Welcome, welcome! The month of July (or was it June?) has sped past, and it is indeed time for a new episode of The Yellow Card Question! The theme song of the day is from 二十分可乐 (something like “20-minute humor”), a TV show produced by the local TV station, all in Jinhua dialect, with a lot of references to local culture and places. If you use Windows with IE and ActiveX, you can watch all 117 episodes online.
So! On with the show! For your entertainment today, we will have a bit of a twist — I will pull the yellow card with my left hand! That’s right, I am ambidextrous (or ambi-sinister?), capable of equally clumsy movements with my right and left hands. So, here we go — wait for it — the yellow card question! How about that folks?!
Well, my main purpose in life is to keep my audience entertained. Or at least that’s what a couple friends have told me recently. How am I doing?
Today I have a special treat for you listeners. It’s time for a yellow card question, but instead of our usual theme song, we have a podcast in production since January 2007. That’s right, like finely aged wine, very moldy cheese, or those dirty socks that got lost behind the dresser, this podcast is of the finest caliber producible by dusty musty forgotten dark corners.
And now, while that plays in the background, let’s get on with the show! The one and only yellow card question of the hour, pulled from this perfectly normal deck of electronic cards — there’s no computer special effects here, folks — well, not very special anyway — I mean, it’s just like a really short python script that picks a random element from an xml file full of questions, and formats it in a yellow-background div element floating in the center of the page, pretty kludgey, really. The text is generally formatted badly, because there’s an extra space for some reason in places where there is a line break in the original printed cards, but the actual line breaks in the electronic version is just dependent on html formatting. For example, take a look at this one: In the printed card, there was a line break between “make” and “the”, and so you can see here a little extra space between those words. And then we end up with “place” on a line all by itself. It really loses the poetry of the question. So I would like to make the world a better place by fixing the yellow card script to make the formatting a bit prettier. If I could do that, my life would be complete. I’ve heard it said that there are other issues in the world, riots, flooding, earthquakes, drought, fires, more flooding, violence of diverse kinds, and even diseased kittens dying slowly. But I can’t change the world or rescue every kitten, so I gotta take small steps with what I’ve got.
The closest bookish thing was actually a magazine with an ad on page 123.
奢白，炫放无暇钻光 “Dior, luxury white, shiny as diamonds.”
The second thing was a Japanese comic book.
Third:
The book w/ at least 123 pages on it is: American Legal English. (I’m reading it now). Topic: Manslaughter -_-� next 3 sentences are: � 1. A homicide that would otherwise be second-degree murder may be reduced to voluntary manslaughter if it was committed in response to adequate provocation, sometimes referred to as killing in the ‘heat of passion’.� 2. In general, four requirements must be met: � 3. (1). The provocation must be reasonable(judged by the standard of the reaction of an objective, reasonable person, not a subjective standard that relates to the actor). � Period.
Good evening, my children. The time has come once again, that special time when we stop to meditate on the omissions of the past and the looming shadow of deadlines to come. Today we celebrate this time of the month by the ritual of the yellow card question, when I reach into that fabled stack of digital question cards, and enlighten you with random bits of wisdom.
The theme song of the hour is 轮回 (Reincarnation) by 盛噶仁波切 (Singa Rinpoche), a Tibetan lama and living Buddha.1 Calm your mind by listening to him chant.
I don’t understand the lyrics, but I think there was more to that song than a mantra. How am I ever going to reach enlightenment when they make such complicated poems for meditation?
Okay, so now that our minds are at one with the universe, it’s time for the yellow card!
And the teacher replied to the student, “Tweet tweet!”
1. Did you know Steven Seagal is a living Buddha too?
It’s the end of another month, and I haven’t had anything to say. So guess what that means! It’s that time again folks: It’s the Yellow Card Question Show!
For today’s theme song, we are going to borrow one from another show: Chibi Maruko Chan, aka 櫻桃小丸子, aka ماروكو الصغيرة, aka 마루코는 아홉살, etc. Choose your language and start the music playing: Japanese, German, Mandarin, Cantonese, Arabic, Korean. I’m sure there are Bahasa and Tagalog versions out there and perhaps some others, but I can’t be bothered to find them at the moment. You’ll just have to cope with these options.
So what now? What we’ve all been waiting for — let’s have a question! Do your happy dances for a moment while I spin the wheel, roll the die, shuffle the deck, and blow on the tea leaves.
Hmm. This question was meant for Chinese students who have three to five roommates in their dorm rooms. It doesn’t quite make sense to ask it of myself, but then who said these questions had to make sense.
Well, the simple answer is that I would go crazy. I don’t have much furniture in my room, but I don’t have much floor space either. I have just my one bedroll on the floor, various items of furniture and boxes along the walls, and a section of bare floor that I like to be able to walk on. I don’t like walking on strangers, or friends for that matter. I suppose that if my “roommates” included those sleeping in my living room, than I would perhaps go a little less crazy, but there’s not much out there to sleep on either. This silly building doesn’t even have places to put hammock hooks! With no bunk beds, no hammocks, and shortage of couches, I just don’t think there is any way 6 more people could live here, unless they slept in shifts. That might work. Both my current roommate and I do tend to alternate hours awake. For example, I sometimes sleep 7 PM to 9 PM and 2 AM to 8 AM, and my roomie might sleep 9 PM to 1 AM and 6 AM to noon. But still, a general increase in the average level of insanity would be unavoidable.
My compy is well beyond the warranty period, and even beyond the age of the recall on the defective video processor soldering of that era. So a couple weeks ago when Humpty’s video wigged out for the second time in his distinguished career, I figured that was the end. I was being forced by fate to buy a new computer. Oh well.
But then I found a company online that was reportedly able to repair such problems for $50 plus shipping. They only want the logic board though, so I disassembled Humpty (using instructions printed off the internet) and sent it in. And this week it came back to me!
Then I had to reassemble it. From this:
To this:
It worked! (Yay!) And I even had a dozen screws left over!
of 2008. And I haven’t said anything for far too long. But I have been having a fairly uneventful life, with little worth commenting on. I mean besides finishing my first quarter in the new program, seeing my sister for the first time in two years, meeting her fiance, going to their wedding, doing Christmas with the whole family, flying across the ocean to see my sweetie, getting engaged, coming back to school late, getting a bad stomach flu, then having my compy die on me, and having an impromptu whole family reunion last weekend, there hasn’t been much happening with me. And most of my readers already know about those things anyway.
P.S. You may have noticed that I’ve moved this blog to my own domain. I’m also now running a proxified version (echo.discurs.us/fieldandgarden) so friends in China can see it without a proxy setup. (Yay!)
I am clearly not doing a very good job of keeping up with my posting quota, so I am resurrecting the yellow card questions. Yay!
And we need a new theme song! I nominate “我愿意” (“I am willing”) originally sung by Wang Fei (王菲, aka Faye Wong), but lots of others have done covers. I recommend you start the video playing, but don’t look at it for a minute, just listen. Then listen and watch for a very different experience.
I have a translation posted on my other blog, if you’re curious.
And now, the moment you’ve all been waiting for, eagerly anticipating for the past umpteen months, willing to read, wanting to read, waiting to read: the all new 8th yellow card question! (Okay so it’s not all new, since it’s been there in the virtual deck this whole time, but it’s the all new time it is appearing here, on this blog, in special blockquoted yellow on green background, as opposed to the black on yellow background, see. Believe me, it really is kinda all new, so be excited.)
And here it is!
If the whole world were listening, what would you say?
I honestly haven’t a clue what I should say, but from the perspective of behavioral observation, I think a highly relevant data set is the corpus of blog posts I have written. Now, we must qualify this by noting that in practice, the whole world is not listening, or even reading, but in principle, any member of the world population on this side of the digital divide could wander through, and in fact a non-negligible portion of site hits come from foreign lands like Tennessee and Canada. They come looking for pictures of chickens or donkey riders, and seeking information about “umlatt” and holey jeans, and we do our best to meet their critical needs. It is for this reason (the benefit of lost internet travellers) that we have devoted so much of our time to wandering, the internet, and the world, alongside the essentials like food and underwear. Always be prepared, as they say. And I do all I can time and weather permitting, to help the whole world out.
A year and a half ago, I joined the social music revolution. World peace and harmony through sympathetic vibrations, you know? Oh wait. That’s not quite right. It promised to connect me with people who like the same kind of music as me. The best part is it didn’t require marching in the streets or hiding in muddy fortifications.
