Martial Arts stick-figure fighting. Brilliant Shockwave -- makes me feel like I'm watching a Jackie Chen movie. Really.

Hatten är din.
We've all seen this Shockwave bizarro song by now ... but this posting from alt.folklore.urban puts it into a fascinating perspective. Thanks to Aton Sherwood for posting this to another mailing list, where it came to my attention.
-----------------
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.urban
From: Deborah Stevenson
Subject: Re: Dracula UL?
Date: Tue, 24 Apr 2001 09:26:34 -0500

On Tue, 24 Apr 2001, Dan Hartung wrote:

[snip of source listings]

> Well, that was odd, wasn't it? It seems there is a popular Arab singer
> named Azar Habib, and this was a love song of his from about 20 years
> ago ... in Arabic. At some point, though, some Swedish wag realized
> that the Arabic lyrics sounded remarkably like Swedish words, except
> of course that they created nonsense.
>
> So the Hatten video is .. I dunno, something legitimately from an Azar
> Habib album cover, maybe, with Swedish lyrics bouncing underneath, to
> reinforce the interpretation (not to mention pictoral assistance, e.g.
> the Coke or ham).

I wonder if this sort of relanguaging, intentionally or not, is more common than we realized. I'm thinking of a song turning up in some Utah Amerindian materials (there's a Brigham Young University sponsored record with it) as a buffalo dance of some sort. In fact, it's a
Japanese song about a Chinese girl, popular during World War II and after, picked up by Amerindian GIs and somehow mutated upon return home. The melody is absolutely pop, especially at the bridge, and it's
wild to hear it sung quite seriously as something else.

Deborah Stevenson
(stevenso@alexia.lis.uiuc.edu)

Features to be found on 2002 Windows computers.

Arial made a new Exile page for us, in celebration of spring!

Editrix's
Cafe - Established April 11, 2001!

Very cool. Hope to get the Exile gang together on it during one of our Sunday online parties in Excite VP.

Got handed a one-dollar bill in change at the Hitchcock Clinic cafe (buying some coffee before an apppointment this morning). Had "www.wheresgeorge.com" stamped in red on it.

Interesting concept -- tracking currency. Unfortunately, one can't track just any currency... only the ones you find and enter into the database. And the hope someone down the line does the same, so you can see where it went (or came from, for that matter). I don't see this as a website strategy that will succeed, given it's running on the now-debunked concept of advertising paying for traffic, but it'll be fun to use while it's still around.

Happy Easter/Spring.

The snow is almost all gone here--and about bloddy well time, too.

And if the sky is clear tonight, we may see some of the stupendous aurora from the solar activity that's been so exciting lately. Earth has been lucky that those enormous CMEs from flares have been mostly going out to space ... so far. We may yet have a catastrophic one aimed at the earth, like the one that took down the Canadian power grid in 1989. It's been a hell of a solar spring.

Mechanical hit counter for web pages. This is too geeky for words.

I seem to have Blogger finally working, which is a cop-out for a blog, but what the hell. I don't have time to FTP the damn stuff every day. We'll see how long this lasts.

I have discovered that Blogger does not like Opera 5. Which sucks. I get repeated database errors plus lousy views of the options and layout with anything but MSIE. And here I though blogging was still a geek's world, unlike all the MS-only-friendly websites of the world. Boy was I wrong.

SALON had an article today, "That's 'Mistress Freelancer" to You" that purportedly reports on a freelance tech writer who has changed to being a dominatrix due to the downturn in tech writing jobs. Somehow this smacks of (1) reality, and (2) a fake article. A friend at UCLA Berkley reports that she has heard in the grapevine that it's a fake. If it is, it's still a funny one. I can't say how many times I've been asked if "editrix" is "dominatrix's twin sister."

The answer is yes, but I get to flog writers with a red pencil for only half the money a domme would rake in.
===============

My column at BYTE.com is saved. For now. All praise to the gods who watch over hungry technology writers. Especially hungry female technology writers.

It will probably be renamed to something more descriptive than its current incarnation as "While Working..." This I don't mind at all. I'm tired of getting B2B press releases when I don't write about business!

I should try to remember to sacrifice something to St. Vidicon of Cathode in the morning in thanks.