Browsing the folder all my spam lands into, I find the subject line 「お食事のお誘いです♪」, which can be translated as “this is a meal invitation”. The URL in the message is randomstring.com/sexcircle, which sounds a bit more… filling.

Best spam subject line I’ve seen in weeks:

Stimulez votre baby-maker

And here I thought the French hated the creeping spread of English…

Ethernet over coax. I knew there was a reason I kept these things around. :-)

25 years ago, I dropped out of a class in Mandarin Chinese. I had no problem with the tones, I just lacked the dedication and discipline to spend ~20 hours a week studying.

Our textbook was a work in progress quick-print, and I threw it away a long time ago. I lost the C-E dictionary in a move some years back. Every once in a while, though, I’ve stumbled across one last piece of evidence: an index card with the Chinese name they assigned to me: 高橋模, with the Pinyin reading Gāo Qiáo-mó, and a note that 橋 means “bridge” and 模 means “the paragon” (高 of course meaning tall/high).

Obviously, I stumbled across the card again today. If you read it as a Japanese name, the first two characters form the common family name Takahashi, and the third is usually Mo, the same sound it has in Chinese. The “paragon” meaning never got to Japan, though; there, it means imitation or copy.

A lot of characters changed meaning going from China to Japan, but this one seemed odd, so I searched through some Chinese web sites, and found a video of a group of engineering students working on a 橋模; sure enough, it was a model bridge. Technically, a paragon is a model or example of something, but it doesn’t match the actual usage.

So my Chinese teacher named me “Big Toy Bridge”. Call me Mo.

(side note: Google indexes the page with 橋, but the character actually used is 桥, the Simplified Chinese replacement)

From Costumes, Inc., we have this little gem:

"Go Grease Lightening with costumes from Grease."

Found in a photo-tour of an abandoned love hotel in Japan:

"Young people looking to sew their wild oats..."

[as a side note, I’m always amazed at the sheer volume of material left behind in abandoned buildings and towns in Japan, even after their locations have become common knowledge]

My loathe-hate relationship with the Hello!Project Costume Designers is no secret. They specialize in converting rather pretty girls into walking, dancing, singing, eye-searing fashion disasters. My goal in these little critiques has a long history in Japanese culture: hammer down the nail that sticks out.

Sadly, it doesn’t work. And it can’t, because a while back I figured out their real goal, and there’s nothing I can do to compete with that audience.

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I find myself wondering if this verb has ever caused a problem with female tourists in Japan: ぶら下げる = bura-sageru = “to hang; to suspend; to dangle; to swing”.