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   Re: [xml-dev] So off-topic it may be too weird even for XML-DEV ...

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Mike Champion scripsit:

> What DOES the "drinking the XXX Kool-Aid" meme / cliche refer to?
> Jim Jones?  [leader of a cult that committed mass suicide in Guyana in the
> late 1970's]  Or "electric" Kool-Aid [spiked with LSD, c.f. Ken Kesey's
> THE ELECTRIC KOOL-AID ACID TEST.]

The Google evidence FWIW uniformly points to the Jim Jones interpretation.
I must say that I had never heard this cliche before, which undoubtedly
is a symptom of my uninterruptible descent into oldfogydom....

> Inquiring minds want to know, and are weary of the debate over Roman dates
> and whether Tully and Cicero are ontologically the same person :~)

Trust me, they are.  And the Morning Star and the Evening Star are the
same thing, too, namely the planet Venus.  And furze is gorse, and gorse
is furze, and it matters not whether you contract Jakob-Kreutzfeld disease
or Kreutzfeld-Jakob disease, for in either case your brain will one day look
like Emmenthaler, or "Swiss cheese" as we simplistically call it here in
the U.S. of A., as if there were no others.  Or as Niklaus Wirth replied
when asked how to pronounce his name, "You may call me by name, and call
me Veert, or you may call me by value, and call me Worth."  And Livorno is
called Leghorn in English, and Italy is called Wl/ochy in Polish, and my
second floor is a Brit's first floor (still?), and even the O.E.D. (also
called the N.E.D.) despairs of distinguishing between beer, properly
so called, and ale, properly so called.  But stop reading this farrago
(from the Latin word for cattle feed, especially that made from _Hordeum
vulgare_, or barley, which brings us back to beer) and go have either
one or the other.

-- 
John Cowan <jcowan@reutershealth.com>     http://www.reutershealth.com
I amar prestar aen, han mathon ne nen,    http://www.ccil.org/~cowan
han mathon ne chae, a han noston ne 'wilith.  --Galadriel, _LOTR:FOTR_




 

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