UNDERDOG of PERFECTION

OK, I don’t actually know what “iss de Hundin” means, but it’s a phrase that seems to come up a lot in Kobaian. At any rate, Magma is a legendary French prog rock/avant garde jazz band, led by drummer Christian Vander, who made up his own language for the band’s Coltrane-meets-Wagner post-apocalyptic jazz-rock-opera concept. (And now I’ve reached my per-post hyphen limit.) They beat Coheed and Cambria to it by three decades, and did it in an incomprehensible Germanic Esperanto to boot.

I used to have a Magma tribute website, back in the days before blogs and Wikipedia and YouTube. I took it down years ago, but fortunately the band has kept up playing. I saw them in Chicago in 1999 and it was a highlight of my musical life. They’re still going strong, as evidenced by this 2006 video. Check it out!

Of course, the truly indoctrinated will probably prefer this clip from 1970. Lip syncing on French TV, “American Bandstand”-style. “Stoah” of all things. Imagine the trauma of an unsuspecting viewer, just tuning in for the supersonic screeching at the beginning. The world’s collective tolerance for the bizarre was certainly much higher back then.

OK, it’s not. But my latest musical creation, the 3-song EP ÷0 [Division by Zero] (Volume One), now has an official release date of January 15, 2008, and I’ve submitted it via TuneCore for online distribution through iTunes and a few other services. It will probably begin to show up in their catalogs sometime in March; I’ll post more about availability as I learn about it. In the meantime, you can read more about the project (and listen to medium-quality streaming versions of all of the tracks) here.

Also, special thanks to my spitting-image son for acting as a stand-in for my 1978 self in the cover photo taken (last summer) in one of my favorite places from that time, Two Harbors, Minnesota.

I’ve been familiar with the term portmanteau for a while, although it had never occurred to me until this moment that, with my own personal tendency to combine words (at least in my head; I usually have the wherewithal to keep the results to myself), this is in fact what I am creating. (I had been carelessly and, knowing I was misusing the word, with some hint of regret referring to these habitual creations as puns.)

Certainly I do not have Mr. Dodgson’s gift for them, but still, it’s interesting to consider the potential of such hybrid words.

For years, native English speakers have gotten a good chuckle out of the (increasingly rare) old chopsticks wrapper with poorly translated instructions. I, of course, am one of them.

But nothing about the chopsticks wrapper prepared me for the shockingly incomprehensible copy on this XBOX 360 headset package.

Credit where it’s due: I don’t own an XBOX 360, and I didn’t find this headset. It was posted on one of my favorite websites for hotheaded computer geeks such as myself, The Daily WTF. (I was glad to see that someone had also posted the Dell plastic bag safety warning hieroglyphics. I brought home one of these bags from work and have been meaning to scan it and make t-shirts. I suppose those images are copyrighted, but I wouldn’t want to own up to having created them!)

I found this on Digg, so it’s not like I’m on to something unique, but I got a good chuckle out of it. Apparently it’s 683 km from Here to There.

Also interesting to note that it’s much farther to Hell and Back. Or from Here to Eternity. Or even from Me to You.

Yeah, that last one’s a bit of a cheat; I didn’t realize ME was the country code for Montenegro. But it still works, even if you’re comparing Apples to Oranges.

OK, I’m done.