I Got My First Spam In Russian

I should've saved the message since it was so weird.

I don't know Russian but I can tell it's Russian when I see it, all the oddball letters.

I don't think I've ever gotten an email in Russian before. Let me search my mind. No, it's never happened.

But today was a first. So naturally I was curious. Not curious enough to click any links, but curious enough to run it through a Google translation place.

And it was Russian for some kind of adult picture place (or something). The translation looked so flawless. Not broken, weird English. So either that thing did a killer job of translating, or they run it through some kind of grammar thing as well.

That was my first Russian spam, and I hope it's my last.

Birther Mantra -- "Yes We Can!"

I want to try something with a slogan we all remember from the '08 campaign.

"Yes we can." Let's say it over and over, "Yes we can! Yes we can! Yes we can! Yes we can! Yes we can! Yes we can!"

Whenever you say something over and over very soon it starts to run together and by now you're not pronouncing the words clearly. You can see how this could work with "Yes we can!" We used to do it when trying to say "Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers" or "Rubber baby buggy bumpers," definite tongue twisters.

With "Yes we can," when slurred together and then separated out, you can see numerous permutations. "Yes we can! Yeah we can! Ya we kin!" And then to take it a step further, if you were saying it for 20 minutes straight, let's say, the rhythm could fluctuate and you wouldn't even necessarily be saying the "Ya" word first, but it'd be out of its normal order.

This could happen so much, with such mispronouncing, that eventually you could be saying, "Can Ya We! Kin Ya We!" To the point that it spells out "Ken-ya-we!" At first it reminds you of Kanye West, but look at that again!

It says, "Kenya We."

Now, I remember years ago when I was in grade school studying some of the various Kenyan languages, going for extra credit. The other kids were out exploding 2-liter Coke bottles with Mentos (This was the mid-'60s. Check it out, there's no anachronisms here), but I was inside studiously poring over African language websites.

And as I recall, and I confess I'm a little rusty, having not spoken Kenyan since winning the Kenyan version of "Who Wants To Be A Millionaire" in 1981, the first person plural can always be translated as a first person singular when expressing someone's occupation, birthplace, town, or country of residence. (Instead of individualism, which we consider normal, in Kenya they relate more in a dyadic way*.) So we in English would say, "I am from America." But Kenyan grammar leaves out the "to be" verb form, with the words "Kenya We" then usually translating, "I am from Kenya."

Was Barack Obama trying to tell us something during the campaign?

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* "A dyadic personality is one who simply needs another continually in order to know who he or she really is," Bruce J. Malina writes in "The New Testament World -- Insights from Cultural Anthropology," John Knox Press, 1981, p. 55.

As an aside, ask yourself, when is the last time you saw a Kenyan by himself? Then ask yourself, Isn't Barack Obama always surrounded by other people?

Agreed On Texts

I've been asked now twice in the last month and a half, "What are you reading?" The first time I said nothing. The second time, having been prepared for this from the first time, I said something about the poems of Sir Walter Scott, even though I've pretty much abdicated from reading them. I need to get back to them.

I was sitting in a chair today -- worried as usual -- and thinking I should read something. There was a book I was thinking of but I didn't know where it was. So I'm sitting there another 10 minutes and glancing around, the very book was four feet in front of me, almost hidden in a stack. So I read from it. It didn't help very much but a little. The thing is I know something about this, and the whole point of that particular text, if you went to the very heart of it, is that you don't really need texts. The real text is in here (tapping my empty head).

So I'm sitting here now tapping out another empty text. These paragraphs and the others I've written today, like at Grandma Slump. I like the entry over there because it picks up on this feeling of worrying and being down. But once you've written it and read it you think, OK, that's done. That helped for that minute but now it's just a thought that came from my own head. It's hard to be entertained by thoughts that come from your own head. One thing about it is that what the text is is a very selective part of the thoughts that come from your head, like .0001% of the thoughts you have all the time.

Who really can be entertained by themselves? It's like Frank Sinatra who said he never listened to his own records. And why should he? The voice was in his throat somewhere, lurking with him all the time. He didn't need a needle to remind him.

But there are these texts that get to us collectively. The Bible is the biggest, most obvious one. I think the Bible is fantastic, but it's a dangerous book because of what people have done with it. It's like it's intentionally dangerous and wouldn't pass OSHA standards if someone wrote it now. It has enough stories with jagged edges that it keeps us perpetually fascinated. That's probably one of the keys to writing an agreed on text. Don't round the edges. Leave it rough. So it appeals to everyone, from the Sunday School child with a white hankie to the biggest flaming, psycho, apocalyptic kook in the world.

The Language Animals Know

I'm constantly on the lookout for what my animals know, the cats and dog.

They start out knowing nothing about us, our mannerisms, what we say, all that. But then in the course of time they learn all sorts of things, whether to trust us or not.

Somehow they come to associate their name with themselves. I'm still not exactly sure how that happens, except obviously by repetition. But whether they know the names of the others, that's not always clear. I do think our dog knows the words we use for the cats individually.

Then there's all the other things we communicate, especially with the dog. The dog comes in for a lot more interaction because of the bathroom duties. And she, being a dog, cares to be with us more in an intimate and ongoing way than the cats. So she responds to things that are kind, sweet, complimentary, and comes to know things like "Stay" and "No." We think of "sit" as a kind of trick, which is just more of the same.

One thing the cats get trained to respond to, by getting a treat or by having something that will be to their liking, is "Kitty, kitty, kitty" in a high pitched call. You figure they're a blank slate till they get the associations.