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____/ Homer on Sunday 04 Oct 2009 03:15 : \____
> Verily I say unto thee, that Roy Schestowitz spake thusly:
>
>> One chippie I went to a few times got replaced by the multinationals.
>> I found out last week.
>
> I don't see much of that in NE Scotland. The only multinational takeover
> round here seems to be some pseudo-bakery called "The Bakers Oven" which
> seems more like a deli than a bakers shop. They're popping up everywhere
> like mushrooms. Now, I actually like bakery goods far more than burgers,
> or any of that other foreign muck, but the problem with these big chains
> is they're invariably English owned and managed, and they don't have the
> first clue about Scottish culture. Example: If you ask for a "roll" in a
> bakery in Aberdeen, what you /should/ actually get is one of these:
>
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aberdeen_roll
>
> Which to Scots not indigenous to Aberdeen is /not/ a roll, it's either a
> "buttery" or a "rowie", depending on where in Scotland they're from, and
> to everyone /else/ in Britain, it's something quite alien that they have
> probably never even seen before.
>
> The big thing (for Aberdonians) about rolls, is that they're full of fat
> and salt ... /lots/ of fat and salt, and that is exactly the way we like
> them. The multinationals, if they bother to sell them at all, remove the
> salt, and substitute the fat for some tasteless polyunsomethingorother -
> probably genetically modified rapeseed oil that'll turn your unborn kids
> into three-headed monsters. The result is some rubbish that looks like a
> flattened croissant, and tastes of nothing.
>
> What others in Britain call a "roll", we call a softie, or a bap, or one
> of many names for specific types of roll.
>
> Multinationals like "The Bakers Over" don't get that. Apparently they've
> never heard of one of these either:
>
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_bun
>
> I once saw one advertised in "The Bakers Oven" shop window as: "Scottish
> Cake". Idiots. Well I suppose I should be thankful they bothered to sell
> it at all.
>
> What bothers me most about globalisation, with these multinationals that
> monopolise entire markets, is it destroys culture - an entire generation
> grows up completely ignorant of the little things that should define who
> they are, cynically turning society into this production-line of clones.
> Arbitrarily consolidating choice destroys the traditions that define us.
> If this change was entirely organic, then I'd have no cause for concern,
> because it'd be symptomatic of purely sociological evolution, but AFAICT
> these changes are actually being driven by corporations pursuing a quest
> for power and greed, and /that/ is decidedly unnatural and destructive.
Cuisine is one thing and linguistics is another. At some stage, learning almost-
extinct languages can be similar to mastering ancient Egyptian (like Shampoleon) and
trying to /reconstruct/ culture when older generations are long gone. Most
culture is encoded in a language with unique connotations.
Then there's the issues of formats in the digital world. The Redmondians want the
British Library to encode everything as "Microsoftian" for future archaeologists
specialising in COM and Rubbish to reconstruct in a very lossy fashion. Just
remember to tell them to squeeze in some imaginary (yet "superb") leap years...
- --
~~ Best of wishes
Roy S. Schestowitz | GPL'd 3-D Reversi: http://othellomaster.com
http://Schestowitz.com | Mandriva Linux | PGP-Key: 0x74572E8E
run-level 2 Oct 3 00:47
http://iuron.com - help build a non-profit search engine
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