"First Prize Winner: Most Inscrutable Notice of 1976," ran the headline in this entry from our captioned photo album, Hong Kong Holiday -- if it's Tuesday, this must be Kuala Lumpur -- the seventies version of photoblogging. Back then "magnetic" photo albums were a revelation, wherein we arrayed artfully cropped snail photo prints and laboriously hand-pressed headlines and captions (one letter at a time) with Letraset on acetate. Nowadays they have acid-free and PVC-free Unimount ® Magnetic Sheets to prevent drying out and discoloration. Press type, of course, another revelation in its day, was buggy whipped into obsolescence by instantly gratifying cybertypesetting -- any face, any size, any weight, any leading, any color, any placement on the page (even kerning at your fingertips, as Dan Rather learned to his regret) -- at the service of even the least visually sophisticated user.
A message that popped up on our screen this morning reminded us of the "Most Inscrutable Notice of 1976" (photo above), a multilingual sign in the guest bathrooms of Kuala Lumpur's International Hotel Merlin that said "NOTICE: Waktu Mandi Tolong Gunakan Badkuip." That was followed with what appeared to be Chinese ideograms. We noticed, but we didn't know what we were suppposed to notice. Another instance of Donald Rumsfeld's "things we know we don't know."
Title page and appliquéd cover of our captioned photo album referenced above illustrate how we fed the blogging monster before digital cameras and blogging software came along. Copy reads "Hong Kong Holiday: A true-life adventure starring Ginny & Barry & Tuck & Sissy." Photo captions, left to right: "Terror" (Sissy hamming it up on Hong Kong's horrifyingly vertical Peak Tram funicular), "Suspense" (Tuck getting fitted for his "Robert Tayloring" Hong Kong suit) and "Romance" (Barry and Ginny trying to act civil towards each other in the aftermath of our enervating 21-hour flight to the other side of the world).
Today's inscrutable online message, in response to our attempt to leave a comment in Iranian Alle's weblog -- where we ended up while pursuing something completely different, one of the occupational hazards of web searching -- was presumably in Farsi:
Fallen : Alee's blog
Comment Submission Error
Your comment submission failed for the following reasons:هر نظر باید متنی داشته باشد.
Please correct the error in the form below, then press Post to post your comment.
Travel -- whether through space or cyberspace -- may be broadening, but nobody ever said international understanding was going to be easy. It would be presumptuous to think so, as the Biblical story of Babel suggests:
In the Bible, a city (now thought to be Babylon) in Shinar where God confounded a presumptuous attempt to build a tower into heaven by confusing the language of its builders into many mutually incomprehensible languages.
Not to mention the most inscrutable of all inscrutables, "things we don't know we don't know."
That last phrase, "things we don't know we don't know," is the human condition. Particularly with IMs. Ha Ha.
Posted by: goomp | August 20, 2005 at 06:09 PM