Can you translate the next 300 words into Hindi, or Korean?; if so, please contact me and there will be rejoicing.

2002 Q1 & Q2
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August 31st; Still sickened by Thursday night's vicious rudeness. Fresh-looking Portuguese-language web diarist aeroplanoeditora who comments on Martin Amis, Sylvia Plath, and seems to read lots of London papers - noted by fellow Brasilian Cora. Wish I could read the Rio press.
Meanwhile, here are some new suitably low-key sound links, also under 'sounds' on the menu bar.

August 30th; Very weary today. Several people are testing my patience and reasonableness. Here, via the ever-alert Sargasso, is a handy page summing up lots of info on the forthcoming {?} attack on Iraq.
August 29th; The mermaid sweetly recommends some books about learning Portuguese. The richly-stocked compendium hairy eyeball points out an Arabic-alphabet keyboard online at a Farsi dictionary. Isam, does it work on your screen?

August 28th; Quiet, enigmatic day. A minor epiphany, with gratitude.
August 27th; Does anyone know if an already dead body really doesn't bleed when stabbed? It would be amusing if Robert Altman's beautifully acidic country-house murder comedy Gosford Park had fallen down on such a basic piece of detective-story research. When I slice into pieces of chicken or turkey, even after a couple of days in my fridge, they bleed. Perhaps something has changed since 1932.

August 26th; Rob brings encouragement as ever, plus a couple of wonderfully handy suggestions. Terri tells me bizarre stories of (believe it or not) a couple of bogus interpreters who once worked at the EU - literally people who claim money for translating out of languages they can't speak by taking everything on relay off one language they can speak. Tales of astonishing nerve, in both senses...
August 25th; Woke at 9am on Sunday morning out of an oddly vivid dream in which a talented young surgeon is slowly being transformed into a giant newt. I was none of the characters. One evening, the surgeon and his wife invite home the lab assistant or male nurse who is covertly trying to promote the newtification of our hero, and in a tense, nauseating, yet also moving scene of my dream, the surgeon asked the junior orderly at the dinner table to strip to the waist, which he reluctantly did, revealing that his own glutinous white body has already been hideously smoothed and distorted by the sinister process which is much more developed, with him already half-salamanderised.

August 24th; Streets fill with thousands of gyrating, scantily-clad pretty girls thronging over slow-moving flatbed trucks throbbing with techno music and various inflatable objects. Fairly good day.
August 23rd; Perhaps the high point of yesterday with Jacob was when, waving a vegetable at me in his kitchen, he told me in one breath that the NSA were "knuckleheads" and that "they've developed a faster-than-light spacecraft". So the NSA can travel backwards in time? I asked (a tad sceptically, I must confess), cautiously citing Go:del's formal proof that Einstein's general relativity allows backwards time travel if you can go sufficiently close to, never mind faster than, the speed of light. Jake brushed Go:del aside with magnificent lack of embarrassment. This is the kind of thing that I'm now realising friends find both irritating and enjoyable about conversations with me. At least one superb idea emerged from the day which I am going to cling to and make sure we follow through.

August 22nd; An afternoon of tenacious tinkering by Jake lets him capture still pictures of Briefcase Boy as .jpgs for me off the security video (using Powerpoint in the end) on his laptop on the patio, capped by him cooking a wonderful vegetarian dinner for Lucia and I.
August 21st; This vocab page looks very handy indeed, especially if I put it together with this translation page over here.

August 20th; Saw 'Wasabi', a French-cop-in-Tokyo film not actually directed, but written or somethinged, by Luc Besson. Not very good. Veers between slack self-parody and slavish imitation of the silliest Hollywood cop movies, but without the sincere sheen of self-delusion that protects American movies from harmful thought. Punches and bullets pack enough kinetic energy to project people backwards through the air, and playing it as ironic comedy just looks weak. Everyone in Tokyo speaks French (they wish), all clearly because "if the Americans can get away with it....". And goodness me, don't youngsters have amazing gadgets these days? Yawn.
August 19th; Spent the afternoon with Tanya and her hospitable Ukrainian/Russian friends on grassy slopes dotted with sunbathers around the edge of a large-pond-stroke-gravel-pit in northern Buda that Hungarians call 'Omsk Lake', amusingly for her, because she comes from Omsk. As we all know, Omsk is a tyre-manufacturing hub in Western Siberia.
In the morning, Steve had kindly offered to extract the young rascal's photograph from the security video. Only with phone numbers he gave me was I able to start reconstructing my contacts list - tracing my way back to Russian-teacher Tanya's number for example by the afternoon.

August 18th; Strolled with Steve through hot, sunny streets down to the bridge to see how the swollen Danube has flooded the tracks of the no. 2 tramline. The overhead cables were about two feet above the water.
The handsomely orange fabulousness looks like an excellent language-resources round-up list, as well as making me feel I've been refreshingly tangoed.
August 17th; The crisply-written languagehat oddly has more items on its menu bar when I view it on an Apple Mac, than it does when I view languagehat's thought-provoking page on an IBM machine. On the Apple my own site sprouts a separate column (not row?) for each link just to the right of this weblog. Something basic I don't get about html?
~?
The police were quite friendly the first time I went to see them, but got rather alarmed when I returned tonight with the security video. Worried that Akos and the Hungarian constitution would spank my bottom unless I obediently took the video straight to the forces of law and order, I did just that. Fear of work lit up their eyes as they saw I hadn't given up, the way the police in every country wish we tedious victims would just go away and leave them in peace. They said there's a special office I must visit to hand over the open-and-shut arrest evidence. Mind you, so far the Hungarian police are proving much politer about doing nothing than the British police. Police in Britain can get very angry if you tentatively ask them more than once how the investigation is progressing, and may visit you in your bedroom to tell you to stop harrassing them about the property stolen from you. At least, I doubt if British police attitudes to victims who irritate them have changed too much since Cambridge in 1986.

August 16th; I now have a copy of the security video showing my briefcase being nicked. Customer service is not really Hungary's forte, at least not at the Oktogon Internet cafe. Akos was a bit cheeky, but at least did something. Marton's self-pitying apathy was less forgiveable. "Why me? Why does someone get robbed while I'm on duty? Why is my life so unfair?" was his only visible emotion. Life is hard, Marton. These things happen. People deliberately get robbed so that they can selfishly create extra work for Marton.
I'm actually quite curious how the friendly Korean 24-hour Internet cafe went out of business thirty yards away when they charged exactly the same price, with better machines, far more space, and ten times better customer attitude. Businesses don't always compete the way economics textbooks say they should. I reckon the nice Koreans were pushed out somehow.
August 15th; Since my brown leather briefcase was stolen from an Internet cafe early this morning, I'm very upset. I've lost all my phone numbers and addresses, so please, anyone who knows me and reads this, e-mail me at contact@otherlanguages.org.
Obviously I would like my briefcase back with all its contents - two green files with photocopies of Russian and Arabic text, a green address book, a blue address book, two spiral-bound blue notebooks, and six 3.5" floppy discs - none of which are of any use to anyone but me. I would also, having watched a security video at the cafe, very much like to talk to a 17 or 18-year-old slightly-built young male of about 5'10" [177cm] height with close-cropped black hair, alert, slim, rodent-like face, slightly pointed ears, baggy bomber jacket and a silver-coloured mobile phone hanging from a long leather neckcord almost down to his waist.
Please pass this link on to any European webcam or crimewatch websites you know of, or to any friends who might know where to send this link. Thanks very much to anyone who can help.

August 14th; Went with Terri to watch the tango couples. Not sure what to make of the confident young Babett.
Here's an article from the Spectator a couple of weeks back, describing the tiresome time a beautiful young Canadian says she had dating English men. She writes: "Two months after Nigel’s chilly dinner party, I was out with a banker, another Etonian, on what was probably our fourth date. During the taxi-ride home, we were both quite drunk and I turned and asked him point-blank if he was ever going to kiss me. ‘I thought you were seeing Nigel,’ he said. ‘I didn’t think it appropriate.’ " Just a quick question to male readers. Wouldn't you appreciate that banker as a friend? I immediately thought more of him. But it gets better. Poor 'Nigel' [aka Charles Gowlland, 8th letter down, 2nd under 'woolly pears'] who Leah jeered at first before getting cross about his friend's ungallant lack of disloyalty, now has his say. If she could learn some of his light touch {" ....In the first, I was merely attempting to comfort a new arrival to London, homesick for the social wastes of Toronto, by taking her to see a four-hour Inuit art-house film. It did at least have subtitles.... "} it might improve her writing a bit.
August 13th; This has puzzled me ever since I first saw a bilingual dictionary. Why are the words all the same size? There are all these people sitting round publishing language-learners' dictionaries, and I've never seen one for any language where the commonest words are in a larger typeface, the rarest printed small, and the others in a middle-size print. In fact, a step down, I've never even seen a language textbook with a couple of pages given to lists of words by frequency - the commonest 500 Arabic words, the commonest 200 Arabic verbs and so on. There must be some books like this now, but why not in the 1970s, 1960s, 1950s? I know frequency lists are disputed, but a list of 600-commonest whatever would include all the differing lists of 400-commonest. And that's not why it took so long to happen, is it? It's because no idea is too obvious to never occur to most people, certainly most publishers. I'm wondering right now about stripping the prepositions out of the English commonest words list and putting the rest through an online translation interface. Sounds like a gruelling 45 minutes' work. Obviously beyond anyone in publishing. Perhaps these people will help: {1 2 3 4 5}

August 12th; Today someone came to this site after putting russian+girls+in+swimsuits into Google. I do hope they weren't too disappointed.
August 11th; Where is the translation I did for Gyorgyi on Saturday? So I have do it again. Lovely. At Rob's suggestion, he and Ryan & I saw the film 'Storytelling' by Todd Solondz; see how not to run a creative-writing class. Some of the prettiest opening movie credits I've seen for years.

August 10th; Very nice lunch with Richard and Melinda. When did I suggest an article to The Register about machine-searchable legal-advice databases to help bring the price of lawyers down towards the price of hand-loom weavers? Only last night? Seems a long time ago.
August 9th; Amazing. For a good six or seven days it's been cloudy, even raining for a couple of hours each day: almost like Manchester all year round, but quite a blip for a dry, hot Budapest summer. The girls with the long tanned legs and the body jewellery are looking pretty cross.

August 8th; Rob sent me this: 2 new book reviews about disappearing languages. No-one yet seems to expect, like me, the privacy industry to catch on to the value of languages down to their last hundred or so speakers. For an extra layer of encryption, of course, the fewer speakers the better: a corporation hiring five people from a language down to its last fifty speakers would know from gossip as soon as an outsider tried to learn the language. Big firms, suspicious of numerical encryption keys national security agencies demand extra copies of, don't yet realise an extra bit of linguistic encryption is just what they need. What will be nice is, when it does happen, it'll save exactly the languages most in danger first - the ones with just a handful of speakers left alive.
August 7th; Right, that's it. Nothing else for it - I'm going to have to use my occult powers again. Of course, only with the greatest reluctance, you understand. Bearing a heavy heart I turn one more time etc etc.

August 6th; Two interesting pages - the first Finnish web diary I've come across (I don't read a word of F, sorry), also archived here for those lucky Swedish readers who are bilingual, and a very thoughtful diary crammed with family snaps and wide-ranging American politics links. While the blog that keeps changing its name, naughty thing, lists a story by Bruce Sterling where he artfully punctuates the 300 commonest words in English left (I assume) in their order of frequency, to try to make it into a story. Almost manages it.
August 5th; Rather a pity I couldn't convince my investor friend to buy those Dow Jones and FTSE put options I was talking to him about last summer. I've been telling everyone for ages it's easier to make money on the way down than on the way up, and now the big drop went and happened. We both could have made a lot of money. Oh, never mind....

August 4th; The colour-shifting Sargasso points to a handy [and rather handsome] Dutch page - nerdcult - where you can find links to the dancing Steve Ballmer video, the fat man smashing his office computer, those pictures of Bert being evil, and so on, all part of Ervin van der Zande's site. A page in Kazakh for my site may be on its way, thanks to more generous help from Miklos and Ancsa. Yes!
August 3rd; Kindly Miklos allows me to use his computer this afternoon, and we discover that Axelero 'provides' a very poor service. What a surprise, Matav owns Axelero. Notice the picture of the phone receiver off the hook on Matav's website? Obviously someone else just died waiting for them to reduce their prices below thieving level. Miklos is not amused when I try to cheer him up by renaming his ISP 'Decelero'. Ho ho, eh?
And I ate some of that Mediterranean powdery stuff.... oh yes, halva.

August 2nd; Some days the African trip to Ghana when I was 9 comes back vividly. That copy of Milly-Molly-Mandy translated into Fante (Akan) swims back into view when I feel this warmth. Right now warm enough to make my forearms shine with moisture after some unexpected exertion such as, oh you know, opening a door and going through it. The wry Swedish in 1000 difficult lessons lists the cheery greengabbro, who then shows the way to the remarkable Which Religion is Right for My Complexion? test. It suggested I choose to be a Shaker or a Quaker, and I was brought up, however unsuccessfully, as a Quaker. How did it know?
August 1st; I couldn't resist this site's graphical charm and poise: the writer is a political commentator and film reviewer. Look out for the website's interleaved wallpaper/endpaper/waistcoat-lining image to keep you all cosy and snug while another page loads. Sent me by David.

July 31st; A no-nonsense, tropically-hued site about the languages of East Timor, which include Tetum and Portuguese, both preferred, as usual, to the language of the most recent imperial rulers, Indonesian - which usually means Javanese, right?
July 30th; Weather still very warm. Much respect going out to the beautifully tidy linguistics desk of Billy, the kind words of Brazilian interpreter and translator Enigmatic Mermaid, the thumbs up from Northern Lake (in het nederlands), and the +ve mention from fellow keenie the blog that keeps changing its name. Not forgetting the eerily stylish blackbeltjones (and let's be honest, slightly intimidating.... {Jones must think my layout is totally scruffy & intrusive, he's just too polite to tell me}). Just received a hello from a wonderfully clear and readable site about language policy, which may or may not be some Esperantists working deep undercover, but seems to have tons of handy links all well laid-out. Actually, I'd very much like a page (the usual 300 words) in an artificial language. If possible I would really like a page of Interlingua or Ido, if any enthusiasts feel translating the start of my rant is worth the effort.

July 29th; Does anybody know how to view Cyrillic lettering in Internet-Explorer-for-Mac on sites that are in Cyrillic? I say that because following Microsoft's instructions I can see sites in English, such as this one, in Cyrillic (that's right, substitution of Cyrillic letters for Latin letters on an English site), but Russian, Bulgarian, Serb, Ukrainian sites are all still a mass of question marks. Of course. I asked Uncle Microsoft very sweetly online, and they got someone from a country whose language doesn't use the Cyrillic alphabet to write to me and tell me they can't help me because their country's language doesn't use the Cyrillic alphabet.
July 28th; Very Annie Mary: another film I quite enjoyed because of being in a forgiving mood. Some of the cloying folksiness of Full Monty and lacking the polished whimsy of Wonderful Life of Amelie (the recent film it's most like), it was still good entertainment. How a Welsh village can be both stifling and supportive, told with rather better acting than either of the other two films {and thankfully VMA lacks the garden-gnome subplot that both Full Monty and Amelie have}. A stranger world than Kevin's planet K-Pax.

July 27th; Back from the L& L Baltics meet Miklos, who generously shares a fine lecso with me. Rathergood directs me to visit the slightly unsettling Weebl {perhaps check his animated story about the Cheese Family}. In a separate development, a blog whose name keeps changing shows me the austere gigablast, and then sends me to a translator called Enigmatic Mermaid, and from her lovely site I reach glosses.net, another good language diary.
July 26th; With Ryan and Rob to see K-Pax, a film which must have been pitched out in swimming-pool land as "Andy Andy Andy, listen to me, I mean this is going to be so ET meets One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest, this is going to be trust me trust me so cool, we're going to have Kevin wearing these shades all the time because Earth has too much UV light for his eyes, like, do you see how totally intense this is going to be?".
I rather enjoyed it actually. Quite good acting, fun idea, very poor writing, badly directed. If you don't mind a plot riddled with inconsistencies and lazy narrative tricks, then you can settle into this warm pudding of New Age sentimentality. I'm going to start tilting my head up oddly while wearing my sunglasses, smiling in enigmatic bliss and murmuring to people in a soft American accent. Things like: "I'd forgotten how wonderful the fruit is on your planet, David?". Should go down a treat at the cafe.

July 25th; Bob bids farewell before returning to Philly, giving me an intriguing book which will reward careful study.
John is still kindly forwarding me this bearish markets newsletter, which chattily mixes thoughts on indebtedness, share pricing, & some moderate gold buggery, with vignettes from the finance analysts' personal lives in different countries. If I was paying attention, then the model on either June or July French Elle's cover is newsletter-editor Bill Bonner's daughter.
July 24th; Three cheers for Giannoulis, Szuni's friend, and John's dad! Now that I am in possession of a Greek page and a Russian page, what is stopping me from having the Eastern Roman Empire properly represented on this site, and actually putting them up? ....My own slackness, perhaps?

July 23rd; Thank goodness. I found my way back to rathergood.com and relocated their remarkable March experiment in building a "weaponised bunny". Joel's commentary uses a lot of special terms like "Woo", "Yay", and "explody things", so it will already be clear that this is a stopoff no discerning web traveller can miss.
July 22nd; Hooray! Finally, I put up my page of text in Basque, Europe's most distinctive and least-understood language. Or rather Euskara, to use its own speakers' name for it. Thank you Iban and Marta!

July 21st; Isaac the Kabbalist came looking for me a couple of days last week, so he's probably on another continent by now. Ryan suggests I revive my Sunday afternoon tea parties of a couple of years back. Excellent idea.
July 20th; Rather alcoholic day. Two shots of Romanian spirits while watching Rob show me how to make lunch (penne arabiata), then translating practice with Terri in a park followed by a white beer, and then to Jake's home, where I arrive an hour late and he is masterfully unruffled about this. We buy a bottle of red wine and drink this with the vegetarian curry he has cooked, sitting out on his patio. As Jake muses about the personal-immortality business plan he has written for the Moravec-like idea of being wired for remotely-accessed experience through multiple bodies, and then tells me of another business plan he has written for a restaurant which would legally serve dinners cooked from human body parts, darkness falls and the moon comes out from behind one of Jake's landlord's trees. I suggest to Jake that perhaps he is a writer whose true literary medium is the business plan. We briefly mention the peace hike in September he will lead up a mountain in Morocco. Round the corner Jake takes me to visit Aziz (appropriately enough from Morocco), though, unsure of which doorbell to press we only gain entry because one of Aziz's stylish young lady friends arrives also and has enough credit on her mobile phone to call Aziz to come down and let us all in. We enter at 11.30pm and our generous host introduces us to some lovely Persians and some quiet Americans. We drink more wine. About 2.30am Aziz, Jake and I are alone watching a TV documentary in French about Moroccan handicrafts and it occurs to us that Aziz might like to get some rest finally. Strolling back through fragrant, leafy streets, Jake shares his thoughts with me on children, women, spirituality. We split. I go home for an excellent sleep.

July 19th; Caroline at prolific just sent me to pseudodictionary. Mumpo than grad, my friends.
July 18th; Heavy summer rain. Talking of minimalist elegance... never mind my clutter, just look at lowercase sound's site. Soothing, or what?

July 17th; My first proper lesson in consecutive interpreting from Terri, with Ryan witnessing. Not easy, ladies and gentlemen.
This handsomely austere page lists otherlanguages as a minimalist site. Maybe Mies was right. Maybe less is more - up to a point, anyway.
July 16th; Time to sandpaper my mortice key? After a few evenings dipping the bow and shank in white paint, it's nice and chubby to hold, so now some smoothing. Too much time on my hands? Me?

July 15th; Quiet day indoors. The forthright Jult recommends Maddox, an attack comedian to remember. Bracing stuff. Look for his "living my childhood dream of becoming a database programmer for a telemarketing company" pic. The more low-key snarkout has links to other intriguing sites all over his olive/beige essays about con-men, geometry, probability and Houdini. Heard about snarkout via Milov.
Did I do anything real today? Oh yes. Ate a very nice cheesecake.
July 14th; Gosh. Not only does Sargasso change colour while on your monitor, the lads also read China Daily; where it says Beijing archeologists are off north to look for traces of ancient aliens visiting earth. And Milov finds an article about how Yahoo alters words inside your html e-mails. So that's where "medireview" comes from?

July 13th; Readers are urged to seek out music by soul/funk singer Abdullah S, something like Prince-improves-Lennie-Kravitz in style, perhaps c/o his Danish record company Offbeat, where he alphabetically tops their scroll column of bands.
Yesterday, couldn't help noticing that Ziauddin's book about science and culture also spells physicist John D. Barrow as John D. Borrow in the text, chapter notes, and index. Perhaps a comeback for Ibn Rushd being rendered as Averroes by mediaeval Europeans.... Nice slip, though, if your basic case is that European science has borrowed lots of science from Chinese, Indian, and Arabic thought without giving credit. Neat mistake, eh? Poor old Pluto.
July 12th; For 3rd time, feasted on fowl procured from poultry girl. Applying flame to pan on stove until goodly warm, I placed therein divers parts of Turkey's Breast heating together with Pepper, Garlick and some of Butter until All was Fine to Eat.
That's cooking, isn't it? Like when they cook on television?

July 11th; Meet Terri for breakfast coffee, sunlight dappled through trees etc, and the darling says my weblog [that's right, this one] is readable & fun! Oddly, she has not clicked on any links. I suspect she rather disapproves of links. Tried to persuade her weblinks are like the little cardboard windows in advent calendars, but I think this tack failed. In fact she is so struck by the wondrousness of this diary - especially if minus the Internet - she recommends I quickly make it a book manuscript and sell it to a London publisher as {blush} a "male version of Bridget Jones"? Gordon Bennett. Mind you, "quickly" turns out in Terri's tough-minded, no-nonsense worldview to mean around a year of unpaid work by me on a book-length MS. Shall ponder.
July 10th; No news of Robin since he disappeared months ago to "deal with" his house in London. The South-East England property market is a dark and terrible place. I fear he may not return from there soon.
The cicadas or crickets or whatever they are get pretty loud at night outside the kitchen. When even melatonin was no help with a bit of insomnia, I turned to a trusty old 'Que-sais-je?'. Each year I inflict one of these on myself for the token bit of French reading, and each one gets duller. This year (beating even the 'Geopolitics of telecommunications' one only redeemed by a nifty map of sub-Pacific telephone cables) it's a history of weights and measures by Jean-Claude Hocquet. I like to imagine he's pronounced 'OK', but he may well be too much of an anorak even for my taste. Jean-Claude has for example written four books and several articles on the history of salt ..., so measurement history must be his populist stuff. And indeed, a few minutes of Monsieur OK on the Piedmont acre and the Flemish rod and I was happily off into the fluffy land of dreams.

July 9th; Sargasso & mijnkopthee uncover Clippy for Presidents. Handy.
July 8th; I wonder how the nice man in L.A. is getting on with that cutting-edge screenplay I wrote last summer about radical Islam, computer encryption, and prime numbers; rather ahead of September 11th? Perhaps the wave of films like mine about mathematical weirdos is ebbing now, or is it just getting started? Apart from doing laps of his negative-edge swimming-pool like any normal person, he must have a lot of scripts to get excited about, of course.

July 7th; Wander around on island in thick heat, dazed, with Tanya and a weary Ukrainian. I'm defeated by his Russian, Hungarian, and English. We... no, I, totally fluff meeting Terri for tango. Meanwhile the inspired Anja says she does something "utterly pointless"? "Terrified mind"? All too confusing for a fool like me.
July 6th; Out on razzle until 4am with Henry, Neil, Taz, and Friendly Owl. Our journeying takes in a visit to Justin's party at around 1am, where the lift takes us to the 15th floor, announcing in a soft, metallic, space-station voice that we are on the 15th floor, and we find Justin alone with 2 Bulgarian girls who are painting henna on their toes and fingers. "Everyone's leaving?" we ask weakly, but Justin gallantly motions us into his flat, ambiguously murmuring "But now you're arriving." On Justin's balcony, Friendly Owl tells me she is 1/16th Cherokee and she likes me saying indigenous peoples will get more respect once it's known how difficult their languages are. I find out that Taz works on electronic share-trading systems in Frankfurt, and I start to babble about price-endings and quote-chunking. Taz humours me.
Earlier in the afternoon, at the poolside, a man lying on the next towel dictates a voicemail essay into a mobile phone about 12" from my head. His message to his friend includes the line "...and like he says, man, just keep on fucking until you fall in love. Best advice I ever had, man." Gut reactions, anyone?

July 5th; Back at the pool on the island in the river to work on the tan and the breaststroke. Meet Istvan again, this time with Zsuzsi. We arrange when I can give him back the Apple Mac he kindly lent me. I learned a new English term recently: 'infinity-edge' swimming-pools are apparently p o o l s where the water seems to go right up to an overhanging edge, as if it was a sheet of glass. Unless you call them 'vanishing - edge' or, perhaps most intriguing, 'negative - edge' pools. Goodness me.
July 4th; Helicopters circle over the city all day in a melodramatic fashion. Perhaps security for the US holiday, perhaps watching the opposition street demonstration calling for a recount of ballots from the recent election before they are finally destroyed. US holidaymaker Esther invites me along to the launch of two new furniture magazines, where we meet Edit looking elegant, and where Esther sweetly arranges for me to win by raffle [without me even entering] a small ad in one of the two handsome reception-area glossy journals.
Separately, Bob Kent puts me in touch with a Rutgers researcher into price endings. You probably think you already know why so many things in shops cost 5.99 something or 17.95 something, don't you? Ha, not so simple!

July 3rd; Is e-mailing textbook-publishers really the best way to get some mechanical-engineering translation work? Um.
July 2nd; Breakfast of chilled cherries again. Not too cheap at seven or eight shillings a pound (tuppence or 3d a lb would be a little more like it), but good. A morning e-mailing, an afternoon doing lengths at the swimming-pool on the island in the river, sunbathing on the concrete terrace under those trees - maybe laburnums? Where I bump into Istvan and his mother and go for an iced coffee with them on our way back.

July 1st; Am forming wild plan to Start Cooking For Self. Tomorrow Will Go To F o o d Market To Obtain F o o d. Could this be a huge new leap into adulthood? Watch this space.

June 30th; So Brazil's stylish footballers won the World Cup this time? Perhaps some consolation for them after being covertly dosed with radiation in Paris 4 years ago -- Oops, did I just give something away?
June 29th; Turns out Mystery Guest is not coming to stay on my sofa tonight after all. Quarrel patched up now, he says.
Mr Choi, where are you? I wish we were still in touch. Perhaps if I link to lots of Korean sites in this a n n o y i n g manner, someone will hear my plaintive plea for help with my Korean page. I hope Mr Choi enjoyed film school in California, after his three and a half years' wait in Budapest while the Hungarian film academy postponed for 4 autumns in a row the directing course with Istvan Szabo he had paid them for upfront....
The Fox apologised very sweetly. All is forgiven of course.

June 28th; The weather is still hot and sticky. Bob points me to Harold Wilson 2 dancing with Son of George.
June 27th; Thank you Nina! The book from Amsterdam is here.
What is Mehmet up to in Morocco? Said, laughing, says he's "lost in Africa." I imagine Mehmet out on silver moonlit sands, abandoned to sacred bliss.

June 26th: 11pm; Just yielded to a sudden urge to clean and tidy. God knows where that could lead. Earlier found my tiny screwdrivers, bought a tiny screw from a screw shop, and fixed my sunglasses. Like buying a ballbearing from a ballbearing shop in December. Are you allowed to buy 1 screw in London or Paris?
No more news about that rumoured proof of the Catalan conjecture (that 8 and 9 are the only consecutive powers) from a few weeks back. If it is a proof, sad to say, it's probably the size of an EU directive.
Just found a link on the very stylish I love everything site pointing to an equally smooth and handsome page called Why are you creative? Checking the 2nd site's content, the unkind answer has to be "You're obviously not." Since the people who made this elegant blue-room site list the saintly and erudite (but creative?) Dalai Lama as a 'creative icon', this suggests 'creative' for them must mean something like 'neat' or 'cool' or 'very good'. How would an icon create something, anyway?
June 26th: 2pm; Finished e-mailing new contacts from indigenous peoples and the World Bank I met at the Saturday conference. Gentle Reader will be reassured that your faithful correspondent does not only loll in jacuzzis under starry skies. There is Actual Work.
June 25th; By chance met Bob Kent, research colleague of Illinois buyer-psychology übermensch Brian Wansink, so found out what 'buyer regret' and 'price-anchoring' really mean. I got quite enthusiastic quizzing Bob, rather to the puzzlement of Stella and Kata at Inbound Travel.

June 24th; Went to an actual dance lesson for first time in life. Fun but tricky. This is what the couple of evenings watching salsa [to, er, "get the idea..."] were for. Hmmm. Will I learn this? Will I be able to learn this? I suppose it would help if I actually started a course at the beginning instead of wandering by fifteen lessons in and annoying the Cubans.
June 23rd; So I went to the pool party, in its new home at the Szechenyi Baths, and it was good actually. Lovely hot water outdoors, music still good [the 'jazzier' sound, they said], and Art Nouveau architecture. The promotional girls, this time from sponsor Ballantine's, surprised me on my way out. Of course the usual very pretty girls in swimsuits and strappy high-heeled sandals. But then I realised that each one was wearing a four-inch-diameter glowing blue disc exactly over her pubes. Yes, I was surprised. One met me with an amused glance from under her gorgeous eyelashes for a second as she caught me catching myself looking her between the legs a second time. But there were lads around her playing the important spinning-needle-in-compass-style-drinks-tray promotional game, so I wandered off into the night, bemused. Just five minutes later, on the street, I ran into some extremely merry, singing people of all ages who said they were a church choir from Iceland. I bet they tell that to all the journalists.
And then today to the gallery to look around the photography exhibition. I'm not sure if I would describe Helmut's pictures as a "dense and complex selection", and the lady-with-gun series was dull, but some elegant snaps nonetheless.

June 22nd; Graybo reminds me to archive these language daredevils, and some other links, even if the pronunciation is going to be pretty iffy, as Anja rightly says. I should review that book full of zip and vim about postmodernism. I was a bit puzzled by Ziauddin quoting physicist C V Seshradi claiming the 2nd law of thermodynamics was ethnocentric, as it would describe monsoons as inefficient because they don't involve the extra work of moving energy from a cold system to a warm system. Silly old me would have thought it was the 2nd law which showed precisely that monsoons are efficient. But anyway, the book was crammed with references to other things I would like to read, so still recommended.
June 21st; Not heard from Jake since our dream group fizzled out. I know he hasn't yet made it through the seventh gate or the tenth gate or whatever it was, because I bumped into him doing that business presentation at that restaurant last week. Still feel bad about letting him down by not staying. Curiously, I almost made it through one of those gates. Is it the 'Second Gate' when you go to sleep within your dream? I was dreaming I was on a Hungarian TV chat show that was so boring I was literally falling asleep just when I was supposed to say something.
Then I woke up.
Then I woke up.
If you see what I mean.

June 20th; Excellent day! Paid bills, bought a pencil sharpener, some vitamins, and a pair of shoes. Hooray for TV quiz shows! Managed to buy shoes from the conspiracy-theorist shoeshop-owner without having to hear the usual 40 minutes of Jewish-Masonic-Illuminati World Cabal stuff. He was busy with other customers. I wish he was an Illuminatus, then he'd have to keep it a secret and not tell me. Had a nice drink with Krisztina later and rounded the night off by finishing Miklos's copy of 'Postmodernism and the Other' by Ziauddin Sardar, from Pluto Press. Despite heavy title (another conspiracy theory of course), it's extremely readable. Weaknesses yes, but full of sharp, thought-provoking polemic. Perhaps I can manage a proper review at the weekend....
June 19th; Another warm, sticky day. I somehow nixed the pool game last night with Ryan and Rob, but kind Heather arranged me a ticket to Saturday's pool party .

June 18th; Ooh dear. Jen says I might have "issues". That sounds rather bad, doesn't it? I'd better check that word with Esther and Elysia.
June 17th; Ah yes - American weblogs. (You just be real good and careful now Mr Google, you hear me?) Still no new readers in Denmark. Sigh.

June 16th; Finished chapter 6 of the novel I'm translating for the friendly agency based in Prague. The novel whose name and author I don't know, and the start and finish of which I haven't seen. Makes it more fun actually. While the book I did in 1999 was agreeably mystifying and mystical, this is straightforward mystery - meaning creaking mansion doors, knife-fights in thunderstorms, and misfiring flintlocks. The story so far: Having swum ashore from the ship they crossed the Pacific in, William and Susanna flee inland into South America, only to be recaptured after several days by slave-traders with bloodhounds, and sold to the sinister millionaire Alfredo Garcia. He plans to transport them to his horribly remote ranch on the Argentine pampas, so they have only three days to escape from his coastal estate at Valparaiso. Luckily Heloise, an elderly governess sold into slavery by Arab pirates thirty years before, knows a secret tunnel to the smugglers' cave. She collapses with the strain of the escape, and only just makes it to the rowing boat before they push off under a full moon. Cracking stuff. I'm quite looking forward to chapter 7.
June 15th; I miss salsa with Terri and Henry. Silly me.

June 13th; Dined with Steve, Tim, Ruslan + this designer.
June 11th; Malcolm and Betty invite me for a lovely meal.

June 10th; Wise Nordic lass Anja sweetly deflects my ingrained sexism.
June 9th; Free, open-source browser Mozilla, and another free browser, Opera, open-source in a different way - Opera is appearing in languages like Breton, Welsh, Irish, Scots Gaelic, and other exciting tongues like Sami and Ladino soon, I'm sure. Impressive.

June 8th; Has this leave-a-book-for-a-stranger-to-find movement touched your life yet? If so, please tell me. "Because books have feelings too" - wish I'd thought of that slogan. Are the books mainly in English still?
June 1st; Rainforest tribe's upbeat website, via Wired. Suggest the Ashaninka show us their language?

May 31st; Europe's language-diversity defenders archived.
May 27th; If June, the young Danish goddess I met on the tram to Oktogon the other night after my long day interpreting for these folk, happens to read this, a page in Dansk would still be much appreciated. She could contact me here. I suppose you've heard all the "shall I compare thee to a summer's day?" lines already, haven't you, June? Oh well....

May 6th; Anyone passing through Budapest on the 24th and 25th of May should check this theatre for a play by Jeff about crooked antiques dealers I am apparently acting in as a recorded voice. Ah, fame... And David's fine poetry events are well worth keeping track of.
May 2nd; My sloth continues. Other busier souls, however, continue to bring us gorgeousness: pearls, sundials, anything small and cute, and of course the lovingly-crafted Blair magazine site. Eat your heart out, Tony.

April; For your internal organ quiz, check out Willaston's Lounge, for inventions you want to see, go to this link, and catch up on the Photoshop Tennis here. A few links on the Swedish page in Swedish at last. Thanks Annika!

March; The Greek has arrived too (thanks to John's kind father). I just have to get my act together and mount it and the Chinese.

February; Want to learn how to learn any language?
Suddenly the Chinese page has arrived, with the kind help of Richard. Arabic and Greek pages coming soon, with the generous assistance of Isam and John's dad.

January; Now I find people are reselling copies of the exotic essays I translated from Hungarian.
Should I be depressed or cheered up about this?

December; An article on Shift.com about programmers lending out coding work at interest, a short excerpt from a stage play translated into the Romani or Gypsy language if you're curious, plus a fine crop of weblogs, listed here and my still-to-be-updated music recommendations. Also a third page added about Robin, the abstract painter who lives out on the wild and windy Great Plain.
Perhaps my Croat and American friends are right, and I should buy myself an actual c o m p u t e r, which I can then, as it were, own. Good old Stojko is even threatening to build me one if I don't get a move on. It's got to that stage.

November; my music recommendations as well as an article on Salon.com.

October; links to sites about learning Arabic or Hindi, two big world languages with particularly lovely scripts here, under 'other alphabets' - plus, on the same page, under 'other links', an English painter living in Hungary, plus a colourful site for live events in Budapest, and, under 'songs and music', a new site about multicultural music.

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Mark Griffith, site administrator / contact@otherlanguages.org

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