The Hersch

I don't know a whole lot about this subject, but I do know that the Yiddish spoken by Russian Jews, while incorporating some Russian vocabulary, descended from Middle High German. It was almost always written using Hebrew orthography, so Cyrillic probably isn't relevant. In German (and I imagine in Yiddish too), "Berg" means mountain and "Burg" means fortress. One element or the other is found in a lot of German place-names.

This doesn't help you know whether someone's surname ends in -berg or -burg, to be sure. I imagine most of them got their spelling at Ellis Island as you suggest, and also that virtually all the "Greenburgs" should have been "Greenbergs"

19 hours ago, DonRocks said:

In Computer Science, the two primary bases are binary and hexadecimal (base 16), and that's because there's 8 bits to a byte, and it takes two bytes to represent a character in systems such as EBCDIC and ASCII (okay, maybe I'm not helping much).

Sorry, this is incorrect. It takes one eight-bit byte to represent one character in EBCDIC. In the original ASCII standard, one character could be expressed in seven bits. These encoding standards share the obvious drawback of a severe limit in the number of characters that can be expressed (255 in EBCDIC and 127 in ASCII, if I remember correctly, not having time at the moment to do the arithmetic). Unicode and its extensions dramatically increase the number of characters that can be expressed by using double bytes or more.

Base 2?

You may not be aware how fraught this subject is to Latin Americans, many of whom insist that North, Central, and South America are a single continent, and that Mexico is in the "central" part.

Dylan's "great" period comprises the four albums "Another Side of Bob Dylan", "Bringing It All Back Home", "Highway 61 Revisited", and "Blonde on Blonde", remarkably all released within the brief span of 1964 to 1966. "Another Side" probably best epitomizes Dylan as lyric poet. Start there.

Leon Russell was among the most extravagantly gifted and gracious figures in American popular music. Here he is in 2011, talking about the genesis of the two songs ("Watching the River Flow" and "When I Paint My Masterpiece") that he and Bob Dylan famously collaborated on:

And inspired historian, always relevant:

But Palamabron called down a Great Solemn Assembly,
That he who will not defend Truth, may be compelled to
Defend a Lie, that he may be snared & caught & taken.

Surely there's a way to work sous-vide into this.

11 minutes ago, DonRocks said:

I'm glad you mentioned this. Rotten Tomatoes led me to Sunset Boulevard, and I was thinking of watching it - would it be a complete waste of time?

No, not at all. I don't think it's a great film, but it's very good and remarkably entertaining. Many consider it great.

29 minutes ago, DonRocks said:

It makes sense, but did you just make this up?

I believe I did.

Expository aside?

They may not participate in this forum, but some people now living (quite a lot, I'd guess) will be living when the non-leap year 2100 rolls around.

This has long been one of my favorite movies, and I've probably watched it at least ten times. That it derives in large part from Sunset Boulevard, with which it shares the terrain of High Camp, should be obvious, but that in no way diminishes it as a work of film art. Baby Jane is a great film; Sunset Boulevard is not, despite its larger reputation. I've always loved Bette Davis, and rather disliked Joan Crawford, so this film (the only one they made together) may have a special resonance for me.

Dazzling fun facts: What Ever Happened to Baby Jane has been remade twice. In a made-for-TV movie in 1991 under the same title, with Vanessa and Lynn Redgrave in the roles of Blanche and Jane, respectively. And as a feature film called Baby Jane? in 2010, with the principal characters played by female impersonators in drag. I've never seen either of them, but it seems to me that camping up the already campy is a dicey undertaking. IMDb also shows a Baby Jane in development for 2017 but with no indication of a connection with any of the earlier films or of the 1960 novel.

ETA: If you're an Amazon Prime subscriber, you can stream the drag Baby Jane movie at no charge.

It seems to me that if, instead of walking into quicksand, you were to fall headlong into it, you'd be lucky to survive.

On 9/14/2016 at 10:33 AM, DonRocks said:

BTW, I'm not sure what you consider to be a song (you did say "since the world began"), but I would put Telemann ahead of anyone, and not by a little. You can take *just* his cantatas (which are absolutely songs), and they'd be double the total output of Dylan.

It's interesting that you've moved this thread from music to literature, while having written that Telemann's contribution to song literature trumps Dylan's. How many of Telemann's vocal works have texts written by the composer? Telemann was a composer, not a song-writer. Irving Berlin wrote songs; George Gershwin composed. Dylan writes songs, many of which I think will live for a thousand years.

It's really hard for me to understand how Michelin ratings of Washington restaurants are so much more interesting than Bob Dylan getting the Nobel Prize.

Just now, Gadarene said:

Fair point.  It may not be a dispositive factor, but it's certainly a factor.  Absent the height restrictions, how different do you think the downtown dining scene would look?  I'm guessing pretty different.

Yes, I suppose it would be like that vibrant dining scene in Rosslyn, where all the tall buildings are. After all, Parisians all flock to La Défense at dinner time, don't they?

6 hours ago, Gadarene said:

 and lack of population density

Just for the record, many if not most of the other cities you mention have population densities lower, and in many cases far lower, than Washington. Houston's density is only about 1/3 that of Washington. Charleston's and Melbourne's are only about 1/10.

About time. 

To Neville Marriner, RIP.

10 hours ago, DonRocks said:

Maybe you're right, but for something that doesn't work, it sure has been practiced a lot by humanity over the centuries.

And most often, as far as I can tell, to obtain confessions, for which it "works".

28 minutes ago, DonRocks said:

Understood, but everything in the world is as it is.

Something tells me the NYC bomber hasn't been staying in the Ritz-Carlton. 

Leaving aside the legal and moral aspects (which are of overwhelming force), by most accounts torture is reliably useful for one thing only: obtaining confessions, whether true or false.

Do we make it absolutely illegal to torture people?

We've already done that, in international and U.S. law. The laws allow for no exceptions, ever.

On 9/15/2016 at 0:53 PM, DonRocks said:

It's really not all that different from the national debt (we can take care of it now, or let it take care of itself later).

Can you tell us what actual doom awaits us because of the national debt? What specific harm will be done by it and how? Can you provide historical examples of nations undone by debts such as the United States now owes? (Note: examples should include only countries whose debt is denominated in their own currency.)

4 hours ago, dwt said:

Pesce

Definitely Pesce. They pretty much always have grilled sardines, served simply with lemon to squeeze. That's on the appetizer menu, but it's three sardines for $12, perfectly cooked, which is a great deal. They always have some other grilled fish on the main-course menu, such as branzino and bluefish, and I don't think they come pre-sauced. They also do a fine fried softshell crab, as good as you'll find.