A self-reflexive moment
As those of you who read Memphilter probably know, mainly the posts here are about interesting or funny or disturbing things that members of this small group of friends find while skirting responsible citizenship and bottlenecking national productivity. Rarely are the posts about Memphilter itself, but I just came across something that is, in my estimation, worth noting.
But first, I digress. I am in the midst of moving to New Orleans, and extremely busy with planning all that moving entails, as well as trying to tie up loose ends at work in Cincinnati. Consequently, I have been living out of hotels and flying and working long hours and have not been online a lot. That much is evident, I'm sure.
Despite the fact that I deliberately took a couple of small steps to make this weblog a place that would not attract an audience much larger than this group of friends (and that, my friends, has been a major success!), I occasioanally scan through the referrer logs or do a Google search on "Memphilter" to see who is linking to the site. Since my participation here has been spotty lately, I did just that. To my amazement, a Google search tonight revealed an incoming link to one of jimoto's posts from this spring. Standing proudly next to links to the Quakers' American Friends Service Committee, the Duke University Library, and Harper's magazine, is a link to jimoto's post and then a bevy of sarcastic comments, the best of which is giappino's forgotten classic: Does dogshit go to heaven?
And where does the link come from? An Al-Jazeerah editorial! Holy fucking shit, indeed.
Posted by samuelad at 1:33 to
Media
Wow! Maybe I should be more careful about what I say. It's truly amazing what you can learn about a person on the net, especially when they are as prolific in their writing as the good professor and those of us at Memphilter. I just hope the professor is never suspected by the feds for funding terrorism or else we could all be receiving a visit from the justice dept.
Posted by:
jimoto on October 23, 2003 02:19 PM
I wonder, in translation, just how well the dripping sarcasm from most of our posts and comments leaks into other languages. Alas, Google Language Tools offers no option for English >> Arabic, so I present you a German link (giappino?).
I must also sheepishly note I had to lookup the official language of Iraq, just to be sure, before hitting Post. How many web-surfing Iraqis know of other online translators (after a brief search, Arabic is unfound). And just how accurately translated were all those multi-colored flyers we dropped? Now where was that Memphilter post featuring a link to some scans...
Posted by:
wseay on October 23, 2003 04:14 PM
The German translation is good actually. I don't know about Arabic (do they read right to left?) but German word order is fairly different than English and that is the only real difference in the translation. Short to medium length sentences are fine but the longer ones tend to come off strange but are completely understandable and the humor comes off well too. Maybe it comes off sounding a little bit like a German Yoda. I hope Arabic people who read this site understand English well because I'm not too sure how this type of commentary would translate into Arabic humor, philosophy, etc. German and American humor, philosophy, etc. are not that much different really all in all, but I wouldn't say the same for an Arabic culture.
Posted by:
giappino on October 24, 2003 02:42 AM
Here's a brief HTML Primer