Most acronyms look like acronyms. Some don’t. Radar, for example, or laser, or USA Patriot Act. Laser is the acronym for “Light Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation.” Radar stands for “Radio Detection And Ranging.” And the USA Patriot Act, believe it or not, is officially “Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism Act of 2001.” Makes you wonder what came first, the name or the acronym.

Among the many unsolicited pieces of e-mail that reach me every day, this one from Shanghai Wonderful Translation Co. Ltd. stood out. The title “Total Language Solutions” made me curious. And their sales point sounds somehow convincing:

You may ask why we offer the lowest price with such professionally integrated service. The reason is that we live in different countries with different living standard. 爀.g. It may cost 200 USD for translating a document in your country, and it costs only 50 USD for translating the same document in my country, which I assume is the most attractive point regarding our cooperation.

Their website dazzles with a big Flash animation (slogan: “Base on Shanghai and go to the world”), and then offers links to numerous languages. I had to pick German:

Das Endziel von unseren Mitarbeitern ist , die Bedraengnisse und die Besorgnisse der Kunden als eigene zu betrachten, das Gewinnen von Ihnen und uns zu erzielen.

Ok. I thought we had left the era of the teletype, so Shanghai Wonderful, please e-mail me to find out how to print an “ä.” And let’s not even start guessing what this sentence might possibly mean. But nevermind the unimportant stuff like umlauts or meaning, what really counts are the people. And here, Shanghai Wonderful comes out on top: “Die Mitarbeiter von unserer Firma lieben ihre Arbeit vom ganzen Herzen.”

Stewart Carter in a 1999 review of Sirens of Titan on the British infinity plus website wrote:

Surely everybody – even the non-sf reading literati who sail the skies of big national newspaper reviews high above – knows Kurt Vonnegut?

Brilliant pseudo-sf novels, bleakly comic, often despairing of mankind? Ring any bells? No? Oh, come on. Slaughterhouse 5, Cats Cradle, Mother Night… I studied Vonnegut on a serious Literature degree, for heaven’s sake, that’s how famous he is!

(And let me add, Kurt Vonnegut is an American writer.) Why I am quoting this is that I went to Barnes and Noble today. I wanted to buy A Man Without a Country for M. since she has been a Vonnegut fan since way back when. I couldn’t find it, so I asked the young woman at the customer service desk. “Is that Kurt with a ‘C’?” she wanted to know. “How do you spell the last name?” I was too polite to ask why she worked in a bookstore.

You’d never guess which section the book was in. Current Affairs!?

[PS: Watch Kurt Vonnegut’s talk with Jon Stewart here.]

Beim Auffüllen meiner Festplatte bin ich auf einen altbekannten Song (auf den MP3-Player unten klicken) von ca. 1967 der Gruppe Smoke gestoßen. Den kannte ich mal sehr gut, und ich ich mußte da natürlich direkt an Uschi und den Beat-Club denken – schwarzweiß und mit den dicken Sennheiser-Mikrofonen. Damals war Radio Bremen noch seiner Zeit voraus! Seufz. Aber mal ehrlich, konnte ich mit dem Text seinerzeit wirklich was anfangen bei meinen Englischkenntnissen?

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Nachtrag: Wie ich so rumgoogle finde ich zu meiner Überraschung, daß die erste Beat-Club-Sendung am 25. September 1965 ausgestrahlt wurde, also kommenden Sonntag vor 40 Jahren! Ein Grund zum Feiern – dachte auch Radion Bremen.

Nochn Nachtrag: Thank you, YouTube!

Ahh, the copyright nazis have struck again. Whatever happened to the idea that copyright is “to encourage a dynamic creative culture, while returning value to creators so that they can lead a dignified economic existence, and to provide widespread, affordable access to content for the public”? Oh, wait. That is what the World Intellectual Property Organization says, and that’s a U.N. agency. And we know what happens in non-elected bodies.

 

Is there any place left where we are safe from Google?

Softeware $trings as poetry: CADverse, by Robin.

And here a genuine Ernst Jandl œuvre:

die sonne scheint
die sonne scheint unterzugehen
die sonne scheint untergegangen
die sonne scheint aufzugehen
die sonne scheint aufgegangen
die sonne scheint

Mmm… interesting. I will look at strings with different eyes now.

Oops. Somebody seems to have been out to lunch.

One of these logos is not like the other. Oh, wait: yes it is.

By now you’ve probably heard that Quark has a new logo. Of course, by now you’ve also probably forgotten what Quark is, but put that aside for a moment, quit out of InDesign, and take a look at their new logo.

(via Antipixel)

Kommt ein „s“ zum Arbeitsamt und will ’nen Job. Sagt der Sachbearbeiter: „Gut, daß Sie kommen. In Saarbrücken werden Sie gebraucht. Teamwork mit ‚K‘, ‚ö‘, ‚r‘, ‚p‘, ‚e‘ und nochmal ‚r‘. Die haben zwar schon ohne Sie angefangen, aber erst mit Ihnen macht die Sache Sinn.“

(via Die Gefühlskonserve)

I had to work through the Labor Day weekend, but I took the opportunity to check out some older movies which hadn’t seen in a long time. Remember C’era una volta il West which goes by the English title Once Upon a Time in West? I saw it first 1968 in Germany where it had the melodramatic title Spiel mir das Lied vom Tod. The title notwithstanding, this film was an epiphany – Western movies were never the same after Sergio Leone’s brutal wide-screen close-ups, Ennio Morricone’s famous score, and the script … were there any good guys? To top it all, Henry Fonda was the head-baddie!

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A couple of years later I saw another much lauded Leone Western named Il Mio nome è Nessuno which has the English title My Name is Nobody. I found the score irritating, the story patchy and confusing. But I was between continents then and thought I must have missed something. This weekend, thirty years later, I revisited the movie and have to say that my impression hasn’t changed. If it is a great film then I am missing something.

From my teenage years on I have been a Claude Lelouche fan, fully aware that his movies were (and perhaps still are) considered schmaltzy. But when revisiting films I remember fondly from those years I usually have been disappointed. Well, here is the good news. I watched again, after thirtysomething years, Un homme et une femme, and it is still a great movie! The title song is a bit annoying because I must have heard it several million times, but the movie itself is a pleasure to watch. It is impressive what Lelouche was able to do with a crew of 10, two cameras and virtually no budget in such a short time – and so well that it is holding up over time.

Which brings me to the last oldie of the weekend. I started early in life to see movies on a regular basis, and quite a few of them were what today would be considered art movies. I don’t recall why I made this selection or whether it was deliberate or coincidence, but it certainly informed my viewing habits for the rest of my life – so much so that we usually check out a movie for me (which nobody else will watch) and one for the rest of the family.

I saw a lot of French movies, and Jean-Luc Godard was no stranger to me. À bout de souffle hit the screen a bit before my movie going time, but as soon as I looked old enough pass for 16 (they took their ratings seriously in Germany then), I went to see what the alleged nude scenes were all about. Well, no nudity, but a heart wrenching story. It became, for a while, one of my favorite movies. My verdict after four decades: It didn’t hold up as well as other Godard movies, Alphaville for example, but then I am a sucker for dystopias – and schmaltzy love stories directed by Claude Lelouche.