Sakhalin Island

"Why is it so cold in this Siberia of yours?”

The Republic of Wine

Congrats Mo Yan!

Thunderdome 1

The sampan rolled under the weight of the man stepping out onto the small jetty. Leaning on his cane he pushed up onto the pier leaving the two men in the small boat hanging on as it rollocked back and forth.

‘Good gods Bertie, how long has it been since we were here man? Forty years hmm? Fifty? This demned malarial deathtrap hasn’t changed a bit. Look over there, I’m sure that’s the river bend where that rat Lao Che tried to ambush us that night we were sneaking up to Sooching. Cunning yellow bastard caught us like a Covent Garden catamite with our pants down, pizzle in hand!’

‘Maybe, George,’ said Bertie, grunting as he used his own cane to climb out of the sampan. He looked out over the turgid brown river, running through a flat landscape of rice paddies intersected by a labyrinthine system of canals.  ‘It’s a long river and these rice paddies all look identical.’

‘No, no, I’m sure this is the spot. Gods, I’ll never forget that night, wild banshees came screaming out of those reeds, took out my batman with their first shot. What was his name, Tuckman? Buckman? Good man; had played rugby at Oxford with Wolseley.’

‘I think it was Dignam’

‘What? No, Dignam was in India – got himself invalided home after the Patar campaign.  Buckman it was, Thomas Buckman I remember, went straight the bottom of the Po over there. Guns going off everywhere, those cursed scythes these heathens use flashing in the moonlight. I don’t know how we survived Bertie.’

George stood leaning on his cane on the end of the pier, staring at the eddying water. Bertie hauled a bag out of the sampan.  The sampan owner pushed off the bank with the long oar, back into the current and drifted away into the heat haze.

George turned back, limping with his cane. ‘Yes yes, definitely the spot. Know this river like the inside of my pockets. I told the Colonel that. I said you need an old hand in this part of the world, not some drafted cockchafer from Luton with his mothers milk fresh on his lip. You know what he said to me Bertie? ‘I wish I had someone with your wisdom and experience fighting under the colours still’.

‘The Colonel was being polite George’.

George slammed his cane onto the wooden pier. ‘Damn your eyes Bertie, I know how brass works, you can’t strip a coolie these days without say so from the BG. No, this is our place. We’ll shufti the demned rebels and be back at HQ for tacks.’

Bertie glanced back over the barren fields. A waterbuffalo stood in a paddy a mile inland. A lone fisherman’s shack sat on the riverbank a few hundred yards downstream. The rest of the landscape was empty. ‘If there’s a rebel army here George, then they’re demned good at hiding.’

‘Bah man, this way.’

George shuffled down the jetty on his cane and turned towards the shack. Sighing, Bertie took up the duffel and slowly made his way after him.

The shack was barely a lean-to, an afterthought of scrap wood and brush designed to provide shelter from the merciless sun now high overhead.

A small cadaverous man was haunched down in the shade, cleaning a fish with a small filleting knife. He had frozen when the two men came into view, a rictus grin on his face.

‘Now here we are Bertie, a coolie who can tell us what we need. You interpret for me’ George turned to the fisherman. ‘Now man, where is Tsung Ha?’

Bertie sighed again: ‘don’t be afraid, we are your friends. We are looking for Tsung Ha.

The fisherman’s eyes darted to Bertie and then back to George.

‘fuck you old man’

‘What did he say?’

‘Uhh, he doesn’t know.’

‘Bullshit Bertie, look, he’s obviously a scout foraging for the men.’ George stepped forward, raising his cane. The fisherman ducked back, still grinning. His eyes darting from the cane to the fish to the cane again. He darted forward, knife extended burying it into George’s mid-riff, grabbed the fish and sprinted out into the fields.

George pressed his hand to the blood spurting from the wound. ‘Oh gods Bertie’, and collapsed. Bertie knelt down, lifting George’s head.

‘I bet that was Lao Che’s grandson, the bastard had the last laugh after all.’

‘I think he was just a fisherman George.’

‘Doesn’t matter now. Damn this. How does it look?’

The knife had done its work, one quick blow had shredded the linen shirt and blue ropes bulged from between George’s fingers.

‘You remember Salisbury?’

‘Oh god, that bad.’

‘Yes.’

‘Oh god.’

Blood pooled into the dirt. Against the drone of crickets in the background a mayfly buzzed though the air.

‘You know Bertie.’

“I know George.’

‘Oh god...’

Herbert leaned forward and gently kissed George on the mouth.

Like a faint drum beat, a cannon fired in the distance. 

The Real Berlin

ABC

North face of the Eiger

Mid-autumn festival

中秋节!

One Sentence Review: The Price of Politics

An interesting blow by blow account of the debt ceiling crises that the author tries to pin on Obama while ignoring the ridiculousness of the House Republicans. 3 stars.

Marc Johns

Diaries of a Madman

Gogol's Memoirs of a Madman

Lu Xun's A Madman's Diary

In Lu Xun's work, the first entry is remarked upon by Yu Hua as being the first time he realised the subtlety of Lu Xun's work. He quotes

何以看我兩眼呢？

The literal interpretation of the phrase goes "Otherwise why should that dog at the Zhao house have looked at me twice?"

The Lyell  translation (1990) states "Otherwise, how do you explain those dirty looks the Zhao family's dog gave me"

Yu Hua translates this as 'otherwise, why would Zhao's dog look at me that way."

Ultimately the Yu Hua translation works best. If the purpose of the line is to establish the mental instability of the madman, who is attributing anthropomorphic intent to a dog, then it is tricky for a translation to ascribe the same intent. As there is really no equivalent in English to the Chinese idiom 'looked at me twice', meaning 'a weird look', a literal interpolation falls short of the meaning of the original. The Lyell translation's attempt to use the adjective 'dirty' is too specific. It is telling not showing. Yu Hua's 'that way' however encapsulates the weirdness and ambiguity of the line.

See the essay on Lu Xun and modernism here

Good enough for Papa, good enough for me

surface tension

Today my History class took a field trip to the Museum of Tolerance. Its a museum showing kids not to be prejudiced and all that good stuff. Anyways, one exhibit is two doors next to each other. One door has a sign hanging over it saying "Those with prejudice walk through this door" The other door's sign said "Those without prejudice walk through this door". Obviously the door for people without prejudice isn't openable because as the tour guide says "Everyone has prejudice". So, I start tugging on the door and say "What the hell is wrong with this damn door, did some damn Jew make this?" and the tour guide kicked me out and I had to sit in the bus for 15 minutes (the rest of the trip). When we get back my history teacher found out what I did and had a fit and I get suspended. What a fucking way to end a week




I understand that Scissors can beat Paper, and I get how Rock can beat Scissors, but there's no fucking way Paper can beat Rock. Paper is supposed to magically wrap around Rock leaving it immobile? Why the hell can't paper do this to scissors? Screw scissors, why can't paper do this to people? Why aren't sheets of college ruled notebook paper constantly suffocating student as they attempt to take notes in class? I'll tell you why, because paper can't beat anybody, a rock would tear that shit up in 2 seconds. When I play rock/ paper/ scissors, I always choose rock. Then when somebody claims to have beaten me with their paper I can punch them in the face with my already clenched fist and say, oh shit, I'm sorry, I thought paper would protect you, you asshole.




If a lion could speak french we still wouldn't understand it, unless you knew french.

Kinryo Sake

I thought Planck would be shorter

Christoph Niemann

Ghost Ghost Rider

I wish every day was Captain Picard day

You want to talk about a new iPhone?

I'm out of here

Return to Shanghai

Our American Cousin

http://blogs.suntimes.com/shinyobjects/2009/05/5-questions-with-christian-verdun---how-did-he-create-his-lincoln-assassination-image.html

Black Mesa

Morse code

http://spectator.org/archives/2012/01/20/remembering-john-thaw-and-insp

Kelly!

Step

- You fuckin' asshole. 

- What a fuckin' dick. What the fuck did you want me to do, back down? He called me a bitch. We kept our rep, bro. 

- Fuck rep, man. I got a callback tomorrow. 

- Yeah, I gotta get up early tomorrow. What the fuck are you carrying a gun for? In case somebody steps to you, Snoop Dogg? 

- Hey, man, you're not from here. You don't know how it is. I grew up in L.A. 

- Anaheim. 

- Whatever, man. It's different out here. It's not like New York, Mikey. 

- Fuckin' A right, it's not like New York. Out here you can avoid trouble. It's not like you live in Compton, Sue, with bullets whizzing by your head. You live in a good neighborhood, man. In New York trouble finds you. 

 - People get carjacked. 

- Oh, man, who would ever carjack your fuckin' K car? He's right, Sue. You don't need to carry a gat. 

- Just 'cause I had the balls to stand up to these guys... 

- Like fuckin' House of Pain was gonna do anything?

Contra-Positive

In logic, if a statement is true, then the contra-positive is also true.

Eg “if p, then q” implies contra-positively “If not q, then not p.”

So is it really true that “If you liked it, then you should have put a ring on it”? One way to test your answer is to ask whether the contra-positive is true: “If you shouldn’t have put a ring on it, then you didn’t like it.”

Of course, there are many possible meanings of “liked it,” but arguably neither the statement nor its contra-positive are true (because you might have “liked it” but learned that the other person was married). However, a majority of people would think that the inverse of the song’s claim is true: If you did not like it, then you shouldn’t have put a ring on it. And we know that the contra-positive of the statement must also have the same truth value. So we must also believe “If you should’ve put a ring on it, then you liked it.” (The inverse and converse of an original statement are contra-positives of each other!)