Irrelevance Glorified

I’m a man of obsession. Obsession over stupid things, mostly, but obsession nonetheless. My latest obsession has been Top Gear. I don’t claim to have discovered this show, of course; Top Gear is a British car show that’s been around for decades. They had a reinvention of sorts at the turn of the century, though, and became quite a bit more eccentric. I had seen some clips of the show on YouTube, so I was aware of the crazy stuff that they did, but it wasn’t until I caught Series 10 on Netflix streaming that I realized just how often they did awesome, hilarious stuff.

As I watched that series (originally aired in 2007), I came across this segment, where the Top Gear crew pay an homage (of sorts) to the quality of British craftsmanship. It’s four YouTube videos (32 minutes total), and it’s just about the funniest thing I have watched in the past six months, perhaps even the past year. If you aren’t laughing hysterically at some point in time while watching this, I’m afraid that we can’t be friends.

 

 

 

 

Over the past weekend, I caught this video up on Fark’s video page. I had never seen it before, and I have to say, I find it positively entrancing. I watch once a day, often more. It’s Italian entertainer Adriano Celentano’s Prisencolinensinainciusol , this video is from roundabouts 1973, and there are few things I don’t love about it. I love the beat and the growl of the guitar. I love the choreography and the outfits. I love the disco-dancing blonde (Should I have been a child of the 70’s? Perhaps. Without the internet, I probably would get a lot more done) Heck, I even like the horns, and in general I hate horn flourishes in songs (you can thank the ska fad of the late 90’s and early 00’s for that). It’s like something Tarantino would put in his movies.

However, the most fascinating thing about this video, in my mind, is that fact that it’s gibberish. He isn’t speaking Italian (except at the very beginning of the video). He isn’t speaking any language. But it’s not unreasonable to think that it’s supposed to sound like English, with its bluesy edge and faux-American accent. And because of this, your mind starts to try and make sense of and form intelligible words (as has been done with great success in some Bollywood videos). The Japanese have a word for it : Soramimi : mishearing words in one language (or in this case, no language) for another language. The intralingual equivalent is mondegreening, like all those people who thought Jimi Hendrix was saying “Excuse Me While I Kiss This Guy.” Since Adriano is singing in something close to an American accent, it also makes me wonder if non-English speakers hear their own language or just assume that it’s English.

I am an ignorant American; while I know a bit of German and a slight amount of French, I couldn’t really carry a conversation in anything other than English. But I’ve always thought that if you had me listen to people talking in Chinese, Japanese, Italian, Portuguese, Swedish, and Hungarian for one minute, I would identify 6 out of 6 at least 90% of the time, just based on what I know about the languages. What this video makes me wonder is that if I had each of those people pretend to be speaking in one of the other languages (Assuming it doesn’t just devolve into racist stereotyping), would I do just as well?

Hey everyone, it’s been a while since I’ve updated. Seriously, it’s all because of one stupid page that I’ve been working on. And, I really didn’t even do most of the work for it. I’ve been somewhat disappointed in my postcard map, so I’ve been thinking of ways to improve it. And by “thinking of ways”, I mean that I kept talking to Cameron about it until he did 98% of the work for me. He whipped up a script to make a Google Map that grabs the images in my Postcard photoset on Flickr and marks their locations. It took me about two weeks, though, to figure out how to embed it within my Wordpress page. I was dealing with a lot of stupid “autoformat” stuff, and hopefully the changes I had to make to the code of the website doesn’t horribly break it. You can find the Postcard Map in the sidebar to the right, under “About”, or you can click here to go to it. I think it’s pretty cool, because I won’t have to do anything beyond adding pictures to the postcard page. And you don’t have to do anything except look on the map, find an open area, go to that area, buy a postcard, and send it to me. It’s pretty easily done.

Oh, and sorry, Sara, for not having your postcard up there, but I’ll scan it in soon. I’m just trying to head off the whining before it starts.

Do you ever have a hard time figuring out where to go for vacation? In this day and age, vacation days are few and far between, and if you have the two-body problem, scheduling can become even more sketchy. With such demands, you need to make things count. A mediocre vacation is worse than no vacation at all! If you’re not going to go all out, just go ahead and send me the money you would have spent on airfare, and just sleep for a week. You’ll come out ahead.

But where to go? At first glance, the possibilities seem endless. Well, I’m always here to help. First of all, 2/3 of the world is covered by water. Unless you like to swim and have a large supply of shark repellent, I would recommend visiting places on land. So that cuts it down quite a bit. Secondly, you should always be broadening your horizons. And, it’s a known fact^* that the best way to broaden your horizon is to send me a postcard from a place that I don’t have a postcard from.

“But Ranjeet”, you ask devotingly, “how do I know what postcards you have?”

“Stop being so impatient”, I will respond condescendingly. “Check my Flickr page“.

Yes, I’ve added a new set to my Flickr connection, again the address is

http://www.flickr.com/photos/ranjeetrao/sets/72157607401290658/

To better serve you, you can check out the Map page by clicking here. Unfortunately, it only shows 21 pictures at a time on the map, but hopefully I can change that.

For the most part, I keep all postcards I get, so here is about 70 postcards that I’ve received since 1991 or so. I’ve cheated and included postcards that I’ve bought myself (mostly because a lot of postcards show picture angles that I can’t achieve with my own camera), but that still counts because at least I’ve traveled to the place that I bought the postcard for.

If you’ve ever sent me a postcard, there’s a chance that you might recognize some of the items. And if you don’t recognize something, maybe you should be spending less time on the internet and more time sending me postcards.

I look forward to your contributions, and your praise.

Update
Sara’s comment suggests that I narrow it down even further than I have already done so. So, here are some suggestions:

• Any place on the continents of Australia, Africa, or Antarctica. Mad props if you mail me a postcard from Antarctica.
• Someplace from Mainland China, like Shanghai or Beijing
• Iceland, Greenland, or Scandinavia
• Toronto
• India
• Danville, IL

^*this is not a well known fact