Month: December 2010

A Mediterranean Morning of Misunderstanding (short story in the style of P.G.Wodehouse)

This was another of my entries to the Daily Telegraph Short Story Competition that made it to the Top Six, but didn’t win – I never did. It seems to have been removed maybe on suspicions that P.G. Wodehouse‘s estate might have something to say about me borrowing his characters and putting them to work again 80 years later. But I expect that it will be safe in a readership as small as this blog now is to share it with you, and I’ve been saving it up a bit. As ever there was a limit to the number of words and certain words like Diplodocus and Ginger Beer Plant had to be used in it – there were about five of these words that had to feature somewhere, I can’t remember them all now and My.Telegraph has been through too much of a transformation for me to be able to access that one now. Here goes, enjoy…

I awoke from dreams of performing “Burlington Bertie from Bow” to a packed music hall populated entirely by an audience of Bow Street magistrates of the Sir Watkyn Bassett ilk and kidney – you know, the sort that would fain and gladly hand yours truly down a short sharp sentence of fourteen days inside of one of Her Majesty’s decreed stately pleasure domes, as the fellow said, without the option, to the voice of what at first seemed to be a distant harpy eagle shrieking after its hapless prey, “Bertie! Bertie! Wake up, you cowperian sluggard! It’s already half past ten, you lazy, glassy-eyed nephew of mine, come and get your breakfast before it all goes cold!” Continue reading “A Mediterranean Morning of Misunderstanding (short story in the style of P.G.Wodehouse)” →

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The Goldlist Method and Kanji

Stroke order for the character 言 (word) shown ...
One technique for learning stroke order, this one's called Stendhal Method.

The following is my contribution from yesterday on how-to-learn-any-language.com .

Victor Berrjod wrote in the thread about the Goldlist method over on that excellent forum:

“I’m on my third day of using this method for Japanese, and while I know the meaning of most kanji already, knowing what readings to use is a problem. I have written 3 pages of 25 words each, with the furigana listed right next to the kanji. I realized that I’m sort of writing down 50 words this way. Would it be a better idea to have them separate, and maybe merge them when distilling if necessary?”

Excellent question. I don’t know whether I really answered, but I said how I use the Goldlist when it comes to Japanese and in particular Kanji.

The use of Goldlist for Japanese is not as straightforward as it is for many languages. I’ll tell you how I go about it, and you’ll see if there’s anything in there that can work for you. Continue reading “The Goldlist Method and Kanji” →

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De impossibilitate parodiae

Picture of Julian Assange during a talk at 26C3
Master wikileaker Julius "Seize 'er" Assange of alledgedly leaking winky...

This week a number of interesting developments hit the headlines as I was travelling around Europe. There is in fact so much going on at the moment that it’s impossible to comment on everything, or indeed stay abreast of everything. Of course one of the main things which caught my eye, and I am sure the eye of every Internet denizen is the goings-on with Mr Julian Assange, the founder of wikileaks, currently under arrest in London and awaiting extradition to Sweden, a country quite happy to overlook and not investigate or prosecute Saab’s dealings in the BAE affair, but extremely concerned to deal out every justice to Mr Assange for allegedly raping two women, whereby the detail seems to be not that he had sex with somebody that was unhappy to have sex with him, but that he did so without wearing a condom when he was supposed to be wearing one. Whether this was two occasions with each of the two women separately or during a threesome, the press has not deemed needful to elucidate. There we go, then, not exactly the next Peter Sutcliffe, but nevertheless enough to put him on the Interpol list in several countries. This apparently has nothing to do with the leaks he is doing other than those involving his genital member, as if anyone is going to believe that. Before you can say Jåkk Røbbænsen, or whatever Jack Robinson is in Swedish, this person will be extraordinarily rendered to the States and called to account before the Senate, some of whom have already issued Iran-style fatwas on him for treachery against their deen.

So concerned that the powers-that-be to nail missed a sandwich (sorry, but that’s how the voice recognition software heard “Mr Assange”) for failure to wear a condom when that was a pre-condition for the sex that in the meantime they even managed to lean on Pope Benedict the 16th to abandon the Roman Catholic Church’s strict ban on blob-wearing, so now Mr A cannot even claim conscientious reasons for his failure to don. That’s how far up the conspiracy to nail this ultraleaker has gone.

And so the wikileaker has been arrested for allowing his own winky to leak into somebody else’s pubic domain, and there has been a scramble for the Internet domain “winkyleaks.com” – one I went to see if I could get it in order to do some interesting parodies of the recently emerging wholly un-astonishing but for some reason scandalous depeches, I saw that the domain http://www.winkyleaks.com had in fact already been nabbed, and moreover even put into effect with some very stylish, Onion-style parodies of the recent news.  Evidently it was not written on high that this domain should fall into my lot, but at least it seems to have gone into good hands, so go and see if you feel like a good chuckle.

No worries though, I can always do a series on Huliganov TV of my own parody wikileaks, so watch this space. If I do them they will be like a mini-series with their own little section on here. Whether they will be as funny as the ones over at http://www.winkyleaks.com is anyone’s guess, though.  They’re doing a jolly good job.

Another interesting headline this week was that Google Translate have now included Latin in their list of languages to translate into and out of. The problem is that of course everything which isn’t in their database which at the moment are still very small is left in the original even if it is a word which seems to have been available to that classical language anyway. At the moment if you ask it to translate “On the impossibility of parody“, for example, it gives you “De impossibilitate parody” – so it doesn’t recognise the perfectly good Latin word “parodia” which presumably takes a genitive “parodiae”. But it’s early days yet, for Latin, I dare say.

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