Tag Archives: lost in translation

Stomp: Off-Broadway Saudi restaurant version

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A barfblog.com subscriber sent this in from Saudi Arabia, (and I encourage anyone from our global network of over 75,000 to send in whatever).

bill-murray-lost-in-translationSomething may be lost in translation (that’s Bill Murray pre-dating my Japanese television experience, which was weirdly similar).

This video was taken in the municipality of Bisha, Saudi Arabia, showing a worker at a restaurant who stomps his feet on a bag of meat.

The worker tramples on the meat in this way “to soften a frozen joint of meat” as reported by Bisha Municipality on their Twitter account, and that is has closed the restaurant immediately.

Video below.

Universities can suck

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I loved my time at the University of Guelph and Kansas State University – to a point.

bill-murray-lost-in-translationAt KState, I met my wife, Amy, we have a daughter, and I was made full professor.

But I know, at both institutions, the people around me thought I was a freak, and when I moved to Brisbane to support Amy, the salary became attractive so I was unceremoniously fired.

KState now brags about its virtual campus, but they couldn’t handle me doing more work than others, electronically.

Gotta be there to meet and greet, because if you follow KState president Kirk Schulz’s blog, that’s all he does to bring in the bucks.

Amy and I both got this message in the past week:

“Your K-State eID will lose access as of (December 03, 2014) to your K-State email account. That resource is intended solely for use by K-State faculty, staff, students, and sponsored users. This action is being taken because K-State records indicate you are not a currently enrolled student or a current employee.  You will retain access to your eProfile, K-State Online, any student records in iSIS, and any personnel records in HRIS as long as you keep your eID active.”

Don’t expect a donation to the alumni fund. My e-mail is dpowell29@gmail.com. I’m in Japan this week (right, not exactly as shown) which could be a great opportunity to promote KState, but, narrow vision doesn’t go far, no matter how much it’s dressed up by PR flunkies.

 

Does moral education make food safer? China says yes; food is worse than twitter weiners

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Maybe I’m losing something in translation, but Xinhua reports that experts in China have called for strengthening moral education to ensure food safety following a string of scandals in recent months.

Zhao Chenggen, an expert at the School of Government at Peking University, said on Wednesday that to promote moral education is conducive to urging food producers to place a higher value on public health.

Under the influence of moral cultivation, food producers could enhance their subjective consciousness to resist ill-gotten gains through adding toxic materials into food, he said.

"Moral decline in the food industry is more terrible than that in social communications," said another expert, Xu Yaotong, a professor of political science at the National School of Administration.

Premier Wen Jiabao said, "A country without the improved quality of its people and the power of morality will never grow into a mighty and respected power.”

Wen said that advancing the moral and cultural construction would help safeguard normal production, life and social order, as well as to eradicate the stain of swindling, corruption and other illegal conduct.

Lost in translation; going public with food safety information – France edition

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Albert Amgar, blogmaster of France’s coolest food safety blog, wrote me after I posted about the 88 people sick with Salmonella from dry sausage in France.

What I had missed was that although the outbreak had been on-going for at least 10 weeks, the French Institute for Public Health Surveillance did not publicly report the outbreak until May 28, 2010, and used a Salmonella naming system that would mean nothing to most people (Salmonella 4,12 :i :-).

No company was named, no statement was released by anybody telling consumers to beware certain foodstuffs.

It was the Belgians who did that, through a press release entitled, La société Salaisons du Lignon adopte le principe de precaution et lance un plan de rappel sur un produit: Saucisse sèche droite La Pause Auvergnate, that identified the Lou Mountagnard brand of dried sausages.

The pdf press release file is linkable through Albert’s blog at http://amgar.blog.processalimentaire.com/?p=8937, where he asks, in my broken English summation, why do French citizens, 88 who are confirmed ill, have to learn details about contaminated product from a city in Belgium? (The image, below left,  is from Albert’s blog.