I found an Android phone on the sidewalk today. It wasn’t password-protected so I figured it would be easy to find the owner by calling some of his/her/zir/their contacts. This proved more challenging than expected because the entire interface was in Korean. I returned the last five phone calls and nobody answered. Digging into the text messages, however, I found one that contained a “Happy Mother’s Day” meme. I called the associated number and reached the phone owner’s daughter.
Having completed a crash course in Korean for Android users, I consider my Asian American, Native Hawaiian, and Pacific Islander Heritage Month off to a good start.
What did the rest of you do for moms? (Keep in mind that, according to one of America’s leading intellectuals, depicted below along with the person who helped prepare the family home for Kwanzaa every December 25, “mom” can be interpreted as “mothers, stepmoms, grandmothers, godmothers, aunties, and all the women in our lives who love, raise, and guide us.” A blind person’s Labrador retriever would be included, I think, since the Canine-American “guides us”.)
What’s a good gift for a mom? How about this translation of some of the works of Confucius, famous for telling us that we need to show filial piety? I’m not sure why it makes sense to pay $35,000 for a stupid white person’s translation of a smart Chinese person’s teachings. Who cares if Joshua Marshman was the first to do a translation back in 1809? Is there any reason to believe that it is better than a modern translation? The photos below are from Raptis, a shop in Palm Beach, Florida.
Here’s another book from the same store, a copy of Ulysses for $300,000. The price might sound unreasonable until you reflect that it would probably take the rest of anyone’s life to get through the tedious work.
$300,000 = 3 bitcoins. If one rare bitcoin costs $100,000 then one rare book could cost $300,000
I’m not sure that South Florida is the best place to store a $300,000 book. It puts rather high stakes on both air conditioner maintenance and DeSantis being able to get the power back on 24 hours after a storm. That book may be a lame duck…
Steve: The last major hurricane to hit Palm Beach was in 1949. If the paper survived for more than 100 years without any A/C, I think it could survive seven additional days without A/C. It seems as though 7 days is about the longest the worst-hit parts of Florida has been without power after recent hurricanes.