Found while cleaning...

On a printout with Polonius' lines from Hamlet, I found the following scrawl, which may be worth recording:

The last typewriter repair shop in Manhattan closed, after 66 years in business.

(It's hard to date this piece of trivia, but I would assume it occurred somewhere before May 1 of last year, when I told Zach I had to bow out of the production.)

Cheers...

Unloading... pardon my dust...

I figure if something remains a thorn in my side for several days, maybe I ought to exorcise it by writing about it. I've been able to successfully absorb a number of disappointments about the ProZ system of Kudoz, but a recent one sticks in my craw...

The asker was apparently dealing with a skin care catalog and wanted to know what "brouillé" means, as in the sentence:

Ma peau est plus luisante sur la partie mediane, son grain est plus serre sur les zones laterales. J'ai souvent le teint brouillé.

I hopped onto the net and found matching pages at Lancôme (a cosmetics company). In the French version of their cosmetics FAQ, I found the following question:

Que faire quand j'ai le teint brouillé, les pores ouverts, une tendance aux points noirs?

The same page in English offers the following question:

What should I do when my complexion is dull, my pores are dilated and I get black heads?

After reading this and a couple more paragraphs, I am convinced that "un teint brouillé" is "a dull complexion." A Google search confirms the word pair is used a lot in the cosmetics field (at least 10 pages of "hits"). I submit an answer at the ProZ site, and include links to both pages.

Some doodah looks up the word in a dictionary and offers the following:

"How about 'irregular' or 'mottled' - these are the closest I could come up with for a term whose only definition I could find was 'scrambled' (but not in reference to cosmetics)."

Number of Google hits for "irregular complexion"? Three.

Who gets full marks for answering the question? Doodah.

I suppose I am being petty in writing about this at all, but on the other hand, I should probably be happy that this is the extent of what's been bugging me, translation-wise, for the past couple of days.

What I don't like, though, is the nagging thought that the ProZ system of awarding points can be easily manipulated by colluding parties. X and friend Y could agree to award each other Kudoz points for translation-related questions, yet still use proper answers proposed by respondents A, B, C, etc. in their translations.

(What I don't like about it is the fact that I'm allowing myself to be affected like this. I suppose it's the competitor in me... I've always been a little over-the-top when it comes to word-based games like charades, Botticelli, Pictionary, Taboo, etc.)

Hey, that reminds me... it's been ages since I've played Botticelli!

Cheers...

One happy camper...

A chance review of the Wall Street Journal front page late last week made me aware (surprise!) of imminent changes in the pricing structure for UPS and FedEx packages. FedEx, it turns out, called on Friday to tell me that the proposed changes in pricing were being put on hold.

That left UPS.

Pricing how much it costs to send a package is getting ever more complicated as carriers make ever finer distinctions in service. Up until now, for example, "next-day" service was the same price whether the delivery was being made to a residence or a business. As of tomorrow, the price will go up $1.10 for deliveries to residences, which are defined to include businesses operating out of residences.

I thought I was faced with having to deal with about a half dozen new schedules, ranging form Next Day to Ground service, where each schedule involved changing anywhere from 500 to 1500 prices. Fortunately, I managed to scrounge my way around the UPS web site until I found a zip file containing what I needed.

I even figured out how to incorporate the new residential surcharges, as well as the so-called "delivery area surcharge," which is $1.50 to zip codes that are, shall we say, "rural" (such as, ahem, Pagosa Springs).

So now I have to make sure the revised spreadsheet makes it to the store tomorrow morning. Myself, I have to meet the truck from our Albuquerque supplier of boxes, etc. at the Sunoco station on Highway 160 just short of Durango tomorrow around 7:30 am, which means I need to leave around 6:30 or so. I'll be stopping at the Office Max in Durango to pick up a couple of network cards and perhaps some network cable for the store, too.

* * *Galina is seriously considering going down to Houston soon, to take some Continuing Education courses for her real estate license and to renew said license. We'll know more tomorrow, but her going down there makes coordinating our respective schedules a bit more difficult.

If memory serves, my stint down there starts February 2. It would probably make sense for me to fly down there and for Galina to fly back here so as not to have her drive the car all the way back here just to have me take it down again almost immediately. Too, coordination will be important, as neither Galina nor I can be absent from the store for any length of time (that's a weakness that needs to be addressed). I need to do some surfing for ticket prices, I guess.

Cheers...