Just a test

The Translator Who Didn't Know How to Spell

Some days ago I stumbled on a review on Amazon written by some Michael D. from the UK. It was about a music album by Japanese band Dir en Grey. Here is what he had to say about it - if you're in a good mood, it may give you a laugh.:

"Dir En Grey are the lastest westurn alternative fad to come out of Japan. Speaking Japanese myself and being fimiliar with the countries way of life, i know first hand who Dir En Grey are and what they are about. The album itself is devised of very modern brain dead guitar riffs with lyrics to cause shock value, with no real meaning or poise for themselves it is very hard for a speaker of Japanese, who is very much into Japanese music, such as Malice Mizer, SID, MUCC, Shiina Ringo etc, to digest this. I beleive that the album is depressive, unnececerraly and filthy, in a sadistic and brutal way. To get away with such sadistic lyrics in music, especially in music that teens may want to listen to, a band needs an excuse, or a cirtain pride in what and why they are doing it, not admittedly to shock there fans and cause disgust. they also need image to fall back on, so they can say "hey it was just a thing you know?", although Dir En Grey lack this. In many interviews i translated, Kyo has said things like "I love to shock people, and see the look on there faces", and this is just not what music is about, especially when in Japan there are many artists working hard to make music to cheer the over worked youth of Japan up. Each track is layed out like a disturbing poem, as if every track is another go at forcing the listener to take his/her earphones out and throw them to the floor. Dir En Grey have an image, they have a sound. But there image is cirtainly mockable and un origonal, as the girls of Harajuku point out quite easily and there sound requires no taste or emotion."

So Michael claims to speak Japanese, to be familiar with the country and even to be a translator of many interviews. That's fine. I just hope Michael is Japanese, or anything, but English. Because using such a boastful tone and pretentious overstatements like "i know first hand who Dir En Grey are and what they are about" and then making so many mistakes is both laughable and pathetic. The poor guy doesn't know how to write some simple words like unnecessary! How could he translate Japanese into a language he can't spell right? Please, tell me Michael doesn't translate into English.

Let's help Michael with his English homework by correcting his mistakes.

"Dir En Grey is the latest western alternative fad to come out of Japan. Speaking Japanese myself and being familiar with the country way of life, i know first-hand who Dir En Grey is and what they are about. The album itself is devised of very modern brain-dead guitar riffs with lyrics to cause shock value, with no real meaning or poise for themselves; it is very hard for a speaker of Japanese, who is very much into Japanese music, such as Malice Mizer, SID, MUCC, Shiina Ringo etc, to digest this. I believe that the album is depressive, unnecessary and filthy, in a sadistic and brutal way. To get away with such sadistic lyrics in music, especially in music that teens may want to listen to, a band needs an excuse, or a certain pride in what and why they are doing it, not admittedly to shock their fans and cause disgust. they also need image to fall back on, so they can say "hey it was just a thing you know?", although Dir En Grey lacks this. In many interviews i translated, Kyo has said things like "I love to shock people, and see the look on their face", and this is just not what music is about, especially when in Japan there are many artists working hard to make music to cheer the overworked youth of Japan up. Each track is laid out like a disturbing poem, as if every track is another go at forcing the listener to take his/her earphones out and throw them to the floor. Dir En Grey has an image, they have a sound. But their image is certainly mockable and unoriginal, as the girls of Harajuku point out quite easily, and their sound requires no taste or emotion."

If there's something mockable, it's your spelling, old boy. Also, I think his opinion is stupid, but that's another story.

Mankind Lives Up To Its Reputation !

In a way, it's hilarious. In the past, I blogged about religion, Africa's tourments (Darfur and Mugabe), the Avian flu, sex. I also wrote about Bam Margera and the PSP. I kind of sensed which topic would get comments if one did, and there was no way to be mistaken: I have 4 angry comments in the Bam Margera post. The guys just registered to Blogger to be able to write their insults here, two of them also bothered to write a death threat and a vaguley antisemitic note in their quickly set-up blogs.

I'm less cynical and angry than I used to be when I started writing this blog, nonetheless my core views haven't changed much: mankind is still principally made up of furious imbeciles. Thanks guys for proving me right first-hand! Yes, I am amused.

No update

Haven't had time for a good update in months, and haven't had much to complain about lately. So we'll keep the cruising speed for now.

Image

Imagination is an infinite number of beetle-like creatures with flashing multicolored shells. I watch them coming out of the plate in continuing flows, running in wild patterns on the table. I try to catch as many as possible, fistful of colors thrust into my mouth, I crunch them voraciously. Such is their taste, unmatched by any other feast, not even the pastry walls of my winged castle.

Beauty in Sex, Shame, and a Root of Evil

They generally tell you sex is beautiful, that there is nothing to be ashamed of (although mentalities can change from a country, a culture to another), that love between a man and a woman is an act of beauty. But is that really so ? Can it really be something so pure when the parts of our body involved in making love are the ones we use for urinating, defecating and vomiting ? It is a strange thing that all the excitable parts of our body are also related to the evacuation of corporal waste.

Dirt and beauty interconnected ? Definitely not. But why is it like this ? Does it help to nourish the feeling of shame, and hence prevent us from abusing pleasure which is probably "intended" as a stimulous for reproduction rather than a motivation ? It is at least easy to understand how Christian religion could manipulate people's mind and use this inherent feeling of shame, mankind's most unique trait compared to animals, even more than love, for their own designs.

They gave it their own rather poor and heavily right-minded explanation (the original sin) which is indeed a monument to the emotions and consequences of shame (temptation, betrayal, loss of purity, punishment, regrets...), making the act of love some obnoxious stolen treasure. Religion has always been very good at using these questions forever unanswered, deep inside each human being, and providing a simplistic tailor-made answer based on fear and hypocrisy, obeying a pattern and serving once again their own and sole ambitions.

At the risk of going even more off-topic, I must say this is one of the fascinating aspects about religion, Christian religion at least, I don't know the other ones so well, but I'm quite sure they must carry their fair share of hypocrisy too. Religions prentend to care about people while they only care about themselves; helping each other is secondary to worshipping the invisible, religion itself. Men are so skilled at destroying themselves, they've been doing it marvelously well for thousand years since they invented religion.

Most of the precepts religions are ordering its followers to abide by are often neglected or stampeded by religion itself, which displays some blood-spilling sharp examples of villainy. It despises and rejects what humans are in so many ways that it actually is quite much the antithesis of our condition. Instead of teaching us how to improve, religion teaches people not to be people anymore, to look for vices in minor flaws and self-questioning, and to sacrifice all to the futility of the unseen. Indisputably, religion stands as the enemy of the mankind and its evolution. People need principles and answers, but they do not need it from religion, they need to find them from within, from experience and with the help of each other.

A Brief Reflection on Insults

Insults are amusing. Not when they are aimed at you, not even when they feed a conversation, they are amusing when you think of what they actually mean. Let's make a comparison, between the most aggressive and commonly used insult in US English and in French, I choose French because I had a chat about it with a friend and he told me a few things.

The big bad insult in US English is probably "m*therfucker" (yes, I know I put the asterisk in a not very relevant place, probably because I don't give a *fuck; oops, did it again). The big bad insult in French is "encul*". Don't get me wrong, those two words are nasty ones, I wouldn't use them myself unless I go real mad at something, out of control. I certainly don't think it makes you sound cool to swear like an uneducated jerk.

What matters with swear words though, is less what they mean than how they are perceived and how they sound. It's much more a matter of sonority than what we may think, like when a dog is growling, just the sound of it makes you feel his anger and the danger of coming near him. Sweard words have a "musicality" to them, it makes them easier to come out spontaneously and it adds to their effectiveness. You can twist and play with the syllables to underline the strength of your emotions. Keep your teeth pressed tight and stretch the 'f' when saying "Fucker", with a little pression of the 'k'. It will sound aggressive, like if a tiny portion of each syllable was made of a hissing snake and a growling dog.

We could use other words as insults if they had an equivalent effectiveness in terms of sounds and if they did not have a positive meaning, and we sometimes do. Even though sound is important, meaning is too. When you use an insult, you want it to be offending, whether it is directed to another human, or to a thing. The two insults I mentioned at the beginning have quite different meanings. The English one means you have intercourse with a mother, though it is not specified if it is your own or not, we can assume it is because having sex with women who have had children does not really sound like a very offensive suggestion, since there's nothing unusual about it, in our time like in the past.

As for the French insult, it means literally "to be fucked in the ass". It refers to anal sex and as such it's probably more intended to offend a heterosexual male audience than the rest. It does not tell if you are supposed to find this pleasant or not, suggesting either you're being forced into it or liking it which is meant to be offending, again if aimed at the right person, but we can easily deduce the core of the insult is to call the victim a sodomite and by extension an homosexual. Considering these two extreme insults and their meaning, we can come to a funny conclusion. Yes, indeed.

Since the first insult describes an incestuous person and the second one a homosexual male, the conclusion is the following: American males fear less to receive anal sex than they fear a stranger to have sex with their mother, while French males are more worried about receiving anal sex than by their mother having sex with a stranger. Insults are a very curious thing, don't you think ?

Care for a chat ?

I feel evil today. So evil I'm going to do something plain awful: promote a friend's site instead of giving the usual rant. His site is a collection of chat rooms which seems a pretty good idea to me, help him out and have a chat, perhaps you'll meet one or two nice persons that will make you forget about the rotten kind.

Chat : http://chat.bbsig.com