Carpe Diem

I can only agree with this. But I recently read another piece of advice (don't know where!) that has left me perplexed. The idea was that when you wake up in the morning, you should ask yourself what you would do that day if it was your last day on earth. All very well if you have a novel or painting to finish, but ... the ironing??! Apart from phoning my sister and seeing a few friends, my concern would be to put certain practical things in order, and maybe, since it wouldn't matter any more, gorge on chocolate!

My Turkish "homework"

Thé à la menthe

Today I spent a couple of hours in Morocco...

Japanese at your convenience

I was only looking at this because I was thinking I should "attack" Japanese again one of these days - having forgotten what little I once struggled to learn! Only in Japan...

Londonstani

The blurb says the book "exposes a city where young Asians struggle with white boys to assert their own, singular brands of Britishness" but it's really about machismo among (largely) young British Asians. It gets an enthusiastic review from a 17-year old on Amazon.co.uk, but personally I agree with Sugarhill.

I found the book hugely irritating to read, written as it is in a combination of text-messaging (b, 2, u, ur..) fonetik spelling (fone, da/dis/dat/dem/dey/dose, wid, somefink - more often someshit - in't, din't, "an" for and, "a" for "of", as in "all a us", "any a it"...) and gangsta/desi/British Asian slang , e.g. ho, blud, bruv, wikid, innit, bhanchod. Nor is the story worth the irritation, because a twist at the end seems to me to make the whole premise of the book unbelievable.

However, there are some nice shifts in register, as in "(Bollywood) films'll always tell you that same shit: that you shouldn't get all hung up about your pride an izzat and that.." (izzat = honour); then from an English teacher "Bollywood offers all kinds of important insights into the tragic dysfunctionalities of sociocultural structures when people confuse the concept of pride with the concept of honour." And it is at least different. So, "respect" to Gautam Malkani for writing it.

Cool cartoon cats

These are the only cats I could find around Brussels!

Provence in Brussels

It was strange to see the Grand' Place under a carpet of lavender, with olive trees, but the smell was glorious - a lot nicer than the view, they always seem to ruin these things with advertising and rubbish bins!

Portuguese celebration, 11 June

In honour of Portugal Day on 10 June, local "lusophones" sent the smoke from dozens of barbecues skyward above St. Gilles town hall on Sunday.


Most of the merchandise on display seemed to have something to do with football - can't think why... (pic below for La Carioca!)

Turkish weekend, 9-11 June

Turkish goodies on sale in Place de la Monnaie, in front of the Opera House.


"Mehter" preparing to process through the Grand' Place: allegedly the oldest military band in the world - though not with these exact members, I presume.

Books for boys

Another interesting post on Language Log, about an item by David Brooks on gender differences in reading. I'm sure there were already proposals floating about some years ago that because girls now outperform boys at school, the syllabus should be changed to favour boys, especially with regard to choice of books for Eng. Lit..

While I mostly attended all-girl schools, up to age 14 we studied Mark Twain, Robert Louis Stevenson, Daniel Defoe and Alexandre Dumas - all "Boys' Own"-type adventure stories! It wasn't until we started preparing for O'levels that I encountered Jane Austen - and received an overdose of Thomas Hardy, because I was then living in "Hardy country" (as it happens, next door to Austen country..). It was also at that stage that we were faced with Chaucer and began to study Shakespeare academically, rather than just putting on plays as had occurred before then. I wonder where Brooks would stand on these two - perhaps he would propose "Julius Caesar" over "Romeo and Juliet", but maybe Chaucer is just too hard altogether?! (Or maybe he is just too irrelevant anyway...)

But I think Brooks' arguments may be beside the point. If boys - or anyone, for that matter - are failing at school because peer pressure makes them despise anything academic, I can't see that it would make any difference to tinker with the literature syllabus.

Four things meme

Oops, I got tagged by Wandering Thinker to list:

Four jobs I've had:
1) sales assistant in a bookshop
2) clerk at a helicopter manufacturer's
3) assistant guide-training officer, London Tourist Board
4) translator

Four movies I could watch again - though not necessarily again and again...:
1) Nobody knows (Daremo shiranai)
2) Starman
3) Women on the Edge of a Nervous Breakdown
4) Three Days of the Condor

Four places I've lived:
1) Accrington, Lancashire
2) Ambasamudram, Tamil Nadu, S. India
3) Yeovil, Somerset
4) Geneva, Switzerland

Four TV shows I watch:
1) Have I got News for You
2) Third Rock from the Sun
3) MASH, when it's on
4) Newsnight Review

Four places I've vacationed (most recently):
1) Umbria
2) Madeira
3) Libya
4) Dubrovnik

Four of my favourite foods:
1) milk chocolate
2) panna cotta with mango coulis
3) aloo gobi (curried cauliflower and potato)
4) tarte au citron

Four things I'd rather be doing right now:
1) browsing in Daunt's Bookshop, Marylebone
2) watching the dancers in a tanguetería in Buenos Aires
3) sitting on a terrace anywhere that smells of orange blossom or jasmine
4) waiting in someone's womb to be born - wouldn't it be great to have a chance of seeing in the year 3000?!

Four things I always carry with me:
1) bus pass
2) digital camera
3) notepad and half a ton of pens
4) book(s)

I'll not tag anyone but leave it up to anyone who wants to play along.

Automatic mis-translation

The Economist reports today on the prospect of a portable automatic translation machine - like Douglas Adams' "Babel fish", that you could stick in your ear - becoming a reality in the near future. I particularly enjoyed the example of machine translation of an Arabic text meaning "The White House confirmed the existence of a new bin Laden tape", rendered into English as "Alpine white new presence tape registered for coffee confirms Laden". This reminds me of the early days of Systran, when a letter beginning "Chère Madame" would come back in English starting "Expensive Madam". My favourite example of all time, however, is "nous avions soumis la proposition au Conseil", rendered as "we aeroplanes submitted the proposal to the Council".

If music be the food of ... err, something

What to do about annoying restaurant websites that insist on playing you THEIR choice of music when you might already be listening to your own (in my case, Turkish pop music which I am pretending is the same as studying), without providing a "no music" button; and then insist on flinging their choice of arty photos all over your screen, with no "skip intro" button; and then after you've waited patiently to get to what you assume is going to be the useful bit - like THE MENU - tell you the rest is "under construction"??? I am sure it takes time to complete an all-singing, all-dancing website, but as they are promoting themselves in several magazines at the moment, you would have thought they would start with the useful stuff. As it is, all you get - eventually - from this one, beyond the intended message "we are cool and trendy", is address, phone number and closing day.

I think we should have an "annoying website of the week/month/year" award.

Crouching tigers, (not so) hidden monkey

I hope this works! This made me laugh out loud:

Must do better

Time management is not my greatest strength, it's not that I don't know how to do it, it's just that I don't actually implement what I know! That is no doubt why I double-booked (no pun intended) myself tonight (correction: LAST night) and had to miss David Mitchell (author of Cloud Atlas) being interviewed at Passaporta, a newish local venue for writers and readers ... grrrr.

And all that jazz..

Here's a nice mixture of franglais together with the French expression "tout ce qui bouge", that I would find difficult to translate accurately into English: "'Ceux Qui Marchent Debout' sont six musiciens dont le répertoire est composé de tout ce qui swingue, tout ce qui groove et tout ce qui bouge."" Literally, "'Those who Walk Upright' are six musicians whose repertoire consists of everything that swings, everything that grooves and everything that moves". It doesn't help that "groovy" and "happening" sound so dated in English now. But if it's swinging, groovy and happening, it's "in" (CQMD's repertoire, at least).

This reminds me of an Italian friend's complaint about English words used in Italian: she was thrown when a friend phoned to invite her to "a pening". Of course, what she had heard as "una pening" was in fact "un happening"!

What's on in Frenglish

"Tout ce qui move in Brussel dans la langue of your choice", according to a current trilingual (Brussel being Dutch) advertisement for a teletext service by tvbrussel. However, the English seems to be a literal translation from French, as well as following French rather than English grammar ("move", not "moves"). I would have translated "tout ce qui bouge" by "everything that's happening" or just "what's on".

You don't often see bilingual ads in officially bilingual Brussels, the only one I remember - and I don't recall what it was for, probably some sort of yoghurt - said something like "trop n'est jamais te veel", or "too much is never too much". Brussels' bilingualism generally works by having two separate language-versions, so in the cinema you sit through the same ad in both languages, with or without subtitles in the other one. And the movies themselves are mostly shown in the original language with both French and Dutch sub-titles - given in listings as V.O. s-t. bil. (version originale sous-titres bilingues).

Suite et fin

On the tiles in Dubrovnik

At ground level you have to look quite hard for signs of the devastation of Dubrovnik during the 1991-92 siege by the Yugoslavian (Serbian and Montenegrin) Army, when more than 200 people died and 632 were injured. You would hardly know that the white marble Stradun - main street - is completely new or that 70% of the buildings were damaged by bombs, grenades and shrapnel (pictures of war damage on here). But from the city walls, you can see how many of the buildings have had to be restored from the difference between those with brand new red tiles and those with older, weathered ones.