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Sagittarius Horoscope for week of January 23, 2014

I understand the appeal of the f-word. It's guttural and expulsive. It's a perverse form of celebration that frees speakers from their inhibitions. But I'm here today to announce that its rebel cachet and vulgar power are extinct. It has decayed into a barren cliche. Its official death-from-oversaturation occurred with the release of the mainstream Hollywood blockbuster The Wolf of Wall Street. Actors in the film spat out the rhymes-with-cluck word more than 500 times. I hereby nominate you Sagittarians to begin the quest for new ways to invoke rebellious irreverence. What interesting mischief and naughty wordplay might you perpetrate to escape your inhibitions, break taboos that need to be broken, and call other people on their BS and hypocrisy?

There is a store in Downtown Knoxville that is now in trouble for their use of the F-Bomb in their display window posters.  The citizens fought long and hard to lure them into opening a store, and now they feel betrayed and dissed by the shopkeepers, even though this probably had nothing to do with the circumstances.

While context is very important, it is also important to be mindful of the life of words beyond context.

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Windows supports just over 3800 kanji (Japanese ideographic characters--the majority of their writing system).
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For the last few days, my Windows 7 Pro has lost its East Asian Language Support. Which means, among a few things, I can't translate the titles of dozens of anime soundtrack songs I have loaded onto WinAmp. The foreign characters display fine on Internet Explorer and other programs, but not on internal Win7 functions like directories and filenames. They don't display in Notepad either.

Windows Update isn't as functional in Win7 as it was in previous versions of Windows. I don't know what I should do about this. I'm not sure I still have the master disks for the OS--Computer King has the nasty habit of just installing the OS and keeping the disks.
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Not only is the title "Sky Fighters" the official English translation for the title of the Chinese fighter jet movie I mentioned previously this week, it is the popular translation (official too!) for the title of the French fighter jet film Les Chevaliers Du Ciel from a few years ago.

ExpandEMBED AND LINK Here...Because You Are Just Too Cool )

How long before a sneaky video editor puts the two films in combat with each other?
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As you may remember, I was following the Mainland Chinese Air Force's process to select a new paint scheme for their aerobatic demo team's planes. And that I posted filched videos on YouTube showing the proposed schemes.

Today somebody posted a long rant on the comments portion of one of my video posts and this clause was included (translated into English by me and Bablefish):

I kneel ask you to duplicate together the above card and to retransmit this card, the slight effort can also behave righteously. Thanks.

Thanks but no thanks. Really.

Meanwhile the PLAAF chose their scheme, but I don't have enough sources to share it. Watch this space.

PS (via Yahoo!/AP):
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Ow!

Mom just pre-ordered a Kobo. No further details are known at this time.
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The local NPR station produces a music history program called Echoes Of The Golden Age, and tonight's show was about drinking songs in opera. So that concept sparked a discussion between myself and Mum about her knowledge of drinking songs, and she told me a story...

...Back in college she took German langauge and for her second year, her teacher was an actual German woman (as opposed to a science teacher who had taken the job the previous year by default). Well, after one particular class, as everybody was leaving the classroom, some of the class cut-ups were serenading everybody else with a drinking song they had made up in German, and Mum recalled how funny the German teacher thought it was. Teenage boys who had never set foot in Germany making up a German drinking song about the Rhine River.

And then I told her that because of all those American soldiers being stationed in West Germany over the course of the Cold War, country & western music is relatively popular in Germany even today...and there are probably German kids writing songs in English about American landmarks.

History works both ways.
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Sagittarius Horoscope for week of February 4, 2010

In the Choctaw language, there are two kinds of past tenses. In one, you speak about an event or experience that you personally know to be a fact. In the other, you deliver information that you have acquired second-hand and therefore can't definitely vouch for. In my perfect world, you Sagittarians would find a way to incorporate this perspective into all your communications during the coming week. In other words, you would consistently distinguish between the unimpeachable truth and the alleged truth. According to my analysis of the astrological omens, this would give you great power to influence the rhythms of life to flow in your favor.


In this era where truth can be mass-produced, mass-disseminated and mass-ignored, there is a silent, underlying desire for a more solid veracity independent of the firehose of ideas.

Wait, did I just write that? Did I mean what I wrote? All of a sudden I'm not so sure. I'll get back to you when I figure it out.
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Hunted down all the tracks for the Legends of Galactic Heroes soundtrack. I don't know if it was the data on the disks themselves or Gracenote that had the problem, but when I ripped the disks to Winamp the titles didn't all match what was on the liner notes. The liner notes were right tho'.

Dunno if there are any fan sites that keep track of this sort of thing that are current. I may just put my track listing up here if anybody is really interested.
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--And wound up buying. I suppose that means the economy might actually rebound.

THERE is a stall at the Kodak Flea Market, one that trades in comic books, action figures and other such memorabilia. What I brought to sell is unimportant.

What I bought is two anime soundtrack CDs: Idol Defense Force Hummingbird and the third part of Legends of the Galactic Heroes TV series. In the process of uploading the content to my computer. It'll take a while; the LOGH soundtrack set is three disks!

The seller has a couple milk crates worth of anime CDs for cheap. Initial D, Ex-Driver, Urusei*Yatsura, Orange Road, Nadia: The Secret of Blue Water, game soundtracks...

And they're cheap because, as I noticed when I opened the packaging, they're Taiwanese bootlegs. I suppose I get what I pay for.

FP

PS: On the LOGH content...as those of you who are hard-core otaku may know, the overwhelming majority of the music for the show is symphonic classical, which means my decades of listening to local NPR stations' afternoon programs is "paying off"--somewhat. (What do you mean we don't have any Shostakovich in our CD collection?--Guess I have to look it up in the Encyclopedia if I have any hope of spelling that correctly.) I can read kana...but figuring out classical catalog notion when it's rendered in kanji is a challenge. At least all the numbers are "Arabic" Numerals.
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Creole name for cottonmouth snakes--Congo. (Gosh darn.)

Cajun name for cottonmouth snakes--Bâtard De Sonnette. (Hmm...kinda like that.)
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I'm researching my story idea and I need to know if there are any Creole words for the species of snake known as the "water moccasin" or "cottonmouth". I've found general words for "snake" in Creole but they all seem to be loanwords from Euro languages (French, Latin, English, Dutch) that had mutated from generations of adaptation.

Just point me to a source, please?

FP
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White House Reaction To Carter's Reaction To Wilson's Reaction...

...And I still expect Obama to be the first President Of The United States to be Lynched in office. There is no "justice for all" in this nation.

I wonder who Kanye thought should have won the election, like, really. :Þ

PS: Somebody On My Friends List Asked About This Subject. *Shrug*
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The book 1984 was mentioned on Facebook today, and it reminded me of a heated discussion from USENET several years ago. I looked up my own posts from that event and found my notes:

I keep Orwell's Rules of Language posted by the computer here. Perhaps you should too.

I) Never use a metaphor, simile or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.
[Stephen Bierce observation: since this is a "print" medium, this rule doesn't apply as greatly as the others.]
II) Never use a long word where a short one will do.
III) If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.
IV) Never use the passive where you can use the active.
V) Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.
VI) Break any one of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.


So that brings me to an important question: do I play by the rules or break them? I'll let you answer that.
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As a by-product of my usual chaotic research addiction logic chains, I found out that I couple fonts I have on my computer (and I suppose, more than just those--I just haven't looked that hard yet) will support Japanese--not just kana, but kanji!

So I'm thinking about various ways I can use these fonts to expand my know-how of Japanese writing in general and kanji in particular. As the kanji seem to be arranged in Japanese alphabetical order (niku ["meat"] is only a few characters from nichi ["day"] for an example), I might make some actual headway.

Of course, there are about 4000 characters in the set, so I doubt I'll learn all of them. I've only been studying Japanese twenty years--with no formal courses.

FP
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Perhaps you may have noticed a set of Chinese/Kanji characters next to my name when I post. Well, this is how they came to be:

When my mother's first book was translated into Japanese in the 1980s, the editors transliterated our surname to Biasu. From that, I decided to make the Asian version of the name 美朝 <- BiAsa <- "beautiful morning".

As for my given name, I found a site that will give a set of choices to work from based on the phonetics of Christian names. I chose from the provided data 深恬 <- ShenTian <- "deep peace"...though this would be pronounced fukabei if in Japanese.

Just yesterday, I learned that with the Japanese numerical mnemonic system, fukabei can be the numerical sequence 291, and biasa can be 183. So I'm thinking about what I can do with 183-291. Or 291-183. Or 183 X 291 (= 53253).

FP
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The word for the day is パトカー.


The reason being the in-the-after-reaches-of-my-mind idea of having Moonshine repainted as a Japanese police cruiser, with my name in Asian characters (美朝深恬) on the sides. As my brother and I have been often compared to the Blues Brothers, and just about all my folks being Blues Brothers fans...perhaps...

And the search has given me This Site to poke around in.

Blame [personal profile] robotech_master. :)
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[Error: unknown template qotd]

* Sports (got a heck of a wallop to the gut from a line-drive in Little League baseball, and that was the end of my career after most of one summer)
* Music (not good enough at keeping rhythm/pacing/timing, and not much at reading sheet music)
* Foreign languages (the ones I've been interested in are not ones taught in public schools in Middle America [first German, then Russian, now Japanese])
* Fashion (by the time I buy it, it's passe)
* Cooking (I'm a complete plebian)
* Draftsmanship (what can I say? I was too depressed to stick with it, and ultimately it became obsolete)
* Politics (now THAT was a bad idea. Running for my class vice-presidency was one of the stupidest decisions of my life and if I had to do it all over again...)
* Boy Scouts (I joined out of Uniform Envy. Wasn't in it long enough to get a uniform)
* Retail (was thinking about that this morning. Almost as bad as politics, and about as painful as sports)
* Hospitality (everything I hate about cooking, plus everything about retail that hates me back)

Good stopping place. A person my age has plenty opportunities for trial-&-error, and as the song goes "we never fail to fail...it's the easiest thing to do".

FP

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Stephen R Bierce

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