Someone watches over me

I caught up with various members of my family last night and was left the impression that I'd lucked out totally in my return trip. It was basically uneventful, the only real aggravations being (1) having my luggage searched at Friendship (no, it doesn't make me special; they were searching everyone's bags) and (2) a noisy kid in the row behind me. And both of these had upsides. The two men who went through my things were very polite and friendly and the brat behind us built solidarity in my row, which translated into some nice chat as I played tour advisor to two visiting Long Islanders. Compare this to the tribulations of my parents and siblings:

• Because of Internet troubles, bunj and e. left two hours later than they planned on Thursday, got caught in horrible traffic and rough weather near DC (the power went out at a filling station as they were tanking up), and got into NY near midnight. Yesterday, they drove 15 hours straight, arriving home just in time to get caught in the endless traffic jam that is Northern Indiana after a holiday weekend.
• My sister's three year-old caught either a flu bug or food poisoning while they were on the road and was throwing up for hours. (I have the story second hand, so I don't know details.)
• Dad's PVC valve conked out and he started burning oil; he spent the Fourth in Indianapolis while mechanics fixed his truck and just got in four p.m. yesterday.

How about the rest of you? Any tales of holiday travel horror to share?

One for the Aussies!

By far the best part of the vacation was the last 24 hours. I'm truly sorry e. and bunj couldn't be there. On Friday, we drove up the Peninsula to Assateague Island, one of the most beautiful places on earth (despite all the poison ivy) and frolicked on the beach. Afterwards, we went back to the motel, changed, and headed out to Side Street Seafood Market in Crisfield (on the Bay) for all-you-can-eat blue crab.

The restrooms had signs over them with large illustrations of crabs. One was labeled "SOOKS" and the other "JIMMYS". Which one do you think I went into?

Why Japanese Is Impossible: Example #30,649

Crape myrtles were in full bloom everywhere in Virginia. They had all the more impact on me since I never remember seeing them outside of a botanical garden before. I kept telling whoever would listen that every Japanese novel I've ever read mentions a crape myrtle at some point. I think someone asked me what the Japanese name is, but I don't know; I wasn't reading those novels in Japanese. Still, I decided to look it up in case it comes up again.

The word is sarusuberi, literally "monkey" (saru) "slide" (suberi, from suberu "glide, slip"). The conventional explanation is that the trunk is so slippery that not even a monkey can climb it. How is this written, though? With the usual characters for "monkey" (猿) and "slide" (滑り)? Oh, why? That would make sense! There's no poetry in that. Let's use the characters for "hundred", "sun", and "red"--百日紅. Read as Chinese[*], this would be "A hundred suns are red." Isn't that lovely? Isn't that clever? Isn't that totally obscure and confusing? Isn't that the way we want our language to be?

[*]This is, in fact, a proper way to write a Chinese name for the crape myrtle. 紫薇 is a vastly more common term, however.