My Archives: April 2006
Friday, April 28, 2006
What's a good French translation for the verb "to heckle"? Céline of Naked Translations wonders. "My trusted Robert & Collins gives chahut (uproar), chahuter (to create an uproar) et perturbateur (why not chahuteur?) (troublemaker) as respective translations. These choices are completely inaccurate, due to the fact that heckling is an activity steeped in the history of this country [Great Britain], and is rife in British political debate, and as such has a poor equivalent in French when used in this particular context. That's why we all need to be kind with dictionaries and their writers; some terms are so charged with meaning that one can't but betray them."
I didn't know that the original hecklers were textile workers who pounded on flax fibers with a hatchet!
Posted by Anita @ 04:40 AM PST [Link] [Add a Comment]
Tuesday, May 2, it's the East Side Weblog Meetup! Start time is 7:00 pm, and location is Crossroads Mall Food Court, NE 8 and 156 Ave NE, Bellevue WA (map). We'll be sitting between the stage and the giant chess board -- look for the sign! Free WiFi courtesy the King County Library branch. Weblog folks who live and/or work on the east side meet to chat about weblogs and more. See you there, and let's spring into blogging!
(tags: blog, blogs, meetup, EastSide, SeattleMeetup)
Posted by Anita @ 03:43 AM PST [Link] [Add a Comment]
Wednesday, April 26, 2006
Robert Brady of Pure Land Mountain talks about harvesting wild mountain vegetables in Japan.
Secret Trees: "Every secret place we went, we were the first ones there (I guess we're pros now), so we got a goodly bag full of fragrant buds, some to have as tempura with rice tonight, some to give to unfortunate tara-no-me-less friends in the city (they could buy the precious delicacies - packaged like jewels, one or two to a package - at caviar prices in the supermarket, but fresh wild tastes - well, fresh and wild), the rest to save for later when there are no tara-no-me to be had anywhere at any price."
Seeing, Beholding: "Most of the trees are so tall I had to bring my extendable pruning saw/shears to get the high buds, you just can't pull that hard (to bend the branch down) on those thorns, even with sturdy American made leather work gloves on (I bought a couple years supply of those on my last visit to the States). I've never seen taranome that tall, because those in more public places (i. e., just about everywhere) are stripped completely, so thoroughly harvested that they don't grow much beyond a meter or two high before they give up the ghost from sun starvation."
More on Aralia elata.
Posted by Anita @ 04:18 AM PST [Link] [Add a Comment]
Monday, April 24, 2006
My friend Ron Drummond tells me that excellent author John Crowley has begun writing a LiveJournal. "Turns out, apparently he posted a few comments on other people's journals, using his real name, and no one believed it was him! What's a writer to do? Poor guy is about to give up! He needs folks to visit him and encourage him to keep going!"
Ron is publishing a museum-quality edition of Crowley's classic Little, Big, to come out this fall.
(tags: RonDrummond, JohnCrowley, LittleBig)
Posted by Anita @ 03:47 AM PST [Link] [1 Comment]
Wednesday, April 19, 2006
I like this detailed appreciation of Thomas the Tank Engine and Friends by Paul Victor Novarese at Gammatron.
Neurotic Personalities
- Gordon: arrogant alpha male
- Henry: hypochondriac worrywart
- James: vain, metrosexual attention-hungry show-off
- Thomas: suck-up brown-noser sycophant
- Edward: old man, nervous about the young rascals displacing him
- Percy: worker bee
- Toby: just trying to avoid the scrap heap
All of them, of course, are obsessed with being "Really Useful" and are maniacal, to the point of self-destructiveness, in pursuit of this unattainable ideal.
(tags: Thomas, ThomasTheTankEngine, Gammatron, PaulNovarese)
Posted by Anita @ 04:05 AM PST [Link] [5 comments]
Monday, April 17, 2006
This Wednesday, April 19, it's the Seattle Weblog Meetup for April! Start time is 7 pm, location is Ralph's Grocery and Deli, 2035 4th Ave (map), in Seattle's Belltown neighborhood, diagonally across from the Cinerama. Free WiFi, food and drink available (you can buy anything in the store and consume it in the deli area, so that includes wine and beer if you want). Local and visiting webloggers talk about blog topics and lots else. I hope to see you there! Parking can be tight in the neighborhood but I usually find a space on Sixth or pay to park in the Warwick Hotel garage across the street for five bucks.
(tags: SeattleMeetup, blog, blogs, weblog, weblogMeetup)
Posted by Anita @ 04:06 AM PST [Link] [Add a Comment]
Wednesday, April 12, 2006
At Smart Bitches Trashy Books they are talking about difficulties authors might have in forming pet names or diminutives in foreign languages. "OK, so I'm taking a long time to make my point, and my point is this: different cultures have different methods of creating diminutive forms of names. And when a name from a certain culture or time period isn't given the proper diminutive, it can really jar on the ears. Take, for example, my French friend, Edouard. Some of his American friends call him Ed, sometimes even Eddie baby, which makes me laugh, mostly because it sounds so WRONG. On the other hand, a very French diminutive (albeit one that would probably only be used on a little kid), Dou-Dou, makes me laugh even harder. But this is a pretty good illustration of how diminutives sometimes focus on the stressed syllable."
Posted by Anita @ 04:30 AM PST [Link] [Add a Comment]
Friday, April 7, 2006
My old officemate Geoff Duncan had a spooky incident with a seemingly abandoned car, in the street in front of his house in the middle of the night. "A little before 1:30 AM, I wake [to] loud grinding sounds and a car alarm going off. Concerned that someone has pulled into the parking strips next to the house and perhaps collided with a retaining wall, I peer out the window, but see nothing. Switching rooms (and windows), I see the source of the noise: a mid-90's Tercel in the middle of the street, revving its engine to maybe 5,000 RPM, making loud clanging and grinding sounds, and going up hill at a snail's pace. Wait, no, scratch that: the engine is revving for all its worth, but the car is actually creeping backwards downhill, making grinding and clanging sounds. Brake lights and reverse lights turn on and off, the driver coasts the car backwards a few feet then...stops. And turns off the engine and the lights."
(tags: GeoffDuncan, quibble.com)
Posted by Anita @ 03:33 AM PST [Link] [1 Comment]
Wednesday, April 5, 2006
We had a good weblog meetup last night at Crossroads. Don Smith of the Seattle PI came by to meet with East Side webloggers, and talked with Kathy Schuler about issues relating to mass aggregation of weblogs. We tried to tell Kathy about which RSS readers use OPML reading lists, but I don't think any of us have been using that feature yet. Also present: Tommy Williams, Jack William Bell, our grandson R-----, and me.
Posted by Anita @ 04:11 AM PST [Link]
Tuesday, April 4, 2006
This flickr set of Expo 67 photos really brought back memories of our family vacation there (though some of the photos seem to come from 1965, and some from 1968). Scanning through the slideshow reminded me of the various national pavilions, Habitat, and the kids area and fun show. I was eleven years old that year. Via Metafilter.
Posted by Anita @ 04:07 AM PST [Link]
Monday, April 3, 2006
Says David Chess, "I tell ya, there's nothing like being woken up at 4:25am by a guy coming up the stairs ringing a handbell, when you've been kept up most of the night by your roommates' snoring. It's wonderful!" He gives a detailed rundown of his adventures at Zen Mountain Monastery this past weekend. "Once we were in the zendo and getting settled, [the leader] said something amusing about the moths and said 'let's get the screens up today' or something like that; and later on I heard one of the students or monks or something say 'yeah, he was looking right at me when he said it, but they're not going to get put up today and he's going to be mad at me!' or other heartwarming words to that effect."
(tags: DavidChess, ZenMountainMonastery)