There are spans of time in which a ton of users are created by Russian spammers. You can tell because they all live in “Moscow, ALABAMA” and have “.ru” at the end of most of their URLs.

Occasionally some of their fake info is amusing to me, and the title of this post is the latest. (That’s all.)

[Thanks, Flickr commons.]

In 1997, the Packers played a preseason game at Camp Randall Stadium in Madison, Wisconsin. (I lived there at the time, but this story has nothing to do with me.) Turns out one guy went to the stadium just to see if he could sneak in, after having heard of people sneaking into the Super Bowl.

Well, he made it, and the rest of the story is pretty funny. Check out Scott Schiller’s Packers Adventure.

1. Spill some oil in the Gulf
2. Put that oil in a box
3. Pump that oil to a ship

And that’s the way you do it….

WordPress is great, isn’t it? It allows me to blather inanely about a wide variety of topics without having to upload an HTML file in an FTP program every time I get the urge to write. (That’s how this site used to work.)

Anyway, enjoy your visit.

According to a Professor of Chinese Language and Literature at the University of Pennsylvania, it’s pretty much bullshit.

On his web page entitled “danger + opportunity ≠ crisis,” Professor Victor H. Mair writes:

The explication of the Chinese word for crisis as made up of two components signifying danger and opportunity is due partly to wishful thinking, but mainly to a fundamental misunderstanding about how terms are formed in Mandarin and other Sinitic languages. For example, one of the most popular websites centered on this mistaken notion about the Chinese word for crisis explains: “The top part of the Chinese Ideogram for ‘Crisis’ is the symbol for ‘Danger’: The bottom symbol represents ‘Opportunity’.”

He goes on to explain the three fatal errors in this misconception:

1. Chinese characters aren’t “ideograms,” because they don’t strictly represent a single idea; they’re better described as “logographs, sinographs, hanograms, tetragraphs (from their square shapes [i.e., as fangkuaizi]), morphosyllabographs, etc., or — since most of those renditions may strike the average reader as unduly arcane or clunky — simply as characters.”
2. The word for “crisis” (wēijī) isn’t expressed as a single character; it “consists of two syllables that are written with two separate characters, wēi (危) and jī (機/机).”
3. Finally (and most importantly), jī doesn’t mean “opportunity;” it’s closer to “incipient moment” and doesn’t really stand alone anyway (similar to an English suffix or prefix).

So there.

Cecil Adams tackled the subject, as usual, in his endearingly glib fashion, way back in 2000.

Of course, that means someone at CLCV (I wasn’t there yet) could have looked it up at the end of 2001 when they wrote the Scorecard. Google already existed in the same basic form at the end of 2001 as it does now, and it was on the Straight Dope site even then. (I believe we’ve improved our fact-checking abilities.)

Speaking of crisis, go see Crisis Hopkins this weekend or next. They’re hilarious.

^*A failed attempt someone made to register for a site I administer, in order to spam it