Jack of all Days

Lost in Translation: English is a rich and wonderful language - but sometimes it’s just not good enough. For example, have you ever searched around in vain for a word to describe someone who gets excited by eating garlic? Or wondered why there isn’t a nice pithy term for a person who is only attractive if they’re standing quite far away? Other languages do have such words. The extraordinary variety of international speech is captured in “Toujours Tingo,” a new book which draws on more than 300 languages exploring the areas where English fails us. Here are some examples:

• Kaelling - Danish: a woman who stands on her doorstep yelling obscenities at her kids.
• Okuri-OKAMI - Japanese: literally a “see-you-home-wolf”. A man who feigns thoughtfulness by offering to see a girl home only to try to molest her once he gets in the door.
• Jayus - Indonesian: someone who tells a joke so unfunny you can’t help laughing.
• Spesenritter - German: a person who shows off by paying the bill on the firm’s money, literally “an expense knight”.
• Kanjus Makkhicus - Hindi: a person so miserly that if a fly falls into his cup of tea, he’ll fish it out and suck it dry before throwing it away.
• Tartle - Scottish: to hesitate when you are introducing someone whose name you can’t quite remember.
• Prozvonit - Czech and Slovak: to call someone’s mobile from your own to leave your number in their memory without them picking it up.
• Hira Hira - Japanese: the feeling you get when you walk into a dark and decrepit old house in the middle of the night.
• Cafune - Brazilian Portuguese: the tender running of one’s fingers through the hair of one’s mate.
• Layogenic - Tagalog, Philippines: a person who is only good-looking from a distance.
• Gattara - Italian: a woman, often old and lonely, who devotes herself to stray cats. (This is what my family thinks I will end up being one day.)

America: Land of the Privileged: Despite its enormous wealth and highly advanced technology, the United States lags far behind other industrialized countries - and even some developing ones - in providing adequate health care to women during pregnancy and childbirth. The U.S. ranks 41st in a new analysis of maternal mortality rates in 171 countries released by a group of U.N. public health experts. The survey shows that even a developing country like South Korea is ahead of the United States. Based on 2005 estimates, the U.N. analysis suggests that one in 4,800 women in the United States carry a lifetime risk of death from pregnancy. By contrast, among the 10 top-ranked industrialized countries, fewer than one in 16,400 are facing a similar situation. The reason? According to experts, in many European countries and Japan in the industrialized world, women are guaranteed good-quality health and family planning services that minimize their lifetime risk. Many independent experts and sympathetic legislators hold the current U.S. public health policy responsible for its dismal record because some 47 million U.S. citizens have no access to health insurance, most of them African Americans and other minorities.

Violent Nature: It is not the cartoons that make your kids smack playmates or violently grab their toys but, rather, a lack of social skills, according to new research. “It’s a natural behavior and it’s surprising that the idea that children and adolescents learn aggression from the media is still relevant,” says Richard Tremblay, a professor of pediatrics, psychiatry and psychology at the University of Montreal, who has spent more than two decades tracking 35,000 Canadian children (from age five months through their 20s) in search of the roots of physical aggression. “Clearly youth were violent before television appeared.” Tremblay’s results have suggested that children on average reach a peak of violent behavior (biting, scratching, screaming, hitting…) around 18 months of age. The level of aggression begins to taper between the ages of two and five as they begin to learn other, more sophisticated ways of communicating their needs and wants.

Bad Sport: An East Rockaway, N.Y., soccer mom took a page out of TV’s “WWE SmackDown,” grabbing a metal folding chair and bashing her daughter’s coach in the face, according to police. The irate mother, who was seen using a key to scratch a vehicle she apparently thought belonged to the 68-year-old coach, was later busted at her home and charged with reckless endangerment. The mom was mad that the coach gave her bad directions to the game.

And you thought you had bad luck? For one Scottish couple, bad luck really does come in threes – particularly when it comes to mother nature. Gale-force winds flattened Brian and Pauline Reece’s garage on Tuesday and last week a strong earthquake caused cracks in their house. Disaster struck again yesterday afternoon when the couple went to the Invercargill City Council to see what they had to do about their garage. Upon returning to their car in Kelvin St about 1.40pm, they found it surrounded by firefighters and discovered their rear window had been smashed. Only minutes earlier, the wind had picked up the H from the H&J Smith sign on the side of the building above and blown it down on to their car.

What do you mean, he’s gay? Australian Paul Croft got a tattoo of Harry Potter wizard Albus Dumbledore on his back but is now being teased by pals after he (Dumbledore) was outed as gay. Croft spent a year having the Hogwarts headmaster etched into his skin as a surprise for his five kids. The huge $1200 tattoo shows Dumbledore holding a scroll bearing the names of his Harry Potter-mad children Charlotte, Deanna, Brandon, Tamzin and Paris. “It seemed like a good idea at the time,” he said. But the factory worker has been the butt of jokes ever since Harry Potter author JK Rowling revealed last week that Dumbledore was in love with a fellow male sorcerer. “It’s been terrible,” Croft said. I’ve always liked Dumbledore - just not in that way.”

Is this your dream job? A condom company is looking for 1,000 volunteers to test its products and report back on their findings. It opened the job competition Monday and will continue accepting applicants until Nov. 4. “Applicants will be asked a series of questions to make sure they are a good fit for this dream job,” the company said in a statement. Questions include how often do you use condoms? And why do you want to be a Durex condom tester? In an interview, Steve Mare, brand manager for Durex Consumer Products, conceded that it’s more of a contest or survey that will help the company gauge consumer satisfaction and preferences than an actual job offering. “There’s certainly an element of fun involved with the program and we don’t want to deny that,” he said from Norcross, Ga.

Why is San Diego on fire? “I would have guessed because it’s very dry and windy, but James Hartline has a less obvious answer,” writes a blogger at Pharyngula. Hartline said, They shook their fists at God and said, “’We don’t care what the Bible says, We want the California school children indoctrinated into homosexuality!’ And then Governor Schwarzenegger signed into law the heinous SB777 which bans the use of ‘mom’ and ‘dad’ in the textbooks and promotes homosexuality to all school children in California. And then the wildfires of Southern California engulfed the land like a raging judgment against the radicalized anti-Christian California rebels.” Doesn’t God have a baseball team to manage? It would be a better use of his time than these silly destructive temper tantrums, the blogger wrote.