Just discovered a gallery of horrible mistranslations found in Korea, many of which I haven’t seen on other Engrish sites: Torgodevil.

I just saw one of the dumbest Internet ads I’ve seen in a good while.

It was selling one of those programs you can download to stop pop-up ads from showing up. (Never mind the fact that I know where you can find such programs for free, and some web browsers have that functionality built in.)

So guess how they chose to advertise this wonderful product? In a pop-up window, of course.

Sure, I can understand the motivations behind the ad. Still, though– maybe it’s just me, but I wouldn’t exactly trust a pop-up remover whose preferred form of advertising is pop-ups…

I know, you probably enjoyed the search requests in the last blog entry. So here are some more interesting and/or just plain inexplicable search requests from my server logs, for your enjoyment:

• grabbing breakfast on campus – I remember mentioning the breakfast during college orientation in one of my blog entries. I still don’t understand why someone would search for such an arcane topic, though.
• we all favorite carrot game, – Woohoo. I’ve apparently helped to make a certain bit of Engrish popular… (And the first hit on Google leads to the RinkWorks forum, to boot.)
• badly translated japanese video games – Wow, I’m on the first page of Google results here too, thanks to a number of references to Zany Video Game Quotes. Oddly, I’m higher-ranked than ZVGQ for that particular search…
• awful baby names – Granted, I only linked to others’ rants on the subject, but still, the second page of Google results isn’t bad at all…
• anal retentive dictionary compulsive – Hm, do we spelling bee geeks fall into this category? 😉

And now… The moment you’ve all been waiting for… It’s… [cue that guy from Monty Python] Weird Search Requests!

Here are some actual, unaltered search requests as found in a recent zone38.net server log:

• myself font – I’m still trying to figure out exactly what this person was looking for. A custom handwriting font?
• “weasel chomping on my privates” – From Google’s Hungarian site, no less. Guess Dave Barry fandom spreads around the world!
• incompetent INTP – Yeah, I have to admit I feel that way myself sometimes… (And go figure; I’m on the first page of Google’s results, too.)
• Free proofreader – I don’t think the Hall of Shame was quite what they were looking for. Though the content there may be considered proofreader-free…
• FREE GRAMMAR & READ PROOF  PROGRAM     WITH SCREEN SHOT – Yes, the capitalization and spacing is exactly how it was entered. Need I mention this search request was from an AOL user?
• cingular medication side effects – Wow. Talk about a phone company branching out. (I believe what they were trying to search for was the asthma medication called Singulair…)

And a special category; all of these searches led to the Proofreader’s Hall of Shame. You’ll see why:

• dowload Mario Word
• Super Mario free dowload game
• smartdownload dowload (And they spelled it right the first time!)
• free movie dowload

Apparently this is a common misspelling– well, then, I say, more power to those who misspell it in their searches! 😉

Y’know, I’ve been thinking about it, and as much as I try to fit in within college society, I still feel like an outcast.

It’s strange, really; I can be quite extroverted when it comes to class discussions. I’m usually one of the first ones to answer when questions are asked, usually one of the most vehement participants in class debates; indeed, sometimes I’m urged by my teachers not to talk so much.

Yet outside of the classroom, it’s almost as if I’m an entirely different being. No longer talkative, I’m instead rather shy, the stereotypical introvert with his head either staring at his own feet or buried in some sort of reading material, often rather oblivious to the world around me (occasionally with rather unpleasant results). Sure, I can get into a conversation, but I generally don’t feel like I’m a part of the group, so to speak; with a few exceptions (and what great exceptions those are!), everyone’s lifestyle and interests seem, well, so different from mine. And even the people I do feel comfortable around can make me feel alienated when they join in the discussions of others; I only feel as if I’m more of an outcast when they refer to such alien topics as driving around town, socializing, and encounters with people of whom I’ve never even heard. (Don’t get me wrong; I’m by no means anti-social. I just detest small talk, and would rather have a discussion on computer glitches, weird typographical mishaps, my own horrible driving, or something of that sort; heck, I don’t even mind listening to conversations about organic chemistry homework amongst some of my more introverted friends, even though I sometimes haven’t the slightest clue what they’re talking about.)

But then again, granted, it could just be that I’m looking in the wrong places. Perhaps I should just hang out more in the library and the computer labs; I can speak from personal experience when I say that it’s generally inconvenient for most of my fellow introverts to bother sitting down in the dining hall for more than a few minutes…

But one thing is for sure: I’m not bothering with fraternities. Well, unless you count such honor societies as Phi Eta Sigma in that category, which I doubt most people would…

Oh, and one last comment: I decided, on a whim, to search for introvert blog on Google, and (at least at the time I wrote this) zone38.net was listed in the fourth page of results. Wow, I didn’t realize I was that popular…I’m quite flattered. 🙂

Nifty site of the day: Open Source Web Design. Need a quick template on which to base your web site? Check out these design templates released by their creators into the public domain.

First of all, I’ve been wanting to post some stuff, but thanks to a Perl module mix-up on the server was unable to do so for much of the afternoon. (Those of you who had trouble posting comments, that problem stemmed from the same source, and it too has been fixed.) Anyway, everything’s been sorted out, so here we go…

• Enjoy the Proofreader’s Hall of Shame? Turns out that Meryl has a similar obsession. Check out her Grammar Gotchas page for more fun with typographical mishaps.
• The Stupid Advertisement of the Week goes to an ad for a cellular phone company spotted in my university’s student newspaper. The ad proclaims, “With each activation, register to win a gift certificate for a free keg of beer!” Only one problem: According to the campus guidebook, “the possession or consumption of alcoholic beverages is prohibited on campus”. Yes, I’m not so naïve as to believe everyone holds absolutely true to this rule, but still– this is the official campus newspaper here. Don’t get me wrong; I’m all for freedom of the press and all, but this just strikes me as illogical…

Yesterday in First Year Seminar class, we were required to take a rather lengthy and bland survey regarding our college experience. One of the questions asked whether the word “vacation” had been worked into any of the previous semester’s curriculum.

Excuse me? Vacation?

Turns out, of course, that it was supposed to be “vocation”. Too bad, really; I think a class about vacation would have been much more enjoyable, too…

(Incidentally, though the item was phrased as a true/false question, the choices given were related to our personal satisfaction with this emphasis on “vacation” and its relative importance to us. No, I’m not exactly sure what I was supposed to mark either…)

Woohoo. Consumer Reports magazine has recently begun putting their “Selling It” columns online. Check out this month’s column for, among other things, a quite amusing example of Engrish (the last entry on the page)…

Yet another useless personality test: What video game character are you? I’m somewhere between Mario and an Asteroid, myself, leaning quite a bit more toward the latter…