Out 'n About Dept.

I spent some time with my folks and my aunt in Jersey yesterday. Time well spent. All smiles, with some fun conversation over lunch about the way languages borrow words from each other.

Most of us probably think about the old line where English follows other languages down dark alleys and mugs them, but the reverse is of course true. Japanese has tons of borrowings from English, but also German (for scientific and medical terms), Portuguese (the word for "Englishman" or "England" is the Portuguese word!), and Dutch. Turkish, as it turns out, is the same way: their word for "clown" — the European painted-face variety — is a variant on the Italian word Pagliacci.

Since my aunt doesn't speak much English, my parents had to translate both ways. Not always easy, although I did manage to get across the plot of Götz Spielmann's Revanche (excellent movie, go see it) without stumbling too badly. Apparently whenever she and Mom go see something together in the theater here, they have to sit somewhere secluded and Mom has to translate for her on the fly.

Dropped through Book-Off on the way back home. Bad news: They're closing the NYC store. Good news: They're re-opening it in a larger location a few blocks uptown. Since a ton of stuff was on sale (they're trying to clear inventory before the move), I ended up with a few really interesting things dirt cheap. Apparently Japanese novelizations exist for many films that normally never have them. To wit: Wong Kar-Wai's In the Mood for Love (rather ironic since the movie was inspired loosely by a short story, Liu Yu-Chang's "Intersection") and the Korean megablockbuster Shiri (!). I've collected movie tie-ins ever since I was a kid, and this just seems like the next logical extension to that hobby. (I'd earlier found a tie-in version of Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance, the absolute last movie I'd ever expect to find a tie-in novelization of, Japanese or otherwise.