Category Archives: Family

Japanese poop: a phrasebook

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ungo, yo!How many times have you been caught, tongue-tied and groping blindly in the darkest corners of your vocabulary for exactly the right word, only to have it scuttle away out of reach, leaving you with only the vaguest sense of its outline and the lingering shame of having failed?

We here at the ol’ raincoaster blog feel your pain. As a public service, from time to time we provide a roundup of obscure-yet-universally-applicable terms for our readers to file in their heads, ready to flash dazzlingly on just the right occasion.

This should be handy for those of you whose friends have recently given birth. Lord knows, they don’t talk about anything else. As the Inuit are said to have fifty words for snow, so the Japanese have coined a surprisingly robust number of terms for what we would simply call “poop”. #2. Doo-doo. Crap. Shit. Turds. Shizzola.

Here, from Japanprobe, is an in-depth dictionary of dung.

  1. unpi 「うんぴ」 : Diarrheal stool. Could be connected to overeating, having a cold, or stress. It is usually a yellowish-color and it has a very strong smell.
  2. unnyo 「うんにょ」 : Soft and tender poop, but not diarrehea. It comes out when you are feel some indigestion. Yellow-ish or light brown in color.
  3. unchi 「うんち」 : Nice poop. It comes out when you’ve been eating healthy balanced meals. It has a clean brown color and doesn’t smell very much.
  4. ungo 「うんご」 : Comes out when you’ve not been eating enough vegetables, and you’re probably constipated when you squeeze out an ungo. Ungo is dark black and really stinky.

So the next time your new-parent friends are yammering on about how your creamed corn looks adorably like Junior‘s last bowel movement, you can bring that conversation to a screeching, juddering halt while simultaneously flashing a glimpse of your own, more cosmopolitan worldview: Just leap to your feet and yell UNKO!

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le grand content

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le grand debate, le grand question, le grand video. Powerpoint solves the meaning of life, via Eurotrash-accented art.

I live for this shit.

A Film by Clemens Kogler together with Karo Szmit. Voice by Andre Tschinder.

Le Grand Content examines the omnipresent Powerpoint-culture in search for its philosophical potential. Intersections and diagrams are assembled to form a grand ‘association-chain-massacre’. which challenges itself to answer all questions of the universe and some more. Of course, it totally fails this assignment, but in its failure it still manages to produce some magical nuance and shades between the great topics death, cable tv, emotions and hamsters.

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Hermione the poisoner!

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Boogiedown Snape!Gadzooks! Mon Dieu! Zounds! And Various Other Vivid And Archaic Expressions Of Horror!

Mild-mannered Hogwarts student Hermione Granger is a poisoner!

Ah, we shoulda seen it coming! Don’t the neighbors always say, “He was the quiet type, kept to himself mostly” after the cops have gone and the news crews arrive at the crime site?

Yes, it appears that Hermione Granger, muggle-born Hogwarts honours student and heretofor shrinking violet has been quietly infecting much of the staff and student body with a wide and deadly range of bacillii, and it is up to the students at Bizzaro Hogwarts to stop her and cure the pallid, sweaty victims of her horrid crimes.

All except Umbridge. Who’d miss her, eh?

At Bizzaro World Hogwarts a lot of the faculty and students have become sick recently. Bizzaro World Hogwarts is a school for the muggles, people who don’t practice witchcraft. So, the science and medical team here at the school has come up with a website to describe the illnesses and treatment of our classmates. We suspect that there has been a serial saboteur who has been infecting people at the school. In the rash of illnesses there haven’t been any repeat cases of the same infectious agent. There is a certain muggle at our school, who has a great deal of knowledge of bacteria and viruses and shesi  always up to no good. Her name is Bizzaro Hermione Granger, there is a photo of her below, and she has now suddenly disappeared from our school. So, hopefully this website will lead to greater knowledge of her capabilities with these infective agents along with how to treat them. Ms. Granger must be caught.

Figure 1. Bizzaro Hermione Granger alongside a shocked Bizzaro Harry Potter.

Bizzaro Harry and Hermione

And what follows? Nothing less than scientific textbook boilerplate on diagnosing and treating various diseases. If your life revolves around the nexus where microbiology and children’s literature converge, you’ve just found your spiritual and virtual home.

Professor Snape has become ill caused by a bacterial infection. The culprit organism is Pseudomonas aeruginosa which belongs to the family of Pseudomonadaceae that inhabit soil and water (5). There are many disease states that this bacteria can give rise to such as endocarditis, gastrointestinal tract infections, and pneumonia just to name a few (5). In most cases and in the case of pneumonia, Paeruginosa enters the lungs after being inhaled into the airways. This bacterium is opportunistic, which means that it does not normally cause infections in healthy people. Rather, infections occur because patients are immunocompromised (4). The infections occur most likely due to a physical breakdown of a barrier such as the mucous membranes (4). According to CDC data collected 1990-1996, P. aeruginosa ranks second in terms of causing nosocomial pneumonia (5).

And so on. I can think of at least one adolescent Potterfan I’m passing this along to; surely I’m not the only one who’s honorary auntie to some science-starved kidlet! Poor Snape!

That's PROFESSOR Snape to you, bitch!

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pic o’ the day: Cthatch of the day!

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From Defrost Indoors of Bridlepath; well, where ELSE would you go for your Cthulhu versus Little Girl imagery? Got to be a horse blog every time.

Don’t ask questions.

I THOUGHT the ground felt a little slimy

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quotes o’ the day

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Let no man accuse me of being narrow. Check out this microroundup:

I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect has intended us to forgo their use.
Galileo

“No one suspects the butterfly.”
Bart Simpson