wombat1138: (Simpsonized)
Have concluded that Naomi Novik's "Temeraire" series has succeeded in eating me as a new fandom, at least to the extent of getting me to read (or at least browse) assorted reference materials that I probably wouldn't've read otherwise, ranging from world butterfly compendia to early Qing histories/biographies.

A particularly odd book that I found in the local library system is A Manchu Monarch : an Interpretation of Chia Ch'ing by A.E. Grantham; this particular copy was a 1976 reprint with no original publication details inside. It's "odd" in that its subject breadth isn't too different from a standard popular history and it doesn't wander into historical novel by inventing dialogue, but it keeps having stylistic freakouts into florid narrative overkill; e.g., "as the newly liberated spirit passed away from the sick-bed in the early hours of a spring morning, grateful itself, it may have merged more readily into all the blossoming loveliness outlined against the blue of a cloudless sky."Read more... )
wombat1138: (Simpsonized)
Found in the checkbook design brochure from my new bank: the so-called "Eastern Expressions" series.

It includes one of the most pathetic attempts at that I've ever seen-- the only way I could even figure out what it was supposed to be was zooming the image and trying to read the blurry English gloss provided: "Love".



Two additional tidbits of hilarity:

1.) It's in the "bilingual" design section; most of the major check fields have (afaik) accurate Mandarin translations underneath the English. And yet.

2.) The design studio who created these checks is apparently headquartered in Vancouver BC, where they were somehow completely unable to find a qualified Sinographic calligrapher.
wombat1138: (Default)
Mediterranean/Near East "royal purple": 6, 6-dibromoindigo
Japanese murasaki/shikon purple: shikonin.

More general list of trad. Asian dye chromophores here, including Japanese color terminology.
wombat1138: (Default)
"Propaganda" is perhaps not quite the right word for Hetalia in that it isn't a deliberate governmentally-sponsored campaign to promote specific political goals.... )

Ack.

May. 19th, 2009 06:49 pm
wombat1138: (Simpsonized)
I was about to make another labored attempt to flail through my reactions to RaceFail (or rather, MammothFail this time), but in the meantime finally remembered to find some of Hetalia: Axis Powers, which I'd been meaning to do.

...I have no idea how to express my reaction, other than relief that in one of the fan communities, a prospective student teacher was talked out of trying to use the material as part of a history curriculum (iirc at a high-school level). I can envision it being meta-studied at a college level as an example of satire or propaganda, but as history? Vast multiverses of no.

Though Italy's persistent characterization as a pasta-eating surrender monkey is weirdly entertaining.

[Added reflink here should people wish to read it, but please, please don't go harass the community or the original poster, since their discussion has now ended amicably. Also, more notes about Hetalia as a separate post.]

Oh dear.

Mar. 20th, 2009 09:27 pm
wombat1138: (Default)
Spotted in the crafty sections of JoAnn's Fabrics today:

1.) An egregiously bad set of Sinographic (e.g., hanzi/kanji) rubber stamps that looked as if they were designed by someone who wasn't at all familiar with the script and had sloppily copied them with their non-dominant hand; this was especially obvious by proximity to another set that showed some of the same characters correctly. See the "Asian Stampers", the first ones down to the left, vs. this other stamp on the actual JoAnn's site. (In the "Asian Stampers", the "love" character is the least bad of them; the others... oy.)

Back to the StampAndGo page, the "Chinese character border" stamp (SIF-PSH060) a few screens down may've been made by the same people, and if anything is even worse-- at least with the first set, the characters were all facing the right way. I think the last two here are supposed to be 河長, but I can't figure out what the hell some of the others are based on.

Not that other languages/scripts are immune to that sort of abuse, e.g. the pseudo-Cyrillic writing in the HP4 movie etc., but still, sheesh.

2.) A decorative iron-on decal of an archetypal Chinese take-out box with the little wire handle and a red pagoda on its side, coupled with the slogan "Miso Cute". I think this is the same image.

And as ever, http://www.hanzismatter.com/ .
wombat1138: (Default)
When I was an urchin, Ursula K. LeGuin's "Earthsea" books were a trilogy whose world was firmly categorized with the likes of Tolkien's Middle-Earth, CS Lewis' Narnia, and Lloyd Alexander's Prydain. In 1990, LeGuin unexpectedly resumed the series with Tehanu, which I rather liked as (imho) an elegiac postscript of both sorrow and hope, but which was widely execrated at the time by male readers on Usenet who thought that it "emasculated" the main hero from the original trilogy. Eventually, there was a fifth novel, The Other Wind, and a collection of short stories, Tales from Earthsea, but neither of those later books really clicked into my brain cell.

A few years ago, the SciFi Channel produced an execrable miniseries that was hashed together as a loose approximation of the first two books. It was produced by the same people who murdered MZB's The Mists of Avalon into a similarly distorted miniseries, and a lot of the same character types and plot twists seemed very familiar wrt that previous adaptation. By contrast, anything else would be an improvement, which I suppose is how I have to describe the anime movie Gedo Senki, whose bootleg DVD at our usual rental place was titled in English Tales from Earthsea but which is really a combination of the third and fourth books rather than anything much to do with the aforementioned anthology, and which therefore I'll continue to refer to by the Japanese name. Read more... )
wombat1138: (marker sketch)
Happy Year of the Fire Pig, y'all.

I intend to celebrate with carnitas or tonkatsu, depending on the restaurant genre we end up at this weekend. Charsiu would theoretically be even better, but these days the red food coloring kinda scares me for no good reason.
wombat1138: (Default)
Yesterday when I was already heading to Borders, BBC World aired an author interview which made me keep sitting in the parking lot after I got there. Once the interview was over, I went in and promptly bought this book.

I wonder if I still have Peter Brook's marathon adaptation of the Mahabharata on tape somewhere?

Addendum: Sita sings the blues.
wombat1138: (Default)
The eBay jewelry board is rife with anti-Chinese sentiment (more specifically, against sellers based in China), which bothers me on general principle. Not that the complaints are entirely unjustified; there's a continuous stream of commentary about listings which are described as genuine gold/platinum with diamonds, despite being priced far too low to realistically expect anything more than electroplate and cubic zirconia. But as one bewildered seller asked (with slightly more uncertain grammar than paraphrased here) in the midst of being flamed, "But it *is* real gold that's being electroplated onto the ring," not knowing that according to FTC/eBay regulations in the US, "genuine" gold has to be a consistent alloy all the way through; moreover, eBay has even stricter regs than the FTC about what karatage minimally qualifies to be called "gold" at all.

But the most persistent problem seems to be the confusion of CZs with diamonds. This may be partially attributable to fuzzy terminology in Chinese; the Google autotranslator renders "cubic zirconia" as "人造钻石", and then cycles the phrase back into "synthetic diamonds"-- which are definitely *not* synonyms within the Anglophone jewelry trade. There does seem to be a more specific phrase "氧化锆石" for cubic zirconia, but it's less popular-- a combined Google search for 人造钻石 "cubic zirconia" brings up about 1600 results, but 氧化锆石 "cubic zirconia" only brings up about 650.

God, I'm sick to death of seeing Anglophone sellers (who don't always have ideal spelling/grammar in their own native language) turn the flamethrowers onto sellers from China with the equivalent of Ugly American tourists yelling slowly and clearly "WHERE! THE! HELL! IS! THE! BATH! ROOM?!?" at every European who can't escape from a 50-yard radius.

Not that I've actually ever crossed the English Channel. Or even been to Great Britain for fifteen years or so. But still.
wombat1138: (Default)
Buried in the middle of this long list of garlic trivia, there's the statement, "Because of its stimulating qualities, garlic was never part of Buddhist tradition in China or Japan, whose practitioners felt it would upset one's spiritual balance. Garlic was never adopted into traditional Japanese cuisine and was shunned by Zen masters. On the other hand, legend tells of a Japanese Buddhist priest who hid in the mountains and secretly cured himself of tuberculosis by ingesting large amounts of garlic."

This made me think, "Well hey-- so what do you use to repel Japanese vampires?" Read more... )
wombat1138: (Default)
An assortment of oddments:

1.) This news item from last year was brought back to mind by a comment exchange with [livejournal.com profile] bellatrys about sauerkraut and kimchee: the ambiguous modern status of Huns in Hungary.

2.) A felted yurt Nativity set.

3.) Sometime last year, I ran across a really fascinating page by a Hungarian physicist/polymath with several essays about cultural coincidences(?) between the Magyars and the Japanese, such as this one. Evidently he's not the only person with that line of thought:

Northern China was originally a temperate and lush place full of forests, streams, and rainfall. It began to dry out, however, a few thousand years before the common era. This dessication, which eventually produced one of the largest deserts in the world, the Gobi, drove the original inhabitants south and east. These peoples pushed into Korea and displaced indigenous populations. Eventually, these new settlers were displaced by a new wave of immigrations from northern China and a large number of them crossed over into the Japanese islands. For this reason, the languages of the area north of China, the language of Korea, and Japanese are all in the same family of languages according to most linguists. Because Mongolian (spoken in the area north of China) is also part of this language family and because the Mongolians conquered the world far to the west, this means that the language family to which Japanese belongs is spoken across a geographical region from Japan to Europe. The westernmost language in this family is Magyar, spoken in Hungary, and the easternmost language in this family is Japanese.


I mean, call me a sock with holes worn through it, cause I'll be darned. Dunno how much underlying truth there is to it (I suppose Cavalli-Sforza might have some interesting pertinent data, if I ever remember to track it down), but it's a dang good story.
wombat1138: (Default)
Courtesy of Wikipedia, with some abridgement:

The first wave of immigration of the gentile class arrived in the province in the early 4th century AD when the Western Jin Dynasty collapsed and the north was torn apart by invasions by nomadic peoples from the north, as well as civil war. These immigrants were primarily from eight families in central China: Lin (林), Huang (黄), Chen (陈), Zheng (郑), Zhan (詹), Qiu (邱), He (何), and Hu (胡). The first four remain as the major surnames of modern Fujian.
I'm pretty sure those transliterations are from the Mandarin pronunciations rather than the local dialect. Which is just as well for security purposes, though even within the specialized context of Lan-nang, my mother's family isn't quite sure how they ended up with most of the current aspects of their surname. (Some of them theorize an earlier transliteration accident based on bad handwriting.) I feel oddly balanced between "Hey! I really do belong somewhere on both sides!" and "Bah, in context, my specific family names seem so boring if everyone has them back home."Read more... )
wombat1138: (Default)
In the midst of trying to tessellate together small scraps of poetry, I think I've finally figured out why I've never liked "The Waste Land" On the other hand, I may be any combination of misguided, trite, or incoherent :b Read more... )
wombat1138: (Default)
This past summer, the wombat-consort and I went to Nova Scotia for my aunt's memorial service, in the small town where she was born. Most of her family still lives nearby; it was one of the first places resettled by the displaced Acadians after the British allowed them to return from exile. They live near the shore, which is a poor place for agriculture-- in Vieille Acadie, their ancestors constructed complex systems of stone dikes and levees in the salt marshes, regularly opening them for the tide to wash through with fresh silt, but the British destroyed those as part of the war of attrition-- so most of them are independent commercial fishermen, with boats worth more than their houses.

Most of the Acadians, of course, never came back. Some of them were sent back to France, more than a century after their colony had been founded. Others eventually coalesced into large communities on the other side of the Bay of Fundy (most of the Francophones in New Brunswick are of Acadian origin rather than Quebecois) and far to the south in the Mississippi Delta, but in their initial expulsion, they were randomly scattered through the Atlantic provinces. I have no idea of the genealogical demographics of those directly affected by Katrina, but I still can't help being reminded of history now, in a strange blend of "Evangeline" and the Middle Passage.

(As a gratuitous anime reference, for those who remember Yumi's cryptic remark about the ship Maria Luz near the end of Rurouni Kenshin's Kyoto Arc, it involved a legal case against Peru, which had adjusted to the end of the African slave trade the same way as several other parts of the world, by filling the same labor roles with Chinese coolies who were nominally indentured but essentially enslaved. Many of them had been simply kidnapped from their homes. In Cuba, one worker on a sugar plantation left the words, "It is certain that for us, there will be neither coffin nor grave, and that our bones will be burnt with those of horses and oxen to be afterwards used to refine sugar, and that neither our sons nor our sons' sons will ever know what we have endured." [Lynn Pan, Sons of the Yellow Emperor] Not that I have a real point, I suppose, except for the traditional observation that People Suck.)
wombat1138: (Default)
I was tidying up some earlier entries by tucking them into lj-cuts, and got caught up again in webhunting stuff on color linguistics as related to two different palettes of metaphysical elements:

Asian quincunx: earth, wood, fire, and metal, and water

Western quartet: fire, air, water, and earth
(sometimes this set also quincunxes with the central addition of spirit.)

From this point on, forget about the metaphysical stuff. You may have noticed I changed my virtual crayon for "water" between the two lists, which I rearranged into the chromatic order given in an older post: Read more... )
wombat1138: (Default)
I'm thinking about recanting an earlier determination to reconcile the "traditional" Eastern/Western elemental cosmologies, mostly due to the appalling number of similar-but-different systems among various Amerindian groups. But maybe if the New World is left out of it, the exercise is still barely possible. Maybe.

As a quick'n'dirty summary, the common Western system based on Gardnerian Wicca is oriented (oriens, rising) toward the east, the direction of sunrise. The traditional symbols ended up carrying over from Tarot to modern card suits, although sometimes Air and Fire swap gear with each other. Read more... )

By constrast, Chinese astronomy was based on equatorial observation toward the south. I have no idea why, since they were familiar with the North Star and had special names for the nearby constellations, but there it is. And while the Chinese zodiac has twelve signs, there's no direct correspondence with the twelvefold Western zodiac because of different timeframes and nonfixed elements: counterintuitively, while the Western "solar" signs change on a monthly basis, the Asian "lunar" signs change yearly; while the Western signs are inherently attached to certain elements, all twelve Asian signs rotate through a five-element system to create a sixty-year macrocycle. Read more... )

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