James’s Blog

Do’s and don’ts:

These are from a book.

This seems a bit over the top to be a real recruitment clip, but contains a rare bilingual double entendre: Besides the obvious innuendo in English, maritime self-defense force in Mandarin sounds exactly the same as maritime masturbation force.

A naughty phonetic transcription of a Dutch kids’ program.

Here is an example.

More here. (Via Andrew Sullivan.)

Where do homosexuals get all their energy? I often wonder the same. I didn’t even know what jicama is.

A few choice quotes:

But a homosexual can sit for hours in Barney’s tirelessly trying on dozens of pairs, and when he finds the one he wants, why, he’s ready to wear those shoes out to a homosexual club and dance all night. What vim!

Or they go jogging in an urban riverside park and take their dogs with them. And as they do these things, they effortlessly carry on the most sparkling conversations filled with witty bon mots and juicy innuendo.

Neill Cumpston writes a review of 300, which I haven’t seen yet. He doesn’t like the dude-ity too much.

NOT SO GOOD THING:
DUDE NUDITY (“DUDE-ITY”)

These are Greek times, when there were a lot of naked women around. And there are some naked women in this film, but almost every naked woman scene has a muscular dude giving the screen an ass picnic. Dude-ity is something directors put in their movies so people will think they’re serious, I guess, and not just throwing in naked hotties.

Any directors reading this – IT’S OKAY TO JUST THROW IN NAKED HOTTIES.

Can’t someone make a movie about naked Amazons and call it PAUSE BUTTON?

Wetzel’s Pretzels gets a mention in the review.

This page has quite a few more hilarious mistranslations. Nothing quite beats the following one, I think.

From a NYTimes ariticle today about the Beijing Olympics. The Chinese sounds kind of dirty, too.

Doug Kanter for The New York Times

Update: photo of the full ad.

Ever since Yen and I found the sheep head at a meat counter in a Chinatown grocery store, it seems like sheep-themed stories are all around us. First there is the upcoming New Zealand horror movie Black Sheep, then there are all those controversies with the gay sheep studies. I suppose it’s only natural that someone wrote a story from the gay sheep’s perspective. I cannot get over the following paragraph:

Finally, my dad found me with Rick, and he flew into a blind rage, yelling that he had no son, and that if I was lucky I’d end up as a cheap Peruvian cardigan worn by a truck-stop hooker in Alaska. And so I ran away, and I went wild. I experimented with everyone and everything. Bulls. Mules. Duck, duck, goose. I found out exactly why they’re called the Three Little Pigs. Call me Old McDonald, because I had the farm. I even made some adult films, and maybe you’ve heard of them: “Wet Wool,” “Lassie, Come Here,” and the mega-selling “Hoof and Mouth.” Then, one morning, I woke up next to a horse, a hen, and an ear of corn—that’s right, all the food groups. And I was disgusted with myself. What was I, livestock?

I’m a little weary of this weekend’s forecast, with multiple days of highs in the single digits.

I couldn’t remember if there were ever days with highs in the single digits when I lived in Michigan. I went to NOAA’s Ann Arbor page to check how they’re faring with this cold spell, and found this amusing tech glitch.