Loanwords in Japanese

Recently, I was eating in Sakura the other day and noticed something interesting on the specials menu, 黒豚ソーセジポトフ (kurobuta sausage potofu). Turning the menu over for the English side, all I found was the added word, soup, in parenthesis, which led me to believe that potofu was, indeed, derived from the French pot-au-feu. With that, I went ahead and ordered it, since the first and only time I had pot-au-feu, it was a delicious duck broth with seared foie gras and truffle oil. (thank you, Captain Jack!) Well, this one was not nearly so good - a rather bland vegetable mix with some decent sausage that tasted a bit more like hot dog than kurobuta, although in retrospect, I think that may be due to the rather unusual sweetness in kurobuta.

EDIT: This post wouldn't be complete without pointing you towards the wiki page on loanwords in Japanese, Gairaigo and the hilarious non-example "left-over", which refers to a "hit that goes over the left-fielder's head" in baseball rather than, well, leftovers. :)

clever spam

For the quick comic intro, see here.

In the latest round of human-blogs vs. spambots, I received this "interesting" comment on an oldish post. Since it's rather long, I'm only going to excerpt a particularly funny bit:

"School officials in Democratic-leaning New England say they have received relatively few charm bracelets." (with "charm bracelets" linking to what I assume is a jewelry site, but which probably sells viagra, too.)

Basically, it seems as though it's pulling random sentences from news clippings and then performing some basic parsing to replace certain phrases with its own links to create sometimes-grammatically-correct-but-always-humorous sentences.

The Snow Leopard Cometh

Well, Snow Leopard is out, and I've read the review. Here's my brief rundown:

Pros:
- performance improvements (resolving that dreaded kernel_task/CPU/overheating issue somewhat, I hope)
- decreased size (freeing up a few GBs for my paltry 80GB hard drive)
- gamma 2.2 (so I don't have to worry about color differences when my website is viewed on Mac vs. PC)

Cons:
- 64-bit apps (breaking the widescreen hack to Mail and the SIMBL-based color hack to Terminal) [these are not insignificant UI fixes that would not be particularly difficult for Apple to implement natively...]

Things I'm excited about that don't affect me at all:
- XCode 3.2 & Clang (cuz who doesn't like a compiler with a metallic silver dragon logo that doesn't support the programming language you use)
- QuickTime X (cuz hardware-based H.264 acceleration is nice IF your graphics card/chipset is supported)