Hungarian phrasebook sketch comes to life

Whenever I see a magazine with Chinese calligraphy on the cover, which I cannot read at all, I have to wonder if it means something strange, like
“My nipples explode with delight“. The journal of the Max Planck Research Institute was hit by this little problem: they used some lovely Chinese calligraphy on their cover without looking up the meaning.

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Translation:

With high salaries, we have cordially invited for an extended series of matinées

KK and Jiamei as directors, who will personally lead jade-like girls in the spring of youth,

Beauties from the north who have a distinguished air of elegance and allure,

Young housewives having figures that will turn you on;

Their enchanting and coquettish performance will begin within the next few days.

Whoops. Max Planck Forschung apparently ran an ad for a Chinese brothel or strip club on their cover. At least they didn’t get it as a tattoo, and have reissued the magazine with a new cover.

For the nerd who isn’t very bright

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Oh, boy — get out the model airplane glue and little bottles of paint: you can build a model of Noah’s Ark! And it’s only $74! (The price of plastic models has sure gone up since I used to buy them with my lawn mowing money).

This injection molded plastic model kit measures over 18 1/2″ long and includes 3 separate interior decks with embossed wood texture and many details including ramps and animal cages and corrals. The kit offers several building options. Modelers may display the Ark in cross section to reveal the internal decks or in the full-hull version. Additional building options include: constructing the Ark with or without the deck cabin and a choice to include the “moon pool” (an open center well allowing access to water and waste disposal). This deluxe kit also includes a figure of Noah and 8 pairs of animals!

Cute. Check out these details:

  • Museum-quality replica
  • Highly detailed tooling
  • Accurately scaled to the cubit

Wait…what kind of museum would show this silly thing? Can we also get a museum-quality replica of, say, the Millennium Falcon?

And this talk of detail and accuracy bugs me. Here are the complete, total, unedited specifications for Noah’s Ark, straight from the book of Genesis. This is really all it says about it; it isn’t as if it even includes photos or movies or piles of glurge from George Lucas.

14Make thee an ark of gopher wood; rooms shalt thou make in the ark, and shalt pitch it within and without with pitch.

   15And this is the fashion which thou shalt make it of: The length of the ark shall be three hundred cubits, the breadth of it fifty cubits, and the height of it thirty cubits.

   16A window shalt thou make to the ark, and in a cubit shalt thou finish it above; and the door of the ark shalt thou set in the side thereof; with lower, second, and third stories shalt thou make it.

Where’s the moon pool, the cabin, the details? All we know is that it will fit within a 300x50x30 cubit box (and cubits are very sloppily defined), and it has one window and one door on the side. It seems to leave a lot of room for interpretation. In fact, this seems like an opportunity for some Big Daddy Roth-style customization — it really needs a big rat fink mounted on the prow.

Kodos or Kang?

I’ve always wondered where this strange meme of one-eyed cephalopods came from — here’s a poster from the heyday of B movies that suggests it has been around for at least 50 years.

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That’s from a site with a collection of old movie posters, that brings up old memories. I used to pedal my bike over by the old Vale movie theater in Kent right after school to browse the coming attractions. Most were pretty forgettable, but when it was always exciting to discover one of these cheesy posters (and the cheesier the better) heralding a monster movie for the Saturday matinee. A lot of these look very familiar.

Oh, and if the theater didn’t offer us any tacky thrills, there was a Saturday afternoon movie series on the TV that would fill in for us, giving us an education in quality film from the 40s and 50s that featured cheap makeup and clumsy costumes.