Yo dawg.

Again, I’m behind on the times. This meme is a couple years old.

I wonder if you actually have to be sick to get those free antibiotics.

A common theme on Engrish sites (such as engrish.com or engrishfunny.com) is a food establishment with the sign “Fuck the vegetables”, or the like. I’ve seen it enough times so it’s not funny anymore, but finally had to research why “干” was so commonly mistranslated.

(Example)

The Language Log page assauged my curiosity:

The problem here is that the word “gan” means both “to dry” and “to do,” and the latter meaning has come to mean “to fuck.” Unfortunately, the recent proliferation of Colloquial English dictionaries in China means people choose the vulgar translation way too often, on the grounds that it’s colloquial.

Just some stuff from around town. Thanks to Annie on the first one; I’d completely missed it before she pointed it out.

Thanks to Allen for this week’s submission!

As opposed to the non-metric United States, where 70 in 1000 represents 4.5%.

Found in: Swine flu worse in Mexico than US, but why?

It’s a bit hard to read; here’s what it says:

The Gift of Nature

Haioreum understands our housewives’ concerns for their families.
Haioreum products contain 100% natural resources from the nature and
it is the best solution for you and your family’s health and wellness.

Stealing borrowing from The Daily WTF.

Monday Fighter! was originally designed to help you briefly forget that it’s the beginning of a long work week. At first, it consisted of non-sensical fortune cookies, eventually branching out to examples of poor English from companies that should know better.

For today’s edition, we have two things to keep you potentially occupied:

1. March Madness

This week begins “March Madness”, the annual 65-team college men’s basketball tournament. (There is women’s basketball as well, but not so many people care about that.)

I’ve started a Liquid Egg Product group where you can create brackets and you can lord your superior bracketology over your fellow readers.

What do I get for winning?
Nothing. No cash. No prizes. Just a short post commemorating your victory. And glory and honor among the readership of LEP.

Who won last year?
Tom of The Everyday Christian was last year’s victor. A big Tennessee fan, he will probably not get to see his team make the Sweet 16 this year. Winning the LEP group back-to-back would be some small consolation, I’m sure.

ESPN lets you make 10 entries. Will all of them count?
I suppose, if you really want to put that much effort into it. I toyed with a couple options, like just accepting the first entry or requesting a “gentlemen’s agreement” of no more than 3. But that’s not fun and it’s more work to keep track of things.

What happened to Egg Madness?
Everyone will get tired of looking at brackets by the time March Madness is over. Egg Madness will probably show up in a few months. We still have to work out some things on it.

2. SimpleWar

SimpleWar is a simple wargame still in progress; occasionally, I’ll spend a half hour or so on it. The primary draw is that it just uses a console window (no graphics or sound) so if your boss glances over at your screen, he won’t think you’re playing a game. Notice that I did not list “amazingly fun” or “strategically rich” as features.

I don’t exactly like the gameflow. But it’s better than it was at first, when you could always beat the computer in the first 3 turns. Let me know what you think.

SimpleWar.zip

Executable and help file included (the in-game help is insufficient). Windows only.

The in-game help is bad, so there’s a help file as well.