“My full name is Gertie Ball, but please, just call me Gertie. I want to be your special play ball. Play with me any way you want: Grab Me, Throw Me, Feel Me, Catch Me, Touch Me, Kick Me, Squeeze Me, Bounce Me. I know once you pick me up, you’ll never want to put me down. But if you do, I’ll bounce right back to you.”
— The Gertie Ball, found in a toy storeDear James Cameron,
After watching the Avatar trailer, I have only one thing to say: if you’re going to remake Pocahontas as a big-budget SF film, you could at least license the music from Disney.
Memory grass and naughty wives
I started out on an innocent quest: find something short and interesting to prep for the upcoming quarter’s Japanese reading class. I still have some leftovers from Spring (a song and the preface to a biography), but I wanted to try something different. I thought a short travel piece would be nice, and when I was visiting my sister in Chicago, I found a 30-year-old tourist guide in a used-book store. It’s a guide to Kyoto, and judging from the ads, it’s aimed primarily at female travelers.
It’s full of short blurbs about neighborhoods, temples, and shrines, and I picked the section on Arashiyama to scan in and prepare a vocabulary list for. At the bottom of the last page, in small, blue print, I found the following footnote:
直指庵では女の子がジッとダマッテ「想出草」を見て何時間も座っているのです。オソロシー！
Vaguely translated, “At Jikishian Temple, girls stay quiet, look at ‘omoidegusa’, and remain seated for many hours. Dreadful!”
Omoidegusa (想出草) does not appear in any of my dictionaries. Literally translated, it would be “memory grass”, but the third kanji is also used to refer to handwritten notes. Using the Japanese search engine goo.ne.jp, I found a few pages that mentioned it in the context of letters written by women, with a hint of confession.
So I searched Amazon Japan, to see where it might turn up. First thing on the list:
It's sad that this makes me happy...
It’s been around for quite a while, but I’d never noticed it; most of my data-mining has been at levels that can be satisfied with the usual command-line interface. It will come in handy for my branch-to-branch bugfix-integration report, though.
Bide Me Tender
My new favorite manglish spam, courtesy of a hacked Windows box located in the Institute of Nuclear Physics at Moscow State University:
Dear Japan,
No comment:
"We wanted to do something that would market augmented reality in a way that's... meaningful. We were like, wouldn't it be awesome if you could look up her skirt, or take off her clothes?"
(via BBG)
