Sixteen Volts

With nothing better to do for now, I think I'll again read through the archives of my Finnish blog and translate some individual paragraphs that I think make a point but wouldn't make an actual posting on their own.

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Earlier today I realized an interesting linguistic phenomenon that works exactly the same in both Finnish and English languages. When a person admits that some fact used by the opponent is true but uses the word "maybe" to start this admission, there really is nothing "maybe" about the truth value of that claim. Some linguist could probably explain why words don't always mean what they literally mean, but can in some context mean their exact opposite.

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When my wife visited Finland for the first time, we went to see "Aladdin" in theaters where it was dubbed in Finnish. [Since Finland only has five million people, dubbing movies is not economically feasible, but only children's movies by Disney always come in dubbed versions.] She learned the word "henki" (spirit) and then wondered what the word "henkilöjuna" (local train) means. I just watched the first five minutes of Aladdin on TV and I have to say that the events of recent years have given the events and characters of this 1992 movie totally new connotations. Do I remember something wrong, or weren't the events of the original movie set in Baghdad? Of the little that I remember about the plot of this movie, wasn't Aladdin at some point thrown into a dungeon to be tortured?

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The posting "View from an Outsourcer" is absolutely excellent. Computer programmers, who a few years ago presented themselves as kings of free market and imagined being heroes in some Ayn Rand novel, now cry for the government to protect their high-salary jobs. Once again "shithead" is the most appropriate term to describe these people. The reader comments in which you can almost see the commenter bursting into tears are funny in their desperation. (Also useful things can be learned here: for example, I didn't know that the often-used expression "we can't live by washing each others' shirts" originally came from Mark Twain.)

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On a trip to library I found a picture storybook about Noah's Ark that was meant for little kids. This book claimed that during Noah's time, the world was ruled by mean sharp-toothed giants and cyclops, who were about ten meters tall in the pictures. Noah's family, on the other hand, was an ordinary sunny human family. When I read the Old Testament a while back, I don't recall any mention of these giants who laughed that they will survive the flood since they are so tall. Religious people are funny when they can't even keep their own miracle stories in check. As a general hint, certain consistency always makes an ideology more plausible.

I guess I'll wait a similar children's book about the Book of Joshua. I wonder if the ethnic cleansings can be sidestepped in a similar fashion. Perhaps the simplest way to do this is to end the story to the collapse of walls of Jericho, and in the last picture, show Joshua carried by his cheering men while God looks down from top of clown and gives him a hearty thumbs-up.

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I while ago I tried to count how many times I have read about goals of some ideology and thought "Man, it sure would be great if those people succeeded in realizing that goal! My everyday life would be so much better if that goal became reality!" However, I could not think of a single situation where I had reacted that way. I wonder if there is a lesson to be learned here somewhere.

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Last night's movie was the colourful "Man on Fire", which was in fact two movies in one: first a one-hour story of a man climbing up towards sobriety, which was followed by a one-hour action movie. The general believability of the movie fell flat at the scene where the nightclub apparently had only one doorman. And I'm probably not the greatest expert of human nature, but as far as I know, even the trendiest of partygoers don't typically react to a building catching fire by exiting the building with continued dancing and then cheer on the street when the whole place blows up. I sure hope that there weren't any more kidnapped little girls hidden in the building.

Another thing that disturbed me in this movie was the fact that even though Crease swore to kill everyone who had benefit from the kidnapping, he let every single female member of the gang live. Apparently Crease is not edgy enough to be able to kill women without being a sexy woman herself. Perhaps we'll be seeing this in a few years. I was also curious about the intestinal gases inside that one Mexican when a bomb in his ass blew up as a giant clean fireball instead of spreading mincemeat all over the place.

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At the bus stop where I usually get on the bus heading towards the Big City there was a police poster that asked for eyewitnesses for a shooting murder a few months back. The poster had the picture of the young man who was the victim, and his friends had apparently written their messages on the poster. A line in girl's handwriting said that they all loved him very much, and below that, a line in boy's handwriting wished painful hell for the murderers. One sentence in the actual text had erroneously used the word "was" in a place where "were" would be correct, and someone had struck a line over this word and put up the correct word in its place. I didn't even have to ask to know that my dear wife, a stickler for good language, had done this.

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Posted by Ilkka Kokkarinen on Wednesday, February 15, 2006 at 11:20 AM