Crashing Best Buy

[sigma7]

The idea for this mission was submitted by a stranger via email. Agent Slavinsky wrote in to suggest I get either a large group of people in blue polo shirts and khakis to enter a Best Buy or a group in red polo shirts and khakis to enter a Target. Wearing clothing almost identical to the store's uniform, the agents would not claim to work at the store but would be friendly and helpful if anyone had a question.

Simply brilliant. I'm just glad it didn't end in tear gas. Also, from Edmonton (!):

The city gang unit seized a bunch of weapons - including a rocket launcher and a samurai sword - as part of an ongoing investigation.

Someone's been using cheat codes.

One more. I need to translate "I like my women like I like my coffee -- covered in bees!" into Korean.

Comments

[dvandom.livejournal.com]

I have to be careful not to wear a red shirt on days I plan to shop at Target, else I inevitably get treated as an employee by confused shoppers. Of course, if this happens in the toy section, I can usually be more helpful than an actual employee, but still....

[aardy.livejournal.com]

One more. I need to translate "I like my women like I like my coffee -- covered in bees!" into Korean.

Where's Vorpal Bunny when you need him? Slacker.

Babelfish to the rescue (with all the Engrish-like caveats that come with that):

나는 나의 여자를 나가 나의 커피를 꿀벌안에 덮어 좋아하는 동일한 방법 좋아한다

Oh, you wanted to know how to say it?

McCune-Reischauer to the rescue. This is close, but since I don't speak a word of Korean, I can't tell if it's close enough:

Na nŭn na ŭi yŏja rŭl na ga na ŭi k’ŏp’i rŭl kkulbŏl an e tŏpŏ choa hanŭn t’ongil han pangbŏp choa handa!

(Where "o" and "u" are pronounced similarly to the way they are in Italian, and ŏ and ŭ are close to the vowels in "pun" and "food", respectively.)

[sigma7.livejournal.com]

And the great thing is if I even managed to say that correctly to a fluent Korean speaker, they're just gonna think I made some horrible grammatical/translation error....

I should also work on "I would like a cup of coffee" as I can already say it in Chinese ("Wo xiang yao yi-bei caw-fei"-ish) and should really learn how to say it in every other language. Just in case. That and other helpful phrases like "Don't shoot," "I'm a doctor" and "I'm a Canadian."

I notice a nascent bent toward linguistics; are you becoming an alternaverse Doug Ramsey...? (Icon lurve, too.)

[aardy.livejournal.com]

I've always had a bit of an interest in languages (much more so in alphabets)--it's just happened to come up more often than usual recently. I have much more of a bent towards "finding information" and "helping information-seekers."

In this case, some knowledge of linguistics happens to a semi-required skill for my job--libraries don't only get English material, and since most library catalogs cannot yet handle Unicode, we catalogers have an array of language charts to turn darn near any non-Latin language one is likely to come across in a library or archive into something that can be displayed in the catalog and is pronouncable by public service staff. My department also has two shelves of various {language}-to-English dictionaries just for our use to assist with the process of knowing what the word "edition" or "copyright" is in those languages, as well as the ability to come up with a summary (for fiction) and a few key subject descriptors.

(And people wonder what sorts of things one could possibly need to learn in master's-level library school programs.)

Thankfully, we have a second cataloger who handles all of the foreign material at my library, one who's a native Chinese speaker and has picked up enough Korean to get the job done. (We get a fair amount of Polish, Russian, and Korean.) However, since each of us checks the work of the other, I still see a fair amount of non-English material any given week, but at least all the hard work has already been done on those...