Wa-oops

/ Japan, language

A pet peeve of mine is Chinese character tattoos. These are often translations of some sentiment the victim wishes to express in code, but have been translated in a way that probably won’t make sense to a native speaker of Chinese or Japanese. In other cases, they are unidiomatic or just plain wrong.

Take a gander at the two kanji above. The one on the left, å’Œ, is the character for “peace,” popular as a tattoo, on T-shirts, decorative rocks, etc. The one on the right looks exactly the same, but for one crucial stroke. In fact, it is not an actual character at all (near as I can tell), though my first guess was that it means “apricot” (I was close: 杏). It is the one on the right that I saw tattooed on the small of a woman’s back on Sunday.

What’s the correct etiquette in this situation? Should I tell her “Hey, I know you wanted the character for ‘peace’ tattooed on your back, but you wound up with something that sorta looks like ‘apricot'”? Or should I leave her in blissful ignorance, as an inside joke for those of us who know the code?

Later: Apparently other people are writing about this problem too.

I give up

/ current events

I’ve pretty much quit blogging about national politics. The news is so uniformly awful, the principal actors so bogglingly loathsome, the agendas so completely evil, and the real truth so hard to pin down that it just doesn’t seem worth it.

Or as Teresa Nielsen Hayden put it, I deeply resent the way this administration makes me feel like a nutbar conspiracy theorist.

When people seriously consider the possibility that Bush intentionally started forest fires as window-dressing for his forest “thinning” plans, when former insiders and former generals are blasting the Bushies over Iraq, and when previously sympathetic British government officials suggest administration complicity in the 9-11 attacks, then you know the distance between you and the wearers of tinfoil hats is…the thickness of a tinfoil hat.

Tuesday-night course ride

/ cycling

Got together for my first ride with both DuShun and Caeasar in over a year. DuShun took us on a loop he’s been riding–halfway to Buda, then east to Nuckol’s Crossing to make a circuit around the Tuesday Nighter course, and then back home on Slaughter Lane. 32 miles. After a long-ish hiatus from the bike, and a 30-miler the day before, I wasn’t feeling too perky, but with them taking it relatively easy, I managed to hang in there.

Afterwards I met Gwen and her gang at the Springs. Gwen convinced me to get into a yoga position to stretch out my bad hip. I tried to be a good sport and went along. I did not achieve enlightenment before my extremities fell asleep.

Today I am toast.

Decorator’s Dilemma

/ tidbit

Now that there’s an all reality show, all the time network, they are no doubt casting about for programming concepts. The makeover show, which has had its most notable success in Queer Eye for the Straight Guy, is a popular sub-genre, what with Trading Spaces and many others of that ilk. Also popular are the “hideous challenge” type shows, where participants wind up eating cockroaches and that sort of thing.

I propose a blending of these two types: a professional decorator is required to make over a home using nothing but materials bought at Hobby Lobby, Lillian Vernon, or equivalent. Kitsch is not allowed as a theme.

The makeover shows seem to be based on A) an “intervention” by well-meaning friends, followed by B) generous servings of smugness by the rescuing decorator, and finally C) the intervenee admitting the error of his/her past ways. In this show, the tables would be turned: the decorator’s friends would stage an intervention on him, saying “Alphonse, you’ve become too smug, and too reliant upon $6000 wall coverings.” Being forced to work with schlocky material would take Alphonse down a peg or two, which is gold, I tell you, television gold. Imagine Alphonse’s horror as he minces through aisles of synthetic plants, tchatchkes that mix farmhouse and patriotic themes, pre-decoupaged gewgaws, etc, afraid to touch anything. I don’t expect the decorators will embrace a new design ethic as a result, though.

Hell, I’d watch it.

360 ride

/ Austin, cycling

Rode 360 today, my first serious ride in a while. 30 miles, and I’m not saying what my average speed was. I felt really out of shape.

Various observations:

  • There is now a bike path that allows cyclists to bypass a hairy section of Barton Springs Rd. If you are riding outbound, go straight across Stratford when you get to the end of the pedestrian bridge. This will run alongside Mopac and deposit you close to Rollingwood. I imagine it’s accessible if you are riding inbound (which would be good, because you could avoid that awful left turn later), but haven’t tried that yet. The city did a good job with this–kudos.
  • There is a shitload of new construction on 360, to my great dismay. I noticed a bunch of new apartments going up on the bluff over 360 northwest of the bridge. Not sure who is going to live there.
  • What had been Cycles 360 has been replaced by 360 Bikeworks (or something like that). Apparently Richard, the original owner, couldn’t run the place profitably, so the managers bought him out and re-opened the store. Glad to see it back.

Yet another social network

/ net stuff

Friendsurfer. How many of these things are there–excluding the numerous parody sites?

This one caught my eye because it shows a fire-twirler in its banner graphic. Friendster has been notably popular among my fire-freak friends–I wonder if there’s any connection.

Fighting back at spam

/ net stuff

Paul Graham suggests that when your spam filter identifies a message as probable spam that it automatically ping any URLs mentioned in the message–perhaps repeatedly–to drive up the spammer’s web-hosting bandwidth costs. If lots of people do it, spam suddenly gets much more expensive to send. I like this–it fights fire with fire.

Minnesota pictures

/ travel

I’ve posted some photos from the Minneapolis leg of my recent trip over at imagestation (log in as adamguest/adamguest).

Home from Chicago

/ travel

We’re back. It was a great trip, but it is good to be home.

On Thursday, we visited the Shedd Aquarium, one of three museums (along with the Field Museum and the Adler Planetarium) that make up the “museum campus” on the lake, next to the newly mangled Soldier Field, where the Bears play. Soldier Field was a beautiful neoclassical stadium, but it was old–first built in 1924, and not much changed since, as far as I know. So it lacked the widgets and gewgaws of modern stadiums, a lack that somebody decided needed to be fixed. Whoever’s in charge was, to his credit, unwilling to tear down all of the old stadium, which is nice as these things go. What they wound up doing was keeping the neoclassical bits and dropping an enormous alien battlecruiser on top, which spills over the edges and dwarfs the original structure. The effect is bizarre.

I hadn’t visited the Shedd since I was a kid. It has expanded quite a bit, with two new exhibit areas. Getting into the original museum and the new areas is alarmingly expensive–$21 for out of towners, $14 for Chicago residents. We splurged, and we did enjoy ourselves, but not $21-worth.

After that, we went to my favorite place for stuffed pizza, Bacino’s, took a siesta, and went out to see the Magdalene Sisters (op cit).

Friday, Gwen, Lissy, and I went to the International Museum of Surgical Sciences, which was fascinating and unsettling. Lots of very old and beautifully crafted surgeon’s kits, which consisted largely of amputation tools, and in many cases, trephination tools. Medicine in the 1800s was surprising for the level of advancement in some areas, and the crudity in others. The museum building itself is quite amazing, modeled on the Petit Trianon and built for a Chicago socialite. After that, Gwen and I wandered downtown to ogle the buildings and for Gwen to try on more shoes. That night, we got together with the rest of the family for more pizza.

Saturday was our return date, but it was an evening flight, so we had some time to spend in town. We went over to Wicker Park, a neighborhood that was “transitional” at best when I lived in Chicago. Today it is a funky hipster neighborhood that butts up against un-transitioned areas. Milwaukee Avenue is notable for having one bad furniture store after another. But it also has a Fluevog store, and after having tried on countless shoes everywhere else we looked, Gwen finally found a pair she liked, and bought them. We wandered around the area some more, had coffee, marveled at a restaurant that serves fried twinkies, and pushed on for O’Hare. The security gantlet went smoothly, as did the flight.

It occurred to me that if I lived in Chicago, my life would be very different–I’d live in a different kind of place. My friends would be different sorts of people. I would do different things with my time. Not necessarily better or worse, just different.

Magdalene Sisters

/ movies

Saw The Magdalene Sisters with Gwen and Lissy while in Chicago. The movie tells the story of Ireland’s magdalene asylums, a system of homes for wayward girls run by the Catholic church. A girl could be committed to one of these by a guardian for getting pregnant, being too pretty, or just being inconvenient. Once in, they could be locked in there indefinitely. They worked as indentured washerwomen, symbolically washing away their sins (real or invented by the nuns), and the nuns apparently had a tidy little laundry business going. For their part, the nuns treated the girls with anything from contempt to sadism. The closing credits inform us that the last asylum closed in 1996.

Watching this movie made me want to go out and throttle a nun. There’s so much about the story that is shocking: that this went on under everyone’s noses with (apparently) no great outcry. That organized religion could practice such institutional cruelty upon its own members. That the Catholic church had so much power in Ireland that the civil authorities didn’t stop what amounted to systematic kidnapping and enslavement. The storytelling in the movie is simple and understated–it doesn’t need to hit the viewer over the head with ham-fisted dialog to get the point across.

The day before we saw this movie, I took Gwen down the street where I had grown up. Half of the block was occupied by a Catholic-run hospital, and the nuns who worked their were widely despised in the neighborhood. An example of why: The street is very narrow, and parking is very tight on the block. One night, when I was little, there was a fire on the block. The hospital had an empty lot on the block, and the firemen wanted to tow some cars into the lot to gain better access to the fire scene. The nuns formed a human chain in front of the lot to prevent the firemen from doing so. The hospital is closed now.

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