S.KRAUSE

Grainssss ... GRRAAINsssssss

So cry out the vegetarian zombies.

When talking with Jürgen and Corina it was decided that if one were to put a restaurant near the location of Hitler’s bunker, it should not serve meat, and should be known as the VegetAryan. (I am not the only one to make bad puns.)

Groucho Marx supposedly said: “I’m not a vegetarian, but I eat animals who are.”

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In IRC this morning a friend posted a link to Rent My Daughter.

Hilarious.

Well, it is if you can see through the rather transparent facade: little info on the site itself, overly-titilating main graphic, claims of being in business for years but having a website registered through a recent registrar, and clearly absurd testimonials:

Name: Jill
Age: 17
Location: Madison, WI

Googling helps to clear up the confusion if one cannot figure it out on one’s own. It is similar to the wonders of Bonsai Kitten or rent a German, but not quite as biting as rent-a-negro. It should not be confused with Rent A Daughter (also www.rentadaughter.com).

I dislike being the person who does not get the joke, but I do enjoy watching others not get it. A double-standard of sorts. Thus the May 2, 2005 entry on Fishbucket is amusing (while discussing the related RentMySon site):

On the one hand it is amusing to see such people be “taken in” ... but at the same time it is very, very disturbing ... not so much that they are taken in, but how extreme their responses are. In particular, their instinctive desire to legislate things is scary. They see a threat, and there should be a law against it. The comments to the blog entry are even scarier:

Here we have the assumption of danger and a negative: while the statement is true, it is also meaningless insofar as it works within a framework of unprovable claims. If you are on a sex offender registry, you are one, but if you are not, it just shows that you have not yet been caught. Thus, one needs to write and complain (though not be a better parent).

Pretty soon she will have to homeschool her daughter and chain her to the bed so she cannot get into any potentially dangerous situations. Perhaps a radio collar and 24/7 video surveillance would help, too.

RSS

Before I ever considered writing my own RSS feed I came across a useful article on RSS, and I bookmarked it; today, while going through some bookmarked links, I found it again and decided to skim it. Making an RSS Feed provides a simple, bottom-up approach to making your own feed. It also linked to a validator, but the link was broken; Google, however, came to the rescue, and I decided to validate my feed with the (RSS) Feed Validator. Two consistent errors popped up. I was using the <pubDate> and <author> tags, but I had provided incorrect or incorrectly formatted content for them, and I got the messages:

• foo must be an RFC-822 date
• foo must be an email address

The email address was simple enough to fix based on their examples, so I did so. I made up dates as well, based on their examples, but also decided to browse through RFC 822 - Standard for the format of ARPA Internet text messages: it provided, among other things, the proper format for all days and months (all should be given only as three letters). After a few minor corrections my RSS feed validated.

Pit Bull

A very rough English translation might be as follows:

I have the following glossary for the verbs in the song:

gristi - to bite, chew (also: torment, vex)
žderati - to gulp (food)
režati - to growl
derati - to tear (apart)
njušiti - to smell, sniff
stenjati - to moan, growl
jesti - to eat, consumer
lajati - to bark
grebati - to claw, scrape, scatch
sisati - to suck
jebati - to fuck

Most I was able to find in Morton Benson’s Standard English-SerboCroatian, SerboCroatian-English Dectionary (1998). I was not able to work my way back from serem to an infinitive, nor was I able to find an infinitive for jebem in my dictionary. Some work with Google provided a page of Bosnian Language Swearing & English Translation, which provided serem as shit and jebem as fuck, from which I was able to produce the infinitive jebati.

All the verbs are in the 1st person singular form; the pronoun ja is given twice.

u is a preposition meaning to or into. In the dative masculine and neuter nouns take a u ending, feminine take an i. Thus, u licu is in the face and u duši is in the soul, from lice (neuter: face) and duša (feminine: soul).

pošten is an adjective meaning honest or honorable. vošsten is not in my dictionary and in almost all online references it is part of a name. It appears in postings of the lyrics of this song as well as on a page with the following formulation: “Koliko si pošten, toliko si vošten.” Koliko and toliko are how much and so much, respectively, with si being you are.

For now I have to rely on the accuracy of the transcription; I will probably email a native-speaker friend or two and see if they can provide some clarification, at which point I will quietly update this page.

—May 19 2005