When Renko arrives in Havana, a body is fished out of the body that is presumed to be his frenemy Pribluda. He is found in an inner-tube. Apparently, there are locals called neumaticos who fish with a net drawn over an inner-tube. They sometimes get attacked by sharks. I tried Googling different variations but couldn't find anything about it. Maybe they don't do that anymore. If you just Google "neumatico", you get a bunch of pictures of tires. Aha-now I get it. Neumatico=pneumatic.
Where does that weird silent "p" come from anyways? Evidently it starts with the Greek root "pneuma" which means wind. This now rings a bell from my history of science class. I do wonder though how the Greeks would have pronounced it.
Oh well. Anyways, Santeria and Abakua are two African religions that are popular in Cuba. All I know about Santeria literally comes from a Martin Sheen horror flick from the 80's. The locals get annoyed when Renko mixes them up because Abakua comes from the Congo and Santeria from Nigeria. Santeria is loosely a mix of Lukumi, a West-African spiritual tradition and Catholicism that percolated into its present form in Cuba. If you have heard of Babalu Aye (and what a great name), that is a Santeria deity.
Ah, I see Chango is too. Chango being the name of the life-size creepy mannequin in Pribluda's (illegal) apartment on the Malecon that keeps freaking poor Renko out. Until someone steals him. It's not clear yet why Pribluda had him, however I see he is "dominant over male sexuality." Since he was stolen and turns up later in an odd place, I'm wondering if there is something valuable stashed in him. Other than mojo.
Abakua, on the other hand, I had never heard of. Not even in a Sublime song, as far as I know. Wikipedia says it is a secret fraternity. And, wait- it also originated in Nigeria, not the Congo. Good grief, they aren't even contiguous. They are some sort of mutual aid group and conduct ceremonies called plantes with the drumming and the dancing.
I guess it's hard to maintain the secret part in those secret fraterrnities in the digital age since I got ~28,000 Google hits for it.
In which I engage in shallow discussions about books, movies, science, history and whatever else I'm thinking at that moment. And have beers with Captain Howdy.
Showing posts with label General. Show all posts
Showing posts with label General. Show all posts
Friday, January 21, 2011
Thursday, October 21, 2010
Japanese class starting
Very exciting because I am starting my online Japanese class today.
It's kind of curious the local learning center would offer Japanese at a time when supposedly university Japanese classes are thinning out AND not offer Chinese. I actually would have preferred to take Chinese because I've been reading so much about the country lately-even if I didn't specifically seek out books on it, they are all over the news. But, I don't have any serious intentions of learning hanzi (or kanji) so I don't have much in the way of expectations.
The NYT is writing an interesting series on the ongoing deflation cycle in Japan. Some economists say it is a harbinger of what could happen in the West following our recent economic peccadillo. Even in Tokyo, which is still doing relatively well compared to, say, Osaka, there is a growing trend of young people living in "microhouses" which the NYT describes as concrete houses on SUV-sized plots. The next generation can't even afford the cramped type of housing their parents lived in. It's hard to imagine that in 1991, economists were predicting the Japanese economy would overtake ours by 2010. And now of course China is the #2 economy in the world. The Japanese GDP apparently is essentially the same as it was in 1991 while ours has doubled.
I had some lingering questions over whether Japanese is, like Chinese, a tonal language. I talked to some pony-tailed dude years ago (who seemed to enjoy being an expert on many things more than he did actually researching those things) who insisted he had studied it and it was. I knew I had read something that said that it definitely was not thus I had a distressing data dissonance. After doing some further checking, it seems that Japanese only uses pitch accents and is indeed not tonal. But the distinction is subtle, at least to me. According to Wikipedia, "Pitch accent languages differ from tone languages in that pitch accents are only assigned to one syllable in a word, whereas tones can be assigned to multiple syllables in a word." Multiple other sources confirm Japanese is not tonal although a lot of people seem to continue to argue about it. I am going to forgive that guy for passing on bad data (but not for wearing a ponytail.)
It's kind of curious the local learning center would offer Japanese at a time when supposedly university Japanese classes are thinning out AND not offer Chinese. I actually would have preferred to take Chinese because I've been reading so much about the country lately-even if I didn't specifically seek out books on it, they are all over the news. But, I don't have any serious intentions of learning hanzi (or kanji) so I don't have much in the way of expectations.
The NYT is writing an interesting series on the ongoing deflation cycle in Japan. Some economists say it is a harbinger of what could happen in the West following our recent economic peccadillo. Even in Tokyo, which is still doing relatively well compared to, say, Osaka, there is a growing trend of young people living in "microhouses" which the NYT describes as concrete houses on SUV-sized plots. The next generation can't even afford the cramped type of housing their parents lived in. It's hard to imagine that in 1991, economists were predicting the Japanese economy would overtake ours by 2010. And now of course China is the #2 economy in the world. The Japanese GDP apparently is essentially the same as it was in 1991 while ours has doubled.
I had some lingering questions over whether Japanese is, like Chinese, a tonal language. I talked to some pony-tailed dude years ago (who seemed to enjoy being an expert on many things more than he did actually researching those things) who insisted he had studied it and it was. I knew I had read something that said that it definitely was not thus I had a distressing data dissonance. After doing some further checking, it seems that Japanese only uses pitch accents and is indeed not tonal. But the distinction is subtle, at least to me. According to Wikipedia, "Pitch accent languages differ from tone languages in that pitch accents are only assigned to one syllable in a word, whereas tones can be assigned to multiple syllables in a word." Multiple other sources confirm Japanese is not tonal although a lot of people seem to continue to argue about it. I am going to forgive that guy for passing on bad data (but not for wearing a ponytail.)
Tuesday, September 21, 2010
Because is it a journey or a journal?
This blog name is probably horrendous. But since I'm just writing it for my own amusement, fuck it.
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