How to write Mandarin

If you want to write chinese characters, simply dip a spider in alcoholic ink and place it on a page. Then wait for an earthquake. I'm not saying that mandarin characters are unnecessarily complicated, but people have been known to die of starvation while attempting to read a menu. And there is the story of the man writing a birthday card who found it was out of date when he finished.

My Chinese girlfriend tells me that their language isn't actually an IQ-burning trap devised against the white-devils. This is the same person who as a child was punished by being made to write out her own name a hundred times, based on the fact that Chinese names can be complicated enough to make this a frustrating and boring torture. For a country that views education and medical care for the population as optional extras that's some pretty impressively advanced psychological control. Communism may be impractical but conditioning children to hate their own names is a pretty good stab at making it work. "To hell with my hateful individual name!" cries the child, casting aside the pen and taking up the Glorious Peoples hammer and sickle, "I will become a faceless soul among many - all hail the glorious hive mind!"


Think I'm kidding? In English the letter 'I' is the absolute simplest letter you can conceive of, a single stroke - the mandarin equivalent is . Try writing that - it's only marginally quicker than sketching a quick self portrait. Even better, spot the difference between and - one means "me", the other means "workman" and "spear"; of course, the fact that the language of a large population views the concept of self and armed warrior as synonymous shouldn't be of any concern. Especially to Russia, their immediate neighbours with rich mineral resources.

A pictographic language reveals a lot more about a culture's history and development than a character-based one. Many chinese characters developed from simple pictorial representations, and evolved over time as they were needed - which makes the following set quite interesting:



That's right; the language was at the point of differentiating between different types of stabbing weapon long before the concept of "love" needed to be written down. Distinguishing between different bladed implements designed for killing takes only two strokes, while the concept of love takes ten - so you have to choose between liking someone or knifing them five times. This is a language developed by people who didn't mess about, and by "mess about" I mean "not stab people".

There are insights into the sexual politics of Chinese history too. The character means female, and is child, or in some cases teenage. Put them together, and you get , meaning good. You know, "good like a young girl" being a universal constant; to say China was patriarchal would be like claiming that Hitler had some effect on local politics. Another window into the equal opportunity heaven that is the Mandarin language is means "too much, excessively" while means "wife". Clearly this is a culture where women hold an important position, and have to keep holding it until the man is finished and falls asleep.

Getting off the subject of how the language speaks of a time about as interested in equal opportunity as a drunk rugby team, and back into how it's just spitefully difficult, observe counting down from five to zero.



Note how it fakes you out with some apparent reason and simple order on the way down to one, before breaking out the zero. You might recognise it as the Mind-Smashing ImpossiPuzzle that Captain Genius had to solve to save the universe from the Sanity Breakers. It's possible to write the Theory of Relativity in less strokes than that.

So ends my first foray into the world of the Mandarin language. Since I'm not quite fluent yet, you can expect to see more.

Forum Safety Tips

Forum Safety Tips for your edification and entertainment over at CRACKED.

Happy Boys

The company behind the phenomenally popular Chinese "Super Girl" series (think pop idol, with girls only, and released in a country that hasn't developed an immunity to idol shows yet) are replacing it with a male equivalent, "Happy Boys", proving that it's possible to make something enjoyed by over a third of a billion people but not have a clue about the real reason it's popular. The producers live in an admirable, if naive, world where it's the excellent singing and genuine interest in the development of a young artist that keeps people watching, where the young attractive girls performing for the viewers approval is merely a fringe benefit.

They may be using boys to destroy the concept of their massively popular show, but it's taking revenge by annihilating the very concept of 'boys'. The happy boys are the most effeminate males this side of a gender-change surgical theatre waiting room. I honestly cannot imagine a girlier boy existing anywhere until a male ballerina is touring a biological lab and is accidentally bitten by a radioactive tutu.

At great risk to my own Y chromosome I've been wading through images of the pansies posturing for popularity, chewing cigars and wrestling bears which are also chewing cigars once an hour to preserve my testicular integrity. I have skimmed off only a few examples below, but in order to prevent a critical loss of manliness you are advised to watch a Schwarzenegger film or headbutt a wall for each of the following pictures you look at. Even if you're a girl.



This person is listed as a "boy", proving that the Chinese must have advanced automation to an impressive degree, as only a soulless machine could have ticked the "male" box for this contestant without adding a question mark or demanding a full medical exam. Cover everything below the neck with your hand, tell yourself that you're looking at a guy. This will feel similar to when you say "I'll just have the one" or "I swear I'll go to the gym tomorrow".

I've seen prepubescent albino girls with manlier frames than that, and I can only assume that emergency ripcord on his shirt is so he can swiftly pull it off to prove he doesn't have breasts. He's obviously used to defending his gender, with that piece of throat armour ready to flip up and conceal his critical lack of adams apple, drawing any attackers within range of those loose dungaree straps hanging from his belt - though when you're fighting accusations of being a slightly mannish lesbian, loose dungaree straps don't help your case one bit.



This guy has absolutely no right to be involved in any project where the concept of maleness is even implied. He should be serving coffee in a feminist library, being obsessed over by pseudo-intellectuals who can remember in vivid detail every time a girl has accidentally brushed against them. They're scared off talking to her by the gang-sign of "The Mincing Mimsies", who dominate the downtown with their cutting fashion co-ordination and strike fear into their enemies with choreagraphed dance numbers.



Now this is just a tragedy of overcompensation. While marching into the wilds and wearing the skin of whatever you kill out there is incredibly manly, it only works with bears and wolves. Something that had a chance of eating you. Marching into a farm and slaughtering a sheep does not cut it. When your barbarian garb is 100% wool and machine washable, you fail to inspire the fear of the bloodthirsty warrior in those who behold you. You inspire the urge to lay your robes in front of a blazing log fire and curl up with a mug of cocoa, and after that you might as well hand your penis in as dead weight.

Even worse is the way the forearm sections are crudely tied down, as if this tender flower would do anything dramatic enough to risk it coming loose. It takes a lot for someones elbow to look small and fragile next to a blanket and a rug, but through a lifetime of avoiding protein and sunlight this brave stick-insect impersonator has managed it. I will move on to another target now, for fear that even the weight of my criticism might snap his rickety bones.



I don't know how this guy got into the competition - perhaps the Advertising Commisison warned the producers that they'd better show something that actually looks like a "Boy" soon or face stiff fines. All I know is that they took a Bond villain, disarmed him by giving him a rimless hat, and shoved him into the mix to bring the average manliness up to a non-zero number, and for that we can all appreciate his sacrifice. Look at the toll it's taken on him; I don't care what you say about racial traits and characteristics, anybody with a face like that used to have chest hair and his has been burned off by sheer overexposure to the other contestants, whose abundance of estrogen is slowly robbing him of his manhood by osmosis. But he soldiers on, brave soul, and for that he will forever be remembered in the Halls of Valhalla; albeit a hall that smells more of air-freshener and grooming products than the others.

BONUS CONTENT:



The producers threw everything they could at this one to make it look male. It's a bad sign when the schizophrenic combination of army camoflague pants and flourescent construction gear, on a truck, in a loading dock can't diffuse the overall feel of "girly". It adds up to the worst attempt by anybody to be something they're not since Vanilla Ice first said "Yo". Best of all is the expression of pure disgust on the face of the driver, who's obviously worked ten hours a day since he was five and is now turning his cold stare on the viewer:

"You did this. By watching you are complicit in these crimes. You have made a joke of all I and my kind have ever stood for."

After his photo was taken, he walked into the distance to become a lumberjack.

Nerding it up with motivational poster time!
Click for full size>


If this spoils anything, you were never going to get round to playing it anyway.

Ogham Blogging

Ogham is an ancient Irish system of writing. As we are a deeply lyrical culture with a rich history, we used the most advanced writing technology available at the time: rocks. Specifically, one rock carves notches in the side of another, larger rock. There may have been metal, but when your national sports are "Being killed by Vikings" and "Trying to grow enough food to not starve before the vikings arrive", anyone using metal for anything but swords, or swords-that-can-also-dig, gets removed from the gene pool pretty quickly.


An ancient gaelic notepad

Ogham should be the required input language for all blogs. The computer can translate it into text for display online, but every word you write has to be carved into a chunk of stone using only a shard of granite. When you have to erode rock to write, you think about what you're writing. You have something you really, truly want to say. The phrase "So, I can't think of anything to write about" has never been written in ogham. There are no monuments, inscribed by sweat and labour, bearing the message "I am SO BORED right now" through the ages. It'll be an awesome cure for the swamp of blogs so full of such mind bogglingly tedious minutiae that even Proust would scream "Fuck off! I don't care!".


The lead singer of Jamiroquai doesn't exist in this language, if that's any help

Within a few months, there will be no more ten thousand words whining rants, ever again. A week of chiseling "life is pain" every night and even the most sunlight deficient teen whiner will be able to tear the limbs from any would-be wedgie-giver. He'll look like a quarterback crossed with Adonis, and you'd be amazed at how much he doesn't hate the "popular girls" clique when they're prepared to touch him. Baby.

From n00b to nerd

Another article up and running over at Cracked, and I've taken another step towards being a real-life writer: I've been edited.

Most of it is pretty painless, cutting down and sharpening sentences (and apparently I hate American teenagers more than just regular teenagers now), but they also cut my favourite gag! Yes, I am not only being published, I'm writing material TOO HOT TO PRINT. Material I will now print anyway, because that's the way I roll:

"Babies were invented by God to give sex a downside. This is why christians oppose both birth control and relationships which lead to fabulous outfits instead of reproduction. I don't usually go around calling omnipotent beings pussies, Christian God, but any Celestial Scheme that can be thwarted with a thin sheet of rubber sucks ass. Nobody foiled Zeus with a little latex balloon unless they wanted a lightning-blasted crater where their genitals used to be."

Cracked seems to draw the line at calling God a wimp. PC, or merely good business sense?

Edit: The article has also been Fark'd (6th article down). Go Team Internet!

Money for old string

Superstring theory is hot with scientists trying to understand the entire nature of the universe (as opposed to, say, inventing a way to block cellphone reception in cinemas). The idea is that all the particles and forces in the universe are different notes on appallingly tiny strings. A key tenet of this theory is that there are at least ten dimensions, that's six more than the four we can access, but that the others can't be measured or in any way observed because they're too small. Seriously, that's the entire argument. And an invisible and untouchable dog ate their homework. Also, the dog cannot be smelled.

One of the main arguments in favor of string theory is that it correctly predicts the existence of the graviton; this would be the graviton that nobody has ever actually detected, by the way. The graviton we only "know" about at all because another theory (Quantum Field Theory) says it exists. Oh, but that theory stops working if you actually try to use the gravitons in it. It's like saying elves have to exist otherwise there'd be nobody to make toys for Santa.

The problem is that gravitons are points, and as soon as you bring the field theory down to a point the probabilites of something or other become infinite. Since it's only actually possible for something to be 100% probable, you don't have to be a mathematician to understand that an answer of 101% is probably wrong, 200% is definitely wrong, and infinity-% is indescribably moon-bendingly wrong.

Superstring theory solves this by saying that gravitons aren't points; they (and everything else) are little strings around those points, so you never get there. That's right. The geniuses, the guys who would have been rocket scientists a couple of generations ago, the frontline in humanities quest for cosmic knowledge solved a problem in the theory by drawing a little string circle around the point and saying "Don't go here or our stuff breaks". Good thing they weren't rocket scientists or we'd have star charts marked "Don't go this way because planes stop working".

After that the evidence gets even weaker, as if that was possible. Some starry-eyed scholars who may have spent a little too much time indoors point to the inherent symmetry and beauty of the mathematics, and how it fits in with the other graceful theories that describe the universe. I have two things to say:
1) Anybody who thinks mathematics is pure art and elegance simply hasn't done enough integration.
2) The concept that all particles and forces are made up of different notes on the same string all throughout the grand totality is very nice, but given the choice on how to arrive at it, I'll choose a joint and a bean bag over ten years of fiendishly difficult mathematics.

Of course the real support for superstring theory is that it would be really nice if it was true. Alas, the same factor has not given my "Lots of hot cheerleaders doing my bidding" theory the same financial and public support. But when you can't provide a shred of evidence for your belief system (other than the fact you like it better than the alternatives), and certain parts of that system actually refuse the idea of being experimentally tested - well, there's only one thing to say:

Welcome to the Church of Superstring.