The Week in Entertainment

Another busy week...

TV: Caught up on The Middle, which had been piling up on the DVR. A few more shows there - maybe in a few weeks when I go on vacation? Anyway, I really liked the "Year of Sue" arc, and the yearbook was just perfect.

Read: "The Day the World Turned Upside Down" - the only non-slate* novelette. It was interesting, though perhaps not really Hugo-worthy, but then again I don't read many novelettes these days (or any, really), so what do I know? I'll probably vote for it. Also read Enter the Janitor, an amusing beginning to an series in which the battle of good v. evil is fought by those who clean up the world. And Uprooted, a genuinely extraordinary book, highly recommended (though I could have done without the last couple of paragraphs (I'd have much preferred Agnieszka to spend more than a couple of months creating her own life before the Dragon came back, if he had to come back at all). But that's a minor quibble. Started The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August, which is fascinating. (Scalzi's "Big Idea" has got me back into reading science fiction, I realize.)

I really don't think so

Not only don't I have an account with Kiwibank, or any foreign bank, I have a hard time believing that Kiwibank uses an American university email account.

Oh, Bing...

Юрій Поправка – один з тих, хто віддав своє життя за волю і віру в свою країну. Наші діти повинні зростати гідними громадянами великої країни Героїв!

Bing gives that as:
Yuri Amendment is one of those who gave their lives for freedom and faith in his country. Our children must grow worthy citizens of a great nation of heroes!

This time, Google is worse:
Yuri amendment - one of those who gave their lives for freedom and faith in his country. Our children should grow worthy citizens of a great country heroes!

Both of them miss the meaning of the instrumental case after зростати, which they both mistranslate as just "grow". As the dictionary puts it, the primary meaning is:

1. (рости) to grow; (про дітей) to grow up

where про дітей means "of children". And the instrumental complement gives the meaning of "to become" or "to be".

And they both - like Mark Twain's translation "'the infuriated tigress broke loose and utterly ate up the unfortunate fir forest' (Tannenwald)" where he "found out that Tannenwald in this instance was a man's name." - translate Yuriy's surname. He's not Yuriy Amendment (Google cavalierly ignores the capitalization); he's Yuri Popravka. 

ps: If you haven't read Twain's "The Awful German Language", you should.

pps: there is an interesting translation problem here. Yuriy might be "one of those (unspecified people) who gave his life". Semantically it's not likely, but it's possible in a context where he was in a group but was the only one to do. The grammar makes it possible, as хто (who) is grammatically singular and masculine regardless of its antecedent, and своє (the possessive "one's own", as opposed to "someone else's") has no number or gender of its own but matches up with the noun it modifies. I wouldn't translate it that way without a good contextual backstory to justify it, but it's grammatically possible.

Also, життя is in a class of neuter nouns where the nominative singular and plural are the same. In this case, in Ukrainian it's actually singular (plural would be свої життя), but that's not so different from English where one could say "one of those who gave their life" and mean the same thing as "their lives".

First impressions can mislead

So I saw this last week and it's funny - mostly funny about how minds (mine at any rate) work.

My very first thought as I glanced at it was "A Christian got a standing ovation? That seems kind of provocative" and then "Wait, what? It sounds like a rare occasion-" which cut off as I processed the whole thing.

"Christian opens session for Oregon State House of Representatives" - not a Christian, Christian Kane.

Of course.

Memorial Day (Observed)

Some music this year:



"The War Was In Color"


I see you've found a box of my things -
Infantries, tanks and smoldering airplane wings.
These old pictures are cool. Tell me some stories
Was it like the old war movies?
Sit down son. Let me fill you in

Where to begin? Let's start with the end
This black and white photo don't capture the skin
From the flash of a gun to a soldier who's done
Trust me grandson
The war was in color

From shipyard to sea, From factory to sky
From rivet to rifle, from boot camp to battle cry
I wore the mask up high on a daylight run
That held my face in its clammy hand
Crawled over coconut logs and corpses in the coral sand

Where to begin? Let's start with the end
This black and white photo don't capture the skin
From the shock of a shell or the memory of smell
If red is for Hell
The war was in color

I held the canvas bag over the railing
The dead released, with the ship still sailing,
Out of our hands and into the swallowing sea
I felt the crossfire stitching up soldiers
Into a blanket of dead, and as the night grows colder
In a window back home, a Blue Star is traded for Gold.

Where to begin? Let's start with the end
This black and white photo don't capture the skin
When metal is churned. And bodies are burned
Victory earned
The War was in color

Now I lay in my grave at age 21
Long before you were born
Before I bore a son
What good did it do?
Well hopefully for you
A world without war
A life full of color

Where to begin? Let's start with the end
This black and white photo never captured my skin
Once it was torn from an enemy thorn
Straight through the core
The war was in color





Writer(s): Terrell H. Clark, Carter Gravatt, Scott Andrew Milstead, Barry Thomas Privett
Copyright: Constant Ivy Music LLC

The Week(s) in Entertainment

The last two weeks have been really, really busy at work, and I've come home not wanting to do anything even the tiniest bit creative. Taking a deep breath this week before a two-week business trip to Anchorage, then another very busy two weeks and then vacation! Yay! Anyway, here's the last couple of weeks:

Live: Last weekend, Dirty Dancing the Musical at the Hippodrome, which was a blast. This weekend up to New York to see On The Twentieth Century with Kristin Chenoweth, who I am unreasonably fond of. It was a terrific show, pure Broadway. See it if you can get up there!

TV: And I realized I'd sort of mixed Dirty Dancing and Flashdance up in my mind, and never actually seen the movie, so I hunted it up on On Demand. It was good.

Read: Finished Traitor to His Class - loved this quote: "Stalin's promise of free elections in Poland might prove hard to enforce; Roosevelt was enough of a Democrat to know the means by which his own party prevented free elections in the American South, and he assumed that Stalin was at least as clever as that... And the mere promise ... was more than Churchill was offering India."Also got several preorders delivered so I devoured Dry Bones, a Longmire novel; Six and a Half Deadly Sins, the latest of the Dr. Siri novels (set in Laos in the 1970s ... how did I manage to miss the Sino-Vietnamese War of 1979????), which was quite good and really had me worried about the survival of several characters; Rock With Wings, the latest of the continuation of the Leaphorn/Chee/Manuelito novels by Tony Hillerman's daughter Ann (she's the one who brought Bernadette Manuelito front stage, and I'm glad of it). Also a few short stories in the "Iron Druid" series.

The Week in Entertainment

Busy, busy week. Kind of spent the weekend with TV on while I did some prep for class.

TV: Grimm's next to last episode for the season. They didn't kill Sean, but they did do some terrible things. Next week's ep should be tremendous. Serenity, which I love even though they killed Wash. A marathon of Columbo, which included the first one I ever say (Ray Milland helping Bradford Dillman fake his own kidnapping and then killing him). The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy - the new one with Martin Freeman, which I hadn't seen before; it was fine. The Court Jester (with Danny Kaye), which is great fun.

Read: More of Traitor to His Class. Up to his election as president.

Nice job, Bing. I'd give you a B+

Oh, Bing. Sooooo close.

ПП: Сьогодні український народ та Збройні сили єдині як ніколи.
Ми переможемо, бо добро завжди перемагає зло!

Bing:
PM: today the Ukrainian people and the armed forces are United as never before.
We'll win, because good always overcomes evil!

Google:
PP: Today Ukrainian people and the armed forces are united as never before.
We will win, because good always triumphs over evil

Google is almost completely correct. I'm not at all sure why Bing translated Poroshenko's initials as PM; surely it wasn't recognizing that it was the Prime Minister? I mean, if it's that smart, why did it capitalize United? Also, in a solemn speech such as this, I don't like "We'll win".

But Bing gets something right that Google missed: it's not "Ukrainian people", it's (as Google has it) "the Ukrainian people". Народ (narod) isn't the plural of person, it's the collective, political-or-ethnic group. The people, the nation.

But otherwise, nice job, Bing.

ps: Note Poroshenko's profile picture: a stylized black-and-red poppy, used in Ukraine for VE Day for the first time, since the old George Ribbon is irredeemably tainted by its association with Russian aggression and separatism.

Pronouns... why the trouble?

"У цьому році я мріяв відсвяткувати 9 травня зі своїм внуком лейтенантом Національної гвардії, але він загинув у бою при захисті своєї Батьківщини", - каже 97-річний ветеран.

Bing translated this as: "This year, I wanted to celebrate may 9 with his grandson, Lieutenant of the National Guard, but he died in battle while defending their homeland," says a 97-year-old veteran. 

 And Google was virtually identical: "This year I wanted to celebrate 9 May with his grandson Lieutenant of the National Guard, but he was killed in battle in defense of their homeland," - says 97-year veteran.

Why do they both just completely miss how to translate свій? WHY? Its very definition is "one's own" - it always goes to the subject of the clause it's in. It cannot be "his" or "their" if the subject is "I' and "he". It exists to eliminate the ambiguity of "John gave Bob his book". Its entire purpose is totally subverted by both these programs. WHY?

MY grandson. HIS homeland.  

So very simple. ... So apparently impossible to derive an algorithm for.

(There are other issues here, like Google's odd punctuation and  the fact that neither one translated мріяв as "dreamed", but let it go, let it go...)

The Week in Entertainment

Live: Un Ballo en Maschera, the last opera of my season. Dmitry Hvorostovsky and Sonja
Radvanovsky, with Ricardo Tamura standing in for the ill Piotr Beczała as the king. An excellent cast in a very iffy production (stark and at the same time over the top - yes, yes, the king is Icarus, we get it. We don't need to see the painting in every scene).

TV: Caught up on Grimm, of which there were quite a few stacked up on the DVR and which is building to a heckuva climax, that's for sure. (If they kill off Sean Renard I shall be pissed off.) (Also, note to production staff: If you end an episode with Nick being forced to shoot Monroe, saying desperately "I can't stop it!", and then go to black and the sound of a gunshot... don't show Monroe hale and healthy in the promos for next week.)

Read: The Forgotten by Bishop O'Connell, a sequel to The Stolen, in his American Faerie series. I like it much better than the first one, which was enjoyable enough. Mitigating Jeopardy, a collection of short stories first published in the 1950s, which was not to my taste though YYMDV; just a kind of humor I don't care for. Also began Traitor to His Class, H.W. Brand's new biography of FDR.

May Day!

Whatever it means to you, Happy May Day!