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Useful tidbits of Physics we’ve learned the hard way this week-end:

  • Leave a bottle of bubbly rosé exposed to Tokyo’s Summer temperatures for long enough before opening, and add some ambiance to your party with a lovely geyser fountain. And I do mean a geyser, not a bit of overflow and bubbles… The ceiling just got a nice new finish coat with that one.
  • The combustion point of alleged “deep-frying oil”, as sold by local supermarkets, is way lower than you’d expect.
  • The melting point of the plasticky faux-woodfloor is also lower than the temperature of that bare 150W lightbulb I always keep at foot-tripping level in my bedroom.
  • The only great thing about the Third Law of BBQ Thermodynamics, is that the guarantee of the heaviest rain of the month on the night of your BBQ, is also the assurance that your garden won’t catch on fire, no matter who’s handling the BBQ.
  • Powerbook keyboards like to remain sober. One glass of wine, and they get f4c2ed 4* f6r g66d.
  • The life expectancy of your average shower door is roughly until the next time you stand butt naked, blinded by shampoo and turning your back to the door when it decides to unhinge and fall on you.

Still wondering why I decided to go back to bed and not move until this week-end is over?

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Going boldly where no KitKat has gone before…

The flavour reads 治字抹茶: unknown to my dictionary, but should have something to do with green tea (I think it may be some sort of Japanese pastry, made of red bean paste and green tea, like pretty much every Japanese pastry out there).

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As often, this entry started as a comment on one of my own entry, specifically addressing Mark’s comment… Then I realized it may as well become its own entry. Consider this the heady and serious counterpart that had to follow last week’s joke…

Mark,

Where do I begin…

No, I do not think poverty exists in African countries just because they need to be freed from their despots and embrace the market.

All these despots, like about every other plague that’s befallen Africa over the past few centuries can be, without a hint of exaggeration, directly traced to one western nation or another. Sure, there are lots of Africans killing and oppressing other Africans. There are bad people in Africa, like anywhere else. But the people manipulating these dictators and benefitting ultimately from the insane amount of corruption and plundering that is underway: they are most definitely not Africans.

Africa is not “dependent”: it currently provides most of the oil that’s running your SUV, my friend. Can you tell me what it gets in return? Beside funding and weapons to whatever warlord agrees to give the best protection for Oil companies, that is.

Entire African countries are currently run, without any pretense at hiding it, by US and European corporations. Countries lucky enough to be devoid of valuable resources (or whose wealth was exhausted in the previous decades) usually have to deal with impossibly stupid artificial borders that make tribal wars a given.

Believe me, it would be a while before whatever money the IMF “invests” in African countries comes any close to even-out what is simultaneously being pumped out of the continent straight into the hands of private corporate interests. And talking about these investments, I hope you do realize that we aren’t even talking about “financial help” here: the debt some of these countries have, was loaned at such rates that the mere interests sometimes overcome their GNP, making it practically impossible to pay back. That is, unless they’d do something like repossess national resources and re-negotiate actual trade agreements that do not just give it away to foreign companies… And I’ll let you count how many government have survived to tell their successful tale of taking on such enterprise (cf. South America).

So in the end, I’ll tell you why that half of the world slowly dying from its excess of fat and junk food, ought to do something for the other half:

Not just out of simple human decency, not just because of that Book they love to flaunt whenever it’s time to burn or stone a sinner but conveniently forget when it comes to the part about human life over material possessions and such other Nazarethian hippy nonsense, not just because even the most raging capitalist ought to realize that there is a problem in a system where people die daily for lack of 5 c. worth of food, while others accumulate more wealth than they could possibly spend in a lifetime…

Continue reading

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Calm down: not my coming-out.

Beside, ever since these pictures of me, in my favorite electric blue vinyl pants and see-through mesh shirt, dancing to Ellen‘s set at the Stud have made it all over the internet, there’s scant little to Come Out of.

Indeed, loose morals and sexual deviance run rampant in the family, and my attention-whore of a little brother decided to up me one: he finally operated his carefully and anxiously planned official Coming Out to both of our loving, yet expectedly old-school, parents.

Even though we were both raised with open-mindedness and respect as core values of our education, this isn’t exactly an easy news to break to the people who are by now routinely asking him when they’ll get to meet “the lucky one”…

So I thought I’d seize the occasion to congratulate him on his courage, on the important life choices and decisions he made, tell him that I am as proud of him as any big brother could ever be and wish him lots of happiness in love as in many other things.

Oh, and you may wonder why it happens that two brothers are blogging in two different languages? Well, it’s a long and complicated story, and I’ll spare the spoilers to the rare few out there who still haven’t downloaded seen Episode 3 (hint: he is the one with the ridiculous Bavarian hairdo, I am the one who gets to blow things up).

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Contest is Officially Over!

I know I said I would post the solution this week-end, but things didn’t go as planned. Far from the comfort of my home and my little computer on Sunday night, I did try to sneak out of bed to send a quick post, around 4am, but was sharply reminded of House Rules regarding computer use, by the most evil phosphorescent glare, this side of the Pacific. I figured I’d rather be one day late on my promise than end up with a ritual katana neatly inserted between shoulder blades.

Without further ado:

The Answers

By order of appearance in the entry (I’ll leave it up to you to match translations and text).

  • La Traviata: “Noi siamo zingarelle” (“We are the gypsies”) – Verdi, on a libretto by Francesco Maria Piave
  • Carmen: Acte 1: “Quand je vous aimerai?… L’amour est un oiseau rebelle” (“Love is an undomesticated bird”) – Bizet, on a libretto by Meilhac and Halévy (based on the novel by Prosper Mérimée).
  • La Vie En Rose – Original lyrics composed and sung by Edith Piaf. Though the only version I have on my hard drive is the cover by Grace Jones.
  • La Traviata (again): “Ah, fors’è lui che l’anima”
  • Chan Chan – Compay Segundo – Calle Salud
  • Le Tourbillon – sung by French actress Jeanne Moreau, written by Cyrus Bassiak: this song is featured in François Truffaut’s famous movie Jules et Jim.
  • She’s Lost Control – Joy Division – Unknown Pleasures (1980)
  • Everybody Knows – Leonard Cohen
  • Il n’y a pas d’amour heureux – Georges Brassens – Les Amoureux des Bancs Publiques
  • Die Lorelei – Schubert (many other versions) based on a poem by Heinrich Heine
  • Kyrie – Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart – Requiem: Κυριε ἐλεησον means “Lord, have mercy!” in classical greek. What? No, I’m not joking. I did mention greek in the rules, did I or did I not?

For your ears only, and very temporarily, I have uploaded all the ones I have on digital support, here. But hurry up, as I’ll probably remove these very much not-copyright-safe files within a day or two.

The Winner

All right, now for the man who shall be getting our unrestrained admiration, as well as a bottle of that nasty paper glue solvant the locals refer to as “alcohol” (comes in a cute bottle) [a picture will soon follow]:
Well, there is no surprise and Mr. Tuitui (helped by family) is the lucky winner. With an impressive 77% result (perhaps a bit less, as I suspect he only spotted the Traviata once, but let’s not be picky) or 10 tracks out of 13. Being French helped, seeing how it was heavily represented with four tracks. But then again, English would have been just a bit too easy.
Congratulation, Mr. Tuitui, my people shall be contacting your people and arrange for delivery. Preferably on a drier day than today.

Another One?

I think I may, when I have a sec, do another one. I’ll try to spend more than 10 minutes this time and make an entry slightly less nonsensical. In fact, perhaps you won’t even notice it’s there. Keep your eyes peeled.

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Nine concerts, hundreds of artists, millions of spectators all over the world…

I think the G8 bigwigs got the message loud and clear: this generation as a whole is still able to stand up, rise, and demonstrate its love of pop music concerts. especially free ones.

Oh, and also they think poverty’s bad and people dying of starvation during evening news is like, so not cool, you know.

I think we are nearly there.

Update: All right, maybe I was a bit hasty in my conclusions. Three billions telespectators, ought to show that this generation does not merely love attending pop music concerts: it is also perfectly happy sitting at home on a couch and watching them on the telly. Wow, take that poverty!
And yea, I think this figure is pure bullshit too, but I read it on the interweb, so it must be true.

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As part of an elaborate not-getting-laid-at-all-cost strategy, I spent the best of my Friday night hacking at home on a whim, bravely ignoring 1am drunken phone calls from a lonely ex, I didn’t stop until I basically had a working prototype.

And thus here you go:
Dr Dave’s Keitai Kanji Multiradical Dictionary!

Of course, you can use this dictionary from any browser, but it has been made especially compact, so as to offer convenient browsing on a small keitai screen.

Why bother making yet another multiradical dictionary when Jim Breen (and many others, most likely) already offers a very decent one on his site?

Two reasons:

  1. I wanted one that be easy to use from a keitai. Jim Breen’s is still a bit heavy to load and browse with a small screen.
  2. I wanted a smarter system for radical selection. All the systems I’ve seen so far let you choose your radicals from a checkbox list of all common radicals. Such a list can be quite long. This makes finding each radical quite tedious and particularly cumbersome on a keitai. Mine use a slightly different approach, that requires at least some knowledge of basic kanjis, but make it much faster then.

Instructions

Fairly obvious, really:

  • Screen 1: enter a string of kanjis. Can be any kanjis containing one of the radical you want to match or directly a radical. In practice, this means you should pick kanjis that look similar to the one you are trying to match… Say, you want to figure out [汾], you could enter [分] and [海]…
  • Screen 2: you will get a list of all radicals matching any of the kanjis entered previously (in our example, you’d get: [ハ], [刀], [母] and [汁]). Select the ones that belong to the kanji you are looking for (e.g. [ハ], [刀] and [汁]). Optionally, enter a number of stroke, with a margin of error (if you want to get any stroke count, do not change the ‘all’ value).
  • Screen 3 will give you a list of all kanjis (if any) containing all the radicals selected in the previous screen, ordered by frequency and stroke count (in our example, you’d get only the kanji you were initially looking for: [汾]). Along with the kanji, you are given stroke count and unicode value. Clicking on the kanji will do a word search in WWWJIC (translations). Clicking on the unicode value, will give you WWWJDIC’s Kanjidic entry (kanji pronunciation keys and data).

This script has been successfully tested with AU’s EZweb, but should work on any net-enabled keitai, please let me know if you encounter any problem. Suggestions and general comments most welcome.

Hope you’ll find it useful, I know I will!

Note: As usual, this project uses extensively the amazing amount of data gathered and made available by the EDRG on Jim Breen’s website.