Star Wars!

A bunch of coworkers and my friend Ivan and I all went out to see Star Wars together when it opened on Friday.

We saw it at a suitably sci-fi building--the Core Pacific City Living Mall. Rather an unwieldy name, I think. It isn't that there is a place called the Living Mall inside another place called Core Pacific City, but rather all five words are a single name for a single place. This is what it looks like:

The movie was everything I expected and not much to comment on. I was probably most interested in finding out why, when Darth Vader's head is shown at the end of Return of the Jedi, that it's all messed up. I had originally thought that he was extremely old, but infact he is just middle aged at that point. Episode three solved that for me.

My favorite scene was probably the openning shot which follows a pair of little fighter ships as they weave through a gigantic battlefield in space. It's hard for me to wrap my head around such a battle. It seems impossibly complex.

Before going to the movie, I was worried that I had forgotten everything I had seen in the other Star Wars movies and thus wouldn't appreciate all the loose-string-tying and whatnot so I found a website to help me reaquaint myself to the Star Wars universe. Check out the main page and the page on Star Wars history(which has been fleshed out alot more in "Expanded Universe" material, ie, comic books and cartoons).

Also this weekend, I went out with my girlfriend, Alfreda (pictured below) and saw a bunch of short animations made in Taiwan. They were shown as part of the Taiwan International Animation Festival in Taipei. Some of the animations were more visually interesting and surprising than Revenge of the Sith because they, much more like the first Star Wars film than the sequels, actually showed you something you had never seen before and couldn't expect.

Me and Alfreda!

Another Item of Interlingual Interest

I came across an interesting anecdote on a blog I check from time to time-- http://litserial.blogchina.com/ --which I reproduce here. But first a preview: what English phrase do you think the Chinese sounds ai-ze-ren-de might sound like?

爱责仁德 = 投降?

I PICKED UP an old collection of Cordwainer Smith stories (The Best of Cordwainer Smith) the other day, and ran across the following anecdote in the forward, by J.J. Pierce:

While in Korea, Linebarger masterminded the surrender of thousands of Chinese troops who considered it shameful to give up their arms. He drafted leaflets explaining how the soldiers could surrender by shouting the Chinese words for 'love,' 'duty,' 'humanity,' and 'virtue'--words that happened, when pronounced in that order, to sound like 'I surrender' in English. He considered this act to be the single most worthwhile thing he had done in his life.

Linebarger here is Paul Linebarger, the real name of Cordwainer Smith. The Chinese words mentioned are probably 爱责仁德, pronounced "ài zé rén dé," a fair approximation of the English.

Interlingual Fun!

No, not French kissing—I’m talking about the kind of the enjoyment of seeing how things translate, or fail to do so. Yes, this is something I consider fun. To wit:

Chinese uses the same word for alligator and crocodile, and another word for both hawk and eagle. I don’t mind that so much because I can’t tell these animals apart myself, but it also uses the same word for rat and mouse, which has been a barrier to my expressing myself on more than one occasion, not to mention an insult to mice.

It also uses the same word for burp and hiccup! I mean, give me a break! These are very different things, people!

In a translation class I teach I had students translate some pages from the children’s book, “Captain Underpants” and I discovered that there is no standard Chinese word for plunger, despite the fact that they do commonly exist here.

Often, students’ use of dictionaries make for odd word choices, such as in this letter to NBA star Allen Iverson:

“You can hegemonic your team to the playoffs.”

But other times it can turn a perfectly logical thought into a piece of poetry that twists the mind, as in this wonderful sentence:

“If the stream of the people are expression of surprise or doubt as to the quality of adjective, the line will be very, very long.”

A friend of mine told an anecdote about a very pragmatic interpretor who was assisting a foreign guest speak at a meeting. The foreign man told a joke, which the interpretor "translated" as, "He told a joke, laugh.” Everyone laughed, accoordingly.

The guest speaker may have marveled at how concise and effective the translation was. The interpreter made everyone look good in that scenario.

More Fauna from the Mountain!

Slugs!


Snails!


Foot-long earthworms!


High School Students!

The one on the left (Tina) is all punked out with eyeliner, crosses, and suitable clothing under her school uniform because she had just performed an Avril Lavigne song on the outdoor stage.

This was part of our school's 50th anniversary celebration. The main event was a cheerleading competition between the classes. Their cheerleading was pretty good, especially considering it was totally self choreographed and without coaches. They just drew material from movies and music videos. (Unfortunately I forgot about my camera until late in the day, so no pictures...)

Malu: The Mystery Solved

Malu, or in Chinese characters, 馬陸, are millipedes. I guess I've never seen one before. One time in Church (in New Norway, Alberta) a centipede dropped on my lap and freaked me out, though. Centipedes are scarier looking. They have long legs and move really fast (if the one from Church was indicative).

This quote from another website:

Millipedes differ from centipedes in that almost every segment bears 2 pairs of legs, the body is cylindrical instead of flattened, there are no venom-bearing claws, the antennae are short, and the reproductive organs open far forward on the body. Millipedes crawl slowly, whereas centipedes crawl rapidly. On the seventh segment of the male, one or both pairs of legs are modified as copulatory organs. A pair of scent glands on each segment, opening laterally, discharge a repugnant secretion. In some species, it can be discharged to a distance of nearly a meter and, in the case of some tropical species, has caused blindness in children (Hegner and Engemann, 1968).

So, I guess I should stop picking them up....

Alien Resident

Alien Resident--that oxymoronic moniker now applies to me!

I have an ARC which means that I can do such Taiwanese things as pay low taxes and get health care so I can walk into a hospital and get an IV for any minor ailment.

It also means I can go back to Canada and then return to Taiwan again without going through the oft hasslesome visa application process.

I can also get a Taiwanese drivers license but the odds of a traffic cop speaking to someone who is visibily foreign is so slight that a drivers license is virtually unnecessary.

In other news, prompted by requests to see pictures of the gecko I refered to in a previous post, I've started a little catalogue of animal life in my neighborhood which you can see below. If anyone can tell me what a "malu" is, I'd appreciate it.

Malu

I don't know what this is. It is a long crawly bug. This one was about 10 cm long, but they get longer. The students call them, "malu" in Chinese. They are harmless, and kind of cool, I think.

Malu Again

They have many tiny feet (which you can make out, though blurry, here) which grasp quite effectively, making it not as easy as one might expect to pull one off a tree. But it's outer covering is hard enough that I'm confident I didn't damage it at all by pinching it.

Slug!

The snails and slugs show at night. This slug was about 8 centimeters long, which is average.

Pest Control

Working late in the office, I was being pestered by three dumb fluttering bugs that must have been taking shelter inside from the rain. My insecticidal impulse was rising as they flapped and flopped about, throwing themselves against the floor, walls, and desks repeatedly. But then a gecko appeared in the middle of the floor, calm and cool. It basically waited there, while one by one, the fluttery bugs, in their haphazard, careening manner flew right next to it. It snapped them up nicely without much apparent effort. A fun little show for me--the gecko swallowing them down, at one time having two sets of wings protruding out of its mouth, and its little belly making some sort of digestive pumping action.

Just now another bug has appeared and the gecko, not content with his meal of three, is in chase.

I guess I should close the outer door before the gecko gets full, otherwise in the morning the office might be littered with the unconsumed carcasses of these short-lived bugs.

Speaking of tomorrow, I'll be going to the police station for the last step in the process of getting my Alien Resident Certificate. After being in Taiwan for over a year, I'm finally a legal working resident.

Everything is hunky dory. My only concern is shutting the bugs out without shutting the gecko in...