Why is this baby crying?

I saw this picture on One Inch Punch (an East Asian site), and I'm wondering if the baby is crying because he's scared or hungry, or is just acting like a baby. It's an interesting image of Halloween, for sure. This is in Japan, btw.

If you want to practice your Spanish and learn about manga

I came upon a Spanish manga site called Manga Spain ("Todo sobre el increíble mundo del manga, comics, anime y más") while doing a search for Shima Kousaku, and wanted to suggest it to manga and anime fans who want to improve their Spanish while reading about their favorite subject.

What's interesting is the use of "mangaka" (romanization for 漫画家) in the post rather than "manga artist" or whatever else the Spanish equivalent would be.

I honestly don't know if "mangaka" is used often in English sites, or if they use "manga artist" more often. Using the romanization seems like a better, sophisticated word choice that represents the hard-working Japanese artists.

Bonnie Koloc: an incredible singer I never knew about

Bonnie Koloc was a very popular singer in Chicago over 30 years ago, but I've never heard of her, and never heard her music until tonight when I saw her at Chicago Live. I had no idea what to expect. She was on stage with just a guitar player, and since I'd seen such a lineup before, I didn't expect much. But wow--she was really incredible. Even though the songs she sang were simple, and there was no flash and nothing fancy, the way she sang cut right through me and I felt very emotional while I was listening. Her style seems like folk, but she has so much depth, it's more like soul. She's a really amazing performer. I met her after the show, and could barely get the words out to express how much her singing impacted me. I'm not usually so moved when I hear someone sing, but I was seriously holding back tears.

Below is a video of her singing a few years ago, but seeing her live is way better--she totally communicates with the audience and truly sings from her heart. She's coming out with a new CD...I bet it's going to be great (here's a list of her previous music).

Weird English from Europe

You'd think that Europe wouldn't exhibit any bad English since a lot of people have studied it, and they've been interacting with England, Ireland, and Scotland for years, but I spotted some strange English on the label of this fruit spread when I was in a German store yesterday. It said: "For a superb taste mix fruit on top down into jar."

What does that mean? I understand the first few words, but then the meaning breaks down as the sentence continues. You'd think the French company that puts this product out would find *someone* who can verify that the English is correct. Puzzling, indeed.

Update: upon reading it again a few times, I think they mean that you should mix in the fruit that is on the top.

If you want to support Balinese

Alissa Stern from BasaBali, a site "encouraging the use of Balinese," contacted me after seeing my post about Tim Brookes' Endangered Language Project. She and some professors are working on "developing the first multimedia language materials for Balinese."

She says:

Although Balinese is not an endangered language, it is on sharp decline in the increasing shadow of English and Indonesian. Professor Hildred Geertz likens the richness of Balinese to Shakespearean English and 15th century Yiddush, but with only a million speakers left out of a
population of 3-4 million, it is quickly losing traction.

They started a kickstarter campaign "to try to
raise funds to pay the Balinese linguists, videographers, animators, and
anthropologists who are working with us."

So if you're interested in preserving Balinese, go to the campaign site to see a video and find out more. They have various reward levels for which you can receive a "thank you" gift for contributing.

Facebook confusion update

This summer, I discovered that I confused Facebook when I changed the display language to Japanese and my residence to non-American places. Then, to see what would happen, I changed again and saw Arabic and French ads.

Here's the most recent update: the display language is French, and I "reside" in Vietnam, so I currently see all French and Vietnamese ads. Confusing Facebook is fun! I've now decided to "move" from Vietnam to Thailand, so we'll see what pops up next. Stay tuned!

What English sounds like to non-English speakers

A short fake English film made to sound like what non-English speakers hear. It's funny to see how others perceive the language.



Thanks to Jordan for this.

Happy Thanksgiving, Canada!

I forgot to post such a greeting earlier to our neighbors to the North. Hope everyone pigged out like we Americans do every year!

Simon & Schuster is ripping ebook readers off

I was looking at the forthcoming Steve Jobs biography on the Barnes & Noble site, and I thought "great, another B&N ripoff" since I'd discovered such over-pricing of ebooks before, so I looked at the Amazon site. Same over-inflated price for an ebook: $16.99, while the print version is $17.88. Then I saw this claim: "This price was set by the publisher" which is Simon & Schuster.

I went to their site, and it had the same price, ie, they're ripping off ebook readers by offering less than one dollar off the print price.

So who's to blame: Simon & Schuster, all publishers, or the online book sellers? Or everyone?

Hopefully their price gouging will cause people to not buy books, which will affect their bottom line. To act as if the same costs go into publishing ebooks as print is to assume that consumers are ignorant. I'm not, which is why I'm posting this here, and will continue to point out such greedy behavior until something changes.

Exercise is important, but...

"Everybody tells me that I have to exercise. That it is good for my health. But I never heard anyone telling a sportsman that he has to read." (José Saramago)

Cristina met Kevin Whately!

One of my favorite TV shows is Inspector Lewis, which is way better than what you can find in the US (it's a British show). Well, Cristina Hanganu-Bresch, one of the writers from the anthology (read it for free: she's on page 61) met the star of the show, Kevin Whately. Lucky!

Let's bon dancing!

I saw this sign this summer when I stumbled upon a Japanese festival at Mitsuwa, a large Japanese store in Arlington Heights. It's humorous and cute--they probably translated "mashou" (～ましょう) literally, because when you put that ending on a Japanese verb, it means "let's". So the Japanese is 踊りましょう (odorimashou), which literally translated is "let's dance". Then for some reason, they made "dance" a gerund, so it ended up as "dancing", and voila! You have some Japlish in Chicago!

He surpassed his goal

Professor Tim Brookes contacted me a while ago about his Endangered Alphabets Project, and I was planning on posting information about it here, but some serious offline stuff came up. Well apparently, his fundraising project was very successful: his goal was $6,000 and he raised over $17,000! It's incredible how much support he got.

He seems to be very productive. In addition to teaching, he writes a lot, including several books, and has even contributed essays to NPR.

The Endangered Alphabets project features "Inuktitut, Baybayin, Manchu, Bugis, Bassa Vah, Cherokee, Samaritan, Mandaic, Syriac, Khmer, Pahauh Hmong, Balinese, Tifinagh and Nom, carved and painted into a slab of Vermont curly maple." He says that:

at least a third of the world’s remaining alphabets are endangered–-no longer taught in schools, no longer used for commerce or government, understood only by a few elders, restricted to a few monasteries or used only in ceremonial documents, magic spells, or secret love letters

which is why he created the book and project that he plans to exhibit in various places.

It sounds like an interesting project, and I'm glad he succeeded in raising the funds to carve and take the show around.

Why are ebooks so expensive?

The other day, I wrote that I got a Nook. One of the perks I thought I'd get was access to cheaper books in e-form, but it doesn't look that way. For instance, the Nook book version of How Language Works is 17 dollars, and the print version is 18 dollars. If it costs so much to print books, then why is it only one dollar cheaper to get the electronic version? Some ebooks are cheaper, but some publishers are not being realistic when selling various versions of their books. Even with the occasional coupon I get from Barnes & Noble, it still doesn't bring the price down to an acceptable level. So I'm not going to buy it, and probably other readers see the illogical approach to such book pricing, too. Pricing e- and print books similarly isn't justifiable.

Mary ended up in a Japanese blog

Mary O'Regan, one of the writers featured in my anthology (read it for free: she's on page 13), has a really good fashion blog and ended up being photographed for a Japanese fashion blog. Her picture is below. That's really neat!

I got a Nook

I usually don't care about gadgets, but a teacher coworker of mine was showing me his Nook, and I was intrigued. I went to Barnes & Noble to check it out, and it seemed really cool and useful, especially since my Macbook seems to be breathing its last, and my netbook isn't that powerful. Well, I ended up getting one for my birthday, and it's a great tool.

There are some limitations, which is expected since it's really a small tablet. Typing isn't as easy as having a keyboard, and touchtyping is hard (I don't hunt and peck). In fact, I'm doing this post on my Nook right now because I wanted to see what it's like. Not so easy, actually. So I won't try it again.

But it makes reading easy, except for an ebook I bought on Scribd: the publisher doesn't allow downloads or mobile access, which is lame, though outside the scope of this post :)

Anyway, I'm now on my netbook typing on a proper keyboard because I couldn't finish the post on the Nook. For some reason, Blogger took me to another location, and when I tried to move the cursor down this text box, I couldn't access the end of the post, so I gave up. That's actually what's baffling about touchscreen tech: precise movement of the cursor and the proper rendering of websites.

One thing I discovered via the Nook was the mobile site of Project Gutenburg. I even found a Japanese audiobook which is difficult to understand because it was written in the 17th century. But I can still listen without having to break out my computer.

It's just a nifty thing to have and to use when I want to go online and read a variety of things via one tool. I still like paper books, though, and am reading a couple now when I'm not reading from the Nook. I just need to increase my non-English reading, and I'll be set :D

This guy was a genius

A lot of people throw the word "genius" around. I often hear that word overused in the radio biz, just because someone came up with silly jokes before anyone else, or can put together audio in an interesting way. That's not genius, it's talent. Talent is important and admirable, but genius is on a whole other level and requires extra-special brain power that seems to be exerted effortlessly.

The obituary of the creator of the e-book and founder of Project Gutenberg shows what a genius really is. Read it, and I think you'll agree.

Japanese signs

A guy who lives in Japan has taken hundreds of pictures of Japanese signs and even has a text file with the transcriptions of those signs (!), which you can copy and paste into an online dictionary to find out the meanings of words you don't know.

Before that extensive project, he even translated a bunch of signs from Japanese into English. Actually, on signs with a lot of text, he translated just the main headline words.

It's incredible that he's taken the time to do all that, in addition to maintaining his extensive Many Things site, which is more for ESL students. But he does have various Japanese-learning links on his Japanese page.

I figured out how to download my Facebook album

I've been posting pictures of signs on Facebook, but realized that I should also post them on Flickr because it will allow me to share them publicly. And there's also a way to synch up Flickr with Facebook, so maybe I'll just post to Flickr from now on. I'll figure out the best way.

Anyway, I was going to do another blog post topic tonight, but it took me so long to find a decent Facebook album downloader, I want to post the results of my search here: PhotoLive. I installed the plugin on Chrome, but it's available for various browsers. I have no idea how it works on the other browsers, but it worked for me on Chrome. So I'm going to post that album on Flickr, and post the link here.

Try it...you'll like it (hopefully).

UPDATE: Tech blogger JP (Jiangpeng) Zhang told me that PhotoLive has discontinued its service (even though the link I have above still works). He has written a blog post about Seven ways to download your Facebook albums and photos.

Seven years! and my Mac is still alive

I just realized that I've kept this blog going for SEVEN years! There was a period of time when I was posting a lot, then as I became more busy with work and my schedule wasn't consistent, my posting decreased. I pretty much gave up the fiction writing dream (which is ok) and started writing more non-fiction for pay (which is nice), so my "need" to express myself here via writing wasn't as great. I was also exerting lots of energy trying to accomplish things offline, so my involvement in this blog changed. But I never want to give it up! My love of language continues, and since I'm not surrounded by language fans offline, I still want to express my enthusiasm here.

Recently I haven't posted much, even though my work schedule is a lot more manageable than it's been all year. That's because some serious things have come up in my offline life. Plus, I thought my computer, which is a five year-old Macbook, was dying because the touchpad was acting strange, and my keyboard was acting up, too. I do most of my blog posts on this Mac, so it felt strange to write elsewhere, though I did.

But then I did some searching online, and found out that swollen batteries can cause touchpad havoc. And I just discovered tonight that's what has happened: my battery had expanded, causing the touchpad to act strangely, and after I removed it, I can type and move around easily.

So I'm very happy that I've kept this blog going for so long, and that my computer is *not* dying!