I decided that it was time to change my blog’s name to something less bland and clichéd than “Rants and Raves”. So, without further ado: it’s now “Letters to the World” — yes, inspired by that Emily Dickinson poem.

Silly rabbit– cursors are for kids!

I guess I should blog this before I completely forget about it…

My dad mentioned to me that one of his employees had the urge several days ago to burn some incense in her house [not in her office, as I had originally reported; I stand corrected]. Unfortunately, there wasn’t exactly anything in the room that was really suitable for burning incense, so the employee in question created a makeshift incense burner using one of the little slots in her computer. Let’s just say that it wasn’t long before the computer refused to even boot up, thanks to what appears to be a broken power supply…

This, of course, is the same employee who installed a print cartridge only to find that the paper still came out blank afterwards. Turns out she forgot to remove the little bit of adhesive tape that’s used to protect the nozzle…

OK, this is getting ridiculous. Try translating “signore” out of Italian through Babelfish and you’ll soon find that it means “getlteman”. Shouldn’t that be gentleman? Oops…

Oh, and one last Babelfish amusement, also courtesy of Travholt: “Live and let die” into French and back results in “Live and leave the matrix”!

And you thought the “White Christmas” translation below was amusing? Here’s the actual trace of a MultiBabel translation of “rink”:

Original English Text: rink
Translated to French: patinoire
Translated back to English: skating rink
Translated to German: Eisbahn
Translated back to English: Ice-skating rink
Translated to Italian: rink Ghiaccio-ice-skating
Translated back to English: rink Ghiaccio-ice-skating
Translated to Portuguese: rink queghiaccio-ice-skating
Translated back to English: rink queghiaccio-hoists-skating
Translated to Spanish: pista queghiaccio-alzar-queghiaccio-hoists-skating
Translated back to English: track queghiaccio-to raise-queghiaccio-hoists-skating

And even more bizarre:

Original English Text: rink works
Translated to French: la patinoire travaille
Translated back to English: the skating rink works
Translated to German: die Eisbahn arbeitet
Translated back to English: the ice-skating rink operates
Translated to Italian: il rink ghiaccio-ice-skating funziona
Translated back to English: rink the ice-ice-skating works
Translated to Portuguese: rink gelo-gelo-ice-ice-skating trabalha
Translated back to English: rink ice-ice-hoist-hoists-skating works
Translated to Spanish: trabajos hielo-hielo-alzar-alzar-ice-ice-hoist-hoists-skating de la pista
Translated back to English: works ice-ice-raise-raise-hoist-hoist-hoist-hoists-skating of the track

Thanks to Travholt, who of course is a regular visitor to Works Ice-Ice-Raise-Raise-Hoist-Hoist-Hoist-Hoists-Skating of the Track, for discovering this bizarre Systran bug.

Too lazy to manually translate things back and forth using Babelfish? Try the MultiBabel interface for your mistranslation amusements.

Speaking of which, here’s a potential classic: “I’m dreaming of a white Christmas, just like the ones I used to know”, after being run through all of Babelfish’s languages, becomes “The dream of the native white man, the right has taste of this, the one that practitioner to know”. Talk about a total shift in meaning…

Woohoo. Not long after I blogged Meryl’s Grammar Gotchas, I got a reciprocal link on Meryl’s blog…

Rather predictable news flash: Miss Cleo is actually a native of the United States. I knew that accent was a fake…

Of course, is it all that surprising given Court TV’s exposé on the whole enterprise? Didn’t think so…

Interesting news story of the day [thanks to ObscureStore.com]:

We all know that it’s usually not a good idea to drop a top-of-the-line digital camera into the water. But sometimes such things happen by accident. Usually the camera stops working, of course; but if things just happen to work out correctly, it’s quite amazing how the results can turn out…