When best to do the dirty deed...

My memory of the medium is fairly weak - I think it was a print story - but I recall a tale from a Long Time Ago™ in which the Russians launch one missile, carrying the biggest Bomb in the Soviet arsenal, at the United States on Christmas Eve.

Soon after the launch, reports of a lone blip coming from the North Pole begin to trickle down to SAC, except that everyone at headquarters thinks this is the traditional "report" of Santa's annual departure for his round of chimney visits to boys and girls everywhere.

No, insist the radar stations, this is no joke! Incoming!

Come off it, says headquarters.

After several exchanges along these lines, an interceptor is dispatched to visually identify the approaching bogey. The pilot reports what he sees, which is the missile, disguised to look like Santa Claus in his sleigh, being pulled by a team of reindeer. (Hey, I didn't say the story was strong on verisimilitude, did I?)

The last line of the story has the general in charge at SAC telling the DEW people not to bother him with any more foolishness, hanging up his red phone, and turning back to join the holiday festivities as the missile continues on its way.

Why do I mention this story? Well, it's only one data point, but Slashdot was all but completely uninformative yesterday, owing to an onslaught of April Fool's posts. Worse, while announcements for "aircraft painting lasers" were pretty obviously intended as jokes, some items had the potential to permanently raise eyebrows.

As a possible example of what I'm talking about, there's one post that mentions a curious story appearing in the online version of La Repubblica about how Silvio Berlusconi's company, Mediaset (which owns three of the six main TV stations in Italy), is alleged to have been tagging employees with RFID chips since last December.

Dunno about you, kemo sabe, but my eyebrows shoot upward when I read something like this. But is this a joke?

The nature of the day would tend to support an affirmative answer - although a heck of a lot of people seem not to have heard of the noon rule - but as the source material is in Italian (and as I don't know how seriously Italians take April Fool's, and don't really have the time to find out, via web translation sites or otherwise), it's tough to say. Even the comments made on Slashdot, although they seem to tend toward dismissing this as a joke, are not unanimous. But whether the story is true or false is beside the point.

If ever the government really does decide to round up opponents and ship them off to concentration camps, if ever the U.N. does vote to shut down the Internet, if ever the EU does vote to ban Macs, the ideal day for any coverage of such stories to appear - from the point of view of the perpetrators - would be April 1, nie?

Cheers...

Fish soup...

The dwindling reserve of foodstuffs and the increasing "reserve" of dirty dishes distracted me from translation this morning.

I started to shop for groceries with the intent of making borsch, but a large, deeply discounted package of salmon steaks caught my eye, and I decided then and there to risk morphing the borsch into a fish-based solyanka. This was my third essay at the solyanka form, and if I do say so myself, the result is excellent. (Now, to see how well it "ages" over the next couple of days, in the sense of soups in general "getting better" on the second or third day.)

Once finished in the kitchen, I spent the rest of the day in the basement, working on a set of comments to a toxicology presentation. Fortunately, the text was not as technical as it could be, but unfortunately, my ability to resolve translation issues (such as, what is the correct English for an official U.S. toxic substance classification, expressed in Russian as "недопустимо опасные вещества") wasn't very much in evidence. There's still a pile on the plate, but I think I'm finished for the day.

I was not so insulated from the world that I failed to note the passing of John Paul II. In late 1979, if memory serves, I recall leaving my basement apartment in Jackson Heights, in New York, and walking some number of blocks to go see him pass by in a motorcade from LaGuardia airport, in the days before Popes, too, had to take refuge from the world behind polycarbonate barriers.

I remember some of the media buzz associated with John Paul II at the time, first, because he was succeeding a Pope who had been in office for less than a month when he died (John Paul I), and second, because he was the first non-Italian Pope since the early 16th century and the first Polish Pope ever.

In that same year, John Paul II visited his native Poland, and there are many who say that his inspiring words on that visit helped organize millions against the communists, thereby accelerating the collapse of communism and providing a convincing reply, by his actions, to Stalin's famous remark to Churchill, disparaging the extent of papal influence: "The pope? How many divisions has he got?"

Requiescat in pace, Ioannes Paulus.

Cheers...

Remembering Mrs. V...

I've written about my high-school French teacher, Mrs. Vamvakis, before (here and here, at least), and I had occasion to remember her again today, when I ran across a phrase from Baudelaire that took me directly back to her 12-th grade class, as convincingly as Proust was taken back to his childhood by a petit madeleine.

The phrase? Le goût de l'infini, the title of the first chapter of Baudelaire's Les Paradis Artificiels, a work inspired by Thomas de Quincy's Confessions of an English Opium Eater. The French translates as "taste of the infinite" and opens a discussion on the consumption of, believe it or not, hashish (though I think that aspect of the text was downplayed considerably in the excerpt we were reading... what could those educators have been thinking of?).

What was particularly noticeable in my Proust-like experience today was recalling Mrs. V's reliance on translation as homework. Except it really wasn't translation, per se, but merely a request - as much as any homework assignment can be a request - to "prepare" pages so-and-so through such-and-such for the morrow, when she would spend the first part of class haphazardly (it seemed) picking on students to read the French, a sentence or two at a time, and then to explain in English what had been read.

Although I don't remember any specific examples, I do recall times when I took the liberty of translating the French directly into colloquial English, which was not the point of the exercise for Mrs. V, whereas I'd go back and render a more literal translation of what I'd read.

When not reading excerpts from classics (I think we did that only in connection with lessons on civilization), we read stories packaged for us in textbooks. I remember this one seemingly endless story about a fellow who, with the advent of WW II, proceeded to drive around the countryside and embed portions of his family wealth (in the form of gold ingots) in the walls of various French cemeteries, only to have one or two of his caches discovered by accident, causing a great rash of destruction of cemetery walls all around the country. The poor fellow lost all of his ingots and went crazy, if memory serves.

Perhaps it was that early experience, leavened with a lack of any other challenging homework to do in my senior year in high school, that paved the way for my current career? Qui sait?

Cheers...