So is Disney's "The Haunted Mansion" actually a movie, or just a pretense for a theme park ride? The commercial somehow doesn't make it look much like a real movie. It even calls it "a thrill ride." I think it already is a ride, or it's already something. Looking into it a bit more, it hasn't actually come out yet. Imagine that, a likely ill-conceived movie about a haunted mansion coming out a month after Halloween. Brilliant!

Jonah brought to my attention an interesting translation issue. It seems in a UN discussion, a Japanese representative called North Korea..."North Korea," angering the North Koreans because they like to be called the 'People's Democratic Republic of Korea.' In retaliation, a Korean representative "repeatedly, and in English" referred to the Japanese as "Japs," befuddling the Japanese delegates who tried to explain that their statement was a simple matter of geography. It sounds from the way the incident was reported as though "Japs" wasn't the only English word being used, that the Korean delegate was speaking entirely in English at this time. The question then, is why? Surely there are suitable words in his native tongue that would have produced the desired effect, and it's a bit surprising that a Korean person would think to use "Japs" at all. Either there's something stronger about using English, or he wanted to offend a broader audience than the delegates present who have interpreters in their earpieces anyway. Speaking of which, one wonders what all the interpreters would do with this, whether they would leave "Japs" alone as a universally known slur, or try to find something equivalent in their language.

While discussing this I was reminded of a scene in "Kill Bill" in which Lucy Liu, making a proclamation to a group of criminal kingpins that she has just fiercely backed up by forcing one of them into 'early retirement,' says "To show you how serious I am, I'm going to say this in English." I thought this was strange at the time, particularly since an interpreter then translated her statement right back into Japanese for the people being spoken to. But perhaps there's something to this, though I can't think of any American analogue. We tend to keep our foreign-language utterances to words and short phrases, of which we may or may not know the literal meaning.

***

Ah, the six day week technique is a harsh mistress. One of the most annoying things about staying up is having to keep eating, or else suffering awful hunger pains. This gets especially dire at work and in the OR; for some reason they don't allow snacking in there. No Junior Mints for me.