentions regarding this article should we bring it in? A complete rewrite, ie, into English English? A rewrite plus enormous condensation and editing? Or should we leave in all of the (fantastic) research that Carlo and the other Little Master fans have conducted? A shame to discard it, I suppose. Another, more minor point, do we do it in British English or 'Merkin English? Or do we compromise with 'Strine English, as befits its subject? Hayford Peirce 16:41, 27 October 2007 (CDT)

Poncho Segoo

I have a gut hatred of Brits using American words (eg, truck for lorry - as on BBC World all the time) but that’s just my age. I would feel the same way about 'Merkins using Brit-talk on NBC, say. And I don't think age has anything to do with it.

Very soon, all usage is going to be acceptable all over (or, er, forgotten) Well, acceptable, yes, but I guess what I meant was "standardized". For instance, in the Rosewall article do we use double quotes (" ") for quotations or single (' ') etc. etc. "Center line" vs. "centre line"? Etc. etc. Just so we don't squabble over this later. in the fall of 1969… and autumn 1972 I use both, interchangeably. Is one Brit and the other 'Merkin? No need for too much of a rewrite, condense it a bit of course, but some people will love all that detail, and fix it away from Carlo, Oh, okay.

That reminds me, have you come across Veropedia? I've read the discussion about it in one of the Forum sections -- it seems to be some people at WP trying to cover their ass, er, arse. From what I've read, it seems to be a pretty negligeable product.

you removed a large amount of stuff about your books & stories. I wonder why. I just checked on this, and you have it 100% backwards -- he removed a lot of the stuff that I had originally put in. Since I was a newbie to WP at the time, I didn't protest.

I remember the first Open Wimbledon: professionals like Gimeno were seeded high & there was a lot of excitement when they were knocked out, at least from Dan Maskell (oh, how shocking) who was Kramer’s sidekick on the BBC. I well remember, and I was shocked also. There was a photo of Gimeno lying on the grass in The Times with a caption: "Gimeno Can't Take Any Moore" -- it was (Ray?) Moore who had ousted him.

I don’t recall Perry or the ITV coverage at all. I only watched them v. briefly. Like all (?) Brit commentators, they didn't *say* anything. Maybe two words per game. "Game's over, Hoad served four aces." Long silence. "My, a nice game, Laver won all four points." "Yus."

our ‘fast’ presumably sounding to you like ‘fost’; or fóst Yes. After a number of months in London I used to joke that I could, if I wanted to, learn to talk Brit English. But that I would never be able to bring myself to say "Shoffsbry Ahvenue", hehe.

I can’t get my head round how there will only be 1 hour’s difference between CDT & MST instead of 2. I’ll be putting the clock back tonight and presumably so will you. Nope, not me. Us'uns in Arizona never touch the damn thing -- we stay the same all year wrong. Right now we're the same time as California. Tomorrow we'll be one hour ahead.

With WAT it’s the same time all the time everywhere. Except maybe on Ceres. I think that my "Stockbroker in Orbit" stories take place on (in the interior of) Ceres....

Thanks for explaining about those four-letters; I really hadn’t come across that before. They've been around practically forever, at least most of the 20th century, I think.... Hayford Peirce 10:33, 28 October 2007 (CDT)

The Mysterious Affair at Hayford Peirce

Yes, I could well have done that. In any case, I was coming under fire at some point for having created the article in the first place, and I may have been trying to cut it down to a shorter, more business-like style. At the time, I didn't have any idea about how much info to include. At one point the article was up for deletion but was retained because it really was pretty objectively written.

I’ve put some links in the article. So your name must now go on my user page, between Edward Albee & Immanuel Kant. I don't see them, only Ivy and Marcel.

Let me know when you think it’s ready to import here. Geez, I hadn't realized that I had written so much at WP! And pretty good stuff too, hehe. I think it's really a pretty dispassionate article. If you feel like taking the trouble, yes, I would say that it's ready to bring in. I don't think I was going to do much more to the WP article, maybe another paragraph or two. I'll think about that....

I must ask my mother to see if she can find any of your novels. What’s your favourite? It's like asking a mother about her favorite child, hehe. "Flickerman" is pretty serious, about the only one I ever wrote, lotsa weird sex and violence in Polynesia. "The Burr in the Garden of Eden" is about the most *fun* book -- I just *love* the epigraphs that begin each chapter. (It's a sequel to "Napoleon", but reads entirely separately.) "Phylum Monsters" is seriously zany. If you like Jack Vance, "Dinosaur Park" is worth looking at. "The Spark of Life" is a terrific late 1940s-1950s sort of S.F. -- I would have been a big success if I had started writing 30 years earlier, sigh. "Blood on the Hibiscus" is a pretty decent hard-boiled thriller set in Tahiti, with lotsa twists. "The Gauguin Murders" isn't as accomplished a book, but it gives a nice picture of some aspects of life in Tahiti circa 1965 or so. All 18 books can be found at Amazon, here, with synopses by me, also, I believe, available cheap, used copies: http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/listmania/list-browse/-/24T8V2KW0SB5T/qid%3D994444296/sr%3D5-3/ref%3Dlm%5Fb%5F1/104-4034002-4119945

As for KRR, it seems to be double quotes, I specified AE in the port-over, since I'm the one who started it, hehe. Maybe we could find an Aussie editor to do the rest and change it all to 'Strine.

Brits (still) don’t say ‘fall’ for autumn. I'll be darned, I didn't know that. In the States I would say that they are 100% interchangeable.

I like CZ because I can make it all up. Me too, although I feel a little guilty about it sometimes, after years of WP "citation" baloney.

Portuguese commentators talk all the time, usually about past and possible future opponents. Surely the American ones don’t do that? American ones are *terrible* -- they babble meaninglessly all the time. I *never* watch *any* sporting event (rare enough that I do in any event) with the sound on. Sound off, New York Times in hand, that's my viewing mode.

Jack Kramer was a very measured commentator, but presumably he feared being court-martial(l)ed by Maskell. Yes, that's quite possible. But he was very chatty compared to Fred Perry et al.

Very wise policy of Arizona: half past six here & already dark. They tried it here once in the '60s for about 1 year. In Phoenix and Tucson, the two major cities, it would be light at 9:30 at night, the temp would be 109 in Phoenix and 106 in Tucson and people would be waiting in their cars for darkness so that they could watch the drive-in movies. It was repealed the next year.... Hayford Peirce 16:01, 28 October 2007 (CDT)

A Perfect Day for Bananafish

Ah, I see now that you put my name between those two really heavy hitters on your *WP* page. I was forced to read Perfect Day a couple of times in 1958-59, 60, when I was taking writing courses and asking myself what the *hell* New Yorker stories could possibly mean, why anyone would want to write one, and, even more, why anyone would possibly want to *read* one. Now, almost 50 years later, I'm glad to finally learn what the damn story is actually about. I still wouldn't bother to read it again, but at least I now why *other* people are apparently so taken by Salinger. I guess. I did learn at the time that the reason we were *supposed* to read this stuff and to be blown away by it was the "revelation of character." To which, I guess, I always said, and still say, "I say it's spinach, and I say the hell with it." I'd still rather read any 1950s story by a Brit named Eric Frank Russell.... They had a beginning, a middle, and an end, and I could actually understand each separate sequence. And I knew why he wrote the story: to put a couple of quid in his pocket....

By the way, there's a key sentence in the WP article about Bananafish that seems to be repeated twice, word for word. Probably done by some typical WP "editor".... Hayford Peirce 18:16, 28 October 2007 (CDT)

Ro Thorpe

Hi Robert, as a user page, this won't work. "Ro Thorpe" isn't actually recognized in the system as a user page. So if someone wants to e-mail you via the system, they'd have to know to click on the tiny User:Robert Thorpe link at the top of the page. We could create a new User:Ro Thorpe account for you, and block User:Robert Thorpe... --Larry Sanger 10:26, 29 October 2007 (CDT)

Various stuff

Read Vonnegut in my 20s & loved it, & Heinlein some time after, quite interesting, but a poor style, I seem to recall. Compared to Vonnegut, yes, of course. But he wrote straightforward, competent stuff, some of it fairly lively, particularly when in first-person mode. Also, we have to remember the context of when he appeared like a bomb burst in 1940. As someone wrote the other day, "Heinlein was like an adult who suddenly walked into a room of unruly children." Within a couple of years everyone in the field except a few such as Vonnegut, Sturgeon, Vance, were trying to emulate his style, tone, attitude, and, of course, success. A remarkable career, although one that doesn't resonate much in GB apparently.

As for Amazon, I’ve never used it, so I’ll talk to Eva. I dunno about overseas, but it sure works well in the USA. The few books I buy I generally get from them, ditto music CDs, and even my brandnew Canon S3 SI camera. (Contrary to what you might think from my page, I haven’t read a book in years I myself read very very few, mostly the occasional biography or non-fiction. Once in a great while some fiction that I'm rereading for the nth time.

By the way, on Americanisms: age does have something to do with it, because it’s the young who regard the Americanisms as cool Oh, I hadn't thought of it that way. Yes, cool appears to have made a reappearance, although it never went entirely away, unlike 99.99% of most slang.

I discovered your nice list of famous players, and adjusted a near-namesake of yours, la Pierce française. Yes, I saw a lot of new info and links. I may fill in a couple more older players, but aside from that I'm pretty much finished with it.

On your bio, the external link doesn’t work, so it must be a different system in CZ. Yeah, for some reason the port over from WP inserted a couple of squiggly {{ brackets, I dunno why. When you get rid of those it works. I also added some real [[ brackets to make it look better. In any case, thanks for bringing that other stuff in.

So American commentators are as bad as the Ports, how shocking. Offhand, I would think they would be 1000% worse, particularly since they can be heard here on 60 gazillion channels. After breaking up with my latest GF, who had about 500 channels working, I switched back to much cheaper "basic" mode -- now I only have 15 or so, but it only costs $15 per month via cable.

How do you manage to watch the tennis & read the NYT at the same time? I've got a TV mounted on a swivel arm up on the wall of my bedroom, so I can lie in bed, drink in hand (or at least on a tray), the Times on my chest, and by raising my eyes over the top of the paper, see the screen whenever I'm so inclined. Since most sports except soccer and basketball consist mostly of pauses occasionally interrupted by a few seconds of action, I find that I don't miss much. In any case, I could live happily the rest of my life with no TV....

That's funny about the drive-in movies in sweltering Arizona... I guess it couldn't have been any hotter in the cars than it was in the non-A/Ced houses of those days.

I’ve begun work on the body, but there’s only so much one can take at any given time... That's for sure! Terminal tedium sets in very quickly! I hope that "obsessive" isn't too uncharitable a word to apply to le brave Carlo. Geez!

By the way, how do you pronounce 'Ceres'? Not very often, hehe. Actually, the few times I've ever said it aloud, as opposed to merely writing it, I think I've always said "Seer-Reeze". I *think* that's more or less how I've heard a couple of much more knowledgeable S.F. types pronounce it, but I could be wrong. Do they say "See-Reeze"? Why not just change the name to Kellogg's? Hayford Peirce 13:06, 29 October 2007 (CDT)

Good to see you back!

Let's not go through that again ;-) At least you know nobody else can get your account! --Matt Innis (Talk) 20:13, 31 October 2007 (CDT)

Ditto! I think Little Pancho was somewhat darker than Big Pancho, but certainly not in mood. He was light and festive. As the excellent Sports Illustrated article about Big Pancho starts out: "Las Vegas and Pancho Gonzales were a perfect match for each other: both were big, dangerous, and mean." Or some such. I've got two more suspects to add to the Famous tennis players tables, the Brit Bunny Austin being one, and then I'll return to Muscles. I see that you have really weeded out the Muscles and all except one Little Master, which I got. At some point, I will *add* a sentence or so explicating "Little Master", however, as a sometime nickname. I'm sure no one on the tour ever called him that. Hayford Peirce 20:21, 31 October 2007 (CDT)

leitão assado

Why don't you do an article about this when you have a moment? As written up in today's NYT it sounds delicious! (Except maybe for the red bell peppers, but I suppose they're necessary, sigh.) I'm gonna try it.

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/31/dining/31pari.html?_r=1&oref=slogin

I guess the recipe is here:

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/31/dining/311prex.html?ref=dining

And we can serve it with any left-over Macons that you might have brought with you -- lucky you! How many years did you spend there, drinking those wonderful wines? Hayford Peirce 21:54, 31 October 2007 (CDT)