strange radiation: the pool of radiance archive
Adventures with an unreliable narrator.
« the eye of arrrrrgh | Main | re-emergence »
Jan 31 05: shun-SHENG duh gao-WAHN.
Everybody knows about Firefly, right? Brilliant and predictably short-lived space western created by Joss Whedon, the man behind Buffy? If you don’t, you should run-do-not-walk and go get your hands on the DVDs. Funny, exciting, and inventive, it was a serious good time. And so it, like my beloved Farscape, met an untimely death so that its host network could broadcast reality series and other such tripe. Fie upon them all. Fie, I say! Fools!
Wait, where was I? Sorry. One of the nicest touches of Firefly’s world-building was that its mainline humanspace culture sprang from an Earth-that-was where Chinese traditions had achieved equal ubiquity with that of the West. People were casually bilingual. Bao were served in the galley, if you were lucky. Emergency klaxons warned of life-support failure in English and Chinese; commercial signage used either orthography or both; clothes fused elements of both traditions. Best of all, all on-camera insults were delivered in inventive and brightly colored Mandarin. The DVD commentaries sometimes clue you in on the more metaphorical bits as they go by. Most amusing.
Inevitably, some jing-tsai entity has produced a complete Firefly Chinese pinyinary. Every utterance, every episode. If you’re curious about how to call somebody a ‘stupid, inbred pile of meat’ in Mandarin, now you have somewhere to go. (It should help you while away the hours until the movie comes out in September. Oh boy oh boy!)
Thanks to Patrick Nielsen Hayden for the tip.