BIRTHDAY LOOT 2011.

I’m too full of chicken curry, beer, and lemon meringue pie to write a long post, but I want to mention a few presents that might be of interest to LH readers: Foreign Words, by Vassilis Alexakis; Solovyovo: The Story of Memory in a Russian Village, by Margaret Paxson; and the Random House Historical Dictionary of American Slang, Vol. 2: H-O, by J. E. Lighter. Also, I got an Amazon box in the mail containing a copy of The Reconstruction of Nations: Poland, Ukraine, Lithuania, Belarus, 1569-1999, by Timothy Snyder, which I strongly suspect is a present from an LH reader, but there was no indication of who sent it. If it was you, let me know and I’ll thank you personally; I’m very much looking forward to reading it! [Turns out it was bulbul. Thanks, bulbul!]

Also, for you aficionados of Chinese movies, my brother sent me a half-dozen of them (“six for sixty!”): Last Train Home, Up the Yangtze, Still Life, The 36th Chamber of Shaolin, Election, and Triad Election.

Comments

  1. Happy Birthday, Mr. Hat!

  2. Bathrobe says

    Ah, yes, 1 July, the 90th birthday of the Chinese Communist Party.

  3. For what it’s worth, “Last Train Home” is the most emotionally arresting and touching documentary I’ve seen in many years. Partly that’s due to the fact that it’s set in The Chinese city of Guangzhou, where I taught EFL. But mostly because it is a truly gripping tale of the damage industrialization can have on desperately poor families who are just trying to make a better life for their kids. I can’t blame anyone in the documentary for making any of the decisions they make (some of which I’ve made myself), but I watched it wishing there were a way for it not to end they way it inevitably would.

  4. mattitiahu says

    С днем рождения, Mr. Hat!

  5. July 1, eh? Then you should learn how to Speak like a Can-eh-dian

  6. Trond Engen says

    Hadde jeg hatt den hatten jeg hadde hatt så hadde jeg hatt en hatt. Hatty dirfbay!

  7. Paul Ogden: Drat! Can’t get the hang of that simple embed-the-url code.
    You may want to save this template for future use:

    <a href=”URL-HERE_BETWEEN-THE-QUOTES”>TEXT-HERE</a>

    Just paste a copy of this into the text where you want the link to go, and replace the capitalized sections as indicated. You’ll still be copy-and-pasting – I do it too, everybody does who is without a snazzy HTML editor – but the result will radiate more man-of-the-worldliness.
    What you had entered was missing the URL:

    Then you should learn how to <a>Speak like a Can-eh-dian</a>

  8. @Grumbly: I HAD the URL in there, but it kept disappearing when I posted. The Lord works his miracles in mysterious ways. Thanks anyway.

  9. dearieme says

    Hat, Hat, hurray!

  10. Paul: Things like that happened to me in the beginning here, before I got used to all these commenting devices. If you have even one chevron (angle bracket) or other bit of syntax out of place, Hat’s server discards as much as it can until it is satisfied with the remainder.
    It’s called “recovery”, and is intended to protect the innocent and Hat’s site. As a programmer, I myself prefer things to crash. “Intelligent”, meddlesome mechanisms at a low level would make it very hard to find errors. Everything would continue to run smoothly, doing something other than it is supposed to do.
    Google Translate has this kind of helper syndrome: it doesn’t throw up its hands when it can’t figure out how to translate something, it just spits out any old thing. Were someone to retort here: “You can’t blame software, it doesn’t know what it’s doing anyway”, my reply would be: “Just so”.

  11. What you had entered was missing the URL
    Actually, it wasn’t; what happened (oddly) was that the quote mark after the URL was a fancy quote (”) rather than a plain one (“), and it was separated from the URL by a space. How that came about I leave to the imagination of those techier than I, but I fixed it, and now the link works.
    Thanks for your birthday wishes, all!

  12. Actually, it wasn’t
    Did you correct the post manually ? Do you have some kind of log containing the comment versions originally submitted ? I looked at the source text that appeared here, and saw no href. Your server has many times silently discarded stuff that I have tried to get into a comment, for instance a jpeg graphic.

  13. Other examples: underlining and different font sizes. You keep us on bread and water.

  14. I’ve often tried to send money, but the server rejects it.

  15. Did you correct the post manually ? Do you have some kind of log containing the comment versions originally submitted ?
    Yes and yes. And no complaints about the bread and water, or I’ll set the hounds loose.

  16. Śicko najľepše, hatu*!

  17. Happy, happy birthday, Hat, from me and the pooch in Moscow!
    ps my dog is bilingual and enjoys Languagehat very much.

  18. Happy Birthday!

  19. Chicken curry, beer, lemon meringue pie…sounds like the culinary equivalent of this blog’s contents: very appealing and cosmopolitan.
    It’s a day late, but the sentiment is no less sincere: Happy Birthday, JOYEUX ANNIVERSAIRE! (I guess that expressing it in Canada’s two official languages is appropriate in more than one way).

  20. Sorry I missed the day itself: HB,LH!

  21. And Happy Birthday from sunny Normandy.

  22. Gefeliciteerd, for sure!
    Also: the Voynich manuscript?

  23. Hatty Birthday!

  24. Also: the Voynich manuscript?
    ?

  25. Trond Engen says

    Completely undecipherable…

  26. 生日快乐,hat!

  27. Tillykke med fødselsdagen!
    Forgot to get you something, I’m afraid.
    I seem to recall reading recently that the Voynich Manuscript had been dated to not be a modern forgery. I don’t remember if it was the vellum or the ink they published on.

  28. Happy birthday, languagehat! And congratulations on (if I parse your brother’s comments correctly) completing your trip around the sexagenary cycle.

  29. des von bladet says

    Oh, sorry, this wasn’t the influential but untranslated text thread?

  30. And congratulations on (if I parse your brother’s comments correctly) completing your trip around the sexagenary cycle.
    You do, and I thank you. It gives me a warm feeling of accomplishment (which means I need to ingest something cooling to bring my qi back into balance).

  31. Oh, sorry, this wasn’t the influential but untranslated text thread?
    No, you want room 12A, just along the corridor.

  32. Happy birthday!

  33. David Marjanović says

    Hadde jeg hatt den hatten jeg hadde hatt så hadde jeg hatt en hatt. Hatty dirfbay!

    ~:-|
    Mein Hut, der hat drei Ecken,
    drei Ecken hat mein Hut,
    und hätt’ er nicht drei Ecken,
    dann wär’ er nicht mein Hut…!

  34. My birthday is July 1st!

  35. And mine was July 2nd.

  36. A belated happy birthday to you both!

  37. My wife’s and mine were July 2nd and 3rd. July 2nd is the middle day of the (non-leap) year, JC.

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