HB: Spoiler madness, Firefly in Chinese, being informal, soulmate matrices
I'm having shocking access difficulties tonight but I finally managed to get to my livejournal.
Spoiler madness again. I'm bemused by fandom again. I've spoken about spoilers before. Are episode names spoilers, are casting details spoilers? One of my fandoms is in a right pickle right now concerning arrivals and departures of actors. The usual things happen - people want to start petitions to protest certain casting changes and so they post about it, asking for support. Then others protest that it's a spoiler and so please put all details behind a cut, and then the rejoinder is that if you do that (put it behind a cut) then people won't know about the casting changes until after they've taken place and it's too late to do anything about it. Then there are various hissy fits as people squabble about it and bystanders barrack them on in with the rather ghoulish glee that online bystanders seem to get when they see a stoush. The mind boggles .....
Firefly. I lent my Firefly dvds to a colleague at work a while back. I've given Firefly to friends who speak Mandarin before but this is the first time I've lent them to a Chinese person. I was very curious about how she'd feel about them. To my delight she loved the series and asked me if she could borrow the second series - at which point i had to tell her 'that's all that's all, there ain't no more ....!' and that the series was cancelled. I have promised to lend her Serenity.
She laughed and said: "那所谓的普通话我都听不懂！" (I didn't understand any of the so called Chinese). *laugh* So I sent her a link to this site so that she could have some clue. I told her that the show did have a Chinese consultant but that she had given up as had the actors at even trying to make their pronunciation accurate :D
Language. Also today was so funny. London Guy III was in my office chatting about different things. He hasn't been in China long but the poor thing's already had a terrible bout of food poisoning. Also while he was born in Venezuala, is fluent in Spanish, German, English (albeit with an American accent despite the fact that I call him London Guy III :) and French - he doesn't speak a word of Chinese so life is tough. It's always the way - speak so many languages but one can't speak every single language so there's always going to be somewhere that you have absolutely no clue what's going on. :P
We had a funny discussion about Spanish and why it is that so many Spanish people seem to speak with a lisp eg. say Barthelona instead of Barcelona. He gave me impressions of all the different ways to say Barcelona. He tried to tell me that the lispy way of speaking was considered somewhat macho, but the problem is, when he tried to demonstrate the macho lisp, he just sounded rather effeminate and I started laughing at him.
Then I told him about how Europeans frequently say a word with the correct 'foreign' pronunciation whereas Aussies are shocking and tend to 'Englishify' everything..... like 'gateau' sounds more like 'gaddow' and 'croissant' sounds more like 'crossunt' etc. :D
I asked him how he'd say zarzuela and he said it with a most Spanish flourish and then laughed and rolled his eyes and said: "There comes a point when you just have to pronounce things the right way even if you sound like a pretentious wanker." :D
Being Informal. He's been relatively formal with me but I think after today, he relaxed a lot. Then things got sillier because a whole bunch of people moved to the new section of the office - Ant and American Guy were among them. I bumped into American Guy walking along pulling a little kind of cart thing on which there were these large blue plastic cartons and he looked a lot like a little kid walking along pulling a toy cart.
"Are you having fun?" I asked him quizzically.
"I'm moving books to the other section," he told me.
"You look like you're going for a walk with your toy cart."
I saw him a few more times, pulling the cart and each time he saw me, he kind of kidded around as if he was walking his cart.
Then as I sat in my office working tonight, I glanced out and Ant walked by pulling the cart with the blue boxes.
"Hey! What are you guys trying to do? Are you trying to make me think it's a new craze or something? Walking around with a toy cart? Next you're going to have London Guy III doing it, too!"
"I'm moving the prospectuses to the new area," he told me. Then London Guy III came up and Ant and he stood outside my door chatting about pros and cons of sharing an office.
Ant said it was great to share an office. I said: "No, I'd rather not because then I couldn't listen to my music."
Ant rolled his eyes. "I thought you were going to say you couldn't work - but no you talk about music."
"I can work with someone else in the room but I can't play my music loud!"
Ant tried to argue that sharing rooms was more friendly and that there were advantages like - banter!
"Without sharing offices, the only way we can have banter is to stand around toy carts with plastic boxes," he told us and we all laughed.
"You look like you stole American Guy's cart!" I said accusingly. Then I glanced at London Guy III and asked him,"Are you feeling better now?" I asked him.
Before he could reply, Ant said: "Oh, were you feeling unwell?"
"Oh gee - I just asked him if he was feeling better now for the hell of it!" I said sarcastically. I've talked with Ant before about how scathing I feel about Stating the Obvious :D
London Guy III looked at Ant who was pulling faces and giving me the finger and said very politely. "I assumed that you were making a polite attempt at converation." Then he proceeded to tell Ant about how he hadn't been feeling very well but was feeling better.
*choke*
Then Ant said something else and I teased him and said that old men in Hong Kong take their birds out for a walk in their cages and he was talking his cart out for a walk.
"How else will I move the prospectuses?" he demanded.
"Are you sure that the plural for prospectus is prospectuses?" I asked him.
"No idea."
"I think you should know that!"
"We avoid situations where we have to refer to prospectus in the plural," he told me.
I pointed at the pile of prospectuses in the cart and I said: "But you have many ....." And paused, waiting for him to complete the sentence with the correct plural for prospectus.
"Of them!" he retorted triumphantly and then laughed like a loon as if he'd won before scampering away with his cartful of prospectuses, leaving me laughing in my office and London Guy III standing outside my door looking very bemused.
After seeing Ant and me bag each other out like nothing else, I think London Guy III has realised that there's really no point being all formal and English ;)
Soul Mate Matrix. Nora was threatening to dig up copies of my emails from when I started work here in Beijing and was miserable.
-----Original Message-----
From: Nora
Sent: Tuesday, March 06, 2007 8:03 PM
To: koala
Subject: FW: Matrix not reloaded
Hello
I can't believe it but I can't find your old emails from last year when you started at work at the new place. But look at the little treasure that I have come up with. Hee hee!
N xx
I opened the attachment and started howling with laughter and almost choked on my Smarties. It started once when my friend CC made me laugh because she had a hilariously ridiculous criteria for going out with a guy. He had to have a TER score (Tertiary Entry Requirement) that was higher than hers. I think it's the Aussie equivalent of an SAT score. After year 12, in order to get into uni, you have to get a tertiary entry score - law is usually 85-90%, medicine and actuarial studies is 98-99% etc.
CC got 99%.
One day she asked me what I got.
"98.8%," I told her and she looked shocked.
"But your TER is less than mine!" she gasped in horror. "I thought you were smart!"
"Guess we can never go out," I told her with a laugh.
When I told Nora about it, she howled but then as we chatted we discovered that there were so many shallow, arbitrary silly little things that made us like a guy / not like a guy/dismiss him out of hand. For instance, I had a hang up with accents and silly names whereas she didn't care about silly names. She didn't mind guys with thinning hair and I did, I put more of an emphasis on languages etc etc.
So for a joke, I put together a soul mate matrix in which a guy's stating score was his TER score and then points were added or deducted depending on various traits he exhibited. Nora and I sent the excel spread sheet back and forth to each other a couple of times and the higgledypigglediness of the list still cracks me up :D
From: Nora
Sent: 29 May 2003 17:15
To: koala
Subject: Matrix not reloaded
Well your additions didn't provide ANY hints about the latest Castle!!! How frustrating. I need more info!!
I've added a few things and am sure that any poor Castle will be confused and bewildered by the array of attributes that he must have/not have.
OK the matrix is below. I couldn't paste them into a table in HTML so the header is an image file but the traits are listed below. You can see why I laughed and laughed when I opened the attachment today.
Any kind of facial hair except eyebrows / eyelashes
Bald
Balding (folliclley challenged)
Hairy back
Overly hairy
Sleazy Sinophile
Tells you how he hates it when anything keeps him from going to the gym
Intellectual snobbery
Unable to laugh at himself
No twinkle in the eye
Likes musicals
Downloads porn
Hides porn
Doesn't return phone calls/sms/emails
Pimply
Short legs long torso
Wears white sneakers with jeans
White socks
Perves at other girls
Prefers to be with mates
Too loud
Sense of humour (real not faux)
Likes to laugh
Loves music (all sorts)
Loves reading
Loves movies
Speaks an Asian language (Mandarin preferred)
Tallish
Is easy going
Australian / NZ / Canadian / French
Is eloquent
Is interesting and holds my attention
Nice eyes
Makes me laugh/smile
Knows how to be serious
Understands I love my family
Likes to travel
Nice shoulders
Is quietly confident/self-assured
Values cleanliness
Plays a musical instrument
Is computer literate
Smokes
Is a non-smoker
Is a good letter/email writer
Isn't too gung ho an athlete or at least doesn't expect me to participate
Speaks a European language (French preferred)
Has a stupid name
Has a hairy back
Is smelly
Is racist
Is sexist
Is a culturalist
Heavy drinker
Overuse of narcotics
Tells me any of the following: to get a life, be mature, grow up, act my age, get out more, it's just a book/movie/book/song
Is arrogant
Doesn't understand me
Wears glasses
Doesn't wear glasses
Wears contacts
Has blue eyes
Has black eyes
Has green eyes
Has hazel eyes
Is permanently bloodshot
Has muddy interdeterminate coloured eyes
Is cross-eyed
Eye colour [to be defined]
Hair colour [to be defined]
Is interested in clothes
Is more interested in clothes than I am
Is frugal
Is extravagant
Is smooth / polished
Is awkward [yet endearing]
Is aloof
Knows what colour puce is
Doesn't phone / email
Takes to long to reply to emails (doesn't he know we are counting down)
Writes ambiguous emails
Is illiterate
Doesn't realise he is supposed to be playing a starring role in my castle in the air
Is gay
Is a gym bunny / junkie / goes on about sport all the time
Is an ex-French foreign legionnaire
Is a slightly gaunt, selfless French doctor working for MSF
Quotes poetry and Shakespeare
Quotes from the Companies law
Makes spelling mistakes in emails
Quotes slabs from Monty Python
Forgets my name
Looks around when talking to me
Disappears for ages and then pops up again expecting everything to be normal
Talks too much
Is uncommunicative and silent
Is a rabid anti-smoker
Is confused from too many TER pluses/minuses
Spoiler madness again. I'm bemused by fandom again. I've spoken about spoilers before. Are episode names spoilers, are casting details spoilers? One of my fandoms is in a right pickle right now concerning arrivals and departures of actors. The usual things happen - people want to start petitions to protest certain casting changes and so they post about it, asking for support. Then others protest that it's a spoiler and so please put all details behind a cut, and then the rejoinder is that if you do that (put it behind a cut) then people won't know about the casting changes until after they've taken place and it's too late to do anything about it. Then there are various hissy fits as people squabble about it and bystanders barrack them on in with the rather ghoulish glee that online bystanders seem to get when they see a stoush. The mind boggles .....
Firefly. I lent my Firefly dvds to a colleague at work a while back. I've given Firefly to friends who speak Mandarin before but this is the first time I've lent them to a Chinese person. I was very curious about how she'd feel about them. To my delight she loved the series and asked me if she could borrow the second series - at which point i had to tell her 'that's all that's all, there ain't no more ....!' and that the series was cancelled. I have promised to lend her Serenity.
She laughed and said: "那所谓的普通话我都听不懂！" (I didn't understand any of the so called Chinese). *laugh* So I sent her a link to this site so that she could have some clue. I told her that the show did have a Chinese consultant but that she had given up as had the actors at even trying to make their pronunciation accurate :D
Language. Also today was so funny. London Guy III was in my office chatting about different things. He hasn't been in China long but the poor thing's already had a terrible bout of food poisoning. Also while he was born in Venezuala, is fluent in Spanish, German, English (albeit with an American accent despite the fact that I call him London Guy III :) and French - he doesn't speak a word of Chinese so life is tough. It's always the way - speak so many languages but one can't speak every single language so there's always going to be somewhere that you have absolutely no clue what's going on. :P
We had a funny discussion about Spanish and why it is that so many Spanish people seem to speak with a lisp eg. say Barthelona instead of Barcelona. He gave me impressions of all the different ways to say Barcelona. He tried to tell me that the lispy way of speaking was considered somewhat macho, but the problem is, when he tried to demonstrate the macho lisp, he just sounded rather effeminate and I started laughing at him.
Then I told him about how Europeans frequently say a word with the correct 'foreign' pronunciation whereas Aussies are shocking and tend to 'Englishify' everything..... like 'gateau' sounds more like 'gaddow' and 'croissant' sounds more like 'crossunt' etc. :D
I asked him how he'd say zarzuela and he said it with a most Spanish flourish and then laughed and rolled his eyes and said: "There comes a point when you just have to pronounce things the right way even if you sound like a pretentious wanker." :D
Being Informal. He's been relatively formal with me but I think after today, he relaxed a lot. Then things got sillier because a whole bunch of people moved to the new section of the office - Ant and American Guy were among them. I bumped into American Guy walking along pulling a little kind of cart thing on which there were these large blue plastic cartons and he looked a lot like a little kid walking along pulling a toy cart.
"Are you having fun?" I asked him quizzically.
"I'm moving books to the other section," he told me.
"You look like you're going for a walk with your toy cart."
I saw him a few more times, pulling the cart and each time he saw me, he kind of kidded around as if he was walking his cart.
Then as I sat in my office working tonight, I glanced out and Ant walked by pulling the cart with the blue boxes.
"Hey! What are you guys trying to do? Are you trying to make me think it's a new craze or something? Walking around with a toy cart? Next you're going to have London Guy III doing it, too!"
"I'm moving the prospectuses to the new area," he told me. Then London Guy III came up and Ant and he stood outside my door chatting about pros and cons of sharing an office.
Ant said it was great to share an office. I said: "No, I'd rather not because then I couldn't listen to my music."
Ant rolled his eyes. "I thought you were going to say you couldn't work - but no you talk about music."
"I can work with someone else in the room but I can't play my music loud!"
Ant tried to argue that sharing rooms was more friendly and that there were advantages like - banter!
"Without sharing offices, the only way we can have banter is to stand around toy carts with plastic boxes," he told us and we all laughed.
"You look like you stole American Guy's cart!" I said accusingly. Then I glanced at London Guy III and asked him,"Are you feeling better now?" I asked him.
Before he could reply, Ant said: "Oh, were you feeling unwell?"
"Oh gee - I just asked him if he was feeling better now for the hell of it!" I said sarcastically. I've talked with Ant before about how scathing I feel about Stating the Obvious :D
London Guy III looked at Ant who was pulling faces and giving me the finger and said very politely. "I assumed that you were making a polite attempt at converation." Then he proceeded to tell Ant about how he hadn't been feeling very well but was feeling better.
*choke*
Then Ant said something else and I teased him and said that old men in Hong Kong take their birds out for a walk in their cages and he was talking his cart out for a walk.
"How else will I move the prospectuses?" he demanded.
"Are you sure that the plural for prospectus is prospectuses?" I asked him.
"No idea."
"I think you should know that!"
"We avoid situations where we have to refer to prospectus in the plural," he told me.
I pointed at the pile of prospectuses in the cart and I said: "But you have many ....." And paused, waiting for him to complete the sentence with the correct plural for prospectus.
"Of them!" he retorted triumphantly and then laughed like a loon as if he'd won before scampering away with his cartful of prospectuses, leaving me laughing in my office and London Guy III standing outside my door looking very bemused.
After seeing Ant and me bag each other out like nothing else, I think London Guy III has realised that there's really no point being all formal and English ;)
Soul Mate Matrix. Nora was threatening to dig up copies of my emails from when I started work here in Beijing and was miserable.
-----Original Message-----
From: Nora
Sent: Tuesday, March 06, 2007 8:03 PM
To: koala
Subject: FW: Matrix not reloaded
Hello
I can't believe it but I can't find your old emails from last year when you started at work at the new place. But look at the little treasure that I have come up with. Hee hee!
N xx
I opened the attachment and started howling with laughter and almost choked on my Smarties. It started once when my friend CC made me laugh because she had a hilariously ridiculous criteria for going out with a guy. He had to have a TER score (Tertiary Entry Requirement) that was higher than hers. I think it's the Aussie equivalent of an SAT score. After year 12, in order to get into uni, you have to get a tertiary entry score - law is usually 85-90%, medicine and actuarial studies is 98-99% etc.
CC got 99%.
One day she asked me what I got.
"98.8%," I told her and she looked shocked.
"But your TER is less than mine!" she gasped in horror. "I thought you were smart!"
"Guess we can never go out," I told her with a laugh.
When I told Nora about it, she howled but then as we chatted we discovered that there were so many shallow, arbitrary silly little things that made us like a guy / not like a guy/dismiss him out of hand. For instance, I had a hang up with accents and silly names whereas she didn't care about silly names. She didn't mind guys with thinning hair and I did, I put more of an emphasis on languages etc etc.
So for a joke, I put together a soul mate matrix in which a guy's stating score was his TER score and then points were added or deducted depending on various traits he exhibited. Nora and I sent the excel spread sheet back and forth to each other a couple of times and the higgledypigglediness of the list still cracks me up :D
From: Nora
Sent: 29 May 2003 17:15
To: koala
Subject: Matrix not reloaded
Well your additions didn't provide ANY hints about the latest Castle!!! How frustrating. I need more info!!
I've added a few things and am sure that any poor Castle will be confused and bewildered by the array of attributes that he must have/not have.
OK the matrix is below. I couldn't paste them into a table in HTML so the header is an image file but the traits are listed below. You can see why I laughed and laughed when I opened the attachment today.
Any kind of facial hair except eyebrows / eyelashes
Bald
Balding (folliclley challenged)
Hairy back
Overly hairy
Sleazy Sinophile
Tells you how he hates it when anything keeps him from going to the gym
Intellectual snobbery
Unable to laugh at himself
No twinkle in the eye
Likes musicals
Downloads porn
Hides porn
Doesn't return phone calls/sms/emails
Pimply
Short legs long torso
Wears white sneakers with jeans
White socks
Perves at other girls
Prefers to be with mates
Too loud
Sense of humour (real not faux)
Likes to laugh
Loves music (all sorts)
Loves reading
Loves movies
Speaks an Asian language (Mandarin preferred)
Tallish
Is easy going
Australian / NZ / Canadian / French
Is eloquent
Is interesting and holds my attention
Nice eyes
Makes me laugh/smile
Knows how to be serious
Understands I love my family
Likes to travel
Nice shoulders
Is quietly confident/self-assured
Values cleanliness
Plays a musical instrument
Is computer literate
Smokes
Is a non-smoker
Is a good letter/email writer
Isn't too gung ho an athlete or at least doesn't expect me to participate
Speaks a European language (French preferred)
Has a stupid name
Has a hairy back
Is smelly
Is racist
Is sexist
Is a culturalist
Heavy drinker
Overuse of narcotics
Tells me any of the following: to get a life, be mature, grow up, act my age, get out more, it's just a book/movie/book/song
Is arrogant
Doesn't understand me
Wears glasses
Doesn't wear glasses
Wears contacts
Has blue eyes
Has black eyes
Has green eyes
Has hazel eyes
Is permanently bloodshot
Has muddy interdeterminate coloured eyes
Is cross-eyed
Eye colour [to be defined]
Hair colour [to be defined]
Is interested in clothes
Is more interested in clothes than I am
Is frugal
Is extravagant
Is smooth / polished
Is awkward [yet endearing]
Is aloof
Knows what colour puce is
Doesn't phone / email
Takes to long to reply to emails (doesn't he know we are counting down)
Writes ambiguous emails
Is illiterate
Doesn't realise he is supposed to be playing a starring role in my castle in the air
Is gay
Is a gym bunny / junkie / goes on about sport all the time
Is an ex-French foreign legionnaire
Is a slightly gaunt, selfless French doctor working for MSF
Quotes poetry and Shakespeare
Quotes from the Companies law
Makes spelling mistakes in emails
Quotes slabs from Monty Python
Forgets my name
Looks around when talking to me
Disappears for ages and then pops up again expecting everything to be normal
Talks too much
Is uncommunicative and silent
Is a rabid anti-smoker
Is confused from too many TER pluses/minuses