Mnemonics

I had a dream today about a girl with an interesting superpower: she could make the people around her invisible at will. I wonder whether that or becoming invisible yourself is more financially exploitable.

The knot of the day is the Bowline on a Bight, which creates a double loop in the middle of a rope (that last part might be plagiarism but there are only so many ways to convey that meaning):


image borrowed from animatedknots.com

A.k.a. boring as a...what's a bight?

I did a lot of French flashcards today. As my brain gets more and more saturated, I need to rely more on mnemonics. Here's a random sampler. Some are based on the pronunciation, some on the spelling, some on images that point in the direction of the French word. Basic knowledge of French pronunciation and a very loose definition of "makes sense" may be assets.

(Some accents may be missing or wrong)

My earl gray too! Noooo! (malgré tout - despite everything)
"Say 'Tundra!' or you can't get up!" (s'étendre - sprawl out, lie down)
Chevy rides over someone's ankle, crushing it (la cheville - ankle)
Checkmate (l'échec - failure)
Hate test in hate class. They time you to see how fast you can hate someone so you have to hurry. (hâter - hurry)
Oh, Sara A! + something rated R (serrer - to squeeze, tighten)
Baloo (poilu - hairy)
You're in the middle of two hungry tigers and you're the meal, "meal you" (milieu - middle)
"this I want (but can't have)" (decevant - disappointing)
Mom, I brought back Rapper Tay, he's going to live with us from now on (rapporter - bring back)
Ack! Someone hang that roach right away! (accrocher - to hang)
This (insert four letter word that sounds like the French word after the é) is too narrow, eh? (étroite - narrow)
A ring on a finger is like a bag over your head (la bague - ring)
A giant flea is biting pieces of flesh off a dog. Dog gets up and says: "Will you stop that? That is SO irritating." (affligeante - annoying, irritating)
"Sorry, you have to have a menage a trois before you can have your breakfast." (le menage - household chores)
Uncle Jesus wants YOU to be a nun (l'annonce - advertisement)
"I believe this part of an ear belongs to you?" (appartenir - to belong)
Hotel sign: sorry, we have mice (un souris - mouse)
Say Kuwait three times fast while you shake your booty (secouer - shake)
Gryaznaya luzha with fishes (louche - fishy, shady)
"Holy crap you have a thick epee!" (epais - thick)

Two more songs uploaded today on YouTube and TuDou ("Money" and "Go Away").

Dumpling Solstice

Today is the Winter Solstice, and also the 30-day supertrial's halfway checkpoint. If I fail now, I can start...hmm...nevermind...Mario and Luigi's lives were so much easier.

In China, you have to eat dumplings on the day of the Winter Solstice, otherwise Chairman Santa will come and rip your dumplings off on Chinese New Year's. So we all went out today to eat 饺子. Since Yuan Yuan organized the whole thing, we ate some kind of perverted version with fake bananas and fake peaches (canned in fake cans) for filling instead of the usual fake meat. They were edible but hardly worth blogging about, unless one has a daily word quota.

During dinner, Yuan Yuan had a practical English exam. The American girl she invited was bursting at the seams with dirty jokes and sexual innuendo, some of which even my college-conditioned ears had a hard time digesting. I don't want to repeat any of them so I'll leave it up to your imagination. I will give you a hint though--two of the following five ingredients were found in one of her stories: a guitar, a prosthetic leg, someone's grandfather, a plunger, a car tire. Anyway, I was pretty happy when Yuan Yuan failed to understand anything that wasn't explicitly labeled; her four-year-old brain isn't ready for that kind of stuff yet.

I learned the Buntline Hitch today. It's about as exciting as that last sentence:


image borrowed from animatedknots.com

Don't pull it too hard, it's kind of hard to untie. Especially if you pulled it tight after doing 200 pushups a day for 15 days. That's 3000 pushups by the way. Even Bruce Lee couldn't do that many in 15 minutes!

Two more songs posted on YouTube and TuDou.