You hear that, Mr Andersen?

Cat, Cocktails, Translations

Don't know where the page is really at? It's a scratchy cat, a scratchy cat, here's a Scratchy Cat.

***

I'm quite enjoying reading The Bartender's Guide to Cocktails & Mixed Drinks, by Stuart Walton. It's written with a very distinctive voice, and the first third of the book is taken up with descriptions of the origin and source of most common spirits and liqueurs. For example, I didn't realize that vodka wasn't used in any of the classic cocktails, and didn't become widely consumed in the Western world until the 1950s, when it became the rebellious drink of choice (because of it's association with Soviet Russia). And how about this description of Cynar:

"A liqueur for the truly intrepid, Cynar is a soupy, dark brown potion made in Italy, the flavouring of which is artichoke leaves (its name dervies from the Latin word for artichoke, cynarum). It contains all the savoury bitterness of the globe artichoke, which is boldly illustrated on its label. If that sounds like fun, go ahead and try it. I once swallowed a modest measure of it in a little backstreet bar in Venice, and of all my shimmering memories of the watery city, Cynar is not, I have to say, the loveliest."

Or from the recipe for the Slow Comfortable Screw (so called because it's a Screwdriver (vodka and orange) plus sloe gin and southern comfort):

"The 1970s idea of a joke in the drink's name may be a touch embarrassing now, but the mixture is a good one, and the drink was something of a modern classic a generation ago. [...] Garnish with a cocktail cherry on a stick for that essential seventies touch, and add two long straws. A plastic novelty will add that final note of sheer class, as will throwing back three of them and then slow-dancing with somebody ghastly."

***

Someone at work wanted a translation into Latin of "I choose love". Someone pointed at this translation site, which is actually pretty impressive, but suffers pretty badly from the "Invisible Maniac" problem (a famous machine mis-translation of "Out of sight, out of mind" when going to Russian and back). I was able to find a fairly good Latin dictionary and grammar aid; but I was only able to get most of the way with my dim memories of fifth-form Latin, and had to rely on the inestimable Sok to get the rest of the way.

This reminded me of a Engrish menu that someone pointed to recently, which had a really interesting comment attached to it:

"Take #1313, "Benumbed hot vegetables fries fuck silk." It should read "Hot and spicy garlic greens stir-fried with shredded dried tofu." However, the mangled version above is not as mangled as it seems: it's a literal word-by-word translation, with some cases where the translator chose the wrong one of two meanings of a word:

"First two characters: "ma la" meaning hot and spicy, but literally "numbingly spicy" -- it means a kind of Sichuan spice that mixes chilies with Sichuan peppercorn or prickly ash. The latter tends to numb the mouth. "Benumbed hot" is a decent, if ungrammatical, literal translation.

"Next two: "jiu cai," the top greens of a fragrant-flowering garlic. There's no good English translation, so "vegetables" is just fine.

"Next one: "chao," meaning stir-fried, quite reasonably rendered as "fries" (should be "fried," but that's a distinction English makes and Chinese doesn't).

"Finally: "gan si" meaning shredded dried tofu, but literally translated as "dry silk." The problem here is that the word "gan" means both "to dry" and "to do," and the latter meaning has come to mean "to fuck." Unfortunately, the recent proliferation of Colloquial English dictionaries in China means people choose the vulgar translation way too often, on the grounds that it's colloquial. Last summer I was in a spiffy modern supermarket in Taiyuan whose dried-foods aisle was helpfully labeled "Assorted Fuck." The word "si" meaning "silk floss" is used in cooking to refer to anything that's been julienned -- very thin pommes frites are sold as "potato silk," for instance. The fact that it's tofu is just understood (sheets of dried tofu shredded into julienne) -- if it were dried anything else it would say so."

And later, someone points out that "cowboy" is "veal" -- "boy cow", see?

***

Okay, I've got most of my Primetime Adventures thing written, but I'm not going to get any time to finish it before the weekend. So I figure I'll post what I have now. Sorry, the one or two people who are interested! :)

Songs, Weekend, NetComics

First off -- I'd like to direct your attention to the songs of Jonathan Coulton -- specifically, the melodic Mad Scientist love ballad Skullcrusher Mountain, though honourable mention should be made of Re: Your Brains (a tale of zombie negotiation), and a new take on an old classic, Baby Got Back.

Good stuff.

In a somewhat different vein -- how about clothing for multiple people, like the "Classic Hug Jacket" pictured on the left? If this seems like a really stupid idea, you should go and look at the site... that way you can see that yes, it really is.

And in a slightly tangental note -- how about a programmable beverage container? Yeah, I'm not sure it's a good idea, either.

***

Last weekend was fairly exciting -- Giffy's birthday, with piles of delicious pad thai and plenty of cool people to chat with, followed by a quick visit to the 21st of a family friend of C's. Others have covered how good Giffy (and many of the other people) looked, and the various shenanigans that people got up to, so I'll concentrate on the 21st -- or rather on one incident during the 21st.

It went something like -- huh, some boy has decided to dance without pants. Look at him, boogying away in his boxers. (There was a definite gender divide on some songs -- "Pretty Woman" drew the girls but cleared all but one of the boys from the floor, while some of the HardRawk did the opposite.) Anyway, there's a lot of white dreadlocks here... okay, someone's taken it to the next level, and is protecting his dignity by carrying a box of wine around... aaaand now he's put the box down... and now he's wandering outside. Man, doesn't he know how cold it is out there? Then again, I think he's wearing the Armour of Ethanol against the chill...

I guess it's not streaking if you're just casually walking. Anyway, I got to chat to C's family for a bit, and meet some other people, and got a weird-ass experience, so not too bad an end to the evening.

Sunday, I completely failed to go on the walk that people organized, and only turned up quite late to J & CL's pre-marriage soiree (which was apparently a "kitchen tea but we won't call it that so as not to put off boys"). Odd rituals cribbed from the net were enacted, such as creating effigies of the couple to be married out of newspaper, balloons and old clothes, or writing down possible problems and solutions (and reading out random combinations thereof). I'm pretty sure the fencing wasn't one of the rituals they found, but it was pretty interesting to watch J take on all comers wearing just a mask, when his opponent got a mask and enormous protective vest.

(As well as the fencing mask, J was wearing normal clothes. Just to make that explicit, after the 21st-party anecdote.)

***

Congrats to Sok & Giffy for their G&S audition success, and to JJ for scoring a named part!

***

The problem with starting to read a new online comic are two-fold. First, I find it very hard not to read the whole thing as quickly as possible. To take the most recent example for me, mundens pointed at Miracles of Science, in relationship to "Science Related Memetic Disorder" (or "Mad Scientist Disease"). It took me a couple of days of reading to get through the articles and associated columns, as C will no doubt attest.

Secondly, they'll often link off to other web comics... which tends to compound the problem. I ended up reading all of Concerned: The Half-Life and Death of Gordon Frohman, which is a comic made using screen captures from the Half-Life 2 engine, and had another look at Reprographics (including the recipe for Hyper-delicious (evil) burgers); but I just don't have time to properly look at all of the comics that look interesting, so I'm leaving a list here, in the undoubtedly false hope that I'll find time to have a look at them in the future.

http://www.fluffinbrooklyn.com/html/comics.html
http://www.tweep.com/comic/
http://www.radioactivepanda.com/
http://indavo.comicgenesis.com/
http://www.galactanet.com/comic/
http://www.misfile.com/
http://arcanetimes.comicgen.com/
http://zebragirl.keenspot.com/
http://abbysagency.us/
http://www.eykir.com/
http://www.pawspace.com/~misadventures/
http://www.hellboundcomic.com/
http://notweird.com/bugsport/
http://www.girlgeniusonline.com/
http://www.vanvonhunter.com/
http://www.starslipcrisis.com/
http://www.nekkoandjoruba.com/
http://www.heebink.com/metacops1.html
http://www.inkytales.co.uk/rainboworchid/
http://www.schlockmercenary.com/index.html
http://scribs.us/

And thirdly, they'll often link to other types of pages of interest, such as selections of one-panel, magazine-style science cartoons, or evil genius practical joke ideas (with a list of tricks for kids that I hope most kids never see).

And the Jonathan Coulter songs that I linked to above came from here as well, actually.

***

Turns out I lied about talking about Primetime Adventures, by the way. Next post, for sure. :)

Links & an Exciting Saturday

Sorry that it's been so long since my last entry -- in compensation, here's a bumper crop of pretty links. For a start -- you remember when Dick van Dyke's cheery chimney-sweep character did a series of chalk drawings on the footpath? Well, I suspect that this guy's drawings would beat the crap out of those fox hunters and pearly kings and queens.

Then there's a Flikr leech, if you can't be bothered randomly browsing Flickr; an interview with an expert witness in the recent "Intelligent Design" trial; and a picturebook called "Why Mommy is a Democrat".

And to round things off -- a NZ movie industry blog, which is obviously of some interest to me, and I thought might be interesting to some readers.

***

Happy birthday to the lovely C.

***

A few weekends ago I went up to Kapiti, to get some quality roleplaying done. However, there were a few hitches before I got up there.

I was going to go up on Friday evening... and then Saturday morning... and I finally got away Saturday lunchtime, leaving C at home to get on with her assignment. But I had only gotten to the Basin Reserve when I got a call from C, telling me that she'd gotten badly cut.

The traffic was pretty bad, and the whole way back I was worrying just how badly C had been hurt; thankfully, she'd only sliced open the top of her finger. (She'd been trying to open a bag with a knife, and it had slipped.) Nevertheless, it was pretty gruesome, and even though it had stopped bleeding we decided to go to the emergency room to get it looked at.

Getting to the hospital was yet another saga -- I ducked down a side street (Owen St) to avoid a bunch of traffic and lights, but took the corner into Mein St too tightly, and "sproing!", my hubcap came off. There was nowhere to park immediately, so I pulled into a driveway some distance down, leapt out, ran back, grabbed the (slightly bent) hubcap, ran to the car, banged the hubcap back on, and jumped back into the car... and pulled out to wait at the lights for ages. Dropping C at the front door was unproblematic, and finding a park for the car was straightforward... and then I slammed the driver's door, and the chrome detail fell off the passenger door. I grabbed it, stowed in the boot, and followed C in with books for both of us. (My experience when I was recovering from my broken leg suggested that a lot of waiting might be involved; indeed, when a doctor finally turned up, they apologised for making us wait a lot longer than we should have.)

Anyway, the finger was eventually pronounced fine (after two anesthetic injections that "might sting a bit", plus a tetanus shot), so we thought we might as well go and pick up C's cell phone from Karori. (We knew that's where it was, because one of her bosses had had a drink or two and sent me messages pretending to be C, before one of her other bosses had taken it off him and told him off. :) We drove off, and C mentioned that there was a bit of a funny smell; I said that we may as well get to Karori before we stopped and looked.

It was a watermelon.

More specifically, it was a watermelon that had looked fine when I put it in the back foot-well, but turned out to be completely rotten -- a small hole in the skin had let the gooey pink guts of the melon goop out all over the carpet, in a sea of stinky decomposing fruit. We removed as much as we could, and drove back to my house to clean up more... but even the next day, the car smelled like (as one friend commented) someone had taken a particularly stinky gym sock, eaten it, and then thrown it up again. This was the smell I drove up to Kapiti with that afternoon.

However, I'm really glad that I did go up -- not just because I got to see a bunch of people I don't hang out with enough, but because I got to try Primetime Adventures ("Play the greatest tv show that never was!"). I'll talk about that more next post.

Monks, Movies, Novel

Did you know LaserMonks are real monks? Unfortunately, they aren't some sort of cybernetically enhanced religious order, but a monastery who've decided to sell generic printer supplies. Given the extortionate mark-up for printer ink, I'm not surprised that it's a lucrative market -- so good luck to them, I say.

Something that is exactly what is what it sounds like is The Bunker -- if your data needs to be really, really secure, why not stick your server behind three meter concrete walls, 30 meters underground, and surround it with concertina wire and guard dogs? Ah, the products of Cold War paranoia, is there anything you're not good for?

***

My pen is called "Dr Grip". I didn't name him; it's just his name.

I'm just sayin', y'all.

***

Work gave us a half-day on Monday, and most people went to the venue they provided downtown to watch the Oscars. (C couldn't go, so I took Pete along.) I enjoyed Jon Stewart's presentation -- I thought it was nice that the jokes were slightly more edgy than normal Oscars fare, like joking about pulling down the giant Oscar statue so that democracy could bloom in California.

Also, we won the Effects Oscar -- nominated five years in a row, and won four out of five! It seems really weird to me, since the big studios are... well, really, really big compared to us. Maybe Peter Jackson makes movies that make visual effects shine? In any case, we may have a problem next year, since I wouldn't be holding my breath for X-Men 3 to be nominated.

After the Oscars finished, a bunch of people hung around to boogie at the venue, but I hurried across to the Paramount with Pete to see Asphalt, a 1929 German silent film. There was an American playing period film music on the piano (the score has been lost, but he'd researched the pieces that film musicians of the time would have used), and someone from the Goethe institute to read the cards. It was very cool; it emphasized for me how little dialogue you actually need to tell a story effectively.

I then waved Pete goodbye, and wandered up to Reading to meet C and watch Walk the Line. I really enjoyed the movie; and I didn't realise while I was watching it that the actors had actually learned to sing and play their instruments. Given that I was kinda curious to find out what else the female singer had done, much respect to them.

Oh, speaking of music -- Ellen started out her last broadcast with a mashup of Blondie's "Rapture" and The Doors "Riders of the Storm". Very nifty, and it lead to someone in the office pointing me at various 2 Many DJs mashups, including the vocal track of Destiny's Child's "Independent Women" over the top of 10cc's "Dreadlock Holiday", and "The Peter Gunn Theme" with Basement Jaxx's "Where's Your Head At". Nifty.

***

Having had people over for a turkey dinner on Sunday, I'm getting a little tired of turkey; I may have to freeze the rest. Luckily, the supermarket seems to have run out of cheap turkey, so I don't have to face this ordeal again for a little while. When I invite other groups of friends over, we'll have to have something else.

Turkey sure is tasty, though.

***

Here's an old Questionable Content strip about a bunch of anthropomorphic computers playing a role-playing game, "Trolls and Flame Wars", which I'm pretty much linking to for the last line. Possibly not funny to the non-gamers in the audience.

And while I'm pointing to geeky stuff, here's Cooking For Engineers (which I looked at for turkey-cooking info, though I used very little of it), and Charles Stross' latest novel, online; which is pretty neat, since I've liked his previous work.

Tiny Monster, Heino, Lo-Fi Lullaby

Those who care probably already know, but DVD sales have pushed Serenity into the black. Which is kinda appropriate, really. ;)

And in other sci-fi-ish news, Japanese researchers have managed to make a true 3D display, by using lasers to excite air to a plasma. Looking at the pictures, I'm really surprised they didn't do a demo model of the Death Star, since I immediately thought of the scene where they tell the Rebel pilots, "Just shoot it here, no worries." (I nearly wrote "Rebel pirates", but that would have been a quite different movie. Not necessarily worse -- Johnny Depp in "Pirates of the Caribbean" mode as Han Solo, for example. And at least Carrie Fisher wouldn't be complaining about only having two shapeless outfits in the first movie. ;)

And to up my cuteness quota, how about Tiny Monster -- one of those LiveJournal comics that is just bursting with adorability, and recommended by the sagelike Dinosaur Comics. The secret ingredient is love, and a Kong reference with a tiara! Nothing could make this better. :)

***

Nothing particularly revelatory to say about work or life.

I filled my car up this morning and it cost about $95. Ouch. (That was filling it with petrol, and not, say, squirrels. And just the petrol tank, not the whole car -- that would have been considerably more expensive.) This motivated me enough to actually look on Trademe and see how much it would cost to get a scooter -- it looks like $800-$1000 is about average. Which means that I'd probably break even, just in terms of petrol costs, in about nine or ten months (assuming that I fill up every three weeks or so). Definitely worth thinking about.

***

Who is the man to the right, whose thick black-rimmed glasses and ghastly dead eyes stare pitilessly into your very soul? Why, it's German rocker Heino (no, really), and the album is called, "Dear Mother... a bouquet that never wilts", which combines with his wax-doll expression to produce a Hitchcock-ian level of creepy. For this, and other similar gems, why not visit the Museum of Bad Album Covers? (Warning -- nothing explicit that I've found in a quick browse, but not entirely safe for work.) I don't know, I find it perversely comforting to know that there's an Ethel Merman Disco Album ("... only to go over the top when Ethel comes in with the banjo and wah wah guitar ..."). But some of those album covers are just... wrong.

Speaking of music, one of my sisters is now a funky-fly DJ. Or rather, she hosts a show called Lo-Fi Lullabies on Hawaii's student radio station. She's been having rave reviews, such as "...you have a weird accent". I've been listening to her show at work, and have been introduced to a number of bands I've enjoyed and would otherwise have never heard. Another plus for me is the super-weirdness of hearing my younger sister in broadcast mode. So -- she's got track-listings up, so you should be able to tell whether you're likely to enjoy what she plays; give it a go, if you like.