The reincarnation! Yet more about credit card mating rituals from this apple juice addict turned Inuit. Now almost no camel spit at all. Or, for my original blog, go here. To subscribe, click this icon: (More options at the bottom of the page)
(April 18, 2008) As part of its abuse and neglect case, my blog offered up this pointless morsel into evidence. It has allegedly been sitting as a draft since it was first written and then apparently abandoned in late 2006. Lawyers for the lazy could not be bothered to comment. Since the NYT link won't really work anymore, let me clarify; I have no idea anymore what the article was about. The Ann Coulter bit is always amusing, though. Well, if Bush says so, what kind of fools would we be to listen to the professionals? Ann Coulter has a tantrum
Just a couple of links to great entries in a health-related blog. Ok, so the first link is more of a rant about people dense enough to support Bush, but generally the authors' posts are really insightful and focused on health issues, but as health care is tied inextricably to the economy and politics, it's a pretty far-ranging topic.
Anyway, on to today's ramblings. I was in the movie rental store ("Family Book") the other day and noticed some of the changed titles on Japanese releases of "Foreigner" movies. Conan is no longer a Barbarian, he's Conan the Great. Kinda makes Arnie sound like a magician. Or there's Resident Evil becoming Biohazard, and many others. But the one that fascinated me was The Color of Money - which becomes Hustler 2. Why the 2? I couldn't find anything just called Hustler, let alone a prequel to Color. (Added Sep. 26 - Ok, so maybe there is a sort of prequel. See the comments. My bad.) Maybe just because Newman and Cruise were partners, but the title is still gibberish. It drives me nuts to watch language being butchered like this, and this is a mild example. I don't care if people anywhere want to change the titles of whatever they want to make more sense to the locals, but to make a mockery of someone else's language to do it is just lame. I know this in itself isn't really a big deal, but so many things in Japan do this. Some phrase that is at best vaguely recognizable as having some meaning in English becomes standard Japanese, to the point that even though borrowed foreign words are written in a separate alphabet (linguistic apartheid?) Japanese people often don't realize that it's actually neither Japanese nor real English. Things like "Everybody fashion!"(a current popular slogan) are part of the common vernacular.
Surely a huge cause of this is that English is considered pretty cool here and probably anywhere that still buys the mythology of the American Dream - I don't know how many times I've seen "American Coffee" advertised like it's gold - but it doesn't seem so much to ask that we not be constantly talked down to by people who insist the general public can't handle anything that takes more than 30 seconds to communicate. Japan's uniquely tortured, fashionable English is well-documented and famous but reaches well beyond its shores. Western celebrities who take spots in Japanese commercials for quick cash on the side usually seem to keep their integrity hovering at least a few millimeters off the floor - Tommy Lee Jones barely speaks or does so in Japanese in this Boss Coffee commercial, Kiefer Sutherland manages to make sense in his Calorie Mate spots, there are others from Ang Lee, Natalie Portman, Angelina Jolie, maybe we can pass off John Travolta's shot because it was the 80's and just a brand name anyway, and Ahnuld skips on English, not that that's unusual, but if anyone can find the spot Uma Thurman is in with the Kill Bill costume on a motorcycle spouting nonsense, I'd be much obliged. Now that's rock bottom. The whisky commercial with Bill Murray in Lost in Translation is not far off at all - obviously it's just a paycheck, but how hard can it be for someone with that kind of star power to look at a script written in their native tongue and suggest changes?
The company I work for is technically a publishing company, with a native English-speaking staff of around 300 and growing, but their publications and even their English textbooks are riddled with mistakes too typically Japanese and awkward to make on a keyboard to believe that they were just typos. Obviously someone was too proud to ask a decent proofreader to have a look. I can't help but picture the nephews of company chairmen all over the country assuming that their 6 months abroad made them fluent enough to write anything you please in English, and then unable to risk losing face by getting a proofreader even if they were willing to do so.
None of this is to say that Japanese is alone in this. We do it all the time in English, and to a far larger extent, given how eclectic and flexible the language is, and how far the British Empire stretched. Then there are helpless and confused Chinese characters tattoed all over people who couldn't be bothered to find out what they mean or get them done properly. French and Spanish words routinely have all their grace and music stripped when they get assimilated. English is like the Borg, it's the ten-cent whore of the language world. It just absorbs everything, which is both its beauty and its greatest weakness. Sure it's a language of amazing versatility (and don't even get me started on the "language of Shakepseare" bit), but that versatility brings the pitfall of believing there's no point in learning other languages, like the apocryphal stories of Americans who've never been more than 5 or 10 miles from home, despite the relative wealth, freedom, and opportunity to travel, because "we done got ever'thang a body needs right here". Aside from the mental benefits of bilingualism, especially from an early age, there are untranslatable words in every language.
Maybe I'm weird but I believe in knowledge for the sake of knowledge, learning just for the joy of it, art for art's sake, all that liberal hippy crap. I hope and believe that most people share that view, although I have to wonder how people of otherwise reasonable intelligence can not only believe in God but insist that God and science are mutually exclusive. If God created the universe, didn't he also create the laws of science that govern it? I don't go quite as far as Richard Dawkins in this clip from The Root of All Evil, where the premise is essentially that religion is destroying civilization, but I do believe that the spiritual benefits of any religion and the inner peace faith can bring have to be weighed carefully against the radical elements and intolerance that people seem determined to read into religious texts. (Yes, I do realize my topic is wandering a bit, check the title of the blog.)
On the other hand, maybe I'm just getting all preachy because what I ended up renting was V for Vendetta. If you haven't seen it yet, I highly recommend it, not as the typical Hollywood wire-fighting and stuff blowing up fare, but because it's a thought-provoking look at terrorism and the mindset that inspires it, and the idea that in the right circumstances it's not necessarily a bad thing. The movie doesn't offer pat answers about right and wrong, though it does lean towards V pretty strongly in most parts and is full of obvious references to the Bush administration.
Unfortunately the disc also included the pilot of "Supernatural", a mind-numbingly flat ghost story series that's probably old news or hopefully cancelled back home by now. I watched the entire painful episode hoping to find enough in the end to redeem it. No luck.
That's about all for today, I'll leave you with two things: one last photo, just a light chuckle. If you think God and Technology can't coexist, check out this computer school. And last, a reminder that mangling English can also be fun!
Wow. Oops. I just realized this post is a bit outdated. I started it a few days ago and didn't have time to finish it, and you know how the hours just fly by when you're playing with your belly button lint or whatever the hell I was doing. So here it is days late and getting stale, but I gotta feed this monkey! So I'm posting it anyway.
The Senate Intelligence Committee (no, it's not a search for some or an oxymoron) yesterday released last year's report by the CIA about Hussein-Al Qaeda ties. More specifically, the complete lack of them. About the only surprise in the report is that the Republican-controlled committee let the word out. Sure, the real thing came out last year, but better late than never, right? At least it was in time for the elections. It just might have been a threat to National Security to tell the mothers of 3,000 dead soldiers that their children died not to spread democracy or fight terrorism, but for oil. On the other hand, I have heard of a documentary about the soldiers in Iraq (I can't find it now) where one of them says "I sure hope we're here for oil" or something to that effect. Oh goody. This is the kind of stuff Ann Coulter skims off the top of her fetid little pond of a mind. (My all-time favorite by her is, "I'm a Christian first and a mean-spirited, bigoted conservative second, and don't you ever forget it." But it is a very hard choice; there is a lot of really premium, choice idiocy among her nosenuggets of wisdom. One more: "We should invade their countries, kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity. We weren't punctilious about locating and punishing only Hitler and his top officers. We carpet-bombed German cities; we killed civilians. That's war. And this is war." Delightful lady, isn't she?)
As recently as Aug. 21, President Bush said at a news conference that Mr. Hussein “had relations with Zarqawi.’’ But a C.I.A. report completed in October 2005 concluded instead that Mr. Hussein’s government “did not have a relationship, harbor or even turn a blind eye toward Zarqawi and his associates,” according to the new Senate findings.
The C.I.A. report also contradicted claims made in February 2003 by Secretary of State Colin L. Powell, who mentioned Mr. Zarqawi no fewer than 20 times during a speech to the United Nations Security Council that made the administration’s case for going to war. In that speech, Mr. Powell said that Iraq “today harbors a deadly terrorist network’’ headed by Mr. Zarqawi, and dismissed as “not credible’’ assertions by the Iraqi government that it had no knowledge of Mr. Zarqawi’s whereabouts.
Well, color me surprised...
I looked at my good friend Youtube's belly button lint for a while and came up with these:
And last, here's another article similar to the one mentioned in the previous post about the spread of Western lifestyle and eating habits creating problems for people around the world.
Since I live in japan, it's always a treat when I find English reading outside of the internet, especially when it's not the spin-it-till-it-pukes swill that Fox et al pump out. So when I found a good, lucid article about the problems of a growing population - not in numbers, but in literal size, I just had to come back to the net and create a link so that I can find it again. (Added 09/12:) Here's my favorite bit:
Technology has changed everything but us. We evolved to survive scarcity. We crave fat. We're quick to gain weight and slow to lose it. Double what you serve us; we'll double what we eat. Thanks to technology, the deprivation that made these traits useful is gone. So is the link between flavors and nutrients. The food industry can sell you sweetness without fruit, salt without protein, creaminess without milk. We can fatten and starve you at the same time.
Please have a look for yourself, but be careful not to be branded Anti-American (thanks Kris!) just because you like to hear ideas once in a while.
Also, please be patient with me while I bring the last trinkets from the old site over.
