The Dead
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A short animated poem, from the youtube bag of tricks. Enjoy!
A short animated poem, from the youtube bag of tricks. Enjoy!
The word seems almost impossible to pronounce at first glance, but it’s not as hard as it looks. The official state fish of Hawaii (English name: reef triggerfish) is not a big fish and it’s often said, half jokingly, that the fish is smaller than its Hawaiian name spelled out.
The Hawaiian language didn’t have alphabets until the missionaries landed on the islands. They studied the vernacular and decided that it can be represented by all the vowels (A, E, I, O, U) and only seven consonants (H, K, L, M, N, P, W). With the exception of W, the consonants are pronounced just like in English. W is pronounced like a V if it comes after an E or I. As for the vowels: A is pronounced as in Ah if stressed or above if not stressed; E is pronounced as in bay if stressed or gent if not stressed; I is pronounced as in bee; O is pronounced as in hose; and U is pronounced as in stew. Once you have the phonetics down pat, the language becomes much easier to pronounce.
The long Hawaiian words often have repeating patterns that make it easier to remember and pronounce once you break it down. Let’s try to do this with the fish name. Humu is pronounced twice as hoo-moo. Nuku is pronounced twice as noo-koo. A is pronounced once as ah. Pu is pronounced once as poo. A’a is pronounced as ah-ah (the apostrophe acts as a glottal stop or pause between syllables). Now say it out loud: hoo-moo hoo-moo noo-koo noo-koo ah poo ah ah. Not so hard now, is it?
This post is relevant only if you know the Indian language Malayalam.
A couple of “clever” Mallus have put together a Malayalam rap song in which they don’t really rap except for the occasional “yeahs” and the “uh huhs.” But they kind of talk through the song invoking memories of the slapstick Malayalam movie comedies of the late ’80s. Ootha wit fans and people who have stayed in university hostels will find this funny. Enjoy.
San Francisco is being invaded by Prius cars, and Noe Valley seems to be one of the frontlines of the invasion. A few days back, while walking around the neighborhood, I saw no less than 7 Priuses in one city block. I’m not kidding. Of the remaining half dozen, another two were Honda hybrids. Now, I’m as environmentally conscious as the next guy or gal, so I cannot see this proliferation of hybrid cars as anything but a good thing. Still, when I look at the plasticky, almost disposable looking exteriors of these cars of the future, I sometimes yearn for the iron monsters of the Detroit of yesteryear. Those were real cars, which looked every bit like metal spawn stamped out in the hellfire bowels of some smoke-belching factory behemoth. And then I think fondly of the first car I ever drove in America, the splendid Buick Skyhawk.
When I tell people I went to school in Detroit, they give me commiserating looks, as if I’d told them my dog just died. I could never figure out this response, because despite the muggings, the freezing weather, the chewed up roads, the shelled out abandoned buildings, and the freezing weather, I generally had a good time in the Motor City. Part of it was because I was too stupid to know any better. Then again, I had a good bunch of friends and even hell can be bearable in the right company. I should know. Alcohol helped too, and Mr. Daniels saw us through many a roach infestation.
(Read more…)
Wolfman offers some tips on fighting global warming.
Hello fellow rantlust bloggers…
I have been silent for a while because I’ve been working with rantlust’s creator anup in getting a rantlust sibling blog: medialust.net. We have been working on and off for about six months on it and I think we finally reached a point where we can expose it to a larger community and audience.
medialust.net (unfortunately .com was already taken) is a space to rant about media. We have started with music, movies, video games and comics. There are few active bloggers this far, you’ll see that most of the entries are either anup or myself, so yes we are looking for active bloggers. As you know by now, if there are no writers it is very hard to maintain the site.
The idea of this space is to not only talk about media but also share media with the rest of the people. If we are blogging about music, we want to be able to share the music we are talking about. If we are talking about comics, we want to be able to see a piece of it, enough that might get the curiosity of the reader.
Certain features are still missing, but we’ll add them as they become necessary. There are a lot of cool stuff out there to share media, but not everything works well in the blog environment. We’ve chosen a hosting facility with lots of storage so we don’t forsee we’ll be running out of space any time soon.
Hope you’ll join us in expanding the lust family.
If you are interested in blogging let me know at josercaldera@medialust.net, or medialust@googlegroups.com
Despite the lukewarm critical response, I decided to buy Not Too Late by Norah Jones and judge it myself. I am pleasantly surprised and think that this is my favorite album of hers. I liked her debut album, Come Away with Me (2002), that sold more than 18 million copies and made her a superstar. Not to mention the Grammys that she picked up for it. But the sophomore album, Feels Like Home (2004) was a dull and boring effort and I don’t think I have listened to it more than a couple of times.
Not Too Late is the first album in which Jones writes or co-writes all the (thirteen) songs. I find her lyrics hard to follow and had a tough time associating some of her songs to their relevant topics. For instance, the song “Sinkin’ Soon” is supposedly about Katrina but I had to read it elsewhere to figure this out. (Of course, once you know that, the lyrics make sense.) As in this song, she makes sure that we know where her political inclinations lie. There are other songs about Iraq and the US elections. She refers to Bush as the “one we hate” in one song and in “Sinkin’ Soon,” she refers to him as the “captain who’s too proud to say that he dropped the oar.” Despite the confounding lyrics, the music is ethereal and is a good accompaniment to some fine Scotch and a Honduran cigar.
In a world full of underwear-shunning pop superstar divas, Jones is a breath of fresh air and I hope she continues to mesmerize us with her unique and melancholy voice.
My favorite song of the new album is “Sinkin’ Soon” and you can listen to it here:
Every now and then, rantlust takes some time off trivial stuff and tackles the really hard questions in life. On these hallowed pages, the seeker may find resolution to such profound mysteries as: who would win a fight between a python and an alligator; exactly how great is Chuck Norris; what is proper shitiquette, and so on. All this, however, has merely been a build-up to tackle the most important mystery of all: why are men so fascinated by tits?
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