v for frequency?

"Romantic" as in:

"Romanticism, first defined as an aesthetic in literary criticism around

Byron, Shelley, Keats, Blake

That is not what 'Romantic' means, Humpty Dumpty.

And romances are not just 'stories' Any more than a Koenigsegg is 'just' a 'car.'

TB, like sex was common in life. And a highly emotional thing. Naturally it featured in *emotional* stories.

But the *Romantics* were a very special movement, and if you didn't bother to read the links I posted then you are not worth arguing with.

Thank You, Cindy. That is a very short and rather limited, but accurate as far as it goes, description. My mistake was assuming that 'everybody knew that already'

Its more nuanced than that. Certainly infant mortality was high, still births common, but then you had to run the gauntlet of all the childhood diseases that were rampant, that you had little or no resistance to and no vaccines for. If you survived measles, mumps, German measles, Scarlet fever and didn't catch polio, meningitis, small pox cholera, typhus, typhoid, die from food poisoning or massive bacterial infections after scratching yourself on a pitchfork... you could still die from a myriad other causes in your teens twenties thirties and forties, and if you lived to 50, then if cancer didn't get you heart disease probably would.

I got a massive abscess in my neck after handling some rock wool, in S Africa. I asked the doctor who lanced it cleaned it and gave me the antibiotics 'what most patients came in for' And his answer was telling 'Raging bacterial infection, like yours, Prior to antibiotics that would have been life threatening'

We forget that the 19th century was absolutely full of things that could easily kill you, and did, at *any* age: Being run over by a horse was far more common than road accidents today. As was dying in childbirth in your teens twenties and thirties.

Technically, shorn of accidents, people could easily live to 60 or 70, before succumbing to 'diseases of the old' but that doesn't mean that many actually did.

The chances that something would get you meant that the overwhelming majority didn't make it past 25.

I don't recall I ever did. As the youngest in the family with fairly vindictive older sisters, they made sure I was disillusioned.

Although an alarming number do not, and most people have at least one unresolved childhood issue.

Far from it, but they have their fair share of anti-social swine, just like the US.

There's not all that much variation in English-speaking US culture - enough to include people who like Trump and people who can see him for what he is - but surprisingly little for a population of 330 million.

The US media does it for him. The Murdoch-owned bits of the US media do it even more thoroughly (if not particularly accurately)/

But you can't name them.

His travel insurance company might quibble. UK tourist in the US get shot from time to time, and shipping their bodies home is expensive. Not that anybody would care about the the Natural Philosopher. He's about as lovable as Jim Thompson, and a lot dumber.

It's about a big as Australia. When the native is as pig-ignorant and up himself as John Larkin seems to be, it is unlikely that he could grasp anything much.

He could set up a proper survivalist refuge with the obligatory armoury and fit right in, until some other survivalist objected to his politics or some other preferred delusions. American survivalist do seem to go in for weird religions as well, which add another potential source of conflict.

The revisionist left is always trying to alter the truth so sometimes Cindy needs correcting.

I am. Anything you do to milk impairs the flavour. And as for modern, homogenised, "standardised" milk. Just white water.

If an oppressive government is starving its people and arresting/torturing/killing dissidents, do the developed countries of the world have a moral obligation to intervene?

North Korea. Cuba. Haiti. Zimbabwe. Many others.

I think so.

You were making sense until that last bit.

Kids like sweet stories with happy endings. And presents under the tree.

Yes, they can wait until college to major in psychology and anger and despair.

Like making yogurt or ice cream?

And as for modern,

Doesn't taste like water.

Last step, give most of it away. If you don't, you'll eat all of it yourself and gain 10 pounds.

We have similar behaviors from similar causes, resentment of Americans by foreigners and resentment of Californians by other Americans. They fear that the other place is a good as it looks. Which it is.

What's weird is that foreigners who don't like the USA love California or Texas or the west in general. I blame Sergio Leone. So I don't say I'm from the USA, I say I'm from San Francisco. That makes people smile and tell stories.

Try designing some electronics at our level. Post it here.

One recipe I remember called for a springform pan. It sounded like a recipe for disaster. Anyway the truth is I don't need a whole cheesecake sitting around tempting me.

Kosovo?

I know lots of people who have lived abroad for some time too.

The USA is all "different demographic groups" so it makes no sense to generalize about Americans.

My neighborhood has all sorts of restaurants - Mexican, Thai, Japanese, Nepalese, Italian, French, Viet Namese, Cantonese, middle eastern, Brazialian, Salvadorian, a dreadful British tea joint, a terrible German restaurant, a great Palistinian-Italian combo, but no good burger joint. I have to do burgers myself.