Celebrating labour by goofing off

It's been a low-key weekend so far, just a few people over for grilling last night. The Chinese calligrapher & co. are due this afternoon for Kaffee und Kuchen which will give monshu a chance to show off some seals (and, one hopes, get a few stubborn ones translated) and me another chance to embarrass myself in Mandarin. I never wrote about my experiences last time since they were, if anything, more humiliating than my attempts to speak Dutch a few weeks earlier. Sitting next to the calligrapher's wife, I turned to her and asked "Ni3 yao4buyao4 ka1fei1?" so I could instruct the waiter to pour and she answered "Yao4!" It was my only fully-successful foreign-language communication of the day.

At the time, I could blame my comprehension problems on a noisy restaurant and sinus congestion. No such excuses this time, so I tried to prep by listening to Chinese Internet radio. Even with news stories I know ("Ka3te4li3na3" was, as you might expect, the top story--even beating out news of the one typhoon currently laying waste to Anhui and the other heading for Kyushu), I could only nab a few comprehensible phrases out of the incessant flow of syllables. I don't favour my chances.

Failure has a hundred fathers, too

So far, mollpeartree has the best take I've seen on the Katrina blame game. I'll echo what she quotes systems management as saying about the way catastrophes happen. Even with events like Chernobyl, most of the process of fucking up consists of people making what seem to be the best decisions given the information available at the time. It's only in retrospect, with full awareness of what the consequences will be, that they take on the appearance of utter moronity.