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)