Ad Infinitum

OMG, I almost died laughing at this hilarious signboard. Good thing, it’s now changed to The Dongda Proctology Hospital. Read the related article, which is about Beijing’s preparation and cleanup drive (on public manners like not spitting in public places and proper English translation of signs and billboards, among others) for the coming Olympics, in full here.

If you’re too lazy, here’s another one:

"Some translations are trickier, like describing pullet, which is a hen less than a year old but appears on some menus as Sexually Inexperienced Chicken."

Now try to make sense out of this. It almost sounds like a sexual harassment invitation; or an act of indecency that you’re supposed to like because it’s a "pleasant surprise."

A better translation of the sign above might be, "Find something new and be pleasantly surprised." (Doug Kanter for The New York Times)

I want to volunteer and be an English police. I need more laughter and amusement in my otherwise monotonous daily life.

I want this Anya Hindmarch bag, before everyone in the street starts carrying one.

It’s stylish, not so expensive, and most importantly, eco-friendly.

I want it. I want it. I want it.

When they first made a limited edition of this,mainly to raise environmental awareness, they didn’t expect the overwhelming response that it got. Hindmarch says of the tote-craze, "It’s gone ballistic."

It has. The bags are now sold out in the UK. There are no plans of producing more of these bags as of now.

Good news is they will launch it in the US and some parts of South East Asia ( yay, Shanghai is included) middle of this year. Stocks are up for grabs by way of pre-order due to the limited availability.

I already signed up in their website to receive updates. I hope I stand a chance. My dreams for the next two months will all be about Anya and her plastic bag-NOT! I hope I’m not going to be waiting for Godot.

Melanie Griffith must stop wearing things that reveal her legs in such sad, sorry state.

                                   She’s barely 50.

I am scared. Must take care of the knees too, from this day on.

I am feeling confused right now because I am not getting my magazine subscriptions the way I expected. What I’m saying is one day I get Time Europe, the next it’s Time International and then some days it’s Time Asia. This is really not much of a problem except that I usually ( almost always to be precise) miss the special issues.

I love special issues. I usually find myself buying magazines that I don’t read whenever there’s SPECIAL ISSUE largely printed on the cover. It’s a weakness or sickness, whatever you want to call it. But I digress.

Foreign magazine subscription here is hard to come by, and they charge really ridiculous,over the top fees that would make you just forget it. So imagine my delight a year back, when I saw an ad in an expat forum offering reasonably low subscription rates. I jumped at it of course, with no second thoughts. 

Now there’s a price to pay for things you get for less, so aside from having to guess which issue I’m getting each time, I also have to deal with their questionable provenance. One time, I flipped through a page and something that looked like coffee stain met my disgust. And I’m not even going to talk in detail about this other time when I came across something mucous-like that got dried. Ick!

It looks like my "dealer" obtains my magazines from airports, coffee shops and hotels. And I mean the "take away in stealth, while no one’s looking" kind of obtainment. I am quite sure because in one of them, there was a sticker of an airline’s name on it.

Those are some reasons to justify why my reading backlog looks this way.

But what I really want to say is, to my understanding friends whose e-mails I have not yet answered, I have not forgotten and will not ignore them. Even these magazines have not taken precedence over your mails.

I read a lot of online news and blogs ( which translate to only one word: gossip) though. But that is another story.

Quote of the day:

"If you don’t wear lipstick, I can’t talk to you. You need to have lips. They are very important for getting men."

                                                         - Isabella Blow,1958-2007