It seems there’s a little row going on over the McDonald’s McItaly burger mainly due to its endorsement from the Italian agriculture minister. The food critics are not particularly happy due to the affront to their national food traditions.

There’s a video here.

You know my thoughts? The whole world should be up in arms. McItaly? McItaly? McItaly. That is a rubbish name for a burger. Seriously. I would not be able to hold my head up with pride and order a chuffing McItaly.

Following on the heels of #1 comes the strangest job advert I think I’ve ever seen. Looks ok(ish) to start with…

[Name Deleted] Photography ltd. is offering full time holiday work. Half term, summer holidays and weekends. We are looking for career minded hard working people to join us&any age can apply&. but we do need you to drive to the venues. You will have to be confident and great with people. The right person will earn around £1000min p/m. We offer all the training you need to be relaxed and confident about the photo sessions. All equipement is supplied. Please have a look at our website and see if this is for you. We look forward to hearing from you and helping you in your new career with [Name Deleted] in 2010.

So you follow the link to the website and reach:

Um… so you can work for them as an assistant for four hours and you only have to pay £75.

Once you’ve done that, you can then work for them during holidays and weekends (which I think is what this job advert is suggesting) for only £495.

Level 3 seems to actually be a job, but might not be.

And yes, if you click “Click Here To Pay” on Level 4, it really will transfer you to PayPal with an invoice of £9,995 before you’ve actually had any contact with the company (Incidentally, I wonder what the PayPal charges are on a sum like that!)

Doesn’t look dodgy at all… no no no!

What do you get if you cross sub-zero temperatures with a burst water main?

Very very very localised snow…

Scene 1…

Scene 2 (90 degrees to the right of Scene 1)…

Fantastic stuff! We passed this on Saturday afternoon and had to turn back to check we’d actually seen what we thought we’d seen!

Time for another rant about Edexcel. Have I ranted about them here before, or just in my head?

Anyway… I’m currently trying to get the Japanese GCSE vocab into a usable state. I’ve found their core vocab lists – in two different formats and with different lists of words – not very useful. But what I’ve found now is the “Japanese Vocabulary Book” which separates words into categories such as “Out & About”, “Locations”, “Directions” and so on. As you can imagine, the overlap between these examples (and many other examples) is massive. I think I’ve seen the word for bread appear about five times so far (Foundation, Out & About, Restaurants, Food & Drink, Lifestyle). Not good for sorting unique, tagged entries.

Anyway… the latest section I reached made me chuckle…

Fashion/celebrities/religion- Foundation

WTF? Must be a misprint in the title. Let’s have a look at an excerpt of the list…

Easter イースター
famous 有名な
fashion りゅう行/ファッション
glove 手ぶくろ
God 神
handbag ハンドバック
hat ぼうし

Ok. Good. I wonder if Edexcel is actually staffed by aliens?

You see… now the problem is compounded.

Someone has re-ordered some card-mounted prints from me.

Because my card-mount supplier has messed up my re-order, I now have exactly the same issue on my client’s re-order.

Gah.

Oh well… there will be a solution – I’ll see if any suppliers have stocks of the old mount.

Is it me or is this absolute bobbins?

Let’s face it, they don’t know what terrorists are up to. The terrorists will wait until the threat level is moderate or low before attacking, that’ll make their lives easier.

Raising the level just allows them to make more laws or conduct more stop and searches without having to justify it so much.

Gah.

/me goes off for a lie down

I am not one to laugh at others’ misfortune. Unless their misfortune is

a) caused by stupidity or lack of research
b) painful
and
c) permanent

I’m not sure exactly what this particular chap wanted his tattoo to say, maybe “World Peace” or “Love For Ever” or maybe he was going for “Strength of Many Men”.

You can clearly see from the closeup that what he got was 馬鹿外人 (baka gaijin) which means “Stupid Foreigner”.

Japanese-literate Tattoo Artist WIN!

Cost cutting, I don’t mind too much if done carefully.
Prices going up? A bit of a pain, but everyone is trying to survive.
Reducing features on an established product – shaky ground here, especially if it isn’t made completely clear.

Prices going up, reducing features AND not making it clear that your “re-order” will be the “new” product. Very poor.

All that PLUS making out that it’s 100% the customer’s fault when they express their disappointment. Not good.

This is the sort of position where, I think, I would take a hit on the bottom line to keep the customer relationship. I’d say – “Look, I’m really sorry you were disappointed with your product, send it back and we’ll refund you”.

That would be preferable to offering a refund (but not for carriage paid – around £20 down the pan), and saying that they can produce the old product but there will be a setup charge (£25), minimum order of 200 units (that’s about a year’s worth) and 2-3 weeks lead time.

They could have just not changed it. Time for a new supplier, I think. Good job one of the biggest trade shows is coming up soon.

Isn’t language complicated?

I was thinking of teaching Japanese some time in the next couple of years. My ideas are good, but my knowledge is still a little behind where I could consider myself an ‘authority’ on the language. I could currently manage a 30 minute talk for the ‘getting old disgracefully’ club or cub-scouts.

I am, however, taking GCSE Japanese in the summer and downloaded the teachers’ lesson plan list from Edexcel with the theory that if I create a complete GCSE Japanese course, then by the end I will have covered everything I need for the exam. And I’ll have a complete GCSE Japanese course saved on my computer should I wish to use it. (My current Japanese teacher has gone very unstructured which is a pretty bad thing since we only have 38 hours of teaching left before the exam, and some people came in with zero knowledge).

But anyway that started me thinking… what about English. How much knowledge do you need to have of English to be considered an authority? That led on, by some strange mental wranglings to the word “shopping”. The subtleties therein are amazing. We all use English, and know how to use it, but could we explain it? Probably not in some cases.

Shopping

There are two activities we can talk about:

“shoppping” is an activity where you go to shops and buy things.
“the shopping” is an activity where you go to shops and buy things.

However, you “go shopping”, while you “do the shopping”. And what of the implications?

“shopping” is a fun activity done for leisure.
“the shopping” is a chore done for survival.

Of course, “the shopping” is also the word for the bags of stuff you brought into the house which needs to be put into cupboards.

My Japanese is just coming to the stage where these sort of nuances are starting to matter. It’s a whole new can of worms world.

Anyway, enough of that… just thought I’d throw in a fun word seen today:

常電導磁気浮上式鉄道 or joudendoujikifujoushikitetsudou which is a non-superconducting maglev train. Who’d'a thought it?

I know it’s old news, but isn’t the London 2012 logo just attrocious?

Fortunately, after widespread public criticism in 2007 including a 25,000 signature petition and other cries for it to be changed, a London 2012 spokesman allayed our fears, saying “The emblem is flexible and will evolve over the next five years.”

So… how’s it doing after three?

It’s lost the yellow and the shade of pink has changed slightly. Granted that’s an improvement, but I still think that pretty much anyone armed with a pack of crayola could do better.

Sorry… I was just looking at a 2012 site and reminded how completely awful the thing is!