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Adventures in speech-to-text

noreply@blogger.com (richard) — Sun, 08 Nov 2009 09:08:38 PST

For better or worse, I have a lot of writing to do these days, and much of it needs to be finished before I walk out the door to my day job. To be perfectly honest, it's become borderline overwhelming.

To improve the situation (i.e. prevent myself from going bananas, and not the Rachel Zoe way), I first tried tweaking my sleep schedule and even my writing style, but eventually it became clear that I needed outside help. As I've mentioned before -- either here or on Twitter -- I've opted for speech-to-text software.

All has not gone as planned. In my head, I had this fairly romantic, Star Trek-ish fantasy of easy, intuitive communications with my laptop. Sadly, that ain't the way The Dragon likes to roll. She's got a reasonably good vocabulary, but it takes a VERY long time to train her on the translation part. For weeks, it felt as if I were making so many corrections, I might as well have typed the stuff by hand.

And that's to say nothing of the process of writing itself. See, as it turns out, thinking and typing is much different than just speaking into a microphone. Typing is obviously slower, it's hands-on, and it's visual: you type something you don't like, you back up and pen it again. There's a chance for reflection as you see your words pop onto the screen. Using speech-to-text, on the other hand, your mouth is moving in time with your brain -- possibly faster. It makes for long sentences, conversational tone, and a bigger chunk of editing when I finish. I've begun training myself to speak slower, reflect, and dictate more like I would if I were typing, but it's not easy, learning to think before you speak. (I could point to examples in the political realm, but I'm sure you could, too.)

That said, the program and I finally seem to have reached something of a truce. I speak slowly and distinctly, pulling back on my emotions and inflection so that I don't confuse her. In return, she does a mostly good job with everything but proper names, and she's begun to shed her habit of tossing in extra "ands" and "withs". Things are livable.

I wanted to show a couple of examples of the translation in action, but just to make things interesting (and completely useless), I've thrown Miss Dragon a couple of curve balls. You'll see what I mean:

Opening passage from Nabokov's Lolita

Original
Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta.

Translation
Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Low-Lee-tot: the tip of the time taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Low. Lee. Top.

* * * * *

Opening lines from The Canterbury Tales
(Read in my best Middle English accent, courtesy of Dr. Nona Feinberg)

Original
Whan that aprill with his shoures soote
The droghte of march hath perced to the roote,
And bathed every veyne in swich licour
Of which vertu engendred is the flour;
Whan zephirus eek with his sweete breeth
Inspired hath in every holt and heeth
Tendre croppes, and the yonge sonne
Hath in the ram his halve cours yronne,
And smale foweles maken melodye,
That slepen al the nyght with open ye
(so priketh hem nature in hir corages);
Thanne longen folk to goon on pilgrimages,
And palmeres for to seken straunge strondes,
To ferne halwes, kowthe in sondry londes;
And specially from every shires ende
Of engelond to caunterbury they wende,
The hooly blisful martir for to seke,
That hem hath holpen whan that they were seeke.

Translation
One that I pre-the which he sure is.
The draw of much have pasted to the Rocha,
and all that every then yukking speech to the core
of which there Chu and John for it is the floor;
lines and if it is a good that he's safe to breath
in spirit hath in every Holton Keith
10 the Acropolis, and the on some
half in the round is half course you're on,
and smaller file is mocking Ms. O'Dea,
that second of the night with open ye
(so predicting hem not sure I need you quarter I just);
then long been sold to goon on to remind just,
and palmettos for second strongest wrongs,
to Ferne Hollis, not use laundry loans;
inspection of the from every she it is and that
of in the long to come the battery bay window,
the only place will mark the fourth Seca,
that hem hath Holton one that they would expect.

* * * * *

Jacques Prevert: "D�jeuner du matin"
(A high school fave, for many obvious reasons: simplicity, angst, coffee, cigarettes)

Original
Il a mis le caf�
Dans la tasse
Il a mis le lait
Dans la tasse de caf�
Il a mis le sucre
Dans le caf� au lait
Avec la petite cuiller
Il a tourn�
Il a bu le caf� au lait
Et il a repos� la tasse
Sans me parler

Il a allum�
Une cigarette
Il a fait des ronds
Avec la fum�e
Il a mis les cendres
Dans le cendrier
Sans me parler
Sans me regarder

Il s'est lev�
Il a mis
Son chapeau sur sa t�te
Il a mis son manteau de pluie
Parce qu'il pleuvait
Et il est parti
Sous la pluie
Sans une parole
Sans me regarder

Et moi j'ai pris
Ma t�te dans ma main
Et j'ai pleur�

Translation
Beyond the new Caf�
Donna pass
you done the today
Donna pass the Caf�
John used to cloak
Dawn the Caf� over day
of that who could keep create
but up to may
be that but new Caf�: a
eight but Outlook does it have to for
soma buy they

Utah pride you may
units the gap at
but I think they own the
of that the unit
eat on me that song
gonna something a
solemn holiday
solemn will get a big

You stated they
you got me
/up oldster socket a
you done me some month old to read
asked you prove that
8E8.keep
suit up to me
songs you to hold
small move look out of date

A more jake please
might that don't Mama
AJ Pillai

* * * * *

NSFW Fanfic Erotica: "Hairy Seinfeld (excerpt)"
(Yes, it's exactly what you think.)

Original
"Mmmmmmmmmmmmmmm, yeahhhhhhh. Fuck me, Jerry. Fuck me, harder." Jerry leaned in, sharing a passionate, lust-filled kiss with George, all the while, fucking him harder than ever, his pubic hairy cushioning his deep thrusts, while his balls slapped George's ass. George wrapped his legs around Jerry's body, and their hairy chests met, their sweat allowing their bodies to slide against each other with minimal friction.

Translation
"That movement yeah talk to me, Jerry. Fox me, harder." Jerry leaned in, sharing a passionate, lust-filled kiss with George, all the while, foxy him harder than ever, is she big hairy cushioning his deep thrusts, while his balls slapped Georges ass. George wrapped his legs around Jerry's body and their hairy chests met, their sweat allowing their bodies to slide against each other with minimal friction.

For some, swallowing is not an option

noreply@blogger.com (richard) — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 03:49:31 PST

Fact: human seminal plasma hypersensitivity is a painful, frustrating allergy that affects roughly 5% of women and a handful of men.

Fact: the lede on this article about human seminal plasma hypersensitivity is mildly hilarious:

A new wife was given a nasty wedding night surprise when she discovered she was allergic to her husband's sperm.

-- much more at The Daily Mail

And that's your conundrum for Thursday.

Handy Mardi Gras tip: how to open a bottle of wine with a shoe

noreply@blogger.com (richard) — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 03:47:10 PST

[via boingboing]

Delta and SkyWest may be sued for anti-gay discrimination

noreply@blogger.com (richard) — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 10:05:18 PST

Today in STUPID PR TRICKS, we feature the formerly friendly folks at SkyWest and Delta Airlines, who refuse to offer the same travel benefits to gay, married employees as those enjoyed by straight, married employees. To wit:

"In a six-page letter to the airlines, attorney Tara L. Borelli, with Lambda Legal, contends her client, Gilbert Caldwell, and his spouse, the Rev. David Farrell, are enduring employment discrimination due to a SkyWest travel policy that refuses to extend its benefits to same-sex spouses 'while heterosexual employees' spouses are fully respected automatically.' The Oct. 29 letter is the first step before formally suing SkyWest and Delta, Borelli said Friday.' In this incident, they are refusing to treat Gilbert in the same way as they do married, heterosexual couples,' added Borelli, a Lambda Legal staff attorney in Los Angeles. 'They should be providing travel benefits on equal terms.' ... Officials with SkyWest and Delta Airlines did not return multiple phone messages on Thursday and Friday seeking comment." [DesertSun via Towleroad]

So, class, why is that stupid?

A) It just is.

B) If Delta and SkyWest maintain their discriminatory policy, and if Caldwell and Farrell are indeed legally married in California, and if the couple move forward with their suit, Delta and SkyWest probably won't fare too well. Sounds expensive.

C) No matter which way things go for Caldwell and Farrell, the two companies' PR teams ought to get out in front of the conflamma and control the message. If you've ever had to do damage control duty before, you know it's neither pretty nor pleasant.

D) We're gays. We're brand agnostic. We're happy to boycott.

E) Delta and SkyWest surely employ hundreds if not thousands of gays and lesbians. Why piss off such a chunk (and a vocal chunk at that) of the workforce? Not the best morale-building exercise.

F) The world only spins forward. Delta and SkyWest can either be at the leading edge of the civil rights movement, or they can play George Wallace. My suggestion? Well, things didn't turn out so good for George Wallace, did they?

Ed Blakely: so close, and yet...

noreply@blogger.com (richard) — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 07:42:14 PST

Few New Orleanians liked former Recovery Czar, Ed Blakely. He was distant, he was presumptuous, and he spoke without thinking. Also -- and this is a fault of our own parochialism -- he was an outsider and therefore, suspicious.

I never met the man. I don't know what he was like. All I know is that watching him on TV was unbearable: his comments reeked of the same jackass hubris that still peppers Ray Nagin's cringe-inducing interviews. Grand pronouncements, back-slapping self-congratulations, all that junk.

However, as the [terribly edited] two-part interview above shows, Blakely did pick up a few things here. He may or may not have had any impact on our city's recovery, but at least he understands now what we're up against -- and I don't mean levee walls and rising sea temps. Of course, you'd have to be a complete idiot to miss the racism -- both black and white -- that informs every move in city politics, but given my low expectations of the man...well, I'm pleasantly surprised he got it.

That said, Blakely is way out of line when, speaking of the recovery process, he says that "New Orleanians expected someone else to do it all along.... They never expected to do it themselves." That may have been true over on Perdido Street (was there ever a more apt street name?), but if the son of a bitch had gotten out of City Hall and into the neighborhoods and seen the work that people were doing -- cleaning up, building networks, starting community organizations, attending endless planning meetings -- he might've understood where the real impediments lay.

The man's no idiot, but he's kind of an idiot, if you catch my drift.

On the need to be ever-vigilant, inside and out

noreply@blogger.com (richard) — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 13:57:01 PST

New Orleans is not the place to live if you're paranoid about safety. Things happen here -- good, bad, accidental, deliberate, and frequently unpleasant.

Of course, the city's neighborhoods aren't created equally. Despite its reputation as a hub for vice, the French Quarter is one of the safest places you can live in New Orleans. The streets are busy, the police patrols are frequent, and many of the residents are tourists, which makes local-on-local crime less likely.

Less likely, but not impossible.

As the big party weekend began ramping up last Friday night, somebody or somebodies decided to celebrate Halloween in a particularly cruel and unusual way: by stabbing a well-known surgeon in his French Quarter home, then setting fire to the place. Dr. Ralph Newsome was pronounced dead that evening, after being taken to the LSU hospital.

I didn't know Dr. Newsome. I'm not even sure I recognize his face in the photo above -- which is unusual, since New Orleans is a pretty small town. Making it doubly unusual is the fact that Newsome was gay, and for one reason or another, we gays tend to know one another, at least on sight.

That's not to diminish the tragedy of Newsome's death, of course, only to say that I didn't know him: I didn't know his likes, his dislikes, his personal preferences, what he ate for breakfast, how he took his coffee, or the other minutae of his too-short life that friends and family will remember over the weeks, months, years to come. I can't say anything about Newsome at all, but judging from the fact that he was a gardener and kept tortoises, I think we would've hit it off really well.

Over at Towleroad, most commenters have jumped to the conclusion that Newsome was killed by what used to be called "rough trade". I'm sorry to say, that was the first thought that crossed my mind, too. The area of the Quarter where he Newsome lived is well known for its population of muscled-up straight boys whose allegiance to money and crystal meth frequently outweighs their devotion to the female of the species. Mix gay-for-pay with gay-for-meth and...well, it's proven lethal before.

But none of that's been confirmed by the police. So far as I know, no details have been released at all. Conjecture leads to the worst kind of stereotyping (is there a better kind of stereotyping?): as proof, look no further than some of the knuckle-draggers leaving comments at NOLA.com. I'm trying to steer clear.

All I know is that murders in the French Quarter are rare; they galvanize locals who are fed up with the city's piecemeal system of policing and justice; that New Orleans has lost a handsome, talented, and by all accounts loving man; and that if I were that man's partner, I would be out for blood.

[Thank you for the reminder, Tyler]

Good friends

noreply@blogger.com (richard) — Sat, 31 Oct 2009 16:57:59 PDT

Judy Garland, minus the talent, but including the (rumored) lesbianism...

noreply@blogger.com (richard) — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 05:20:27 PDT

...at least that's what I think whenever I see Rose McGowan. Looka here and tell me I'm wrong:

[via GoFugYourself]

"Exhilarating and frightening to behold"

noreply@blogger.com (richard) — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 09:19:36 PDT

I'm not sure where I found this article about New Orleans' rebuilding process -- probably via Gambit or from my pal Tyler. But no matter: it's a beautifully written piece. Here's an excerpt:

Four years after Katrina, the rebuilding of New Orleans is not proceeding the way anyone envisioned, nor with the expected cast of characters. (If I may emphasize: Brad Pitt is the city�s most innovative and ambitious housing developer.) But it�s hard to say what people were expecting, given the magnitude of the disaster and the hopes raised in the weeks immediately following. Seventeen days after the storm, President George W. Bush stood in Jackson Square and promised: �We will stay as long as it takes to help citizens rebuild their communities and their lives.�

The terms we, as long as it takes, and help turned out to be fairly elastic. The Federal Emergency Management Agency shuttered its long-term recovery office about six months later, after a squabble with the city over who would pay for the planning process. Since then, depending on whom you talk to, government at all levels has been passive and slow-moving at best, or belligerent and actively harmful at worst. Mayor Ray Nagin occasionally surfaces to advertise a big new scheme (a jazz park, a theater district), about which no one ever hears again. A new 20-year master plan and comprehensive zoning ordinance was being ironed out early this summer, but it remains subject to city-council approval. A post-Katrina master plan has been under discussion since before the floodwaters were pumped out.

In the absence of strong central leadership, the rebuilding has atomized into a series of independent neighborhood projects. And this has turned New Orleans�moist, hot, with a fecund substrate that seems to allow almost anything to propagate�into something of a petri dish for ideas about housing and urban life. An assortment of foundations, church groups, academics, corporate titans, Hollywood celebrities, young people with big ideas, and architects on a mission have been working independently to rebuild the city�s neighborhoods, all wholly unconcerned about the missing master plan. It�s at once exhilarating and frightening to behold.

�If you look at the way ants behave when they�re gathering food, it looks like the stupidest, most irrational thing you�ve ever seen�they�re zigzagging all over the place, they�re bumping into other ants. You think, �What a mess! This is never going to amount to anything,�� says Michael Mehaffy, the head of the Sustasis Foundation, which studies urban life and sustainability and has worked with neighborhood organizations here. �So it�s easy to look at New Orleans at the grassroots level and wonder, What�s going on here?� But if you step back and look at the big picture, in fact it�s the most efficient pattern possible, because all those random activities actually create a very efficient sort of discovery process.�
--full article at TheAtlantic.com

Arnold Schwarzenegger is more clever than you think

noreply@blogger.com (richard) — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 04:14:18 PDT

[via TechCrunch]

I fail to see anything wrong with "strip hockey"...

noreply@blogger.com (richard) — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 04:11:37 PDT

...except, of course, that these guys are way too young for my tastes. But, you know, someone out there might enjoy the sight of naked and half-naked teens.

'Strip hockey' players punished in Idaho
By The Associated Press

Call it puck naked.

An Idaho junior hockey team was banished temporarily from a city ice rink after players engaged in a game of "strip hockey" -- shedding a piece of uniform every time a practice shot missed its mark.

As redress for Wednesday's incident, Boise forbid the Idaho Junior Steelheads team from using Idaho Ice World for four days; one 17-year-old player who shed his underwear briefly was suspended until next week. In addition, police are investigating, a spokeswoman said Tuesday.

Doug Holloway, Boise's recreation superintendent, says rink employees told him the shootout drill went like this: "If they missed a shot, they had to take off a glove. If they missed another, they had to take off another glove. And so on, and so forth."

-- full story at NOLA.com

Trannies, trannies, everywhere

noreply@blogger.com (richard) — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 20:28:00 PDT

I find it very hard to believe that these three hookers have vaginas:

My elementary school was not this creative

noreply@blogger.com (richard) — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 13:06:44 PDT

[via boingboing]

Dueling perfume ads: which is worse?

noreply@blogger.com (richard) — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 15:01:00 PDT

Perfume is dreadful, but the ads used to sell it are worse. I thought we'd reached the bottom of the barrel in 1985, but apparently, 24 years of technological and marketing advancements haven't done a damn thing to improve the genre:

[via Copyranter]

The pioneering Disney animator living quietly around the corner

noreply@blogger.com (richard) — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 05:17:41 PDT

Here's the problem with New Orleans: its residents walk a lot and talk a lot (to each other, to themselves, and sometimes to no one in particular). We've been here for hundreds of years, strolling the sidewalks that buttress our narrow streets, stopping to chat with neighbors, and taking streetcars more conducive to conversation than quick commutes because they travel so damned slowly. The city is flat, movement is easy -- unlike the town where I grew up, which was small, decentralized, hilly, the sort of place where you'd get in the car to go anywhere, even to a neighbor's house for coffee.

That's what keeps us here. That's why it's hard for us to move to new places, places that might be geographically and meteorologically superior. Apart from New York, San Francisco, and a handful of smaller burgs like Provincetown and Savannah, there aren't many locales that have the same convivial, walkable feel (at least not on this side of the Atlantic). And that's why we stay, or at least why I stay: not for the 24 hour bars, not for the loose liquor laws, and certainly -- certainly -- not for our efficient city government.

* * * * *

Over the past 16 years or so -- ever since I moved to my current neighborhood, the Faubourg Marigny -- I've seen an elderly woman walking the streets. She's a bit stooped and gray and slow, but there's something unusual about the way she carries herself; to call it "regal" would be cliched and also inaccurate, but "semi-regal" might do. I've tried to catch her eye on occasion, but never had any luck. A couple of years ago, a friend told me that she was once an animator at Walt Disney Studios. That sounded like a nice rumor, exactly the kind of story you might spread about an eccentric neighbor, but I didn't put much stock in it.

For some reason -- possibly because the New Orleans Museum of Art is hosting a huge animation retrospective in conjunction with the release of the new Disney film, The Princess and the Frog -- I've been thinking about this mystery woman lately. Yesterday morning, on my way to the gym, I saw her trudging down the sidewalk, and although I'm not ordinarily the sort of person who strikes up conversations with total strangers (I'm shy that way), I did. I turned my bike around, pulled up beside her, and with all the guileless enthusiasm of a seven-year-old, I blurted out, "Excuse me, ma'am, but I've heard that you were once an animator for Disney. Is that true?"

She was confused at first. She's in her mid-80s and not as sharp as she once was. But as it turns out, my friend was right: this woman, Eva Schneider, was one of a tiny handful of women who worked in the animation studios for Walt Disney in the 1950s and 60s. When I spoke to her, she insisted that she was not an animator herself, that she was simply an assistant in the animation department. She made it sound as if she might've been a secretary. But when I got home, I did a little googling, and it appears that she was just being modest, or that she didn't consider her work to be animation per se. Fact of the matter is: her presence at Disney is fairly well-documented, and she's fondly remembered by former animators.

[drawing of Eva by Floyd Norman; full story here]

[drawing of Eva with Wes Herschensohn by John Sparey; full story here]

* * * * *

Over the course of a rambling, hourlong chat, she shared fragments of her life. Originally from Z�rich, she must've come to the states around the time of World War II, landing first in New York, then moving to Los Angeles, where she worked for nearly 20 years at Disney. As I understand from our conversation (decades later, her English is still somewhat broken, and she speaks with a pronounced German accent), her father passed away around 1970, and on the advice of her nephew who lives in New Orleans, she used her inheritance to retire here. She's never left -- not even for Katrina. That photo at top, that's from a profile run in Vanity Fair in the fall of 2005, documenting the fact that she remained in New Orleans for the storm. (She told me she stayed because she had a dog, and the authorities wouldn't let her take him.)

Now, I know that not everyone deserves to publish a memoir or to be the subject of her/his own documentary. Certainly there are many that have bored the world to tears. But in my chat with Eva, she seemed very interesting, full of experiences that few living people ever had. I'm not so sure I could tell her life story -- in fact, I'm not even sure she could -- but it would hold more than my own attention.

The morning after

noreply@blogger.com (richard) — Sun, 25 Oct 2009 05:08:00 PDT

[via DRB]

Screw the cold shower. Get to the point.

noreply@blogger.com (richard) — Sat, 24 Oct 2009 07:54:20 PDT

[via dog'S faint!!]

Please marry me, Al Franken. Or adopt me as your mistress. Or your mister. Or whatever you want to call a guy on the side.

noreply@blogger.com (richard) — Sat, 24 Oct 2009 05:07:54 PDT

[via BoingBoing]

David Vitter doesn't think he's the only racist elected to public office

noreply@blogger.com (richard) — Fri, 23 Oct 2009 07:37:48 PDT

A couple of days ago, I mentioned that Louisiana's governor, �ber-Republican Bobby Jindal, and his nemesis, Democratic U.S. Senator Mary Landrieu, had both unequivocally condemned Keith Bardwell, the justice of the peace in Tangipahoa Parish who refused to marry an interracial couple last week. I also mentioned that Louisiana's other U.S. Senator, noted whoremonger David Vitter, had remained positively silent.

Well, Vitter has finally spoken out. In this clip shot by the worst interviewer ever to purchase a low-end video camera, the senator admits that he's not the only racist elected to public office in Louisiana.

TERRIBLE INTERVIEWER: "...elected from Louisiana not to have commented on the judge that refused to marry the interracial couple. Do you --"

TERRIBLE SENATOR: "I don't think that's the case."

[via BlogOfNewOrleans]

If you know my boyfriend...

noreply@blogger.com (richard) — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 09:27:07 PDT

...you might also know that today is his birthday. Perhaps you should drop him a line -- or come to Bearracuda this weekend and offer well-wishes to the poster boy in person.

Apparently, you need more than National Treasure to pay the bills

noreply@blogger.com (richard) — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 04:56:03 PDT

Nicolas Cage's homes in the French Quarter and Garden District are listed for sale at auction Nov. 12 as a local lender foreclosed on the properties for unpaid mortgage debts, according to the Orleans Parish Civil Sheriff's office.

In July, the Internal Revenue Service placed liens on Cage's New Orleans properties for $6.6 million in unpaid taxes. The Academy Award-winning actor and nephew of director Francis Ford Coppola is trying to sell homes around the world to raise money at a time when the values of real estate and stock portfolios have fallen.

-- full story at NOLA.com

Did my temple garment just get smaller?

noreply@blogger.com (richard) — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 06:29:00 PDT

[via CTRL+W33D]

An awkward boner, indeed

noreply@blogger.com (richard) — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 05:58:00 PDT

This may or may not be a photo of Christian activist and senior-level douchebag Randall Terry, using one of them newfangled CB-type megaphonical devices to shout nasty things at homosexualists:

But whomever it is that's being ignored by gay cowboys and polar bears alike, that is almost certainly NOT a boner in his poorly pleated trousers*. Still, it's a funny thought, right?

* We, The Gays, are a tolerant people, except in matters sartorial. Perhaps we'd be inclined to listen to people like Mr. Terry if they would take our anti-pleat message to heart.** Remember: hate the pants, love the man inside 'em.

** Just kidding. There's no way in hell we're listening to that fuckface.

[via AwkwardBoners]

I don't know anything about astrology or phrenology or whatever, but...

noreply@blogger.com (richard) — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 11:51:23 PDT

...it appears that something's gone wrong with the world. I mean, okay, things have been going wrong (and occasionally right) for a really long time -- like, since ever -- but today, Planet Earth seems particularly off-course. As evidence, please note:

Louisiana's fiercely Republican governor and its fiercely Democratic senior senator have spoken out against anti-miscegenation (who'd have thought they had to?), but one crackerfied ho'monger has remained eerily silent.

Antoine's has begun publishing its menu in English.

Fairly NSFW, craptacular ads like this have been pitched, created, paid for, and run on...well, possibly television:

I don't know what the people of the world have done, but karma, as The Gays say, is a beeyotch.

[h/t Tyler, Gambit, Copyranter]

WHERE THE WILD THINGS ARE, in a nutshell (not a spoiler)

noreply@blogger.com (richard) — Sat, 17 Oct 2009 10:22:13 PDT

I am not a religious person and I never have been. As a kid, I hated going to church (although bible drills brought out my competitive side), and I haven't really been to a service since high school. For the last two decades, I've only set foot inside cathedrals and basilicas and synagogues to take photographs -- and pretty lousy ones at that.

However, I do have a sort of moral code or a guiding principle -- whatever you want to call it. Not to get too hippie-fied, but basically, I think that the best that anyone can do is to be kind. Like Dorian Corey said, life is rough. It's an ordeal just to get through it. In my opinion, our responsibility is to make the trip easier, happier, more comfortable for others.

And remarkably, that is what Where the Wild Things Are is all about.

And that is nearly all it's about, with one notable exception, which also happens to be one of my core concerns: how are we supposed to make life easier for friends and strangers when everyone keeps moving? Someone's always dying, changing, shifting locales. It's heartbreaking. There's no fixing it. Sometimes, I just want to shout, "Be still!", but that's silly. And I don't shout much anyway.

One last thing worth noting about the film: screenwriter Dave Eggers' ability to think like a child. The way kids speak emotionally; the way their rationale is grounded in feelings and not what we ordinarily think of as logic; the way children keep everying right on the surface; their utter lack of guile: he captured it, and beautifully. I shouldn't have expected less, but Eggers and Jonze and everyone else and everything else have created another world -- albeit one that'll look very familiar to anyone who's ever been six.

So, I guess what I'm trying to say is that Where the Wild Things Are is profound, moving, and I wouldn't take anyone under the age of 18 anywhere near it. It's terribly depressing.

I did have some complaints about the lighting, and the twee soundtrack occasionally made it feel like I was watching the world's longest Toyota ad, and James Gandolfini's voice took a bit of getting used to. But still: go. Go.