that’s French for German

I stumbled across an interesting website recently, called Poetry in Translation.  You type in a sentence or part of a poem and press OK.  It uses Google’s Automatic Translation service to translate your text from English to German, then to French, then back to German again, then back to English.

For example, I typed in : “This poetry translation contraption is pretty cool.  It definitely creates some random results.”  This became : “This Poesieübersetzung invention is rather fresh.  It causes some occasional results definitively.”

Definitely random!  (Or should I say, rather fresh?)

again looking forward to Monday

Am I crazy?  No.  (Well, not for this reason, anyway.)  This upcoming Monday is Labor Day, so we’re off work.  And so it’s exciting.  I’m not sure yet what I’ll be doing, but it will involve getting enough sleep and not going to work.  So it sounds promising.

We need more holidays that give you Monday off…

a woman teaching her dog to drive

This is one of those things where you just shake your head and wonder, “What were they thinking?”  From the news this week :

Woman crashes when teaching dog to drive

August 28, 2006

BEIJING – A woman in Hohhot, the capital of north China’s Inner Mongolia region, crashed her car while giving her dog a driving lesson, the official Xinhua News Agency said Monday.

No injuries were reported although both vehicles were slightly damaged, it said.

The woman, identified only be her surname, Li, said her dog “was fond of crouching on the steering wheel and often watched her drive,” according to Xinhua.

“She thought she would let the dog ‘have a try’ while she operated the accelerator and brake,” the report said. “They did not make it far before crashing into an oncoming car.”

Xinhua did not say what kind of dog or vehicles were involved but Li paid for repairs.

There’s a “rumor” going around that women aren’t good drivers… perhaps this woman thought her dog might drive better than she does…  🙂

crazy random game

This is a very random game.  I don’t know if you can win or not — but it’s kinda fun for a while.  There’s 4 elements falling at all times : sand, water, salt, and oil.  Then you can add any of these elements as you wish, plus fire, plants, a spout, a wall, cera, and “???”.  There’s also an eraser, if you want to remove part of a wall.  There’s some type of thing that destroys all you do, if it’s moving around (you can turn it off).  It seems to not like salt.  You can use walls and the “cera” to direct the falling elements as you want them.  Combine a plant with water and it grows.  Obviously fire has an effect on a couple of elements, too.  And sometimes things can get crazy.

Check it out here.

It’s pretty pointless, in that you don’t ever “win” or get a high score, but it’s one of those games where you can play for a while, then realize time has went faster than you realized and then you think perhaps you should’ve been doing something more productive.  🙂