26 January 2007

Hal's Friday Evening Blog Review #15 - Archaeology

Simple name for a straightforward blog... until you actually try to read it. The latest post on the ancient city of Petra in Jordan is fine but when you get to "Artificial Eye Unearthed in Iran", you'll be struggling with the syntax. Particular favourite of mine:

Two holes in the sides helped to the grasping he in place in the socle of the eye of the woman.

Sounds vaguely reminiscent of one of the hexagrams of the I Ching.

None of the many comments on this post said "this is a really bad use of auto-translate software" or anything like that, which either means the content is good enough that people don't care about the bad English, or that the blogger is posting a lot of comments to him/herself to make it look like the blog is widely read. I did follow a link on the comments to an appalling blog which is honestly so ludicrously fascist it's probably a piss-take (or a "troll" in web-jargon) called "liberal dyke hags suck". Example content (far from the worst thing on there):

I think women should have certain rights but voting and going to school are not to be those. Like you said if women get educated then they think they will be too good to be wife of men here [in Afghanistan] and that is not how it should be. Also they should not be clerics because the Quaran tells us so.


This guy really needs to lighten up with some crystal meth, stand in a bucket and get somebody to pass him the jump leads.

Anyway back to 'archaeology'. The blogger, Brno, has a couple of other finance-related blogs - Forex and Make Money. Both are regularly updated but almost impossible to read. Case in point, off the Forex blog:

he expectations for an increase of the tariff in this meeting had descolorado far early this week already, since several officials and Japanese means of the government indicated the government recently worried raising tariffs could prevent too much early the economic development. There was only one certain speculation that the bank could make an independent decision. The Yens were debilitated more far after it left the decision the tariff really as dissapointing as hoped.


By itself this would be just another nonsense blog were it not for the fact that some of the comments left seem to indicate that people are actually reading this stuff. Is anyone actually trying to trade in the market based on this garbled nonsense? God help 'em. It makes Boris & Co look like good sense.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

The poor grammar and syntax of this guy's posts is, for me, reminiscent of some of the poor bastards I've tried to provide with some sort of education during my career as a primary school teacher (e.g. "A Hebrew text... talks about a woman who used an artificial eye done of gold.")

Estuary English has a lot to answer for.

(Or perhaps that should read "...has a lot for which to answer.")

T.N.T. said...

If that's the case then it's amazing because a priori the syntax looked very like someone had put the thing through an auto-translate engine like BabelFish.

When I saw 'artificial eye' I thought they were talking about the company who put out all those art-house DVDs. For example the 1972 original version of Solaris is on Artificial Eye.

Martha said...

So you think your stinkin blog is so great!! This blog sucks big time!! I am suprised that anyone reads it at all!! You are an idiot loser!!! FUCK YOU!!!!

T.N.T. said...

That's precisely the kind of intelligent discussion we're trying to promote on this blog - cheers then!