How I Spent the Last Hour at Work.

Since I am a dork and enjoy playing the game of Telephone almost as much as I enjoy pondering the fallibility of language, I am madly in love with the Lost in Translation web app created by Carl Tashian, which translates a phrase back and forth between several different languages. "The resulting half-English, half-foreign, and totally non sequitur response bears almost no resemblance to the original...Something is lost and sometimes something is gained."

I decided to "babelize" some of my favorite quotes. "Here we are, trapped in the amber of the moment. There is no why," from Vonnegut becomes, "Here that interests them, hung before amber. Because it does not have, it is." I kind-of like it.

Andrew Bird sings, "In time you need to learn to love the ebb just like the flow." Lost in Translation replies, "In the time you must learn, because one sufficiently appreciates the later river like the river." It's like something a zen robot would say! I know what I am going to be for Halloween!

"You are not a beautiful and unique snowflake" from Fight Club becomes "They are not pretty and only tape." Hmm. True dat?

Marianne Williamson calls us to awaken with the words "It is our light, not our darkness, that most frightens us." Ten translations later we arrive at, "It is our light, not our density, of that scares to majority we." Actually, I think it is the presidency of George W. Bush that scares to majority we.

Joseph Campbell tells it like it is when he writes, "I think that what we're really seeking is an experience of being alive, so that our life experiences on the purely physical plane will have resonances within our innermost being and reality, so that we actually feel the rapture of being alive in our bodies." This babelizes into "Task that, observes the interior in true, a experience of being the alive creature who our experiences of the duration in the only physical surface that resonances in ours to being the greatest piece of the secret and the truth, since then that really we create the enthusiasm, to be alive in our bodies." Wait, where can I get the greatest piece of the secret and the truth?

Maybe these are too complex. Let's keep is simple. Let's try the classic "There is no spoon." End result? "It has spoon" Well, there is only one thing to say to that. Whoa.