Wordle 223 3/6

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So I decided to try this Wordle thing. I’m not sure what the point is because it’s kind of really easy. But it’s short and inoffensive, so why not.

I promise I won’t post this daily. Or ever again.

I’m preparing a class on mistakes and mishaps in translation, and it’s going to be really funny. Aside from the well-known “vuela en cueros” (American Airlines “fly in leather”) and Ford Nova, I found a more nuanced Mazda Laura and Audi-Q3 (say it aloud in Spanish if you don’t get it) and a US movie that translated “the Holy Ghost” as “Santo Fantasma.”

Electrolux’s vacuum cleaner campaign with the jingle “Electrolux really sucks.”

There’s also the famous Russian assorted ice-cream that was translated as “ice-cream in the ass.” And the Spanish “favor de descubrir la cabeza” (please remove your hat) translated as “please discover the head.” And “lugar de culto” (place of worship) as “cult place.” And “me da mucha lata” (it’s so annoying) translated as “he gives me many tins.”

Tons of other great examples. I laughed in my office until I cried.

One of Klara’s favorite stories that I made up is about a car called Ellie who became friends with a truck called Truckie and he treated her to his favorite meal of diesel fuel. Of course, that made Ellie sick, and she couldn’t run anymore. I told this story to Klara about a million times.

So guess who’s the idiot that fueled her car with diesel? Yes, that would be me.

In my defense, I was sleepy, distracted, in a rush, and there was icy wind with a gust of snow blowing in my face, so I didn’t see what I was sticking into the poor vehicle. And yes, the fuel thingy didn’t fit into the opening very well but I’m a Soviet person. I forced it in.

Of course, the car died in the middle of the road. We have extremely polite, patient drivers in this region, so nobody even honked at me. Instead, people stopped and some kind gentlemen pushed the car manually into a parking lot. It was a narrow, one-lane street but nobody got impatient. In Ukraine, I would have gotten every kind of abuse hurled at me for doing this early in the morning when everybody is going to work. But here I got nothing but kindness.

I feel excruciatingly stupid. But also happy to be surrounded by such great people.

Talking about undiagnosable chronic pain conditions, you could drug the sufferer to make them more convenient or you could look at what circumstances in their life make constant pain a viable and often the only possible life strategy. You could even do both at once but somehow the latter option always gets overlooked.

This applies to a host of things. Depression, anxiety, fatigue, ADD, gender dysphoria, chronic migraines, even early-stage diabetes. Try to make the symptom less noticeable (because who cares about the needs of the body, right?) or look at what’s causing it. Controlling the symptom is profitable because you get a lifelong patient. Plus, it works well with the consumerist mentality.

I once developed a condition that inexorably led me to the hospital. I asked myself, “why do I want to be at the hospital? What’s so attractive about it?” The answer was, I was exhausted and wanted to lie down and not move. It’s been 15 years. The condition never came back. I now lie down and not move whenever the fancy strikes, so the condition is unnecessary.

For Klara’s birthday, I decided to organize a very small playdate with just a couple of kids at our place. I thought nobody would want to come at all because COVID, etc. But it turns out that everybody wants to come and the guest list is getting out of control. I hope that the parents, at least, realize that they shouldn’t stay. I’m fine with a bunch of kids running around but entertaining a group of moms at 10 am on a Saturday is my idea of a personal hell.

Maybe I should prepare mimosas (whatever they are) for just in case I need to get the moms soused.

Now this is interesting:

Biden is trying to terrorize the Ukrainian president. It’s exactly what Putin is doing. We know why Putin is doing it. What about Biden?

Might be a total coincidence but this all started exactly at the time when the authorities in Ukraine handed out indictments to people (including the former president) who are involved in a major corruption plot at the time when Biden was Pres. Obama’s pointman on Ukraine.

Be that as it may, if the story narrated here is true, it’s absolutely shocking. The president of the US is bullying the president of Ukraine on behalf of another foreign leader.

There’s something real fishy happening here.

This weird moment when you reconnect with a former friend you haven’t spoken to in 15 years and realize that he’s moved dramatically to the left while you’ve moved just as dramatically to the right.

“Hey, I realized you were totally right back then when you used to say XYZ.”

“No, man, I was talking out of my ass. You were right, and I was wrong.”

“But I now agree with you!”

“No, I do!”