Bad mental health … Collaborative online translation 21st of March, 2006 POST·MERIDIEM 01:21

I have the impression that Robbie Williams is ridiculously open in his lyrics; there is no reason to sing “the pause button’s broke on my video” unless you’ve actually been wanking so much that that happened, there is no credibility or coolness or admiration to be gained from the admission. Which means that this (from his last album) says he’s actually in a bad mental place:

You see the trouble with you
There’s no trouble with you
So when you say that you love me
That stops me loving you

Ah well, I’m sure the money and ridiculous numbers of people who like him, admire him, and the women who find him attractive outweigh that and mean his life’s on balance good.

I am really interested in whether the US Forces’ “open source translation” effort will have much success: http://​itre.​cis.​upenn.​edu/​~myl/​languagelog/​archives/​002941.​html I suspect the numbers are against them; very few people with good fluency in Arabic support the Iraq war enough to voluntarily help their efforts.

Word of the day: Қолин means “carpet” in Tajik.