I have been taking part in an intense French immersion program for about 2 years now, and it has produced amazing results. One of the side effects of living another language is that you get to see how words pass between cultures and how those words come to represent different ideas.
Take the term menage a trois, a loaded term if there ever was one, at least on disreputable websites the English-speaking world over. However, menage is a homebody as words go, it means “the cleaning” as in faire le menage, ” to do the cleaning”. From there we get vivre en menage, “to live and clean with someone”, and if that isn’t the definition of a modern Western couple, I don’t know what is. And finally, the infamous phrase in the title of this poste. Hilarious, isn’t it, that a prude word can become so dirty?
Friday, February 15, 2008
I was going to start this series on Monday, seeing as how we all dread Mondays and yet they never cease to arrive.
But then I thought, “No, man, be positive. Think Fridays!”
Booya. Be aware that once you click on the load files button, you’ll be downloading about 7 MB of sound filery. Also be aware that you need Flash 9, and that this might not work on Vista.
Wednesday, January 2, 2008
There were the heat variations, the changing pitch of light on the walls, the growing children, all these would mark time in the containers. Clothes had shredded over the years, shame proving surprisingly resilient before giving way to indifference and quiet comfort. Nights were warm, a hidden light source assumed to be the moon hidden yet allowing for the dexterous to entertain with lively hand shadows. Time passed.
Leaders emerged within hours of the containers being populated. These were gradually ignored as reality dawned and priorities changed. Contrary to the past, security and fiscal reform did not figure largely into daily container life. Instead, the ability to tell a great story, to allow container dwellers to forget their bizarre predicament as fully as possible, proved the most common characteristic among the respected. To forget the bafflement, to build one’s resignation to it, to contemplate the growing contentment, this was where most of the effort within the containers was directed toward.
Those responsible for creating these curious communities are lost to posterity. It is thought only a small number of inhabitants have been identified, and even then only through the stories they told. Tales concerning the introduction to container life center around a brutal sensation of abrupt removal, the rough shearing of deep roots. They had gone to sleep one night, in their respective late twentieth century settings, and found themselves in the containers when they awoke. No one ever entered in any other manner than finding themselves placed there by some invisible hand. They were apparently relieved of the need to eat, and therefore also of the purging of waste by-products that normally followed. Sleep still occurred, although dreaming was more frequent and less hurried than before. Although some containers were large enough to allow for exercise, it too was not necessary, as aging seemed to have slowed to a crawl.
The containers were organic designs, bulbous and smooth and bone white, with varying numbers of pyramidal tubes jutting from and looping over each structure. It was difficult to see very much of the surrounding landscape through these openings. Inhabitants came to ignore the outside altogether over time, only occasionally mentioning a patch of blue sky or arid, rocky land visible through an opening. The perspective turned inwards, and the imagination took over.
Thursday, November 29, 2007
Heyo,
check out the stats:
Now all those numbers don’t mean actual people, it’s almost impossible to know that (unless you are Google, but instead the requests for files from my server, which is much easier to calculate. In any case, the numbers are way up, which means a large amount of my intellectual property is floating out there (Konichiwa China!) in the noosphere.This is great.
“Sounds travel through space long after their wave patterns have ceased to be detectable by the human ear: some cut right through the ionosphere and barrel on out into the cosmic heartland, while others bounce around, eventually being absorbed into the vibratory fields of earthly barriers, but in neither case does the energy succumb; it goes on forever-which is why we, each of us, should take pains to make sweet notes.”
How many sweet notes get lost in our brains, do you think, trapped in there for entire lives? What about all those sweet notes trapped on scratched CDs and unreadable hard drives?! What about the children?!!
Soooooooooooooooo, what next? Well, the pandakarian nation is firmly entrenched in the newfound fervor around the internet, more as a platform for expression than a method for viewing acquaintances’ pictures (though it has a place for that too, as well as for news and political economics). This quote nicely describes what thoughtful web design can be:
Web design is the creation of digital environments that facilitate and encourage human activity; reflect or adapt to individual voices and content; and change gracefully over time while always retaining their identity.
Alright, I like it.
Music is music, that’s not going to change, but the music business is different, mostly because of the internet. This was inevitable; contrary to what some assholes might say, the system was severely flawed. Now, you got your recommendation services, your music blogs, your harmful mp3s. You got You Tube where guitar shredders get millions of views, which might explain the success of Guitar Hero, injuries be damned. Finally, you got the next generation stuff, the this-isn’t-a-pushed-to-the-limits-piece-of-software-called-a-web-browser but a-globally-accessible-music-production-and-plugin-suite.
So we hope to be a part of all this. Check back for updates, or subscribe, that might be easier. A bien tot.
Saturday, November 17, 2007
Into the thin air of the Blogosphere!
No actually, the loading time for this site was taking way to long, so we are gonna take some time to update everything here, thank you for your patience.
Search engines run out of gas, navigation becomes treacherous. Ride into forgotten myspaces, raining less gratitude each year as a billion thank you’s evaporate. Blogs prove that a million monkeys tapping away at typewriters eventually do produce Shakespeare. Still unproven: monkeys can recognize the Bard. Abandon coal mines of opinions, ye distraught at leaky memories!