nnozomi | That’d be a long tale. That’d be several long tales.

Thanks to osprey-archer’s reread, I’ve been rereading the Joan Aiken Dido books for the first time in years and years (bless openlibrary and its ilk), including some I never managed to read before at all, for one reason or another. I have to keep stopping or skimming now and then because the tension is SO MUCH, they’re thrillers really, but full of the most bizarre and wonderful (and horrific) flights of imagination. Captain Hughes breaking out of jail by designing the flying craft he's always been obsessed with, Dr. Talisman (whom I kept picturing as Wen Xiaoliu the whole time), the frightening witch antagonists drifting suddenly into wistful, genuinely poignant raptures about going home to the Caribbean, the Birthday League, Dido entranced by her scoundrel father's compositions...and I’ve still got like half a dozen books to go. In particular it occurs to me that Aiken makes Dido immensely brave, clever, funny, resourceful, and caring—heroic, as Captain Hughes says—without ever making the reader draw away from her as they would from a worse written Mary Sue-type.

If you have been blue lately, as which of us hasn’t, and could use a momentary burst of sheer elation, go listen to the ending of this Kapustin piano sonata—the timestamp should take you right there but really the whole thing is a lot of fun. Exhilarating.

I was infuriated and amused by a client comment on the math workbook I had to translate recently: the original question was about averages, “if you have five ミカン (mikan) of the following weights, what is their average weight?” or something along those lines. I translated mikan in the normal way as “tangerines,” and the client commented “The weights given would be too heavy for tangerines, so we should make this ‘oranges’ instead.” First, if they’re too heavy for tangerines they’re too heavy for mikan too! The words are synonyms! What did you want me to do, make it “clementines” like my dad used to call them? Second, who goes and LOOKS UP the average weight of a tangerine? (And where do you even look that up?)

Also vaguely on the same theme: for some reason the English textbook they use at the nighttime junior high, which I think is originally designed for sixth-graders, happened to have Boy A saying “I like math!” and Girl B saying “I don’t!” and I could not stop myself pointing out “you know, that’s not a very good stereotype,” before remembering that the half-dozen Korean-Japanese ladies who make up the class were undoubtedly familiar with sexism in much more straightforward and intimate ways (to start with, among the reasons they had to wait forty to sixty years to attend junior high). Oh dear. They saw the point, though.

I ran across Aoyama Akira in a work project the other day and I just thought he was neat; he was a prewar civil engineer who was the only Japanese surveyor involved with the Panama Canal, and then went back to Japan and built a bunch of drainage canals which prevented deadly flooding. Also he has the rare distinction of looking pretty good with a mustache (in his 1928 Wikipedia photo, at least). He seems to have been a gentleman of integrity: during the massacre of Koreans after the 1923 earthquake, he sheltered Korean laborers from his current construction project in his own home, and when asked by the government during WWII what would be a good way to demolish the Panama Canal, said “I know how to build it but not how to destroy it.” He also enjoyed poetry and Esperanto, gave his daughter a dagger when she got married, and believed women should have technical skills.

For all my ongoing farming show obsession I still remain loyal to Liu Chang and his livestreams as low-key background listening; in one recent one he streams himself playing a video game called What Remains of Edith Finch (I’m not a game person, I had to look it up; it‘s a bit dark for me but very interesting). Not the first game I would have expected to get a Chinese release, but why not? In language-learning terms it’s extremely fun to watch him play. His version of the game has the original English voiceover plus very artistically inserted on-screen Chinese text, and his English is good enough that he picks up the phrases in the voiceover from time to time and responds—“…but I had no idea what was behind that door.” “我也没有 idea!” and so on. Also he reads on-screen English text out loud in English with dates/numbers in Chinese, which seems to be a universal first-language constant (I still count rests in English, for instance). Plus, while he himself is not subtitled, it’s much easier to follow what he’s saying by ear when the visual context of the game is right there.

Latest farmboy words: 卖萌, to act cute (lit. to sell cuteness); 交卷, to hand in a completed test (interesting because it uses 卷, a scroll, although I don’t think many people are taking tests on scrolled paper these days); 刷刷的, smoothly, a breeze; 虎头蛇尾, starting strong and finishing weak (lit. tiger’s head and snake’s tail); 无籽, seedless, as in grapes; 弄巧成拙, to try to do something clever and end up the worse off for it (very roughly, “do smart end stupid”)

Photos: Lots of plum blossoms and assorted local cats. The matched pair live near the nighttime junior high and will let me pet them only at very irregular intervals, I never know when they’ll be in the mood, but the day I took the photo was a lucky one and I ended up with both of them bonking their foreheads into my knees and alternating purrs and meows. The other three I often see (and sometimes get close to) on my morning runs; Kuro-chan senior, a free-range pet (note the extravagantly long fur) who must be quite an elderly gentleman or lady judging by the brown tint; Kuro-chan junior, much younger and sleeker and more skittish; and Miké-chan, usually friendly and amenable (except occasionally when preempted by another cat).