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When you know you’ve made it
. . . is when you get phone calls at work from pump-and-dump operators. The guy on the phone just now told me he was from Addison Capital Management’s New Delhi office. This outfit has called me a few times in the past, usually to pitch some wealth management deal (offshore accounts to shelter my vast wealth from tax authorities or something).
Today the deal was on a company called EM International, which is about to announce a contract with JC Penney to produce furniture, or something. “It’s trading at $4.00 now. I won’t tell you it will go up to $10.00, but I can say that it will be trading at $6.25 within three or four months,” goes the guy. This is a deal to show me just what ACM can do for me and make me a loyal client.
A quick bit of Googling for EM International + JC Penney turns up this message board discussion in which two people report the very same EMIE/JC Penney story. Long story short, maybe I should have tried to keep the guy on the phone and get more info on the outfit to pass on to the authorities, rather than say “mm hmm, maybe not” and hang up on him.
Anyway, the most important thing to take away from all this is: Vast wealth! I gots me some of it, and they knows about it, yes they does.
The oldest words in English
Link of the day: An interesting look at language-related stuff comes from the University of Reading, where researchers have used powerful computers to figure out which words in the English language have stuck around unchanged for the longest time and to predict which ones are likely to disappear in the future. The rundown is that “word types evolve in the following order (from slowest to fastest): numerals, pro-nouns, nouns, verbs, adjectives, prepositions and conjunctions.”
Scientists at the University of Reading have discovered that ‘I’, ‘we’, ‘who’ and the numbers ‘1′, ‘2′ and ‘3′ are amongst the oldest words, not only in English, but across all Indo-European languages. What’s more, words like ’squeeze’, ‘guts’, ’stick’, ‘throw’ and ‘dirty’ look like they are heading for history’s dustbin – along with a host of others. . . .
Looking to the future, the less frequently certain words are used, the more likely they are to be replaced. Other simple rules have been uncovered – numerals evolve the slowest, then nouns, then verbs, then adjectives. Conjunctions and prepositions such as ‘and’, ‘or’, ‘but’ , ‘on’, ‘over’ and ‘against’ evolve the fastest, some as much as 100 times faster than numerals.
(Side note: This press release is really poorly written. Par for the course for language researchers, huh?)
It would be interesting to see similar research done on Japanese. What little I remember of the Heian-era stuff I studied back in the day was very different from what gets spoken in the streets of Tokyo today, although I suppose the numbers have remained relatively constant, and using the same kanji over all those centuries has given the vocabulary an anchor of sorts to keep it more static.
(Via the Tomedes Blog.)
A child custody story to watch?
My company gets lots of unsolicited messages from people around the world looking to get something published. Today as I was cleaning out our catch-all address, erasing several hundred spam notes and forwarding or responding to the two or three messages that actually needed attention, I saw this press release from someone at Turkey’s Dogan News Agency. (The text is sic.)
JAPANESE MOTHER STRUGGLES TO HAVE DAUGHTER BACK
Mrs Michiko Deniz, a Japanese mother, struggled for days to get parental rights on her daughter from her Turkish partner in Turkey, but she has had to leave the country alone.
Mrs Deniz claims that Mr Deniz, who is still formally her husband, does not let her daughter, Kader, see her, and she has been seeking for help to take Kader to Japan with her. She has left the daughter behind for now, but she promises her daughter “to come and get her sooner or later”. Mrs Deniz is planning to try every legal ways including the European Court of Human Rights to have parental rights on Kader and take her to Japan.
A search for “Michiko Deniz” turns up numerous hits, but they all seem to be in Turkish so far.* This might be an interesting story to watch: if it gets picked up at all in Japan, expect to see any sympathetic coverage of Ms. Deniz get slammed as hypocritical in the light of foreign parents’ treatment when the tables are turned and the kid is with a Japanese parent. (See for instance this group and any number of stories like this one.) Do you suppose a trip home to Japan with mom would end with a happy return to dad’s house in Turkey soon afterward?
* EDIT: The second Google hit for her name is now this post. Fear the Google!
News roundup
In “Sport ‘bought access to Olympics’” the BBC looks into the possibility that keirin cycle racing organizers in Japan splashed a bit of money around to get the sport admitted to the Olympic lineup. Shocking, shocking to see a gambling industry involved in shady financial deals. I will have to confront my friend at the Bicycle Promotion Association of Japan with this development and see what he has to say.
In other news . . . Well, not all that much in the way of news to post here. There have been big earthquakes up north recently but I’ve managed to sleep through them all. Went to Hokkaido for the G8 summit and came back alive. Tokyo is hot hot hot now, making me want to go back to the Rusutsu hills. Sakura is tall and slender and energetic. She likes bananas, which makes this news story a troubling one to read. In September we’re going to take her back to California for her first overseas trip, first flight at all, and first time to use her two passports. Anyone in the Bay Area want to meet up around then?
This post brought to you by the letter D, the number 8, and the desire not to see this blog wither and die on the vine in the summer heat.
No smoking
Kin’en Style is a site that lets you search for smoke-free restaurants. There’s an English section up as well, although its list contains zero establishments, making it somewhat less useful than the Japanese version.
(Time for the obligatory plug for Enchanté, my in-laws’ restaurant in Yotsuya San-chome. Lunch hours are smoke-free there as well.)
(Via Asiajin.)
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