Lingvo estas Viruso

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“The ideal place for me is the one in which it is most natural to live as a foreigner.”
- Italo Calvino

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The good news: A school in Indonesia have offered me a job.

The bad news: I didn't contact them - they contacted me. And they don't want an interview - they just saw my online CV and offered me the job with no questions asked. And their "contract" is a mindmangling sludge of pseudo-legalese.

So far as I can tell from the website, it is a real school, just one that's at the bottom of the pile.

Nevermind - I've got telephone interviews on Saturday (with an endearingly shambolic operation in Bulgaria) and Monday (with a hyperefficient outfit in Moscow).

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There are two concepts the British civil service can't cope with. That people are different from each other, and that people change.

Faced with someone who teaches English and won't be around in a month, they've decided their only option is to put him on a training course. For three months. To teach him how to look for jobs. In engineering.

I'm much too busy to go along with their silly schemes.

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Today's fascinating fact: The unit of currency in Korea is the "Won", with an exchange rate of roughly 930 won to the American dollar, or 1880 to the British pound.

If I worked there, I'd get about GBP1000 (USD2000) per year. Or two million won. I wonder how many suitcases you'd need for a year's wages?

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Kapitano's current musical squeeze: Icehouse. The Cure with more synths, Duran Duran with mellower vocals, Alphaville with, erm, what Alphaville had.Yeah okay - it's more 80s synthpop with new-wavey post-punky new-romantiky guitars.

I knew someone at college whose musical soul was firmly in American stage songs from the 1920s and 30s. At a different college (I managed to go to three) there was a fellow from India who was very much into Cliff Richard and 70s soft rock. Another thought everything written for the past four hundred years was rubbish. Mine is only from three or four years before I switched on the radio.

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Chiu tago estas Zamenhof-tago!

(Today is Zamenhof day!)

Mi nur eksciis acidente.

(I only found out by accident.)

Ludoviko Zamenhof estis la viro kiu komencis Esperanton. Li publikighis la "unua libro" en 1887, donata nekompleta gramatikon kaj malgrandan vokabularion, kiu estis malgrau suficha ke homoj povis komencu paroli.

(Ludovik Zamenhof was the man who intiated Esperanto. He published the "first book" in 1887, giving an incomplete grammar and a small vocabulary, which nevertheless was sufficient for people to begin speaking.)

La lingvo kreskis dum la unua duono da la dudeka jarcento, sed char politikaj kauzoj ghi kontrauighis per registaroj, kaj atakita per konservativistoj.

(The language grew during the first half of the twentieth century, but for political reasons was opposed by governments, and attacked by conservatives.)

Certe ghi ne estis la perfekta ponta lingvon - kio ajn tio vere signifas - sed estis (kaj restas) bona ideo, kaj ghi funkscias. Eble vi ne kredas min? Mi estas skribanta tiuj vortoj esperante, sekve tradukanta mi mem al la angla.

(Certainly it wasn't the perfect bridge language - whatever that may really mean - but it was (and is) a good idea, and it works. Perhaps you don't believe me? I am writing these words in Esperanto, then translating myself into English.)

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