The Mood of a Nation (as seen from afar)

As the back of this jacket makes clear, happy day are here again! For those of you residing in Enjoy Time, why not toast your winners with some Ohana sake?

Of course, every election has its downside. To be gracious, let's not forget those whose candidates and causes didn't win. If they are particularly disgruntled, their mood is perhaps reflected by the Malaysian sign below.

For the following five reasons, all signs originate from Engrish.com.

The Current Spate of Cuteness: It Must End!

The forces of cuteness threaten to overwhelm me. First, I see that the Cute Overload calendars are sold out. Drat! If you're not familiar with it, this is a daily calendar born from the Cute Overload website.

If Cute Overload ever joins forces with StuffOnMyCat.com, there will be heaven to pay. But while I admit to enjoying this neotany, I'm not its ideal demographic. According to a piece in the New York Times, the deepest diggers of all things cute are women between 18 and 34. Web expert (and man) Henry Copeland says, "For these women, recently graduated from college and sitting in grim corporate America, Cute puts them in touch with their nonwork selves."

Okey-dokey, though I've always feared meeting my nonwork self in a dark alley.

Thankfully, there is a mildly snarky site that has spun off from the intentionally tortured syntactical cuteness of I Can Has Cheezburger? It is EngrishFunny.com, which specializes in "Engrish Pictures and other Funny Engrish Mistakes in English from around the world."

This is an ongoing riff on the idea of books like Chinglish (put out by my publisher, Gibbs Smith). I gave a copy of the book to a friend who had just returned from teaching in China for the last two years. He made polite amused noises. Maybe I should have gotten him a Cute Overload calendar instead? (Dang it, are they STILL sold out?)