Posting just to post

• It's a pet peeve of mine that some people term lists of loosely or seemingly unrelated items like this one "random". One of the days, I want to assemble a truly random list of short entries, but I haven't decided what's the best mechanism to use.
• No Hungarian subway movies for me tonight: I'm underslept, cranky, underperforming at work, and I forgot my tummy meds.
• I've been meaning to post about the pretty fall colours, which are just now appearing in earnest, but I haven't yet found an angle of approach that intrigues me. In short, the sweetgums and many of the sugar maples are starting to peak, as are a subset of the honey locusts, and various plain jane trees (those whose leaves merely yellow or brown, like basswoods and poplars) are providing background. The saddest of all are the ashes, which look about as they would if they were losing foliage simply due to drought.
• When I first sent one of my new hires down to file books, I had trouble understanding why he ordered them all right-to-left when I must've said "left-to-right" at least three times. Turns out that, at a previous job, he learned to file on shelves boustrephedon so now he naturally follows a l-r row with a r-l one. He learn, even if it means having to spend all day in the basement!
• I probably have a mini-rant about national language policy coming up, but I want to see where a discussion I'm in about it goes first.
• I'm also currently in a discussion about the possibility of "reconciling" Buddhism with other, theistic religions. (I spastically went on about this a bit in one of cpratt's recent entries.) I have a real bug up my ass about people trying to shoehorn concepts unique to Buddhism--such as Nirvana or boddhisattvas--into a framework derived from Abrahamic religions. I see these "universalising" motivations as either chauvinistic ("See, everyone really worships my god, even if they use different names!") or trivialising ("Deep down, we're all really the same people with the same beliefs.")
• For another viewpoint on Lyric's Don Giovanni that largely supports my own but augments it with some fresh observations, see bunj's recent contribution in the comments to my entry.
• I found out over the weekend that Chinese (by which I mean SMC--"Standard Modern Chinese") has two different words for "future". One appeared in the title of the MCA's exhibit of recent Chinese art, another in the movie McDull: Prince de la Bun. I'm not sure what the distinction is, if any, and I haven't been able to ask my teacher because class was cancelled due to some dipwad from Genoa hopping the Atlantic 512 years ago.
• Speaking of McDull, I'm more baffled by the subtitle than ever. As far as I can tell, it reads "Pineapple Oil Prince". Is boloyau some dim sum order I've never heard of before?