Fearless Gibberish

My friend Mark Swofford has informed me about a new movie called Fearless starring Jet Li, which is loosely based on the life of Huo Yuanjia.

The movie is written and directed by a Chinese person, dialogue is in Mandarin Chinese, and the storyline is about a Chinese person, yet ironcally the characters in the movie's trailer are gibberish.

These are two screen shots Mark has captured from the movie's trailer to show just how ridiculous they are:



Just below COMING SOON is a giant ㄍ. Along the right side of the screen is the following, in zhuyin fuhao: ㄇㄞㄒㄖㄘ. This, in Hanyu Pinyin, would be “maixrici,” which is complete gibberish. The other vertical lines of text are also nonsense in zhuyin fuhao. Again, there’s nothing wrong with how these are written. It’s just that they’re no more meaningful than a random string of letters. (more)

The zhuyin fuhao on the left read, from top to bottom, ㄔㄐㄎㄊㄆ, which would be “chjktp” in Hanyu Pinyin. As I think should be obvious even to those who don’t know Mandarin or any other Sinitic language, this is simply nonsense. (more)

Hopefully the actual movie would be better than the trailer, unlike the last movie I saw Lady in the Water by M. Night Shyamalan which really sucked scrunt's balls.

Asian Font Gibberish 3

From Shannon Larratt's BMEzine.com gallery, here is a July 27th posting from Bulgaria:


http://www.bmezine.com/tattoo/A60726/high/bmepb316498.jpg

Two of my earlier postings (one & two) have already talked about some people would download this so called "Asian Font" from the internet and tattoo themselves with gibberish.

If you have not seen Clerks II, Shannon Larratt had a brief role in the movie. He was the "Ear Guy" in Mooby's.

Wise Words Very Beginning

Helen of eLearners.com sent in this photo from Zao Tattoo in Macomb, IL.


http://www.zaotattoo.com/images/muriel/54.php

名言 means "wise words" or "famous saying" and 最初 is "beginning" or "initial".

Obviously this person has never heard of the wise words from Dr. Gregory House, Seth MacFarlane, Red vs. Blue, Fox News (it is a bit strange to see "Fox News" associated with "wise words"), and Bill Maher.

Parasol

Aiko Valentine sent this photo to me a few days ago. Her sister has purchased this parasol from a store called Earthbound Trading Company.


(larger view)

Despite the incorrectly written characters, 伊勢 or 伊勢囯 is a province in Japan. 戦国 or 戦国時代 is referring to Japan’s Warring State Period which is roughly from mid 15th to early 17th century. 戦国村 could either be a village or a compound from the Warring State Period.

For those who are not familiar with Japanese history or read the five characters on the parasol as Chinese, 伊勢戦国村 might mean something like “Iraqi/Iranian warring/conflicting village”.

The reason why it might mean either “Iraqi” or “Iranian” is because both terms were phonetically translated into Chinese and often abbreviated using just the first character. 伊拉克 is “Iraq” and 伊朗 for “Iran”.

HanselMinutes

Hanzi Smatter was mentioned in the latest episode of HanselMinutes with Scott Hanselman and Carl Franklin. For those who do not have the patience to sit through over twenty minutes of geek talk, the clip starts at time mark 26:30.


audio: clip 517 KB mp3 or entire show22.5 MB mp3

I use Macromedia Fireworks (now Adobe Fireworks) for most of the graphics work, and Sony Vegas 6.0 for audio and video editing work.

The character in Computer Zen's logo is 善, typically "zen" is referring to 禅.