For You’ve Not Attained Marriage Age

First, a song you likely have not heard before:

It’s “Single Girl,” by 60s pop star Dusty Rose Muddy Tulip Rocky Chrysanthemum Sandy Posey. And it’s great, if you have ever felt like your experience of bygone pop music was lacking an American Petula Clark. But that’s not the point. Here, below, watch the same song performed in Cantonese by former child star Fung Bo Bo, a.k.a. Bobo Fung, Feng Bao Bao, Fung Po Po, Petrina Fung and the Hong Kong Shirley Temple. Or at least it’s the same melody played in a more upbeat manner and paired with Cantonese words that, of course, have been translated hilariously into ka-chunk ka-chunk robot English.

The lyrics:

Active youth
Promising and sentimental
The active young ones
Full of gaiety and laughters
Dance gaily but not too much
And be sensible
For you’ve not attained marriage age
Enjoy the songs of the birds
The beautiful flowers on meadows
The fascinating country scenery

(Note: When the hell did we go to the country?)

Active young ones
Compete energetically
Play but not too much
And be sensible
For you’ve not attained marriage age

(Another note: The song may have continued, but the video cuts out, so we’ll never know. Never.)

For what it’s worth, Fung Bo Bo is giving it all she’s got. But I brief flashes of worry on her face make me wonder if she had a choice about the matter. In conclusion, does anyone else find it disturbing that the Wikipedia list of former child actors from China features only two people, one of whom is famously dead? How likely do we think it might be that some disaster befell a Chinese national child actors convention?

Straining the Definition of “Gift”

Do have mixed feelings about an acquaintance whose birthday is coming up? Do those feelings sometimes veer more toward the negative, now that you think about it? Do you wish you could indirectly communicate your feelings toward this person?

Well, I have the method for you.


Kristen sent me this photo — along with the message “Please, do not get me this gift” — of a set of sink strainers inexplicably marketed and marked as a “gift.” (I assume they meant “item” or “object.”) I honestly can’t think of a present that better tells its recipient “I don’t especially care for you.” I suppose in the literal sense of a gift being something that is given, the terminology is appropriate, but I can only imagine that this “gift” has been responsible for many broken friendships. Unless, of course, someone’s sink blockage problem is so bad that they must be given this by somebody else, in which case that person probably has more pressing concerns than their birthday presents.

The packaging says “Made in China.” Chinese readers, if you exist, can you tell me if this would be considered a thoughtful present in your country?

Fried Enema Revisited

In early January, I posted a photo that Sanam took during her trip to China. She had spotted a restaurant menu that listed fried enema. She was understandably perplexed.

Per the suggestion of word blogger Goofy, I sent a link to my post over to the people at Language Log, who were kind enough to repost it with an explanation. We can all be thankful that the food-that-should-not-be isn’t, in fact. Fried enema is merely sausage or a meat-free sausage-like substance made of wheat flour and fried, sometimes in hog casings. The enema appears as a result of the last two characters in the dish’s Chinese name —炸灌腸, written in the English alphabet as zhá guànchang and translating as “fried sausage” — being pronounced as guàncháng, which could be the noun “enema” and the verb “to give an enema.”

The commenters did not discuss why there would be such a similarity between the words for “sausage” and “enema,” but given that the verb form of guàncháng literally translates as “to irrigate the intestine,” I’m guessing that the similarity may not be coincidental. I don’t know much about Chinese, but there’s a certain visual resemblance between a sausage and an intestine. And the English word colon comes from the Greek kolon, which can mean both “large intestine” and “food” or “meat.”

which is it? WHICH IS IT?!

I know, I know — just when fried enema began to sound a little less gross, I went and spoiled sausage for everyone.

The Spinning Hat of Death

Your interesting bit of information from the day, as far as I’m concerned, regards the object referred to in the title of the film Master of the Flying Guillotine. As fantastic as it might sound that anyone successfully removed anyone else’s head with what is essentially a rather unsafe hat attached to a bit of chord, the flying guillotine was not invented by the makers of the film.


It may have actually existed, though how it would have worked remains even more unclear. Wikipedia speculates that the device could have actually killed using poison rather than with razor-sharp blades that lop of the heads their hat-like base has come to rest upon. I’m hoping this is not true, if only so the device can keep its amazingly cool name — so good, in fact, that it even beats out the Chinese name, which translates to “blood dripper.”



Though the flying guillotine is most famous for having appeared in the the 1975 Shaw Bros. film, it appears in others as well. Master of the Flying Guillotine — which is alternately known by the even better title The One-Armed Boxer vs. the Flying Guillotine is worth seeing even if you can’t stand martial arts movies. And it’s amazingly generative. Aside from homages in obvious works like Kill Bill, the film has resulted in some strange pop cultural connections. As point out by this blog — which charts various sources from which video game developer Capcom “borrowed” character designs for its Street Fighter series — the film’s Indian martial artist yogi would seem to be an obvious inspiration for the Street Fighter II character Dhalsim, also a Indian yogi prone to physical combat and able to extend his limbs to superhuman lengths.



Why anyone thinks yoga masters would can stretch their arms and legs to such lengths is beyond me. And the notion that they would do so for the purposes of hand-to-hand combat makes even less sense, but then again until today the idea of the flying guillotine seemed preposterous too.