Finally approaching the end of Season 3 of Supergirl.

[conuly]

Watching with Jenn, so I haven't seen the season finale yet. I keep screaming "STOP BEING SUCH A FASCIST!" at the screen, though, at Kara.

Anyway, since Jenn's out I decided to watch something else, and I must say Netflix's algorithm works pretty well on a lot less data than Amazon's algorithm does (seriously why do you keep recommending books I have no interest in, Amazon?) and I'm watching this historical medical drama set in Germany. Filmed in Germany too, they all speak German. I cringe every time one of those doctors touches somebody with his bare hands. I have two burning questions though.

First, just now the new Empress misquoted Shakespeare and attributed it to Goethe ("more things on heaven and earth") and obviously the point of the quote is to show she's not have as erudite as she'd like to believe, but is it a Shakespeare quote in German or just in the subtitles? It wouldn't do me very much good if it was some other well known German writer, but maybe the intended audience would do better?

Secondly, same episode the particularly dour and humorless matron wants all her staff to scrub the walls with bread and why bread? Is that like how you can use stale bread to erase pencil from paper?

I'm taking a break from TV for a few because this couple outside is having a long, protracted, and i will say very boring fight about how he took her phone and/or her headphones and she wants at least one of those back and he's insisting he didn't and would like her to go away. Instead of watching TV I'm focusing on the thorny question of "Is this fight about to get violent, and if so, would calling the police improve matters?"

I think they've calmed down now, though, which means that not calling anybody was probably the right move.

******

Bee friendly companies are getting the science completely wrong

Diversifying Crops Is Good For The Planet. But Can It Be Good For Farmers' Wallets?

Good: Superhero whose secret identity is just staggeringly obvious, and everybody “knows”, but in spite of countless people’s best efforts nobody can actually prove it.

India’s Diverging Paths in Kashmir

US judge blocks Trump's health insurance rule for immigrants

Donald Trump isn't most dangerous when backed into a corner.

"Walmart feels like home now" for these fire evacuees (Photos)

It’s Getting Riskier to Walk and Bike After Dark

Are We Flushing Our Resistance to Antibiotics Down the Drain?

The Student Vote Is Surging. So Are Efforts to Suppress It.

Under digital surveillance: how American schools spy on millions of kids

How Facebook Bought a Police Force

Border Agents Can Now Get Classified Intelligence Information. Experts Call That Dangerous.

After ICE Came to Morton, Mississippi

The Amount of Money Being Made Ripping Migrant Families Apart Is Staggering

As Trump tackles vapes, African Americans feel stung by inaction on menthol cigarettes

The patient lasted just minutes after being taken off life support. By then it was too late.

Boot camps for troubled teens are flourishing despite their terrible reputation.

Illegal loggers kill Amazon indigenous warrior who guarded forest, wound another

The Cost of Trump’s Aid Freeze in the Trenches of Ukraine’s War

After the Last Cop Killed Himself, All the Criminals Have to Do Is Hide

Comments

[dark_phoenix54]

Using bread to clean stuff, including wallpaper, really was a thing. People may actually still do that, what with the trend towards using less toxic shit to clean stuff.

[okojosan]

I vaguely recall Laura Ingalls Wilder writing about cleaning walls with some sort of dough. But in the show you watched, it's actual baked bread?

I guess cleaning walls with bread dough is a restoration thing...

[movingfinger]

What's the show and episode?

[conuly]

Charite, and I think it's episode 2 of the first season.

[movingfinger]

She's an idiot, and her smugly misattributed quote is to cement her as a potentially harmful ignoramus after her previous speeches. Goethe is associated with Shakespeare in Germany (still) and someone who has actually read neither might well make such a mistake. Does that help?

PS I'm enjoying it, thanks for the pointer

PPS Weird that they don't limewash the walls. I thought that was a Europe-wide sanitary thing that was done in dairies and so forth? Huh. Of course we are seeing the pwersistence of some other primitive practices. Like breading the walls.

[conuly]

Yeah, I knew why she made such an obvious misattribution, story-wise. I just wanted to know if making it Shakespeare was a translation convention for us non-German speakers :)

Season two apparently is set at the tail end of WWII and I've decided to read reviews before venturing there.

[movingfinger]

No, every educated German at that time would know that quote was Shakespeare, from Hamlet. Shakespeare was very popular in Germany!

I wish they'd done a sequel season to this one rather than WWII. This period is much less well-known, at least in the US.

[ioplokon]

Honestly, even though the point is to show she's not particularly erudite, it seems like an understandable mistake, and is probably the Shakespeare quote in German as well. Goethe was a HUGE admirer of Shakespeare, and it shows in his style. It's even possible the quote is Goethe's German translation of it or a riff on Shakespeare's text. He translated a lot of English poetry and drama in his works (eg: his translation of Ossian at the end of Werther). I think it's totally plausible she could have gotten the source mixed up between them!

[movingfinger]

She's quoting Schlegel's translation.

[ioplokon]

Haha, oh no! Thank you for identifying it. I think it's still an understandable mistake for her to confuse Goethe & Shakespeare (as in, you can see how she got from A to B), but definitely an embarrassing one!

I wish association between Goethe and Shakespeare was as strong in English... I'm now thinking it would be kind of funny to write a story where someone cites Shakespeare's study on coal!

[conuly]

Thanks. I don't know nearly enough about Goethe to know that!

[spikethemuffin]

I do recall being shocked to see the "Sonnet 134," which I had loved in high school and was attributed to Sir Thomas Wyatt, up on my R.A.'s wall in college and signed "Petrarch." Likewise, most people think they are quoting Yeats and not Ronsard when they snark from or sigh at "When You Are Old and Gray and Full of Sleep."

[ioplokon]

Oh no!! I can see going 'Petrarchan sonnet = by Petrarch', I guess.

My worst one is carelessly attributing Robinson Crusoe to Willem Dafoe. And that's why we proofread.

[spikethemuffin]

Ha!

Although I guess I phrased that poorly. I meant, I didn't realize that the sonnet in question was Wyatt's (rather brilliant) translation of a sonnet by Petrarch, because it didn't occur to me to question my high school textbook's attribution, not that the sonnet was actually misattributed to Petrarch.

[ioplokon]

Ah - that's actually kind of awesome. Lbr, translators get nowhere near the credit (nor the pay) they deserve.

The other quote I love but cannot remember the attribution of (which is, in fact, part and parcel of why I love it) was some Victorian or other who complained that there was no point in saying anything witty because everyone would just assume Oscar Wilde said it.

[spikethemuffin]

That is a WONDERFUL sort-od quote. And I actually kind of want it to be attributed to Oscar Wilde himself.