foraging in the kitchen

[lyschan]

I feel like some sort of hunter-gatherer. Minus the hunter part (but it doesn't make as much sense to say just gatherer). I wandered into the kitchen looking for food, and what I came up with were a handful of dried fruit, a couple almonds, a few grapes and strawberries, and a bit of salad. I guess the dried pineapple wasn't something a normal

Comments

[double_dear]

Maybe if the gatherers were in Hawaii, and some big animal or bird or something knocked a pineapple plant down, smashing open at least one of the pineapples (I'm actually not sure how pineapple plants work, come to think of it) so that the fruit was in the sun long enough to dry it out--then they would have had dried pineapple!

It seems to have gotten cold everywhere again! Even here, where the weather has been so contrary to what all our friends around the country would talk about. Oreo's been meowing about stuff like crazy, too. He keeps wanting treats. He sounds very tortured, as well. Punk.

And we totally bookmarked that link! We're gonna use it next time we have to translate someone with a northern dialect!

[lyschan]

*laughs* Awesome! And thus the Michigan accent will pervade manga

[double_dear]

Yup, it was the MangaLife column. I remember you mentioning accents in manga! I wanted to comment on it, but I think it was a manga review collection post, and there was so much else to comment on that it slipped my mind. But my comment was that there's one series (Spiral: Bond of Reasoning) where the author (in this case it's a collaborative work, with one guy doing the story and another guy doing the art) talked about a new character that he introduced, who uses Kansai dialect. The author speaks Kansai dialect himself, so he figured it would be easy, since it would just be writing the dialogue in just the way he talks, but when he actually wrote it out and read it, it seemed fake

Ooh, Hawai'i talk

[umadoshi]

*g* Hawai'i has tons of mammals! (Although yeah, a huge proportion of the plants and animals were imported over the years. Or drifted in from Fiji or something.) Cattle ranching is one of the Big Island's two biggest industries (the other being tourism). There're definitely goats, cattle, horses, sheep, and pigs, off the top of my head.

Also, I think pineapples will randomly fall off trees when they're ripe enough, although I don't know if that'd break the rind enough for them to dry. Husband thinks they grow low to the ground. Don't mind me. Okay, his exact wording is: "More to the point, the primitive hunter-gatherer would split open his/her own damn pineapple and lay it on a hot lava rock in the sun to dry".

Re: Ooh, Hawai'i talk

[double_dear]

But if the hunter/gatherer was nomadic, wouldn't they just eat the pineapple without drying it, and then move to the next area for more pineapples? I kind of get the feeling it would have to have already been dry before the gatherer found it for them to eat it that way.

Re: Ooh, Hawai'i talk

[umadoshi]

Entirely possible. ^^ Although my (limited!) understanding is that one of the reasons Hawai'ian culture has been so traditionally laid-back (invading cultures seem to have had this chronic notion that Hawai'ians had no "work ethic") is because it's...well, pretty much as close to paradise as you can get. "Foraging" consists of walking up to a fruit tree and eating. (Although then there's hunting and fishing.) So chilling out and waiting for fruit to dry doesn't sound implausible to me, although I can't say for sure it was done.

Re: Ooh, Hawai'i talk

[lyschan]

Ooh, are you a Hawaii-expert? Neat! Actually... when I read the twins' comment my first thought was "Wait, don't they have like... koalas or someth-oh, no, wrong island entirely!!!" Gah.

The pineapple tree (shrub?) pictures I saw online looked pretty low to the ground. Haha, it would make more sense to break open and dry their own pineapple (or just eat it un-dried, more likely (unless they were getting ready to store up food for winter? (wait, this is a tropical island, not michigan! my brain is definitely not functioning at a proper level right now))). However, I've always thought I'd be one of the first to go in a "survival of the fittest"-type society, so I probably would be the one looking for a pineapple knocked down by free-ranging goats :D

Re: Ooh, Hawai'i talk

[umadoshi]

*laughs* Definitely not an expert--I've "only" visited twice (once for five weeks, and then for a couple weeks last month). But my husband lived there for a year when he was a teenager, and his parents go every chance they get, and my mother-in-law soaks up and passes on knowledge at an utterly terrifying rate and LOVES Hawai'i, so she knows tons about it.

They do have "winter" there, but it's a strange definition by our standards. We found it out the hard way when we went to a beach that really wasn't meant to be used by people who didn't know what they were doing (which we don't), and someone explained to us that it was easier to get in the water in summer because in winter the beaches lose about 15 feet of sand. I think it might also be slightly cooler in winter than summer, but not by much.

(That said, there's snow on top of the mountains, at least sometimes.)

Re: Ooh, Hawai'i talk

[lyschan]

Five weeks is better than I can claim-the farthest south I've ever been is... South Carolina? For like a week, when I was 6 or 7? Heh, sorry... I'm just getting anxious for warm weather again. Hawaii sounds so nice~ :D

(snow on the mountains totally doesn't count, unless people live there... (err, do they? I wouldn't think so, surrounded as they are by beautiful tropical beaches and the like, but...))

Re: Ooh, Hawai'i talk

[umadoshi]

Hawai'i's lovely. *^^* (We still haven't posted trip photos, 'cause we're slackers.) One of the nice side effects of spontaneously getting married there is that now we have a bonus excuse for going there--going last month wasn't actually because of an anniversary (it had much more to do with having enough airline points and a free place to stay, since my in-laws were there), but being able to say "it's almost our five-year anniversary, so let's go back!" was nice

Re: Ooh, Hawai'i talk

[lyschan]

Nice :D Glad you could enjoy your time there!! You may well have it even colder than me, living in Canada, so I'm sure you appreciated it!

Bringing down snow for a snowball fight on the beach is awesome! And those are lovely pictures your friend posted. The rock formations in the last one are really neat looking! I'd love to see your photos if/when you get around to putting them up :D

Re: Ooh, Hawai'i talk

[hysteriachan]

We're on the coast, so it may not be as cold here as you'd think. Although it's more than cold enough for me! (I hate cold, and last night we had a snowstorm. >.< Our March is famous not for being warm or cold, but for being bloody unpredictable.)

We keep meaning to post photos, but...we'll see. ^^; If we do, they'll be under this account, not umadoshi.

Re: Ooh, Hawai'i talk

[lyschan]

Michigan's rather known for unpredictable weather as well. We've had an unbelievably lovely March so far (by which I mostly mean, "It's above freezing!! Yay!"), but I know we've gotten snowstorms as late as April so I'm trying not to get my hopes up too high.

And no problem if you don't get around to it ^^

[lyschan]

That's interesting about the Spiral author. I've wondered if the accents in Japanese manga sound as obnoxious or fake as they sometimes do in English. My (completely unfounded) assumption was "no" because I have the impression Japanese written-accents are based more on differences in grammatical structure/conjugation/word-choice, and less on spelling out the differences in pronunciation (which I see a lot of in English-language written-accents, and which mostly just looks awkward to me, even if it is an accurate phonetic depiction of the accent). But, as with many things, I don't have any sort of proof so I may be entirely wrong :D

I think the manga I was writing about earlier when I mentioned accents was The Magic Touch, and I keep going back to that one because of these three lines some gag-characters said, because it's possibly the only time I really loved the use of an accent in a manga. But it's only three lines, and they're imaginary gag characters, and the accent is supposed to be completely ridiculous, so I don't know if

[double_dear]

Actually, we always had the same assumption (although we have read interviews with voice actors playing characters with accents, and they would apologize to all the people who really use that accent). Maybe someday we'll ask one of our pen pals.

It's weird, though, because usually I don't have a problem reading accents, but I can't bring myself to type them very easily. We didn't translate any volume with Rin, though, so that accent is completely not our fault. But we like to at least have a slight indication of accent, because it's so much more fun when you can tell who's talking based solely on the speech bubble and not necessarily who it's pointing at. Incidentally, in Final Fantasy IX, there's a whole village of dwarves that use like a Scottish accent or something. It was really hard to read out loud, but it seemed to work really well.

From what we understand (based on like a million cartoons), goats will eat just about anything, so they probably would!

[lyschan]

Oh yes! It is fun when you can tell who's talking just by how it's worded. And I've always been a fan of Mark Twain's writing too. I'm not sure what it is I'm missing, that the accents in manga still bother me... I'll work on my attitude too! If I can find an example of someone with a cute voice using a southern accent, maybe I won't mind Rin's so much :D