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Had a discussion with Serendipity on the finer points of politically correct translations and PCization of language in general.

It all started with her quoting some dead Roman guy and my hastily transcribing her quote for the benefit of the English speaking vulgus pecus present, by use of the word man, when we all know how essential it is to respect the Latin difference between homo, hominis: “Man, human brothers” and vir, viri: “a man, a real one, with a hairy chest and all that”…

To me, it was essentially a matter of adding capitalization and turning a gender specific man into an all inclusive Man. Her position was that human, and nothing less, was required in order to give an appropriate translation and spare me the wrath of the progressive masses. And she might be right on the second count, but I must disagree on the first: while “human” is indeed a fine way to translate it, I must stand by my use of the non-gender-specific Man. And I would furthermore ask: WWCD?

Answer: Cicero would most likely use Man and laugh at the mere suggestion that a woman might have a valid opinion on such a matter.

And that is precisely my point: Romans were not particularly nice people when it came to a lot of progressive social concepts. Gender equality would only be one in a million. To the patrician authors of such Latin quote, a rough 99% of their fellow humanoid bipeds were barely bestowed with a mind of their own… let alone entitled to voice it outside of domestic issues.

Ugly bastards? Sure.

Does it mean we have any right to rectify their speech in the name of modern enlightened ideas? Hell no.

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The Japanese word for “fountain pen” is 万年筆 (まんねんひつ: man-nen-hitsu) which literally translates to “ten thousand year brush”…
I’m not sure why, but I find that awesome.

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The French tend to consider that, in order to become a talented writer, one has to spend their days in smoke-filled cafés, possibly while drinking oneself blind on exotic liquors.
Americans think the secret to becoming a good author lies in bullet lists of writing techniques and prestigious writing classes.

I am no writer (understatement if there ever was one), but something tells me they are both dead wrong.

Then again, I do not think Dan Brown is much of an author, to say nothing of the hordes of navel-gazing, bored & boring, Parisian writers who persists in trying to give their worst second-class Bret Easton Ellis rendition every single year… So what do I know…

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At long last, Friedrich speaks his mind on the blogging world…

Just came across this oh-so-timely paragraph (line-breaks inserted for clarity purposes, emphasis mine):

Einsamkeit lernen. – Oh, ihr armen Schelme in den grossen Städten der Weltpolitik, ihr jungen, begabten, vom Ehrgeiz gemarterten Männer, welche es für ihre Pflicht halten, zu allen Begebenheiten – es begiebt sich immer Etwas – ihr Wort zu sagen!
Welche, wenn sie auf diese Art Staub und Lärm machen, glauben, der Wagen der Geschichte zu sein!
Welche, weil sie immer horchen, immer auf den Augenblick passen, wo sie ihr Wort hineinwerfen können, jede ächte Productivität verlieren! Mögen sie auch noch so begehrlich nach grossen Werken sein: die tiefe Schweigsamkeit der Schwangerschaft kommt nie zu ihnen!
Das Ereigniss des Tages jagt sie wie Spreu vor sich her, während sie meinen, das Ereigniss zu jagen, – die armen Schelme! – Wenn man einen Helden auf der Bühne abgeben will, darf man nicht daran denken, Chorus zu machen, ja, man darf nicht einmal wissen, wie man Chorus macht.
Friedrich Nietzsche – Morgenröte – 177

Unfortunately, any online version of the English text I could find somehow skipped many paragraphs (including this one), so I will have to give my own weak attempt at a translation. Bear with me, as I have no claim on native-level fluency in German:

Oh you poor fools living in the metropolises of world politics, you gifted, tortured by ambition, young men, who consider it your duty to give your word about every passing events – and there is always one!
Who, when you have made much dust and noise that way, think you are History’s driving force!
Who, always on the lookout, always waiting for the moment where you will be able to slip your word, lose any real productivity!
No matter how much you yearn for major accomplishment, the deep silence of maturation never comes to you! The day’s news chases you like a chaff in the wind, while you think you are the one chasing it – you poor fools!
When one wants to play the Hero’s part onstage, he should not think of being in the chorus, he should not even know how to speak in chorus. (Friedrich Nietzsche – Daybreak also known as the Dawn – 177)

[if any of our dear Saxon readers has any suggestion for improvement, please go ahead]

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The Vaterland Sicherheit Homeland Security Agency has just come up with a brand new idea to protect you.

Choice quote (emphasis added):

In his letter, Soaries pointed out that […] “the federal government has no agency that has the statutory authority to cancel and reschedule a federal election.“

Soaries wants Ridge to ask Congress to pass legislation giving the government such power, Newsweek reported in its latest issue that hits the newsstands on Monday.

Homeland Security Department spokesman Brian Rochrkasse told the magazine the agency is reviewing the matter “to determine what steps need to be taken to secure the election.“

Source: Yahoo News via BoingBoing

So let me get this straight: a member of the current executive branch (whose very election is itself a point of controversy) is considering asking the legislative branch to pass a law, that would in effect put the decision to renew the executive branch into the hands of… the executive branch.

Yea, if that sounds like a lot of executive branch in the same sentence, that’s because it is. Somehow I get the nagging feeling this plan doesn’t go in the overall direction of more Check and Balance.

Just remember people, War on Terrorism is Peace, Slavery is Freedom and who needs a goddamn election anyway?

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Have you noticed how common it is to receive professional corporate e-mails that show absolutely no respect whatsoever for basic typographic rules?
And I don’t mean such nitpicking as whether periods and question marks go inside or outside quotes: I’m talking full-on spacing chaos (either dozen of whitespace before and after every single item of punctuation, or inversely, not a single space for the whole paragraph), with the occasional (though thankfully rare) ALL CAPS EMAIL every now and then.
While I do not expect spam or random newbie mails to be jewels of typography, it is always a bit unsettling to receive such loosely typed e-mails from people who’ve supposedly been exercising higher-exec positions for up to a few decades sometimes…

I think the explanation is precisely there: none of these people are used to typing their own mails. Up until this fateful era where typists have been replaced by MS Word, nobody above the rank of manager would have ever condescended to type his own mail. Maybe a quick draft by hand, but that’s about as far as it would go. As for formatting and typography: this was the secretary’s job.

Ironically, nowadays, even CEOs of multi-billion dollars companies have to occasionally type emails by themselves. And obviously, they were never told not to put spacing before a period.

That reminds me of such a man who justified his absolute refusal to carry a cellphone thus: by answering your own phone, you are basically doing your secretary’s job, and lowering yourself in the face of business partners. Sheer brattiness aside (I guess he could afford to be a brat, at least by his own standard of success), he had a point: at the time, by adopting this nifty new gadget, businessmen were virtually downgrading their standing, since even the most common peon could break in their higher spheres of power and reach them directly at any time of day or night without fear of being filtered by a zealous assistant.

As for our cellphone-adverse gentleman: he held strong and never accepted to carry a portable communication device on his person. And thankfully never lived to see the cell-phone boom of the following decade.

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I think it’s been established by now, that I am a horribly self-indulgent whining bastard with an amazing talent for ranting about every single pointless non-issue in my life. I got a good ten yards of blog entries to prove it, right here.


BUT, I pride myself in that you will never hear me, in the middle of a regular conversation with friends, start detailing excruciatingly dull and meaningless minutiae of my work life: how such or such project is not coming along as we expected and how I can’t stand the girl from accounting and so on and so forth.

I might mention some work-related items or geeky stuff somewhat connected to work every once in a while, since after all, work is quite a central part of my life (well, until that massive cocaine deal goes through, that is: after that, I’m off to retirement for good).
Informal roundup of long time friend’s careers, idle “how was your day” chat and the like: it’s all good.
But do I ramble endlessly about the finer points of project implementation, the mediocre sex life of complete strangers that I happen to work with, or the new color of my office wallpaper: nope.

NOT, mind you, out of some stupid altruistic consideration for my friends and their understandable lack of interest for discussing the intricacies of somebody else’s work, for which they do not receive a salary. Once again: I’ll gladly bore to death anybody with the most pathetically mundane details of my life provided I got enough rope at hand.
No. The reason I do not bask in office stories when going out with friends is that It is only a fucking JOB.
Call me vain, but no matter how I might actually enjoy doing my job, I am still glad to be done with it at the end of the day. And I DO like my job. doing a job I am happy to do is, along with reaching a complete moratorium on the presence of any alarm clock in my bedroom, the only lifelong professional ambitions I have ever had: in that regards, I can safely say I am quite a successful man, since I haven’t owned a sound-enabled time device in many years now. I like my job, but I like doing other things even more, ok?
Seeing how the goal of my day is usually to get my work done with, so as to be able to partake in other occupations that are not work, no matter how similar in practice, I don’t see why I would ever want to drag work along once I’m done. If I wanted to keep feeling at work, I would not be sitting in a bar with a beer in my hand, I’d be in my cubicle (ok that’s an image: I don’t have a cubicle and my office is about 5 feet from my bed, on my couch, previously dragged in the middle of our 2-square-feet garden if the sun is shining).

I don’t bore other people with petty work-talk because it also bores me. And I pretty much expect the same selfish courtesy from my, otherwise fondly cared for, friends. If I keep switching the topic off that latest xml scheme you’ve been fighting about with your boss, onto the hairdo of the blonde next to us, it’s not because I really care about scary 80’s soap opera fashion revival, it’s because I am desperate and about to kill someone if the word “project flow” is uttered one more time when I’m drinking a beer.

So in the future, unless your job is absolutely fascinating (and I do mean fascinating, as in I-hunt-and-trade-albinos-unicorn kind of fascinating, not I-improve-workflow-productivity-for-major-corporation-XYZ-foreign-exports-division kind of fascinating), please just stick to the skinny and assume by default that I really do not want to hear about the woes of your IT department when they tried to upgrade all the PCs to Windows 2006. To put it bluntly: I don’t care. And I know you probably don’t care about whatever else I might launch the conversation on, but at least, it is not work. And that’s good enough for me. And please don’t get pissy if I finally clue you in on the level of tear-inducing boredom of your work-related topic of predilection: I don’t hate you, I love what you got to say, but come on, you are better than that, I’m sure you can discuss non office-life-related matters with the same brilliant insights and exciting details that flourish when relating your boss’s secretary last fling with another [equally unknown to me, likely to remain so for the rest of my life and therefore of no interest whatsoever] workmate.

PS: If you are a friend reading this and we’ve gone for drinks and chat in the past few days: I’m not talking about you of course, I’m talking about all the others.
PPS: To my parole officer and my buddies at the twelve-step program: I know I screwed up. I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have brought back that pack of red bulls from Barcelona. I thought I was stronger than the Can now. I thought I could control it… I was in denial, I know.
But I swear I’ll stop soon as soon as my paxil prescription comes though. Just one more can, and I stop. Promise.

* we are currently accepting votes on this entry for the title of most uninformatively meaningless subject line.

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You know what?

Nothing really new with this one, but it just hit me today:

Reminiscing about Bonzo and his ruthlessly opportunistic career (or how to slide from union leader to strike buster in less that 10 years), I realized all of a sudden that he was only the first one in a line of Mediocre Actors Turned Conservative Republican Governors of California…

And for a second, I had some apocalyptic vision of him ever getting closer to the Presidency of the United-States than he was when he married Jackie’s niece…

Thanks God for that stupid born-American-citizen requirement… I can breathe now…

Update: This week’s edition of the Onion has the best headline, ever:

Reagan’s Body Dies

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Since it seems dying automatically makes you a flawless human and a regretted politician, regardless of the fact you were actually a senile, dim-witted actor with more blood on his hands than many a current dictator… I feel obligated to add my little contribution to the endless string of tearful eulogies filling the media right now.

Or rather, I’ll let the brilliant Gil Scott-Heron do it in the words he used more than two decades ago:

Well, the first thing I want to say is…"Mandate my ass!"

Because it seems as though we’ve been convinced that 26% of the registered voters, not even 26% of the American people, but 26% of the registered voters form a mandate – or a landslide. 21% voted for Skippy and 3, 4% voted for somebody else who might have been running.

But, oh yeah, I remember. In this year that we have now declared the year from Shogun to Reagan, I remember what I said about Reagan…meant it. Acted like an actor…Hollyweird. Acted like a liberal. Acted like General Franco when he acted like governor of California, then he acted like a republican. Then he acted like somebody was going to vote for him for president. And now we act like 26% of the registered voters is actually a mandate. We’re all actors in this I suppose.

[…]

And when America found itself having a hard time facing the future, they looked for people like John Wayne. But since John Wayne was no longer available, they settled for Ronald Reagan – and it has placed us in a situation that we can only look at – like a “B” movie.

[…]

Remember, we’re looking for the closest thing we can find to John Wayne. Clichés abound like kangaroos – courtesy of some spaced out Marlin Perkins, a Reagan contemporary. Clichés like, “itchy trigger finger” and “tall in the saddle” and “riding off or on into the sunset.” Clichés like, “Get off of my planet by sundown!” More so than clichés like, “he died with his boots on.” Marine tough the man is. Bogart tough the man is. Cagney tough the man is. Hollywood tough the man is. Cheap stick tough. And Bonzo’s substantial. The ultimate in synthetic selling: A Madison Avenue masterpiece – a miracle – a cotton-candy politician…Presto! Macho!

“Macho, macho man!”

“You go give them liberals hell Ronnie.” That was the mandate. To the new “Captain Bly” on the new ship of fools. It was doubtlessly based on his chameleon performance of the past – as a liberal democrat – as the head of the Studio Actor’s Guild. When other celluloid saviors were cringing in terror from McCarthy – Ron stood tall. It goes all the way back from Hollywood to hillbilly. From liberal to libelous, from “Bonzo” to Birch idol…born again. Civil rights, women’s rights, gay rights…it’s all wrong. Call in the cavalry to disrupt this perception of freedom gone wild. God damn it…first one wants freedom, then the whole damn world wants freedom.

[…]

“Why wait for 1984? You can panic now…and avoid the rush.”

excerpts from the lyrics to the song B Movie (1981) by Gil Scott-Heron

And that was before he was able to carry most of his politics…

Whether him or somebody else, never would I wish in cold blood for the death of a man. But please do not expect me to mourn him:
For fuck sake: the man died peacefully in his bed, at an age most people on the planet have not even heard of. I can think of quite a few people in Latin America who were not given this chance.

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Now I ask you:

Could ten consecutive hours spent in the sole company of Messrs. Lebesgue and Cauchy’s monstrous brain-children somehow be nefarious to one’s sanity and legendary sense of humor?

Not in the least of course. Actually, the American Association of Stand-Up Comic Mathematicians (AASUCM) recommends at least a 15 hours daily intake of Calculus to stay in good health.

By the way, you know the story of Whack, the Dog, and Flop-Flop, the Seagull?

Wanna hear it?

OK, so there’s this cute little dog who’s crossing the street, failing to notice the huge SUV roaring down the street in his direction and… Whack, the Dog…

Oh, Flop-Flop the seagull too?

So there’s this seagull peacefully flying somewhere off the Persian Gulf coast, failing to notice the huge UH-60 Black Hawk helicopter scurrying in its direction and…

anyway.

so yea, maybe it’s time to take a break from mathematics and sleep some…