Translation problems

My pet peeve of translated pop songs has been for some while the Finnish version of Blue Velvet, which was quite cleverly done as Puuhelmet. Just try to imagine a David Lynch film using that one…

But it is kind of comforting to know that Finns aren’t alone in this foolishness. Shirley Bassey has done Edith Piaf’s Je Ne Regrette Rien in English as No Regrets. And it just does not work.

Weary

Spent the day shopping and consequently lugging heavy bags around Cardiff. I never knew there was an Oxfam store dedicated to books. Picked up You’ll Never Eat Lunch in this Town Again and Tilting at Windmills, a collection of ”new Welsh short fiction” (don’t know why, it just felt appropriate).

Moreover, the bastards at WHSmith lured me into buying Antony Beevor’s both Berlin – The Downfall 1945 and Stalingrad. This wasn’t reasonable behaviour, and the only explanation I can give was that the books were £4 off marked price, ie. pretty cheap.

Add to this the fact that I couldn’t resist the £6 Billy Connolly DVD I spotted at MVC and that Noreena Hertz’s The Silent Takeover arrived in the mail in the morning, and the conclusion is that I’ve bought way way too many books and will face some logistics problems hauling them back to Finland. Oh dear.

Great movie ad

UGC Cinemas publishes a magazine called Unlimited, which is basically one big monthly advertisement for coming movies. Every flick that is ”reviewed” within has a little subheading called ”You should see it because…”.

Now, the latest issue included a review for Kangaroo Jack with the already legendary blurp ”YOU SHOULD SEE IT BECAUSE… Is there anything funnier than a comedy kangaroo wearing a jacket and sunglasses?”

Shouting motorists

Yesterday I saw for the first time motorists getting so agitated that they actually stopped their vehicles and stepped outside to yell at each other. (”You better stop now.” ”Fuck you!” ”Yeah? Well fuck you too.”)

I really am a small town boy, aren’t I?

Word 43: Mephitic

At eight, Ellen and I grab a snack together standing at the mephitic end of kitchen counter, but I can only manage two or three mozzarella sticks, and lunch had been a mere handful of McNuggets.

mephitic (adj) : 1: tending to destroy life; poisonous; noxious; as, mephitic exhalations; mephitic regions 2: offensive to the smell; as, mephitic odors [syn: miasmic] – source: Nickel and Dimed, p. 46

Hum

I’m so bored I think I’ll go see X2 despite the silly name.

Word 42: Octogenarian

’You Stole The Sun From My Heart’ appropriates a line from the poem Reflections by RS Thomas, an octogenarian, cleric and Welsh nationalist, whose sombre meditations on life west of Offa’s Dyke have clearly struck a chord.

octogenarian (adj) : being from 80 to 89 years old (n) : someone whose age is in the eighties – source: NME Originals: Manic Street Preachers, p. 118

Hummer style

The New Yorker had an advert for Hummer (the civilian version of U.S. Army’s general utility vehicle) with a flashy close-up of the bumber and the slogan ”B to the L to the I to the N to the G”. Who the hell are they selling the cars to?

Asylum seekers

Here’s a little gem of journalistic skill I found in G2 today.

”It’s just about standards of living,” says Tremaine Bashford, herself from Priory estate, who works for the council advising local community groups and residents’ associations. ”The problem is that the government sets a basic standard of living for asylum seekers, and it’s nothing to do with the council. […] The stanrdard of living is actually better than some of the people in that area.” One might argue that if a housing estate can make asylum seekers look wealthy by comparison, it is not the asylum seekers who are the problem.

Innit so?

Virtual sets

Just saw the tackiest virtual set imaginable on ITV news. A word of explanation: because filming, or photography in general, is not allowed in British courtrooms, the media have to resort to all sorts of tricks to illustrate their stories: hand drawn portraits, footage of people going in and coming out of courtrooms, and now this.

So what was so bad about it? Well, it was ugly and worthless. The reporter walked in the virtual courtroom for just a couple of seconds to point out ”where the defendant stood”. Now, the room was a flashback to computer games of the early 1990s: a hastily assembled 3D model of a generic courtroomish flavour with blocky shapes of solid colour. And all this just to push totally noninteresting news.

A Heartbreaking ∞ of Staggering Genius

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