0809191130 Bite Your Tongue And Breath Out

0809191130 Bite Your Tongue And Breath Out

Language difficulties take on various forms. I have more trouble speaking “American” than speaking Cantonese. One of Hugo’s friends asked me a computer related question the other day – he asked if a certain game can run on his “V-Star” computer. I thought about some different brand names and tried to remember a company called V-Star. It sounded like the name of any other computer company that makes an “IBM clone” as they were known way back in the early days of computers in the 1980s. He could see that I was having some trouble with this seemingly easy question that required a simple yes or no answer and offered some help by saying “You know, a V-Star computer, like PSP and Xbox and XP.” Then it hit me. I had to translate from his American accent into English – he was asking if the game could run on a “Vista” computer.

The different tones in Cantonese have pulled another ghastly trick on me. As a Native English Teacher, I thought it would be nice to show some respect and courtesy by telling the students that they are behaving well in class in their own native language. The rough transliteration of the word behaviour is “Gwai”. This is similar to the word “gwylo” which means “foreigner” or “White Ghost”. The all important correct Cantonese tone is vital. When the students were sitting quietly I would say “Nay Ge Ho Gwai” which I thought was Cantonese for “Your behaviour is very good.” It turns out that I was telling the children that their behaviour was “very expensive”. The students are so polite that they rarely correct me.

For the last few days the students have been practicing for an English recital as part of their assessment. The wonderful little Chinese Students have to remember a few paragraphs in a story. One of the more difficult words for them to say is “Athlete”. The “th” sound is not so easy to describe. The minimal research that I have done in order to continue my crude masquerade as a teacher tells me that this is known as an unvoiced consonant. It is not even a real sound - I have been telling the diligent students to “bite your tongue and breath out.” I will continue my campaign against the horrific mutilation of the word vegetables into “wedge-a-tab-ells”.


Linux experiment.
Linux is not as easy to setup as Windows. I am having an ongoing argument with my Linux computer about who owns the network. It insists on passwords to run a printer and this may be the reason that I return to the tried and tested Windows XP. There is a truism in life – you get what you pay for. It is a shame that Linux comes so close and then one simple thing that does not work makes the whole project unusable. The only duties that I can get my Linux computer to perform are to run a browser so that I can check my email while my real computer plays games and to show really interesting screen savers.
It is a nightmare to get a wireless card working on Linux. It will take more mental energy than I can muster – it involves setting up a windows emulator to run an NDS wrapper so that the WiFi driver can work. It is laborious because due to the unforgiving nature of typing commands into the shell Konsole that involve unfamiliar path names only to be told “bash: file not found” that I find particularly unrewarding. I am told that help is only a as far away as the Linux forums online. With all the complaining it is hard to tell that I am having a lot of fun with it. What I find interesting is not so much that it works so well, but that it works at all. Someone decided, with no promise of any financial reward, to write an operating system. They, that is, the Linux people, whoever they are, did this just to see if they could. The strange thing is that they probably used a Windows PC to get started.

Last week, the whole family was invited to a friend’s place to look at the moon for the Chinese Mid-Autumn Festival. We had an amazing barbeque the likes of which I have not seen since I had a barbequed roast beef the Ormsbys. Our friend, even though he is an American, understands the purpose and intent of a barbecue. He had at least the three essential ingredients: meat, metal and fire to which he added about 10 kilograms of onion, capsicum and chilies. He knew that cooking steak on a barbecue requires the sort of temperatures that produce smoke. A steak needs some black on the outside while the inside remains so tender that a gifted veterinarian might be able to give the beast a decent chance of a full recovery. There are few things worse than a steak that has met its unfortunate fate of being boiled in its own lukewarm juices and those things are usually found when doctors clean up after a cancer operation. The steak was perfect, the onions and capsicum were delicately seared and the portions were generous to the point where it was socially acceptable to have a second helping while still leaving enough for our hosts to have some for lunch the next day.
After dinner, during desert of a ferociously delicious and blatantly American dish that involved chocolate and pumpkin, we all sat around the table for hours talking about where we used to live and how we have adapted to living in another country. Arthur Dent must have felt somewhat like this when he was with Ford Prefect and Zaphod Bebelbrox – they all had amazing stories about fabulous adventures in wild far-off exotic places. It occurred to me that Arthur Dent was also from a pretty amazing place and had his own interesting stories.

Alex called the other day to tell us about his freshman university pranks and antics. It seems he found a big cardboard box that one of his cohorts used to ship his big screen TV. Alex packed himself inside and was delivered by his mates to the cafeteria. This is the sort of behaviour that typifies unsupervised teenagers. Carolyn and I watched, as proud parents, while Alex was sealed inside amid the packing foam and trundled off to his adoring audience. Even though Alex is all the way over the Pacific Ocean and some of the Rocky Mountains, we keep in contact all the time. I feel as if I should be sad that my son has left home, but I am really happy for him – he is off on a fabulous adventure. There is no sense of him being “gone”: - I do not have a sense of distance because he is always on the computer chat or a video call on Skype or on Facebook. I wonder if, as a society, or as a species, we have an ancient instinct that makes us feel sad when someone in our family leaves home. It must have been terrible for the pioneers or the explorers when they left their families and they could only write letters that took months or years to reach home. There is no feeling of loss.

This is for wefeelfine.org
I feel like everything is going well, and with only a little more effort, I could be a lot better.
http://www.wefeelfine.org/index.html