Day: August 21, 2009

Whenever I see an effort like this:

It tells me that something is very wrong.

I actually didn’t know that things were so bad as to warrant this sort of reaction. I voted NO and hope that others do the same. We don’t want to send the message that ignoring our problems – and pretending that everything is fine – is “W.A. Okay”.

Confidence should come from somewhere other than a marketing campaign. It should come from being able to really afford the things that you need, and knowing that your government is tackling problems with the interests of all citizens in mind (rather than pandering to the business sector and investors).

Translation Party is neat, and fun for… a few minutes.

It’s basically a webpage that takes an English sentence and translates it back and forth between Japanese and English until it reaches equilibrium (ie. the translated sentence doesn’t change).

When I first came across the page, Mao and Bruce (our cats) where trying to catch a cockroach and Heidi commented that:

Mao and Brucy Goosey are stalking a cockroach

I put that into Translation Party and it reached equilibrium at:

Mao, cockroaches and geese are stalking brucey

Yikes! Ahahahaah. What do you think about that Bruce?

Yeah. Pretty funny.

I was also pretty happy with this fairly long translation party in which:

He got down on one knee, looked up at her, and asked “will you marry me?”

becomes:

I said, “My laptop, my PC that I married?”

True geek love. The intermediate stages are also satisfyingly surreal:

He is in her knee, and had seen “the question is how to marry me?”