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The HP Lovecraft Historical Society seems to have missed this one, so I’ve filled it in for them.

Great Cthulhu’s Coming to Town (lyrics)

You better watch out
You better keep an eye
Better not doubt
I’m telling you why
Great Cthulhu’s coming to town
Great Cthulhu’s is coming to town
Great Cthulhu’s coming to town

He’s making no list
I’ve checked this out twice;
Gonna find out Who’s tasty and nice
Great Cthulhu’s coming to town
Great Cthulhu’s coming to town
Great Cthulhu’s coming to town

He sees you in your safe place
He knows if you’re alive
He doesn’t care if you’ve been bad or good
Just to stay sane you must strive!
O! You better watch out
You better keep an eye
Better not doubt
I’m telling you why
Great Cthulhu’s coming to town
Great Cthulhu’s coming to town
Great Cthulhu’s coming to town

Great Cthulhu’s Coming to Town (Lyrics) by Andrew Alexander Adams is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
Based on a work at http://blog.a-cubed.info/?p=637.

Japanese has a lot of homophones. This is at least partly due to their importing of Chinese characters and their pronunciation. Japanese has a much more limited set of phonemes than Chinese and so symbols which have different sounds in Chinese get imported into the same sound in Japanese. These collisions or near collisions make Japanese a great language for puns, as are Chinese and English for both related and different reasons. My flashcard system Anki is set to give me 15 new cards a day from (currently) the JLPT 1 set of vocabulary, which some kind other user have entered (I alter them to my needs and preferences as they come up). Today, the word 幹部 pronounced “kanbu” meaning executive, senior manager or officer came up. I often double-check words for extra meanings (and particularly for use as adjectives – many Japanese nouns can be used as adjectives with the particle な or the adjectival phrase 的な added). The electronic dictionary I use does lookup by phonetic entry (using roman letters though it has a kana entry option as well, though most Japanese people seem to use the roman letters, too). The first entry for “kanbu” is not the word I was looking for, but the homophone 患部 meaning “diseased part”. Great fun for puns, methinks.

Apologies if the Japanese characters don’t get transferred to LJ properly.

The Geography of Prejudice, maps of the world according to cultural or other sterotypical viewpoints. Absolutely brilliant!

I’ve been meaning to post this quick one for a while. $WIFE was reading a biography of Agatha Christie last year and found one comment on Christie’s habits a bit odd. The translator had reported that her favourite drink was half-cream half-milk. $WIFE thought this sounded incredibly rich. Half’n”half may be fine as a whitener in coffee but it would be a bit rich. After thinking about it for a while, I realised that the translator must have mis-translated “half-cream milk” (an older term I remember from my childhood for what’s now in the UK called semi-skimmed milk). The translation was fairly recent, though I’m not sure when the original was written, so this may well be a case of an earlier term confusing the translator who know the usual current terms of whole, semi-skimmed and skimmed instead of the old “full cream”, “half cream” and “no cream” terms.

A Cthulhu Knit Cap.

In Japanese shibaraku (しばらく) means “a short while”. $WIFE just spotted and re-tweeted a Japanese message defining (a-la Uxbridge English Dictionary) the word mubaraku (むばらく — the Japanese pronunciation of Mubarak’s name). It is defined as “about thirty years”.

Just had a phone call from a BT (British Telecom for my furrin readers) which was cut off about ten seconds into the call. Rather ironic that the UK’s biggest telecoms company can’t run their own outgoing call centres properly.

A colleague sent a link to a Japan Today article, which seemed of interest, so I followed it up. The article was indeed interesting, but one of the side-bar adverts was amusingly bizarre. It’s an “Ad by Google” and looks something like this (best I can do in WordPress to duplicate the formatting).

Hot Japan Girl
Thinking of buying?
Compare 100s
of retailers’ prices at
Shopping.com
uk.shopping.com

Yes, Minister has always been tragically true to the reality of UK government. Yet another example of how close to the reality was mentioned today on BBC News 24. In a discussion about the impact of the comprehensive spending review on DEFRA, it was mentioned that “all departments are having to find a 5% administrative saving”. There was an episode of Yes, Minister in which that was the exact source (even the same number) of a battle between the Minister and Humphrey.

I was reading my weekly copy of the THES on Sunday and spotted an advert which I mis-read on an initial scan. It was for a lecturer in interior design, but I first read it as “inferior design”.