h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Kaeori, never be hesitant about contradicting me. You are of course right. In most versions of the story it is Daddy Bear, Mammy Bear and Baby Bear. But in at least one version, they are just bears of indeterminate age and sex.

Notwithstanding the size of the bears, what was the middle chair? Was it a middling chair, a medium-sized chair or what?

In one version, Daddy Bear's Porridge is too salty and Mammy Bear's porridge is too sweet, while Baby's is just right. It doesn't say whether Daddy Bear had a Scottish accent to go with the salty porridge. I met two Scottish women in Paris once. They were flabbergasted that the French couldnae understand them when they said the food was no' ho'.

G (nearly gone on hols)

Ooh, going anywhere exciting?

More baffling than the Japan for Nippon is Hungary for Magyar

I expect (unless someone has already suggested this, in which case you all know better by now anyway) that the rule for the extra "e" in words ending in "o" has something to do with the Spanish participle. Some words ending in "ado" or "ada" are adjectives or nouns derived from Spanish verbs. The Spanish spelling does not have an "e". The feminine version makes no problemos for us, (cf Bermudas) but as there are "o" words from other sources contaminating our language, these somehow joined the English Club and got their honorary "e".

Perhaps I'm talking through my hat, as I don't *know* any of this, am just putting some bits of knowledge together. Sort of spring cleaning my brain, ready for my holiday in Menorca.

To continue: The need for an "e" arises from our tradition of making the "s" for plurals a voiced one, so we want to say "afficionadoze", whereas the actual Spanish pronunciation would be "afficionadoss". (There is no voiced "s" - i.e. the sound zzzzz - in Spanish.)

Can anyone help me remember who actually started the story of Golidlocks? I don't think it was the Grimms, but either way, Anderson, Grimm - none of them were originally written down in English, so we might have languages problems of the scale of biblical translation boobs.

Postings in this thread get more and more like shopping lists. Sorry, I can't look in all day, my connection has been docked at work, so by the time I get here in the afternoon you're all three topics down the line.

Fun, isn't it!

I think Goldilocks is Grimm. All dark Bavarian forests and evil endings that have recently been neutered.
As to Hungary, isn't that because Atilla the Hun and his mates stopped there? That's always what I thought, but I've never looked it up because it seemed so obvious. In which case was he actually Atilla the Magyar, just the Romans (?) called him something else to be obtuse?

The whole Goldilocks story was concocted by Daddy bear in an attempt to swindle his insurance company.

What about Gary the Hun?

K, I'm going to Wexford, Ireland and Legoland, Windsor, England. You can find an excellent entry on Wexford in the Guide.

In one version of Goldilocks I read, it was a dirty little old woman rather than a beautiful young golden-haired girl who came in and played havoc with the bear's house and possessions.

I hope, on your return, we'll be getting an equally excellent article about Legoland!

Have fun!

The too salty/too sugary version of the porridge myth comes as a startling surprise to me. All versions seen in North American don't get into these heady, sophisticated, adult questions of taste, but deal only with the educational awareness issues of hot and cold. A sensible thing to teach children of course ..but...
This always left me curious about a) why bears would have set a table and then walked away and b) how anyone, even a dumb bear, could get one bowl too hot and one too cold and one 'just right'. Remember I heard these tales years before microwaves when all porridge came out of one pot and therefore had to be the same temp.
My confusion left me with very serious doubts about anything one reads in books, not to mention the cooking skills of Momma bears.
So, thanks for salty and sugary; you've brought this story back into perspective for me with the original European values. No doubt there are other examples where I have been exposed only to the 'american' version and lost out on the truth somewhere.
doubtless
~jwf~

Well I was always told "hot" and "cold" - I've never heard salty and sweet. That would equate to "plain" in Scotland, because the debate is always salt or sugar. If the porridge was neither salty nor sweet, it must have had nothing added. Of coure you could also go down the milk or cream route as well...

The bears went for a walk because the porridge was too hot, and the reason why each bowl had a different temperature was because the bowls were of different sizes. What is harder to account for is that the baby bear had the smallest bowl and yet the mother bear's porridge was the coolest - bviously the author wasn't a great student of thermodynamics.

Anyway, I prefer the version which has the ursine collective heroically free themselves from the tyrannical yoke of the bourgeois capitalist Goldilocks.

mean while back in the kicthen,hey t.c. go ahead and run speaker cables into the kicthen why don'tcha,no big deal really,you can even put in an inline volume control,to turn it up and down/off.i prefer honey with my porridge btw.a bbc news program is now on public t.v. in my area,but i keep forgeting about it.

I understand there was a porno version made (in the same way as "Bra Wars" and "Forrest Pump"). I have no idea how (or even whether) porridge featured in this version, but I feel sure it would be a valid and intellectually stimulating re-interpretation of a tired fairy tale.

"One tomato, two tomatoes"
"mango, avocado, lilo, wierdo,"

This is where the shopkeepers' aberrant apostrophes really come into their own:
One tomato, two tomatoes, tomato's 25p per pound
etc.

Yes thank you Mycroft of course... the bears action (Go walkies) is a demonstration of appropriate behaviour when encountering porridge that is too hot!
'Avoidance' is an essential skill that cannot be learned too young. It's damn near a first principle of survival.

The Momma bear's bowl was coldest because she served herself first to let it cool, before attempting to scald her husband. And baby bears was just right because it was really McPorridge and cures warts as well.

~jwf~

It wasn't porridge - that was just a euphemism for certain illegal substances that desperate British politicians are now trying to make freely available.

Why do you think Goldilocks needed to sleep straight after her porridge?

I guess that's what made them grizzly afterwards !

Porridge doesn't have a plural - however much of the stuff you have, it's still porridge.

Are the porridge mines in the Scotish Lowlands or in the Highlands ?

Just as the scone prospects and Devonshire cream wells can be found in the south of England...

(This is sure to spark someone's memory...)

Being a little more serious for a moment, can any of the clever clogs who inhabit this place give me some generic reasons or clues to why some things don't have plurals ?

Thinking of breakfasts, there seem to be loads of anomolies ...

* Cornflakes are plural, but no one would have only one cornflake for breakfast
* Porridge has no plural, but could that be because it's so messy trying to isolate and individual oat flake ?
* Bacon & eggs - only singular bacon no matter how many rashers you have
* "I had toast for breakfast" - what, a whole loaf or just one piece ?

PS. Only obsessed with breakfast because my tummy is currently too big to allow that luxury in the morning