Sunday, March 29, 2010
In the course of some online research, I chanced upon this page: http://today.msnbc.msn.com/id/21690514/
In 2007, a 13-year-old girl hugged a 12-year-old female classmate who had just returned to school after having grieved the loss of a parent. Both girls were given detention by their middle schools for violating bans against public displays of affection. I think that's about as bad as it gets.
Thursday, March 11, 2010
The Swiss teenagers who clobbered 5 people in Munich some time ago, including a 45-year-old man whose face they disfigured by repeatedly kicking his head, are a disgrace to society. Now, Australia has a similar case: a young man in a wheelchair was beaten to near death by two youngsters. They were filmed by a security camera in an elevator where it happened. As if it were a video game.
Last night, when most people were already asleep, ARD broadcast a docmentary about salmon farming in Chile and how its various manifestations drove "regular" fishermen into poverty. One big corporation runs most of the farms. It dumps hundreds of tons of antibiotics in the sea, along with huge volumes of chemicals and dyes. When the ocean floor is littered with cadavers and feces, it shuts down the pens and moves on south. Patagonia is next. The government does nothing.
Oh, amost forgot: the company responsible for this never-ending disaster, run by Norwegian mogul John Fredriksen, secured a WWF endorsement for the paltry sum of EUR 100,000 p.a. - which will forever change my attitude to WWF.
There's not much uplifting stuff in the news these days. Greed is still the underlying theme everywhere.
Saturday, February 13, 2010
OK, it's just a tiny picture, but on a Mac, you can latch your mouse onto it, drag it to your desktop, and double-click it to get a decent size that shows those silly little pompoms on the guards' slippers. WAIT: I don't even remotely want to bash Greek traditions. I could just as well have taken Switzerland's Vatican Guard, a gathering of members of the Order of the Garter with their fluffy headgear, the Beefeaters with their interesting high hats, ruffs, and tassels (not to mention stockings), or some Pashtuns wearing Pakols. Does anyone remember ten-gallon hats? Then, there was the Ministry of Silly Walks. If you don't know what that is, Google it by all means.
Enough
The picture is a metaphor for really, really ridiculous traditions. Some traditions are absolutely bona fide, such as honesty (also in politics), benevolence, and helping your neighbors get through difficult times. Or, say, the way decent beer is brewed. But others are poised to be the downfall of the human race or at least of some very fine examples of fauna, like the Bengal tiger or the rhinoceros. Both face extinction because some people think their personal erections are more important than the survival of the animals to whose parts they attribute aphrodisiacal properties.
Some really stubborn traditions need to be abolished. Like FMG. Or parliamentary sessions populated by thousands of money-greedy, anonymous fourth-tier politicians with no track records, whose sole purposes in life are to hang on to privileges like chauffered limousines and five-star accommodation and opportunities to bask in the limelight of a third-tier sub-alpha politician. Copenhagen was one of those things. The United Nations Security Council is another example that the broth can never succeed with so many cooks. A kitchen brigade has an executive chef. A clan has an elder. A tribe has a chief. A company has a CEO. Political factions have phalanxes of infighters who stalemate progress.
And of course, the executive chef, the elder, the chief, the CEO or the political honcho can be incompetent or corrupt or both. The problem is always how to get rid of such individuals. In the case of parliaments, it is impossible, because such institutions are tradition.
Music
On another note: after having taken in Beethoven's Missa Solemnis recently, I can only hope to live long enough to listen to all the Schumann, Chopin, Mozart, Bach, and E.S. Posthumus pieces that I don't know yet.
FDAs
Why don't the world's leading economies merge their FDAs? How can it be that some substances are deemed carcinogenic in Canada but not in the USA? (added on March 16, 2010: I just read somewhere that men who grow bald by around 30 are less likely to develop prostate cancer. Now, it's time for a study which proves that the same holds true for women. It would also be useful if scientists could corroborate that men who buy Sears refrigerators are less likely to grow bald - so these clueless consumers could sue Sears for promoting a carcinogenic appliance. Sears is just a metaphor here, please!)
Crowdsourcing and collaborative sites
Of course I pop into proz, dict.cc, linguee, and LEO sometimes. I also have this dictionary/thesaurus application that comes standard with Mac OS. The trouble is: there's a lot of dead rhino stuff in these places. proz has a points system that entices lots of people who might otherwise be lurkers to propose ways of translating terms like Mehrfachnutzen. That's a really tough one, originally from the printing industry. When I see suggestions like "multiple uses", and realize that if a sufficient number of people second the motion, it will be carved in stone, I get really worked up. Translating is not a democratic process. And when a text really becomes involved and you run across a word like "beitragsorientiert" (as applied to pension plans), answers are not available on any of the four sites mentioned above. My experience is that about 20% of the suggestions provided by eager helpers are wrong. Wikipedia, so far, is a much better source of peer-reviewed knowledge, and I fervently hope that its quality will not be diluted by zealous contributors. But my visits to these sites are also humbling: there's so much I don't know.
India and translation
Coming back to proz, I see a growing number of Indian translators who are offering virtually every combination of source and target languages, even German to Swiss German! That's extremely surprising, because obviously, a German company that wants to localize its material for Swiss users has asked an Indian outfit to quote on the project, and the Indian outfit, obviously, has to find an extremely cheap provider in Switzerland to do the job. If I ever needed a translation from German to Korean, I would try to find someone in Korea with good references. That's globalization for you.
No
What I won't go into at this point is Helmand, Leuchtpetarden (not translated in proz, linguee, dict.cc or leo), highly incendiary and extremely dangerous pyrotechnical flares thrown into grandstands by brain-damaged soccer fans, Palin and the GOP, the expense accounts handed in by EU officials, the arranged marriage in Saudi Arabia of a 12-year-old girl to an 80-year-old man, and how Goldman Sachs helped camouflage Greece's debt. Oh yes, and Switzerland-bashing. Which percentage of Germany's population is composed of civil servants, anyway? Wherever you are and whatever day it is: keep out of trouble.
