In LA

Welcome to Ai Qi Coffee. Please have a seat over here in the overstuffed booth fringed with tassels. Here is a glass of boiling-hot water and a menu. Your waitress will be with you shortly.

I highly recommend this dish. "Customer get angry"

"Frozen old duck soup" Truth in advertising taken one step too far.

"The cold discolored ears, The cold cow shutter" –Would you like to order an unappetizer?

One of the side-effects of living in China for a while is that "Crispy pigeon" doesn’t even raise an eyebrow. It’s a good translation, and just looks like food. But "Chicken rice spent"? Hilarious.

"Spicy beef noodles, bake butterfly" Braise like a bee?

"Onions detonation small cattle" Onions detonation small cattle!

Hints of lava and surfboard? "Hawaiian scenery pizza". ¹

"Nalco small cattle baked carbon"

Lovely. "Red pink beautifuls woman"

"Coconut amorous feelings" It’s a very emotional drupe.

"Flame hockey" Game on.

"Colocasia esculenta schott pearl milk tea"²

"Enough to give comfort" Dayenu.

"Low because of Columbia coffee" You said it buddy, Columbian politics always gets me down too. Let’s stop listening to NPR for a bit.

I really wish I’d asked if I could buy one of these menus, it’s the gift that keeps on giving.
Although I think many of these translations are hilarious, it is worth noting that I don’t think badly of whoever put it together –it was extremely courteous of them. Very very few English speakers ever pop into the small town of Hengdian, let alone drop into Ai Qi Coffee. So kudos to that establishment for trying (and largely succeeding) to accomodate the occasional English-speaker.
Customer not really angry.

1. Again, those not accustomed to China might also find "Super cows feet pizza" to be noteworthy [↩]
2. I suspect a scientific name crept into their woeful Chinese-English dictionary [↩]

These images show the combination of weights used, the span angle setting, the hole in the mounting plate to which the camera was attached (hole N), that the gezornenplatz screw was in place, and the position of the mount plate.

Full setup

middle weight and span setting	end weights	mounting plate
mount plate position

1. i.e., a single message sent to me on Vimeo [↩]
2. as opposed to unattached? [↩]

Sometimes Chinese parents show how they really feel about their child with a carefully-chosen bumper sticker.¹

When I saw this sticker I laughed aloud², then reflected on the fact that if my parents had sported this on their Toyota station wagon when I was growing up, I’d probably have been a better student. Fear of unknown unknowns³ is a great motivator.

OK, so the bumper sticker has nothing really to do with the “Tiger Mom” meme, but that phrase is all over the net and the whole concept alternately interests me and cracks me up. My theory is that any truth to Mrs. Chua’s newly-named stereotype has little to do with being Asian⁴, and much to do with the fact that it wasn’t easy for people to immigrate to the US from China in the 1960s-80s and the process disproportionately selected for the hard-scrambling type. Many of those immigrants later decided⁵ to imbue in their kids the same drive that served them in getting through that filter. It’s just like the Johnny Cash song “A Boy Named Sue“, but with the parental focus being toughness mental rather than physical.

But no need to be so serious; The best Tiger Mom jokes I’ve come across so far are the article “New Parenting Book Sparks Outrage” from The Onion, and Jen Kwok’s “Tiger Mom Rap!”.

1. Yes, I smudged out the license number, just in case China’s “Human Flesh Search Engines” are on the lookout for people with unharmonious bumper stickers. [↩]
2. …then I stopped laughing and wondered whether the driver could have purchased this sticker as a deliberate joke, which would still be funny but less so. Unlikely given that the median level of English literacy among locals of this area in nil. [↩]
3. Rumsfeld, Donald, “I never promised you a WMD”, Press Briefing (Winter 2002 Edition), GWB (ed.), URL = <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/There_are_known_knowns>. [↩]
4. …except for the Orientalist-tinge to the naming of the meme. [↩]
5. …or had less choice in the matter than that, since people may often just use the same parental behaviors that were modeled for them when young, or maybe their nature trumps nurture and the filter selected for genetically-driven type-A peeps. [↩]

So here are the header images I threw together yesterday, along with brief explanations:

In Los Angeles it is important to drive everywhere, regardless the distance. Yes, you could walk 3 blocks to your destination, but then you’d miss out on the many routes suggested by your car’s factory-installed GPS system.

An average sunset in the hills of LA’s "Studio City" district.

The pets of a film editor I know share an "American Gothic" moment. Part of the "A day in the life of Burbank" collection.

Disneyland isn’t exactly LA, but it’s close. This picturesque scene is part of the Grand Canyon diorama, one of the many sights to behold while enjoying Disneyland’s charming and ancient train ride.

Due to the extreme horizontal aspect ratio, it’s a challenge to edit images for the header. But it’s fun. The header image displayed per visit is chosen randomly. Once I’ve installed more images, you’ll likely see a different image each visit.

Click either photo to see it full-size.

I grabbed her cell phone¹ and snapped a couple of pictures. He did the same. I don’t think he has a blog in which he posts photos of people in the act of taking his picture², but if he does you’ll now be able to find a photo of me on it.

1. It’s an iPhone 4G. I’m pretty impressed by its camera’s image quality. I don’t think I gave the phone enough time to properly set its exposure for that 2nd shot, there’s likely have been better highlight detail had I waited a couple of seconds. [↩]
2. which is something I’d definitely do if I were any sort of celebrity [↩]

I thought this screenshot might amuse. Click the photo to see it at full-size. At the top of the image are photos that include Chow Yun Fat, cropped to just the automatically recognized face. Below a line are photos that Aperture 3 thinks may be the same person. To refine the computer’s idea of what his face looks like and tag more photos with the appropriate name I had to select all Chow Yun Fat photos from the bottom part of the screen and drag them to the top, above the line.

For more info on the facial recognition feature in Aperture 3, check here on Apple’s website.

I have about 16,000 photos in my archive, and though the process isn’t completely automatic, the facial recognition feature made it much more feasible to tag all the people in these photos. Even just the fact that the application can display an entire set of photos cropped and resized to only show faces alone would be a huge help, the fact that Aperture 3 makes decent guesses is a bonus.