Here is biker Santa greeting visitors in front of a Hualien City government office:

Biker Santa

My friend Kristin recently went to Dubai on vacation. And she took some pictures, which she posted for her friends. It included this one with a note saying, “I have no idea what it says.” So I asked my friend Niam, who lives in Doha, if she knew what it said. Here is our little exchange (I know its all a bit self-indulgent, but humor me folks) for your pleasure (edited down):

Niam:
This is not Arabic. I think its Urdu. It looks as if an Urdu poster version for an Arab film though, but I can’t be sure as I don’t have any idea what the words mean.

Shashwati:
Oh, I can understand Urdu, just can’t read the script. So if you can give me the transliteration I can probably get it. It looks like movie posters from 15 years ago in India, when they still hand painted them.

Niam:
Ok, the main title reads like “Injmen” or “anjaman.” The name above it is naghmati shanikar and the words below it look like
vak ardornkayn film

Shashwati:
Ohhhh, its probably Anjuman, which means meeting, association, getting together. The names seem like Tamil names, but the words below I can’t figure it out-probably the film company’s acronym. I found a reference to a Pakistani film from 1970 that looks like a good match.

Niam:
Thats it! The actor names are the same. Waheed Murad, Rani, Deeba, etc. lol. Thats so funny. And enlightening

We are all feeling absurdly pleased at this bit of detective work. I am curious about the film and want to get hold of a copy to watch. Pakistani soap operas were hugely popular in India in the 80’s and avidly exchanged in the black market. The film looks like it would contain the same pleasures.

I picked up Steven King’s On Writing for 50 NT at a yard sale a couple of months ago.  And this weekend, I actually read it. I’ve never read Stephen King, even though I loved Carrie (especially the opening scenes) and The Shining (can’t bear to watch that one all the way through, I just watch couple of scenes at a time). I haven’t read Stephen King, not because I am snobby about not reading popular fiction, but….anyhow I digress….

I don’t think of myself as a writer of prose,  despite that, I really enjoyed reading ‘On Writing,’ and found it useful.  It was like reading a good book on how to be a plumber, and I respect plumbers greatly, which is how I think of my job as an editor-making sure the shit drains out properly.

King is full of good advice about how not to write sentences like the following:

He sat stolidly beside the corpse, waiting for the medical examiner as patiently as a man waiting for a turkey sandwich.

And yes, he disapproves of adverbs-the fig leaf of timid writers. Actually the entire section on grammar is pretty interesting, makes me want to go looking for my copy of Wren and Martin (or Strunk and White as King would prefer).

The best thing about the book is how it tries to demystify the process of writing. King is very generous about discussing his writing process, and how he edits his work, its designed to encourage one to try, rather than intimidate you into thinking, “I can’t do this, because I am not a genius like x, y, z.” He is more like your favorite uncle, whose advice you are actually inclined to take.

And now for something completely different. When I was an assistant editor on “Michael Moore Live” (yes that Michael Moore), one of the segments in the show was, ‘naked re-enactment of the news,’ we had it because the show was for the BBC, and censorship laws are quite different in the UK. For one of the shows we re-enacted Stephen King’s accident on a country road in Maine. The guy who played Stephen King, looked so much like him, that it’s impossible for me to think of Stephen King as anything but stark naked.  Kind of makes it interesting to read anything by him, even the part where he tells you to stay away from adverbs and be sparing with verbs of dialogue attribution.

Ennis has a very good post on the floods in South Asia. He points out that the floods have displaced nineteen times as many people as Katrina. For donations to India, go through AID’s All India Relief Fund, I prefer them to the Red Cross, as more of the money will get to the victims (besides India has refused foreign aid). For Bangladesh see this post by Mash (via Globalvoices).

The police in Thailand has decided to punish officers for minor offenses by making them wear a “Hello Kitty” armband:

“Simple warnings no longer work. This new twist is expected to make them feel guilt and shame and prevent them from repeating the offence, no matter how minor,” he (Police Colonel Pongpat Chayaphan) said.

“[Hello] Kitty is a cute icon for young girls. It’s not something macho police officers want covering their biceps.”

Out here in Taiwan, with its love for all things ‘ke-ai’ this would probably not be considered a punishment. I think all the 25,000 plus items that the Sanrio company sells do pretty well here, and have been since 1974 when they started. Personally I intend to get the pink Hello Kitty scooter myself. And in case you were wondering why Hello Kitty does not have a mouth, the company website says:

Hello Kitty speaks from her heart. She’s Sanrio’s ambassador to the world and isn’t bound to any particular language.

One of the great perks of being a filmmaker is that I can hang out with people doing really interesting things, and its considered work!

Last week, a screenwriter friend and I spent the afternoon with Ken Perlin, a professor in the Computer Science department at NYU who originated some of the algorithms that ended up creating the special effects in Tron! and his research has ended up in movie effects too many to enumerate, not to mention video games.

Ken showed us his latest research, which was the creation of virtual actors who performed ‘Pride and Prejudice’ as the 30 second version was narrated!

Another one of his experiments Rudolph, has its own poem:

Rudolph the red nosed rein-sheep†

Rudolph the red nosed rein-sheep
Had to stand on just three feet
This made his A.I. program
Always run NP-complete

All of the other rein-sheep
Used to call him names and laugh
They always said poor Rudolph
Had an asymmetric graph!

Asymmetric graph, wow, thats funny! Check out Ken’s page, its got all sorts of fun stuff to play with.

Kerim often complains about how I am bad at posing for photographs and that is why there are more photos of our dog than me in his flickr sets. Here is his narrative about what he is talking about.

This was taken while on a hike in an old Tea estate outside Taipei.

Yesterday we went to restaurant in the next village which is famous for its clams. You can pick your own clams from a tank and they cook it for you. It got me thinking about the expression “happy as a clam.” Why would a clam be considered happy? A quick google query reveals:

The saying is very definitely American, hardly known elsewhere. The fact is, we’ve lost its second half, which makes everything clear. The full expression is happy as a clam at high tide or happy as a clam at high water. Clam digging has to be done at low tide, when you stand a chance of finding them and extracting them. At high water, clams are comfortably covered in water and so able to feed, comparatively at ease and free of the risk that some hunter will rip them untimely from their sandy berths. I guess that’s a good enough definition of happy. (From World Wide Words)

It seems the expression came into vogue in the mid-nineteenth century. Humorist Eric Kraft’s web-page informs us that the author Louis Kronenberger, the author of Animal, Vegetable, Mineral (1972) (a commonplace book, hence our unfamiliarity with it, I suppose) claims:

“I wish I had made up a word that had entered the language; the most I can claim is to have dredged up a metaphor that was subsequently decapitated. It was a metaphor I found listed somewhere and had never seen in print, whereupon I used it several times in a magazine with a large circulation — ‘happy as a clam at high tide.’ Thereafter I began to see it in print and to hear it in speech in the truncated form ‘happy as a clam.’ Thus what gave it point it had been robbed of: ‘happy as a clam’ is neither good sense nor good nonsense.”

Unlike the occasional story about the last of the Mughals driving a rikshaw in Delhi, and the last of the Romanov’s living in genteel poverty in Coney Island, this one doesn’t reek of melancholy and nostalgia, as much as a prosaic middle-class take-everything-in-your-strideness.

Balthazar Napolean de Bourbon, a lawyer in Bhopal seems to be the next in line to inherit the throne of France. From the Guardian:

Prince Michael of Greece, the cousin of Prince Philip, this week published a historical novel called Le Rajah de Bourbon, which traces the swashbuckling story of Mr Bourbon’s first royal ancestor in India. Prince Michael believes Jean de Bourbon was a nephew of the first Bourbon French king, Henry IV. In the mid-16th century Jean embarked on an action-packed adventure across the world which saw him survive assassination attempts and kidnap by pirates to be sold at an Egyptian slave market and serve in the Ethiopian army.

In 1560, he turned up at the court of the Mogul emperor Akbar. It was the beginning of a long line of Bourbons in India, who centuries later would serve as the administrators of Bhopal and become the second most important family in the region.

These days the Bourbons live a respectable middle class life and the very down to earth Mr. Bourbon:

….is aware that his family’s fortunes waned in Bhopal long ago. He describes the Indian branch of the family as Bourbons on the rocks.

How can you tell you are back? well for one thing, the minute you get off the plane, the PA system announces, “Homeland Security has issued an Orange alert, all passengers must submit to security procedures, blah, blah,blah.” Posters at the Immigration desk mention “Our Great Nation” several times. After you are done feeling scared, and intimidated for being an immigrant, you stumble out of the airport and look for a taxi. Several limo drivers, all of them immigrants, are milling around, one of them asks you where do you want to go, you say, “Queens,” without batting an eyelid he says, “Forty five dollars,” you are suddenly indignant for being mistaken for a person who doesn’t know how much it would cost to go to Queens. Another limo driver yells out, “Thirty five,” your instincts kick in and you say, “I’ve never paid more that twenty five,” “Ok, thirty then.” Another driver, obviously Desi, interjects, “You should agree to that price, it pretty good you know,” he is just interested in the haggling, he doesn’t really want the job himself. A rather handsome driver says, “You have a nice haircut, you remind me of a Filipino friend of mine,” I wonder if he says that to every female passenger who gets out of the terminal. Again, he is not really interested in driving me, its all part of snatching a few moments of interaction in the middle of scrambling for a living. I finally get into a yellow cab, the Punjabi driver on learning I lived in Delhi, says that Delhi and Punjab is the same thing. I suppose you could add New York to that list. I am glad to be back.