B***h, B***h, B***h

Happy Birthday, Mike! You Da Man!

Important lesson: bad days don't cure themselves. They grow and fester, and suck the life out of a beautiful day unless you take control of it and try to turn it around like a power steering wheel without the power. This was not one of those days.

The workday dragged on in a torture-Dilbert-way but it finally ended like they all do, and I was headed out the door with bike in hand when Liz called me on the cell: the truck had a flat tire. I rode over to Kinkead and saw the driver's front tire was flat to the ground. We wrestled with the jack and the lug nuts, but couldn't get the damn nuts off with the tools we had on hand. I called Becky for a lug wrench, and she brought her husband Anthony. He's a Nevada Highway Patrol trooper by trade, and it took him all of ninety seconds of watching me wrestle with things before he "suggested" that I get out of the way so he could finish the job. It took him about three minutes to get the old tire off and to put the spare on. We thanked them profusely and parted ways.

We found a big nail in the tire, and found another nail in the other front tire, too, but it hadn't gone flat, yet. Thinking an ounce of prevention would work here, Liz and I drove home to get the van so we could drop the truck off at the tire place. After leaving it there and taking Liz home, I went to a local restaurant about half a mile from the house to pick up gift certificates for Becky and Anthony. Went back out to the van...and the battery was dead, again. It wouldn't turn over. At all. No problem, because we bought Trina's car from her, so I called home to get Liz to drive it down to jumpstart the van...except her cell phone was in another room in the house and she couldn't hear it. Probably wouldn't done any good because Trina's car has a leak somewhere and tends to overheat after short periods of time. I walked home.

So as I write this, the truck is at Les Schwab with nails in two tires and the van is down the road with a dead battery and the overboiling teapot that is a 1988 Ford Taurus is in the driveway. The upside was today was still nice and warm, and I had a quiet walk home.

Anyway...

For some reason, I got the idea this morning that I was going to get a tattoo today, perhaps something with a Japanese or Chinese character, but I didn't want something that said, "This is an idiot American." There's a fascinating web site called Hanzi Smatter, and it's dedicated to educating the English-speaking public about the misuse of characters from Asian languages. Above is an example on how easy it can be for tattoo artists to make a simple mistake on a well-meaning illustration about "wife" and end up inscribing "poison," instead, or vice versa.


Here is what translator wrote about the Serenity logo (the misspellings are his, not mine):

"Two seperate readers have emailed me asking if the poster for new upcoming movie, Serenity, is correct. Apparently this movie was either based on or a spin-off from a television show called "Firefly". I have never seen the show myself, but rumor has that some of the show's dialogue were in Mandarin Chinese. The two characters featured in the poster are correct and they do mean "serenity", or " tranquil; tranquility".

One question I have is: why use Simplified verison of [Hanzi character], when the Traditional version [another Hanzi character] is better?

Update: Firefly's "Chinese" Dialogue May Be Machine-Translated

Several readers have commented about the pseudo-Chinese dialogue in the show "Firefly". Samples of Chinese dialogue with English translation suggested that the show's scripts are either directly machine-translated via translation tools like Babelfish, or their so-called "Chinese consultant" is an idiot with bare minimal knowledge of the Chinese language."


He also take Aunt Lily's former employer to task:

A tip from an UK forum has lead me to a Chinese guidebook published by Lonely Planet. I am still trying to figure out if the publisher wanted the cover to say "clock"...or "China", since both pronounciations for "clock" and "China" are homophonetic (zhong1).

The translator takes a reasonable amount of pride in his web site and knowledge of the languages, but is, candidly, intolerant of some folks who make honest mistakes in their passion to be unique. Nevertheless, he has a valid point criticizing people who haphazardly (or drunkenly) get their bodies permanently marked up without doing proper research. What can start out as a tattoo about "love" could easily turn into something about "barley," as it did for one unfortunate soul.

For the record, if I do get a tattoo with an Asian character, it'll be something real simple like this.