Here’s a sign in the subway that entertains me a lot. The first time I saw it, I thought maybe it meant not to break glass. If you look at the two major objects in the lower left half, they look like a broken wine glass. However, on closer inspection, the objects are revealed to be a hammer, a pair of pliers, and some nuts. The caption basically reads, “Do not litter”. Who’s going to litter by throwing their tool chest down on the ground?

It might not be completely odd. In the East there is an old saying something to the effect of “Before discarding a tool that is no longer useful, it should be destroyed.” This might be derived from this saying:

玉石俱焚

(yu4 shi2 ju1 fen2)

It means something like “You destroy both jade and stone together”. Back in the old days, if the emperor had a cabinet of say 20 advisors and eighteen of them were disloyal and two were absolutely loyal, in order to preserve his power, the emperor would need to destroy and discard all of them, destroying both jade and stone.

Here’s the first is evidence of a pirated car I’ve seen (it’s probably not). Check out the new Honda Legend! There is some precedent for this actually. A legit car company (I forget which) sued another in China when they suspected that China was copying the car. The company won it’s case when it took the door from the Chinese copy and bolted it directly on to their own car and showed that it opened and shut without a hitch.

11/27/07

OK, I was wrong. My buddy Robert found this link which talks about how Acura markets the Legend in the US, not so in other countries. You never know in China though…

Sorry for my neglect of the blog lately. There are visitors from the US in town now and I’ve spent most every night entertaining and being entertained. But, I found some time to squeeze in some fun “Engrish”. This plaque is found in the elevator of our building. All of the quotes have errors but two are especially bad. One is unintelligible to the point of qualifying as solid Engrish comedy. I need to submit it to the Engrish board.

From top to bottom:

• Don’t use lift when fire happens.
• Don’t smoking in the department and prohibit swinging acutely.
  
• Don’t touch the safety panel during shutting doors.
• Children need to be accompanied with adult.
• Press the alert call button of <bell> for help in case of trouble

And the winner is…

• Carrying cargo by lift rust make the gravity evenly and adopt the effective package.

Top notch.