“What if what’s always happened with Hillary—they did all the work, they know everything, they’re super qualified—what if they didn’t do it? What if they fucked it up?”
— Esquire collects election-night quotesContext is everything, lesson #23
The word for the day is “fungai”. If you search a dictionary, you’ll find it written as 憤慨 = resent + lament = “indignation or resentment”. My shiny new copy of Kenkyusha’s Bilingual Dictionary of Japanese Cultural Terms has another: 糞害 = feces + harm = “problems with damage caused by bird droppings”.
In our parking lot at work, there are several spaces that Spring has rendered unusable due to fungai over fungai.
Either they got me, ...
…or they picked the wrong day to announce this:
From: PizzaHut@getmore.emailpizzahut.com
Subject: Pizza Hut is now Pasta Hut!
Our new Tuscani Pastas are so good, we decided to change our name to Pasta Hut. Try both delicious flavors - Meaty Marinara or Creamy Chicken Alfredo.
Finally, restaurant quality pasta delivered right to your door! Feeds 4 and comes with 5 breadsticks for only $11.99. Dinner’s done!
They updated the web site, too, but I’ve seen that trick before!
[Update: their web site is still Pasta Hut, so it was just their total lack of awareness that “April 1” means something other than “beginning of new fiscal quarter”, especially on the Internet]
...and three weeks later, we celebrate my other birthday
When I was reading the star-crossed-puppy-love story 野菊の墓, I found myself wondering if the editors at Ask had over-simplified the main conflict, since it boiled down to “you two can never, ever marry, because she’s two years older”. Skimming through the original version (a much slower read, even though it’s easier to look up vocabulary with cut-and-paste), it looks like that really is the reason the whole village is upset about their budding romance, to the point that she’s forced into an unhappy marriage with someone else. Pause for mild culture shock.
One thing that caught my eye, though, was this passage:
僕は小学校を卒業したばかりで十五歳、月を数えると十三歳何ヶ月という頃、民子は十七だけれどそれも生れが晩《おそ》いから、十五と少しにしかならない。
Roughly: “Having just finished elementary school, I was 15, or if you counted months, 13 and some change; Tamiko was 17, but since she was born late, she had just turned 15.” [note the use of Aozora Bunko’s 《》 convention for furigana, in this case glossing the character for “evening” with the word for “late”]
The Ask version just gave their ages as 13 and 15, respectively, but clearly there was something going on in the original. I noted the multiple ages as something to look into later, and then spotted the answer by accident while flipping through my collection of reference books: 数え年. In the kazoedoshi system, you’re 1 at birth, and gain a year on New Year’s Day. These days, the most visible use of this system is probably the Shichi-Go-San festival.
With little effort, one can manage to enumerate no less than three levels
In deference to Brian’s delicate sensibilities, I will not use the phrase “…on SO many levels”.
Slight change to the site...
So, the downside to adding jquery to all my pages is that, with my carefully throttled bandwidth, it ended up adding significantly more time to the page load than you’d expect. This was recently explained very clearly over on Surfin’ Safari.
As a result, I moved all the JS libraries over to Amazon S3, where I’m already hosting my pictures. This turned out to be a bad idea, because while their service is very quick, every once in a while it fails to deliver a page. And if the jquery library doesn’t get loaded, my comment-spam trap becomes lethal.
The system I came up with a while ago, that has proven to be 100% effective, is to set the form-submission URL to “imacommentspammer”, and use JavaScript to replace it with the real URL once the page finishes loading. My log-scanning script checks the Apache logs for this and other “interesting” URLs, and immediately adds the associated IP address to the firewall’s block list. Spammers that scan the static HTML pages never see the correct URL, so into the trap they go.
The unfortunate side-effect was that if S3 failed to deliver the jquery library, any attempt to post a comment resulted in my site vanishing from your view of the Internet. That’s a little extreme even for me, so I added a second step: the form submit button is disabled in the HTML, and enabled by the same script that fixes the URL.
[I noticed this because the script tried to ban me; fortunately, I have a whitelist for just such occasions.]
Merosu, Serinuntiusu, and Dionisu-ou in Shirakusu
I’ve now read all ten of the books in level 3 of Ask’s graded readers, and six of the ten books in level 4. I’ve also discovered (by reading the front cover…) that they didn’t just record audio for some of the stories; they did it for everything, but the ones that were too long were left off the CD and put online as MP3 files. That gives me a total of eight hours of professionally-recorded audio of stories that I’ve read and understood.
Mostly understood, anyway. I had a little trouble with the basic premise of 野菊の墓, which is that Our Hero’s first love can never be his, because she’s two years his senior. It’s possible Ask’s version has been over-simplified a tad, so I’m going to attempt to read the real thing at Aozora Bunko, a free online library of Japanese literature.
Another one I had some trouble with was called 走れメロス, not so much because of the story as the basic problem of figuring out who the heck these people are in this tale of ancient Girishia. Quite literally, it’s all Greek to me.
One thing I found interesting at Aozora Bunko was their method of encoding furigana in a text file. A string of kanji characters is glossed by following it with hiragana surrounded by double angle brackets. If the glossed word immediately follows another kanji that isn’t covered by the furigana, a vertical-bar character is added to separate it.
So, the title of the first story would be rendered as 「野菊《のぎく》の墓《はか》」, and if I only wanted to add furigana to a single word in an all-kanji phrase, it would look like this: 「東京｜特許《とっきょ》許可局」. They also include annotations of the form ［#whatever］ (mostly for rare kanji and special formatting). All of the characters are full-width forms that line up neatly with kanji, but aren’t otherwise used in Japanese prose. I don’t know if this is a common standard, but it seems to be sufficient for most uses.
Autumn-colored canal in Kyoto
I was playing with the new version of Aperture today, flipping through the pictures from my Japan trip, and noticed something unusual. See if you can spot it.
